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CleanTechies
#122 Offset Skepticism, Regulation Driving Demand, Sustainable Supply Chains, Content GTM Strategy, Climate Business Opportunities, & More w/ Saif Hameed (Altruistiq)
In this episode, Silas Mahner (@silasmahner) & Somil Aggarwal (@somil_agg) speak with Saif Hameed, the CEO and Founder of Altruistiq, a leading Carbon Emissions accounting software.
The conversation is full of insights because Saif has an incredible background, diverse career exposure, and a very good handle on the overall ESG & Sustainability space.
Some of the key topics are, how ESG is an incorrect usage of terminology, how Scope 1,2,3 emissions were created as frameworks for governments, the difficulty of deploying money into non-renewables climate solutions, and a lot more.
Enjoy 🌎
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Topics:
*13:27 ESG SaaS Breakdown
*23:12 Critique of Corporate Promises
*29:56 How CPGs Track Responsiveness
*39:13 Sustainability Product Demand Insights
*48:29 Advice to Founders
*54:27 GTM Advice
*1:01:15 Startup Ideas
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Links:
*Connect w/ Saif: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saifhameed/
*Follow Altruistiq: https://altruistiq.com/
*Climate Capital Summit: https://www.climatecapitalsummit.com/
*Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn:
*HMU on Twitter: @silasmahner
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Welcome back to the Clean Techies podcast, where we interview climate tech founders and VCs to discuss all things building and investing to solve the biggest challenge of our generation climate change. Today we have a very interesting and insightful episode with Saif Hameed, the founder and CEO of Carbon Accounting Platform Altruistic, based out of London. Saif brought a lot of perspective because he started out his career in political activism in Pakistan. He ended up working with the new democracy for disaster relief after helping promote that and achieve the outcome that they were looking for. He then went on to work for McKinsey for many years and during that time he said that he got a little bit bored and ended up starting a flower farm which was selling flowers to fragrance companies and through that experience of being a supplier, realized that these kind of companies were looking for data on the carbon emissions of the supply chain. He thought there was a need for carbon accounting. He started in this space slightly earlier than most people, building carbon accounting platforms, which was beneficial in some ways because it gave him a head start and helped him to capture a strong percentage of the market share. But at the very beginning it was difficult because nobody was familiar with the idea, the initial part of raising money was a little difficult until suddenly the idea became more popularized.
Silas Mähner:In the episode there was a lot covered, but some of my favorite takes that Saif shared were why the term ESG is misused, as well as the frameworks for scope one, two and three, how they're just kind of mischaracterized and not necessarily well suited for what they're being used for today, and he shared his skepticism for carbon offsets and the reasoning for that skepticism. He gave a lot of really good advice to founders, including his tips on using content community and referrals as part of your go to market strategy. And finally, we closed off with several of his climate tech startup ideas that he shared. I thought that was quite interesting as well. Honestly, there's just so many good things packed into this hour, so I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Do reach out to us after you listen and share your favorite takeaways. So, without any further delay, enjoy the episode. All right, welcome to the show, saif. How's it going?
Saif Hameed:Good thanks, very happy to be here, silas.
Silas Mähner:So we're really excited to have this conversation. I think there's not a lot of these kinds of platforms of what you're building that I would be excited to have this conversation about just very candidly so, but I am excited to chat with you. I think you've got a lot of great insights to offer. So let's start with just kind of a quick intro to yourself and a little bit about your career and how you ended up doing what you're doing today.
Saif Hameed:Yeah for sure. So I've been in this space for around about 20 years. I started my first sustainability non-profit when I was around 15 with my high school friends. We were planting trees. We then got quite involved in this sort of civil movement several years later, which was trying to bring back democracy to Pakistan. We were, fortunately, on the winning side of that. We were, we were we had sort of all grown up together in Pakistan were very, very motivated to try and try and contribute to some sort of improvement in the country. We were on the winning side and helped bring back. We're a very small part of a larger movement that helped bring democracy back.
Saif Hameed:And then we thought what do we do with the sort of skill set that we deployed in a civil activist sense? And we had been bringing people out onto the streets for protests and and that sort of thing and leveraging Facebook and Twitter, and so we thought we'd use the same playbook and the same toolkit to get people out for another social issue. So waste. We chose waste as the issue we'd like to focus on, and so we try and bring people out every weekend to pick up trash and get people involved in taking more ownership of their community. This really caught on, and within several months we found that we had expanded to all the big cities in Pakistan. We were in a lot of the local news, and then one day we sort of showed up in the New York Times as well. The next thing we knew, hillary Clinton, who was a trip state for the US at the time, was visiting Pakistan and started talking about us in some of her speeches, which brought us on the radar for the new democratic government, which then asked me to help them set up something similar for the government.
Saif Hameed:The guy I was working for at the time is now the Prime Minister of Pakistan. At the time, he was running the largest state or province in the country, province of Punjab, which is around 100 million people. The first thing that he asked me to do was to contribute to the flood relief effort. So around 2010, there was this massive flood which left around 20 million people or so displaced across the country, and so my job was to coordinate the public-private sector response.
Saif Hameed:So he wanted me to help gather more relief goods, more donations, from the private sector, and then ensure that, on the public sector side, I could get them distributed in the right way, and so I sort of went to the flood affected areas and it was, in honesty, quite a traumatic experience, because you'd be sort of driving down into the areas that were affected and you'd find that there were just these sort of rows and rows of dead animals lining the roads until you get to the affected area. And this is like a climate disaster at its worst. Right this is. Every animal is someone's business and livelihood, and then when you'd run out of the animals, you'd find these sort of makeshift beds stacked up one on top of the other, and people are slotted in like sardines because there's flooding on either side of the road and so their houses are submerged, and also it's blistering heat, and so there's not really much that you can do.
Silas Mähner:Hey there, quick break to remind any founders or VCs listening. If you are looking for deal flow, seeking to raise funding, looking for partners to help service your needs, or perhaps you're looking for corporate investment partners, feel free to reach out to us through our Slack channel, which can be found in the description. Because we meet a lot of people in this space, we set aside time each week to make introductions to the various people that we encounter. This is something we do free of charge in order to help these incredible companies solving climate change to scale. Looking forward to hearing from you in the Slack channel.
