#124 Timing, Team, & TAM, Removing the Friction of ESG Reporting and Data Tracking, Utilizing Your Investor Network, & More w/ Tee Ganbold (OpenESG)

In this episode, Silas Mahner (@silasmahner) speaks with Tee Ganbold, the Co-Founder of OpenESG on what she's doing in the ESG tech space. 

They have created an incredible tool that operates like ChatGPT but is specifically designed and trained on corporate sustainability data. Instead of spending time researching a company's ESG data and commitments, you can simply ask OpenESG and you have detailed data at your fingertips, along the precise references to the underlying data. 

Tee has a great story coming from Mongolia, being raised in London, starting a few companies, living around the world, and now choosing to build OpenESG in NYC. 

We had a really great conversation so it's exciting to share it with you here today. 

Enjoy the Episode! 🌎

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Links:
**Connect with Tee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teeganbold/
**OpenESG: https://www.openesg.com/
**Climate Capital Summit: https://www.climatecapitalsummit.com/ 
**Check out our Sponsor, NextWave Partners: https://www.next-wavepartners.com/
**Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clean-techies/
**HMU on Twitter: @silasmahner

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Other episodes you might enjoy:
**Most Recent Episode: #123 Driving Adoption in Hard-to-Abate Sectors, Why Not an IP Play, Partnering w/ Large Corporates, Hiring PhDs, & More w/ Jeff Erhardt (Mattiq)
**Similar Topic: #47 The Current and Future State of the ESG Software Space w/ Sondra Tosky (Measurabl)
**Something Totally Different: #63 Carbon Markets and How they Work, Democratizing Forestry Carbon Credits, & More w/ Matt Smith (Finite Carbon)

Transcript

Tee Ganbold: 0:00

So, firstly, we are working with the businesses, because there are about 300 million businesses we know nothing about. This is businesses around the world.

Silas Mähner: 0:16

Welcome back to the Clean Techies podcast, where we interview climate tech founders in VCs to discuss all things building and investing to solve the biggest challenge of our generation climate change. In today's episode, I speak with T Ganbold, the co-founder of OpenESG, on what she's doing in the ESG tech space. They have created an incredible tool that operates like chat, gpt, but specifically designed and trained on the corporate sustainability data of companies that publish that data. Instead of spending time researching a company's ESG data and commitments, you can simply ask OpenESG and you have detailed data at your fingertips, along with the precise references to the underlying data, which I find pretty fascinating, so you can go right to the source and see where it's coming from.

Silas Mähner: 1:02

No hallucinations T has a really great story overall, just generally very fascinating coming from Mongolia, being raised in London, starting a few different companies living around the world and now choosing to build OpenESG in New York City specifically. We had a really great conversation today, so it's exciting to be able to share this with you and, if you're able, I do encourage you to go to OpenESGcom, you know, while you're listening to the episode, and play around with their tool. Really, really fascinating. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it and you can use it for free today. So, without any further delay, enjoy the episode. All right, Welcome to the show. T Good to see you again.

Tee Ganbold: 1:40

Good to see you.

Silas Mähner: 1:41

I guess let's just start things off right away by telling us a little bit about yourself, kind of where you came from and how do you end up in doing what you're doing today.

Tee Ganbold: 1:49

Well, thank you so much for having me on the show. I really I started this journey when I was a student and I was brought up in England, hence why I speak like this, watching BBC news every day to learn English. But I used to go back to my home country, mongolia, where I was brought up, where I was born Olambatir, our capital. Every time I used to go back I used to have smoke in my face and it made me question why and what stage of industrialization Mongolia was in and what sort of energy we used. And I found out that 90% of Mongolian energy Olambatir's energy was coming from coal and unsurprisingly and actually I find it unsurprising because of many cultural and political and economic reasons it hasn't changed and Mongolia is not the only country that is operating like that. So I wrote my thesis on alternative energy how the West is transitioning to a much more diverse energy strategy, really for self sufficiency purposes and then worked at an investment bank looking at alternative shipping, mining oil or services for a Norwegian investment bank in my as my first job. And then I had a good look at myself and said I'm an entrepreneur, I know what I really care about, and so I built my first sustainable brand when I was 23. I went and lived in Mongolia, worked on the factory floor, went to spend time with the herders to build a sustainable cashmere brand from Mongolia to give value back to Mongolians, mongolian herders, mongolian suppliers of cashmere, and I learned so much from that process. I also learned what I didn't know, and when you're young it's great you have all this ambition, but you also realize what you don't know.

