Sharing his experience and insights from building Pawprint, Christian will talk about the importance of scientifically valid information; behavioural science and its role; getting the tone right; what really makes a difference; and the massive opportunity to marry commercial success with real world impact.
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Lead Strategy Turing Fest 2021
Empowering Startups to Fight Climate Change: What can my Startup Do?
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Thanks very much, Natalie. Can everybody hear me? I think you you probably can. Right. I'm into games in a big way. Games, not not necessarily gaming, but games. And so I'd like to start off with everybody maybe standing up, and we're going play a quick game of self identification to see where everyone's at on the whole climate agenda.
So at Pawprint, we think about the population. We think about individuals as being one of three types. You are either a Donald who is not going to do anything about the climate emergency, even if it comes and slaps you in the face. You are a Greta. You care about it.
Maybe not as much as her, but you're an eco champion. Or you're somewhere in between, which is you're aware of it, you care about it, but you've got constraints and all that sort of stuff. So if you are a Donald, please sit down.
Feel no shame if you are a Donald. That's okay. We're a nonjudgmental bunch at Pawprint. I think nobody's sat down, and that's absolutely fine. If you are more on the Greta side, so top twenty percent of people who are really active on eco stuff, please sit down.
Wow. That is overwhelming. You guys are all in that sort of middle group whereby you care about it, you'd like to find more ways to do stuff. Thank you very much for that. You can please be seated. Make yourself comfortable. There won't be any more games because that was mostly for my benefit.
The way I'm going to run this session I view this very much as the beginning of a conversation about what we can all do. In half an hour, you've all got different opportunities and constraints. We're not going to be able to come to all of them.
So I'll give you my contact details at the end. Hopefully, you can find a way to get involved with us, whether that's POPRINT or some of the communities we're building around. But this is just the beginning of a conversation. I thought a useful way to do it would be because the subject of climate change can be very emotive and emotional, I thought it would be useful for you guys to hear a bit about my story, how I came to set Popcorn up.
And then what I'll do is run through some of the learnings that we've had over the last two, three years about the right tone to take, about different resources, books, standards, what people can do even if their business is not obviously related to climate.
So a wee bit about me first. So I set up a business called Lingo24, a translation business, and ran that for about seventeen years. It was moderately successful. We set up in several different countries, worked with companies like Patagonia, Lush, Eventbrite and eBay, and enjoyed that journey and learned a lot through that journey.
But I always felt like there was something missing. Like, if I was going to have on my gravestone, Christian built a translation business that was three percent better than his neighbor, I sort of thought, not something my kids are going be like, Why, dad?
What a guy. Not that they'll ever say that, but, you know, I'm going to try. And so there was something missing, and I think it dates back to when I was nineteen years old. I fell out with my best mate up in Aberdeen, James, over how we were going to change the world.
He'd been traveling to Cuba, and he wanted revolution. He wanted communism. He was properly ********. And I was like, No. I can't see that. I believe we can do it through business. And so there's part of me that's still trying to win that bet.
I really do believe that through business, you can change the world. So fast forward these seventeen years that I've been running this translation business, I moved into a non exec role. And around that time, my dad, who ironically is a former oil and gas industry exec, had his climate epiphany.
So he started getting a little bit too obsessed about it, going to websites, getting involved with activists. And ultimately, he joined Extinction Rebellion, and he blocked the Lothian road here. And it's a really weird feeling. I don't know how you guys all feel about your parents, but you've sort of got this underlying pride about your parents.
But to have a massive surge in pride for your dad, as you see him being arrested on national TV and spending a night in the clink, is quite weird. But you can sort of understand why. Right? He was lying down for what believes in.
That night he spent in the clink with a bunch of his other activist friends was quite insightful. They were very upset that there was no soya milk to have with their coffees and that the pot noodles were not vegan. So these are the sorts of things that you have to deal with as an extinction rebellion access.
Anyway, he sat me down and said, Christian, you've got to do something about this. I think I was wondering about Brexit. Climate change is bigger. You've got young family. Let's see what you can do. And that really is where paw print came from.