Saif Hameed:To hide from the heat other than slot in underneath someone else, and I spent about three, four, five months leading flood relief efforts and that was my sort of introduction to climate risk management, or the lack thereof, in a sort of a trial by fire or by flooding. I spent three years working with the government across a range of mostly sustainability or environmental infrastructure topics, so help set up a sort of an electric transport system, help set up a new solid waste management system, hydropower, a few different infrastructure heavy projects. Became. A client then for McKinsey on a large education program that McKinsey was leading, decided to join McKinsey because I plateaued in government, spent eight years in McKinsey, ultimately as part of the sustainability practice, serving clients across a range of sectors Halfway through McKinsey.
Saif Hameed:I got a bit bored of the experience so I started a farming business on the side and my farming business supplies flowers into the fragrance industry and the cosmetics industry and our customers started asking us for better emissions data related to the flowers that we were selling and they wanted to understand what is the emissions footprint or the carbon footprint of a kilo of roses that we're selling them, let's say, every day. And if they wanted to help us change that impact or reduce that environmental impact? What would the business case look like and how would we stack up the cash outlay versus the impact gain, which really gave me the initial seed of an idea for altruistic. And around the same time my clients at McKinsey were asking me for help with building decarbonization programs on top of their sustainability or emissions data, which was unpredictably inaccurate and so sort of. Put both of those two pieces of information together and started altruistic about three years ago. Sorry, it was quite a long answer, silas, but it was a long journey getting here.
Silas Mähner:No, that's all right. You've done a very good job of summarizing it into a pretty compact few minutes and that actually answers a bunch of the questions we had right, which is how did you get into climate and that's obviously seeing kind of that firsthand climate disaster at a very, really bad version of it, not just something that's minor right, something that's really, really impactful, and then kind of how you ended up building altruistic. So that's what I wanted to get into. So I guess let's talk a little bit more. You mentioned that there was a certain need for sustainability data. It's mostly just wasn't very high quality. So can you kind of dive a little bit deeper into altruistic and what particularly you're doing, that is, you know, for people who are not familiar with the space, just kind of help us understand what exactly do you do?
Saif Hameed:Yeah for sure.
Saif Hameed:So our mission and real focus is around helping business to build, buy and sell products that are better for the world, and so what that means is if you're buying, you know, a chocolate bar or a bottle of ketchup or a can of soda, we want that product to be, to be, one that comes with as low an environmental impact as possible and, ideally, maybe even some positive impacts or net benefits associated with it across the supply chain.
Saif Hameed:And you know, if I think back to my experience as a supplier into many of these value chains in industries, what would make my 100 kilos of roses better is if my farm was on a regenerative model. I wasn't using diesel generators on the farm, I was shipping or transporting the flowers through an electric vehicle based distribution setup. All those things require resources to be allocated in a more efficient way, because you want them to be deployed against their more efficient use case. And so, at Altruistic, what we see ourselves doing is providing the tools, the analytics, the insights, the solutions in a technology driven platform to help companies to make better decisions from an impact perspective, and whether that's an internal operational decision that they're making, or maybe something in their value chain from a procurement standpoint or it's in a distribution sense. It's how they get their product to consumers. We're really trying to provide that central operating system that can make all of that stuff easier.
Somil Aggarwal:What's missing the most from that in today's operations or today's options that are available?
Saif Hameed:It's a good question and you know, the interesting thing is that most of the technologies that we need to deploy to, let's say, reach a 1.5 degree global warming scenario, most of those technologies already exist and are proven technologies and can be deployed at scale. What's missing is the ability to evaluate them and deploy capital in small increments.
Silas Mähner:Hey, there are you building a climate tech business and looking for very specialized talent? Consider reaching out to our sponsors, next Wave Partners. Next Wave are experts in talent acquisition, recruitment and retention across the climate tech, renewables and ESG spaces globally. So if your team is growing or you're looking to make a career change yourself, feel free to reach out to Next Wave at next-wavepartnerscom, or reach out to one of their consultants directly via their LinkedIn page.
Saif Hameed:What I mean by that is, if you're a climate investor, today the easiest place for you to invest is to put a billion dollars into a solar farm or a wind farm, because it's a large infrastructure project. It's really predictable, it's really easy to get your hands around the financial diligence involved in that. But if what you need to do is deploy that billion dollars behind a thousand or 10,000 or 100,000 small initiatives across lots of small suppliers or across lots of different types of initiative categories, whether it's packaging or farming or logistics that ability to prioritize and deploy doesn't exist, and that's a data problem. So we see ourselves solving the data problem, particularly by helping companies make use of decision grade data or procurement grade data to make better sustainability decisions. Right now, the main problem with that sort of data is that it's inaccurate, and it's unpredictably inaccurate. You couldn't decide where to deploy that money beyond anything but the most obvious interventions, because you just don't know what the underlying numbers are.
Silas Mähner:Interesting. That is really helpful. I think that we might have to double click into that a little bit. I think that we might have uncovered a nice gem here, but I do really want to understand as well before we get too far into this. Can you give us a breakdown of the ESG SaaS space as a whole, because there's a lot of people who criticize that. I'm one of them. When I saw initially the thought about having you guys on the show, I was like, okay, well, I got to figure out is this actually a good platform, because there's so many that have popped up in the past few years. Can you just give us a breakdown of the ESG kind of data tracking and reporting space as a whole globally?
Saif Hameed:Yeah, very happy to Just want to start with a disclaimer, which is that I don't think the term ESG really makes much sense personally. I know there are different views on this, but I find ESG to be a almost random mix of issues that have no clear correlation between each other and between the financial performance of a business. There are some legacy reasons why we use this term and why what sits beneath this term sits there, which we can go into as well, but I think as a term, we've outgrown it basically as a business community. That said, I think that the first thing is really that there's a split between software players or SaaS players that are encompassing the whole ESG space or going metric specific, and so and that's driven also by customer demand there are some companies that are better suited to an all in one ESG solution and others for which an all in one solution will be too simple and won't do the job. So if I kind of maybe start with the all in ones, right, and an all in one ESG solution will typically do a few things, it'll provide you with a good framework of reference to understand what types of numbers are you going to need for external reporting purposes. It'll help you gather that data somewhat efficiently across your business. You'll probably be doing some of the load in terms of getting that data together and getting it clean and getting it into the system, but you'll have, you know, effectively, a solution partner walking the journey with you. It'll then probably provide you with some ability to benchmark those numbers against your industry or your space and it'll usually then make it easier for you to bundle together those numbers or that data into some form that you can export externally.
