Olio co-founder, Tessa Clarke, shares how she is reducing waste and backing female founders
By CA magazine
24 August 2023
Tessa Clarke has two driving passions – reducing waste and boosting the visibility of women entrepreneurs. As co-founder and CEO of Olio, the best-backed female founding team in the UK, she’s achieving both. Lysanne Currie hears how
Outsiders need money, not mentoring; power, not platitudes.” So said Olio CEO and self-proclaimed outsider Tessa Clarke as she received this year’s Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award in June. “What really shifts the dial is giving female founders money. To suggest we need mentoring is to suggest we’re not capable of launching businesses. That is just not true.”
It certainly isn’t in Tessa’s case. Olio, the sharing app that aims to reduce food waste and promote sustainable consumption, has gone from strength to strength since she and Saasha Celestial-One (formerly of American Express and McKinsey) founded it in 2015. It has grown beyond its starting vision – connecting people to share unwanted food – to include the lending of household appliances. With over seven million users, more than 119 million portions of food shared and 18 billion litres of water saved, its impact is significant. Two years ago, Olio announced a £31m Series B round, bringing its total financing up to £42m and making Tessa and Saasha the UK's most heavily backed female founding team. The likes of Tesco are now partnering with the firm to reduce their waste.
What's in a name
The name Olio refers to a miscellaneous collection of objects – which is indeed what you will see on the app – as well as a traditional Mediterranean stew. “And stew is used to prevent food waste, which is obviously what Olio exists to do,” says Tessa.
But, while the vision was in place, Olio faced a significant first obstacle – early adopters loved the concept but didn’t have any food to share, while local businesses had excess food but were too busy to engage with the app. “We’d naively hoped local bakeries, cafes and delis would use Olio to give away food themselves,” says Tessa. “We quickly discovered that they didn’t have enough time to be messing around with an app, messaging the community and handing out food in different portions. In the very early days, we were a food-sharing app with no food – pretty useless!”
Olio saw it needed to match people with spare time but no food waste to businesses with plenty of food waste but no spare time. And so it created the Food Waste Heroes programme, recruiting and training 95,000 volunteers to collect unsold food from local establishments. “On their allotted time of day, they go across the road, collect the unsold food from that business, take it home, add it to the app, and within minutes their neighbours are requesting it and picking it up,” says Tessa. “Half of the food we put up is taken within 21 minutes.”
Olio also recognised it was building a two-sided marketplace with a focus on supply rather than demand. “We learned from day one that there’s no shortage of people who want free stuff and we obsessed over how we could get more supply into our marketplace to really get it kick started.” The solution was to expand beyond food to allow users to give away household items too. “We hate waste of any variety.”
Olio, Tessa says, may have started off as a food waste app, but “where we’re going to is an app that completely reinvents how we live and consume, because the current model of consumption is entirely broken. Many people are buying stuff that has been ripped out of the planet thousands of miles away, shipped across the world, utilised for 5% of its useful life and then tossed into landfill. Humanity is consuming resources as if we have 1.75 planets.”
Tessa points the finger of blame squarely at the West: “We are a living test case to demonstrate that a consumption-fuelled economy is not a fulfilling economy. We need to reinvent our model of consumption, which is really about harnessing and fully utilising the resources that already exist in our local communities. We’re building the rails of redistribution, if you like, to make sure that the world’s precious resources are fully optimised.”
She recalls the “hair-raising” challenges of Covid-19 when the very existence of a neighbour-to-neighbour food-sharing app was thrown into doubt. Ironically, it worked in their favour. “The community made it extremely clear that we had a responsibility to keep operating through the pandemic,” she says. And this they did, taking steps to ensure compliance with guidelines, implementing a no-contact pick-up system, with items left outside for collection. Initially, there was a 20% decrease in sharing, but it skyrocketed soon after, resulting in a fivefold growth for the app.
Tessa thinks several factors contributed to this surge. “Drag your mind back to the early days of the pandemic,” she says. “All across the media, we saw photographs of empty supermarket shelves. For many people, that was a visceral gut punch of fear about access to food in a way that perhaps they hadn’t had before. That led to an overnight increase in the value people attached to food.”
