On this week’s episode of Masters of MAX, Tom speaks with Tessa Clarke, Co-Founder & CEO of Olio. Founded in 2015, Olio is a sharing app for local communities, making it easy to give away the things you don't need to someone else who would value them. You will hear just how fast Olio took off, where they are at now in 2023, and what Tessa has planned for the future.
On this week’s episode of Masters of MAX, Tom speaks with Tessa Clarke, Co-Founder & CEO of Olio. Founded in 2015, Olio is a sharing app for local communities, making it easy to give away the things you don't need to someone else who would value them. Since inception, Olio has now grown to over 7M users, with nearly 100,000 volunteers and more than 28M local neighborhood pickups.
In the conversation, Tom is able to explore what inspired Tessa to start Olio in the first place, and the way it connects back to her early upbringing. Tessa also gives an inside look on how she and her early team built the first version of this product as simply a WhatsApp Group in order to test their idea.
You will hear just how fast Olio took off, where they are at now in 2023, and what Tessa has planned for the future. One of the biggest lessons to keep an ear out for is the impact that Olio’s community has had on growing a loyal user base and why this can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Hear Tessa give her advice on building your own community, and why it might not be for every brand.
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Guest Bio
Tessa is Co-Founder & CEO of Olio, an app tackling the climate crisis by solving the problem of waste in the home & local community. Olio does this by connecting people with their local community so they can give, get, buy, sell, lend and borrow pre-loved items, as well as give away surplus food. They also have over 85,000 volunteers who collect unsold food from local businesses and redistribute it to the community via the Olio app. Olio has grown to over 7 million users in 63 countries and its impact has been widely recognized, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted Olio as a "beacon” for the world, and by Vivatech who awarded Olio "Next European Unicorn.”
Prior to Olio, Tessa had a 15 year corporate career as a digital Managing Director in the media, retail and financial services sectors, and she met her co-founder Saasha whilst they were studying for their MBAs at Stanford University. Tessa is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world, and about ‘profit with purpose’ as the next business paradigm.
Tessa was awarded the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award for 2023, the longest running female business award.
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Guest Quote
"I think the single most important thing that you need to do if you want to foster community is to have a very clear ‘why,’ a very clear mission that will resonate with a community. Our mission at Olio is extremely clear. We want to live in a waste free world, and we believe in sharing, not shopping, and that's something that our community can really rally around." – Tessa Clarke
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Time Stamps
*(01:25) Tessa's background
*(11:35) What is Olio?
*(14:50) From WhatsApp to iOS App
*(17:21) How fast did Olio grow?
*(22:57) Tessa's plan for the future
*(25:39) How to foster community and sharing on your app
*(29:44) Changing humanity's North Star
*(33:20) Preventing burnout
*(35:19) Rapid Fire Questions
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Links
[00:00:00] Tessa Clarke: I think the single most important thing that you need to do if you want to foster community is to have a very clear why, a very clear mission that will resonate with a community. Our mission at Olio is extremely clear. We want to live in a waste free world, and we believe in sharing, not shopping. And that's something that our community can really rally around.
It makes them feel excited to belong to a community that's working towards the vision and ambition that we have got, which has been so core to fueling our growth to 7 million people today.
Welcome to Masters of Max. A mobile app experience podcast. Please welcome your host, Tom Butta, chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at airship.
[00:00:55] Tom Butta: Welcome to another episode of Masters of Max. We have a really great guest today in Tessa Clark, who is the founder of a very, very cool and super important app and company called lio. So she's here to tell us all about it and the story of how she got here and the significance of what it means perhaps to others who are exploring similar paths.
So Tessa, welcome to the show. Thank
[00:01:21] Tessa Clarke: you very much for
[00:01:22] Tom Butta: having me. You've got quite an interesting background. Do you mind maybe just giving us a little bit of perspective on how you got to this place of starting this really, really cool
[00:01:31] Tessa Clarke: company? Sure thing. So I think it's all rooted in my childhood. I grew up on our family farm in the Northeast of the UK.
Along with my two younger brothers, we were the workforce of three, and we had either a well spent or misspent youth, depending upon how you're looking at it, working incredibly hard on our family farm. And that upbringing definitely taught us a lot of important life skills, resilience, problem solving, creative thinking, and we were surrounded by cows, cows, cows all day long as well.