Tee Ganbold: 4:07

So I went back into industry, but this time I went into tech. I decided I wanted to know how to engage my audience. I wanted to know everything about technology. So, a little bit like the book by Anne Rand, I decided to go learn from the best in data analytics and actually what is now AI. Early on it was really a technology for the sake of communication. So worked at a company called Cambridge Analytica when I was 24 and was working with some of the largest enterprises in understanding how to engage their audiences, retain customers. And then the co-founder of Ethereum approached me when I was 25. And this is before the craziness, and I have a strong alignment with the principles of the Ethereum community. So, at 26, I went back to my roots and created a company called Clear AI.

Tee Ganbold: 5:13

I was 26, with some amazing technologists data scientists, student learning engineers, knowledge graph engineers and we created what is called supply chain optimization tools to eradicate waste in the food supply chain. And we were working with Nestle in Canada to help understand where consumers want certain products and looked at local data, helped the buyers, the retailers, know what to buy and then feed that back to Nestle, so no one's buying things they don't need to. That's how you can't waste and there's a lot of it. A third of every food on this planet created is wasted, to give you an example. And then, finally, the company.

Tee Ganbold: 6:05

We paused during COVID and had a lot of time to think, go back to the drawing board, and this time we learned a lot about what we could do and what we couldn't, and what we realized is that we have a fragmentation problem. So sustainability, climate, esg is a massive category. People are doing so many amazing things in silos and we just need to bring it all together, pre-linked in. We did not know who was sitting next to you. We had CVs flying around, probably in the WhatsApp equivalent of the time in MSN messenger, and what we realized is that we need to create a single platform to bring everyone together and that's what we're doing at Open ESG. We're bringing everyone in the community together because we believe we can solve the climate and sustainability challenges.

Tee Ganbold: 7:13

We also are pro-business, so we want to help businesses do amazing things, because they're the people who can really change the needle, move the needle, so that we, as consumers, can go to a shop is you know, the business has already thought about which material has been used. I'm you know, I drink coffee from this coffee mug and they've already done the hard work my coffee shop to make sure this is a product that's really well sourced. That's how it should be. So we've got this amazing team which I'll go into you, but former Spotify, siri board directors to form a world economic forum, international Olympic Committee, ethereum, namesalvis, consensus. I mean, we just the team are so special and I wouldn't be able to do this, of course, without them. So I'm really speaking today on behalf of them and I'm really excited to share this story.

Silas Mähner: 8:17

Yeah, so I think this is really fascinating. There's some things that you mentioned I want to just kind of we don't have to necessarily talk about them too much, but I think it was interesting. You pointed out that the US was making a transition to renewables and kind of just various energy sources for a self-sufficiency purpose, and I think that a lot of times it's overlooked the importance of renewables just from that perspective. Right, it's not only not only is it cheaper energy in most cases and it's the best and cleanest, it's, you know, it's also about sovereignty, right, national sovereignty, which is a lot of countries, I think, as the world begins to fragment more, perhaps I think more countries are going to be considering that, and I'd like to go.

Silas Mähner: 8:57

You know, you have a really interesting career journey up to this point. I think it's pretty fascinating to hear, as somebody who is, you know, very early in my career still and I'd be curious to hear if you could walk us through some of the, I guess how you navigated the critical moments in your journey of deciding to become an entrepreneur, so how you know what was the internal battle like? Like, oh, you know, should I really leave my good paying job to go do this thing. You know what. What really was the pushing factor, and what advice would you offer to other people who you think are going through a similar kind of moment in their career?

Tee Ganbold: 9:31

I definitely think it's so fantastic to work with amazing people in large organizations and also high growth organizations. I've done that and I love it. I got so much training in my formative years and I saw, you know, companies go from zero to one Consensus was 100 people, then 1200 in such a short period of time, and so it is fantastic to see that. It's fantastic to be part of it. You meet the most amazing people. It's so creative and you have this global network. So I think it's really important to go and do that and be disciplined, turn up on time. You know all the good stuff.

Tee Ganbold: 10:19

Do you think? If you have a particular problem, you want to solve it? The it just doesn't go away because it is something so fundamental that if you, if you care about something so important for for me it was I think we can change supplier behavior, because suppliers are what creates certain products and if we create the right incentives really are in the global economy where buyers wants positive, you know, positive for the planet products and positive for the people products then supplies will have to act that way. So when you become obsessed with something, that's when you should absolutely go for it, because it is so all consuming and it is so beautiful. It is like a beautiful relationship with something that you love so much and you want to solve. And so when? But I really, really encourage people to go and learn from amazing people and then meet amazing people and take away experiences from it and then apply what you want, what the amazing things and maybe some of the things you don't want to do yourself.