Saif Hameed:If you think about what types of things sit within the ES and the G, you could have many dozens of different metrics. So potentially even you know 100, 150 different metrics sitting beneath those three. Within environment, you'd usually have, let's say, carbon emissions, water waste, biodiversity, land use. Within social, you typically have multiple different forms of diversity and inclusion could be gender, could be sexuality, etc. You'd also have some elements of, let's say, fair wage and labor rights and that sort of thing.
Saif Hameed:And then within governance, you usually get stuff like board and come and see how long has someone been in a board role. Is the chair of the business and the CEO of the business? The same person? Is the founder still the CEO 15 years in a lot of stuff around the legal setup within the business. That sort of thing comes under governance and those are the things that you're then looking to kind of keep track of or monitor with an ESG only one. That solution increasingly works well for businesses that are either very small and are being asked for some ESG metrics by an investor or otherwise, and they don't have a lot of complexity within the business and they don't have a lot of complexity within their data, and so bringing all that together is feasible and the demand is a high level demand. The request is one that doesn't need to go very deep. It can be a somewhat superficial request. I don't mean that word pejoratively, but you know it can be a somewhat high level request.
Saif Hameed:The alternative is for companies that want to really go deep. Right now that's mostly environmental and it's mostly carbon. I don't see many amazing solutions for other single metrics in the ESG space out there, but there are a number of solutions now targeting emissions in a deep, granular, increasingly accurate sense, and obviously we believe we're one of them and and that those solutions tend to ignore most of the other ESG metrics and they sort of actively say look, we're not doing all this other stuff. In the case of altruistic, for example, we're very committed to environmental impact metrics and so we're going beyond emissions into water and waste and so on, but we have no no pretense to go into social and governance, and usually the capabilities that you unlock with that kind of depth are interesting for anyone who wants to really really move the needle in terms of change in this metric rather than just report. So they actually want to change the footprint, change the business model, change the products, redesign the products.
Saif Hameed:If it's a chocolate bar, they want the cocoa to come from a different type of farm. They want the processing to be powered by renewable energy. They want the packaging to be made up of more recyclable or recycled content. All these things require that more more accurate, granular and usable data from an emission standpoint and that tends to be better suited to a business that is either, you know, a bit larger and therefore more complex inherently and has many different facilities and so on, or business that operates in a space that is more environmentally complex and so usually you'll find, like food, apparel, cosmetics, you know, maybe some types of manufacturing, automotive. These sorts of industries tend to be areas where that's a really good fit. I hope that answers the question.
Somil Aggarwal:That's a super helpful breakdown, especially because I think then you know you elaborate on basically the horizontal versus vertical expansion and you know that could change the direction that an aggregator tries to bring in a bunch of different sources versus. You know, if you talk about like what vertical SAS has done to software, it looks like that's both necessary and possible in a few spaces where demand is high enough and I think that distinction is incredibly important. Kind of following off of that to go to break, to go to the breakdown of what you do more specifically, I you know a lot of your reporting also has to do with, you know, from what I understand, scope one, scope to scope three, emissions and things like that. So just for the audience from a high level breakdown, could you walk through that you know the very basic differences between scope one, two, three and emissions and how that relates to your business.
Saif Hameed:Yes, very happy to. With another disclaimer, if I may, which is that scope one, two and three won't make logical sense to most people, and that's kind of unfortunate and it sort of is the way it is. Scope one, two and three as a structure really came out of I think it was sort of post Kyoto protocol and it was really ultimately developed for countries and economies within countries. And so the idea was that, if you like, look at the global problem and you divide it into countries because that's how we think about things from an international like geopolitics and, and you know, an international ecosystem perspective, and then you think of each country having a carbon budget as the budget for this country and now you need to manage within this budget. You can then maybe subdivide that into sectors, but originally I don't think it was really conceived that this would go that much further. And then from there you kind of moved into trying to extrapolate this to oil and gas companies with the expectation that most oil and gas companies might get on top of parts of that problem scope one and two particularly, and not scope three. And as we've pushed against the edges of that model and brought it more and more business context, the framework has really started to fray and break down and I'll explain what it is and it'll make sense from that angle. So if you think of like scope one, scope one is really everything that's within your typically everything that's within your operational framework of a business. So think of stuff that you have direct operational control over. So let's say you're running a small, you know, let's say you're running a small grocery store, right, or restaurant. Then it's like how are you? You know, what are you kind of making at the restaurant? What are you? How do you own a van and the van is shipping out deliveries. So if you're like people sort of commuting into your office space, there's a number of elements there that would fall within your sort of operational control, which is what you can shift or change within your business yourself by direct action.
Saif Hameed:Scope three and I'm going to kind of come back to scope two in a moment scope three kind of flows from that, which is, if scope one is everything that's within your operational control, scope three is the stuff that's typically outside your operational control. So scope three is everything that you're buying, your purchasing stuff from other people. Maybe you have some third party distribution going on and so it's all the stuff that's like outside your parameter of influence and operation. And then scope to kind of looks like a bit like the odd one out, in the sense that scope to is traditionally or typically, everything that you're buying from the grid in terms of power and gas and so on.
Saif Hameed:It's the stuff that you're purchasing from the power system and that doesn't seem super intuitive, but that's kind of how the structure is designed. And then, to make it a little more confusing, the energy that you're buying doesn't really neatly fit inside scope to either. There are parts of that that'll fall within within other scope also, depending on how you're using energies, but unfortunately it's a confusing setup and it's not like this makes a huge amount of sense, even when you have your you know, when you have your sort of feet in it for a bit. But but that's that's. That's my best attempt at simplifying it.
Somil Aggarwal:Thank you for that. You know I didn't want to want to, didn't want to tee you up for a trick question or anything. I appreciate you. You breaking it down how you did. I think I definitely understand the distinction between where the emissions come into play and you brought in something that that again, not a gotcha question you brought in something that I think I wanted to touch upon in a different context. So you brought up, you know, brought up how certain governments or frameworks probably didn't anticipate the relevance of some of these things and that could have fed into the foundation A lot of rush.