Was it a dairy farm? It was a dairy farm, yes. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Got it, okay. So as a child, I never... I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was always slightly envious of those people who did know what they wanted to do. But I was absolutely convinced that I did not want to be a farmer or a farmer's wife.
And so as soon as I could, I left home, I went to university. And then after that, I went to the bright lights and big city of London and pursued what could be described as a fairly classic corporate career. And I really. Ran away from my background and my upbringing, I became a, an unconstrained, unrepentant sort of consumer of stuff.
And I did that for almost 20 years. And then I had an experience which took place eight years ago when I was living and working overseas and moving back to the UK. And the removal men told me that I had to throw away all of our uneaten food and the inner farmer's daughter in me refused to do that so I instead set out onto the streets with this food hoping to find someone to give it to and unfortunately I failed miserably so I went back to my apartment and I resorted to cross border smuggling of that food and that was the point at which I realized that perhaps I'd gone a step too far this time.
But that equally, it was ridiculous that there wasn't an easier solution to this problem of me having too much food in my home. And at that point in time, I'd worked in the digital world for well over a decade. I knew there was an app for absolutely everything. And I couldn't believe it wasn't a simple app that would connect me with my neighbors so I could give away instead of throw away or give away instead of smuggle my spare food.
So that's. In a nutshell, my journey.
[00:03:46] Tom Butta: Fabulous. I just want to go back a little bit, if you don't mind, because a farmer's daughter, my mother was a baker's daughter. So a farmer's daughter leaving home, choosing not to continue with the enterprise of the family business, which was very much a traditional.
and old school business, but thankfully one that continues because it nourishes, you know, many of us, but you not only chose to leave to go to the big city, but you chose to go to, you know, a great university in Cambridge University. What was that experience like and how did it maybe open your eyes a bit?
So
[00:04:20] Tessa Clarke: it was an incredibly humbling experience going to Cambridge and very, very mind blowing when you think of all the incredible people and minds that have been there before you and the things they've created and invented. So I was definitely very starstruck as that farm girl having left the farm. Got into Cambridge because back to that point I'd made earlier that I didn't know what I wanted to do and the absence of knowing what I wanted to do, I just did what society told me.
It was a successful thing to do. So I kind of just aspired to do as well as I could and going to either Oxford or Cambridge felt like that. I was very fortunate to get in and I studied social and political sciences there, which was an absolutely fantastic degree to do because it encompassed. So many different disciplines, sociology, politics, social psychology, philosophy, social anthropology, and I just found it really, really fascinating.
And it kind of brought together that intersection of humanity and politics and economics and technology and having change at the heart of all of it. So I really, really enjoyed that experience. Plus I made some lifelong friends. Yeah, it was a great experience.
[00:05:38] Tom Butta: I love your dual pursuit here in terms of your studies of social and political science.
I'm sure that that had really great grounding for, you know, for what was to come next. At what point did you move in to another really phenomenal place with lots of history, one of the best universities in all of America in Palo Alto, that being Stanford and not only Stanford, but the Stanford Business School.
What drove you to choose to do
[00:06:03] Tessa Clarke: that? Yeah. So I had a slightly circuitous route to that. So my first job after university, because I still didn't know what I wanted to do. was as a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group, and the way BCG worked back then was after you'd been working with them for about a year or 18 months, they would decide whether they wanted to sponsor you to business school or not, and if they didn't want to sponsor you, you had to kindly leave.
I was very lucky that they wanted to sponsor me to business school, but as I started writing the applications, I I just couldn't convince myself, let alone an admissions committee, as to why I should be going to business school when I felt that I had only just come out of university and I felt like I had so little experience of the wider world.
So I actually agreed with BCG or they kindly agreed to allow me to MBA. I then ended up leaving consulting and I went to work for a FTSE 100 media company which had had a decade long incredible rise. It was the darling of the stock market and I joined at about the time when the digital dot com boom version 1.
0, so the late 90s and the early early 2000s, and unfortunately that company then started to really struggle to make that digital transition and I was Working alongside the CEO and the CFO at the time. And I can remember seeing all these troops of various advisors coming in and out of the office. And I can remember thinking, gosh, I never want to be in a position of seniority and not have good grounding in all the basics of the functions that comprise a business, because otherwise I'd just be so dependent upon these experts and I wouldn't.