Silas Mähner: 11:40

Yeah, I think it's really. It's really helpful to hear that. I mean, a lot of people want to do something, but there's they're afraid to do it or whatnot. But if you, if you really focus on the problem and you can find a solution, you should go and go and do it. I think it's also important.

Silas Mähner: 11:52

I really appreciate you sharing, because a lot of people, especially early on, have a substantial amount of anxiety when it comes to deciding what to do or, just generally speaking, in their career, because they want to be a straight line. There's so many pressures from other you know, parents or colleagues or things like that people around you that it's important to recognize that even if you quote unquote do the right thing and do the thing everybody else wants you to do, your career is definitely still not going to be a straight line. So do the thing that you know helps you get out of bed in the future and make you, make you really excited and okay, this is very good. So let's go on to talk a little bit more about open ESG. So you've kind of described it very briefly for us as a sort of like way to help understand who else is out there in the space. But can you give us kind of a more in depth of what is open ESG?

Tee Ganbold: 12:42

I will, and I just want to add that sometimes that necessity is really important in becoming an entrepreneur when something is doesn't exist or you know, when you identify a gap and you see that it is necessary to fill it, you should go and do it, and that's what we are doing at open ESG. We realize that there are some incredible companies out there and there are some incredible companies already doing amazing things, and but what we realized is that there are some companies that are struggling. So let's take S&P 500 companies. They get, you know, bashed by. Let's take Elon Musk to give you an example a lot of people and current rating systems really bring his company down, tesla down, and because of certain social factors, from an environmental and social governance perspective, we think that it should not be like that. We believe that, in order to have progress, we can have measurements, absolutely. So what we do at open ESG is give people a sustainability ID so you can have a health check and how you're doing as a company, and it is important to know. You know this is where the standards are. You can also see where you're not doing well and you get an idea of how to improve. So we are almost. We have a way to help companies improve and be better.

Tee Ganbold: 14:21

So, let's say, elon Musk wanted to be our customer. We can say, look, here's where you're at and here's how you can improve. But you're not. He's not paying a large consultancy to do this. You know, it doesn't take a lot of time. Literally. His chief sustainability officer can sign up for free today and get a health check and if he wants to, he can publish it to the world and say, hey, this is where Tesla's at and there's no judgment.

Tee Ganbold: 14:47

Not only that, we also verify information. So a lot of issues in the current system of, let's say, esg are that you cannot trust the information. That's the really the secret in this industry and the reason you cannot. And I'll give you an example FTX got a really high governance score, so G score, in the ESG, and no one had decided to do any due diligence to see if he has a board. So that's an example of let's just do our basic homework double check, let's, you know, let's go back to principles. Let's check how a company is doing. Let's make it free and accessible for everyone to check how they're doing, or the company to see how they're doing. If they're happy with it, they can publish it and if their customer or their investor or someone in the community that is important to them, important stakeholder, wants them to get verified, they should. So we really push it to when it is necessary almost pays, you go, you know, rather than here's a, here's a payment all the time. To even get started, we've eradicated that cost, the upfront bid. So that's how we're changing the system, but with generative AI.

Tee Ganbold: 16:10

This year, literally, generative AI has completely changed the entire game. Generative AI has meant that you can find the most sustainable companies in the world, even SMP 500 companies. We've trained our data on SMP 500 companies, but our vision for it is that large companies could go all the way down their supply chain, find the most sustainable supplier of, let's say, coffee beans, and with a chat interface you know everyone's been probably filling with chat, gbt and barred and it allows you to really find what you're looking for. But we go so deep in our category. We go deep in sustainability, climate and ESG information, so you get exactly the answer you're looking for.

Tee Ganbold: 16:57

So all the people, silas, that you work with, or the executives, for example, we give them superpowers because when they go to do their job instead of spending all their time finding information. We give them the information to them at their fingertips and a reference to where that has come from. So there's no such thing as hallucination. They can do that jobs better. We're also starting to do auto fill of clauses for a report writing so you can put standards in that, you can put legislation and you can auto fill according to that legislation. It is a game changer. Literally, we're living in such a different era and we fundamentally believe that we're going to be able to solve this problem by getting everyone, by giving everyone the tools to solve it, together.

