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Crucial Conversations
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Crucial Conversations
Sustainability Unearthed: Simon's Handprint on the Environment and Economic Landscape
This episode questions the status quo, challenges the well-worn paths of environmental dialogue, and highlights the importance of embracing innovative approaches in the fight against climate change. We explore the power of nature's positive feedback cycles and the potential economic and human life benefits they can unleash. From the heated debate of switching from nuclear to coal, to the potential consequences of reducing the use of fertilizers in agriculture, and the exciting possibility of transforming farmland into sustainable tourism or nature rewilding—no stone is left unturned.
Finally, we take a deep look at the innovative strategies employed by Handprint to promote sustainability. We discuss their unique business model, which combines technology and business to foster transparency and accountability in the environmental space. You'll hear about their upcoming product, a novel banking card that contributes to positive impact projects with each transaction. We also discuss their collaborations with various industries and their efforts to foster a marketplace where NGOs set the price for a unit of impact. Join us, as we navigate these complex waters with Simon, gaining invaluable insights and sparking thought-provoking discussions about our shared future.
So I think, simon, you know, first off, we've really been looking forward to this conversation and thank you for making the time. We've had a short journey together. We haven't spent too much time in person together. We've engaged a lot online. I've been fortunate to meet some of your team members that are part of Handprint and I think, all in all, very impressed with what your company does, the team that you have very respectful of the challenge that you're trying to solve and the approach that you're coming at it from, which is, for me, your unique differentiator and steers away from the doom and gloom of climate science and a lot of the noise coming down around the challenges around carbon reduction. So maybe, before we dive into all of the climate discussions, I'd be keen to just get a feel where Simon from and how did you land in Singapore? I took a look at your profile and you had quite an interesting journey and I think it's worth scratching under the surface a bit there.
Speaker 2:Sure. So originally I'm from Belgium. I was born and raised there and spent the first 23 years of my life in a very small village and then a couple of years in a student town called Leuven, where I did my first degree digital engineering like a mixture of business and basic science, and after that degree I decided to specialize in corporate social responsibility and business ethics. So I moved to Nottingham in the UK to study that. At the time, nottingham University was really the foremost university within Europe that had a dedicated program for corporate social responsibility, and all of the professors that I had there are, within academia, very influential people in this domain. What year is this? This was 2006.
Speaker 1:So it's still very early on before sustainability.
Speaker 2:corporate social responsibilities mainstream or oh, I mean in Europe it was probably already starting to become a bit more mainstream. But I remember having a conversation with my thesis advisor in Leuven who was a professor in business ethics, and he said you do know that if you're going to do this specialization in CSR, you will never make as much money afterwards than if you don't get this specialization Right. This is not an area where businesses are looking for and I think that has shifted in the last 15 years. But against his advice or against my commercial instincts, I still went, did the degree, enjoyed it very much and actually wanted to do a PhD straight afterwards. But I was talked out of it by most of my professors there, specifically one guy, andy Crane professor, who afterwards moved to Shulig Business School in Canada. He basically said look, you've been at university now six years in a row and I think that you should go and do something else. And if ever in the future you decide you want to come back to academia, all of the doors are going to be open for you because you're going to have these two degrees, you're going to have your real world experience and you're going to be able to do something that's much more relevant. So I took his advice.
Speaker 2:I went traveling for a year, then went back to Belgium at the beginning of the financial crisis. So I think I got back to Belgium in October 2008, just two weeks before or after Lemon Brothers collapsed and I was looking for jobs in sustainability. So that was great. So what I ended up doing was I worked in bars for a year and then eventually got a job in a boutique sustainability consulting firm. I spent two years there developing their innovation arm. Really. So my understanding and more like my realization at the time was that what I wanted to do within sustainability was not what everyone else was doing at the time.
Speaker 2:This is 2009 in Belgium and in Europe, because everyone else was really focusing on oh, we need to write these sustainability reports, we need to focus on trying to measure what we do as a company productive processes and I thought this is all very tangential. I'm not really interested in this and I really don't think this is where most of the impact is. So what I wanted to work on was how do we work with companies to put innovation and sustainability at the center, really looking more at design of entire systems, redesign of supply chains, redesign of products and redesign of business models, and so that was pretty exciting, and so we did a couple of interesting projects. The biggest one was a collaboration between a university in Belgium, four companies and a research institute to look at how do we redesign flat screen TVs and how do we close the loop on the materials in flat screen TVs, and so spend time doing this.
Speaker 2:But then I got bored with consulting, mainly because, despite the fact that some of my projects were really kind of achieving this kind of impact and leading to change within organizations, I felt that as a consultant, you're still very much on the outside, and I wanted to have more time to understand problems in more depth, and so I ended up going back to academia. Then, after a variety of opportunities in three different continents, I met up with that same professor, andy Crane, who happened to be in the vicinity of where I was living, and he recommended I'd go to London, to Imperial College, and to work with Jerry George, who became my mentor for the next 10 years really. So in September 2011, I moved to London, started my PhD and then, after I finished my PhD at the end of 2014, I moved to Singapore to join Singapore Management University, initially as a postdoctoral researcher and then a year and a half later, as a faculty member.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's quite a lot of academia and clearly I have a passion for it. A few questions. So, despite the advice, you went a very specific route. Was there always a calling for you? What was, if you can remember, what was the drive to? What about CSR? Was pulling you in that direction?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure if it was like an evergreen calling that was always there. I think what really got me interested in exploring CSR and business ethics and kind of the larger purpose of business was my fundamental disagreement with the core human assumptions underpinning economics. So as a grad student in Belgium, so we had a variety of macro and microeconomics courses and I was really really bad at them, not because of complexity of the mathematics, but because I just couldn't rhyme the underlying assumptions with my own perception of how the world was working and that led to me initially doing very bad on my exams as well. But it always kind of bugged me that why are we assuming that people are innately self-interested and that their drive is only focused on their own wealth maximization? Because this is not reflective of most people.
Speaker 2:This is probably reflective of some people, and we would call them psychopaths more than anything else, and so this was something that really annoyed me, and I remember having conversations with my professors and some other advisors around these topics. I said but these assumptions just don't make sense, and if you change these assumptions, then everything changes. And so that was the initial area of conflict. And then, when I was looking for a topic for my first dissertation so I did a five-year degree, so we had to write the dissertation as well I ended up just accidentally bumping onto this professor in ethics that was looking for a dissertation student to write on the intersection of Buddhism and economics.
Speaker 2:That's interesting, and by coincidence, I was sitting in one of the kind of study rooms from the university and this professor had a speaking hour that was still open for five minutes when I saw this thing online and he was in an office 20 meters away from where I was sitting. So there is something that just seemed to click. So I rushed out, walked into his office he was very surprised to see anyone coming in, and then we talked for about an hour and a half and I said, okay, this is what I'm going to do. And so I wrote my dissertation on this very weird topic of how would the economy work if the goal is not profit maximization but the alleviation of all suffering under the Buddhist ideal?
Speaker 2:And so I think that kind of set me up for what I have been doing in the next 15 years of my life and what I probably will be doing for the next 30 of my life is to figure out how do we work within the constraints of a capitalist economy in order to achieve something that has a higher purpose.
Speaker 1:That resonates quite deeply because I think I had quite a disillusioned view of economics. It didn't make a lot of sense to me. It felt very woo-woo, a lot of it. I never went and studied it, to make that clear. The only time I really started diving deep into it is when I started researching Bitcoin and trying to understand what Bitcoin was, and that pushed me towards Austrian economics and that started making a lot of sense for me. The intersection between Buddhism and economics. That sounds really interesting. I'd love to hear more about that and I suppose that's shaped a lot of your ideals. That currently has come through in handprint.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure if it has shaped a lot of my current thinking, so it's also been a very long time since I read that dissertation so I can't really speak in too much detail about it. But the quintessential assumption there was within economics how we look at organizations, organizations, corporations is extremely naive Because of the fact that economics relies on elegance of models. You need to have a very simplistic understanding of what is a company, and in economics a company is defined as a profit maximizing function with a variety of inputs. And the assumption in mainstream economics and neoclassical economics is that most of the inputs that you put into that function are somehow interchangeable, which basically leads to a strong denial of the kind of un-missibility of some kind of natural resources already and the fact that they are not necessarily replaceable or interchangeable. And so in my dissertation I basically started working on this concept like what if we replace this profit maximization objective with an alleviation of all suffering as an objective? How would that change, how you think about this and how then an economy would work? And then in the dissertation I did a very strange thing by looking at how, because then the question of course becomes how do you conceptualize at a macroeconomic scale, how do you conceptualize suffering? And so I used sociological theory from Emil Durkheim, where we can measure suffering at a societal level by looking at suicide data, and so I created this kind of weird model. I don't think it has any strong academic merits, but it was interesting to do and I enjoyed writing the dissertation. And I remember talking with my friends I'd finished my dissertation in just before Easter break, while it was due in June or in July, and everyone was hating on me. It's like how are you already done with this? We still have to start. I was like I really loved doing this. This was very fun, just sitting reading, thinking, writing.
Speaker 2:I wasn't introduced to Austrian economics until I was doing my PhD, and Austrian economics and especially like Mises and Lachmann Lachmann is for me the most, maybe the most interesting one have a very different understanding of this kind of interchangeability of inputs, where Lachmann, in his book on kind of capital structure, talks about this that most things in organizations are not interchangeable. And at a macroeconomic level, the idea that capital has so capital and that includes financial resource capital, human capital, technological capital, that capital has a structure, means that you can't just add a little bit of this in order to replace this other thing, which is much more reflective of how organizations already work. Right, because we all know that if we work a new work for a large company, I work in a small startup, but things are not interchangeable, and it's not because we have, I don't know, $50,000 more capital tomorrow that we can immediately solve something else, or that, if this person leaves, that we can just find an ideal replacement. Right? So things and as a consequence, economics as a science, I think, omits all of this complexity in order to be able to make more large scale predictions and more kind of generalizable predictions. But when I started studying organizations and innovation in my PhD, this was much more relevant to me, because then at least, we were talking about things that somehow were more closely aligned with what I thought okay, this is really the engine of an economy and it's not a profit maximizing function. It's messy, it's chaotic, it's trying to figure out how we merge people with structures, with routines, with practices, in order to create some kind of outcome, but that outcome need not be only profit maximization. Organizations can set very different goals. Profit, probably, is going to be one of them, but it needn't be the only thing, and I think so. It's probably more my thinking during the PhD and then also in the first few years of working here in Singapore, where I also got very interested in crypto and blockchain and I unfortunately didn't invest in Bitcoin in 2011,. It took me until 2015.
Speaker 2:But I think the interesting thing for me as an organizational scholar at the time now I'm more an entrepreneur, I would say, but the interesting thing there was that these crypto organizations or this new technology was really challenging the way companies are structured or even the necessity of the corporate structure as an engine for creating innovation, as an engine for organizing economic activity.
Speaker 2:And so initially my interest was really in this abstract field or this abstract way of thinking like how are these types of decentralized groups like an Ethereum foundation or like a Bitcoin? How are these guys organizing economic activity in a different way? How are they creating incentives? How are they getting people motivated? How are they succeeding in growing this business without all of the standard tools that are available in a profit maximizing entity or in a classical corporation? So that got me really interested, and then I learned more about the technology than I got interested in that, but eventually I kind of reduced my attention to the crypto space. To return more to my real passion, which was like how do we use technology or how do we think about solutions to protect the natural world? Protect and restore the natural world.
Speaker 1:Before we dive into that, there's something else. Before it slips, I want to engage with you. So you did that gap year and you traveled and I always think about my journey. To this point I never had that gap year and I wonder if I would have ended up where I am if I had taken it, because so many people I think a lot of people find clarity and it serves them well. Others get stuck, maybe working yachts, whatever it may be. How much did that influence you or was that of benefit to you to try and get your head straight about your trajectory?
