Tackling climate change with big data

“I think we are just at the beginning of a massive revolution” — Lubomila Jordanova

Lubomila is the founder of Plan A, an impact tech startup that uses big data to tackle climate change. Doing this wasn’t always her plan at all. Lubomila has always been working in finance, first in investment banking, then in VC, and afterwards in a FinTech start-up in London. But something happened that changed her focus and career path a bit.

Lubomila is the founder of Plan A, an impact tech startup that uses big data to tackle climate change. Doing this wasn’t always her plan at all. Lubomila has always been working in finance, first in investment banking, then in VC, and afterwards in a FinTech start-up in London. But something happened that changed her focus and career path a bit.

How did you get involved with sustainability, climate change, and Plan A?

A few years back, I went on a trip to Morocco, to explore the best places for surfing. This trip was definitely an eye-opening experience. I expected to see beautiful places to surf, but everything was really polluted, mostly covered in plastic. For the first time, my eyes were open to the negative impact we, humans, had on our planet.

After this experience I got back to London and started to dig deeper into the topic of pollution and climate change, spending all my free time for the next 6 months educating myself on climate change and the correlation it had to pollution through online courses, books, and scientific papers. The knowledge I accumulated showed me that the situation worldwide was actually much worse than what was communicated across channels. My next step was to conduct a vast survey with 300 people and 100 companies to understand the behaviors and opinions about climate change. This was the final straw. After this I was beyond convinced that addressing climate change needed a different approach. I quit my job and founded Plan A.

How did all of this reflect on your personal life?

I changed a lot in my daily life. Firstly, I have stopped taking any kind of transportation — I take my bike everywhere. Moreover, I don’t eat meat for 5 years now and I don’t eat processed products that are processed. Last but not least, I haven’t bought new clothes in the last 4 years.

Ever since I started working on Plan A, I have so much respect for what nature gives us and her intelligence. This has helped me live a very minimalistic life — I don’t really have materialistic needs anymore. Somehow during this whole journey of consumerism, we ended up developing unnecessary needs for owning items. I can comfortably say I am beyond this. It’s quite shocking when you see the statistics on how many items an average person buys per year.

So, what is Plan A?

Plan A has developed the first Carbon Reduction Software which helps businesses calculate, monitor, and reduce their carbon footprint monthly, while automatically building each month a tailored sustainability action plan and offsetting schemes, according to the footprint of the company. The technology behind the software uses insights from the Plan A algorithm which analyses over 300,000 data points to predict and prioritize the most critical environmental issues and the way industries and companies impact these environmental changes.

For us, data has been very important since day one, as our fundamental basis is to respect the facts. I have made sure that we follow scientific principles and all the work that we do follows what the climate data science field has taught us.

What was your best moment as a founder until now?

There are so many! The first team member, our first event, our first “thank you” email, our first corporate client. In the last 6 months, the most exciting was the response to our software release. After we released the product, we had a waiting list of 300 companies within a few weeks. This was the proof that people and the companies where they worked were waking up to the urgency of climate change. What more would a Greentech startup dedicated to the reduction of emissions want?

Do you think that being an impact founder is more challenging?

I generally think that being an impact founder and any other entrepreneur involves the same activities and entrepreneurial challenges. You need to build a solid structure, a good team, set some tests to understand what your customers want and develop an amazing offering people love. As long as there is a business model that allows the company to sustain itself, and to grow on a long-term basis, then the challenge for an impact and another tech startup is the same.

One of the unique features of any impact startup is the dedication to the purpose of the company. Finding a topic that is bigger than you, bigger than a software, bigger than a life, makes you significantly more driven and also long-term dedicated. I feel incredibly honoured to be working on fighting climate change and would hope that one day every single business on this planet has the capacity to choose their own cause. Mine is climate change.

I think it is important to start talking more about that because when you are building something for impact, people often think you are building an NGO or it’s something that won’t scale. It’s still not properly perceived as a proper business and this is visible in investment patterns and in opportunities of acceleration for companies — this image of impact business unfortunately still needs to be changed in people’s’ mindsets.

Do you have any advice for (future) founders?

Be curious
I’m not sure how I would’ve built Plan A without the constant need of feeding my brain with new content, knowledge, and facts.

Be impatient
Normally this is not considered to be a positive skill, but in my case it helped me to have a sense of urgency. Anyone fighting climate change or any other big issues should work with a sense of urgency.

Be positive
Positivity has this creative power to engage people, get them excited and active. If you need help or want your startup to succeed, put a smile on your face, and work on a daily basis with positivity. It moves mountains.

Be balanced
Making sure that your head is clear is very important. I personally achieve this through yoga and meditation. It’s something that sets my day off in a way that I have a mind that can manage many tasks at the same time and a body that supports the intense work schedule.

Be with a good team
I think if I would have been doing this by myself, I probably wouldn’t be as motivated. It would feel like fighting a battle on my own — and it’s a big battle, which you need good people for.

What’s next?

At the moment, companies are in a big existential crisis, as with the urgency of climate change and embedding new sustainable business flows, the companies need to reshuffle completely on how they are used to make business. We definitely see shifts and baby steps being made, but there is still a lot that needs to happen, as we are just at the beginning of a massive revolution I would say. Our mission in this revolution is to help companies to reduce their emissions, as our number one goal has always been climate action. We want to generate the biggest impact through helping thousands of companies learn how to embed sustainability into their existence Big agenda ahead, but we are beyond driven to see it through.

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