Silas Mähner: 17:50

Yeah, I understood. I think it's very important, obviously the enabling factor in helping to make things the barriers low, because I've had a lot of companies come to us and say, oh, we want to hire a head of sustainability or a sustainability analyst for our company, and then when they start getting down the search, they're like, oh, wait a minute, how much I got to pay? And then, wait a minute, they're going to need to build a team. That's kind of crazy. And then they just bail right Because it's too much of a barrier to entry sometimes for what the CEO thinks it has to be down or whatnot, and then they realize, wow, this is actually quite a lot. So if you can remove those barriers to entry, it's very easy to catch fire and get more people doing it, and obviously that's what we need. We need more people doing it in order to actually have an effective outcome. So I guess the big question I have is you mentioned Fortune 500 companies, for example, and big companies like Tesla. But who are the users, the ideal users, of this platform?

Tee Ganbold: 18:45

So we're actually going directly to the buyers. So the incentive model for the buyers is very clear. So there's regulation, there's consumer demand. There's a lot of demand for the buy side in the US, for example, and US companies are actually far ahead. American companies actually comply with laws and regulations and very much take it seriously, because otherwise you get sued in America. In other parts of the world it might be a little bit lenient, let's say, which we think is a problem, and of course we'd like to change behavior of time.

Tee Ganbold: 19:27

But we operate in America because we believe that American businesses are taking it seriously. So the American business, let's say, sends the sustainability ID to all their suppliers and of course their suppliers are global. So that's what's amazing about our platform. We get global information. We've already built the platform so we can ingest a lot of information for the large corporate, and what we do then is make it understandable for the CEO. So the CEO or anyone in the C-suite who should have this information can then interface with information on their most sustainable suppliers literally the who is not doing well. Just any bit of information so that they have it at hand. Not only that, but we're going to get to the point, we're going to be able to write reports. So it writes reports according to a particular you know. Ask, and that's how sophisticated it's becoming.

Silas Mähner: 20:36

I guess what I think is, once you get a lot of companies on here and generally speaking, it becomes usable, and I'm assuming there's also an opportunity for the general public to use this and to be like, oh, like, what's the most sustainable coffee shop in my neighborhood? Things like that. Is that correct?

Tee Ganbold: 20:49

Yeah, so firstly, we are working with the businesses, because there are about 300 million businesses we know nothing about. This is businesses around the world. That is so shocking. So some of the incumbents that are out there, they've scratched the surface. They've only been managed to get about 100,000 businesses on that platform and for us, we looked at all the friction points and we've eradicated it. We focused on how to eradicate it.

Silas Mähner: 21:23

Yeah, okay, yeah. But I guess my point of the question then is once you get everybody on this, you know, do you foresee any particular second or third order kind of consequences of what will actually happen? Do you see anything that you're noticing in the data now or that you have a hunch on, where you say, hey, you know, once consumers have access to this stuff, I think this or that will happen.

Tee Ganbold: 21:46

So we believe that firstly we're working with the businesses, then we will integrate with B2C platforms. We cannot do both. We're going directly to consumers is a lot of work and there are existing platforms out there that have their relationships with consumers and we'd rather work with them. The consequences are very positive. Having insight as to the coffee shop you go to quite regularly let's say Starbucks and the consequences of learning the amazing things they're doing is pretty positive. You might want to go back even more. Think about all the loyalty points, and we think we can enrich the existing customer relationships with the large businesses and not only large but small businesses too, because if you are small and your family owned business and you're doing all the right things, you should get more customer retention by doing positive things for the planet and for people.

Silas Mähner: 22:47

Yeah, now it makes a lot of sense and I think it's especially right now. The thing that I'm fascinated by is how the companies who are doing sustainable things will have an advantage for a while until it becomes mainstream, and then you basically have a disadvantage for being brown or being not green, not sustainable. So I think it's in everybody's best interest to jump on the wave now, while they have the opportunity to be making maybe a little extra profit, even hypothetically, or getting more customers from the neighbor Very cool. So I think we've talked about this a little bit before, but I'm really curious to understand, in particular from having lived around the world and built businesses around, why specifically you mentioned America already, but why specifically New York for building this? I'm curious if there's any particular reason for focusing here, because we've had these discussions. I've had these discussions where it's like, okay, what is the most? What is the Silicon Valley of climate or whatnot? Right, where is everybody at? And I wouldn't necessarily first thought be New York. So I'm kind of curious to understand why New York.