Feel able to challenge them properly. And also at that point in time, I'd had several years with a business experience. And so I really did feel ready to go to business school and I was wanting to do it on my own terms. So I was very, very fortunate to be accepted into Stanford and it was an incredible experience.
It was the first time I had lived overseas. And being introduced to a new country, a new culture, a new way of life, the culture shock was definitely far larger than I was anticipating. I think I very naively thought that we spoke the same language, we watched the same movies, listened to the same music, and ate a lot of the same food.
How different could it be? And I, how wrong was I? It's like politics, religion, economics, whatever you pick, there are enormous disparities between the UK and the US. So it was definitely a culture shock, but a really, really fantastic experience. And there was something. Very special about being with a group of people from all over the U.
S. and all over the world who had actively chosen to go there and to study, because when you're doing your undergraduate degree, so many people are doing that because that's what they think is expected of them. They're doing it to make their parents happy, whereas when you go back for postgraduate study, you have chosen to do it, and it really alters the mindset and the experience that everyone has.
[00:09:15] Tom Butta: Yeah, and you, you know, we're in the heart of Silicon Valley. Right. So you talk about like inspiration. There are people, you know, starting companies, funding companies, building companies, selling companies. It's in the water. I lived in Palo Alto, so I'm quite familiar with, with that culture. Yeah. I even felt like I had entered into a different country myself when I moved there and I'm American and I'm, you know, grew up in a city like New York city and in Boston and, you know, been in other technology hubs.
It's a pretty fascinating place. It
[00:09:48] Tessa Clarke: is, but what makes me really sad now is that I was in the heart of Silicon Valley for two years, and at no point was it clear to me that someone like me could become an entrepreneur or a startup founder. And I don't think I took a single entrepreneurship course at Stanford, which is, looking back on it, absolutely criminal.
I have wondered why that is, and I think the reality is that I just could not see any role models who looked or sounded like me, and I therefore didn't have the courage or the confidence to even to dare dream that that could be a world for me. And I look back on it now and I'm like, that's absolutely ridiculous, because clearly now that I understand who I am and the type of person I am, it was almost inevitable that I was always going to branch out, uh, and do my own thing at some point.
[00:10:55] Tom Butta: From the pieces that you've told in your history, it certainly seems that you were kind of destined to do what you're doing. But it's interesting not having those role models is, yeah, is a shame. And I'm sure that you've tried to fill that void yourself or others. Uh, now that you've, you've become one of the, well, one of the models that people want to pattern their lives against.
[00:11:18] Tessa Clarke: Yeah, it feels very strange acknowledging that, but I think this is the time when you need to put imposter syndrome to the, to the side and just step up and be there and be visible so that hopefully you can play a little part in inspiring other diverse folks to become founders.
[00:11:35] Tom Butta: So then let's get into Oleo now.
Just describe for our listeners what Oleo is, how it started. And then we'll get on from there because I think the way it started is, um, is, is a fascinating story.
[00:11:46] Tessa Clarke: So, Olio is an app that exists to tackle the enormous problem of waste in our homes and local communities, and in doing so, play our part to solve the climate crisis.
And we do that by connecting people with their neighbors so they can give away, rather than throw away, their spare food and other household items. And you can also buy and sell. And lend and borrow household items so that you can kind of share rather than shop. There's a second aspect to what we do, and this is our Food Waste Heroes program.
We have 100, 000 volunteers who collect unsold food from businesses such as Tesco or Iceland or Pret a Manger. And they collect that food from the store at the end of the day, they take it home, they add it to the app. Within minutes, their neighbors requesting it and minutes later, they're popping around and picking it up.
So that enables that food to go from being considered a waste stream in the store to instead being eaten by lots of local families. And how the app works is really simple. You just snap a photo of... Your spare food or your household item you no longer want to add it to OLEO, people living nearby get an alert, they can browse the listings, request what they want and pop round and pick it up.
So 7 million people have joined OLEO so far and roughly half of that community is in the UK, half is outside of the UK and a really core part of our growth. It's thanks to our ambassador programs. We've got 50, 000 people who are helping to spread the word about OLEO in their local community. And it's really incredible that we have achieved that growth given that OLEO started off as.
A WhatsApp group, so Sasha and I, before we invested our life savings, building an app that in all probability, nobody would want, we decided to test our core hypothesis that actually, if we just connected people together digitally, then they would be able to share their spare food rather than throw it away.
