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Founder Vision - Episode 047 - Interview with Alex Price, CTO of Ecologi===One of our core values at Ecologi is transparency. So we, we post all of our financials, all of our board minutes, every receipt in that is all online available. And so we're operating at like a higher level of transparency than any charity in a smaller margin than most charities. And we try and retain that transparency within the team.And I think having such an impact driven mission and ethos within the company, enabled us to hire a star talent. And there's people that are just desperate to do something really good with their skills. And, everyone at Ecologi works so hard. It does make my life a lot easier in hiring is really hard, but when the people are so great and they're so grateful to.Such an impactful job, it makes it a lot easier.[00:00:57] Brett Kistler: All right, everybody. Welcome back to founder vision. I'm your host, Brett Kistler. And today I'm here with Alex Price. Alex is the CTO of Ecologi. How are you doing Alex? [00:01:07] Alex Price: Didn't really well. Thanks. How are you?[00:01:10] Brett Kistler: Doing very well. So tell me a little bit about Ecologi and then even more importantly, and perhaps more deep, what brought you to the journey that brings you to caring about what you're working on with Ecologi?[00:01:22] Alex Price: Yeah. So Ecologi is a social enterprise based in the UK here. And our main goal is to reduce the world's emissions by 50% by 2040, yeah, pretty lofty, but we think through the power of collective action, we can, fund some incredible climate solutions and by collective action, I mean, involving as many individuals and businesses as possible.Contributing small amounts to, to have a huge amount of monthly spend, basically.[00:01:51] Brett Kistler: Beautiful. Yeah. How did you end up in this, in this business and what made you think that you could change the world so impactfully and decide to spend your efforts? Going for this. [00:02:04] Alex Price: Yeah. So I've been a climate activist for quite a while.Mainly doing things with extinction rebellion and taking a lot of personal action to reduce my own emissions, my income. And through that, and the previous stops I was working on, I was approached by Elliott. Who's the CEO of Ecologi. And he knew that I was interested in this stuff and he said, look, I've got this idea.What do you think? And I unfortunately ignored his email for about three months, I think. And, eventually when I got around to reading it, yeah. Like, oh crap. This is amazing. I'm going to basically drop everything that I'm doing and start because it was an opportunity that was too good to miss. I really wanted to do something with my technical background.my software engineering background and yeah, this was the pitch. The Elliot gave me, it was, was too good to miss. [00:02:51] Brett Kistler: Nice. And so what, what about that pitch resonated in you and what in your life has brought you to the point that it would resonate in such a way? [00:03:00] Alex Price: Yeah, I think it was just so simple. I know, I think the best ideas are often the simplest and he just said, for the price of a coffee and a croissant a week, sorry, a month, you can offset your emissions and implant 140 trees a year.And I just thought, wow, like I didn't realize climate action was so affordable. When you look at how many people, especially in the Western world have that much money to spend on a coffee and a croissant. Some people spend that you've every day, hopefully we can convince them to part with one of those a month and really make a massive change.And if, if we can scale to the size of Spotify, we can reach our goals in terms of reducing the carbon emissions of the world by 40%, by 50%. [00:03:38] Brett Kistler: So talk to me a little bit about the ways that, that, that, that money would be deployed in, reducing carbon emissions. Because my understanding is that you can't just plant trees or just purchase carbon offsets.There's a complex network of carbon that is being released that needs to be reduced and it's released. Then there's a number of solutions for sinking carbon. And of course we require a mix. And how are you, how is Ecologi approaching that? Yeah, [00:04:06] Alex Price: so right now we are focusing on, on verified carbon reductions and tree planting that we don't count towards any carbon emissions reduction suite.We call that kind of future planning and offsets and carbon reductions are kind of verifiable today. And the plan is to do that until we have so much money that we can start throwing, like future tech, carbon sinking in various different ways. So it's, there's a multi-phase plan and we're just at the beginning of that.So there's many, many avenues to go once we, which like a bigger scale. [00:04:40] Brett Kistler: So what makes it climate for you that this is the thing you're working on personally? Yeah, [00:04:45] Alex Price: I think it really encapsulates so many of the things that I see that are kind of broken in the world. So in terms of like, Emissions of meat, like mass meat production and, plastic pollution.And so many of these problems that are so prevalent right now, kind of come under the umbrella of climate as well. Like if you solve those problems and you solve climate problems, then kind of doing them all at once. And the other part of Ecologi that's really cool is that we educate our customers and how to reduce their own emissions.So we're not just about like set and forget it. We're also about reducing your own current footprint. yeah, so much of that can be done through quite simple changes. And I made those changes a long time in my own life and, I really think that there's not a sacrifice. Yeah. That's, that's kind of how it becomes, became such an obvious kind of path for me. I didn't feel like I was missing me. I