Speaker 2:I don't think that that year. So I spent one year in South America, traveling from Argentina to Colombia. I don't think it had any massive influence on the trajectory that I had previously envisaged. When I was graduating at Nottingham University, my plan was I'm going to take a year out because I've been in university for six years, I have some family in Argentina and so I'm going to go see them. I'll learn Spanish and then I'll just travel around, and my plan was I'm going to work in sustainability afterwards, and so it ended up taking a year longer than expected, but I did it and I kind of persisted. So I don't think it had a fundamental impact on what I was going to do with my life, but it wasn't incredibly fun and enriching experience to go on my own. This is in a time where smartphones were still few and far between.
Speaker 2:So, I was there in 2007, 2008, traveling through seven different countries on my own, something I had never done and I was very fortunate to initially land in Argentina and then having some family there not that I'd ever met them, but at least had a place to go. And then, one of the first weeks that I was just going out in town, I met some other people, belgians, who were there, and they told me about couchsurfing, and I hadn't heard about that before, but I was like that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to basically spend the rest of this year just couchsurfing, and that was really interesting. I think that transformed what otherwise would have been a standard trip where you go from Uthosthel to Uthosthel and end up speaking English at all time, because most people do that. I was just staying with local people and spoke Spanish the whole time, and I think that because of that, I had a very different experience than most travelers do and that was probably a richer experience.
Speaker 1:I mean, you're getting into people's personal space, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, in a good way, and I think that was very interesting. And then there were moments that during that trip that will be very memorable, I think, for me for the rest of my life. I spent one month working in an orphanage in Peru as part of this trip you do, many travelers do this, but during that month I was an orphanage founded by a Belgian guy and a French woman, and they'd been there for 15, 20 years. But during the time that I was there, this one month, the woman died and so all of the kids that were orphans lost their mother again. Right, and this was a super emotional experience and also like, how do you deal with? This is like I'd been there maybe for two weeks and suddenly this person dies, and then, of course, it's a very sad period.
Speaker 2:How did she die? She had cancer, it was a long, long-term illness, and so at some point this was going to happen. But of course you don't know, I didn't notice before I decided to go there. So it wasn't super abrupt, but doesn't mean it's less of a shock for those kids, many of whom were also physically and mentally handicapped. So it was painful, mainly from an empathetic point of view, but it was also really inspiring to see how the entire community in that place where we were that kind of rallied, you had this burial ceremony where you had 15, 20,000 people coming.
Speaker 1:That many, hey, yeah, she must have been quite a special person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean what they were doing was, of course, they were working in a very poor community about an hour and a half south of Lima, and what they had built there for these children was pretty unique in a country like Peru, and so having that experience was pretty amazing, despite, of course, the sadness with it. I also had a very bad. I was also hospitalized in that same month. I had a pancreas crisis, which is something I can absolutely recommend you should avoid because it's extremely painful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially in a place where the medical facilities were not necessarily up to standard. And then a couple months later, I was in Colombia, in the south, and On that one of the day, I think I was there for maybe three weeks already in Colombia, and Ingrid Betancourt was liberated after eight years of being captured by the FARC, which was suddenly like a national holiday. So people were elated about this news, and so for me, I'd been reading a book about the FARC before I went to Colombia. But to be part of what in Colombian history is a transformational moment where you have this sudden eruption of joy that you see with people and of course I was staying with local people and then everyone was talking about this for days. And so what is the FARC?
Speaker 1:like a terrorist organization.
Speaker 2:So the FARC is a kind of used to be communist organization, but they're mainly in the cocaine trade, and so they do, or did. Now they've actually become somewhat legitimized. But they did a lot of kidnappings, and Ingrid Betancourt who was the daughter of a famous politician, if I'm not mistaken so, had been kidnapped for eight years.
Speaker 2:In captivity for eight years in the jungles in Colombia, and so at some and during that time that I was there, I spent three months in Colombia she was liberated and it was I don't know because I wasn't in America, but I can imagine it was a similar experience to Osama bin Laden being captured or being killed in America, that kind of sense of finally this is over. So, yeah, I think those were really influential experiences.
Speaker 1:Did you immerse yourself at all? I mean, that's pretty cool. I'm enjoying this, so I'm going to keep pulling on this thread if you don't mind. Did you go into the Amazon and immerse yourself into any of the more jungle environments there?
Speaker 2:Yes, less so in. So I did a bit of everything. I went to Juarez in Peru to do mountaineering. I went up to 6,000 meters, which was hard, but also one of those things is like this is great that I have done it, and I promise that I will never do it again.
Speaker 1:And then I think without training that would be pretty tough.
Speaker 2:How many days did?
Speaker 1:that take you.
Speaker 2:We did it in two days, but we're us is pretty high, so we started at about 3,800 meters and, yeah, then got to base camp at 444 and then got to 6.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that lack of oxygen starts knocking you.
Speaker 2:I mean, the oxygen is just what, of course, wears you out, but it's the moment your feet touch the snow that, for me, like the light went out a little bit and then you realize I still got eight hours of climbing to go. Like how am I going to do this? But then in Colombia I went to a couple of areas in the jungle, One in the north of Colombia in a place called I forget something Santa de Maria, where we did a six day jungle tour which was pretty interesting. In Peru I went to Machu Picchu through a jungle experience as well and then in the south of Colombia I also spent some time in like a village on the outskirts of the jungle where I did the ayahuasca.
Speaker 1:Are you done ayahuasca? Yeah, okay, interesting, that's a whole nother thread to pull on. Okay, nice, it sounds like there was quite an enriching trip. So, and did you touch chili at all?
Speaker 2:No, and there was a very specific reason for this. I think it was still in. Yeah, I was still in Nottingham University and I was. I started making my plans to go to South America and starting in Argentina, and at some moment and I absolutely no explanation for this I was sitting on the on the toilet in my house and I had some kind of vision that I was going to be executed in Chile. Oh wow, which was very strange. It's just like this kind of suddenly something hits your mind. It's like what is this? So I went down.
Speaker 1:I mean Pinochet is already out at that stage. I think politically Chile was pretty stable then.
Speaker 2:Oh, very stable, One of the most secure countries in the region and so, but it was very specific Chile, although I didn't even know where or something, and I so I remember going down, talked to my husband. It's like I had this very strange experience like this and they're like, okay, weird. And then we were going to a friend's house and when we arrived at the friend's house it was totally pitch black. There were candles everywhere. It was like they were holding a wake and it was because one of the friends was leaving. But rather than making a joyous occasion, they decided to make it a very kind of sad occasion, and the combination of those two things made me decide I am not going. And so the closest I got to Chile was on the Salar de Ujuni in the south of Bolivia, but I never set foot in there.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I think there's nothing wrong with listening to your intuition, you know it's. It's a super power that we tend to ignore, and that would freak me out as well. It was very creepy. When you speak of Peru, am I correct that the Peru is got one of the the craziest water reticulation, ancient water reticulation systems where they have like, almost like ducks that were constructed from the mountains down to enable agriculture? Or am I getting my countries mixed up? I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:There is something interesting about water management in Peru.
Speaker 1:At some point I thought about doing a project on this, but I wouldn't speak to it with any authority. So yeah, okay. So that that sounds really really good and I'm glad that you thank you for sharing some of those stories. Any other standout stories before we move to the more serious stuff? Oh, there's many, many more stories. Do you fall in love while you're there Every week?
Speaker 2:Now there are many more stories, but I think they would take us into a very different conversation.
Speaker 1:Conversation. Okay, We'll take that offline over. Yeah, there's something else that I've been wanting to ask as you speak in and I've picked this up as you. As you mentioned, you just came from lunch with Gert and him and I've become really close and good friends and he's given me a taste of the Belgian community and people. There's something about the Belgian community that just feels so tight knit and I don't know if it's just a perception that I have. That's maybe biased, because I'm now become friends with Gert and there seems to be like a really strong Belgian culture but that is quite supportive outside of Belgium. Is that true? Is that a fair statement? Are Belgians cut differently? I mean?
Speaker 1:I think this is this is a strong bias, so feels like he's always at events and you guys always coming together and drinking beer.
Speaker 2:So maybe I am the one who's biased right, so I actually don't hang out a lot with Belgians.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Now, on the other hand, I have to admit, one of my closest friends here is a Belgian guy and that was despite the fact that we had when I was living with my former housemate before I started living with my wife. We said, like we want to have a woman who doesn't speak French. So we got a Belgian guy who spoke French, so we messed up there, so he became a good friend, and now Gert and a few others I think there are. There is a Belgian community. Maybe some of these people hang out a lot. I'm probably not part of it. I think the French community, the Italian communities are probably much stronger.
Speaker 1:I've been in the French community on the rugby side and there is chaos I was quite shocked with. I mean, there's a strong South African community, I suppose as well. Maybe it's just how it is communities from different countries group together when they expats. But I definitely enjoy the Belgian community. I find you quite an interesting people and very progressive, but also very direct, very direct and I would say everyone that you meet that lives.
Speaker 2:Every Belgian you meet that does not live in Belgium is a very atypical Belgian. So Belgians, as they say, are born and die in the shadow of the church, meaning that they tend not to move very far away from their childhood home, and that really holds true for, I think, for most of us.
Speaker 2:So everyone who's abroad obviously doesn't meet that fundamental criteria of they. Also say Belgians have a brick in their stomach. They always want to build their house somewhere. So I think most of us who live abroad don't necessarily have that brick. So I'm not sure we're very reflective or similar to the 98% of Belgians who just live in Belgium, but I always like the ones that I meet abroad. I also have a lot of friends that never moved out of Belgium and I'll happily see them again when I go back to Belgium. But yeah, it's a good community. We have still the best beer in the world and good chocolate.
Speaker 1:There's one that Gert introduced me to. You have two of those and you're well on your way. I forget the name. Okay, so let's dive into sustainability. So I think I'm not sure how old you are, but I think we have similar age and growing up we had a lot of, I would say I heard a good name for it the other day, but it's leading me now but climate clambit carstere or clambit doom and gloom. Growing up, there was always this anxiousness that we've got this clock and this time to fix things, and by no means am I saying that that is not the case. I think this generation has grown up with a lot of information being made available about the impact that humanity is having on ecosystems and life systems, and I think I want to just explore the space a bit, because it was quite a big calling card for me.
Speaker 1:I knew when I left school I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do, didn't take the gap, ended up going to study immediately went into occupational health and safety. There was elements of environmental science from there, had a general interest in energy efficiency, started doing at the time this is like 2007, maybe decided to jump out of occupational health and safety. I was like I want to work for a company that is doing energy saving. There was no such thing in South Africa. So I phoned the department of minerals and energy. They put me in touch with a guy by the name of Max Radman. This guy that's like 68, 65, still going strong, bringing energy saving lights into South Africa. This is pre-2008, when we started having what we call load shedding and trying to sell and create a distribution network for energy saving lights in a country that did not need energy saving. So that really helped me cut my teeth. When I came to the hard sell they say leading edge is bleeding edge.
Speaker 1:When it comes to technologies and trying to get people to adopt new technologies figured out that people weren't really interested in carbon reduction. It was more about how much money could I save. When I figured out how to build out those RRR models, that's when I started converting deals and actually getting some big projects underway. From there went into doing mass rollouts for solar thermal. So setting up a single project office and working with our central energy fund or an investec SASL and getting the employees to have a finance program to convert from electric geysers to solar thermal had a 3% conversion rate there. Even though we thought we removed all the barriers to change People would rather finance a plasma TV at the time I don't think we had LED TVs and then from there went to go create my own startup, which was a combination of a smart home solution, linking it to e-commerce low cost, low cost, high cost solutions for not only being energy efficient but for being green, using probiotic products for cleaning products, the whole shebang.