And so we ran an experiment for two weeks via a WhatsApp group with a bunch of people who all lived near each other. They didn't know each other. They didn't know us. And we said, if you've got any spare food over this two week period. Here's a group of people who might be interested in taking it. And we waited with bated breath for the first listing to be shared into that group.
And it took, I think it was 24 or 48 hours before that happened. And then it did happen, which was a very exciting moment. And thereafter, there was actually lots of sharing took place over those two weeks in that WhatsApp group. And when we. Met with those 12 participants in coffee shops all over the area of North London we were in.
First time we met them face to face, it was definitely slightly surreal. But they said to us, you have to build this. It only needs to be slightly better than the WhatsApp group. And how can I help? And it was that, how can I help, which really... Was the genesis of the ambassador program, which has been so core to fueling our growth to 7 million people today.
Very
[00:14:43] Tom Butta: cool. So, so what was the next step? Did you create a, you know, a website? Did you think about building an app right from
[00:14:49] Tessa Clarke: the start? So after we'd done the proof of concept with the WhatsApp group, we... did then have the conviction to invest our life savings building an app. And so we found an agency called SimpleWeb in Bristol, which is a city near where I lived.
And we struck a deal with them whereby they were prepared to build the Odeo app for half price day rates in exchange for a small equity stake in the company when we did our first round of financing. So that was really, really critical to helping us finance. The first version of the app, but also it meant that the developers were really bought into and invested in OLEO.
Then in parallel, whilst they were busy building the app, myself and Sasha, we launched a website holding page where we captured people's details so that we could let them know when this new food sharing app was coming. We set up our social media presence and drove people to that website to sign up. And then we also.
Spent many, many, many days on street corners in North London, handing out free surplus food to people and talking to passers by about this new app that was coming soon. And as a result of doing that, we managed to collect just over 2, 000. Email addresses of people who lived in the launch geography and who we knew were super excited about this app that was coming soon.
And then, when we were ready to launch the app, we asked those 12 participants from the proof of concept if they would mind raiding their cupboards and putting all their spare food onto the app. On launch day. So that was providing the supply to our marketplace. And then we sent an email to those 2000 people, letting them know that this app had launched.
And that then brought in the demand. And then we had sort of a couple of weeks where we. We're just watching very, very carefully what happened, and there was just a series of major milestones. So the first listing added to the app, the first listing that was picked up, which was a homegrown lettuce, by the way.
Uh, the first listing that was picked up that wasn't between two ambassadors who knew each other, the first of, you know, stranger to stranger pickup, and so yeah, that was a very, very exciting time as we watched this idea Become a reality.
[00:17:16] Tom Butta: So it sounds like you were doing a lot of things to foster a viral growth plan.
Was there a moment when it just really took off or was just slow and steady or fast and steady?
[00:17:27] Tessa Clarke: There's only been one real moment where it's really sort of taken off and that was through COVID. So I would say that Oleo's growth rate prior to COVID. was steady, we would have major spikes when we were covered on television and we would see thousands and thousands of people sign up to the app in a matter of minutes.
But COVID really was the inflection point for us. So we had a very hairy 48 hours when lockdowns were announced in the UK and it was deeply unclear how a neighbor to neighbor food sharing app could continue to exist. Under lockdowns, but we listened to our community who told us in no uncertain terms that we had an obligation to stay open because for many people earlier was an invaluable.
source of food at a time, perhaps when they were isolating, vulnerable, and not able to go out to shops, et cetera. We also consulted with our food safety advisor, our primary authority, and we basically very quickly shifted the model to work on a no Contact pickup basis, which meant that you had to leave the items outside a few moments before the person who was due to come pick them up arrived.
And we had a dip in sharing of about 20 percent for the first couple of weeks. I think just back in those crazy days where everyone was just trying to get their heads around this new normal. But then from that moment onwards, through the COVID years, Oleo grew five fold. And it really did turbocharge our growth, and I think there's a couple of reasons why that happened.
First of all, if you recall back in the early days, we were seeing photographs of empty supermarket shelves. And for many people, that was the first time in their lives when they had felt genuine fear and anxiety about access to food. So immediately, food was seen as far more valuable than it had been previously.