So paw print, I was looking around, I guess, and thinking, what can I do? And found that it was quite hard to understand what would make a difference. You see a lot in the media about recycling and plastics, but what can I, as an individual, do that's going to make me more eco?
And then once you've done all of those things and you've understood what's relevant to you, how can you use that understanding and use the energy you've got on this topic, the effort you're willing to make to make a difference? And so that's what paw print's about.
It's for individuals to measure, understand and reduce their carbon footprint, and it's for businesses to engage their people in sustainability. I'm going to not dwell on paw print too much because I think you've come here to try and understand what you can do as a start up.
That's the topic we've got here. And so we're going to go through the stages that you might think about going through with your start up. And I'm very happy to go into things in more detail through the Q and A afterwards. As I say, this is very much the start of the conversation.
Okay. If you're in a larger organization and you want to do stuff, you need to get buy in. So you need to understand how you're going to manage to marry any objectives around climate with what the business is achieving. There's a truckload of evidence we've got on our blog that you can use to support any arguments you need internally, but even just this week at COP, we've got private companies pledging one hundred and thirty trillion for the green transition.
We've got incredible start ups taking on the world's biggest, most technical challenges. We've got governments pledging things that we never thought they would pledge. Yes, we need to see delivery, and we need to see how we're going to check up on them. But there is undeniable momentum around the topic, and there's a real determination that this time is different.
And frankly, I believe it in a way that I don't think I believed it before. So I feel like you will not struggle to make cases, but some of the information that we've found really helps our clients and the eco energizers in businesses to cut through important for the people who are more skeptical, more financially oriented, etcetera, etcetera.
We've got pressure for change coming from all angles. There are coalitions of asset managers who are coming together to insist that they transition what they're funding to stuff that's part of the future low carbon economy. We've also got real people power coming through.
I guess, act I was speaking to someone who studies youth activism in the climate space recently, and I was saying, what will youth activists think about paw print? Will they think that it's just a vehicle for greenwashing? Big companies can sign up, job done, that's it.
Or will they see that this is an opportunity to build a movement and make change within their organization? And she was quite interesting in that. She said, The younger folk who maybe haven't had the reality of working in a business might be more skeptical, but people who are in businesses and see how things work and want to make change within those businesses will be up for it.
The number of people within companies who are willing to really stand up for what they believe in and vote with their feet if the organization is not moving with it is phenomenal, and I think growing. So back to my point around marrying what you believe in, doing something good with business.
I think the evidence of the two being aligned, and certainly if you fast forward five or ten years, all businesses having some form of genuine purpose, some sort of transparency on what they're actually doing, support for their people in being the types of people they want to be is pretty overwhelming.
We're seeing this cutting across how every department within larger businesses behaves, and obviously, that has ramifications for start ups as well. So talent. When we first launched the idea of Pawprint, we had the climate angels getting in touch, the likes of a Patagonia, but we also had the climate sinners.
We had the oil and gas companies, and we had the airports, because they've got a real talent drain going on. People don't want to be associated with those businesses, and they saw paw print as being something that could align. Partners are also so through supply chains and commercial partnerships, organizations are having to be meticulous about how they look at every element of their business, every sort of touch point.
So if you don't, you're going to shrink, I guess, the number of commercial opportunities you have if you're not acting on these things. Investors. You've got so many funds who are taking into account many aspects of what it means to be a business to believe in.
We had an investor turn us down recently because we're not diverse enough, which is a completely fair reason not to take us on. That's going to happen more and more. All businesses have to be businesses to believe in across multiple strands if they're going to really accelerate.
And then customers, likewise, voting with their feet if they don't see and believe, crucially, that organizations are onto it. How are you guys one of the first things that people look at as a start up, as any sort of organization, is what is your own carbon footprint?
Now carbon footprint is one element. It's probably the one that we picked at Paw Print because it's a number, and it's probably the best single measure of how eco an organization is. It's imperfect, so it will, for example, say that it's better to have battery hen eggs than nice organic eggs because that's more efficient from an energy perspective.
