Isobel Wild [00:00:07]:
Hello, everybody. This is the state of sustainability podcast brought to you by altruistic. Now, I realized that we've been running this podcast for a while now without actually really getting to know who's behind the mic. So in today's episode, we're actually going to talk about Saf. So, Safdiel, before you jump in and.
Saif Hameed [00:00:28]:
Before anyone runs for the hills, basically.
Isobel Wild [00:00:31]:
Yeah. Please stay in tune, because you have had many, many lives, and I think we've joked about this before, but you have had many. So you've been an activist government official, an NGO co founder, a flower farm owner, and most recently, obviously, you founded and you're running altruistic. And just a caveat for those who have been listening, thinking that we are consultants, I have heard the rumors altruistic is actually a sustainability data management platform, so we'll dig into a bit more about that. But for today, we're going to draw on Saif's unconventional career path to better understand how sustainability professionals can effectively engage a diverse set of stakeholders in the change transformation process. So, Saif, how are you doing?
Saif Hameed [00:01:22]:
I'm good, Izzy. I mean, I say that, but the hay fever has kind of gotten me quite low, generally at this time of year. Having said that, it comes in peaks and troughs. Sunny days are bad for hay fever, so I'm kind of trying to stay indoors when it's sunny, but otherwise, I'm doing okay. How about you?
Isobel Wild [00:01:39]:
You're probably going to be the only person not in London in the pub on a sunny afternoon, so at least you'll be able to kind of go against the crowds and stick. Dear Cliff, but I. Well, I'm excited to dig in to a bit more about your life in a kind of story way. So maybe just to start off, I came across a video of this sounds particularly of Hillary Clinton referring to you as a social activist. Can you give us a bit of context around that and around kind of the story of your social activism?
Saif Hameed [00:02:15]:
I was kind of at college between 2006, 2009, which was really an exciting time. There were a few big things happening. One was the financial crisis. And so I had, like, an internship at a law firm rescinded because they were basically firing everyone. And at the same time, you had arab spring going on kind of across a relatively large part of the world where multiple countries were almost insane, trying to bring down dictatorial regimes. And so my high school friends and I were basically all caught up in this sort of the Pakistan division of this movement, which was Pakistan had a military dictatorship. It was a long running kind of military regime. And there was a trigger point where the military dictator fired the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and all the lawyers basically took to the streets.
Saif Hameed [00:03:08]:
So the whole legal fraternity of Pakistan, which is literally millions, like a million plus lawyers, all took to the streets in protest because they said, this act of the government has basically removed any of the validity of all the work we do. Because if the chief justice of the Supreme Court can be sacked arbitrarily, then actually, what's the point of anything in this sort of judicial side of the spectrum? And so you had all these kind of lawyers taking to the streets. And in Pakistan, all the lawyers wear black. They wear black suits and black ties. They actually called it almost the battle of two uniforms, where you had the military regime with its uniforms and the legal fraternity with its uniforms as well. I was a law student. My friends were kind of doctors and bankers and other sort of professionals. I mean, we're all students, but we were sort of caught up in this atmosphere.
Saif Hameed [00:03:59]:
And so I was actually at college in London at the time, and I was trying to organize sort of virtual protests, like candlelit vigils around the world. I was trying to bring together students in London as well and kind of arrange protests here. And then my friends were doing similar stuff in Pakistan. The protest was actually very successful, and so the military regime had to step down. The only alternative for the regime was to have mass violence in the streets. And they thankfully opted not to go in that direction, instead to step down and have a democratic election. We had been very effective in using Twitter and Facebook to organize a lot of the protests that we were involved in. So I had been arranging this global candle individual to protest the regime.
Saif Hameed [00:04:41]:
And I'd used Facebook. My friends had been using Twitter for similar purposes. And so at some .1 of the five of us, there were five of us. One of us had this idea of actually now starting to pick up trash from the streets because we're all kind of caught up in the euphoria of protest. My friend Murthas, I kind of thought, let's actually just start picking up trash from markets and public places. And that's the thing that Hillary Clinton was referring to, which is there were these five kids that she talks about, which was me and my four friends. And I would be kind of spending the summer there. And then I had no job because my legal internship had been rescinded.
Saif Hameed [00:05:18]:
So I moved back to Pakistan. We were just basically going out on the weekends. It got a lot of news coverage, including in the New York Times and there was this big article in the New York Times covering this sort of trash collection drives that we would be organizing. And we got lucky with timing because Hillary was visiting Pakistan very soon after the article came out. So she read this article, she visited Pakistan and then she started saying, hey, I read about these five kids and they're taking democracy into their own hands and being activists. And I had this surreal moment of getting a text message from one of my friends saying, you'll never believe this, but Hillary Clinton's talking about us on stage right now, which was quite cool.
Isobel Wild [00:05:58]:
Whenever you need a fun fact around a dinner table, I think you're sorted. When I saw that video, I was also slightly dumb pounded and I was like, that's so cool. She also mentioned in the video how it grew to, was it 1600 people who were part of this community of collecting trash on the streets? Is that correct?
Saif Hameed [00:06:18]:
I think we were probably a bit bigger at our peak because we started franchising and so we were like 22 at the time. We had very little sense of how to build an organization. And so we kind of just saw it as a movement. And so it franchised across different cities. So we'd have like four or five other chapters running their own thing. I think it was probably maybe three or 4000. We also actually had all this news coverage locally. So I think we did 21 or 22 appearances on radio and tv as well.
Saif Hameed [00:06:51]:
And so we were kind of drumming up quite a lot of attention basically. We also were sponsored by Pepsi at some point. I think we probably sold out. With hindsight, I think that was maybe a bit of a sellout moment. But Pepsi basically made us an incredible offer, which is they said, we will not give you guys money. So they didn't give us any cash and we didn't ask for cash in our defense. But they said we will basically cover a whole bunch of media. So we will pay for ads.