A lot of people were also... Feeling very powerless to help others when they were locked in their homes and they wanted to find a way to help others and being able to give away their spare food and other household items was a really effective way to do that. And then thirdly, through COVID, we had some pretty extreme weather events, which were coming through the TV screens directly into people's homes.
And that was the first time that collectively. Certainly in the Western world, we woke up to the fact that the climate crisis is real and it is happening now. And so all of those factors also combine with the fact that because people were at home, it just made the neighbor to neighbor sharing much easier because people were around all day long.
So that really kind of turbocharged our growth and then we've continued to grow steadily since then.
[00:20:21] Tom Butta: So does it seem that this could have been possible as a business without an
[00:20:25] Tessa Clarke: app? It could not have been possible as a business without an app because when you. Add a listing. Well, one, you can use the camera functionality.
We can set your geography. And then all of the notifications and everything are based on your specific location. And yeah, it's just a very convenient, seamless. experience for people.
[00:20:50] Tom Butta: So just give us a sense of, like, scale. Where are you today?
[00:20:55] Tessa Clarke: So we've had 7 million people join OLEO so far. We have had 120 million portions of food successfully shared via the app.
And we have had over 9 million household items shared as well. But what's really exciting is the environmental. Impact of that sharing, so that is equivalent to taking 470 million car miles off the road. And we've also saved over 18 billion liters of water. So an incredible environmental impact, and we're doing a rounding error in our full potential right now.
But just as powerful as the environmental impact is the social. So we've had 29 million unique sort of neighbor to neighbor pickups or exchanges take place. And 40 percent of our community say that they have made friends through Oleo, 66 percent say that sharing has improved their mental health, and 75 percent say that sharing has improved their financial well being as well.
So we really are, I think, kind of a fantastic example. of the powerful effects that can happen when you take technology and engage communities with a very clear mission.
[00:22:14] Tom Butta: So, first, congratulations. Those are really extraordinary accomplishments. And knowing a little bit more about you, I think you probably would say you're just getting started.
[00:22:25] Tessa Clarke: Yes, I sort of, I don't feel like congratulations are due at all. I'm deeply frustrated that we aren't bigger, further on, making more of a dent on the problem. And it has been a long, hard slog to get to where we are, and we are only just getting started. And the reason why we're only just getting started is because humanity is only just getting started.
Tackling the climate crisis, and we have got a long way to go in a very, very short period of time.
[00:22:56] Tom Butta: That's exactly right. What are your plans then? How are you going to help accelerate that for all of us? Sounds like there's a lot of education, uh, required, but there also has to be these stimulating moments, right?
Where it sort of suddenly comes home, as it were, right? To get people to truly, um, embrace and then act.
[00:23:14] Tessa Clarke: Yeah. So I think there's a few things that we are doing. So we have built a tool that is really, really easy and convenient to use. We are working our socks off to educate everybody about the scale of the problem and the fact that we've got a really nice, simple, easy solution that just feels great to use.
I think we also lean heavily on attempting to inspire people because too often the climate crisis feels overwhelming, depressing. I feel like, what difference can I make? Just one little old me. And what we want to do is really inspire people and show them the incredible impact. That they can have just through taking a really small, simple action, because if I take that small, simple action, and you take that small, simple action, and everyone else in our community takes that small, simple action, and everyone else in our towns, and our county, and our country, then actually that is how transformation takes place, and it can happen really, really quickly, so thank you.
We've built a tool, we're trying to educate people, we're trying to inspire people. The bit that we cannot do by ourselves, but which is essential, is regulation. So we absolutely do need governments to take action on the problem of food waste, because unfortunately, at the moment, businesses in the UK are throwing away over two billion portions of food every single year.
And there is no pressure for them to solve that problem. And sadly, sort of, since All the events of 2022, the war in Ukraine, rising energy prices, cost of living crisis, inflation, rising interest rates, sustainability has dropped down the corporate agenda. And so what we really need is governments to regulate and there are several things they can do.
The first one, which several governments around the world are actively looking into right now, is to mandate that businesses have to publicly publish their food waste data. That will be game changing because at the moment food waste takes place behind closed doors. There's also a really great opportunity for them to provide tax incentives and benefits for businesses that do redistribute their surplus food.
And when we see... Regulation coming in, I believe that we will experience another incredible inflection point for the business.