Somil Aggarwal:A lot of, you know, I would say, advice or detailing has come out recently about how do we let, how do we make climate software and climate technology succeed Right, how do we create business models that are effective outside of some of this, like you know, government support and government influx of money, and one of the recommendations is to build your product outside of corporate promises, essentially not leaning on, you know, the things that these big corporations are promising in terms of their commitment to sustainability, but rather the actual direction of the market. You know, as you mentioned, is incredibly broad, but as a whole, it sort of is this promise space, we're seeing a lot of, a lot of criticism about how certain corporates are making promises but not exactly making headway in terms of how they're, you know, supporting different issues, solutions. You know, migrating to different issue, like positive technologies, things like that. How do you feel about these corporates and the criticism of, you know, these corporate promises? Do you think they're real in your experience or are they something that people should still be very, you know, gingerly about?
Saif Hameed:Yeah, it's a good question. Let me answer this in two ways. As an individual and as an environmentalist, I'm obviously keen for companies to make ambitious commitments and live up to them. That's how change happens. As an entrepreneur, on the other hand, I would say it's kind of relevant, but it's not super relevant, and what I mean by that is at Altruistic.
Saif Hameed:We're a very ideologically driven company and so, at our core, the reason why we believe that there's a business in what we're doing is because we believe that consumers, and every generation of new consumers, are more concerned with the impact of what they're buying than the generation that came before them.
Saif Hameed:And there's actually really good data behind this to substantiate that we tend to be better people than our parents and actually, like, if you kind of read Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker or the Expanding Circle by Peter Singer, there's a lot of good, very well researched, very well researched sort of thinking on this stuff.
Saif Hameed:And so, from our perspective, a growing percentage and a growing share of consumers are more concerned with the environment and are more likely to factor that concern into their decision making and choice when they buy a product.
Saif Hameed:And right now that percentage might be 5% in some markets and 15% in others, and maybe that 5% or 15% won't pay anything extra for the product, but they might choose the product in preference to something else at the same price point in quality if it has better environmental credentials and a better environmental narrative, and maybe at some point or in some cases, those consumers would pay extra. But the trajectory that we believe we're on as a society, and the trajectory we believe we've been on for generations now, is a progression towards more environmental concern for decision making and purchasing as consumers. And so for us like whether companies live up to their promises for 2025 or 2030 or 2035, we feel that we are enabling a big seismic, almost maybe not even a seismic, but just a slow moving and profound change that builds up steam year on year. And so you know, from a business perspective, I'm, to be honest, not super concerned.
Somil Aggarwal:And so is it the. Is it the idea that the generational shift in thinking then drives the decision making of the corporates, or is it that the decision making of the corporates is a non factor to the way that you think about the problem?
Saif Hameed:I think it's much more the former.
Saif Hameed:And so if you look at how fine tuned most corporate response mechanisms are to changes in how they sell, right, imagine that you know you have you have Pepsi and Coke both on the shelf side by side.
Saif Hameed:And actually, you know, these two have historically competed heavily for decades upon decades and the difference has mostly been around marketing and obviously there's a debate around taste. But now one of them manages to capture hearts, hearts and minds from a sustainability perspective. And suddenly you know, 2% additional, an additional 2% of consumers, right? Just one in 100, 150 consumers makes a sustainability oriented buying decision between those two and makes that systematically again and again. And, by the way, there's also good data to suggest that customers, consumers who make a sustainability oriented buying decision are much more likely to stick to that decision over time and be loyal customers of other products that the same brand produces. If you think of that, even one or 2% market shift happening, that's enough for a pretty powerful market moving signal to move all the way through from that corporate, that brand owner, but also all the way back through its supply chain. So it doesn't have to be huge shifts, it just has to be sustained small shifts over time and you get the corporate needle moving pretty steadily.
Silas Mähner:I think this is something that was actually brought up quite a while ago when I had Peter Leiden on.
Silas Mähner:He's a he likes to research things about the kind of the future and how things are changing and in particular in the US there's a model where generally what California does, the rest of the country will do in about 10 years, and he was pointing out in that conversation how all corporates they don't really they may or may not care about sustainability, but what they do care about is what their next customers are going to want to buy, right, so they're focusing on Gen Z and millennials and what. What are their purchasing decisions? Because people are getting older, they're buying less stuff and they need to focus on the next generation. So I think that's a really great point and it's good to bring back to that. And the quick question I'd like to get answered is how are they actually, how are these companies actually able to find out whether or not you know when they make a sustainable product, it's actually making a difference? Can you talk about the mechanisms there? Is this something you help them with or how does this work?
Saif Hameed:The, the, the direct consumer linkage is quite hard to substantiate because you know there's a, there's a. Well, no challenge, which is when you kind of do exit polls After an election. Exit polls can be unreliable because people will say what they want to admit to and will hide what they would rather you didn't know, and so they sort of know that the truth is in the, is in the polling booth. And it's a little similar with sustainability, where if you ask people kind of why they made a certain choice, they'll give you one reason. Or if you ask them whether they will factor sustainability into the buying decision, you typically get an overinflation, which is why you know there's a, there's been. I quoted 5 to 15% of consumers based on market. There's a lot of data to talk about 4050, 60% but I tend to discount that. Personally, I think it's a.
Saif Hameed:It's quite difficult to really suss out the direct linkage. What I think we're starting to see, which is quite interesting across our customers, is particularly those that own the customer interface. So they sell direct, for example, to consumers. If they release, let's say, a sustainable variation of a product, then they're able to already see what's the degree of kind of people choosing this product versus the traditional alternative. And they see, actually there's a sudden shift where, all of a sudden, 30% of consumers have switched from product type a to product type B. Like that shows that there was a demand, a pretty ready demand, for them to tap into and you can get a pretty quick response mechanism for that. What they can then see is again, does the same consumer make that same choice again and again, in which case you you've also tapped into a more loyal customer base.
Saif Hameed:The interesting thing for us to then start trialing after that is is there some element of price differentiation that you could work in, where you can actually potentially even raise the price a little for the sustainability credential and the consumer would still buy it?
Saif Hameed:In some ways, airlines, despite not being fast movers of sustainability on sustainability, in some ways they're pioneering some of that testing because in many, in many cases, when you're buying an airline ticket, you already get an option saying would you like to offset this, the cost of this flight? Whatever you may think about offsetting and personally I'm skeptical on many, many cases of offsetting in the corporate sphere In some cases not, but in many cases yes, whatever you may think about that, it's still an uptick on price that the consumers paying, and the only rationale for the consumer to pay, that is some element of sustainability based desire or or personal validation, and so I expect to see a little more of that sort of thing playing out, which is going to be interesting to see out of curiosity, what can you maybe just elaborate a little bit on the corporate purchasing of offsets?