Saif Hameed [00:07:18]:
You'll be in a lot of ads. You'll be in all these Pepsi commercials running all around the country. We will get you on every tv channel. We'll get you on every major radio. We will arrange massive Pepsi sponsored trash collection drives and you guys will be the figurehead of that. So at some point, I remember we had like in multiple cities, we had the whole Pepsi executive leadership team for Pakistan marching alongside us, literally with waste collection shovels and all the kit and picking up trash with us. And there were camera crews and so on. So it definitely brought a lot of visibility onto the trash problem.
Saif Hameed [00:07:52]:
At our peak we were able to basically show up in a vicinity and call the government and say, we're here, we're picking up the waste in this market. We need you to bring your trucks to this market now to take the waste that we're gathering and take it for disposal. And the government would literally show up with all their infrastructure to pick. Now, with hindsight, I think that's not a great way to run it. You shouldn't run a government like that. But it was just interesting how much attention you can bring to this sort of issue if you're an activist. Like, being an activist can be quite powerful.
Isobel Wild [00:08:25]:
I also love to take this experience and kind of place it on top of a sustainability professional in an organization. And it's around, like, how do you captivate, empower, and, like, align people behind a purpose and a mission? And I feel like the fact that you have franchised that, the waste pickup situation, you got Pepsi on board. It feels like you've captivated the audience and you captivated a lot of people behind this mission. How did you do that? And how maybe apply it to the lens of a sustainability professional internally? What are the hacks?
Saif Hameed [00:09:02]:
So I think, Izzy, there's actually two plays here. One is the activist play that we were making, my friends and I, and the other is the Pepsi play that they were making. And I actually think both of those will be relevant for different types of corporations. If I talk about what worked and didn't work for us, making the activist play, I think what worked is that we seemed very mission driven, and we were. We were, like, very committed to what we were doing. We weren't getting paid for this. We were purely doing this for the work. And we got a lot of media attention and a lot of coverage, but it was very clear that we were hands on, literally getting our hands dirty and taking time out and doing stuff.
Saif Hameed [00:09:43]:
I think we managed to get a lot of grassroots excitement and involvement and engagement. And I think that some challenger brands are able to use the same playbook, I think, of an oatly or a lush. You have these mission purist brands that are able to demonstrate that they take the mission seriously. And I think that there needs to be some element of ritual sacrifice there almost. And so, like, when I think about, like, a lush, I think about things like lush kind of pulling out of advertising on a lot of social media and lush saying, look, we expect this may harm us. We don't care. And for my friends and I, in our play, the equivalent was, you know, at some point, I had, like, syringe needles poking through my shoes and, you know, like fetid mango peels that I'm kind of trying to sort through and just noxious waste that I'm. And, you know, it's very visibly some ritual sacrifice that I'm going through.
Saif Hameed [00:10:35]:
And I think there is a corporate equivalent of that where you just say, we are in this for the mission and we are going to go down the mission route, even if it hurts us in the larger company space. Johnson and Johnson famously has the J and J kind of principles. And if you look at how Johnson and Johnson abides by its principles, there was one instance where they actually recalled, I forget what product it was, but they had a mass recall of that product because it was considered to be hazardous or unsafe or detrimental for the consumer to the financial pain of Johnson and Johnson. They did a mass recall, and that became almost like the Lodestone or the high watermark of how a brand can be mission driven, where it says, we're going to take the hit, but we're going to absolve our customers. I think it was Hertz that had another one of these moments where at September 11, I think it was. And Hertz said, wherever you are in the country, if you've rented a car from us, get to a safe space, get to where you need to get to, and there's no additional charge that's on us. And you have these moments, I think, in company experiences where they can actually demonstrate mission over matter or mission over money. If I look at the Pepsi play in this situation, the Pepsi play was to find an activist, find a mission, and get behind the mission.
Saif Hameed [00:11:54]:
And I think that play can also be quite effective. And I actually think we're seeing this play out in how large companies are having B Corp brands. Either they acquire the B Corp brand or they build the B Corp brand. And so whether it's like a Ben and Jerry's Unilever sort of situation or it's a Nestle Nespresso situation, where in the Unilever case, they acquire the mission by actually buying it into the company. In the Nestle case, they ring fence the mission and say, this is the mission driven part of what we're doing. I think there's a really interesting big company play there as well.
Isobel Wild [00:12:30]:
And on the ritual sacrifice piece, do you think that's the same case for individual sustainability professionals when they're trying to get their case across internally? Is there something around having to really put your neck on the line and say, I'm really committed to this. I am willing to make a risk on it? Or do you think actually the player is different when you're looking at it as an individual versus a corporate entity?
Saif Hameed [00:12:55]:
I actually don't think that's the case at all. So I actually think that as an individual in a corporation, ritual sacrifice is mostly not a rewarding thing. Be going for. Maybe im a bit jaded, but I spent eight years at McKinsey. At McKinsey. I think if you said, look, I believe in this, and this may not be the right thing from a general company wisdom perspective, but I think this is the right thing to do from a mission perspective, I think that was probably a fast track to leaving the firm. And im not saying that McKinsey isnt mission driven as an organization. And I think it is mission driven in many directions.
Saif Hameed [00:13:36]:
And in many ways, I think the company is very clear on what the company mission is and what mission alignment looks like. So in McKinsey, for example, and they may have changed the rubric or the wording, but very deep in the bones of McKinsey is the logic that you have two priorities. Your client comes first, and your team is, if not first, then a very, very close second. You put the client needs first, and you value the needs of the team and the health of the team, and the performance of the team. And those two things are the two kind of shibbolets, basically, of McKinsey. These are the watchwords, really. And so whenever you wanted to make a case in McKinsey, you would actually put it in the terms of the McKinsey values. So if I ever wanted to say I think we're doing the wrong thing, I would say I think this is the wrong thing for the client.
Saif Hameed [00:14:24]:
I think that what we're doing here is not in the client's best interest, and this is against our values as an organization. I would never say this is against my values as a person. And even if that's what I felt, I would frame it in terms of the organizational values. And I think that's actually the way that I would advise sustainability leaders to do it. Find the organizational values and position, whatever it is that you want to get through in terms of those values, ideally in terms of the economics, if not the economics of, than in terms of the business values.