Tee Ganbold: 23:57

So New York was. We chose New York as a team because there's so much. There's a concentration of capital. There's a concentration of, of course, capital markets, but also there's a concentration of the largest law firms. There's a concentration of some of the largest companies in the US, which are multinationals based in New York. So for us, it is such a clear area to focus on. We as a team are very global and we have such a global mindset, but for us, new York makes a lot of sense because of the concentration of people being there.

Tee Ganbold: 24:36

Not only that, but this year the wildfires in Canada woke up everyone in New York. Suddenly all New Yorkers are talking about climate change. They realize it's not something that they can ignore now. No one on this planet can? It is not possible. There are hurricanes in California all the time. There's there are fires across Greece. This is so global and it can impact us, our families, our communities, anytime. This is also not something that's an intellectual discussion anymore. This is very real. Capital is at risk. There are real businesses at risk because of this.

Silas Mähner: 25:27

Yeah, I think it's an interesting point. There's a number of interesting points you bring up and I guess I'd be curious would you say that you think New York is a place that you would encourage other climatic founders, if they're considering to set up, depending on, of course, their niche right? Would you encourage them to consider New York as a place to do so because of those reasons you mentioned?

Tee Ganbold: 25:46

I definitely think New York is for any founder. They should be where their customers are, because you should be in front of your customers, speaking to them, updating them. You should have a close relationship with your customers. So absolutely wherever your customers are, be there. If your customers are, of course, somewhere else in the world, be there also.

Tee Ganbold: 26:11

Really, the mindset is that it's very now willing and there's a understanding in American corporations that it is so important. So our Chief Product Officer was at a conference in Seattle last week and he identified that every corporate while you think AI is the largest topic of the town, actually it's sustainability and every executive is trying to figure it out. It's all very bureaucratic at the moment, but they wanna get to actually solving the problems because they know it's so important for their customers, for anyone they're serving. They want to also and their shareholders. Not only that. To give you a deeper example, one of the publicly trading American logistics companies that I know pretty well and the Chief Strategy Officer setting me tea I spent so much of my time writing reports, I do not have time to go and actually do the things I'm meant to do. You know the what is it called? The back of a truck when?

Silas Mähner: 27:26

the the trailer. The exhaust no, the exhaust, oh the exhaust, yeah.

Tee Ganbold: 27:30

So he was saying that he identified a technology that eradicates the fumes coming out of the exhaust and he said T I'd rather be going putting that on every truck and making sure it's implemented, because that would make the true measurable impact. So now we want to actually get every Chief Sustainability Officer doing the things they were hired to do go and change the company for the better so it actually can last, because really now it's a matter of who can actually implement the things they were writing about.

Tee Ganbold: 28:07

And how do we help them to do that? Firstly, we need to help them save time on writing reports and a lot of the bureaucracy so that they can go and implement.

Silas Mähner: 28:17

Yeah, I mean I think it's a really good point.

Silas Mähner: 28:19

Obviously, there are there's reasons to have all of these checks in place, because you need to make sure the data's accurate.

Silas Mähner: 28:27

You need to have it true, especially if you miss, if you miscommunicate, the ICC might be knocking on your door, so you gotta be careful.

Silas Mähner: 28:34

But it is a very good point that there's a lot of these people who are hired to do sustainability things, and I hear it from the candidates I talk to all the time that like hey, I just wanna actually get something done. I don't wanna keep doing reporting and data tracking, I wanna actually do something. And I think that's what they all went to school for is to make an impact. But now they're sitting here writing these reports and tracking data and then they kind of see especially the ones who work in consulting and a lot of times, year after year, it's just recommendations and no, you know, no action. It'd be much better spent maybe half hazardly getting things more sustainable and then doing the reports later on. Once you find out, hey, wow, look at this, like we measured our baseline and now, three years later, look how much more sustainable we are based on these metrics. And I would love to see more of that happening.

Tee Ganbold: 29:20

I wanna show you. So let's take, let's say, a company that you care about or public trading company. Do you wanna name one, or just like?

Silas Mähner: 29:30

Let's say Tesla.

Tee Ganbold: 29:32

Okay, let me see if Tesla's and what is Tesla's, or it could be. Let's see. Okay, we how about?

Silas Mähner: 29:49

how about say another company? Maybe we have Apple.

Tee Ganbold: 29:53

No, let me show you. But as you can see, our system does not go and make up stuff. There is no fluff here. It will actually go and say, oh, what about? This is what the industry is doing, and it will also reference, as you can see here.

Silas Mähner: 30:09

All the reports.