Silas Mähner:just that kind of the skepticism there.
Saif Hameed:Yes, corporate purchasing of offsets has typically come from a few different impulses, and so if you sort of look at where offsets originated and how they've been used over the last couple of years, it is quite a big split.
Saif Hameed:So originally, offsets were more like part of the CSR or the Corporate Social Responsibility Program for a business where they were something small that the business is doing on the side to give back but also to create a better, you know, as a talent value proposition, to get talent excited, as a marketing value proposition, to show that they're being a good corporate citizen. That was literally what it was intended for, and so the frameworks that were built up to be able to verify that those offsets were genuine and credible were frameworks that fit the purpose for that time and for that period, and so, for instance, you know most of the frameworks. This is. This was true until a couple of years ago, I think it's probably still true. You could kind of only you could only register offsets at the point of creation or at the point of retirement, but not all of the transactions that happen in between origination or creation and retirement. So you could basically sell me an offset, I could sell it on to someone else, someone else could sell it on on further, and the reason that there were no controls around that sort of thing was that no one ever anticipated that there would be a market for this stuff like a resale market for this stuff, because it would have been, like, you know, a Nestle or a Coke sponsoring a wildlife restoration project. Who would ever want the resale rights on that? And so you know, the original thesis was quite different and therefore the infrastructure to support it was quite different.
Saif Hameed:Now it's basically being treated as an alternative or a proxy for money, which is not just that people are buying and selling and there's not a liquid market, but there is a market, but it's also that your alternative is to pay for an actual reduction in your emissions. Your alternative is, you know, do I, do I, let's say you know, help my supplier transition the type of mulching that they're using on their farm and put forward some money for them to do that in a more sustainable way? Or do I go and buy a bunch of offsets from from a third party seller? And so there is a proxy for financial value there, which means that suddenly, now that you're putting real money into this market, the infrastructure, whether it's certification or otherwise, needs to become a lot more robust, and it isn't. It isn't yet. And so that's kind of one challenge I have, which is that the market is just is just not ready. The off that space is just not ready for the kind of money that we need to be putting in there and to an extent that'll get better with time.
Saif Hameed:But all these sort of accusations you see a fraudulent offsets or offsets that like actually like the forest wouldn't have been under threat otherwise and someone positioned it as a forest under threat to milk the offset space, like there's a lot of good intentions in this market and the problem is you're just suddenly pushing stuff through at high velocity and it's in the engine is now breaking right. That that's just a big part of the problem. That's kind of one critique. The other is that there's a big fear amongst the sustainability community that more emphasis on offsets detracts from real decarbonization and real change within companies and their supply chains, and that's a real risk.
Saif Hameed:And if you kind of play this out, two of the big buyers for the off in the offset market today are oil and gas and aviation, both of which are really difficult to decarbonize industries which would have to otherwise take real, enduring changes to their business models, most likely or significant R&D spend, to make their emissions targets successful. And if they effectively have the ability to buy offsets instead, they're doing a couple of things. One is that they're potentially kicking the can further down the road in terms of those heavy investments and business model changes, and the more that they're putting it into the future, the less likely it is that it's ever going to happen or going to happen in time. And the second thing is that by buying up the available offset capacity, they are reducing the available offset capacity for other businesses that have undergone significant changes but are left with a small residual portion of emissions that is really hard to abate.
Saif Hameed:What I mean by that is, you know, take two companies, right. Let's say that there's an airline and a chocolate business, and the chocolate business has changed up the packaging format, it's changed up how the cocoa is grown, it's put solar panels on all the rooftops, it's done a bunch of stuff, but there's still some small portion of the emissions that they just can't get rid of, because it's just to do with how the cocoa bean is roasted, for example. Right, and the cost of them going the extra mile on that might be $150 per ton of emissions. And so it would never make sense and they would much rather go out and buy an emissions offset for $25, but they can't because of an airline bought the offset rights already for $6 in bulk, and the airline then avoided having to make any reductions of any sort, and they just sort of bought their way out of it more cheaply and with less effort. So those are the two, I would say two typical challenges.
Silas Mähner:Yeah, I mean, I do think, just one maybe observation I would have and I have, no, no opinion one way or the next, necessarily. But I do think if these companies like airlines and oil and gas are willing to put a ton of money into offsetting their efforts, I'm assuming that they would also be very willing to purchase new technology if it comes up. So it kind of gives a little bit of a market indicator to people building that technology. They're probably looking for it, but they're just waiting for when they can find one. That's kind of, you know, plug and play to what they're doing.
Silas Mähner:I know aviation is a tough one. You can't exactly just plug and play new airplanes, but so I think this is interesting. I do want to ask one question. I think that because of your, your clients and your exposure to this space, you probably have good insight on what would you say are the biggest areas or the where there's the most demand for sustainable products across your clients. I'm really kind of curious to understand this, because you it sounds like you have a lot of data across the space.
Saif Hameed:Yeah, I think that. I think that right now some of the best sectors. So I kind of see the world in terms of three categories of business. I sort of look. Look at a small category of sustainability leaders or sustainability champions. I sort of see a second category of sustainability followers and then a third category of kind of sustainability adopters and and I think that the first category is a small percentage of the market In that category or likely to find products that are consumer products, a little more on the premium end, a little more targeted at, you know, let's say you know younger markets aged between 15 and 35 or 15 and 40, much more urban.
Saif Hameed:So in a good examples of products and companies I think are like Tony's chocolate lonely, which is obviously big in the UK and Europe, lush cosmetics you know Patagonia right, obviously Patagonia is kind of overtaken now in terms of size but like a lot of these companies, sort of targeted a really a loyal, enthusiastic base. That was probably, you know, in general I don't generalize too much, but in general a little more affluent than the average consumer, a little more likely to be urban, a little more likely to be younger and a little more likely therefore make an identity based discretionary purchase. I think that's where we're going to see a lot of sort of forward momentum in this space and that's quite exciting to watch innovation happening there. I think you then have a second tier and so if you know, rudely speaking, if you say out of the, you know the spectrum of companies between the mid and larger size, if you say maybe 510% around that first category, then I think we're likely to see 304050% in the second category, which is going to be large businesses that look at the smaller ones as having set the bar and want to now themselves meet the bar.
