A Day in the Life of an Arborist Founder
People keep asking what "arborist founder" actually means, day to day. A founder's calendar is supposed to be meetings. Mine, one day this week: a trunk injection at breakfast, a stump consult, an investor call, three treatment plans, and a final walkthrough on a Tree of Heaven eradication that got a lot more dramatic since June. Here's the log, roughly in order.
Morning: a white ash on the street I grew up on.
First stop, I treated a white ash for emerald ash borer — on a street where I spent my childhood playing baseball and racing mopeds. Full circle doesn't begin to cover it.
If you're not from ash country: emerald ash borer has killed tens of millions of North American ash trees, and it isn't done. The ones still standing in neighborhoods like mine are, for the most part, standing because somebody chose them — a trunk injection on a regular cadence, carried up through the sapwood into the canopy, is the difference between a mature ash and a stump. This one got chosen.
The first Steward client, and some stubborn stumps.
Next I stopped by my first Tree Steward client — the first name in the program — to plan a removal for a few stubborn sprouting stumps.
If you know, you know: a stump is not a dead tree. Cut a vigorous tree at the ground and the root system underneath it is still alive, still full of stored energy, and still taking instructions from a playbook older than we are. It answers the saw with shoots. Getting rid of a stump for good means dealing with what's below the grass, not just what's above it.
Hold that thought. It comes back at the end of the day, at scale.
A first investor conversation.
Midday: my first investor conversation about ArbKeep. I'm not raising right now — the practice funds the software, and the software serves the practice — but an hour with someone who evaluates products for a living, looking hard at the thing you've been building nights and mornings, is worth having early. The perspective and feedback were gold.
And the ask I'll keep making, here as on every other channel: developers who arbor? Build with me. [email protected].
Afternoon: treatment plans.
The afternoon went to treatment plans for Tree Steward clients. Keeping Japanese maples and magnolias strong — the quiet, preventive work that never makes the highlight reel. And a harder case: Zimmerman pine moth larvae chewing through a mature Eastern white pine, announcing themselves the way they always do, in masses of pitch at the branch whorls. Timing is most of the fight with this insect — the larvae are only exposed and treatable in narrow windows — so the plan matters as much as the product.
Eastern white pine is the tree that literally built America — ship masts for navies, and the beams and floors of half the old Northeast. When one anchors a property, you fight for it.
A Tree of Heaven walkthrough — and a PSA.
Last stop: final walkthrough on a Tree of Heaven eradication. When we scoped this job in June, the stand was roughly 50 stems. Today I counted 200.
That jump is not the job going wrong — it's the species showing you exactly what it is. Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) responds to any disturbance by suckering from its root system, which can run under lawns, driveways, and property lines. It's also the spotted lanternfly's favorite host — I've written about what that pest is doing here — and a genuine nuisance across Columbus.
If you've got a Tree of Heaven: don't cut it, don't pull it, don't weedwhack it. The only fix is treating the roots.
Every one of those shortcuts reads to the plant as an attack, and the root system answers with an army of shoots — that's how 50 stems become 200. Kill the root system first, systemically, and take the wood down after it's actually dead. It's slower. It's also the only version that works.
And in between: building ArbKeep on my own book.
Threaded through all of it, I'm building ArbKeep on my own book of trees. Every stop today ended the same way — on a chart. The ash's injection is on its record, next to the ones before it. The white pine's plan is written against its own history. And the only reason I can tell you the Tree of Heaven stand went from ~50 stems to 200 is that the June count is sitting on that property's chart, dated, next to today's.
Those of you who've built products with me before know this part already: the passion runs endless. The difference this time is that the user I'm hardest on is me, six months from now, standing in front of the same tree.
If you're an arborist running a book like this, Heartwood is the small guild shaping the tool from inside the work. If you're a homeowner with a tree you're wondering about, point your phone at it on arbkeep.com — free, no account, and that photo becomes the first entry on its chart.
Farmer with a Silverado and a MacBook Pro — no farm. That's the deal.
David All · Arborist in Upper Arlington, Ohio — by way of heritage apple orchards in Pennsylvania and old-growth conifers on the Olympic Peninsula. Builder of ArbKeep — the health record for trees. Featured in The Guardian. Ohio Chapter ISA member · Upper Arlington Tree Co.