didn't feel like I was missing flying in know, there are just like alternatives that you just get totally used to and you don't miss out. And so, yeah. [00:05:48] Brett Kistler: So tell me a little bit about the journey of. So you're, you're the CTO of Ecologi.What size is the company now? And what size was it when you joined? Yeah, [00:05:56] Alex Price: so for the first six months, it was just myself, Elliot and Lucy, the three founders. And now we're at 31 as of this week. I think we doubled in head count last quarter after our first investment round. And yeah, we're continuing to scale really rapidly now.And it's, that's partly due to the way. Like at the very early decision to not be a charity, we got like a very, like, quite a few emails at the very beginning. Like, oh, why, why aren't you guys a charity? You seem like a charity. We just were like, this is too big of a problem to scale like a charity scales.Like we have to, we have to blow up right. We basically become a unicorn, but with an impact driven model. And, and so, yeah, we're, we're social enterprise B caught pending, but for-profit, and that allows us to take on, external investment from VCs and, and hyperscale. Hopefully [00:06:46] Brett Kistler: Tell me a little bit more about that.about the financial sustainability of the business. How are you bringing in, this like coffee a day and applying it towards carbon credits and towards, towards planting trees. In a way that is profitable in a way that also feels good to the efficiencies of people who are wanting to be paying their money to, to [00:07:07] Alex Price: help the environment.Yeah. Cause w when it kind of boils down to it, our core model is basically being a middleman, right? So we, we take people's money and we distribute it to the best climate action. And I have to do that with a really slim margin, which is, it's been difficult at times. We have a 15. Mark up on the emissions reductions and the trees that we plant for people.So, but the there's a lot in the pipeline. I'll, I'll just say that, we've got many other products and services that, especially in the B2B market, we can offer a lot more and hopefully have a much more sustainable kind of business model for our investors and shareholders. [00:07:41] Brett Kistler: So,tell me a little bit about the journey of growing from a team of three co-founders to over 30 people and especially in such a rapid time.With this rapid scale-up. How has that been for you? [00:07:55] Alex Price: It's been a whirlwind. Yeah. It happens really, really quickly. We just had a quarterly meet up cause we're, fully remote teams. So we try and meet up at least once a quarter. And, having 20 odd people there and after a few drinks, they're coming over and they're saying, oh, you've created such a great company.You must be so proud. I'm like, I don't even know what happened. I was just like hustling away at the computer and suddenly there's all these people that kind of like are employed by me. And so, yes, it's just been a real emotional journey. I've just started with, my first proper mentor.He's going to help hopefully help me, continue to be a really valuable CTOs, the company skills to 200 members of staff. And, but up until that time, like I've just, I think we've really focused on hiring really great people and creating a leadership team that is really supportive and transparent and honest.And that's one of our core values at Ecologi is transparency. So we, we post all of our financials, all of our board minutes, every receipt in that is all online available. And so we're operating like a higher level of transparency than any charity in a smaller margin than most charities. And, we try and retain that transparency within the team.And I think having such an impact driven mission and ethos within the company has really enabled us to hire A star talent. and. They th there's people that just desperate to do something really good with that skills. And, everyone at Ecologi works so hard and it, it, it does make my life a lot easier in hiring is really hard, but when the people are so great and they're so grateful to have such an impactful job, it makes it a lot easier.Yeah. [00:09:30] Brett Kistler: You mentioned bringing on a mentor and, I'm curious what aspects of mentorship you look for and you're looking for in a mentor and also what, what personally you want to work on with them. [00:09:40] Alex Price: Yeah, I'm quite clear on my weaknesses and where those lay. So I'm always focused on improving those bits.So my mentor has a technical background has, has always been a technical leader of a big companies. He has a very, a business mindset. He always looks at the bottom line, looks at the return on investment, those types of things. And those are things that I will typically glaze over because I'll be too focused on the mission.it's like, I want to build the best product ever. He is like, well, can we afford to do that? Can you, what's and so it's, it's good to have that person to bounce back,and to really ask me the difficult questions. And, so yeah, I think just focusing on my weaknesses and that that's the, that's the kind of key ingredient for sure.