Speaker 1:I've been it, I've walked that road and the reason I'm telling you that story is I've gone down that path and I think one critical documentary that really triggered me and inspired me at the time was An Inconvenient Truth. Watching that with from Al Gore and fast forward to today, and I think the need is more pressing than ever, but it also feels like it's become a very politicized subject. It's become very distorted. In some respects it feels like we've got all the technologies and the solutions to solve the problems. It's the policy, the leadership, the people such as yourself that are on the ground that are trying to make a difference broad strokes. What is your take, where's your mindset at? Because you're still fighting the good fights at the front, and we'll dive into how you're coming at it from a different angle, but I personally have a I don't want to say disillusioned view of the world. I would say it's a frustrated view of how things are currently operating. So what's your take on it all broad stroke?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could probably talk about this for seven hours. So I think I share your frustration in many ways. I think that the reality is that we were closer to a binding agreement on climate in 1989 than we were last year and we've made some progress. Step changes, sometimes leaps forward, but given how long we've known and I say we, I would say the scientists and the political establishment that doesn't deny science let's say what needs to happen is very disconcerting that the willingness to take action at the right speed isn't there and it's still not there. It doesn't matter what happens in COP28 in a couple of months, it doesn't matter what happens last year, it's what we still see an incredible reluctance to accelerate what needs to be accelerated and decelerate what needs to be decelerated.
Speaker 2:A lot of this, I think, relates to entrenched power. The fact that it is still legal anywhere in the world to do oil and gas exploration is insane. If anything about climate science is correct, is totally unjustifiable that there are companies still doing this, because we know that if we look at only the fossil fuel reserves that are listed on public exchanges, where we know what the reserves are, if we only look at those and of course that includes coal, then that's already four times more at least four times more than we will ever be able to extract if we are serious about halting climate change. So the fact that this is still happening, the fact that we still don't have a global carbon budget, the fact that there are no enforcement mechanisms from the political establishment imposed on most companies, the fact that, despite the reality that more and more companies are making various forms of sustainability reporting mandatory, which is potentially a good idea, the fact that there is no proof that doing this leads to actual sustainability improvement on the corporate level. So I think there is a lot to be frustrated by, and I share that frustration.
Speaker 2:But the other side of that is that I read this recently and I think this is a beautiful example. So I obviously work a lot in nature restoration. This is really what I'm focusing on so much less focusing on the reduction of negative impact, like what? Energy efficiency and green energy and so would be, but more on the direct creation of positive impact. And what do you call it?
Speaker 2:Regeneration, regeneration, restoration, revitalization, whatever you want to call it, but it's the yeah and also rewilding, so creating, making more space for the wilderness, and so what's interesting is that one of the critical, one of the most critical global ecosystems that is under threat is oceanic health, and the interesting thing about oceans is that they are extremely resilient and that oceans can bounce back from serious damage much faster than land can, and so somebody recently wrote this, and I don't know what the scientific source is, but they said, like if we want to double the total mass of animals that live on land, it would take about 80 years. If we want to do that in the ocean, it takes three days. That is insane.
Speaker 1:So I just want to make sure I understand. So to double the total bio, the total mass of all living organisms on land, 80 years in the ocean, three days, assuming that we just let nature be, yes, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:And the reason for this is that most living creatures in the ocean are smaller than one millimeter, okay, and so their ability to grow in size is much higher. So, and I thought this is really interesting, there's an interesting example about this that maybe you've even witnessed in the Philippines, that famous island where the Leonardo DiCaprio movie the beach the beach was recorded.
Speaker 1:So that's Thailand, wasn't it? I think it's in the it's.
Speaker 2:Thailand.
Speaker 1:I went to that as an island in Thailand.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, yeah, Anyway, but that island I think they stopped giving access to tourists and to anyone, and it took 45 days and suddenly it was riddled with sharks that had seen this is now a place where we can come, and there were thousands. So the ability of nature to restore itself is very, very strong.
Speaker 1:I mean, we saw it during COVID right.
Speaker 2:We saw it during COVID. To a certain degree as well.
Speaker 1:Like channels in Venice had dolphins all of a sudden again and all sorts of wildlife coming back, because humans are locked down in their houses for a period of time and the nature just started progressing again.
Speaker 2:And I think this is one of the things that we still very poorly understand, right. So if we look at the climate science, there are the things we know to be true, right, as long as we put more carbon in the atmosphere, then the temperature is going to keep on increasing. And even if we stop putting carbon in the atmosphere, the temperature will continue increasing for quite a while until eventually it might go down. And if we then be able to remove carbon from the atmosphere, then we can kind of reverse that temperature increase. We also know that there are what is known as positive feedback cycles, which are the thresholds that scientists are very fearful of, right. So the typical example is what happens when a large part of the Arctic suddenly melts. One fear is, of course, that this leads to massive sea rise, but the bigger fear is that the methane that is stored underneath would suddenly be released and that this would significantly accelerate planetary heating, or just fever and the planet's fever. And so these positive feedback cycles are being studied because they are so dangerous, but there's not much we can do about it, well, obviously, besides just radically changing the entire economic industrial system. But what's even less understood is nature's positive feedback cycles where what happens when you rewild something, when you invest in a specific part of nature, we can measure. What is the increase in carbon sequestration. There's lots of good technology for this, but the other positive feedback cycles we don't really understand very well.
Speaker 2:And I think there is this amazing potential and that is one of the things that gives me hope that there might actually be very strong positive feedback cycles if we give nature more breeding room, and these very strong positive feedback cycles could have very big positive effects both on the economy as well as on humans in general and, of course, on other forms of life.
Speaker 2:So I think that's what gives me hope, and the reason why we started with handprints at the end of 2019 was really to kind of change the narrative around climate anxiety and the continuous, as you say, like frustration or the continuous oppression of the media and of the narrative of governments and scientists I mean rightful narrative that we are in an existential crisis. Biodiversity is collapsing, the planet is heating up. Yesterday, august 2nd, was Earth Overshoot Day, so that means that we live on borrowed time for the rest of the year. So we know all of these things are true, but the reality is that continuously reminding people of how bad things are is not a strategy that leads to change. It's a strategy that leads to numbing and it's a strategy that leads to disinterest and disengagement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to pause on that one and push back on a not push back, interrogate a few different things, because I look at my own perception and where does it sit at the moment? So you mentioned the drilling for oil and how unnecessary it is. I think everyone's always looked at that, and even myself would be at some point. I remember quite militant, which was just stop. But then the reality is, if you look at every single thing that's in this room that you're wearing, that you use on your daily life, that all comes from oil. How do we supplement that, how do we replace that?
Speaker 1:You know that's still 95, 98% of our energy source probably is. And what's the numbers there? You know, if you look at how much oil still drives our daily lives, it's massive. And we can't necessarily and I want you to correct me I'm going to make some incorrect statements but I think it's important to balance the discussion and I want to start with the oil part. So what is your take on it? And I mean how, if we can't just eliminate oil from our lives as it currently stands?
Speaker 2:Sure, and I agree. So my point earlier on was very specific on exploration, which is the searching for new oil reserves. Sure, right, I genuinely believe this should be legal. There is no need for this. There is enough oil to take us through the next 80, 100 years already now. We don't need to find more.
Speaker 1:Is it not an economics thing and is it not about keeping? I mean, it feels like they're always having these broad discussions which is ramp up production to impact the price of oil. You know, that's kind of the narrative that always comes through. Everyone's always going on about the price of oil. That's what people measure things by.
Speaker 2:No, no, I mean, ramping up production again has nothing to do with exploration. Ramping up production for Saudi Arabia just means putting the tap from four to five, and they can do this, and many oil producing countries can do this, and what they mainly do is slow down production in order to increase the price of oil and then, under some forms of political pressure, they might reverse that policy. But I really think that there is a reality that oil is a very it's an incredible source of power. It's an incredibly valuable product that has been very valuable in our industrialization and economic development. But even if you look at oil, it's hard to look at oil in this. If you look at fossil fuels in general, like fossil fuels, still today, they receive probably 10 times more subsidies than green energy.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is criminal, this is genocide. That is the only thing to say, that this is governments engaging in genocide. That is the only reality, because we know what this does to people not necessarily people right now. This is intergenerational genocide and, as a consequence, I think there are, there need to be, limits to this. The problem, of course, is like who is going to impose them.
Speaker 2:But it's true that oil is a very useful product. It sits in a lot of the plastics we use, and plastics can be very useful products, but I think it's about 5% of oil that goes to the plastics industry. Everything else goes to transportation and a variety of other industrial applications. And then the question, of course, is can we phase this out at a velocity that makes sense, that doesn't jeopardize economic growth, which I'm absolutely convinced is not something we can do in the long run and this would take us to a long discussion on the monetary system. But we can't survive without economic growth, and so the question then is, of course, what do we want to grow? But I think it's true that we can't just say like, well, no more oil tomorrow, but no more oil exploration. I think that's a very different discussion. A gradual phase out of oil in transportation is going to happen. We see that. I think the most popular car in was it in China. The most sold car was electric, I think, in the US.
Speaker 1:Definitely surging the number of EVs.
Speaker 2:But of course that also means you need a lot more power to power that, and nothing is as efficient as oil.
Speaker 1:But there's also there's a lot of controversy around EVs and the not only EVs, even renewables. If you look at solar PV, if you look at wind, if you look at what has to be mined to create those products and what is the net benefit. I haven't seen the calculations, I haven't tried to do them myself, but I've seen a lot of controversy around how efficient is the energy generation source versus the cost of the materials to make it. A lot of it isn't recyclable or isn't being recycled. There's a lot of new stories of that coming out. It just seems very messy and there's a lot of conflicting information or viewpoints. That is diverting us away from what needs to be done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are conflicting viewpoints, but there is no conflicting science. So life cycle analysis of the average electrical vehicle will tell you that the footprint reduction when compared to an average internal combustion engine is 69%. That takes into account the mining process, the everything. The challenge, which you rightly pointed out, is material sufficiency. And how do we solve for material availability if we don't improve our recycling capability of these batteries, as in when they run out of steam? But that's a business opportunity.
Speaker 2:That's an innovation opportunity. That's something that lots of companies are working on. Improving the mining conditions and the kind of social conditions for people working in these mines is obviously also very important, but I don't think the debate about. Is it or is it not better to have an electrical vehicle over a specific lifetime? If you look at life cycle analysis, there is no debate. It's just better. Of course, if you buy the car and you crash it within a day, then it might not be better.
Speaker 1:Is it better if the energy powering the electric vehicle is a coal powered power station?
Speaker 2:So I think the LCA that I read so LCA for life cycle analysis used the average global carbon intensity of energy. So if it comes from a very polluting coal fired power station I don't know it would probably move the needle in the wrong direction. It might not move the needle far enough to make it worse than oil, but I couldn't tell you for sure.
Speaker 1:Is there an argument? So I mean, we know renewable works and there's different types of renewable that's been implemented en masse. I think China is leading the way in a lot of respect to solar PV. I have a mate that lives in Scotland that installs these massive wind turbines in the ocean. So it's happening. It's there, doesn't look pretty, doesn't always take up a lot of space. There's a lot of counter arguments. Is there an argument for nuclear? And it seems like nuclear received quite a bad take and it seems like somehow nuclear has been bucketed into the non environmentally friendly category. If we look at the, an IC nuclear as a gift that has been provided. With regards to the potential, yes, there's risk, but if you look at the, the, the, the risk versus the outputs versus the need, what is your take on nuclear?
Speaker 2:I have very long been on the fence with nuclear and I'm now off the fence. I think we should invest 100 times more in nuclear than we do, agreed. The problem, the real problem with nuclear outside of nuclear waste, which is obviously a big problem, and how that's managed and how do you ensure that that is stored safely. There is a problem, but we've been reasonably good at this so far. Now how we would deal with this under a cataclysmic event is something else. But the real problem with nuclear is that the rich western world so Europe, the US has lost the capacity to build complex infrastructure including nuclear.