Isobel Wild [00:14:58]:
Yeah, I think that's great framing. I want to get onto your government life. And it was funny that you mentioned oatly earlier, because I think the role that oatly plays in the space around lobbying government, and they do incredibly clever things with their marketing and their like you know, challenger brand status to get this message across. But I would love to hear from your side what you think, effective ways of engaging and leveraging policy and government officials to actually get what you want across the line.
Saif Hameed [00:15:29]:
I'm going to caveat this, Izzy, with saying that I don't know if my experience will be super representative, but for what it's worth, let me maybe illustrate a bit. After all this stuff with the waste collection drives, my friends and I got on the kind of political radar as well. And so I was offered a job by the guy who was the head of the chief minister of the largest province in the country, Punjab province, which is 100 million people in that province. And he's actually currently the prime minister. So he kind of moved on from that role. And he's now in his second stint, I think, actually, as prime minister. And he offered me a job and he basically said, look, you're doing all this great stuff outside the government. Why don't you come into government and do this in government, and you'll have a platform through which you can have an even bigger impact, and you'll have the government resources behind you and machinery behind you, and you can go much bigger.
Saif Hameed [00:16:24]:
I spent three years with him, and I always say that for anyone who's like a West Wing fan, I was playing a Josh Lyman kind of character in the West Wing, which is I had very ready access to the source of power in the government. So I had, like, walk in access. If I did the things that my sort of boss wanted me to do, I had a lot of freedom to do whatever I was interested in doing. So I could champion education programs or I could champion healthcare or environment as long as I was also hitting the basis that I needed to hit. And I think I kind of learned a couple of things from that experience. One is that actually nothing was interesting to my government unless it could go big. So if I wanted to talk about a pilot program for something and it was 100,000 people, it was meaningless. I got no attention.
Saif Hameed [00:17:12]:
It had to be a few million people. If it was even going to be a pilot, it had to be at least a few million scaling to 2030, 40 million people in the next year or year and a half, and it didn't matter what it would cost. So actually, it was more interesting for me to go big rather than to go small and pragmatic. So the bigger the vision, the bigger the ambition, the more I was able to galvanize excitement and resources and attention internally to get it across. And I think the same is true for business, frankly. If you have a small program that's not going to move the needle, even if it makes more economic sense, it may just be harder to get attention for. Go for it, Izzy.
Isobel Wild [00:17:54]:
So when you say big in terms of scale, I think we can also apply this back into carbonous and reduction schemes. But then what do you think about perhaps developing projects or investing in projects which aren't actually meaningful to say your carbon reduction, but actually meaningful in the splash that you can make in the media because it's new, it's innovative, it's something somebody else hasn't done, so it's engaging. What do you think there when you have to figure out the trade offs between scale and reputation?
Saif Hameed [00:18:30]:
I think you're still able to create scale around initiatives that may not move the needle in a big way. Just for any listeners who are thinking, why would you ever do something that doesn't move the needle? It might be that it's an iconic brand building initiative that you could do, let's say reusable packaging or something like that. And maybe in the context of your overall emissions footprint. Actually, this is a very small component, but it's still interesting, exciting and builds brand and builds consumer loyalty. And then I think that the way that you make a big splash around is you just think, okay, well, actually, if the reason we're doing this is because we want to build consumer loyalty, what are all the channels through which we can get the message out? How do we kind of get real excitement? Think about with the oatly emissions numbers for dairy. Like oatly kind of buying the big billboard and saying, here are our numbers, we're waiting for the dairy numbers on the other side of the billboard. That's an expensive initiative where actually it's not like they're doing anything incrementally. They almost get that for free.
Saif Hameed [00:19:32]:
They're an oat milk company. A lot of the gains that they get versus dairy are there for free. But there's a big wraparound on the initiative, which is how do we just pump the airwaves full of the message that we are better than dairy? Big splashes can come in different ways.
Isobel Wild [00:19:48]:
Yeah, I think that's a good example. I'm going to take us on to your non for profit experience at the Pakistan Environmental Trust. Well, I think Nestle is a great example for, I think, what they term. I don't know whether this is termed industry wide, but landscape collaboration, so involving lots of different parties, and the main player of that tends to be a non for profit and how you can engage them to involve them in your decarbonisation initiatives as a non competitive player is really crucial from your experience at PET. Firstly, maybe give us a bit of context on PET and then we'd love to hear what you think is crucial in that kind of partnership with non for profits.
Saif Hameed [00:20:31]:
Yeah, so I think that for PET, and just to summarize, the Pakistan Environment Trust is this organization that I co founded along with others like Ben Goldsmith, who's very active in many environmental circles, Far Rohan, who's the CEO of the Pakistan Stock Exchange, Ershad Adamji, who's a prominent business person in Pakistan, Muqit Majid from McKinsey and a few others have really been instrumental along the way. I won't name them all. We created that with the aim of basically identifying white spaces for environmental and sustainability work in Pakistan that no one else was addressing. Creating the right combination of stakeholders to solve the problem and then bringing the solution to scale. So that was almost like our three part mission, like identify white spaces, create the solution complex through different stakeholder alignment and then bring to scale. I think that for us it's always been very important at bet to make sure that what we're doing is financially viable. So we're actually always looking for revenue rather than donations and grants. And we get donations and grants as well, but we're looking for revenue primarily.
Saif Hameed [00:21:42]:
So we have three big programs that we're running. One is carbon markets development, which is we want to be the issuer of renewable energy certificates. We want to be the project developer for emissions reduction projects. We want to be the market maker that helps bring them to market, the consultant that helps kind of give advice because that whole ecosystem doesn't exist in Pakistan. So we want to be a catalyst that can kind of really do that and bring it to scale. And there we're looking at revenue streams coming in. Like each of the things that we're doing, we charge for and we get revenue from it. Even though PET is a nonprofit, we want it to be non reliant on injections of capital.
