Encounters With Success Podcast Transcription

Richard

Welcome to Cazenove Capital's Coffee with the Founder, the podcast where we talk to people who make and build businesses. It's not just the business creation we're interested in, it is the people themselves. How do they fit their entrepreneurial activity into the rest of their lives? How do they feel when they encountered failure? And how do they feel if they were successful and as is inevitable with success, they have to pass on their business creation to someone else.

I'm your host, Richard Dyson, and today we're talking to Saasha Celestial-One. It's an amazing name and it's such as legal surname, invented by Sasha's parents who Sasha herself describes as hippie entrepreneurs. And it's also the start of an amazing story. She may have hailed from a hippie background, but Sasha's careers involved stints at corporate giants Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, and Amex. She also has an MBA from Stanford School of Business, but we're talking to Saturday because of the huge success of Olio the food waste Enterprise she co-founded in 2015. It now operates in dozens of countries and has almost one million users. Saasha, welcome and thanks very much for joining us.

Saasha

Thank you for having me.

Richard

Saasha, start by talking about your childhood. You grew up in rural Iowa. What was that like?

Saasha

I often describe my childhood is very unconventional and rather chaotic, but obviously leaving a huge imprint on me and shaping me into who I am today, which of course I'm sure it's the same with everyone in their childhood. But I was the oldest of six kids and my parents separated when I was really young and my responsibility was to help my mother keep the household together and help her to make ends meet, so we grew up without a lot of money and I self-identified as feeling poor and that meant that we, my mom specifically, but me in and support of her had to be really, really resourceful and creative in terms of making everything work. My childhood was sort of every hippie stereotype under the sun you can think of. It was part of my childhood. No, I went to Grateful Dead, toured around the Grateful Dead every summer for the 1st thirteen summers of my life and I was you born in a barn and my parents had a party where everyone ate my placenta. And I've never been vaccinated, and all of those types of all of those sort of things you might think of as a bit, I guess off the grid form part of my childhood. It was very free. And also I, I don't think I felt as much as a child as I felt as a, you know, a human in a child's body and that I had immense freedom to do what I wanted as well.

Richard

It sounds incredible. You talk about the kind of culture of making use of things and finding things. Was that out of necessity, or was there a sense of value and purpose in that?

Saasha

My, so this countless of examples. My mom is just a serial micro entrepreneur and I was as well as a kid. Everything from you know, one example I gave us that she used to have me climbing the dumpster behind the plant nursery and pick out broken plants and then we would re-pot them and then sell them on our front lawn. Sort of all year round. You know $20.00 for a potted plant. She does that because she loves gardening. For her, there is an ingrained sense, and in me too, of injustice and just wrongness that perfectly good things are going to waste when they're still, you know, value that could benefit people in those things. And then also it is absolutely out of necessity. My mom was never the type of person to hold down a regular job, so she sort of had twenty, thirty, forty different micro enterprises such as that, which collectively you know…

Richard

Kept you guys going..

Saasha

Yes, exactly.

Richard

Wow. We'll come back to that to that sense of waste in a bit, but can you now take us to the next step? How was it that from that background you moved into something completely different, which was a sort of Wall Street type career in big business and finance?

Saasha

I think it's just a matter of a story of opposites and as is as much as many parts of my childhood. The free spiritedness and sense of adventure that I enjoyed. I really wanted to be normal. I really wanted financial security. I certainly, as much as I love my mother looked at sort of her approach to financial planning, and thought that's not for me and so it was relatively apparent to me that sort of bucking the system wasn't necessarily going to provide that level security that I was looking for, and that maybe I needed to conform to the system, which meant I've always just always been a bit of a pleased teacher type of person, so I focused on my academics. I, you know, I studied really hard. I performed well and I ended up going to University of Chicago to study economics, which seemed really sort of sensible at the time. And, the rest of my sort of the following thirteen years or so after university was a is a story of risk adversity. It seemed like all of the smart competitive kids were going to work either in management consulting or Wall Street, and so that's what I did, and I you know, they make it pretty easy for you when you're a high performing student who is studying economics. They basically come to you and woo you, and they offer you an insane amount of money  to go move to New York and get it, you know, work for them. So, it wasn't really a proactive decision on my behalf to go and spend four years at Morgan Stanley. It was more sort of following a well-trodden path. That said, I really enjoyed that time. I loved the, I don't know. I guess the big city-ness of it all. The sort of fast pace. I worked on a trading floor for two years, then just the sense of energy and the emotional rollercoaster day-to-day as the stock market went up and down. All of that I found quite intoxicating in the middle of my four years. So, we did have the dot-com crash and then I was in New York for 911. And you know that was not a pleasant time to be working on Wall Street.

