OLIO FOUNDER TESSA CLARKE ON WINNING EDGE BY SOLVING HUMANITY’S BIG PROBLEMS

Tessa Clarke is the co-founder and CEO of Olio, a mobile app for food sharing.

Olio is backed by the likes of Accel, Octopus Ventures and Alumni Ventures, having raised $50M+ till date.

Tell us about yourself, your journey and your business.

I'm Tessa Clark, and I'm co-founder and CEO of Olio. Olio is an app that aims to tackle the enormous problem of waste in our homes and local communities. We do that by connecting people with their local community so they can give away rather than throw away their spare food and other household items, and they can also borrow everyday things as well instead of buying brand new. That is how we tackle the problem of waste in the home. At the community level, we have over 60,000 trained volunteers who we match with their local business, which might be a Tesco or an Iceland or a Pret-a-Manger, and on their allotted time and day, that volunteer will pop out their house across the road, they'll go collect all the unsold or unserved food from that business, they'll take it home, give it to the Olio app, and within minutes their neighbours are requesting it. Minutes later they're picking it up, taking that food from having been considered a waste stream in the store to instead, on average in less than 2 hours being fully redistributed into multiple homes, thereby enabling those businesses to have zero food waste locations. So that's a brief overview of Olio.

I'm originally a farmer's daughter. My parents are still farming today up in North Yorkshire, and it was very much as a result of that sort of childhood experience of just how much hard work goes into producing food that I grew up with a pathological hatred of food waste, and that is why I co-founded Olio to try and tackle the problem at scale. I studied social and political sciences at Cambridge undergrad and then had an almost 20-year corporate career, including strategy consulting, and then a variety of management positions, always in the digital space, in the retail, media and financial services sectors.

What was your process in deciding to start your own business versus joining an existing firm that was perhaps tackling the food waste problem in a different way?

So the Olio idea was very much born through a personal experience. I was living and working in Switzerland before, and when I moved back to the UK, the removal men told me I had to throw away all of our uneaten food. I wasn't prepared to do that. So instead, I bundled up my newborn baby and toddler and set out to the streets with this food, hoping to find someone to give it away to. And to cut a long story short, I failed miserably. I went back to my apartment and wasn't to be defeated. So when the removal men weren't looking, I smuggled the non-perishable foods into the bottom of my packing boxes. And that was when I thought it was crazy the lengths I was going to avoid throwing this food away. I knew there was an app for everything and I couldn't believe it wasn't a simple app to connect me with my neighbours to be able to give that food away. 

My co-founder Saasha and I met studying for our MBAs at Stanford Business School 20 years ago now. First thing we did was to research the problem of food waste and we discovered that globally, a third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away. It's one of the largest contributors to the climate crisis. And also in a country such as the UK, actually half of all food waste takes place in the home. So there was no other solution. Our biggest competitor was and is the rubbish bin. It was very clear that if we wanted to solve the problem of food waste in the home at scale, we had to set about doing it ourselves. And I do think it is fair to say that I had had a growing entrepreneurial itch prior to founding Olio, but retrospectively I made the mistake that I think many people make, which is thinking I don't have an idea and I spent many years wanting to do something entrepreneurial, but lamenting the lack of an idea. What I have now realised is that actually, that's the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is look for a problem that you want to solve.

Indeed! How much money have you raised to date? Can you tell us more about your fundraising journey?

We have raised just over $50 million over five rounds of financing. In a nutshell, we have found fundraising to be an extremely challenging process because we're a female-founded tech for good remote first early revenue business. So it's always been a challenge for us, but we have persisted and eventually prevailed.

Do you think that being a tech for good business has made fundraising more difficult or less so?

Yes, a lot of investors have not been interested in the tech for good space. But that is changing fast and there are a number of reasons for that. One is the great resignation is very real and I think lots of investors are seeing it across some of the more established portfolio companies that they are really struggling to retain and attract staff because many of those companies don't have a profit with purpose ethos. I think many of the problems of the world have started to make themselves very apparent, even to investors based in the West and in particular, as you look at the climate crisis, we saw that investors were themselves directly experiencing wildfires, smelling smoke in their nose, watching floods on the screens. I think that has helped to really accelerate their interest in investing in this sector and solving some of humanity's biggest problems.

How big is the team that you run at Olio?

It's just under 100 people. That doubled in the last 12 months because we raised a Series B round at the end of last summer.

Do you think your mission is a differentiator when it comes to attracting and retaining talent? 

100%. We have been through a big round of recruitment, and we have been spoiled for choice when it comes to talent for most positions. And if I look at our senior leadership team that we've recently recruited and a number of other senior hires, we have taken people away from Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Just Eat and Deliveroo and Miro. Lots of big household names and brands in the tech world, and people are wanting to do work with purpose. They're wanting to stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

You mention your biggest competitor is the rubbish bin. How do you think about building a business where actually the only other player who delivers the solution is the public service? How do you keep a defensible business within that space?