Speaker 1:I saw a stat yesterday where China built a new nuclear that will. They've commissioned they're commissioning 18 new nuclear plants at a billion per plant or something like that, whereas the number in the US is, I think, 14x that for the same type of plant.
Speaker 2:The last I read was there's a nuclear plant going online in the US. It was either Georgia or Arizona and it was budgeted at 14 billion. That's it, and it's coming in at just over 30, seven years late. Yeah, and they commissioned four and only two are going to be built. So this problem, which is an infrastructural capability right, is very evident in the US and is the biggest impediment to the success of the IRA, the inflation reduction act in the US, together with permitting.
Speaker 2:In Europe, the problem is equally severe. Our capacity to do large scale, complex infrastructure work is very, very limited. China, with its belt and rodent is, given its own kind of productive capacity, still has this capacity. China is developing this capacity quite rapidly. The Middle East has it now, all of these countries. You can ask serious questions about human rights and like to what extent workers are not being almost enslaved and so. But they have a capacity to build complex, large scale infrastructure. Just look at the Saudi Arabian project, the line. I mean it's so grandiose in its ambition that nobody in Europe or the US would touch it with a 10 foot pole, right, but they're just going to do it and I'm sure it's going to be a hellhole for many people that are working in there, but they will get it done, and so I think this is really why nuclear is so problematic. It's just that the countries that have the money to do it don't have the capability, don't want to go to the countries that might have the capability.
Speaker 2:Because of its extreme strategic importance and so you have a stalemate that isn't going to be resolved until maybe we'll have another breakthrough in fusion.
Speaker 1:But we've been waiting for fusion for 70 years and seems like there has been some progress there of late in a lot of noise on the wire, not sure how productised and really it is, but lab based.
Speaker 2:But there is progress and that is promising. But we can't wait for fusion and I think that nuclear is going to have to be part of the energy mix for a long time.
Speaker 1:I mentioned earlier on that Germany is switching off. They've switched off their nuclear power stations.
Speaker 1:They've now reactivating coal power stations, it's just crazy to see some of the policy and thinking that's coming down Over and above that excuse me while I go on, a little ranch here is you see, policy that's been forced onto third world nations around reducing your use of fertilizer, reducing. You see the Dutch trying to reduce the amount of farms because they believe that that could be a quick win for carbon reduction. So now introducing policy that is again a have and will have a direct consequence on food production and food security. You've seen it in Sri Lanka, where they had a complete overthrow of government. Because what happened? They followed the logic of reducing the use of fertilizer. The yield in the following year or the following cycle dropped. Everything went out of whack from an economic standpoint and you had massive inflation of all sorts of things, which resulted in that government being overthrown. You can see the Dutch uprising. You can see now that I think the French are even uprising or from a farmer perspective.
Speaker 2:So the French are always up.
Speaker 1:They love a good ride.
Speaker 2:I don't think I necessarily agree with this perspective, and so let me tell you why. One as a European, although I've been living in Asia for a long time, the reality is 99% and it might be an exaggeration, say 90% of farms that exist in Europe are economically not self-sustaining. Everything is subsidized by the government. Keeping this alive may be good for a variety of kind of strategic independence reasons, it is economically very bad. It costs us billions, of billions, creates an enormous amount of waste, that in food that is being produced and just wasted because of the very powerful lobbies of the French, the Dutch, the farmers associations. So reducing that insane subsidy for these completely non-viable businesses I don't think is a bad idea.
Speaker 1:That sounds crazy to me, but when you've got starvation and hunger is a global issue still.
Speaker 2:But starvation and hunger are not driven by food production or a lack thereof. They are problems of logistics.
Speaker 1:We waste 50% of food that is produced globally 100% agree, because I had someone on here recently that was sharing some stats in Singapore who's created a food bank to try and prevent a lot of this going to waste. So I hear you on that. But it seems like strategically a very bad idea to start tinkering around. I mean, sri Lanka didn't have the luxury to do it. That seems like a very bad decision. That's a case on its own. How do you justify and I don't have enough statistics to argue and debate at that length with you but to start shutting down farms en masse for a carbon reduction program and I can't talk to the economic side just seems strategically like a very bad move.
Speaker 2:I think there's two things there. If it's a government mandate and it goes against the will of the people, then I think it's always very risky. These things tend to be only possible in the types of societies where most people people like you and me might not want to live. Having a very directive, top-down approach on those things, like telling private businesses you need to shut down your business, I think is very, very risky. Telling private businesses you're going to lose your subsidies, think, is another thing. It's basically that is how you create innovation and if you don't, then fine. If you do it. Well, I think, with conversion from farming to potentially, indeed, kind of a nature rewilding, and you can monetize through carbon credits or biodiversity credits, there might be different business models that are possible, including sustainable tourism. I think that is possible. I don't know enough about the Sri Lanka case, but the question that I would ask is how was this executed? Because the difference between policy and result is implementation.
Speaker 1:I think there was an IMF loan and linked to that was an ESG requirement and then, based on that, that situation unfolded.
Speaker 2:That still sounds like policy, because the reality is that we know very well and again, I'm not an expert in this but the excessive use of fertilizer destroys the soil. There is a very clearly understood scientific process that basically explains this. This is quite new. Our understanding of this is maybe four or five years old. What we see happening when you put all of these synthetic fertilizers in the soil is that you create a kind of asphyxiation problem. The soil does not regenerate anymore. As you do this over a longer period of time, your soil is not able to feed enough of its nutrients into the plants, so your yield is going down. The only thing that you can do to remedy this is to buy more and more and more fertilizer. This is a cycle that eventually has a breaking point.
Speaker 2:The transition towards a much more regenerative agricultural practice is viable, is economically viable if it's done well and is ecologically the only sustainable option we have. But the reality is that when we talk about all of the kind of challenges at the level of environmental sustainability, the climate problem dominates the agenda. The biodiversity problem is kind of coming up, but it's still like a footnote almost. The agricultural problem is, I would say, the most challenging one, because globally, we produce energy in about five or six ways. We know two or three of those we need to change. That's it. This is a simple problem for which we have different technology that is available.
Speaker 2:The energy problem is solvable with existing technology, but the way we produce food globally is so culturally entrenched that it's not five or six systems that need to change. It's thousands of systems that will all need to change or will all need to evolve a little bit. That's much harder to do because it's much less easy for governments or for innovators to say this is how we fix this industry, because it so depends on soil location, crop type, seasonality. As a consequence, I think we need to spend more time and effort on the research of how do we roll out regenerative agriculture at scale. Avoid stories and kind of crises as they happen in Sri Lanka, but not say, oh, but we can't do this, it's too risky. Look what happened in a country like Sri Lanka, so we need to keep on putting this fertilizer in there. No, we know that this fertilizer, at some point it is finite.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. I think I definitely believe that it's essential that we evolve. How we evolve and how policy versus action is implemented is key. I think that's been a consistent theme. Whether it's technology or anything of that nature, you have to get the buy-in. I just think I feel quite strongly about food security, number one, and making sure that doesn't get eliminated, because I think there's all sorts of other weird things that come out of that when it comes to reliance and keeping people hungry so that you can control them.
Speaker 1:I think that the need for cheap energy to drive advancement as a species is essential, but that energy obviously needs to be clean, which is why it gravitates towards. And again, I was on the fence with nuclear and I thought nuclear was bad because of a lot of the stuff that was coming out growing up about it. But then if you look at the actual statistics versus the benefits, it definitely is a gift that needs to be leveraged more and I agree on the investment in that. I think the dichotomy that we sit with is advanced nations that have created the problem. Telling third world nations what they can or can't do is a challenging one, and that is where I think a lot of this stuff gets locked up and stuck, especially when you start going to the cope 20, whatever number we are in 28.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there is a fundamental challenge with the distribution of responsibilities. So I think at the policy level, but also at the corporate level, I think that we are spending we as basically companies, are spending too much time drawing boundaries on their responsibility and should spend more of that time doing shit. So we know that about. I think is it like 200 companies globally are responsible for like 75% of global emissions.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. I mean, that's an insane statistic.
Speaker 2:And I could be off by a little bit, but it's close to that and so. But does that mean that all of the oil majors are the only ones that bear responsibility? And I'm not here to defend ExxonMobil and Chevron and the new appointment of the Shell CEO, but the reality is we've all benefited hugely from their work and we've all created a more prosperous society. So I think this idea, which is so pervasive in the world of sustainability, that an environmental responsibility of an organization is equal to the damage it does to the world, this idea is stupid. It is fundamentally outdated. It focuses on attributing guilt and attributing blame to organizations rather than focusing on how do you get to where we need to go?
Speaker 2:Because a company that has an incredibly big carbon footprint think about any kind of oil major like a Shell and telling them you are the only one that needs to fix this scope one, scope two, scope three just makes no sense, Just like it makes no sense to tell a company like McKinsey or a hedge fund saying your only environmental responsibility is to compensate the flights of your employees and your electricity bill, Because that's fuck. All. That is nothing. That is not the extent of the environmental responsibility of an organization like McKinsey that might have 200,000 employees. That creates an enormous amount of wealth, which facilitates an enormous amount of consumption that eventually leads to an enormous amount of environmental damage. But by having this extremely narrow and I would almost say this is an extreme perspective on responsibility is only equal to damage done. This is a very strange concept. It is not self-evident that this has been what we settled on as a society and it needs to be questioned.
Speaker 1:Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head from my perspective, which is you can get lost in that debate and draw in those lines and argue in which is where it feels like we've been for the last few decades, or you can jump into action. It brings me to some other interesting points and then I want to dive into handprints and how that's actually changing the game. But I remember I've seen some of the ESG rankings and it just confuses me how you could have certain companies that are in the top 10, other companies that aren't, that they call philosophies building out EVs. So what is your take on ESG and how much does that confuse or help the situation? And what is ESG for those that don't know?
Speaker 2:So ESG is the latest acronym in a long series of acronyms that stands for environmental, social and governance. And when we talk about ESG rankings and ratings, we really talk about semi-independent evaluations of how well a company reports on these ESG dimensions in its sustainability reports, plus, potentially, how willing a company is to spend more time talking to or engaging with a rating agency. The reality of this is and I know what you're referring to that Elon Musk said ESG rankings are bullshit. Exxonmobil is in the top 10 of the most ESG companies in the world.
Speaker 2:So I think there are two fundamental problems. One, es and G don't necessarily have a lot to do with each other, and the idea that we can then, if we go back to our earlier discussion on Austrian economics, say like, oh, you can be very good at G governance and, as a consequence, your ESG score is going to be reasonably good, doesn't inform people a lot if you care more about environment or if you care more about social and, of course, vice versa. So I think this is a problem. This kind of aggregation of these three things doesn't necessarily help us. Secondly, most of the popular reporting frameworks within ESG and there are loads and loads and loads, but the kind of.
Speaker 2:The two main ones that are really popular now with companies are TFCD, the Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures, which was started by Michael Bloomberg, and SASB from the US Accounting Board, or something. They're very explicit that what they care about is the reporting of environmental, social and governance factors that are very likely to have an impact on a firm's ability to earn a profit in the near future. There is so much wrong with that objective that for me, it kind of bypasses the entire point of it. If the focus of ESG is purely on does it, might it affect financial performance in the relatively short term, then it's fundamentally not about sustainability.