Richard

But Saasha, to pick you up on one word that you used, which I think is fascinating, which is ‘risk’. And if I understood you, you were saying that that career that you've described, which is you know by anyone, standards, pretty super high flying was a process of avoiding risk.

Saasha

Yes.

Richard

Tell us a bit more about that, How is how is? How is working on Wall Street on the trading floor during you know, the aftermath of the dot-com boom and so on. How is that risk aversion?

Saasha

Well, I think that the Wall Street banks have really well established analyst programs which are known feeders into business schools, so you're basically, you know each additional professional experience you have, if it's, you know, if it's difficult to get a job at Morgan Stanley then, then you survive it. You're building up a CV that is just getting, that you're getting this sort of the brand association with the various universities or organizations or businesses that you're working with collectively helped to…

Richard

Keep you on a kind of straight and narrow you mean? For the next step up?

Saasha

Yeah. Exactly, if you're sort of fun, you're well positioned to go on to the next step. Be at Business School, and then you're well positioned to go into the next step and it just gives you. You know, it gives future hiring managers a sense of security to know that you've been accepted by and developed within, you know, large scale admirable you know, corporations.

Richard

And I guess then that does take us then to the next step. So you're sort of saying having built all that up. You are then prepared to change direction and leave it all behind, is that right?

Saasha

Absolutely I. It wasn't until the point where I had what I more or less felt was a bulletproof CV. Like anything happened, I could get a job, right? I was never going to sort of be homeless and destitute. Like, my CV was strong enough that I could take some risk and I found great comfort in knowing that I had a solid backup CV to support me in making some more risky decisions. I never felt that, I mean, I loved working on big accounts and later at McKinsey; big organizational challenges or big business challenges, but I never, I always, the things that interested me the most, were, you know, getting my hands dirty, you know, taking something that's worth $0.50 and then turning into something that's worth $0.75. And that process of ‘value add’, is the kind of thing that's always motivated me and I don't think I knew I was never cut out to be a partner, sort of in in a big corporate, but it took me a long time to feel that I could be more risky with my career choices.

Richard

So, were you hunting about for ideas to take forward in your own business space? Or how did how did Olio present itself? What led up to that?

Saasha

So yes, the answer is yes and yes. Yes, we were hunting. Tessa and I, but the other answers that actually came before Olio, I'd done another business for nearly two years and I was ready, that I started and I was ready and we won't go into that now. But I was ready to then think about, and at that point I was absolutely convinced that I wanted to continue to be my own boss. Continue to be an entrepreneur, but I also knew I wanted to work on something that was more scalable and could have greater impact. And in November of 2014, Tessa was at a similar sort of crossroads in her career, and we had previously worked on another start-up together, which we had abandoned the year before that. So there's lots of back story, but we knew we loved working together and that we shared the same values and work ethic, and so we proactively put our sort of McKinsey and BCG hats on respectively, and said, what is it? What kind of opportunity are we looking for? It needs to be global, needs to be scalable, it needs to be digital. It needs to be all about fixing and improving the environment. However we can. We did a three month of study looking at like, a classic market assessment study looking at every possible opportunity where we might be able to come in and modernize and bring value to some part of the sort of global waste system.

Richard

So you were drawing on, as you sat there, you were drawing on your management consultancy experience. You were saying these are what our project needs to satisfy.

Saasha

Absolutely, and the one thing about management consulting is that really for all of it's sort of… what it really leaves you with is, uh, of language or a toolkit. A way to approach problems and structure problems. I'm like, that it's impossible for me to really think about any problem without leveraging that skill set, if I'm honest. It sticks with you and it changes the way you approach things. It's incredibly valuable resource to have and on a very practical level.

Richard

Now explain how suddenly they earlier presented itself as something that went through all those criteria.

Saasha

I remember very clearly at the end of that big sort of out, that big sort of market assessment. We couldn't find anything that we thought was good enough to do and pretty much in tears on the eve of abandoning our start-up quest and thinking that we're going to need to get real jobs to support our families. As I went upstairs to breast feed her now five year old and she came downstairs and she said, well, I did have something happen to me that I haven't told you about. That's been niggling me, you know, on my mind. And she went on to explain how she wants before she been moving back from abroad to England. And on moving day, she had some perishable food items. I think, like an organic cabbage and some sweet potato things that would last for weeks if stored properly and she wanted to pack them in her, you know, boxes which we're going to get our ship back to the UK and they said on you can't. You can't pack any food. and she wasn't going to throw them away because that would be ridiculous and so she packed up her two very small children in the middle of winter in Switzerland and went out on the streets to try to find someone to give the food to, which was awkward and embarrassing.