[00:25:39] Tom Butta: Yep. So given that, first of all, you've created this extraordinary business that not only has fostered great community and provided great social benefits, but is really helping all of us to live another day, and you're doing all of this through the app, what advice would you have for other people?
Companies that have an app centric business and they're trying to figure out how to, I don't know, embrace community or foster sharing and things like
[00:26:06] Tessa Clarke: that. I think the single most important thing that you need to do if you want to foster community is to have a very clear why, a very clear mission that will resonate with a community.
So our mission at Olio is extremely clear. We want to live in a waste free world, and we believe in sharing, not shopping. And that's something that our community can really rally around. It makes them feel excited to belong to a community that's working towards The vision and ambition that we have got, but I also think you have to be honest and realistic about the nature of your business.
So community is not the right avenue for many, if not most businesses. And I definitely do see organizations, perhaps expending a lot of time and energy trying to build a community. Where a community does not want to exist. And I think you have to have a really honest conversation with yourself about that, do we have the attributes that are required to genuinely create a community?
The second thing that you need to do to build a community is it then has to be a top three strategic priority. It's not something you can do in your spare time. It has to be something that you are genuinely committed to. The third thing is that you have to recognize that building a community is a double edged sword.
On the one hand, it is incredible in terms of your net promoter score. For example, our net promoter score is 72, the sheer passion and enthusiasm, our new customer acquisition, 60 percent of that is via word of mouth. So that's all the positive side of this, uh, this double edged sword. The negative side or the challenging side is the fact that that community really feels like.
OLEO is them and they are OLEO and they have incredibly high expectations for you as a business. They really do hold your feet to the fire in terms of your strategy and your execution and that can be quite emotionally exhausting and draining.
[00:28:13] Tom Butta: Yeah, I can imagine that. Going back to the first point you made, not every business can benefit from having a community because they don't necessarily have the right attribute.
What would the, what are the kind of attributes in a community that would give a signal to a company to say, we really should have
[00:28:29] Tessa Clarke: one? The first thing really is that mission and that vision. I think you need to have a view on the world. You need to have something that you are striving towards. There needs to be some momentum of change going on there to make it interesting for people.
I also think you need to create an environment that is safe. Communities are built through little and often interactions. So you need to have a topic or a mission or something that people want to form around on a little and often basis. I agree with all
[00:29:13] Tom Butta: of those points. They all make complete sense. And I think that's where the hard work is in the last thing you said.
Which is how do you continue to have these little and often actions, whatever those are, that just, that is where I think momentum gets created. And it fosters more people. So, speaking of what we need to foster more of, you know, the idea of sustainability, do you see other trends regarding positive moves around sustainability that, besides regulation, that would help make, drive this level of transformation that you all are doing?
[00:29:44] Tessa Clarke: So, there's a mindset shift that needs to happen for sustainability to truly happen at scale. And a core part of that mindset shift is changing humanity's North Star metric. So at the moment, our collective North Star metric is GDP growth. And as long as humanity has GDP growth, as long as all of our governments and businesses are all focusing on GDP growth, then we will never be able to live within the planet's boundaries.
And part of the reason why GDP growth is so problematic is one, because the concept of. Endless growth on a finite planet by definition is absolutely bonkers. And secondly, GDP growth and GDP excludes any reuse or trading of secondhand things. So it's about the production of brand new items. And we live in a planet with finite resources.
This is best exemplified and we're sort of. I guess overshooting the planet's boundaries. So this is best exemplified by the concept of Earth overshoot day. So earth overshoot day is the day in the year in which humanity has used all the resources that the earth can replenish in a year. In the early seventies Earth overshoot day was the end of the year, so we were living in equilibrium with the planet.
If you fast forward to last year, earth overshoot day was the 28th of July. And so what that means is that every single thing that every single one of us 8 billion people are consuming after the 28th of July is net net. And so that is why GDP growth, which is based on the consumption of the world's virgin resources, is taking humanity off the cliff edge.
So we've definitely got to change our North Star metric. We've got to really, I think, sort of therefore rethink capitalism. Much more broadly, there are many things that are fantastic about capitalism, but many things that are quite dangerous about it. And I think to truly have a sustainability revolution, we need to see.
A partnering at scale between startups and large corporates, because the reality is that it is the startups that have the solutions to these problems. They're the ones that are innovating and the large corporates have the route to market. And so the marriage made in heaven is that partnership between the startups and the corporates.