Speaker 1:I mean the irony right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but it's not about environmental sustainability. It is about financial sustainability, and the hope is that there might be a correlation, but it's not very clear. Then the third thing and I think this is also fundamentally problematic is that there is almost no evidence that the diligent reporting on sustainability metrics ESG actually leads to strong improvements in sustainability itself. I was recently in a conversation with one of the large projects that I can't name them because it was a Chatham House rules conversation, but with one of the large projects that are incentivizing companies to submit their carbon tracking data, and all of this over the world. So I asked the simple question what is the evidence over? If you guys have been at this for quite a long time, what is the evidence that companies that submit their data to your platform actually reduce their emissions faster than companies that don't? That was no answer. They said our job is to collect more data.
Speaker 2:Well, if that's the mission, then what on earth are you working on? It? Is this artificial boundaries where, again, the situation when it comes to climate change by diversity collapse, doesn't benefit from us drawing artificial boundaries between this is my companies, this is your companies. There is no benefit to this from a global holistic perspective, and if it doesn't lead to an action acceleration, then it means that we spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources, a lot of human intelligence on figuring out exactly and more and more accurately how to assign blame, without necessarily doing anything about how to solve the issues at hand.
Speaker 1:What happened to carbon credits? Has that fallen flat? It's gone very quiet. I remember it was a thing. Then it was going to be a global play. Then it dropped down to certain regional levels, like certain countries, certain provinces would have their own program. I haven't looked at it recently. Where is the carbon credit methodology and why is it not more relevant?
Speaker 2:I would disagree. I mean the voluntary carbon market. Prices have been dropping lately, but the carbon credit market, I think, is still very active. There is still a lot of work being done. Demand is on the rise again in different countries for different reasons. Then we are despite. I mean, since 1997, when we kind of started, when governments invented this concept, we are at the early days of the assetization of nature. Carbon credit is the front runner.
Speaker 1:What is a carbon credit for those that don't know?
Speaker 2:A carbon credit, depending on how you interpret it. I'll give you two definitions. One is a carbon credit is a right to pollute one ton of CO2. That's one interpretation which comes from the mandatory markets which exists in Europe with a Europe trading scheme and exists a little bit in some other regions, where companies can earn carbon credits if they basically pollute less than expected. Then they can sell those carbon credits to other companies that are polluting too much and say well, I had the right to emit 10,000 tons, I only did 9,000 tons, so I get 1,000 carbon credits and I can sell them to you. In this kind of system it's considered to be a right to pollute.
Speaker 2:In the voluntary carbon market, a carbon credit is a little bit different in my interpretation and basically captures a credible proof that one ton of carbon has either not been emitted or has been removed from the atmosphere through the engagement in a specific activity that could be restoring a forest, changing agricultural practices and could even be installing clean energy. There are a variety of complex conditions and actually we've just published an article on this on our website where we dive a little bit into unpacking what this is. It's a proof that one ton of carbon is not in the atmosphere that is pretty much what it is Then companies can then buy those proofs to engage in offsetting, which basically means to engage in public claims that they are on track to meet their stated carbon goals. If they can't do this through abatement and reduction of carbon emissions, they can do it through the purchasing of carbon credits.
Speaker 1:Got you great explanation. Thank you Also, simon. Let's quickly dive into the amazing team that is handprints. One of the things that always jumped out to me when I first came across handprint what it is that handprint does. The concept of regeneration was like a breath of fresh air. You called it earlier the climate anxiety or what was it term. You know the carbon reduction, the fatigue I've developed in trying to get people to reduce carbon in my own right to see that basic human nature really struggles with that concept alone. You guys are coming at it from a different angle and a lot of it's action-based and it's on regeneration and capture and sequestration, I think is the terminology. Maybe you can just paint us a picture of handprint. What is handprint and who are you as a team and what is the core verticals or the work that you're doing?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I'd say, first and foremost, handprint is a scientific concept that refers to a unit of positive impact being created in the world. It was kind of launched in, I think, 2011 by an MIT professor who wanted to have a counterweight to the work he was doing on footprinting, which focuses really on the negative impact you're creating in the world, and so we set up the company in 2019, and initially it was called the Green Company with three E's. Probably the best thing the Singapore government ever did for us was telling us that we couldn't use that name because it was too similar to another company called the Green Company with two E's, and so we ended up renamed the company.
Speaker 1:Why the three E's? Because there was another one with two, no, but what was it going to be? What was it going to be? There was no way.
Speaker 2:So there was just, really, yeah, we took over another company that was called Green Design, also with three E's because it had something to do with electric, and, yes, we renamed the company Handprint Tech, and so, yeah, what we do as an organization. So we have two core activities, I'd say, or two core capabilities. On the one side is we curate, digitize and productize the highest quality positive impact projects in the world. So that means we work as a commercial agent for, typically, charities, non-profit associations, social enterprises that are working on things like ocean plastic removal, coral reef building, providing access to education, building schools, solving food insecurity, hunger, female empowerment, gender equality, anti-slavery work, reforestation, so across a wide variety of spectrum and we bring those organizations after a diligent kind of two diligence process, kyc process, we bring them into a digital platform and we equip them with monitoring and reporting tools so that they can provide high frequency, high quality and socially meaningful updates of the work they are doing on the ground. So the idea is to make impact very credible, very visual and tangible for whoever.
Speaker 2:So that's one side. So we do this kind of impact curation, digitization. We work as commercial agents with NGOs. On the other side, then, is we've built this digital platform and a marketplace where companies can buy impact in the same way that you can go on Lazada or on Amazon and buy any other product on our marketplace. Impact has a price. It's a specific product, it's one tree planted and monitored for two years by this organization in this country, in this place, and there's a price attached to this which is set by the NGO, not by us, and so companies can come on this marketplace and buy these units of impact, but can also use some of our digital tools to integrate impact into their interactions and engagements with their key stakeholders.
Speaker 1:Let's dive into that. What does that mean? Exactly, because that's where the magic happens, that's where you're innovating and, I feel, kind of revolutionizing ways of doing business and driving impact at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yes, so by way of background there. So in 2018, Ryan Merrill, one of my co-founders, and I worked with DBS Bank here in Singapore and the United Nations on a report on sustainable digital finance.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Ryan, by the way. What a legend, legend and.
Speaker 2:Go to In that report. We studied a lot of different organizations, but one of our main conclusions was there is a big challenge for companies and that's when it comes to kind of sustainability is if they are interested in creating positive impact. There is a trust problem. How do we make sure that this impact is real? And that is kind of what we try to solve with this monitoring and the curation and digitization and visualization which we have on our platform. And this is a very big problem. But the other problem and I think it's even a bigger problem is value capture.
Speaker 2:If you're going to do this as a for-profit business, why would you spend I don't know 1% of your revenue on creating a positive impact in the world if that is not necessarily part of your mandate, your investor mandate, If your board doesn't want you to do this? And so what we are arguing, and have been able to prove over and over in a variety of contexts, is that it doesn't matter that you spend this money on something that is good for the world. We think that matters, but from a business perspective, what matters is that if you do this and you do it in the right way, you can capture a lot of value from this. So the idea is that you can create public goods, like supporting nature or providing free access to education and capturing private value, and so the key innovation for handprint in that front is that we can demonstrate that if you embed this impact into your engagements, you change the fundamental nature of the relationship you have with your employee or with your customer, with your supplier. So a very simple example that will be easy to understand is you can have an online e-store and at some point, people will end up on your website and they might want to buy your product.
Speaker 2:Now we know that in e-commerce, about 84% of products that are put into a basket and the virtual basket are not bought. This is a very big business problem because it creates stock that is in limbo, and it obviously means that you have potential customers that are not willing to just make a decision. They're kind of virtual window shopping, which, as a business, you don't want. So if you integrate a plugin like one of our plugins in your e-commerce store, we've been able to show that this increases cart conversion by 16%, Because you're demonstrating to the person that is making this decision hey, if you're buying this product now, we will do X and X is something good in the world that should be strongly aligned with the brand. So we have surfing companies and they're going to support coral restoration. We have other companies that are going to do reforestation in the region If they're very localized companies. We might have bookshops that will support education something that kind of makes sense from an online market.
Speaker 1:So you're attaching an upside, so to drive the buyer to convert, you're adding more value to the purchase in the form of a regeneration project or an education project.
Speaker 2:So a contribution, a pledge towards a positive impact creation, a regenerative project, and so we've seen that this works in e-commerce. And how we've done that is we did AB testing with Google to demonstrate, like, hey, you take people to two identical websites where you only have one piece of difference is this plugin, and you see over a period of time which website converts more. What is the difference, what is the financial difference between the two? And we see the 16% increase. So it's very substantial. That is quite a lot. It's nine times. The additional revenue that the company generated on the website with the handprint plugin was nine times higher than the cost they incurred for planting the trees. Say that again, please. So the additional revenue in terms of margin that the company generated through the 16% increase in sales was nine times higher than how much they needed to spend on buying the impact. So this is a very strong kind of proof that if, depending on the type of brand, the location is obviously contingency to this, but that this can work, that there is business value captured from the creation of positive impact. You've done the same thing in the advertising industry where, through a variety of partners, mainly with teats, companies can integrate a message into their ad, their creative, that is going to appear on your phone or wherever, and that message says something about the advertising campaign, something like this ad plants trees or this ad provide access to water for refugees. And then you can click on that message if you're interested as a viewer, as part of the audience, and find out what is actually behind this. And then so we explain what we do, what the brand is doing, how much money is going in there, and so we've seen that doing this leads to a variety of improvements in performance of advertising time spent watching the ad, ad completion rate, click through rates, all of those things that, if you're paying for ads, these are the things you care about. So again, it's that tight interlinkage between what is it that we're trying to achieve in a specific business, in a specific industry three layer positive impact on top of that, and we make it very credible and visual, then this can lead to business capture, business value capture.
Speaker 2:We're soon launching a product where banks can opt into the service so that they can issue bank cards that have a positive impact on the world every time they are used for transacting. So that I can have a bank card let's say a Indonesian mangrove bank card and say every time that I transact some money is going into mangrove restoration in Indonesia, for instance. Or I have a more general purpose positive impact card where at the end of the month I made all my transactions, I've got a bunch of points, loyalty points, and I can allocate those points to specific projects that I choose and then money will go to those projects. And the reason why banks are interested in this is because they believe their customers are interested in this and because banks are competing for new customers. Banks are incumbent banks especially are afraid of all the NIO banks and they want to become more lifestyle brands, more front of mind and working around.
Speaker 2:Impact can attract new customers, can improve loyalty of the customer. Same kind of story with telco industry, where there is not a lot of switching in the telecommunication industry and I don't know how long you've been in Singapore and how often you switch telco provider, but probably the answer is never right, or maybe once, and that's not because you're super loyal to the telco provider you have, it's probably because it's corporate, but people very rarely switch. Similar with energy providers, right? So these are all industries where you have a high potential for creating a better loyalty experience or for attracting new customers, but it's hard to attract new customers because of high perceived barriers to switching. So if you can link impact into your engagement strategy, then not everyone, but a growing number of people all over the world, not just in Europe, not just in the US, all over the world, including Singapore, especially in China, including India, indonesia are interested in this, and this can become a tool to lower your cost of customer acquisition. So what handprint kind of figured out, and we're probably not the first ones but is that by changing, almost by fractionalizing, the pledges that companies make to corporate philanthropy or CSR or positive impact, and by embedding it into their business processes, they can arguably save money, but they can definitely capture more business value, right In the just?
Speaker 2:I'll give you one more example. So like in the, let's say, in the cloud computing, right. So there are lots of different providers in this space, of course, and Huawei, azure, aws, smaller ones, google Clouds From a third party perspective, especially somebody who doesn't really know much about this industry, it's all going to be very similar. I can store stuff in the cloud also. Or even, if you go like more B2C, like something like Google Drive or like like Dropbox right.
Speaker 2:So then the question is, would I?
Speaker 2:I subscribe to Dropbox and I pay money for this every year.
Speaker 2:Would I spend $1 more if I know that at the end of the year they'll plant a tree?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I would, especially if that becomes a customer experience.