Saif Hameed [00:22:21]:
So that's kind of one program and that's how we fund it. There's a second program which is the net zero Pakistan coalition, which is a coalition of Pakistan's industry. Most particularly. We have all the major textile companies in Pakistan and they collaborate with us on their net zero programs and they pay a license fee to the pet every year to be a member of the coalition. And again, the aim is for us to make that cost neutral. The third program is a nature restoration and a rewilding program. And we're, for example, bringing the one horned rhino back to Pakistan, which used to be indigenous and is now not. And we're kind of bringing that scheme species back as a species reintroduction, because the one horned rhino has the potential to be almost like an anchor tenant of a natural ecosystem, because many other species are capitalized by the existence of the rhino.
Saif Hameed [00:23:09]:
And there's a few species that play that anchor tenant sort of role, and that one probably is the least financially viable of the three. But we're still looking at ways to maybe build in some sort of credit scheme to help cover the costs of that. I think that the role that would be most advantageous from our perspective for us to have with a corporate like a Nestle, and I think there's maybe some valuable advice for how a nestle could approach it, is we are looking for customers, we're actually not looking for grant givers and sponsors, we're looking for commercial relationships with organizations that we can kind of build a whole work stream off the back of, because that means that it's repeatable across other customers. I think that when companies like Nestle engage with nonprofits, it can often be very similar to how they should engage with startups. Which is the best way for you to engage is not capital injection. And similarly with startups, I think it's not often just investment in the startup. It's actually have an off tick agreement, give a contract for something, and guarantee that you are going to be there as a buyer of some service or some offering for the next x years. And I think there's a lot of potential in the sustainability space for companies like Nestle to play a very catalytic role through that avenue.
Isobel Wild [00:24:22]:
That's a great framing. Treat nonprofits like startups when you're looking for collaboration, and as a startup founder yourself. So you started up the flower farm in Pakistan, but also altruistic. Maybe if we touched on the flower farm first. So it was a farm that actually supplied flowers into the cosmetics industry for brands such as lush. I know that there was like quite a few iterations of how the farm was run, and actually the sustainability credentials of your farm kind of evolved. Would you be able to give a bit more like, context on that evolution?
Saif Hameed [00:24:57]:
Yeah. So actually, the way that I think about it, in my head at least, and I don't know if I've reverse engineered this narrative to reconcile the different parts of my personality, but I thought of as a climate risk mitigation, which is agriculture in Pakistan is super sensitive to climate change. Yields are becoming increasingly volatile. Frankly, I think agriculture in Pakistan has serious long term challenges as a result of both the excess precipitation, heavy rainfall and heat waves. If you look at many core agricultural materials actually imported into Pakistan, chickpeas are a good example. Rapeseed or canola is another good example. These are all imported in. Flowers are the same.
Saif Hameed [00:25:40]:
Flowers are not a core commodity, but also imported in. And so my co founder and I, our play was that we wanted to grow something that is high value domestically and create effectively like an agriculture platform through which we can grow more and more things and sell more and more things locally through long term optics, and then just basically grow out the agricultural production side and be more efficient and bring economies of scale, and therefore make Pakistan more resilient locally to shifts in climate, but also less reliant on imports. Flowers are an interesting material to start with. They have some things that work in their favor and some things that really worked against them. One thing that worked in their favor is that they're relatively high value, and so you can have a smaller acreage growing quite high value production, basically. And so we had a combination of open field greenhouses and tunnels. We were on maybe 75 acres at our peak, and those 75 acres were probably much like six or seven or eight times the revenue of what you would have on wheat across 75 acres. However, flowers have a big drawback that we didn't recognize going in, which was that there's a wide skew proliferation.
Saif Hameed [00:26:51]:
What I mean by that is there are many stock keeping units that you need to have for flowers. You need to have many different types of flowers, maybe different formats, etcetera. Unless you're a very, very specialized play exporting at global scale, you're going to probably have 60 or 70 or 80 different varieties that you're growing to make a bouquet and to provide into florists and the like. And that complexity, I think, was one of the things that weighed us down. The other thing that ultimately tanked our business was weather volatility, even though that was what we were trying to hedge against through tunnels and greenhouses. The volatility was just so high that it broke the constraints of the infrastructure that we were relying on. What I mean by that is a greenhouse, for example, might get you four or five degrees celsius of protection. Let's say you're optimizing for 26 degrees celsius.
Saif Hameed [00:27:43]:
You can go up to 30, you can go up to 31, but if it goes to 40, your crop is non viable, and that's basically what we kept running up against. We had multiple biblical plagues, we had hailstones, we had rainfall, we had heat waves, we had a plague of locusts at some point as well. And that just completely destroyed our business. I think the big learning for companies buying from companies like ours, I think, is that this is happening, it'll happen more and more. There is more volatility in the system. Your suppliers are all at risk. If you want to be able to rely on those suppliers in the future, you need to figure out how you can help them, how you own part of that problem for them, or can support them in being more resilient. And I think part of that is going to be about longer term contracts, and part of that is going to be on more support for insurance schemes, in my opinion.
Isobel Wild [00:28:34]:
Can you dig into the insurance schemes point a little bit?
Saif Hameed [00:28:39]:
Yeah, for sure. So agricultural insurance is woefully underdeveloped across most of the world. And I think that it is almost impossible, in my view, to overstate this. So in Pakistan, which is a largely agricultural economy, we could not find anyone who would insure our business. We were potentially one of the largest commercial farms in the country, which is insane if you think about the relatively small acreage we were on. But we were probably one of the largest commercial farms in the country, I would imagine top hundred, frankly, just in revenue. And we could find no one who would insure our crop. And the closest we could get is we could have some companies that would provide an orchard insurance proxy.
Saif Hameed [00:29:19]:
They would say, look, we're insuring some orchards, here's what we can provide. Or we're insuring wheat. We can provide you a similar program to what we do for wheat. And I think at some point we were quoted a 50% premium for what we would have to pay to get ourselves insured, because there were just no real products in the market that could work for us as a horticulture player or a floriculture player, and we couldn't afford a 50% insurance premium. I don't think anyone can afford a 50% insurance premium. When climate risk events happen, and they will happen, we were seeing them once in two years, every second year, we were having some major event, we just had to absorb it. And if you think about margins that are 15 or 20%, that's the profit margin we have from which we have to cover our cost of capital. And if you see, actually in a good year, you do 20%, Max 25, and in a bad year you do -60 and you have a bad year once in two years.