Richard

What? So literally wandered around the Swiss city offering up vegetables.

Saasha

Well, there was a part where there was one or two people who had their sort of spots in front of the supermarket asking for help and she thought she might go and ask them. I don't know. I'm not quite sure what they would do necessarily with the cabbage, but she couldn't find anyone. Who was, you know, on the street. I guess asking for help. So she didn't knock on our neighbours doors. She thought that would be weird and that basically, that moment for her was, this is a very frustrating painful moment, which led her to eventually smuggling food into her packing boxes anyway.

Richard

So that was that, so she said to you, right, look, this happened to me. I haven't shared it with you. Haven't really thought about it, but could there be something in that.

Saasha

Yeah, she shared that idea and I think I think she in her mind. She been ruminating on whether  on the fact that there was clearly a problem that could be solved with mobile technology. You know, obviously someone wanted her food, she just didn't have any way to get to contact them.

 Richard

To connect to people who needed it.

Saasha

Exactly, and that was that was the spark when she told me that you know that story. I thought this is absolutely true. This is a real. I could just instantly see what she can see and had had been sitting with which was the opportunity to efficiently collect people with surplus with those nearby who would like to have that surplus, so that less goes to waste. And I think the reason that we initially, or maybe we had sort of dismissed that area of investigation initially was, we were thinking well it's just a cabbage, it's just that you know how can we really make a difference in scale? So it wasn't at that point like we just quickly did a Google search and we realized that food waste is the third largest contributor to the climate crisis. Sixty to seventy percent of all food waste actually takes place in the homes. It's not at restaurants, it's not at supermarkets, and the scale of the problem had not been immediately obvious to us at all before, and in fact, most people have a hard time getting their heads around the fact of the scale of domestic food waste, and just how catastrophic it is for the environment and obviously immoral too. But that was that was in January 2015.

Richard

So immediately you saw that this thing could solve it, that there's a financial aspect to the problem and there's environmental, there’s ethical aspects to it and you could potentially provide a solution, but presumably you are also thinking right from the start. How is this going to generate revenue?

Saasha

Obviously, we didn't not think about that, but I think we were smart enough if I'm honest to know that we weren't going to have that answer right now and that trying to monetize anything when it's subscale, because ultimately, what we're talking about is a hyper local marketplace. And you know, both Tess and I'm met at Business School, we've got plenty of experience in the business world like monetizing something subscale is counterproductive and also the constraints constrain the growth. If you have millions of people using the same platform to do X,Y or Z, you can find a way to monetize it, and often that's a process of experimentation. But, you are correct in the beginning we thought that we allowed people to sell, so we said you could sell your surplus as long as it wasn't more than fifty percent of the original retail price and we thought eventually we would take a percent on that. A Commission on that. We never even got to that point because we quickly abandoned selling. If I'm honest because it just didn't fit ultimately with the community in the vision that we ended up creating.

Richard

Sure, so it was really at that point about building a community. And of course you can talk a little bit more about this and we want to hear, but the community presumably is built around this very strongly held shared view about waste, environment and so on?

Saasha

It is. People join Olio because they really hate waste. It goes against sort of every evolutionary instinct in our body to throw away things that have value. Specifically, nutritional values that could help a member of your species like no one enjoys throwing away good food. It's a pain. It's physically sort of painful experience. And on the other side it feels amazing to give food to someone and have them appreciate it. That's why we love to bake for friends and family and we celebrate Holidays and celebrations with food, it's food that plays a really emotional part in all of our lives and it brings us together. And you know when people are sharing two or three bananas on Olio, they're not doing it because they want to get 40 pence worth of free bananas right. There's a lot of other psychological and emotional reasons that go in to facilitate food sharing.

Richard

I understand that, so you must be. I mean, you must have seen that early on as the community grew, tell us, tell us a little bit about that early sense of ‘we're on to something’.