[00:10:23] Brett Kistler: What are you doing for, for interpersonal development, for your, for your own personal, emotional development, and also for the purpose for that, for that side effect of doing so, which is being able to operate more effectively as a leader and with a team. [00:10:37] Alex Price: Yeah. So I've always been interested in, in personal growth type topics and, kind of group those under the umbrella of intentional living.And there's quite a few things that are kind of come into that, there's like Buddhism and stoicism and yoga and like, there's lots of, lots of things that kind of come into that. And yeah, I'm just, trying to not burn out. I think that's the core principle because I've seen, I've come close to burnout before I've seen my colleagues burnout.I just have to like keep myself from not hustling too much, like really real that end. Cause it's so easy to work over overtime and it's really hard to, to reclaim that once you burn out. So, that's, that's my current focus right now. [00:11:21] Brett Kistler: What's a good example of a time that you've burned out. And what were some of the signs of having had this experience could now see earlier and the actions you might've taken to prevent that burnout. When we were doing the due diligence for the first round of investment, that was, was tough. Very had to, I had to take a few days after that was signed because. It wasn't so much that it was like long days or, or like, hustling for a deadline necessarily.[00:11:52] Alex Price: But it was that there was so much riding on this, it's like, if we truly believe in this mission, then we have to raise this money. And if we don't, if we can't pass the due diligence, because of some, some technical issue or, something. like data protection or some policy that I've written that isn't good enough, then you aren't going to feel, feel appreciated.So that was a lot of like emotional weight and the there's a few sort of signals that come up for me. My daily practices go out the window. My sleep goes out the window, a have an aura ring and that used to track my, like, my metrics. And I got that after that, that close burnout call. Cause hopefully every day when I check my aura, I can say like, yeah, you slept like sh*t last night, take it easy.And yeah, that is, I kind of recommend it to anyone in a leadership role. And that comes under a lot of stress. A lot of pressure has some kind of biofeedback mechanism just because it's, you get so stuck in the weeds unless you have something to like call you out. It's really easy to, to just, yeah, just run yourself into the ground.[00:12:53] Brett Kistler: So as you, as you've transitioned from, that founding trio, and you're more focused on your own burnout, your own personal,centerdness, personal resourcing. And as you grow to a team of 30 and you have a number of people working under you, how have you shifted from tracking your own emotional fluidity and your own emotional resources to also now observing and tracking and supporting that, that same thing for, for those that work for you.[00:13:22] Alex Price: Yeah. It's a really interesting question. Something that we think about a lot in the leadership team, we at college, we try and distill things to their kind of core, and we're trying to find those single or. Two metrics that kind of tell our whole story. and, and for us that's team energy, that's the kind of core, the core metric that we track for, for this sort of thing.If someone's energy is low, then it's usually because they're stressed or there's too much work on their plate for some reason. And, and for us energy means like, how enthusiastic are you when you wake up on a Monday morning or, at the end of a Friday night, like, are you desperate to get onto your weekend or are you happy to stick around?[00:13:59] Alex Price: And, it's not that we ask people. To push through and work extra hours. Like we're really, we really pushed them to not have to work extra hours, but, people do and that's because their energies are up. And, and, if it's just a really good indicator of where someone is. So, that's, that's kind of the core metric that we've.[00:14:16] Brett Kistler: So a question that I really like to get into often, and I think I mentioned this in our preparation, but I I'm really curious to hear about something that you've learned about yourself, whether it's through business or whether it's through a personal experience or a heartbreak or, sports or something that just completely opened you up to a new aspect of yourself that having seen changed the way that you operate in business or in relationships or everything, if one comes to mind. yeah, it's kind of two that come to mind. the first one is around lifestyle design, and it's, it's that kind of a term that was really trendy like 10 years ago. and is a bit. bit these days, but, back in the, in the Tim Ferriss days, when it was all about lifestyle design, that was, I really bought into that.I I simplified my entire life and, took my backpack to Bali and lived out there and was, was doing the digital nomad thing. And, and when I came back to Britain, I continued that way of life and, That really, that low cost living and really minimalist living allow me to take on this opportunity with Ecologi.Because I didn't, we worked for the first year without paying ourselves and, I could do that by completelyminimizing my, my outgoings. so that, that's the first kind of the first thing that I'm really grateful for that, that that happened. and the, the, the other main kind of experience, I guess, was, reading a book by John Wheeler. And, this book is about non-dualism and, and the kind of, aspect of Buddhism and. It was, it was like a wake-up call, I guess it was like a, it was like someone who just shaking me up. I'd be like, this, you like, everything is just consciousness.everything is appearing in consciousness. You're not there's no, you there's. No. There's nothing going on that isn't just an appearance and, and that, I don't think it translates directly to my work, but it has given me an outlook and the space to make good calls, like all the way along until where I'm at right now.