Hi everyone. My guest for the 30th episode of The Curious Learners is Lubomila Jordanova. She is the founder of Plan A, which is a climate-tech company working with businesses and top institutions around the world to help with their sustainability journeys.
Prior to starting Plan A, Lubomila had substantial experience in financial services as an investment banker and as a VC investor. She describes her path to Plan A as one with serendipity. However, after seeing her passion for what she does, I have a strong conviction that sooner or later she would have started Plan A anyway.
Lubomila and I had a super interesting conversation on all things sustainability. Below are some highlights:
- Why do we have to execute Plan A perfectly to save the Earth?
It is humanity at stake and the problem is global. We have to act as a team including businesses, governments and individuals.
- Climate change is not yet clear for some people. How do you define it?
It is the planet warming and becoming more unstable in terms of different weather events. People find it more and more difficult to live comfortably, as evidenced by the recent heat waves across many regions, flooding and drought.
- How do we reverse the trend? Is it even possible?
Yes! It is only possible if all the actions that we do in our daily lives (e.g. buying non-plastic packaged foods) as individuals and in business practices across manufacturing, financing as corporations are less harmful for the planet.
- How can we put this obviously global issue into perspective across different layers, so we know what levers to use across different regions, industries, etc.? What would be those layers?
1. Funding: decarbonisation efforts are largely driven by businesses in the US and in EU given the supportive legislation and shared government agenda
2. The way economies are built: GDP composition makes a difference in carbon emissions. Service-based economies vs. production-based economies have substantially different environmental footprint
3. Cross-border trade & supply chain: businesses with customers or suppliers overseas have a larger impact
- What is Plan A in one sentence?
Plan A is the award-winning end-to-end decarbonisation and ESG optimisation software that supports businesses to reach their net-zero goals.
- How do you do that?
By using science and data that is available to the business to show them what levers they can use to reduce their emissions and to achieve sustainability.
- What is the key product of Plan A that attracts customers?
It is the end-to-end sustainability software, which enables customers to manage their sustainability journey from one single place.
- How do you define Plan A's customer base? What is the best way to segment them? Would it be by sectors?
More meaningful to consider them by the degree of their awareness of what they need to do in order to address their footprint and how mature they are in the journey to sustainability
- What is ahead for Plan A? What is a key goal post in the short-term?
Watch out for many announcements coming up in September!!!
- What are you most #curious about these days and what are you doing to #learn more about it?
Psychology of transformation within a business. Change is inevitable in society and it is no different for businesses.
Please enjoy my conversation with Lubomila Jordanova.