Saif Hameed:And so a good example of this in my mind is if you look at like, if you look at, let's say, ben and Jerry's and Unilever right, ben and Jerry's then it's got the kind of the B Corp leading on innovation, leading on sustainability. Unilever, as you know, the now the biggest investor is also then kind of the next mover into the space and is trying to try to now lift the whole business to meet the bar. And you see this happening with a number of large businesses you know Nestle, denone, all examples where they're trying to roll out ambitious sustainability strategies and programs based on the trail that's been blazed by a sort of a newer generation of companies. And then I see that that third category, which is a sizable chunk of the market, which is probably going to defer most action until absolutely necessary, and it's probably going to be regulation or some other forcing mechanism that's going to push them, push them into sustainability terrain and, you know, from a change perspective, I think that's that's fine, right. Everyone kind of moves for a different reason.
Somil Aggarwal:I know that was sort of the end of the explanation of three, but based on the regulation point, how much of new demand creation do you believe is coming from regulation, versus that shift in societal behavior? Like if you had to break down a balance, what would you say is the percentage? You know one way or the other, and which one do you see is the more, the faster growing segment?
Saif Hameed:Yeah, it's hard to say. You know, like if I anecdotally share what our observation has been from companies coming to us, I would say that a year and a half, two years ago, we probably had 60% of the companies that we were engaging engaging with us because they wanted to build better products and wanted to capture hearts and minds of sustainability oriented consumers. And you know, maybe the remaining 40% were there because they had to be there or regulation was pushing them. I think that that has shifted and it's now 30% the former and 70% the latter, where 70% are coming to us because they have to be be in this space. And I don't think that's a sign that the absolute numbers have dwindled in the first camp. I think it's just the market is bigger. There are more companies now out there looking to drive change and most of the new entrance that weren't looking for support or solutions two years ago are at the table now because they have to be, and that's that's kind of what you'd expect, right, you'd expect regulation to enforce that sort of change.
Somil Aggarwal:And I think exactly what you said, like this type of investment is meant to, in theory, splurge, spur the flywheel where eventually you get, you know by you know forcible market mobility. You know a lot of demand for these different types of solutions. Customers get used to them, preferences change and then you build on that momentum and essentially now exists in its own, in its own, its own, and it sounds like you would agree that that thesis is building. Or is there a nuance that you think people are should be looking at? That's that's maybe not going according to plan.
Saif Hameed:I think I agree with you. I think what's interesting to see is going to be so like two things that I'm looking out for which are gonna be interesting to see. One is how do regional variations in this sort of regulation affect the playing field overall? And so right now, the EU has probably brought in the most aggressive regulatory framework from a sustainability perspective in the world in terms of the ambition, the rigor, the granularity, the expectations all of that right, it's the most advanced out of any other geography, I think, or any other big market, and so what we're seeing from the US, for example, is that any company that is exporting reasonable amounts of product into the EU is now having to adapt to meet the needs of the EU's regulation, and that's quite interesting to see. On the other hand, the US regulatory landscape is catching up, and then, obviously, with the Inflation Reduction Act and its ginormous incentives, it's gonna be interesting to see how that skews, maybe even the supply side first as a way to then build the demand side right. You suddenly get a lot of innovation and technology and solutions, and that can actually spur then a lot of demand as well, which will be interesting to see, and so I think that's kind of that sort of geographic element is gonna be one interesting aspect to look out for, and there's all kinds of curveballs within that. So, if you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, the EU has now brought in its own thinking on that and how they'll counter so as not to have a massive loss of talent. On the other hand, if you look at, like, the EU's innovation with the carbon border adjustment mechanism to tax embedded carbon on imported products into the EU, the US is now looking at how it has an equivalent mechanism of some type to match that. So there's a whole interesting dynamic playing out here.
Saif Hameed:The second thing is that at least in the EU regulation there's an expectation of better measurement, target setting and progress on some metrics that no one has really managed to measure, set targets and achieve progress on before, and so, for example, biodiversity and nature right, or some of those elements I, as someone who used to be a, who was a co-founder of a farming business, if I'm trying to measure biodiversity impact of my farming business like I can look at potentially some inputs and look at the correlation between pesticides and fertilizer and what the likely biodiversity impact is expected to be of those inputs, but how am I gonna measure the outputs, like, do I actually count the species, the number of species of insects on the farm?
Saif Hameed:Like you know, this is really new and the nicest word is probably bold sort of territory to go in, and I think it's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. It's an important agenda but in a way, regulation is now kind of over leapt right. It's leapfrogged where even the most innovative players were. The innovative players set the bar on carbon and water, and now regulation is kind of raising that bar by a fold. Basically, in some areas.
Somil Aggarwal:I think that isn't really a question anymore. I mean, it's not only just the idea of regulation, but the scale at which it was implemented and the massive movement that that big investment makes. So definitely agree with you there, and I think it's very visible, and the many guests that we speak to, how much it is touching almost every part of the you know, the climate and or sustainability spectrum of technologies. Well, look, this has been a fantastic, you know number of different points and insights, insights that I don't think I've heard this quite, you know this clearly or this in depth. Before we're not done with the interview quite yet, but before we get to the end, there's one thing that I definitely wanna ask. Especially with how well you understand the space, how deeply you've been able to operate with that knowledge, I wanted to ask you what your top three pieces of advice for founders are.
Saif Hameed:Ooh founders in this space, or founders in general, Both you know.
Somil Aggarwal:Maybe if you could give something specific to the space and then in general, to the different types of lessons you've learned, not only here in terms of be founding a company, but you know previously in terms of the many different skills I'm sure you aggregated working in government and you know supporting change on the ground.
Saif Hameed:Yeah, sure, this might be a little unstructured, but let me let me give it a go. For the first one I'd go with maybe some advice to founders in this space, which is there's almost a unique challenge and opportunity in this space of getting the pacing right. And what I mean by that is, when you know, when I first started this business, for three months no one understood why I thought I'd have a business model or why I thought there was a customer need. And then suddenly everyone expected there was a customer need and I had investors banging down the door. And at this point I think it's honestly quite challenging for someone to come in into the carbon accounting space or similar, because it's quite saturated, right, if I'm being honest, there's like 100 players in this space, but out of those 100, there are probably like a dozen that are doing decent revenue and with decent traction. You know, and again, you know, I think we're certainly one of those dozen, but you know it's a busy space and it's hard to break into. And that'll probably change again in maybe several years in this room for more innovation, but right now the pacing kind of prompts you not to go into this part of the market.