Saasha

Well, from the day we incorporated to the day we launched in the App Store was five months. Which meant we were very, very busy. The first thing we did was to put together a market research survey through using SurveyMonkey, and we knew that we were going to have to pick a geographical area to pilot which was north London where I live and we had three hundred and fifty, maybe four hundred people posted in local North London Facebook groups. We got them to fill out this survey and of course we ask them how they feel about food waste. Over a third of people said they feel physically pained when they throw away food that is recently was edible. We asked people how  likely they were to participate in a variety of behaviours. Would I pick up? How likely am I? How far would I walk to pick up, you know, homegrown food from a neighbour. Home cooked food from a neighbour, you know, a whole variety of different scenarios. Leftover food from takeout. From it, you know, be able to figure out basically what the appetite for Olio was. And then we also asked people you on a scale of one to ten. How much would you love for us? You know, how excited are you for us to bring Olio to life, and the results were pretty incredible. I think ninety three percent of the respondents said they blocked 10 to 15 minutes to pick up homegrown food from a neighbour, for example.

Richard

Wow! Which is probably further than their local supermarket.

Saasha

Yes, but the idea that your neighbour has an allotment and they've got a glut of courgettes and they don't know what to do with the glut of courgettes. I mean, that's just a ‘ticks the box’ on so many different levels. And from a satisfaction perspective for people.

Richard

So in a way, you had your kind of reason to go for it. Go for the concept in that survey.

Saasha

We, to be fair, Tess and I were so convinced we're going to do it. Probably no matter what, but we also knew that we had to follow some basic best practices in terms of validating our idea. There's a big difference between what people say they're going to do and what they actually do. So we then did a proof of concept. We found twelve people from the survey who were a nine or ten in terms of wanting us to launch Olio and we asked them to participate in a two week long WhatsApp proof of concept. Which was simply a WhatsApp group where these strangers who had never met each other, but who all lived within a mile of each other, put in the group and told. You know, if you have food that you don't want to take a picture and add it here if you want it, private message and requested it. That was really what people actually follow through on these certain intentions . Because of you know there's often a gap between intention and action.

Richard

And so you saw that WhatsApp group, you know, flashing busily with pictures of food?

Saasha

We had twenty Yep so we had twenty six physical exchanges of these strangers sharing food in fourteen days and it was pretty incredible if I'm honest. And when we debriefed everyone they all said first of all,  “you have to build this”. That was amazing. Second of all I've met someone that, by the way, I've been Twitter friends with for ten years. We've never met and now we've had tea and the community element was something that we hadn't quite realized how much people enjoyed meeting people in their community. And they also said, by the way, guys were sort of showing them wireframes of our app. And they're like, you don't need it really. Just needs to be a bit like a WhatsApp group. So we were able to strip back loads and loads of features and launch our MPP much earlier than we originally anticipated. So it was actually a really helpful process. That's what really, that proof of concept may encourage any entrepreneur to make sure that they find a way to read the mom test first of all, which is an excellent book for this, but to find a way to like actually test demand for your product or service before you spend a bunch of time designing it or launching it.

Richard

I mean that must have been an amazing sense of confidence. Yeah, can you jump forward now to closer to where we are today and tell us how the service is operating and give a sense of scale and growth.

Saasha

Absolutely, so we launched across the UK in 2016 and then the next year we made the app available globally. We have seen food sharing successfully take place between neighbours in fifty one countries. Actually it's fifty two now, but I can't remember the most recent one. I think it was Malaysia and this has all been achieved and we've got 2.2 million signed up onboarded users who have collectively successfully shared 6 million times with each other. We have achieved this through a volunteer program. So what we have done, is anytime someone hears about the app and they download it and they open it up and they're in a place where there's not a lot of activity yet, this is very strong call to action which says we wish there was more activity. People are listening. Click here to find out how you can grow olio in your community and we've had over 50,000 people go through that process now all around the world and it takes them on a self-directed journey to give them the membership, the marketing materials and the guidance basically like a step by step plan. All the hyper local marketing materials they need to go out in their community and sign up their neighbours and basically get it started. So what we have is a very thin presence in a lot of places. In the UK though,  we're sort of definitely at that point where we are fairly well known and it's very liquid.

Richard

I understand, but to understand, there  this almost two sort of strategies. One is this networking at a very micro local level across huge global area. And then there's the brand, the brand presence,  increasing activity that you're doing say the adverts have people in the UK may have seen on the underground.

Saasha

Yes there is. So we started about just a year ago. We decided to, we've raised four rounds of financing and we're now just over thirty people. So, and we've also started monetizing a couple of years ago through our Foodways Heroes program, whereby we whole different set of volunteers. We've got just about 10,000 food safety trained volunteers that we match and assign to clients who engage us to help them achieve their goal of having zero waste stores. So whether that's Tesco or Pret et Manger or we work with Costa, Selfridges and loads of different businesses. Volunteers collect their end of day surplus and then safely store, handle and redistribute it to the community through the app from their home.

