HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I am the co-founder and CEO of Plan A and co-founder of the Greentech Alliance. The latter is a community of 1,000+ startups that are connected to over 350+ advisors from VC, media, and business. Prior to Plan A, I worked in investment banking, venture capital, and fintech in Asia and Europe.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
We are Plan A. We have developed a science-based, one-stop SaaS platform that helps companies to decarbonize their operations. Our end-to-end software empowers businesses and organizations to accurately measure, monitor, reduce, and report their carbon footprint while improving their ESG performance.
What is the origin story?
A few years back, I went on a trip to Morocco, to explore the best places for surfing. This trip was definitely an eye-opening experience. I expected to see beautiful places to surf, but everything was really polluted, mostly covered in plastic. For the first time, my eyes were open to the negative impact we, humans, had on our planet.
After this experience I got back to London and started to dig deeper into the topic of pollution and climate change, spending all my free time for the next 6 months educating myself on climate change and the correlation it had to pollution through online courses, books, and scientific papers.
The knowledge I accumulated showed me that the situation worldwide was actually much worse than what was communicated across channels. My next step was to conduct a vast survey with 300 people and 100 companies to understand the behaviors and opinions about climate change. This was the final straw. After this, I was beyond convinced that addressing climate change needed a different approach. I quit my job and founded Plan A.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
The Plan A team consists of 40+ experts in climate data science, tech, business, design, and more. We gather some of the brightest minds such as our CTO and ML expert Oliver Spragg as well as our CEAO Vamsi Akuraju (ex Climate-KIC, WWF, Potsdam Institute).
What I love most about our team is that we are so many like-minded people who share the same mission and vision day in and day out. We all want to tackle climate change by helping companies on their way to becoming truly sustainable. It’s this high level of cross-functional expertise combined with our passion and devotion to the cause that makes me confident we will be successful.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
There is so much evidence - and it’s ever-growing - that climate change is by far the biggest challenge of our time and that we have incredibly little time left to take action and turn the tide. That is why there would have been no alternative scenario for me - I would have founded and started building Plan A anyway.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
Within our company and throughout our teams we have various OKRs, KPIs, and metrics we want to deliver on to be successful. Our vision as a company, however, is that we want to empower organizations of all sizes to build a sustainable world. Therefore, two key metrics need to be mentioned here: The number of clients we can support in decarbonizing their activities across scopes 1, 2, and 3, as well as the number of carbon emissions they have reduced by using our SaaS platform.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
What is really exciting is that we have successfully supported more than 100 organizations from various industries around the world with our software and consultancy services to achieve their sustainability goals and reduce a significant amount of CO2 emissions. Through our information and education campaigns, we have reached, educated, and engaged over 1,000,000 people - from individuals to employees and directors to private, non-governmental, and governmental organizations.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
What really fascinates me is artificial intelligence and its many applications. I think AI is both a curse and a blessing because it can be used for good but also for the exact opposite. In the fight against climate change, AI is irreplaceable and a crucial part of our SaaS.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
Hackernoon luckily found us. What I like most is the community, the valuable stories and insights, and the exchange.
Vote for Plan A as the startup of the year, Berlin.