But it's your best guess, and it's something that, you know, if you've got a number, you can work on progressively. I think it's worth mentioning that many of you will know this, but the carbon footprint is not just about carbon dioxide. It's a carbon dioxide equivalent.
So it takes into account other greenhouse gases like methane. So methane from eating beef and lamb has quite a large impact, and that will contribute to it. So if you want to go about measuring your own business' carbon footprint, which is, as a start up, arguably not the most important thing because your impact as a start up can be much greater if you influence all of your customers or your partners or if you've got a large stakeholder group, you can nudge them in the right direction.
It can be greater. But the reason for measuring your own carbon footprint is that you'll then and if you do that at home and at work, you've then got a real understanding about the numbers, about which numbers you might want to be sensitive about and which ones you might deprioritize.
Because let's face it, we can't do everything. There are a lot of consulting organizations. Small World Consulting is Mike Burner's lead consultancy groups. They work with businesses. They're extremely good, and they work with BrewDog, but they are also extremely busy. And there are many consultancies that would help you.
But maybe at the start up phase, it's more appropriate to work with an online tool that's low cost, like Compare Your Footprint. So I'd encourage you to have a look at that. It's very inexpensive. And alternatives are available, but it's a strong one.
Greenwashing. Massive issue around progress. It just slows us all down if we don't trust what's going on. And I think we need a standard that everybody can buy into. And the one that is emerging as the most credible one is unsurprisingly one that is based on science and is run by scientists and is pretty uncompromising in terms of how it's positioned.
For example, it will not allow offsetting to wipe away five to ten percent of your emissions because offsetting used to a greater degree than that is like the sort of get out of jail free card. It's it can be very damaging, I I believe, for people to feel that they can just cop out in that way.
So I would encourage everyone here, if you do nothing else actually, to go and have a look at the science based targets initiative, SBTI, and see how you might be able to learn from that and implement that within your businesses. So that is in line with getting the planet to only one point five degrees of warming.
It includes scope three. And it encourages you to look a little bit beyond this carbon tunnel vision. So I talked about the inadequacy of the carbon footprint number in the context of simplifying things down a wee bit. I think with science based targets, you'll start to look at some of the other things that matter a lot to the world's sustainability, such as inequality, diversity, health, etcetera, etcetera.
And it's quite interesting when we start talking about standards like this because one of the major problems that we've got, in my view, in the world is this belief that GDP is almost like our god. We must make GDP grow because that is almost inherently unsustainable if we're continually having to grow when the resources of the planet are limited, and we know that chewing them all up threatening our very existence.
There are so one of the books that I would recommend that you all take a look at is is by Kate Raworth, and it's called Doughnut Economics. And the idea behind the doughnut is that in the middle bit, you have people who are falling below the sort of living standards that we all take for granted, decent shelter, human rights, food, access to clean water.
That nice doughy bit of doughnut, that's the happy place where everybody's got the best needs they've got. Some have more luxurious lifestyles than others, but everybody is broadly okay. And then out with that doughy ness, you've got us exceeding our planetary boundaries, everybody taking private jets and all that sort of nonsense.
So I'd encourage you to look at that. And then there are other measures that are coming in. People talk about the happiness index, they talk about net positive domestic product, things like that. I think we're going to see a shift to people measuring success in those terms, including the startup world, rather than a growth at all costs.
So a little bit political there, but hopefully useful context. That's what I'm hoping. So I mentioned about the science based targets limiting what you can do around carbon offsetting. Just a wee bit on what we've done. Because we're a small company, we're a startup of thirty people.
Most people work from home. We've got a small office in the WeWork here on George Street, and we're pressurizing WeWork. We're pressurizing WeWork on different things. So for example, we know that dairy has quite a big impact, and yet the default with your tea and coffee is dairy milk.
So WeWork, perhaps could we have, as default, oat milk? And I've seen cafes doing a premium for dairy milk to try and nudge people behaviorally. So that's one thing you can do if in a rented office. Put gentle pressure to start making the small changes that are good signals of us moving in the right direction.
