Interview with Frederik Fonte — Full Stack Developer
By: Inside Cf
Tags: Culture, Cooler Future, Meet The Team, Impact Investing, Sustainable Finance

Frederik Fonte — Full Stack Developer at Cooler Future

As the Cooler Future app is launching soon, it won’t be long until you’ll be able to invest your money in solving the climate crisis with a tap of a button, directly from your phone.

But who are the faces behind the Cooler Future app?

It is time to shed some light on them: we sat down with our Full Stack Developer, Frederik Fonte, to talk about his journey, his role and mission at Cooler Future, and what exactly it means to be part of the Cooler Future development team.

Welcome to the team! Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from?

Thank you, I am very excited to be part of the team.

I was born in Aosta Valley, the smallest Italian region, right under Mont Blanc and bordering both France and Switzerland. It’s a mountain region with a lot of ski stations, so you can maybe imagine that nature played a huge part in my childhood. I used to play in the forests during summertime and in the snow during winter.

Growing up, I moved to Turin. I enrolled in the university there, did my degree in Computer Science, and started working as an IT consultant. I learned a lot, had a bunch of fun, and met incredible people (shout-out to my former colleagues in Italy 💙)!

But after a couple of years, I decided to move on and ended up in Tbilisi, Georgia for a while (what a beautiful place!) and after that, finally, in Berlin, where I’m currently living.

What led you to your current role at Cooler Future?

It’s been more than 10 years since I left Aosta, but I still miss the mountains all the time — especially now during COVID-19. However, the distance helped me realize one very important thing: how quickly our climate is changing. Whenever I come back home, the effects of climate change are more and more evident. There is less snow during winter, scorching temperatures during summer (the glaciers are disappearing so quickly 😢), and more frequent, violent rains in spring and autumn.

After I left Turin, I continued to work remotely as a consultant, but I increasingly noticed that I was getting tired of what I was doing: I wanted to work for a cause that I actually cared about and make a positive contribution to the growth and development of our society. So I started looking for a company that shared my values and goals. That’s when I found Cooler Future! I immediately fell in love with the company’s ideas, values and people.

In your current role, how exactly do you contribute to building a Cooler Future (both figuratively and literally)?

The Cooler Future core product will be the fund, with its unique impact-first approach to investing. However, what’s equally important, is the Cooler Future app we are currently developing. The app is the tool that everyone will use to easily access the fund and invest their money in it.

As a Full Stack Developer I help the development team to create and release the Cooler Future app. This work is especially important to me because I think that many people — me included — still have very little knowledge of how finance and banking actually work. I believe that many people aren’t even aware of the fact that the money in their savings account isn’t “just chilling” in their account. It is actually being invested by the banks in industries that are destroying our planet!

At Cooler Future, we want to offer a tool that anyone can use for investing in projects that deeply care about our planet and our future — thanks to the impact-first analysis done by our incredible team.

Tell us an interesting fact about your work as a Full Stack Developer that most people (probably) wouldn’t know!

We produce a lot of CO2!

Being a developer means working with computers and smartphones, servers, IoT devices, etc. on a daily basis. It’s not as evident as driving around town with a horrible SUV to buy fast-fashion clothes, but the production of those technological devices bears a high CO2 price — and often also human lives.

As if that isn’t bad enough, we throw these devices away and buy new ones, as soon as we encounter any problems with them! It’s a vicious cycle to break. Luckily, some people have started tackling this problem — people with good ideas and strong beliefs, who are willing to shift the paradigm and help us survive on our planet. With that in mind, I think that anyone who would like to support these people or companies, should be able to do so. To me, that’s exactly what Cooler Future is trying to achieve.

Can you share a bit about how your team is structured?

Being a startup often means having small teams and wearing multiple hats. We are no exception.

Everybody in the development team is doing their best to develop the Cooler Future app, with all the systems that stand behind it. Having to change roles, from frontend to tester, from backend to DevOps (sometimes in a single day), is very stimulating: it offers many challenges, but also many rewards.

We are a very multicultural team: everyone is from a different country. I find it extremely interesting to work, talk, and make friends with people from a different cultural background. I believe it helps us to put things into perspective and evolve our empathy — something the world definitely needs more of!

What are you and your team focusing on in the next 12 months?

We are releasing the app this year, so be ready 💪🎉!

This is our main goal right now. We are working tirelessly to offer you the best app for investing your money in climate-friendly projects and improving your CO2e footprint. After all this is our beautiful — and only — planet.

After the release, we will sit back and relax…wrong! We have millions of ideas that we are exploring, so be ready for further communication. If you still haven’t joined our waiting list and newsletter yet (shame!), you can do it by clicking this link!

Ciao 👋