Today my guest is Tessa Clarke. Tessa is the co-founder and CEO of Olio, a free app tackling the problem of waste by connecting neighbours with each other, and volunteers with local businesses so that surplus food and other household items can be given away and not thrown away. While Olio has grown to 5 million users in just over five years, and its impact has been widely recognised, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted OLIO as a beacon for the world. And by Viva tech, sorry, who awarded Olio the next European unicorn. Prior to OLIO, Tessa had a 15 year corporate career as a digital managing director in the media, retail and financial services sectors. And she met her co-founder Sasha, whilst they were studying for the MBAs at Stanford University. Tessa is passionate about sharing about the sharing economy as a solution for a Sustainable World, and about profit with purpose as the next business paradigm.
Katherine Ann Byam 0:13
What an amazing mission you have Tessa, welcome to the show.
Tessa Clarke 1:21
Thank you, great to be with you.
Katherine Ann Byam 1:23
Olio clearly hits a nerve with people and has become such a trending brand name and the sustainability space. What prompted you to really begin this OLIO journey.
Tessa Clarke 1:33
So the earlier journey started, really in my childhood, my parents are farmers up in North Yorkshire in the northeast of the UK. And when you grow up on a farm, you learn firsthand just how much hard work goes into producing the food that we all eat every day. And as a result of that, I grew up with a pathological hatred of food waste. Now, I didn't think anything in particular about that, and went off and pursued as you've touched on a fairly classic corporate career. But everything changed through a seemingly inconsequential moment in my life. Just over five years ago, now, I was living outside of the UK moving back and a moving day, that movement told me that I had to throw away all of our uneaten food. Now, obviously, given how much I hate food waste, I was not prepared to do that. So instead, I set out to the streets clutching this food, hoping to find someone to give it to and cut a long story short, I failed miserably. But I wasn't to be defeated, so I went back to my apartment. And when the movement we're looking at smuggled the non perishable food at the bottom of my packing boxes, and I remember that moment so vividly, I thought, Wow, I'm probably performing a criminal offence right now. But to me, it felt even more criminal to put perfectly good food in the bed, when I knew there was someone probably within 100 metres of me who would like it. And so that was how the whole idea of OLIO came about.
Katherine Ann Byam 2:53
It's incredible. Because I think you know, growing up on a farm in Yorkshire, I grew up on a farm in the Caribbean, and the community was always important, right, so nothing would ever go to waste, you would always share.
Tessa Clarke 3:04
Exactly. And actually, that's one of the things we've discovered, since launching OLIO, is that nobody enjoys throwing away food. And the reason why we throw it away is because we're no longer connected with our local community, we no longer have someone to give that food to. And that's actually what earlier is trying to counter. We're trying to harness the powers of modern technology to make it simple, safe, fast and fun for you to be reconnected to your local community. So you do have someone to give that food away to
Katherine Ann Byam 3:34
powerful message. Which of your past skills would you consider most transferable to the OLIO journey? And why?
Tessa Clarke 3:42
That's a really interesting question. Because both Sasha and I, between us we'd had a 40 year corporate career before we became entrepreneurs. And so we definitely felt that we were going to grate against the grain a little bit. I think the stereotype of an entrepreneur is some kind of couple of young guys who have dropped out of college wearing hoodies right at the beginning of their careers. And we were definitely not that we were sort of two mums in the middle of their life.
But what we've realised, actually, is that all of those skills that we acquired through our corporate careers have been incredibly helpful and valuable for us. And I think it's fair to say that we have kept probably half of the things that we learned from our corporate background, and we've ditched the other half that we think is a waste of time. So the stuff that we've kept, is everything around recruiting, retaining, managing people, leading teams, communications strategy, the importance of customer insight, data, analytics, all that good stuff is absolutely critical, no matter what size of organisation you're working in, the stuff that we jettisoned.
And then we got the opportunity. I think it was a lot of that bureaucracy, just the timescales on which things happened when You're an entrepreneur with very limited resources. And time is money, you have to move extremely quickly. You have to test and experiment the whole time. And so very early on, we read a book called The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. And that book above all others, I think, really transformed our mental mindset and changed it to something very new which prioritised as I say that constant test, measure, learn test, measure learn process.
Katherine Ann Byam 5:28
Yeah, I think there are a couple of books in this category of startup that are really powerful. I think Alex Osterwalder is one of those authors that I think is really pivotal in this space, right? Yeah. So what are some of the challenges you faced when you started as well.