Speaker 2:That's interesting for me, like at the end of every three months, I get updates from what's happening with my, with the tree, and like get some pictures from the field, and so I think, yeah, I would happily do this right, and I think in any kind of business, there is an ability to link the key growth metrics and KPIs to the creation of positive impact B2B, b2c doesn't matter B2G and if you do this in the right place, in the right way, for the right budget, it's going to make business sense, because there is a growing community of individuals, business leaders and governmental leaders that care about this, and it's going to win. It's going to win your business, and so this new way of capturing value from the creation of public goods is quite fundamental in terms of what we do, but it's also fundamentally different from how it has been done in the past, and I think that's where the future of the work we do in terms of regeneration and where regenerative strategy and regenerative business models will integrate this thinking.
Speaker 1:I love how you have created a win-win-win scenario for the consumer, for the business, for its clients and for the environment or the relevant life system. I think it's ingenious to enable that mechanism by allowing people to carry on with their daily lives while still being able to make an impact. It's just about partnering with the right service provider that is catering for that. It brings me on to, I think, something that how do you validate your impact? Because there's a lot of concern and there's been a lot of greenwashing and a lot of abuse of funds. It's a known fact that most of the money that goes to NGOs is spent by the administration. A lot of people, a lot of money is wasted on the administration. You don't see that end-to-end visibility of how much of an impact if you give $10, how much of that actually ends up as a coral reef project and how much is lost in the process. So how do you, as a handprint, provide that transparency and visibility?
Speaker 2:Very good question. I think it's one of the things that we're very proud of, and it's another thing that it's another. I wouldn't say it's a big innovation, but it's not a technological innovation, but it's a conceptual change that we are bringing to this market, which is actually very substantive. I need to take a step back before I can answer this question. So if you think about the example you just gave about like you're giving $10 to an NGO and you don't know how much is actually going to that coral right? So then the question is, why would you do it?
Speaker 2:One is because maybe you want to feel good, but why would you pick that specific NGO over another one? And the typical response would be well, I've heard about it from someone or by virtue of its reputation. Why do NGOs like WWF and Oxfam and the Red Cross, where they get a lot of money they have stellar reputations. Whether or not justified is something else, but in general, I would say these are great organizations, but they have these higher overhead costs because they do a lot of other work. That is not just impact. Wwf doesn't only protect the panda. They have obviously lots of different activities.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's been a lot of controversy with Greenpeace and private jets and, and and.
Speaker 2:So so what Handbrain does is is a bit different. So, firstly, we so far we almost work exclusively with what I would call hidden gems, local NGOs that have a very small base of operations but that can scale, very limited overhead costs, even limited capacity to speak English, and hence totally outside of the international kind of money flows. Right, Because if you don't have a great capacity to do reporting and to source money from international donors, you're not going to get that money. It's a market where you have to really get into. So we find these organizations through our impact network and we bring them into our ecosystem after our KYC and then, very importantly, they are setting a price for a unit of impact.
Speaker 2:So, as I said, it's a marketplace where the NGO is a price setter. What does that mean from the perspective of the buyer? It means that rather than a company donating funds to an NGO, which is the old approach to impact creation, they are now buying impact units. So if they say on the market, to plant a tree in Indonesia with Yagasu costs 1.75 US dollars, then they know if I give 175,000 US dollars, 100,000 trees will be planted. How do you know? How do you validate that? So what we then do so. I want to, just I'll get started.
Speaker 2:So the fact that you built the price transparency and that you have these units of impact makes impact accounting. Namely, can you show me what is happening on the field?
Speaker 1:So there's a scale linked to the project. That gives you some sense of metric.
Speaker 2:Gives you air because projects are defined, especially in the nature space, are defined with a specific size. This is a five hectare project where 12,500 trees will be planted, for instance. So anyone that project is fully funded, then nobody else can fund it. So you're creating a lot of financial transparency in that way. So what we do with the NGO is basically in the back end, a lot of the work that goes on saying, okay, how do you define your project? How do you find the size? Where do you get your inputs? What are the costs of these? Can you show us a little bit about that so that we know that you're not charging $80 while actually you only need five? But make sure that all of your overhead costs in terms of salaries, building, are included and fractionalized in the price of the impact unit, because that's the real cost.
Speaker 2:It's not just planting a tree, is not the 10 minutes of labor that you need, it's also collecting the seed, it's preparing the land, it's the bill. I mean, all of this needs to be included in the price. So, once we're agreeing on the game, this makes sense, this is the right price. Then, the moment we send the budget so typically this happens on a monthly or bimonthly basis we send money to the NGO. The NGO does a confirmation that the budget has been received through a mobile app that we created, and that confirmation triggers a framework agreement, a contractual agreement that we have in place with the NGO. In that contract, it's laid out that, for every specific unit of impact, you will need to do the following types of reporting. You will need to be able to demonstrate that, if we send you $50,000, that 25,000 units of impact are being created. So you need to provide us with data that demonstrates this in a credible way. And so the way we are developing this and this is not a fully finished product right now, because it is quite complex is that what we are trying to do is break up the impact creation process into various steps according to a theory of change that is going to be specific to the NGO but mainly specific to the type of impact that's being created. So that goes from let's keep it with reforestation, okay, there is land preparation, there is seedling, collection, there is potentially nursery building, there is potentially growing the propagules in the nursery, then there is the transportation to the planting site. There is the planting, there is the monitoring in week one, monitoring, in week four, monitoring. So we're breaking down all of these steps, creating this outline, and then the NGO will need to report. Okay, we've done this now for each of the steps, right, and by doing that, you give a lot of transparency to the buyer, who can see all of this information on their dashboard that, okay, this is really happening.
Speaker 2:And then the second thing that we're another thing that we're working on is also to put the financial, the proofs of funding, and so the moments that money comes into our account that goes to the NGO. To put that proof on a blockchain where we could potentially demonstrate in a public, an open blockchain architecture, that there is no double funding of projects, which is a critical challenge in the impact space, because it's in reality, it's probably easy to do. And if you're an opportunistic actor in this space, you could sell 100,000 trees to a company in Belgium and 100,000 trees to a company in South Africa, and if these trees are going to be planted in Myanmar, are they ever going to know that you sold those 100,000 trees two times? Not very easy.
Speaker 2:So typically in the space there are centralized registries that take care of this and kind of make it harder for, but in the impact space in general there are, these things don't exist. So you need a trusted intermediary to make sure that this doesn't happen. And of course it wouldn't be aligned with our mission to double sell. But at some point as we start scaling, we will need to be able to prove this in a way that is kind of beyond reasonable doubt. And in the environmental space it's still pretty easy. In the social impact space it becomes very hard, got you?
Speaker 1:I love that you apply technology like blockchain to provide the decentralized ledger. Is that tethered to a smart contract and escrow of some sort to manage the release of funds as they hit the different milestones?
Speaker 2:So at some point I can absolutely see that our infrastructure that is currently living on centralized kind of cloud would fully move towards a smart architecture that lives on a decentralized system. Both Ryan and I have done work on the conceptualization of this. We have a high level overview of how we think this could work, with a variety of I think nothing really new in there, but just a variety of new ways of deploying existing use cases or existing pieces of tech in the blockchain. But right now, this is not where we are focusing our attention. The focus is much more on kind of building this digital trust architecture that is still centralized but that works a little bit like Airbnb. So the idea is that normally when you want to work in the impact space like we talked about carbon credits before carbon credits have credibility and value by virtue of the fact that they are verified by third parties, so they require a centralized authority to put their stamp of approval on something, and this works, but it creates massive bottlenecks. Firstly, there's a bottleneck in terms of cognition. These organizations may not be good at verifying everything. Secondly, there's a bottleneck in terms of how quickly these organizations are able or willing to update their technological understanding. Most of the existing verifiers in the carbon space don't know much about digital MRV or space-based analytics machine learning, so they don't use these latest technologies. But, with the best of intentions, they are centralized authorities that are also small bureaucracies that have limited capacity to scale. So this is how impact is being verified in the form of carbon credits, and it fundamentally doesn't scale, and it also means that a lot of the money goes to these guys that need to do all of this very complex work to make sure that they can put their stamp of approval on this.
Speaker 2:If you think closer to Airbnb, think about how hotels get five stars. There is also a whole process of restaurants get the Michelin stars, and so once you rely on a centralized authority to make decisions about, this is high quality, this is low quality. You gain a lot of trust, provided that the centralized authority is trustworthy, but you lose scalability, and you lose a lot of scalability, and that trust that you gain comes at a very high price. So if you say like we're binning this model and we're doing the Airbnb model, it's totally different. You're doing trust by design, you're creating price transparency, you're creating reviews, you're creating wisdom of the crowd, systems that also create trust, but in a totally different way that is 100x more scalable at a fraction of the cost, and that's what we are trying to do with the impact space.
Speaker 2:And then, as an intermediary solution, we will enable all these third party auditors to also be on the marketplace and say you can offer your services to our clients directly. You can. The client can plan the 100,000 trees they want space-based analytics. Okay, here are five providers. They can do this, but at some point, I think, in the future, our system of continuous assurance, using a breakdown of theory of change and very detailed reporting and I say detailed but also very low effort reporting for the NGO is going to be so trustworthy in a similar way that Airbnb has become that that every company is going to be pretty happy with this.
Speaker 2:This is good enough in terms of credibility. We know that this impact is real. We can see it with our own eyes, and then we will have really cracked this space wide open, because, based on the study we did in 2018, 80% of the money that is being spent on impact goes to intermediaries. So if we want to flip this to 20%, that means we can do 4x more impact with exactly the same amount of money that is being spent right now, and that's what we're trying to do and I think it solves a bit of concern that most people have how much of the money goes to the impact.
Speaker 1:And it's amazing that you've been able to visualize and pull together not only all the NGOs but the mechanism to provide that throughput, that bi-directional throughput to the NGO and then back to architect the step-by-step process across the different projects to give people on the consumer and innovative models and the retailers or the bigger players a mechanism to pull people towards their brand and continue with their business as usual but, at the same time, make an impact, because I do believe that most humans on this blue rock want to make an impact, want to make a difference, want to see the ecosystems regenerate and balance out. I do sincerely believe that. Tell me a little bit more about other technology that you use to validate at the edge. Are you using things like Satellite to validate how many trees have been planted? Are you employing IoT? How do you measure some of these projects outside of the data that comes back from the NGO? Just to have a bit more of an agnostic view, Right.
Speaker 2:So what Handprint has decided to focus on and this has been debated over a couple of years is that at the moment, our focus is on improving trusted direct reporting. Now, we think there's a lot of value to this because also because of the incentive structure and the economic alignment with the NGO, if they are caught in a lie, they will be excluded from the platform. There's a lot of things behind this in terms of behavioral economics that facilitate trust by design, but we do understand that that is not necessarily good enough for every company. Now, once we acknowledge that it's not good enough for every company, then the fundamental question becomes how can we increase this level of the trust by using, for instance, things like you're saying, satellites, iot, other ways to evaluate and capture outcomes, and so what we learned is that the best way to do this is by not building it ourselves. So, of course, as a startup, you're resource constrained. You can't just build everything, but because we are an impact type agnostic platform, we do all of these different types of impact. For us to go and say we are going to build in-house the capability to do very specific space-based analytics for mangrove forests and then do the same thing for regenerative agriculture and then build sail drones that can go underwater and measure the changes in biodiversity for a coral reef that we've restored, or build an IoT device on a river filter that measures how much kilograms of plastic is being sequestered. If we would do all of that, then we would need to be funded by Softbank and have 100 million in the bank, and then we potentially would say that's a good idea. But given that that's not the case, I don't think it's a good idea.