That is how we will solve humanity's largest problems within the very limited timeframes that we have left available to
[00:32:24] Tom Butta: us. Do you have one of those yourself in terms of, uh, one of those
[00:32:28] Tessa Clarke: partnerships? I would point to our partnership with Tesco. They are the UK's largest supermarket and they have been incredibly pioneering.
They set themselves a bold ambition of having zero food waste from their stores. They did not know how they were going to achieve that. They set that back in 2017. And through setting that target for themselves. That then encouraged them to take the risk of working with a nascent startup, such as Olio.
And together we have scaled now across their 2, 700 stores. We're redistributing. Millions and millions and millions of portions of food from Tesco every single year. And that's just a classic example of a real win win
[00:33:15] Tom Butta: there. Wow. Yeah. Great. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. The question I want to ask you now, as we get into the closing part of the podcast, is...
What do you do for fun? Because you have all of this pretty heavy agenda that you're solving for here, day in and day out. What do you do for fun?
[00:33:35] Tessa Clarke: I have to work very hard to make sure that I maintain my sanity through this journey. It's very easy to become very depressed very quickly. If you look at the truth and our reality, um, it is overwhelming.
So I can't live in that space for very long. So I just dip in there long enough to get that fire in my belly to give a sense of urgency to my work. But I spend all of the rest of my time in this kind of optimistic. Glass half full space to keep my energy levels up. I know that I do need to carve out time for myself.
And so I, my most important time of the day is I walk the kids to school in the morning, and then I have roughly an hour after that, where I will go for a walk or a run, or we'll do some form of exercise. I listened to podcasts all about startups, um, which I absolutely love. So I'm kind of outside getting fresh air, learning, uh, and that is my.
Highest quality thinking time. I've gone from being, feeling incredibly guilty about the fact that I'm not at my desk until 10 o'clock or sometimes even 11 o'clock in the morning to recognizing that that is my. Most creative time. That's when I have all of my breakthroughs in my thinking. And so I guard that time very, very fiercely.
I then on the weekends, I spend a lot of time batch cooking, which again, listening to podcasts, because I just love to learn and also through batch cooking, I'm getting to feed my family healthy, organic, zero waste food. Uh, it also means I don't have to then cook at the end of the day. At the end of the working day, during the week, I can just pop something in the oven that I had created on the weekend, and then spending time with friends and family.
[00:35:18] Tom Butta: Those sound like great activities. What app can't you live without besides Oleo?
[00:35:23] Tessa Clarke: It would have to be Overcast, which is the app that I use to listen to all my podcasts on and queue up my podcasts.
[00:35:30] Tom Butta: Cool. On the off chance that you actually do take vacations other than this, these hours or two hours in the morning where you're...
Opening your mind and body up to doing things that are outside of your work. What's your favorite vacation spot?
[00:35:45] Tessa Clarke: So I don't have a single favorite vacation spot because I really like to travel. And explore. I can't name one. Last summer, we had an incredible summer as a family. We sort of put on our backpacks.
We were trying to do our bit to reduce our carbon footprint. And so we traveled overland, all through Italy, caught a ferry over to Croatia. Uh, and went round Croatia, which was just absolutely stunning and beautiful. And then perhaps the other favorite place, it's not really a vacation spot, but I do go there when the kids are on holiday, which is my parents farm.
And I often get put to work and my mum tells me that a change is as good as a break, apparently. So no vacationing there, but I do get a change.
[00:36:30] Tom Butta: Uh, that's great. The kids like it there.
[00:36:33] Tessa Clarke: They love it. Yes. They, they are absolute heaven. They can just run feral, all the animals, all the machinery and grandparents.
They're very, very happy.
[00:36:43] Tom Butta: That's great. Well, I have to say this was the most enjoyable conversation, Tessa, and I really applaud what you're doing. I know you won't necessarily accept those congratulations at this stage, but let's just say you're off to a really great start.
[00:36:58] Tessa Clarke: Thank you. That I will accept.
[00:36:59] Tom Butta: After all of this, this time, you're off to a great start, and you truly are an inspiration to so many people and have become a role model for everyone who's looking to do good by doing the right thing. So, thank you for your time.
[00:37:13] Tessa Clarke: Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to Masters of Max, a mobile app experience podcast brought to you by the team at Airship.
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