[00:16:24] Alex Price: It's given me clarity has given me space to, to make strategic decisions. And, it's what most of my daily practices kind of based around. And, and he, and I just, I kind of lean on that. For sure. [00:16:38] Brett Kistler: How does that non dual practice, how has that impacted your view of global issues, such as climate and global coordination problems across all of humanity that we all need to address in some sense together or.Some interlocking network of special interests that somehow complexly achieves harmony of some time. [00:17:03] Alex Price: I think the, the most obvious one for me is that there's nothing special about my existence and my outlook. I view myself as a, a viewport to, the universe witnessing itself and that can sound quite vague and hippy if you like, but that's, if you really distill what's going on, then you realize that everything like, we're all the same roommate at the same stuff. We're all, all the femoral and we're all gonna die rule. we all were never born for the last, however many years before we were born.And those like that, that level of understanding for me has enabled me to just be totally compassionate with, with everyone and everything that I see. And,that led me down a path of veganism for the, for the last five years. led me to, the kind of the aching of the global south and how they are going to be affected by the climate crisis and kind of mass migrations that are inevitable .I Have a lot of pain that comes from that, but a lot of, a lot of energy and a lot of drive that comes from those things too. and it's, that's really what makes me up in the morning and just, not, not thinking that I'm better than anyone and whether that be an animal or a rock, it's, that's kind of at the core. [00:18:15] Brett Kistler: Something that I like to ponder, which is when we do work that internal work or, nondual contemplation and we reach a place of just recognizing that we are a part of a system and that there's nothing special about us, but there's everything special about us and it's both end. And we reached this place of compassion and understanding, even for those who are acting against what we perceive to be our own interests.There's also. Once we're in that place, we become attached to it. And then, as humans, anytime we're triggered, we jump out of that. And then suddenly we dropped the compassion. We drop, the seeing and the vision. And I'm curious for you, what are the ways that, what are the triggers and the things that happen for you, perhaps a couple of recent examples or distant examples that drop you out of that level of compassion and how does that impact your your life and your work and then how do you recognize it and bring yourself back there? Yeah, [00:19:10] Alex Price: I think when I am exposed to. Like mass negligence, I lose hope and that can, can sometimes spiral into a bit of an existential crisis where I'm like, what am I doing? Like, why am I spending so much time on this problem when there's just no hope?And like literally losing feeling like we've gone too far and that humans have, have f*cked up basically, but Yeah, I'll have to just remember that no single individual is to blame, we're, depending on how much you believe in free will, you can, you could just have to lean back in compassion and say, like this, this world leader or this dictator, hasn't decided to have these thoughts, that's just a product of his upbringing and the negative system that he was brought up in.When I get into a spiral like that, I have to just take some time away, usually get into. And I'm very fortunate to live on a boat on the river, Avon and here in, in Bristol. And so I feel quite connected to nature on a daily basis, but it's really good to get out into, into a forest and just sleep on the ground like that for me,really brings me back and yeah, doing a lot of journaling, just there's something about writing that.It uses a different part of the brain. I think like, I don't know the science of journaling, but I know that it's different. Yeah. [00:20:27] Brett Kistler: So th there's this, there's this aspect of climate action that, in a way of seeing it, and, in many ways humans are perhaps the first species that we know of to be self-aware enough to be self critical of the actions that we've, that we take in overpopulation. And, I could, I could go to the, the reefs in, the Cayman islands and see, the lion fish that have overpopulated and they're killing all kinds of species. And I look at the lion fish and I'm like, There's one way to say that they're f*cking up the reefs.And there's another way to say that they're just being lionfish and this entire process that humanity is in is also a natural process of reaching its point of overpopulation and hitting a homeostatic limit that needs to be brought like come back from. And I'm curious to what extent going into nature brings you into contact with the naturalness of our human process, even in all of its artificial destruction. [00:21:25] Alex Price: Like what you said about, The reefs like it is going into nature is a reminder that I'm just an animal. Right. And, that I am just human thing, if that was ever a word and the, I can't remember where I heard it, but there was, I was chatting with a friend yesterday about freewill and they were, I was saying, if a bear mauls someone to death, like, do you blame the bear?Do you like doing bad things and if you see human maul someone to death, then you lock them up and you tell them they're a bad person. And we were just discussing like how that's a, it's a complicated problem because you have to de-incentivize harm where possible. But, but really like these, we are just all doing.These things without really, we think of them are conscious of them, but in reality, like in I don't know what the percentage is, but very close to a hundred percent of our actions are non-conscious and, and just automatic. even down to the words that we're saying right now, like they're just coming out without me really thinking about them.So, I have to be careful too, Not overthink these problems because I'm aware that I could easily decide that this isn't a problem and that I should quit. when I'm talking about climate, correct. Like climate crisis. And I know somewhere deep down that this is a, this is a worthwhile