Speaker 2:What I think is a good idea is to work with companies that are super focused on this specific part of that kind of job and say you have an amazing capability, but what you very often lack. You have this capability, but you maybe do this for like 10 projects and that's kind of how you make your revenue over the year. But come on our platform as a service provider and when one of our clients comes to us and says we want to spend half a million dollars on trees for the next 10 years and we want those trees to be audited every year, then we will say we've got five amazing companies that can do space-based analytics. They'll give you carbon sequestration. They'll give you all of this. You can choose which one you want to work with. We would recommend this one or not, but you can choose, and then at least it's independent. So our choice has been to not get into the deep weeds of the technology, but to partner with organizations and provide this as a service to our clients.
Speaker 2:The one exception to this, where we are also not building it ourselves but partnering, is on visualization, because I think visualization is really key to what we're doing, and especially when we talk about, like reforestation, people want to see where the trees are planted.
Speaker 2:But also there we're thinking that, yes, we could develop this ourselves or we could commission it right, we could outsource it.
Speaker 2:But then there are so many great platforms that are available already and that can make that capabilities accessible through API. They say, like it makes much more sense to just work with these guys because they focused on this super visualization engine and if we want to copy this, it's going to take us five years and it's not going to be as good. So for us, that decision became more and more evident as we kind of grew the company and grew the team like no, we need to focus on this engagement layer, because that's where a lot of the value is captured. We need to focus on funding transparency, because that's what clients find very important. We need to focus on the right incentive structure with the NGOs so that they do very good reporting. This is the technology that we can control and this technology scales to any kind of impact partner. Something that is useful but doesn't scale or across social, environmental and kind of economical impact is not something that we should do ourselves.
Speaker 1:I think there's such a good lesson there for any founder or entrepreneur when it comes to understanding your product market fit, understanding your key partnerships. Where do you need to focus? What do you focus on? How do you manage your key partnerships to deliver a deeper value for your product or service? I mean you guys could not have picked a more challenging field to what you're doing. It just blows my mind. It's so complex.
Speaker 1:It's so there's so many stakeholders and so many layers, and tell me a little bit about this founder journey and the team journey to identify the product market fit the challenges that you face. What is some of the resistance that you're getting from the markets you know? Share some of that, because I think there's some golden nuggets in there.
Speaker 2:I mean, the founder story can also take a very long time, but Matias, who is the current, is a CEO and co-founder. Matias and I were friends.
Speaker 1:He's got the barley glow. Matias, whenever I see him, he's got the barley glow, the barley glow.
Speaker 2:He lives and works in barley. He does work very hard, but so Matias and I were friends since February 2015. So we met socially in Singapore. I was fresh of the boat, he'd been here three months or two months. We met at a barbecue and we became friends and we never really worked together. I mean, I was an academic, of course. He was initially working for a company, and then he bought out, did a leveraged management, buyout and he took over the company, and so we were just friends. We saw each other socially.
Speaker 2:And then in 2018, I was still just an academic working at the university and I hired Ryan out of USC University of Southern California. I just finished his PhD in climate management, in climate policy and energy policy. So I hired him to come to SMU to work with me on a grant that I had received on studying innovation in the natural world, and so we started working together very closely. As part of this grant, we went to Myanmar. We visited World View International Mangrove Restoration Organization and then set up a nonprofit organization in Singapore somewhere at the end of 2018 to start helping this Norwegian NGO in Myanmar access international financing. And then, with the nonprofit called Global Mangrove Trust, we also started working with DBS Bank and we worked with them for about two years on developing blockchain architecture and the beginnings of the machine learning approach that has now been fully developed, really, by Kumi Analytics, another Singapore startup. And so, once we started experimenting a lot with blockchain, we worked with Zillica and US Spinoff and then people from the DBS Disruptor team, which is like the best coders that they have in India. So we worked with these partners and then Matias for the first time really got interested in what we were doing, because he was working on a lot of technology grant innovation schemes, and so he said like what you guys are building is actually pretty cool. You're doing this thing with Zillica. I have partners that I know in France that could build really great blockchain technology.
Speaker 2:And so we set out to work together on a grant proposal for the NGO to be co-funded by the French and the Singaporean government to build public transparency architecture for reforestation funding, and we built the entire grant proposal, but we never even ended up submitting it because there was an issue between the French partner and the French government, and so it never really materialized. But throughout this six to eight weeks of working on this grant proposal, matias was suddenly really convinced that we were actually sitting on not just a piece of technology, but mainly a set of ideas that were very scalable. And so he convinced us to set up a new company, so this time a for-profit social enterprise, to start developing some of these ideas in a more commercial way, so to take some of the technology that the NGO had developed in open source, put some of that in handprint and then start kind of building a team and look for venture capital. And so at the end of 2019, I think 19th of December or something we formally set up the company. So that's kind of the founding story, right. So that's where the three of us come from and how we all met.
Speaker 2:And then we spent a lot of time figuring out like, what are we going to do? Of course, this was just before the circuit breaker in Singapore, so we had a lot of time to work not necessarily a lot of time to talk to clients, but we started working on, actually initially on quite a few ideas. So we were looking at like we wanted to build something that would facilitate the planting of trees and in a way, that would make it easy. I think that was always a core kind of we need to make it easy to initially plant trees, and we discussed a variety of ideas based on kind of what our network was, and so one of the things we discussed was could we build an IoT device that you can insert into boats and specifically yachts, that would just measure how much petrol or kerosene would be put into the boat, then shoot that to a centralized platform, then information and automatically kind of compensate for this true directory for a station, and so we build a platform like an initial platform I say we it's really Matias, he's an engineering background Platform that we call tree, with three E's. They were really stuck on this tree and then over time, quite quickly, we renamed the platform, handprint and eventually also the company.
Speaker 2:But that idea of that IoT device wasn't really something we ended up pursuing, and what we ended up going for, I think, couple of months into our existence as a company, was, because of COVID and because of the lockdown, saying like we're going to start with e-commerce because everything is going to move online, so, and so we started building the initially a Shopify plugin that would enable a pretty simple integration into an e-commerce checkout process, and during that time so I think by then, by that time we probably had one developer that I was paying out of pocket and we suddenly got interest from an advertising company based here in Singapore that said, like could we do something similar in the advertising industry? And I remember Emmanuel, who is the guy who kind of came up with this idea, sending this extremely long email and I just could barely understand what he had in mind. It was just all. It seemed all very farfetched. It's like what do you mean? Like doing this in the advertising industry At the time didn't seem intuitive to me, but I think he had a hint of like what this could be, of course, because he understands the advertising industry in depth. And so we started talking to him and then discussing this and eventually we built this, probably a year, maybe a year and a half later.
Speaker 2:But from the moment that we had that conversation with him, we also started thinking about okay, we've done this or we're doing this for e-commerce, and this might be a great place to focus in the beginning, because you need to be somewhat focused as a startup. But the potential for doing what we're trying to do is much bigger than just e-commerce. Right, the next step we were thinking about, like point of sale systems. We do have that now as well, and so over time are, let's say, I'd say, the selection of use cases for how we could deploy our API, or how companies deploy our API, kind of kept on growing. Sometimes there was someone came up and say, oh, can we use this for event registration? I was like, yeah, and so a lot of that innovation or these new ideas initially really came out of client requests that said like, can we use this kind of stuff for something else?
Speaker 1:So taking the initial concept and leveraging the principle of people being able to make impact across different use cases, just by wedging that plugin into the interface.
Speaker 2:Yeah, by basically deploying the API that was underpinning our Shopify plugin in different ways, and so that really, I think, led for us to the understanding of like okay, what we're building here is a platform for impact visualization, monitoring and reporting, linked to a global or a universal impact API that can connect a handprint to any action with a digital fingerprint, and that's like an. Okay, that's a big thing, that's an interesting thing to do, but that obviously creates a massive problem in a startup, because then you're like who the fuck is our ICP, right? Who are we going to be talking to? Because suddenly it's like well, every company can now use this, right, it doesn't matter, that doesn't work. I think it's taken us a very long time and we're probably still like at the tail end of this to really hone in on what is the ICP and what is the right type of company for us to work with. And the interesting thing, as well as the continuing challenge, is that the ICP for us is not very closely affiliated with the ideal customer profile, right? So typically in normal marketing and going to sales, the ICP is like a specific industry, a specific type of person, personality profile yeah, but it's also the industry and the type of company right, and so For us, this is extremely. Our ICP is not related to an industry, is not related to a specific role in a company, and that is from a growth strategy perspective and from a marketing perspective is very challenging, as well as from a sales perspective, because you, a good salesperson, knows more about the industry they're selling into than the person who works in the industry. But so for us that's very hard because we work across so many industries. But for us, what we've seen now is like the ICP.
Speaker 2:The type of organization that we need to work with is an organization that for whom customer acquisition and loyalty whether it's B2B or B2C is very important, is tricky, and for which many clients of that company work with that company despite kind of recognizing that whatever it is that they are offering as a service is quite interchangeable with what other companies are offering. So our ideal kind of customer is a company that is fighting against the commodification of their own business, and so banks are a great example of this. Most banks fit that paradigm. Telcos are a great example of this. Energy companies are another good example of this. Some insurance companies fit that brand as well.
Speaker 2:Some platforms like travel platforms or booking platforms could be somewhat similar, where people might be like oh well, I go to Traveloka, I go to bookingcom, I go to Agoda, I go to people don't necessarily have loyalty to many of these platforms, or I go to Trip, and so but it means that there's a lot of different types of companies that we can work with and then, within those companies, the right person to identify, the right person to speak to is typically not defined by the role that they have in their organization, so it's not the general manager, or it's not the chief strategy officer, it's not the chief commercial officer, and that makes it really challenging, because if we don't get in with the person who can become an internal champion, it's very hard, because what we are selling and you, of course, understand this are working at Huawei like you're selling complex technology solutions, typically.
Speaker 2:I mean, cloud is now easy, but you're doing a lot of other things, and so if you sell complex technology, then the buyer has no idea how to buy, especially when the technology touches on product, on marketing, on strategy, on sustainability and on maybe four or five other departments.
Speaker 2:So this is the essential challenge for, I think, the type of stuff we do, because we talk to the sustainability department or the HR department, because a lot of what we do also is kind of focusing on employee engagement outside of customer engagement. But for them to be able to buy our technology, they need to really be able to convince a lot of people in their organization that they've never met before, because organizations are pretty siloed. So this is, I think, the challenge, but it's also where the opportunity lies, because once you get in, then it becomes very, I'd say, internally contagious. It's something that a little bit of budget for marketing, a little bit from product, a little bit from sustainability, and suddenly these people know each other and then they're doing something together and then if it works and we know it works, then it's something that becomes self-reinforcing.
Speaker 1:So finding and identifying that champion is key. The co-creation, which is what you're doing, is key. There's a consultative co-creation element to it. So any advice you can give for any startup that's playing in a similar realm that can maybe remove a learning curve or get out.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think the advice you give to startups is always the same. It's like get good advice, don't stress too much about pricing, and I would always say, like if you don't do, at least when you're in that phase of finding product market fit, if you don't do 10 experiments per month, out of which nine are wrong, you're not doing it right. That's a good idea. I think there is, even in larger startups that are going to like I mean, now we're like 20, but like looking at maybe growing from like 20 to 500 people. Right, I think there is a tendency that startups have because they get advice from like professionals and there's this as a strong focus on like we need to build processes, processes for scale. This is a little. I think this is a total illusion. If you're 20 people, you can build whatever process you want. It can be a great process. Once you're 100 people, that process doesn't matter anymore. It's going to need to change. So the idea of building processes for change or for growth, I think is overly ambitious. I think you need to build routines that work and that allow you to do very fast experimentation, which also means, of course, you need to do product discovery, talk to users, I mean all of those things, but you need to be trying things out with limited budgets in order to almost hope that shit doesn't work Right. So because if you can run a sales experiment where you're saying, okay, we're going to go to this event, we're going to end out 100 business cards and we're going to see how many people actually book a meeting, if you get zero meetings, you shouldn't be dissatisfied because you've learned an incredibly valuable thing Well put Right. So, in the same way, if we're doing this and we have developed over time, we've developed a very good capacity to do cold email outreach, so, of course, a big part of sales hunting, and so we can probably run 20 experiments of 1000 emails in a month. That's a pretty useful thing to be able to do, because we can say we're going to target this market, this profile, this type of company, four emails and we're going to see. We're just going to measure what happens, and if nothing happens, then it's not like, okay, we should have planned this more. It's like, no, this is super valuable. We've learned that right now, with this type of messaging, this is not a segment we should pursue, and so, by working through exclusion, this is very useful.