But, she says, crises often drive people to connect, to offer or seek help in their local communities: “The ‘great pause’ many experienced during the pandemic really led them to reevaluate their lives and how they were living.” Meanwhile, severe global weather events brought the climate crisis closer to home – “very much on people’s own doorsteps,” as she puts it – leading to a step change in how people think about sustainability.
There was another factor, of course: the shift to remote working provided people with more time at home, leading to more decluttering and easier pick-up arrangements. It’s a concept Tessa was familiar with long before the pandemic. “We’ve been remote working since founding Olio,” she says. “And for many years it felt like our dirty little secret. We’d try to tell people about it but they couldn’t wrap their heads around it. We stopped talking about it because it became a distraction. Investors, in particular, genuinely couldn’t believe it was working.”
At first, it had been adopted out of practicality, as both founders had young children and couldn’t easily commute to an office. And it has other benefits too: “A lot of businesses lament the fact they can’t recruit for diversity in their organisations. It’s hard to get female developers, for example. But the minute you release the constraints of a London HQ commute, it suddenly opens up an incredible talent pool.”
Funding battle
Tessa describes herself as an outsider “living in a man’s world”. And when it comes to investing, the data bears this out. “Just 1% of all venture capital investment goes to female-founded businesses; 85% goes to male-founder businesses, and 14% goes to mixed teams. And those data points have stubbornly refused to budge.”
She understood both the conscious and unconscious biases against a women-led business “fairly early on… I remember vividly realising in our second round of financing that the very first slide in my deck needed to have all our corporate experience underneath my and Saasha’s name to make investors take us seriously.”
And while there are now more junior female investment professionals, that’s still not translating into funding for female founders. Tessa believes investment committees can only effect change if they’re truly diverse, and, at present, only 10% of cheque-writing VC professionals are female – a figure, she believes, that highlights the need for targets to increase female representation.
“Fundraising is a process of negotiation,” she says. “And you negotiate well when you’re negotiating from a position of strength. Yet, as a woman, you don’t find yourself in the luxurious position of having five investors who want to invest with you, so you’re not starting from a position of strength. As a female founder, you’re having to try to summon up confidence while doing a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors act. It is extremely challenging.”
She refers to the 2018 TED Talk by Dana Kanze, Assistant Professor at London Business School, in which Kanze describes how female founders are asked “prevention” questions while male founders are asked “promotion” questions. “And that is true,” says Tessa. “Very occasionally, I’ve had an extremely enlightened investor, who has asked me promotion questions. And it’s then that I realised how fun fundraising can be. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is why the men like fundraising, because this is what their experience is like.’”
These days, as a Venture Partner at MSM fund, Tessa spends time helping people with their pitch decks: “More importantly, I can also connect them with people who can actually invest.”
Tessa can recall her own lightbulb moment, co-founding Olio after a 20-year corporate career. “When you become very senior in a large corporate, you’re considered an expert,” she says. “And I realised at the beginning that, actually, when you start your entrepreneurial journey, your knowledge is zero. You have to embrace the fact that you don’t know anything, but to set about learning as much as you can as quickly as possible. That gave us a real learning and experimental mindset which, coupled with that fire in our belly, has enabled us to keep on going despite the odds.”
Those odds are shortened by recruiting not just for mission-fit but “mission-obsession: a really important unifying glue,” she says. “In the early days, when you haven’t much of a reputation, and haven’t raised a lot of money, only the truly mission-obsessed want to work for you. We’ve been overwhelmed by the calibre and quantity of our people. So many people are quitting their jobs to work for us – they realise they don’t want to be part of the problem anymore, they want to be part of the solution.”
Having that degree of mission-obsession also minimises the internal politics, she says, because everybody is working towards the same goal: “It builds an incredible foundation of trust. And, as a result, we have an exceptionally strong company culture.”
Failure, Tessa says, is not an option, “due to our deep understanding and fear of the climate crisis. And we know that if humanity is to stand any chance whatsoever, then we have to scale earlier – we have to get to one billion Olio-ers by 2030. We are extremely stubborn, resilient, driven and motivated. We are here and we are committed.”
Amid news that the UK, like many countries, is missing climate targets on nearly every front, it’s to be hoped enough people recognise the challenge Olio has taken on and join them in their crucial crusade.
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