Tee Ganbold: 30:10

Every bit of information where this answer has come from. Let's say what is Apple's sustainability strategy? Sustainability strategy? So Apple, on the other hand, which I know, we have the information on this information. If you asked in tragedy or bad, it would not give you specifics as to exactly what they're doing to eradicate waste exactly. Or we can go even deeper. The next question we can go even deeper, such as what is the packaging strategy? Apple has significant strides in reducing past that content in the packaging by 2025. You can see exactly where it's come from. What is. You can also say what is Apple's net operating revenue.

Tee Ganbold: 31:09

So we, if you were to go and do this yourself right now to find that information, if you time yourself, it would probably, depending my God, it took me a long time. So you go through a hundred page reports and then suddenly you find that information and even if it's a very complex question, it takes even more long Cause you have to go and find the report and so on. Here you've got the report. You go to that report. What let's see? It says page 11. So go to page 11 and you can see exactly where that information has come from.

Silas Mähner: 31:50

Yeah, that's very fascinating.

Tee Ganbold: 31:52

You can chart, you can see the examples, and it makes everyone's lives easier, and that's what we want to do you. We want to. Also, and we've been very specific If you want to ask about Taylor Swift's latest song, we're not the right place to do that.

Tee Ganbold: 32:11

But we are training it on specific information so that the industry can benefit from it, and we also do it by demand. So if you want to go and find out information about a particular category, you can say Open ESG, need your help here and can you upload all of this information? And I want to interrogate this information and get the answers I need. So it's really on demand. So we lower the infrastructure cost for everyone. Not only that, but we are also doing it for large corporates that want to focus on their business, serving their core business units and lines.

Silas Mähner: 32:55

Our revenue.

Tee Ganbold: 32:56

So we help them really with an infrastructure to focus on sustainability and ESG.

Silas Mähner: 33:05

So they can it can be comfortable that they're doing it already.

Silas Mähner: 33:11

Yeah, it's really awesome to see when things can, especially with AI. If we talked about how much more efficient people can become and companies can become, I think this would be a great example to really help maximize, because I will say there's a shortage of total available talented ESG professionals right now. So helping to maximize their efforts and help things go forward to be great. I do want to shift a little bit to talking about advice to founders, so there's a lot of different things that we could go after, but I think maybe the first thing I'd be curious to ask you about is what is your advice to people who are right, thinking about starting something and they have maybe several ideas on what they want to do. How do you recommend that they go about testing to ensure that are they working on? Is it going to work? Is it going to be impactful? Is it going to solve a problem? Like, what are the things that you they should do at the fundamental beginning of the process to ensure that they're not spending their energy on something that is useless?

Tee Ganbold: 34:14

So the first thing is you have to have especially if you want to build a global business, and you have, and I'm sure that everyone wants to build a global business that you know that serves lots of customers. So the first thing one should ask is how big is this market? Is it served? And if it's not served, what can be done? So that's one thing that I would definitely ask, if that problem is very much got, a massive target sort of addressable market. The other thing is is this is it timing? Is the timing right? Am I building this company at the right time?

Tee Ganbold: 35:05

And I have to say before, when the supply chain AI company, it was almost the wrong time because the will internationally was not there. It was pre-COVID. People didn't really have that much to know their global supply chains until they realized all their PPE was coming from one place on the planet or their medical goods, and there was a dependence problem. So suddenly the entire supply chain world became the heroes of the story because they've been. The supply chain world has been saying like we need to know where our products come from. And now consumers want to know, regulators want to know, everyone wants to know for self-sufficiency purposes and everyone understands the language of self-sufficiency and security for the community. So, finally, the team. We can have the best ideas, a massive market and timing can be right, but it's also the team and I learned from some of the amazing VCs in Silicon Valley that have invested in my company and also I've learned from over the years is Sometimes you have to change out your team to achieve that mission.

Tee Ganbold: 36:28

So you have to be and you have to make sure you have the right people to deliver. It's like a competition. You know when you're in a sporting competition, you pick the best team to go and win the competition. So that's how, as a CEO, I look at it from a perspective of do I have the right team in front of me? If I don't, I'll make sure I do. So it's really about and as the founder of Particularly, you really want to make sure that the team is really fitting for the mission.

Silas Mähner: 37:05

Yeah, I think that the team thing. Obviously I work in town so I'm a little biased to talk about these things, but I would say it's very interesting to hear you bring this up in particular, because I think that it's difficult when you're building a climate company, in particular focused on ESG. You want to be very conscious to be a company that also internally, is focused on the ESG and the G right of how you take care of your people. But you know, there's times where I've talked to some founders where they realize that, even though, like, they want to be very empathetic, to taking care of the people, and they realize that the people in the business want something different, or what they want in the outcome they're hoping to achieve is completely different than the companies. Right, maybe they're company pivoted, maybe they kind of slipped through the interview process somehow, but you do.