Speaker 2:The other thing, of course, is that a lot of what happens, I think, in the first years of running a startup is that you're building your own network as a founder, and I think handprint I mean, we have maybe six or 7,000 followers on LinkedIn, but both Mathias and I, as the main kind of spokesperson for handprint, we have many more on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Our networks are growing faster than our corporate network and exploiting that network is also very important. The personal branding A personal brand and I know from Gert that you're working on this as well as a thing and I think it is really where a lot of the value that you bring as a founder hopefully outside of ideas and vision and some execution but you're bringing in credibility from other domains, right? So, ryan and I bringing in a lot of credibility from being academics or reforming academics, which has high status in Asia and in Germany, less so in, maybe in other countries, but that's very high status here. So when I speak to people in Singapore or in Malaysia or in say like oh, I'm a professor in Singapore, that resonates with like oh, that gives me a little bit more credibility than any other kind of founder. That. So, exploiting that network and having the audacity to just do that because it's uncomfortable in the beginning.
Speaker 1:Of course and I've seen this in my own experimentation that the company page versus your personal page gets a whole different statistical reach. When it comes to social media, how much have you positioned yourselves as the authority in the space? Because there's something there as well, and I had this with another founder that was breaking into an emerging market and for the first year two years he was just making sure he was at every convention speaking on the topic agnostic lead, just to establish some authority around that. I suppose you've touched on that because of the professor link. What more have you done in that space too?
Speaker 2:So we haven't done a lot of field marketing, so going to conventions, and so the main reason for this is obviously COVID and so. But also a lot of those speaking slots, especially when you're not a CEO a very famous company are pay to play, so you pay to be on that stage. And so we've said very early on, like we don't do this, because I also don't believe it has any credibility. Like I recently was approached on LinkedIn by someone who spent half an hour on the phone with me saying like oh, it'd love for you to come to to COP28 and we do an interview with you. So inspiring what you're doing with handprints. Like okay, this is amazing. And then at the end of the call is like oh, by the way, this is how much it costs. No, like are you? Are you?
Speaker 1:joking Could have opened with that. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you should have opened with that. I should have wasted an hour and a half of my time. So I don't believe in that that medium as being very credible if it's pay for play. Now, of course, the audience might not know this, so we haven't done that much, but I think, on on thought leadership, we've probably done quite a lot with. We publish regularly Matias, especially on LinkedIn. I try to as well. Practice right and you need to develop routines for this, and I think we are quite highly regarded in the space, and we've also occasionally just pinged some of our competitors and said guys like, what is on your website? This specific thing, this is horseshit and you shouldn't put it on your website because you're giving the entire industry a bad name by putting that kind of shit on your website.
Speaker 1:And there's a lot of that in the space I mean most people in the space.
Speaker 2:Successful companies in the space don't come from a scientific background. There are exceptions, but most of them come out of different sectors and they don't have the scientific background. And that's fine. We welcome all types of companies in the space, but you need to kind of be true to the impact that you're trying to create. So and I think that is helping us, and more and more so because we now even hear from some of the companies we talk to is like oh yeah, we used to work with A or B or C, but we don't trust them anymore.
Speaker 1:Or we just create abilities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because they're saying all this about these projects, but I think they're just buying these projects somewhere else and they don't know what's going on there and it's like so there is this shift happening which I mean, obviously is good for our business.
Speaker 1:But it's not. It's more than just that. What I'm hearing is that you're purists, that you're calling out the bullshit and you stick into the cause and by maintaining that trajectory and staying true to yourself and the belief system. There's something there, right?
Speaker 2:I think it's more than a belief system.
Speaker 2:I mean I would say we're trying to stay very close to the science and of course, this creates conflicts in a sales driven organization or whatever. If you're trying to sell, then sometimes the science is going to basically give you a number that doesn't necessarily work out very well. My door is going to say I don't know, we shouldn't tell this company to do this, we shouldn't tell them whatever. So there might be these conflicts, or we have to be very, very honest about exactly what this is. Well, you might say like let's just round off, it's okay, right, and so that might create some conflict, and especially with two out of three academic founders that come from a scientific background and went through rigorous PhD training.
Speaker 2:So we are leaning very hard towards the science. Matias is pulling us more towards like we have to think about this commercially, and I think it works very well. We keep a balance because we all know that our scientific base is a key part of our credibility, but we need to. We can't be too rigorous on one end either, because otherwise, I mean, there's a reason why scientists don't do a very good job at selling their research in terms of getting attention for it, because it's always very nuanced, right, the reason why there is so much persistent misunderstanding or misinformation around climate change is because scientific science will say like well, based on the models and with 98.7% accuracy, we are confident that the temperature will be within the X and X range. Under these conditions, and by the time that they finish the sentence, people have walked away.
Speaker 1:Something else that's jumping out to me, which I think is probably, if not the most critical fact, at least in the top three that founder, that founding team, the strength of that team and it makes me very happy to hear that handprint is going strong, that the team you know. You mentioned 20 plus now. Yeah, that's crazy, that's phenomenal In eight countries. Yeah, so kudos to you and the team. I think there's a lot to be said around that and making sure that you have the right team, that you have the right balance, that it's not biased in one direction.
Speaker 2:It's got to be well-rounded, right, I mean so, as a student of innovation right, I wrote some papers in the past, like 2018-19, on what makes teams successful at innovation, and these are nothing to do with sustainability. But I have this other area of research, or I had this other area of research, and one of the things that always comes out from the literature is that diversity, perspective, taking empathy, being willing to look at something from the vantage point of somebody else that these things are critical to innovation. The other thing that comes out of the famous studies that we've done in Google is psychological safety right, the ability to dare to say whatever you want and knowing that the repercussions are not going to be personal.
Speaker 1:That's a big one.
Speaker 2:And this is a very big one. And so what we've been trying to do, as we've built out the team and kind of grew it and narrowed it down and grew it again is always thinking about like you need to have a balance between diversity and homogeneity, because a team that is too diverse doesn't understand each other, and a team that is too homogenous let's say it's all white, french, it's a 28-year-old man which is very common in founder teams that they're all very, very similar. But a team that is too homogenous has too many blind spots and, as a consequence, faces a lot of external risk Less internal risk but more external risk. So I think what we've been trying to do when we're hiring senior people so we are three founders, we're three white men, but one living in Bangkok, one in Indonesia, one in Singapore and one American, one Belgian, one French. Then our most senior person is a French, vietnamese woman. She's the general manager. Then we have two other French people. So we have quite a lot of French people, but one lives in Hong Kong, the other one lives in Singapore, then we have a Peruvian who lives in Vietnam and a Portuguese who lives in Portugal. So we have three women and four men, five men. So in terms of balance, I think that is reasonably good, probably better than most tech companies. And that's just the eight people in leadership. And then our board is also quite mixed. So I think we've done a reasonably good job at getting this diversity but also ensuring that there is enough similarity and, of course, purpose alignment drives a lot of similarity. So today was the day that Martin, our head of product, worked with us for one year and Monrache, one of our impact experts, has been with us for two years. And so, because we all share that purpose and they mentioned that in the group chat like we're on Slack saying, like I mean, it's been an amazing year, it's been such hard work, but like, what keeps us all together is like our shared mission and what we believe we're trying to achieve, and that big vision of like we want to get to $1 billion in ecosystem services restored, want to win that Nobel Prize, we want to like these massive, ambitious visions. That's what keeps a lot of the team together.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, and then developing the processes that allow for conflict to emerge but also have tools to deal with that. I think it's unavoidable. I think that founder teams of multiple people. There will be conflict, there will be disagreements, and there will be, and if they don't, if they're not managed very well, then they can fester and kind of really ruin the relationships. So I think working around on these kind of soft edges is something that we're learning. But I almost think that the way we're thinking about this, like as a leadership team and this is not just the three founders but like, say, the eight people is that every time conflict emerges it's an opportunity to kind of learn something that eventually makes a team stronger, right. So it's like this idea of anti-fragility. It's not about resilience in terms of withstanding breaking point. It's about turning stressors into things that strengthen your organization, and I think we're doing a pretty good job with it, love it.
Speaker 1:I could talk to you for another two hours, and I'm quite just.
Speaker 1:Not sure anyone could listen. Yeah, no, you'll be surprised that the statistics speak for themselves, but I think that there's so much to learn and you've shared some real perlars at the end around what other entrepreneurs or founders can focus on, because it is such a difficult journey and I always have the utmost respect for people that take it and it's nice to see that you've hit this stage of your growth. I fully endorse and back what you're doing and hope that Huawei can get more involved, and we've been knocking at that door and trying to chip away at it and we have to unlock more collaboration and get involved and get our own handprints. And yeah, I think, in closing, simon, maybe it would be good just on three points and to get your inputs If you had to give a message to, firstly, any partner that wants to come and play a role within your ecosystem as a subject matter expert or technology expert, and then to anyone that's got their own business, that wants to leverage handprints how do they get involved and where do they go?
Speaker 2:I think every organization, individual that is interested in learning more can obviously start at the website handprinttech, can send me an email at simon at handprinttech, or on Twitter or threads or Facebook although I don't really use Facebook, linkedin is probably where I'm most active but, yeah, I think for every company that is interested in and maybe not even our company handprint, but in the concept of handprint, I think it's so easy to get started.
Speaker 2:That's almost a key advantage. It's very hard for companies to focus on like, okay, we're going to change our entire supply chain to make it more sustainable, but saying that we're going to do something good and talk to make sure it's credible and talk to our customers about it, everyone can do that. It doesn't matter if you're a one-stop shop, one person shop, or if you have two million employees. So I think the power of handprint as a concept is also that it's very inclusive, whereas many of the kind of footprint reduction activities are not inclusive because not everyone can get involved in this. So, yeah, that's what I'd say Just start reach out to us if you want to work with us and we'll be happy to have a call.
Speaker 1:The thing that jumps out is there's a strong co-creation element and you guys have lots of interesting use cases and you can help any potential customers shape something that will give them that differentiator to create more loyalty or stickiness with their customer base. So I think that's exciting. There's a lot of tech-based startups that can reach out as well. It seems like you're building your ecosystem and they can get involved and help you. If anyone's got any ideas on how to leverage tech to help validate or enhance.
Speaker 2:Sure, as well as I think, always, we prefer to partner with tech companies that are aligned with our values. If you're a SaaS platform and we have clients like this and they just say, okay, for every, we have a $50 per month subscription and 50 cent goes to positive impact and that's part of our narrative, so I think a lot of the tech startups and tech companies can easily partner with us. So, yeah, that's always a possibility, and if you offer specific tools and you want to in the impact space and you want to be part of the marketplace, then yeah, let's connect.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, simon, thank you, it's been a good chat. Suspect that we'll have another one in the near future. I want to dive into some of your projects, so it's really appreciate your time, your insights, the honest thoughts and the deliberations around the key of the subject matter, that is, sustainability. And yeah, I think all the best and good luck and I'm confident that you're only going to go from strength to strength.
Speaker 2:Thanks, lewin. We'll find out in the new year. Cheers, cheers. So we'll talk about COVID.