Saif Hameed:At the same time, I see some companies that are coming out, some startups that are coming out almost assuming that carbon accounting is a success and is rolled out universally, and they're now coming in with, let's say, new API-based products to link up different carbon accounting systems, on the assumption everyone is gonna have a system. And I think those ones are probably a bit too early. Actually, and I think, almost you know, you kind of are better off waiting a few years and then coming out with that because, again, if you get the timing or the pacing wrong, that's basically life and death. The most startup success is a combination of timing and execution, and the first one is luck, basically right, or some degree of market analysis. So I think getting the pacing right is gonna be super important.
Saif Hameed:I think, for example, right now there's a lot of room for someone to come out with a better water measurement product, actually, or a better recycled, content-focused product, like. There's a lot of these niche opportunities that are at the right time if you're trying to paste things properly. So that's maybe my first piece of advice. The second is a little more general, which is I've found that in my space and in a lot of similar spaces, people try and find a cool technology and then look for a customer problem to solve with it. And so you know, I kind of hear I used to hear a lot about blockchain in this space. I'm now hearing a lot about AI in this space, and both of these technologies will have applications and use cases. But I think what's more important as a founder is to start with a customer problem and then work backwards to solve that problem, and then you'll naturally find the right technologies to solve the problem with.
Saif Hameed:And so you know we're an AI intensive company. We don't talk about it a lot, but most of our, you know, like most of year one for us, was understanding the customer problem, most of year two was data engineering and now we're getting into the funky cool data science and AI stuff right. So you kind of work your way backwards into the technology from the customer problem and I think that's a lower risk way certainly to go about it. So the third piece of advice and I don't think I've done a fair bit of angel investment I've invested maybe 18 or 19 startups and I don't think anyone really gives this enough thought, and I'm probably included in that which is organizational setup and company culture and actually thinking about that from the first day and the first few days, and usually just the first few months, and building progressively. And so we've tried to be very intentional with what we're building from a culture perspective, and what I mean by that is how will culture flow and be consistent? How can you spin up a new team and it can be an ambassador. You can have ambassadors from the company culture into that.
Saif Hameed:We're in the process right now of looking to set up a LATAM-based hub to support our US-based customers and we're already thinking about how do we ensure that our company culture and values are embedded in that new team and what are we gonna have to do to make sure that that works. And in that thinking we're building on top of a lot of early, well-documented, well-entrenched thinking around distributed governance within our company and a logic for the type of company values and culture and organization we're trying to build. And so I would say, wherever you wanna head with that, for us we want it to be very flexible, we want it to have an open holiday policy, open location policy, work from anywhere and be very values-led in those aspects. And for others it'll be different. But being intentional about that early on, we'll lay the foundations in groundwork that you'll ultimately build abilities on, and I think that's under-invested in today.
Silas Mähner:One that's, by the way, that's really helpful. I'm always a huge fan of talking about scaling culture. A lot of companies really just don't think about it. It's not in their mind. They're like, okay, how can we get talent? And they don't think about it when you're trying to scale the culture, because if you have two different cultures in different parts of the world, it can be in some cases, detrimental to your company. But one thing I would think, based off of your guys' success, I'd really like to ask you about is, in particular, on go-to-market strategy. Do you have any kind of tactics or things that you would share with companies, because there's a lot of, not just in the, you know, carbon accounting space. There's a lot of software companies in climate that have pretty good technology. They just need to scale. So can you talk a little bit about some of the tactics or strategies around growing and just going to marketing, getting customers?
Saif Hameed:Yeah, happy to do that. I mean, maybe just to start with. I think that I read somewhere at some point something that stuck with me on this topic, which is you know, in your first year you're kind of expected to do, you know, a few hundred percent revenue growth and in your second year you're expected to do something similar, and then eventually you know that trails down. But what's interesting is not to look at it just in percentage terms but in the amount of absolute new revenue you're going to have to bring in this year versus next year, versus the year after. Because you know, for example, if you're looking to, let's say, a hundred thousand dollars of revenue in your first year and then you want to do three hundred thousand dollars of new revenue in your second year or whatever those numbers might be for you like, you're going to have to put more gas in to get that three hundred thousand dollars and do something incremental beyond what you're doing today. And so, whatever your program is your GTM program, it's going to have to be a program that can potentially be scaled within the context of your market and the resources that you have available. So, for instance, for us we had a couple of different options. Right, we raised, you know, frankly, a very large amount of funding last year and so we kind of had all options available to us. We can either say, look, let's go for a, you know, an ad spend heavy approach. We're just going to really, you know, max out the airwaves on LinkedIn, seo, whatever else we need to do, and basically get, you know, spend our way in and we're going to squeeze out a lot of players that kind of afford to do that. But that becomes a very expensive strategy and you know we felt it would have diminishing returns over time. Similarly, you know, another approach could be we could, like, have, you know, invest heavily in a proper outbound sales channel, hire a lot of BDRs or SDRs, have a very traditional enterprise sales approach and again try and kind of build up sales muscle to really try and, you know, again use our spending power in that space.
Saif Hameed:What we've gone for instead on our side is a very community oriented approach, which is we focus very heavily on content creation. We focus very heavily on organic so you know, word of mouth spreading of our content and thinking from one potential customer to another. We decided to do this because we were getting a lot of referrals and most of our business growth was referral based. So we thought let's double down on this. It works very well for us because of a few things. One is that our DNA is very subject matter heavy, so it's less. You know. We're very steeped in the sustainability context and content in our business and we have a lot of good subject matter leadership and expertise and so we are able to appeal to a subject matter oriented user on the other side by doubling down on content and thought leadership. So that was kind of one aspect for us.