pursuit of my time and it's better than me being in FinTech or, app like Apple apps, And like this has got to be the best. The best use of my time in the stock world. And if there is like unwritten plans for Ecologi to kind of not pivot, but grow into other areas of crisis. So like ocean pollution, for example, that isn't covered by anything we do right now. But. say in 10 years, you and we scale to a place where we can just pour money into the climate issue and we fix that, then we can start pouring that money into, into the next problem.And hopefully we can solve all the problems that money can solve that way. There's a lot of problems that money can't solve, but that was kind of like tangent tangent off for your question. But, yeah, hopefully that makes sense. [00:23:35] Brett Kistler: Yeah. Again, I mean, that brings me to something else that's interesting to me, which I, I think something that you were, that you were pointing to there and with a bear example is that it's important to just recognize that sometimes processes or processes, there's a pair. If he's a taxi who is being a bear and, maybe we feel a little bit more helplessness about that because we don't have the tools of communicating with a bear that say, Hey, could you please not do that?You'd have other tools like separation distance fences, bear spray, but that's sort of a digression, but I think that's curious to me is that you made this distinction between the problems money can solve and the problems money can't solve, and often money thrown at problems to solve them when money can't solve them starts to create that muddy cycle of things being non-linearly worse.And that's just a, that's just a core aspect of the human condition or the condition of life, which is, the lionfish, the bear and our climate crisis all coming from that place. And so I'm curious how you meditate that question and find a deeper and finer distinction between the things that money can solve and the things that something else needs to solve and how you can be interacting with both of those things and affecting both of them through your company, [00:24:54] Alex Price: From a leadership and like found the role position we made a really early decision to. To lean on the experts and the scientists. we're ideas people, we're product people, and we are confident in our skillset in building an incredible product like incentivizes climate action and rewards people for, for giving money. But we are well aware that we're not climate experts.We're not, we're not experts in other areas. So we have a, a group of, we call them the climate committee. I'm not sure how many people there. I know it's growing quite quickly, but they are people that we pay for for their time. And they've been sourced around the world and they have different sets of expertise, but we go to them with every, every question, every project that we support goes through them and is verified by them.So it's, if we were to tangent into a different area than we would create a new climate and a new committee in a full for that topic. And, and just trust that the kind of group sync. [00:25:50] Brett Kistler: How do you select those committees? But my kind of my experience with like expert panels is that there can be a lot of different perspectives that are integrated there.And then how are you also integrating the perspectives of the people who aren't thinking about these problems, but still have a stake or are impacted. Like what's the way that you consolidate as many perspectives as you can into, into a panel of experts. Yeah, [00:26:13] Alex Price: that's a great question.after our Sam. Climate coordinator because we put out a big call for, for people to apply for the climate committee and we do various intakes. So we like, we started off with a small group and then we opened it up to some more. And so as Sam interviews, each of them, and, and I presume that he goes through a process of making sure that we're, we have people from diverse set of backgrounds and a diverse set of scientific knowledge, but I don't know the specifics of that. So I think if we don't do that, do that, then like XR, extinction rebellion do a really good model where they, they make sure that they have representatives from every single group and they don't have to be experts.[00:26:54] Alex Price: They just have to have an opinion. And I think. It would be a great model to grow into if possible. [00:26:59] Brett Kistler: All right. So we're getting kind of close to our time here. And so to, to wrap this up, what does Ecologi look like in five years? If it exceeds all of your expectations and what does your role look like in both Ecologi and in the climate space. [00:27:16] Alex Price: Yeah. If we can, if we can hyper scale, like we want to then basically everyone in the west, at least that can afford to contribute some money per month to these issues. We'll be doing it through our platform. The platform will be very rewarding and social in many ways. And that pool of money, you can, can be distributed into the best places.And rather like we're going to probably quite quickly run out of verifiable emissions reductions. there's, there's massive companies that are buying these certificates and, and retiring them to get, to meet their emissions goals. And so we're going to have to start looking into running our own projects, which is really exciting.We're also going to have to start funding, breakthrough climate technology that, it doesn't, it's not going to have the same numbers and the same verified standards that we currently have, but is going to be able to fund a lot of research in, in really exciting areas. So that's where we want to get to and, and hopefully have some in to have some real breakthroughs. [00:28:14] Brett Kistler: Beautiful while I'm cheering you on Alex.And thank you for joining us. [00:28:17] Alex Price: Thank you so much.