Silas Mähner: 37:51

It's unjust to not to keep them around and to not get them in the right companies because they're not going to be fulfilled and you can't achieve your mission. Right, and there's obviously you only get so many shots. Right, you're raising money you have, you have to get it right over the over the course of that timing and then you have to raise again, right? So it's important to make sure you have the right people and I appreciate you bringing that up and any particular advice on when you're building, especially at the very beginning, right? There's so many things to do, there's a lot of opportunities and you're maybe not necessarily 100% certain of the market focus. How do you decide what to focus on? Do you have a framework for helping people rank? Hey, this is like really really important now, but I should focus on this later. There are certain way in those early stages that you recommend people to focus on the things that really matter.

Tee Ganbold: 38:41

Totally, I definitely think, taking time to research in the very beginning. So last year we literally I took what I was going to put in a property into the business I was a co-founder of my co-founders and we just we just focused on experimentation, research and that is okay. That's so important so that when you know you keep hearing the same problems, the pain points. So we decided to focus on our pain points that the industry kept repeating to us and actually, with the advent of generative AI, we could solve that pain point. So that's so important to know, to have the timing right as to when to launch and you know, go actually even before launching, to build the right product for your community, for your customers.

Silas Mähner: 39:44

Yeah, absolutely, that's really helpful. I think the one thing I have noticed is that a lot of founders do not spend the proper time to do product market fit, especially in climate, because it's usually a moment where they're like, oh my gosh, like I need to work on climate, I've realized, like how endangered my neighborhood is where I grow up, or whatever, and they just start doing something and then they don't realize that maybe this isn't actually an impactful problem to solve or maybe the underlying issue or something else. But you need to also make it. Make it make money right if you're going to actually achieve it, because otherwise it's a nonprofit right and yes, there's obviously there's room and space for those. But to really scale something, it's kind of probably not be a nonprofit organization in many cases. You talked about, you know, having some good advice from your, from your investors. Can you talk about the process of raising money and advice to founders in that process?

Tee Ganbold: 40:38

Absolutely so. As a co founding team, we divide and conquer. One of my co founders focuses on all our customer relationships and I love spending time with all our customers, but we divide and conquer. He spends his time really surfacing customers and and then my other co founder he spends all his time making sure that we're you know, we. He looks at every detail of the product and the technology and making sure that we're secure, it's private and all the bits you have to think about from a security perspective and also making sure that it is the latest state of the art technology, because you don't want to use a product that's, you know, a tool.

Tee Ganbold: 41:20

Let's say, a center, by the way, said no to a particular company out there in the market because they built on chat, gbt and basically, if you silo yourself into one technology, you might have customers saying we can't work with you and that's so important to note. So we have a particular strategy around that and we work with we work with all the other labs because we think that's the right thing to do. It makes us a sustainable business and long time, you know, we can service lots of customers. And then I focused really with our time as a, as a business, working with investors who can help us scale, and investors are global. It's really I'm from Mongolia, but I was brought up in, of course, in London, but lived in America and lived in.

Tee Ganbold: 42:23

Europe and Korea and a few different countries and I believe that it's so important to have a global perspective. I've worked with Middle Eastern companies, african companies, so my time is really spent speaking to our investors, seeing how they can help us, and speaking with investors. They have to be able to help their to make a return on their investment and they probably have networks. They have not just capital but they will have tools that can help you scale. So I spent my time making sure that they're the right fit and also you know that their particular beyond capital can bring their other value. Ads can bring in so much more value to help us, you know, make a return on their investment. Those are the type of conversations that I spent my time on.

Silas Mähner: 43:25

And I think that's one of the very particular things if you can share with during the, because I'm not totally familiar with how much money raised or whatnot, but with the process, whether any particular things that were very valuable to help get the investors say you know what we're willing to, you know to make a check for this at the early stages. Was it certain amount of traction, any particular things that really helped you get moving and to a point where investors said you know this is, this is efficient traction for us to to invest in Investors really care about timing.

Tee Ganbold: 43:58

They really care that. They care about the target market addressable, total addressable market and they care about the team. They only really care about those three things because that's what will help them get what they're looking for, which is, if they're a fund to return, you know, to be the investor that help them achieve their goals, or if you're an angel investor to help them, you know, see a return on their investment. For us, it's really been our laser focus on our customers and our obsession making sure suppliers can put in their information so quickly, so seamlessly, and the insights from that. So there's a company called Canva which everyone might use to create graphics.

