How a Biologist Built a Startup to Stop Billions of Bird Deaths with Dominique Waddoup
About this episode
Dominique Waddoup discusses her journey from biologist to entrepreneur, creating a window film to prevent bird collisions with glass.
Every year, roughly a billion birds die from flying into glass windows and buildings. The problem is massive, well-documented, and largely invisible to the public. In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro talks with Dominique Waddoup, CEO and Founder of BirdShades, about how she went from studying giant honeybee behavior in Nepal to building a company that makes glass visible to birds without changing the way it looks to humans. Dominique explains how Bird Shades developed a retrofit window film that uses UV-reflective patterns birds can see but people cannot. The product applies to existing glass on homes and commercial buildings, eliminating the need to replace windows entirely. The conversation covers why birds collide with glass in the first place, how bird vision differs from human vision, and why the company is now pursuing licensing models to embed its technology in other window-film products. Paul and Dominique also explore why bird-window collisions remain an underrecognized conservation issue despite killing far more birds than hunting, how emerging building ordinances in the US, Canada, and Europe are beginning to create regulatory demand, and what it took…
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