Saif Hameed [00:30:19]:
Let's just math.
Isobel Wild [00:30:21]:
Yeah. And we've spoken before a little bit about Nestle, who's making really cool inroads in this area. And I think they're partnering with a yemenite organization called Blue Marble to provide insurance programs for over 800 of their smallholder coffee suppliers in Indonesia who supply into Nescafe. And I think that pilot's up and running at the moment. So we have to keep tabs on how that's going, because I think it is, as you said, a really good support mechanism for your supply chain and for your farmers, maybe onto the data piece as well. What kind of requests were you getting for data, and what advice would you have for professionals who are asking for that data to make it as easy as possible to respond to?
Saif Hameed [00:31:05]:
I think what we started to see that was quite interesting is we started to see opportunities for us to sell products based on better environmental credentials. And this is like, 2016. 2017. That was a balance of, can we provide some quantitative data? And that was helpful and relevant, but also a lot of qualitative data. So there's the sort of the numbers and the narrative, and the numbers would be, here's what we are doing, and here's what the footprint looks like for the product that we're selling. And ideally, here's what it looks like with the counterfactual. So here's what the market will sell you, and here's what we will sell you in emissions footprint terms, let's say. And that was the numbers part, and then there was the narrative part.
Saif Hameed [00:31:48]:
And the numbers part is in some ways easier. It's, like, more expensive. So there's more science to it. It's more expensive to basically cover the quantitative aspect, but it's a straight line. You know, what good looks like? Good looks like a good, completed, verified set of numbers. The narrative side is more art, I think, in that you don't know necessarily what your customer wants from your narrative terms, but you know that they want some narrative, and so you want to tell some story about what goes behind this. And the way that I would think about approaching this for sustainability teams, particularly in the B two B space, where you're looking to provide both numbers and narrative is, I would look to have numbers that cover the most common use cases. So emissions numbers, most prominently, maybe water numbers, maybe there are a few other things.
Saif Hameed [00:32:35]:
And I would then look to differentiate the narrative on the basis of one or two story aspects that are unique for my product. So if I'm selling cocoa or coffee for example, there is a great narrative which I think the Tonys open chain captures very well around just the cocoa farmers and the supply chain, what their lives look like. And actually you can help us have a pre packaged narrative that goes with that. And actually, I think Tony's is doing a great job now of leveraging that as a platform and saying, well, everyone can buy using the same framework. And so you get actually ready made narrative off the shelf for any brand that is tapping into this framework. And I think that's quite cool as a way to get a leg up.
Isobel Wild [00:33:19]:
I think Tilda Rice is also doing quite cool things around that, especially around their methane reduction, like agricultural techniques, around terms of wet drying. And whilst it's hard to actually measure what reductions have been made, the narratives and the videos and like the really emotive stories that they've generated for their b corp impact report in particular. Like, honestly, I was nearly tearing up at them because they had really good relationships with these farmers, so they were able to spend lots of time with them and get that story to convey over camera. And I think that shouldn't be underestimated. So, onto the biggest and arguably most important part of your life, because I'm part of this section. Altruistic. What sparked a altruistic, like, what got the clogs turning and inspired you to start it up?
Saif Hameed [00:34:13]:
So, ac, I'm going to give you two options here. You can get the unvarnished truth story, or you can get the slight variation that I use in most of my introductions.
Isobel Wild [00:34:24]:
Let's go for the unvarnished raw version of events. But keep in mind that this will be streaming out to the public.
Saif Hameed [00:34:32]:
That's fine, that's fine. Okay, so basically, I had been running my farming business. My co founder and I had been running this farming business for about three or four years. And I was really excited about the farming business because I thought, we're reinventing agriculture in an emerging market and we are creating a kind of playbook for how to do this across other crops and other materials. And so we have been doing this for flowers, particularly roses and jasmine. We'd kind of done the whole, everything from growing to logistics to market making and e commerce. And so we had the whole vertically integrated agriculture business in flowers in Pakistan. And I thought that it would be so cool if we could do this across other crops, not just in Pakistan, but also in other geographies, and if we could do it in a sustainable way.
Saif Hameed [00:35:25]:
And so I wanted to basically set up multiple farming businesses in multiple geographies. To provide low environmental impact produce into value chains. And I thought that the best way to get this off the ground is through two angles, basically. One is that each of these businesses should have an offtake agreement from a large buyer, so that I don't have to worry about the sales side, and I can just worry about how to reduce the environmental impact of what I'm producing. The second thing was, I thought, actually, because I want to do multiple of these, and each of these projects is quite capex heavy and requires investment and is modular, and then needs to be scaled up, let me do it in a fund construct. So I raise money for a fund, and the fund basically sets up multiple projects, and each project can have outside investment as well. I really don't know if this would have worked or not, but this was the idea, and it was going to be called Borlaug, and it was going to be named after Norman Borlaug. And for those who aren't in the know, in the sixties and seventies, there was a green revolution worldwide, which was where a number of geographies around the world that had historically suffered from a famine in cycles, benefited from innovations in agriculture, particularly the innovation of a type of wheat called the dwarf wheatley wheat variety.
Saif Hameed [00:36:48]:
And so in South Asia, for example, you had wheat falling over under its own weight, and dwarf wheat was resilient to that kind of collapse. And that was an innovation led or spearhead by an agronomist called Norman Borlaug. And so that was why my fund was going to be called Borlaug. To this day, I actually still own borlaug.com dot. So this was what I was actually going with. And then I was all gung ho about setting this up. And I even had this concept of a fully circular greenhouse that I had come up with. Basically, the idea was that you go to a location that has heat waves, flooding, and basically all kinds of yield volatility.