Tessa Clarke 5:47
So many challenges every day is a new challenge. And the important thing to recognise is that that comes with the territory. And you've got to learn to be at ease with that, we had a couple of very significant early challenges. So one of the first early challenges was that our early adopters loved olio. But they hated food waste, and so they had no food to give away. And then we had, somewhat naively I think, hoped that local businesses would use the owner app at the end of the day, to bring extra customers into the store, etc. And they were too busy, you to run in their core businesses to be messing around sort of messaging with members of the community in an app. So we had a food sharing app that had no food on it, which I'm sure you'll agree was pretty useless. So how we solve that conundrum was, we said, why don't we take the people who hate food waste, don't have any, but have plenty of time, and match them with the businesses that have lots of food waste in no time. And that resulted in our food waste heroes programme, which today has over 35,000 trained volunteers. These are members of the audio community who we match with the local business. And then at the end of the day, for that business, the volunteer will show up, they'll take all of their unsold food, they'll take it home and add it to the app within minutes, the neighbours requesting it and minutes later, they'll pop around and pick it up. So that helped us overcome the problem of a fish sharing app with no food. Another early challenge was how to grow the community with very close to no marketing budget, because again earlier is a product that depends upon there being lots of other people using it for it to actually work and be useful. And so how we managed to get around that was we developed our ambassador programme. And we now have over 50,000 ambassadors. So these are people who are really passionate about our mission. And they recognise that for them to be able to use OLIO, their neighbours need to be on earlier as well. And so we give our ambassadors both digital content to enable them to spread the word. But we also give them old school letters and posters and flyers, so they can do that sort of hyper local guerilla marketing on our behalf. And that's been a really, really cost-effective way for us to grow rapidly.
Katherine Ann Byam 7:58
Really powerful story. I'm really curious about the topic of the business model because I read in your summary that this is a free app. So I guess my question is, how are you actually making money?
Tessa Clarke 8:12
Great question. So we are firm believers in profit with purpose. So Elio is absolutely not a charity, we believe that business can and should do good. But in order to survive and thrive, you've got to have a sustainable business model. So we generate revenues through the service that we provide to the businesses that I just outlined with our food waste heroes. So at the moment, businesses have to pay a waste contractor to take their surplus food away. Instead, they are now paying us to ensure that that food is taken away but redistributed to the local community so it's eaten, not thrown away. And our largest clients are Tesco, pret Aman, Shea, Booker, the wholesaler, and many, many more.
Katherine Ann Byam 9:02
Wow, that is brilliant. It's really a great way to solve two problems, right? It's really turning waste into a product. It's a circular economy. It's everything. That's good, and what we're transforming in the world today. So really, kudos to coming up with what a great model.
Tessa Clarke 9:19
Thank you. Yeah, we love it, too.
Katherine Ann Byam 9:22
So what's it been like as a woman leading in a global trending brand, and in this new space of sustainability? Tell me a bit about that.
Tessa Clarke 9:31
You Yeah, so I think that being a female co-founder business, so I should say it's not just me, it's my co-founder Sasha as well, is nothing but an advantage and a benefit. I think we've been able to build a brilliantly inclusive and diverse team. We have a phenomenal culture and we measure our culture regularly and we're really, really proud of that. There is only one way In which being a woman is a disadvantage, and it is a crippling disadvantage. And this is when it comes to the topic of fundraising. So female-founded businesses receive just 1% of all venture capital investment. Male founded businesses receive 89%. And mixed teams receive 10%. And when you are fundraising, and facing those incredibly depressing odds, it is extremely challenging. And I should say that this is a problem that afflicts not only female founders, but diverse founders of all types as well. And it infuriates me because when I look at the world, and when I see who is really stepping up and solving some of the world's largest problems, like the climate crisis, light, social inequality, etc, it is diverse founders who are doing that. And the fact that they receive just spare crumbs of investment capital means that we are short, ultimately shortchanging humanity due to a lack of investment in those diverse founders. That is the only thing that has been challenging as a female leader.
Katherine Ann Byam 11:15
Yeah, no, that's really a powerful message. Because I think I've spoken to many, quite a variety of people on this podcast. And you're absolutely right, the people who will go getting who are really making game changing moves in their local environments in the nation states. I spoke to a young lady in Namibia the other day, who's trying to change how they do agriculture there and she can't get the funding. And this is such a problem. It's a crisis.
Tessa Clarke 11:41
Yeah, it is. And it's not like this is sort of nice to have topics that we're talking about, you know, that lady you mentioned, she's literally trying to feed local communities and feed the world. And we are shortchanging all of us by not investing properly in these diverse founders. And the flip side of that is I find it infuriating. Seeing all the capital flowing into areas that argue if you kind of to step back and look at what humanity really needs to be investing in at this point in time, you might say that we perhaps shouldn't be spending billions on getting people's groceries delivered within 15 minutes, right. So yeah, it's a topic that I'm very passionate about.
Katherine Ann Byam 12:24
What surprised you the most about this journey, if anything?
Tessa Clarke 12:30
surprised me the most well, every day is a surprise. Quite literally, I think one of the things that I learned very early on, I think, is because you listen to lots of stories of successful startups, and you hear about Airbnb and people like that. And often when the story is told retrospectively, it's told as if there was this sort of silver bullet or this moment in time, which resulted in this massive inflection point. And what we have learned early on, I think many entrepreneurs quickly realise is that there isn't a single silver bullet. You know, for a long time, we lived in hope that the next feature, the next marketing campaign, the next initiative would be the one that propelled us into the stratosphere. But the reality is that actually is just about showing up every single day, and just testing and improving and testing and improving. And cumulatively, that adds up. And that's what takes you the distance.