Tee Ganbold: 44:51

The founder, one of the ambassadors, mentioned to us that she obsessed over the fact that a hairdresser should be able to create a graphic design within five minutes. And that was the obsession. Our obsession as a team and literally, is making sure that suppliers can put in their information so seamlessly, so quickly and without friction, because, especially if they have all the information at hand, they should be able to fill it out quickly. We'd even like to get to the point where it is automated, as long as we can plug into all their workflows. It should actually be able to autofill.

Tee Ganbold: 45:31

That's how sophisticated we want our platform to be and we're getting there, which is very exciting.

Silas Mähner: 45:40

I think it's. Maybe it's not necessarily a side tangent, but it's something that's not necessarily the core of the show, but you bring it up which is the customer experience and the customer I guess you could say user experience right, and I think that obviously, as you can see, I'm a fan of Apple. I think this is something that a lot of climate tech founders should be considering, because if, especially in the case, obviously it's for everybody, but especially in the case of working directly with the consumers, you need to make it very easy, because there are a lot of people who are skeptical of using these things and it might take extra time and if it's not a beautiful experience, if it's not something that makes you feel the same way when you open that iPhone box, you're probably not going to get a lot of people hooked on it, right, and you want people to really appreciate that experience, because it is extremely, extremely important to ensure that the users really enjoy what they're seeing.

Tee Ganbold: 46:37

So I'll show you our product. It is designed actually with the customer tan and actually, what a lot of people don't realize is that on the other side, it's probably a female administrator on the factory floor or in the office of the factory, and so we've built the system and really the sustainability ID so that it is so beautiful. Literally, I feel like I'm on Instagram when I'm using it and that's how beautiful it had to be for me to feel like, oh yeah, I'm happy to do this, and so it's so seamless. And, of course, there are bits of it where the data verification that's so important so we can trust the information going, but we've designed it so it's incredibly, actually beautiful. That was one of the requirements to the product design team, who are amazing, which has to be beautiful. I need to feel as though I'm using Instagram, because most people spend all their days on social media. We're used to this and we need that transferred to our experience as a product.

Silas Mähner: 47:56

Yeah, 100%. I think it's extremely underrated in many cases that a lot of people they don't think about it. Especially if you've got a lot of science people in climate, you need to make sure that the end users are enjoying the experience. You know we're running out of time at the end here, so I guess maybe just any one. Last thing I would like to ask is generally what areas are you excited about inside of climate for people to build companies in? What are the big opportunities from what you can see?

Tee Ganbold: 48:27

You know, the market is so expansive and there's so much that needs to be solved, so much actually, in every market there's a huge opportunity to build something. So I think there's a level right now the entire global economy, anyone who you could be from Mongolia and you can create a global business right now if you go and seize the opportunity. So the point is, you can start now and you can build something, as long as it solves a particular problem, and it is. You know, you get the capital and you know exactly what you need to do for your customers. I would say there's the best time to build a company in the climate, sustainability, esg, space, and the more the better, because, like nature, we need competition, we need the best product to win and we need those who deeply care about it, are knowledgeable about it, to win.

Silas Mähner: 49:34

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. You know we've talked I've mentioned several times on my side as well here the making. It has to be a really big impact that you can make but at the same time there's a lot of opportunities for small impact in the local community. I think that sometimes that is overlooked. So don't want to over, you know, underplay the necessity of a lot of people doing things, because if there's something great and maybe it is done on a smaller scale but you're still doing it and then you recognize, oh, maybe actually we could do this on a bigger scale, it could be a better opportunity. So I appreciate that and I like the competition side. I think there's a lot of. It's very important to be kind of searching out for these new things that really are the best solution so we can use them, because there's always going to be new things. So let's keep an eye out for those. Any final thoughts or kind of calls to action for the listeners?

Tee Ganbold: 50:27

Yeah, totally Well, if anyone wants to collaborate and work with us, if you want to understand how Genitive AI can help you as a business, become, you know, even more powerful. Literally, we call it sustainability superpowers. If you want sustainability superpowers, get in touch, and we've got an amazing team in America. We've also got teams in other places in Europe, canada, and so let's get in touch and please email me directly if you have any questions at teaatopiniestucom.

Silas Mähner: 51:05

Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure.

Tee Ganbold: 51:08

Thank you so much. Guys, take care bye.