Saif Hameed:The second is that we're headquartered out of London. London is probably 70% of our sort of UK market is based out of London, probably even more than that. Frankly, like the people we're targeting for our market is our based out of London, and so that lends itself well to a community oriented strategy. You can get people into the same room, same events, they all know each other. Most of our customers will know some other customers of ours or potentials. And then we also orient around certain value chains predominantly. So we focus quite a lot on food. We also focus a bit on apparel and a bit on personal care and cosmetics, which again creates a bit of a network effect. So a community and content led strategy has sort of worked well for us. It may obviously change, but this was a strategy that we felt confident we could put progressive amounts of acceleration on next year and the year after to give us the absolute revenue gains that we'll need to achieve to deliver on our potential.
Somil Aggarwal:Definitely and you mentioned you mentioned that I actually want to talk about and partly into the last thing we'd love to ask you, I think, especially with how much you understand about the space and a lot of the way that it's changing, being able to work with all these different industry players and people looking to find solutions, you probably do see, like you mentioned, the parts of ESG that are relevant, the parts of ESGs that are not, and the different business opportunities that you have in the space.
Somil Aggarwal:So, at a high level, I wanted to know the different types of business opportunities that you see in climate based off of where the space is going and if there's room for this. You talked a little bit about the angel investing. I know for many people who are seasoned entrepreneurs have had a good history of operating experience when they do angel investments. Oftentimes if they're sort of a later stage company, they'll see the growth of different angel investments and companies that they would like to see either in the space as customers or potential acquisition partners or just technology that help further their business. I wanted to know if that ties in to how you see advancement in the space as well.
Saif Hameed:Yeah, happy to take both of those. Let me maybe start with the second because it's a little more fresh. I originally invested in other startups to understand how startups worked, and out of boredom and a desire for something interesting in my life, and that was great, I think, and in some ways it's still very rewarding because it gives me a lot of exposure to a lot of different topics Progressively. If I continue down this road in terms of investment, I think it would be in some ways, playing more to my value addition as an investor, rather than necessarily value addition for altruistic and what I mean by that is I'm likely to gravitate towards other enterprise SaaS, where I can deliver value in terms of advice and network, or potentially sustainability-oriented consumer businesses, which are then again another area where I might be able to contribute something in terms of value addition and also which would provide me with a good stream of insight that I wouldn't otherwise get, because I'm on the enterprise side of the fence and it's useful for me to understand to have better access to consumer data, which I might get through involvement with other startups.
Saif Hameed:I've forgotten what your first question was. It makes it. I was thinking through it at the time. Do you could just remind me?
Silas Mähner:Yeah, the first part of it is really about where do you see opportunities in climate to build, because we always like to get ideas for other founders who are looking to start something. Where do you see opportunities?
Saif Hameed:I think there's a lot of opportunities, to be honest, I mean so the whole. Having gone head to head with offsets just a bit earlier in this, I think that our whole space is obviously ripe for innovation. They're just the scale of funding available, the fact the US government is getting into the market and going to be doing direct purchases I think anything in that realm is a super exciting space. So let's call it the direct air capture technical offsets. I have issues with the space, but it's a great area to go into as a founder. I think there's a second space which is, I think, maybe three or four spaces, so that's kind of one. I think a second space is around alternative materials and inputs, which I think is frankly under-invested in, and so I'm looking at I'm talking about alternative fibers for the apparel space, alternative types of flavorings and fragrances and colorants that are less environmentally heavy, alternative types of ingredients for the food space. There's a whole reinvention possibility for lower impact inputs into other people's businesses, and I think there's a phenomenal scope for those businesses in a B2B context to grow and scale, and that's really exciting, at least for me. I think there's a third space which is going to be around data and potentially also certification and assurance and accreditation, and there's different sorts of plays there. There's obviously a few plays in accrediting or certifying offset providers. There's a play in emissions factor databases or even water factor databases or other such databases, and there's a few areas to go into there. A difficult market to make work and I think there'll be fewer winners, but I think it's an interesting space.
Saif Hameed:I think that there's, let's say, a fourth category, which is where we are, which is more the kind of classic SaaS, which is going to ultimately compete on stuff like user experience and solving the customer's needs and being able to be usable and helping them to achieve their sustainability targets and trajectories, and in some ways, I think the timing isn't right for new entrants on that right now, but in others, I think that for many of these other metrics within ESG, there's room for a focused platform.
Saif Hameed:I would love to see more stuff in the social column. I'd love to see more SaaS coming out to solve some of the social issues that many large companies are taking seriously and will happily put money behind. We're a customer actually for at least three or four people focused SaaS and we're only a 60-65% team. We have a SaaS focused on the mental health of our team. We have a SaaS focused on people evaluation and making sure that that process runs in a merit-based way. There's a lot of room for innovation within that social column that I think is just under-invested in and under-explored by entrepreneurs.
Silas Mähner:That's really helpful. I think that that is probably one of the most valuable answers we've heard when we ask that it's really helpful to see direct insights. Just really quickly, are you able to, with your platform, having a lot of clients that are seeking to make their different processes sustainable, especially on the material side? Is there a way that you're able to, or that your clients do this, where they go out to market saying, hey, we're looking for these products, and it gives a market indicator for somebody to go start working on this, because in some cases, especially on materials, it's going to take many years of R&D to solve those. So I'm just kind of curious is there any way that you're pushing out signals to the market through your work or through the clients themselves?
Saif Hameed:Yeah, I wouldn't want to go too far into this for sensitivity reasons, but it's definitely an area that we're interested in and I think that it's a direction of travel, and so I think that for platforms like ours, there are two likely directions to innovate. One is around more solutions to decarbonize and more involvement in that space, in bringing those solutions to customers, and the other is around more solutions to offset and going deeper into that space and working more with the developers and being more of a market maker on that side, and I think it's very difficult for companies to do both simultaneously because they are both big challenges, tackling effectively $100 billion markets. So, but yeah, definitely I think there's a lot to do in that space.
Silas Mähner:Very good. Well, we've got overtime. I appreciate you doing this, so where can people reach you? Any final things to mention to the audience?
Saif Hameed:Yeah, probably best place to reach me is on LinkedIn. So I think my kind of handle is just my sort of full name on LinkedIn, so easiest place to find me is there. I'm sort of a, I'm quite active, and even a direct message there will also reach me as well.
Silas Mähner:Awesome, very good. Well, we really appreciate you coming out. I think this has been very, very helpful, very glad that we had this conversation and look forward to having you on again in the future to bring further insights.
Saif Hameed:My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you.