So how do we compete with the bin? We work extremely hard to provide a user experience that is significantly more delightful than the bin. So we can never be more convenient than the bin, but we can create a user experience that is as efficient as possible and gets us as close to the bin as possible in that respect. But where we significantly outperform the bin is in terms of how it makes people feel. We connect them with their local community, they build friendships, and people feel empowered.

They feel like they're playing a role, helping to solve the climate crisis. We have data, for example, that over 40% of our users say that they have made friends through the Olio app, and you certainly don't make friends through your bins. And 66% of people say that using Olio has improved their mental well-being. 75% of people say that using Olio has improved their financial well-being. 

How do you work alongside policymakers to make sure that you continue building? Do you think that fundamentally the solutions are more policy based?

In terms of the policy piece, specifically, the biggest opportunity is in the business domain and a number of governments around the world have this year released statements that they are imminently going to introduce legislation that will require businesses to not only measure their food waste but also to publicly publish their food waste. We’re very supportive of this, and we know that that is going to be transformational for the pace of adoption of various B2B solutions whereby we collect and redistribute unsold food from businesses because at the moment food waste is a problem that's taking place behind closed doors. But the minute it's brought out into the open air and there are league tables showing who is most and least wasteful, then it's really going to sharpen the minds of those businesses and get them working much more proactively to get to zero food waste locations. 

We've also seen that the race to net zero has been a very powerful initiative as well in terms of galvanising businesses to try and reduce and eventually eliminate their food waste problem too, because they know they've got to achieve that as part of their net zero plans.

How do you scale across different markets?

At the moment, Olio is roughly 80% in the UK in terms of the actual sharing activities take place by the app and 20% overseas. To date, we've grown very organically, so we've got a super active community in Singapore, for example, and also in Latin America. That's very much the key proposition. People are just kind of using the app because we've got an ambassador programme so we invite people to spread the word about Olio in their local communities and we've got over 50,000 people around the world who we put on digital pathways to do just that. And post Series B we have started our international expansion with the Food Waste Heroes program. So we have business partners in Singapore and Mexico and also in a couple of other markets where we're redistributing their unsold food for them.

In your Sifted article, you mentioned that you've looked at a bunch of decks of female like female founder decks. And what you've noticed is that women on average tend to build more social and environmental-focused businesses than male founders do. Why do you think this is?

This is sort of a sweeping statement, but one that is broadly and directionally correct. Just in my experience, I think women are more concerned about the environment and about community. And if you're concerned about the environment and community, you can see very clearly the enormous challenges that we have in those sectors and therefore you look to try and solve them. I could talk at length about my personal theories about the evolution of men and women and our ancient hunter-gatherer tendency. But I don't think that's directly relevant here.

I also saw you quoted Dana Kanze, who is one of our advisors. In her research and in her TEDx talk as well, she talked about the use of prevention questions. Did you experience that in your pitching?

Yes, 100%. And I remember watching that video, which was incredibly helpful because it gave me a language and a tool and a framework to understand what was actually happening. I can remember on multiple occasions receiving an email and just scanning it and going “prevention question, prevention question”. So yes, it is very, very much a real-life problem.

And do you think that that evolved over time as your business scaled?

I think that in the early stages and this is why it's really, really challenging for women is that in the early stages, investors are investing not in the business, they're investing in the founders. And that is why conscious and unconscious biases are particularly problematic, because it means that the female founders, the diverse founders, are never able to get going because the decisions are being taken on the basis of the founders rather than the business. As the business scales up, you watch that balance changing and the role of the founders is still important on the journey, but by the time you've got to Series B stage, there's so much more data and numbers, metrics, evidence and traction that it's a much more balanced investment decision. And I did see some data showing that actually, once female founders have managed to get funded, their probability of onward funding is very similar to that of men. So the real challenge is that sort of 0-to-1 experience. It's the getting going phase.

Are you looking at an exit in the near future? What does the next phase of Olio look like? 

No, we have set ourselves a very public goal, which is we want a billion people to be consuming through Olio by 2030. And the reason for that is very simple. If humanity stands any chance whatsoever of living in a 1.5-degree warmed world, then we have got to stop throwing away food. So we are very focused on that long-term goal and we certainly are not thinking about exits at this point in time.

Do you have plans for what you want to do post-Olio?

Over 6 million people have joined Olio to date from around the world. They have together successfully shared 66 million portions of food and also 6 million household items. And that's had an environmental impact equivalent to taking over 200 million car miles off the road. And we've also saved over 10 billion litres of water, which is because food production is incredibly water intensive. But we need to go from 6 million to 1 billion. We're in the process of building an on-demand service, really focused on offices and events organizers as well. We have so far to go still, so I haven't given much thought to a post-Olio world!