Saif Hameed [00:37:28]:
And you set up a greenhouse that has a reservoir and solar panels. And the reservoir basically can store excess precipitation or rainfall. When it's. When the rain is heavy and when the sun is shining, you get power from the solar panels. You can then have water pushed up into the reservoir. And then when the sun isn't shining, you can have water come down a pipe, basically, and turn a turbine and generate power off cycle as well. And so your greenhouse can actually be well covered from the power perspective. And then for bonus points, I wanted to have aquaculture in the reservoir as well.
Saif Hameed [00:38:04]:
I tried to find examples of this working elsewhere in the world, I found one research paper in India, I think, that described something similar. So I kind of was going out with this idea, and I went out to two types of communities. One was people that I thought could help me get an off take agreement with the large retailers. And the second was just people that I knew to sort of tell them, I'm going to go and start this. I had already handed in my notice at McKinsey, and I negotiated what I think was one of the longest notice periods in McKinsey history, which is five months. And that was because I wanted to force myself out of McKinsey. So I said, I'm leaving. What is the max you can give me? They gave me five months, and I then was working on this idea in parallel.
Saif Hameed [00:38:46]:
And so two people I went to had a formative influence on me and changed the direction of what I was building. One was a senior partner at McKinsey, whose name is Dago. And I was speaking with Dago, and I said, look, dago, you're based in Germany. You must have connections into Lidl and Metro and Macro and all the biggest hypermarkets and retailers. Can you please help me get an introduction, because this is what I want to do? And he heard me out, and then at the end, he said, so you're trying to work with these retailers on decarbonizing the tomatoes that they're buying, is that it? And I said, yes, basically on a set of a massive tomato solar powered greenhouse farm with this pumped hydro based reservoir system. And they said, look, this is great, but why do you just want to help them on their tomato emissions? Why wouldn't you help them on the whole breadth of their environmental challenge? Why just solve for tomatoes? There's so much else you could be solving for. It'll be a much more interesting conversation you can have with them if you solve for the whole problem rather than just a slice of it. And I started thinking, that's actually quite interesting.
Saif Hameed [00:39:49]:
And this agriculture thing also seems really hard. Maybe there's a way I could take off a larger chunk of the problem. And around that same point, I had another conversation with Greg Jackson, the founder of Octopus Energy. And Greg and I had known each other for several years at this point. And at some point early in Greg's trajectory with octopus energy, when they were around 100 people, I had been kind of helping him with his fundraisers and all the stuff he was doing. And so I thought, let me go to Greg and tell him what I'm doing. And so I was telling Greg about pumped hydro, solar farm, Pakistan, and I think there was an East Africa component as well. And Greg was kind of patiently listening.
Saif Hameed [00:40:27]:
And then at some point he said, look, I'm actually quite offended that you've gotten this far in your thinking and concept, and you haven't yet asked me to be an investor. I said, oh, that's quite interesting. I actually never thought that Greg would want to be an investor in this totally random infrastructure project that I'm thinking of. I took that away, and I thought, well, Greg must think that I'm actually starting a technology business. Otherwise, there's no way that he would suggest being an investor. Around that point, I was putting these two things together, and I thought, actually, maybe solving for the whole problem is more interesting. Maybe solving for it in a technology way is more fundable. And so I sort of then pulled out this second concept that I had been working on, which was the idea of some kind of a balanced scorecard for environmental problems.
Saif Hameed [00:41:16]:
And so that was around two months into my notice period, basically, with McKinsey, that I sort of pivoted and moved on to the altruistic side, which was probably my second concept, if I'm being totally honest, that I was pursuing at the time.
Isobel Wild [00:41:29]:
I was really wondering how you were going to get from your hydro, solar powered greenhouses to altruistic. So, Greg and Dago, thank you so much for prompting Saif in the right direction. So how did altruistic actually get started? Like, from your random idea and speaking to Greg and Diego, how did them formalize into the. Into a company?
Saif Hameed [00:41:55]:
I think that the idea that I had, and this is as of, like, founding minus two months. And I'd sort of pivoted from Borlaug, the agriculture infrastructure fund, to, I think it was not even called altruistic. I think it was called altruist tech at the time, that might have been the precursor name. And so it was basically a few slides with a very high level concept. And I started taking this to different companies that I knew to see whether the general space I was talking about resonated in was interesting. And at that time, I was trying to speak with heads of sustainability, heads of strategy, or really anyone on the side of the business that I thought could be interested in what I was pitching. I had tried to pitch a similar concept to a big food company about a year earlier and failed, or about eight months earlier and failed. I started with that company.
Saif Hameed [00:42:54]:
I went back to them and I said, look, I think this failed because of the price point. And I was pitching a certain price point when I was at McKinsey for basically building something outside in for you guys and doing a handover, whereas here I'll be doing this as a SaaS. Would this make more sense? They gave me a lot of great feedback. I spoke with maybe a few dozen companies at least. And by this point, a couple of months in, I also then had. Our first person in the teams was me and one other. And we just kept having these conversations with company after company and getting feedback after feedback. We then brought on a freelance UX designer as well, and a UI designer.
Saif Hameed [00:43:36]:
And we started creating wireframes. So just sort of images of what the solution could look like, one page of the solution could look like, basically. And getting more feedback and changing that page and then making a new page and then getting feedback and then changing it again. And we went through this sort of circuit until we had a first company, which was Rubik's group, actually. They sort of. At the end of the first conversation, the first conversation was with the CEO. He said, this seems really interesting. Let me introduce this to the guy who's leading this topic area at our company, whose name is Mal.
Saif Hameed [00:44:11]:
I spoke with Mal and Mal said, this looks really interesting. We think we need it. Our existing experience with a consultancy that we're working with is somewhat painful for us. So let's have another conversation. I'll introduce this to the wider team and then a few, basically a couple of weeks later, we then found ourselves in our first negotiation where Mal said, this. This is something we want to go ahead with. What would it cost us? We know you don't have something built yet, so we're assuming that we're a first mover here and you're going to build it from scratch. So we should get some kind of a fair price for it as well on that basis.