Katherine Ann Byam 13:28
You know, pretty much an overnight success takes about five years to build. Yeah, like,
Tessa Clarke 13:32
Which part of those 10,000 nights was the overnight?
Katherine Ann Byam 13:39
So what would you say to someone who's wanting to begin on a green first sort of intrapreneurial journey, and it could be green first, Digital First, whatever the idea
Tessa Clarke 13:51
I have several pieces of advice. So the first one is to make sure that you are solving a real problem. And a problem that you are really, really passionate about is this, your life's calling life is far too short to be working on something that isn't sort of your life's calling. And there are so many massive problems out there that need solving yesterday, that I think we all need to kind of stand up and kind of get going. The other thing I would say is very much linked to that is to stay focused on the problem that you're trying to solve. And do not allow yourself to fall in love with your particular solution.
Because it is almost inevitable that your solution will not be perfect when you first launched into the market. And it might actually be completely incorrect for the problem that you're trying to solve. And if you just stay really, really focused on the problem you're trying to solve, then you will be able to test and iterate your way to a product that will solve that. The other thing as I've already touched on, I recommend that everybody reads the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and also a book called the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, which is all about how to do that kind of early market research.
And then I think the other thing I would say is to reach out and build a peer group, connect with other people who are going through the same journey, it can be extremely lonely. Unless people are kind of going through it themselves, it's really hard to understand what the entrepreneurial journey is like. And also, it's much quicker learning from the experience of others than necessarily having to experience every single mistake yourself. Absolutely. Yeah, the final thing is to enjoy it. Right? Like, make sure you enjoy the journey because you will never reach your destination. That's something else that I've realised. So enjoy it while you're doing it. And sort of what's next for olio?
Katherine Ann Byam 15:39
What's on the horizon? What's happening now? What are you excited about?
Tessa Clarke 15:43
So we have set ourselves an enormous and terrifying goal of 1 billion OLIO is by 2030. And the reason for that is really, really simple. If humanity is to stand any chance whatsoever of living in a 1.5 degree warmed world, then that is what we need to achieve. So we're super clear on the end goal. And we are busy plotting the right path in between where we are now.
And that goal, which I'm kind of really excited about, but I'm really excited that businesses are finally waking up to the fact that food waste is wrong. And so we have lots and lots and lots of businesses, from supermarkets, to the quick commerce companies to quick service restaurants, to corporate canteens, they're all wanting to work with us, to enable them to have zero food waste locations. And that's what's changed. You know, we've been sort of slogging away at this for a couple of years. And definitely this year, there's been a real mindset shift as businesses are realising that time is up for food waste.
The other thing I'm super excited about is we've recently launched a section in the app called borrow, which connects people to their neighbours, so you can lend and borrow everyday household items. And we're super passionate about that, because we are sort of currently in the midst of a resource depletion crisis, basically, and that's best exemplified by the concept of Earth Overshoot Day. So Earth Overshoot Day is the day in the year in which humanity has used all the resources that can be replenished in a year. And when it was first measured in 1969, Earth Overshoot Day was 31st December.
So humanity, using a year that the planet could replenish in a year, fast forward to this year, Earth Overshoot Day was the 29th of July. And so what that means is that every single thing that every single one of the seven half billion people are consuming after the 29th of July, is net net depleted to the planet. And this is a very long, roundabout way of explaining why I'm so excited by this new Baro section. Because what we have, you know, we're consuming collectively as if we have 1.75 planets.
And by 2030, we're on track to be consuming as if we have three planets. And by 2050, we're on track to be consuming as if we have five planets. Clearly, we only have one planet. And so we've got to reinvent how we consume. And so we really want people to when they want to consume, to first and foremost, utilise the resources that already exist in our local community.
And so instead of you going out to buy a cat carrier, or buy a fancy dress costume, or buy a drill, why don't you just borrow one that is sitting gathering dust in a neighbour's home. And if we can borrow instead of buying, if we can give stuff away, instead of throwing stuff away, then we really can help solve the climate crisis at scale.
Katherine Ann Byam 18:31
Absolutely. Listen, thank you so much for this. How can my listeners follow your work and get involved in what you're doing? I guess, go download the Oliwa.
Tessa Clarke 18:39
Download the earlier app. Yes, absolutely. So earlier, we spelt out li O. And you can find it in the app store in Google Play, and then on our website, as well. So you don't have to have a smartphone to use olio. You can access it via the website. And then we're very active on social media as well. So it's at OLIO dot app. And if you're interested in learning more about sort of sustainability and sustainable living, then please do follow me. I'm on medium. I'm at Tessa Clark.
Katherine Ann Byam 19:10
Perfect, thank you so much for joining us today.