So what have we done? We're identifying our key suppliers and engaging in their own target setting process, so trying to ask them where they sit on different issues, looking at which provider of servers is the most eco, for example. That will be relevant to lots of the tech startups.
We're trying to reduce our spend. Our head of finance loves this, obviously, but there's a really direct correlation between spend and carbon footprint. So the more that you can be thrifty, you know, like our grandparents used to be during the war or whenever they were about, that's good stuff.
There's no shame in thrift. You are saving the planet by spending less, and then you can invest it more in maybe in paw print or in other companies that are part of the solution. Setting a minimum energy rating standard and partnering with a company to eliminate e waste.
So those are things that people don't always think about, but there are lots of little things that add up. And I think this point around signals, promoting it, sharing it, celebrating the great stuff you can do rather than being too concerned about the things you can't do is our ethos.
I think we've got start ups of different sizes here. What we are finding is that the dynamic for getting things done around climate is a bit different and can be a bit difficult for older, more hierarchical businesses. The people who really care about this are the ones who should be driving the action.
And so if you guys are leaders within a business, almost however big that business is, the more that you can give relatively free rein to the passionate people in your organization, the better. We've set up a group called Eco Energizers, mostly aimed for larger businesses, but it's a peer to peer learning group for people to share how they've affected change in the organization, how they've put business cases together and and and really, you know, come together as a community to to to move faster.
Quite funny, just a quick a quick anecdote for you. I remember speaking to my Norwegian grandmother. We'd had a couple of drinks, and she told me I was talking about her life generally. And she said, you you know Christian? I might cry if I say this forever.
The happiest time of my life was the second World War. And I was like, that's just sort of perverse. But the reason I didn't say that to her, but I think it. And she said, reason was that was the time in my life when I remember people coming together for a common purpose.
There was an existential threat to people in her country, in this country, and they came together, put aside normal differences of class and of politics, football team, whatever, and did it. This is our climate this is our world war, right, coming together around the climate agenda.
So we've got to yeah. We've just got to we've got to do. We've got to find a way. I've talked a wee bit about books. I mentioned doughnut economics. Behavioral change, which is the problem that I think the biggest problem around the climate agenda.
I mean, you have obviously massive governmental issues, and we can all vote, we can protest, and we can see what we think. But changing behaviors tough. And I think you see tech companies starting to try and nudge people, the likes of a Skyscanner publishing the CO two impact of different flights, to show that even if you are flying, which is a highly impactful activity, if you can choose a slightly more eco option, that's a good thing.
And I think reading books like Tiny Habits, which is about understanding how behavioral change actually works, and looking at things like what Skyscanner is doing. There's a company called CHOOS with three o's. They integrate climate information into other products. Those are the sorts of things that are going to help you understand how your communities, how your user base might be able to do their bit.
And it reflects extremely well on you, obviously, to be building those sorts of things into your product. There are some other useful behavioral change books. One's called Atomic Habits. I would I would recommend that one as well. I'm sort of getting to to to to the end of the the things that I really wanted to raise in in this.
My gut is, and obviously I'm biased, but is that companies of all sizes absolutely don't have to have all the answers. Nobody has all the answers. There's so much complexity here. But there really isn't at this time, given what we know about the ramifications of not acting, there really isn't time for us not to be doing something.
And that's why I wanted to come here today and speak to you all, because I guess I'm beseeching you to engage with us, to engage with one another, and to do your bit. I think your sphere of influence we all tend to think that we are just one person.
What difference can we make? And my dream for paw print would be that people can use it as a tool to amplify their positive impact through their company where they work, through their friends, through their local communities, and that we can all move towards, in a fun way, not in a life's **** we can't go on holiday anymore, in a way that feels community oriented and where you still have the joy in life.
You still want to have a world that's worth living in, for goodness' sake. So that's my dream, that Paul Print can be a platform that supports that. Yes. I've got a few resources for you here, and I just want to leave you with that rallying cry to meet your businesses businesses that people can believe in.
Thanks very much for your attention. And if you've got any more questions any questions, in fact, love to take them later. Yeah.