Saif Hameed [00:44:49]:
And so that had the first commercial negotiation made the first terms and conditions signed the first contract. Around that time, we actually had three other companies that also were interested in working with us. And so we managed to get four customers off the bat, which was quite exciting. We had founded the company three months ago.
Isobel Wild [00:45:09]:
That is exciting. Also sounds relatively easy, or it sounds like a kind of easy walk in the park. Was that the case? Because at the moment there is a lot of competition and we hear from people the whole time that they're just being bombarded by outbound from sustainability tools. Was that the case back then? And how has that evolved?
Saif Hameed [00:45:31]:
Yeah, so I think, in fairness to SAS founders everywhere, I do think that I had a bit of a head start, just having spent almost a decade at McKinsey, working largely in the field in which I was founding a company. So I had worked quite extensively in sustainability. I had a track record, and I had a network, which meant that I could go to people and speak credibly about the problem already credibly, not just in that I understood the functional aspects of it. I understood what were the main drivers within the sustainability space, but I also understood the business logic and the commercial aspects of what could work in their organizations. And I was pitching an enterprise SaaS solution. So I was basically going to exactly the same sorts of companies that I might have gone to while I was at McKinsey. And at McKinsey, I was an associate partner. So I was responsible for developing client relationships, and that's exactly what I was doing.
Saif Hameed [00:46:31]:
In this early stage, there are, I think, some big drawbacks about coming from that kind of environment and moving into SaaS. And the drawbacks are that you often end up being caught up in consulting purgatory. You never really build a SaaS. You never build a software solution. You're always consulting. I think we had that problem in year one, and we ended up building four different SaaS solutions for our four different types of customers. And then we had to start from scratch and go back and create one configurable solution. So we did have the drawback as well.
Saif Hameed [00:47:03]:
But we certainly benefited from the upside, which was our founding DNA included a good predisposition towards enterprise, and we had a great network from scratch. It was at the same time, also not a crazy competitive market in January 2021. I think there were probably a lot of solutions out there under the radar that were developing and were getting early stage traction. But the market was big enough that maybe some of them were in different parts of the world, some of them were focused on different sectors. And so it's not like every company we spoke with was saying, hey, yes, we spoke to three other people on this just this week. And actually, I think that that kicked in maybe in the second half of 2021 or the first half of 2022, but in h one of 2021, I was also still speaking with investors who were unsure whether this would be a market, and were saying, this concept of yours seems kind of interesting, but were not sure if theres demand for it. Whereas, of course, now its kind of the opposite, where the investor landscape says, how are you different versus all the other people doing this? And that question is something that every founder in our space probably gets, and the market, the customer side, unless you have a very differentiated offering is, again, just feeling bombarded and saturated. And I think at altruistic, we benefit from being quite focused in the customers that we go to and work with, and we have an increasingly strong brand with those segments.
Saif Hameed [00:48:30]:
But I feel that for anyone who started maybe even a year after we did or two years after we did, it's a very hard market to penetrate.
Isobel Wild [00:48:38]:
And what about now? Like, the sustainability space is evolving so quickly, regulations and reports and policies changing the whole time. Where is, like, altruistic focusing? And I know you dread this question, given what you just said now, but, like, how is altruistic different?
Saif Hameed [00:48:53]:
If I maybe answer the second aspect first, or maybe answer them both. So if you kind of look at how industry needs are evolving in the system sustainability space, our hypothesis was, and still is, that industries require increasingly specialized solutions. And one of the first big signs that this was true was when you kind of had flag standards coming out and sort of describing a very different approach to how companies impacted by forestry, land use, agriculture, and their value chains should start to account for and deal with emissions. And that trajectory is only getting stronger or getting more meaningful. So if you look at the food and Bev space, it has a lot in common with apparel. It has a lot in common with personal care. These all depend on agriculture centric value chains. They all tend to have a lot of fragmentation in the supply chain.
Saif Hameed [00:49:48]:
They all kind of deal in consumer products at the end of the day, which has a massive proliferation of stock keeping units as well. You have a lot of complexity within food and Bev, apparel and personal care. And these are the three sectors that we think are probably our biggest focus areas. These sectors are very different to how you might work in automotive, very different to how you might work in metals and mining, very different to how you might work in oil and gas or construction, for example. And we have lost very few situations at altruistic, like, we win a majority of proposals that we compete for. The ones that we lose tend to be where it's outside of our ideal customer profile. So we are a good solution, but we are not the best solution. And by contrast, the ones we win are where we can comfortably say we are the best solution in the market for this space.
Saif Hameed [00:50:38]:
And what we're finding now that's quite interesting is a further level of differentiation, which is even within, for example, food and beverage, which is our biggest sector. You see differentiation in quick service or fast food, restaurant chains versus retail, and grocery versus manufacture versus b, two b versus agricultural production. These are all in some ways sub sectors. And we find ourselves now solving for each of these sub sectors as well. And as we solve for each of these sub sectors, we come up against even more specialized solutions. There are solutions we're competing with that are only interested in doing fast food restaurant chains or only interested in doing retail grocery within the food and beverage category. And we have to manage the right balance between being generalized enough that we have a big enough market that we can play for, such that we can be commercially strong and viable, attract lots of investment, build great technology and compete effectively, not just at the category level, so within food and beV, for example, but also the subcategory level, and out compete more niche solutions that have specialization advantages but lack the ability to scale. And I think that's a fine balance, actually.
Saif Hameed [00:51:58]:
Like, I think that, for example, personally, I think focusing just on fast food restaurants is too narrow. And I think focusing on every category, from food and beverage to metals and mining to banking, is too broad. So I think that there's a balance there that we are striking, which is we specialize in everything within the agricultural value chain, basically, and that is some level of specialization, but it's not a huge level of specialization. And that also, I hope, is the answer to the question of how we're different, which is there are many aspects of a technology solution that you need to have to be credible, from the databases you use, let's say the environmental factor databases, to the calculation methodologies and calculation engine you deploy, to the analytics layer you create on top. And we like to think that in each of those aspects, we differentiate in our ideal customer profile territory, which is food and Bev personal care apparel. We also think we're very good in many other sectors, but these are the ones where we think we differentiate across all aspects of the tech stack.
Isobel Wild [00:53:01]:
What are the big challenges that people are coming to you with in the initial calls being, okay, we want to solve for x, y and z, and how is that actually reflected in the product?
Saif Hameed [00:53:14]:
One trend that we've noticed in all of our customer conversations is in year one we were pitching a concept. So in year one we were saying, this is what we're going to do, this is why it's important, this is why it adds value to your business. And we had to sell the idea and the vision to the customer. And that was partly a function of our company. Altruistic, not having a fully baked solution yet, and still being quite experimental, and partly a function of the customer not being fully mature in the space and having a full understanding of what they needed and we're looking for in year two. So let's say 2022. We started to see that shift a bit, and we started to see more customers coming to us with a specific problem. We have an environmental accounting problem and we need help solving it.
Saif Hameed [00:54:01]:
We're not sure if that's a consultancy or a software solution. We're not sure all the variables within that, but that's the problem set in 2023. I think we started to see a lot more specificity in that. So we have an environmental accounting problem, and within this problem, what we particularly struggle with is the data. Getting our data into a clean and tabular structure that we can use to run a calculation is hard. Beyond that, we think it's easy, but getting our data into a good space is hard. Can you help us with that part? And then, yes, help us with the rest as well. But this is the difficult challenge.
Saif Hameed [00:54:35]:
And then, more recently, we've actually started to see a lot more formalized tender processes. And so most of the deals that we compete for today, or win, tend to be large, structured processes where companies are engaging with many different vendors or solution providers, maybe a dozen or even up to 2025 in some cases, and filtering through stage after stage. And I see that as a very helpful development because it also means that the customer, the business, is getting a much better understanding of what they need. And so, just to give a comparison, we have many deals running at the moment, but there are two that I kind of pull up. One is a structured tender process and one is an unstructured process. And in the unstructured process, both are at the same scale. They're both large foot seat. Sorry, Fortune 100 companies, basically.
Saif Hameed [00:55:30]:
And in both deals, in one of them, which is the unstructured process, we are the only solution being considered. We are the only one they're speaking with. And it has taken us a year to get to the point now where we are about to kick off with them. In the other case, it is a fully structured process. There are many different vendors in consideration. They're now shortlisted to the final two. It's taken maybe six months to get to this point. I much prefer this second example, even though it's competitive, because in this second one, the business aligns around the requirements and structures those required.
Saif Hameed [00:56:07]:
Ask from the solution provider or vendor. And that is very helpful for us because it gives us full clarity on what we're competing, on what we're trying to demonstrate. I think it is also very helpful for all the business stakeholders because it means that everyone has a forcing mechanism to engage around the same stuff inside the business as well. You have a reason to go around the twelve or 15 different stakeholders, gather all the requirements, get them into one place, and get them over to the solution providers or the vendors. Whereas in that other example, which is an unstructured process, over the past year, we've been getting a whole cottage industry of requests from dozens of different people because all of them are being engaged piecemeal. And it is a much harder process to navigate, which I think is worse for us and worse for the business as well.
Isobel Wild [00:56:56]:
That's a really interesting evolution. My final question before we wrap up, Saif, is why altruistic? Why the name? What brought it about?
Saif Hameed [00:57:05]:
I think that maybe there are two aspects to this. One is that, frankly, only one aspect, I guess, really, which is the purpose of our business, is to reduce the cost of positive change. Like that is the overriding purpose of our business. It's not really about environmental accounting, it's not about product carbon footprints, it's not about supply chain engagement, although those are all the use cases that our solution enables today. The actual vision that we're working towards is we want to make it easier for business to drive positive change through its supply chain and through its distribution. And that means lowering the cost of positive change, and that means better data. And if you look at the variables that we want to have an impact on right now, we're talking about emissions and increasingly water and biodiversity in nature. But really we kind of want to make the cost of positive change across a flexible range of metrics cheaper.
Saif Hameed [00:58:04]:
It may be that in ten years time, there are other things that are super important to us. Maybe ocean plastic is one of the top two variables that we're solving for. It may be that there's something else in 20 years time. And so it was very important to me that our vision be one that scales across decades, rather than just call it carbon go lightly or something, and it's only solving for the next two or three or five or ten years. I've also been finding the concept of effective altruism quite interesting in that it takes a very utilitarian approach to impact and tries to focus on quantification as a big value add, which is focused on the next cheapest impact intervention available to you, because your money will go the furthest distance if you focus on the next cheapest impact intervention. And then once you're done with that, focus on the one after that. And so one of the questions that I often ask in onboardings at altruistic is what do you think is the cheapest intervention you could go for per units of impact? And the cheapest that I'm aware of is mosquito nets for malaria. It's the most tried and tested, lowest cost solution that can have the biggest impact, positive impact on the world, measured in units of human life.
Saif Hameed [00:59:18]:
And so altruistic was basically a nod to effective altruism. And also, it was my way of sort of throwing a stone into the far distant future where we don't know what variables we'll be solving for, but we know that they will be in the positive interest of the human race.
Isobel Wild [00:59:34]:
Saif, that's a strong note to finish on. Are there any final comments before we wrap up today? No.
Saif Hameed [00:59:41]:
No. I think we've covered quite a lot of ground. I feel like for those watching the video, we should also acknowledge that we are wearing different clothes and sporting different hairdos to what we were in the first half of this video. And that's just because we wanted to keep things interesting. And of course, the other answer is that we did this in two takes. So for those who have been watching the video, don't be alarmed keeping our.
Isobel Wild [01:00:02]:
Watchers and listeners on their toes. Saif, thank you so much. And thank you, listeners, for listening. Please send in any comments or content suggestions. We're very happy to pull them into future episodes as well as other written content. Thank you so much. Bye.
Saif Hameed [01:00:19]:
Thanks, everyone. Bye.