Richard

Saasha, is that the primary source of revenue now for the business?

Saasha

That is our first of and primary source of revenue now. For the business, correct? About half organization is focused on that part of the business from an operational and sales perspective?

Richard

You talked briefly about raising finance. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how easy it was to convince investors? I mean, it's a kind of hot sector for all of its environmental and social appeal, but I also imagine there's probably some scepticism amongst traditional sources of finance. How did that go?

Saasha

It's an odd one because it's been absolutely hell, fund raising like neither Tess or I enjoy fund raising. It's just such an emotional experience and it's at times and feels so arbitrary. And you know, often times, investors are like, wait, isn't this a charity and wait just fallen for lead and wait, everything's for free? I mean there's lots of things that might that make us stand out from perhaps a more typical, not necessarily in a good way. Typical, you know, potential investment. On the other hand, we're tackling a massive problem, you know, the global value of food that's wasted each year is $1.2 trillion, right. And Tess and I have really strong track records in terms of leading teams and business units to perform. Also, we have a really, really engaged community within a marketplace with exceptional liquidity. The percent of items and listings that are collected has stayed at three out of four, if not stronger everywhere since the day we started. So we've really high, We have a really strong liquid marketplace.

Richard

Presumably there's a lot of appetite from those businesses that you named who want to associate with the service as part of their own commitment to reduce waste?

Saasha

There's certainly a lot of appetite, absolutely. They would all love to have this service for free. Persuading them then they need to invest and this is a service that they need to pay for. It’s been a process. But I would say that we clearly have product market fit in our Olio for business proposition and that's why we've just invested significantly in growing the team to support that end in the business development team as well.

Richard

But give us a bit more of a flavour of how you've been received by investors, so you paint a picture where it's been quite tricky. There's a massively powerful story, but it sounds quite a tricky one to get across. What have people said to you?

Saasha

I mean, on the other hand though, I would say that that we're a success story because we have raised quite a lot of capital to grow our team. You know we have, you know, a really healthy start up or, you know, from a health start-up perspective, we're in a really good position from runway perspective etc. So, on the one hand, it's really hard. On the other hand, I'm really, really grateful and recognize that we've actually been really successful. You know, as two female founders working on tech for good. More or less for pre revenue and most of the time that we've been fund raising. I think the investor reception is completely binary. People either get it right and are convinced that this is an urgent and important problem and want to be part of the journey to solving that or they don't and there's not much we're going to be able to do to persuade them in the near term that food waste is a massive, really important problem.

Richard

Interesting. So, when you talk to investors, do you think you kind of come down to whether they buy the urgency of the need? Or does it come down to straight numbers game about revenues and so on?

Saasha

It's certainly the former. It's certainly the size of the problem, the vision, the team, the community, and I think also we will be honest, we've had more success with female partners and that our community is also skews sort of two thirds female as well.

Richard

That is so interesting, that is such an interesting glimpse? Both what you said about the community and the response that you had from investors? What's your guess as to why?

Saasha

I still think there are some gender differences in terms of what roles different genders play in the household. Thinking about shopping, cooking, surplus. I can't count the number of sort of meetings I've had with investors who said, well, I need to ask my wife or my housekeeper about this.

Richard

I see, so you think it's because still it's typically women who are throwing away food and purchasing food, and we're having to throw it away that they're the ones who feel that sense of waste most acutely.

Saasha

I do, and that's held quite steady and wherever we go we sort of see that. I think that also they might care a bit more about it, at least at this stage if I'm honest. Making the world a better place for our children so that they can live in hopefully not too much of an environmentally degraded future is something that is a message that resonates more with or so far, with at least where we are now is our early adopters and are sort of late/early adopters generally have been female now as we get more and more mainstream, which we're doing. I expect that will shift to a more balance gender split, but right now that's where our message has resonated the most, and we have certainly had that same sort of gender bias I guess, with when presenting to women.

Richard

That is extremely interesting and slightly depressing.

Saasha

We do have some really incredible male investors as well and so it's not like 100%. But for example,  our board is four female and one male.

Richard

Saasha, this whole this question about motivation and values. It leads me to another question about you, yourself. Clearly, you're passionate about what, what Olio can achieve and the whole issue of waste. But that is only part of the motivation is that you talk a bit more about the whole drive to create something, to create the community. Presumably something that is able to grow and be commercially independently successful. Is that important?

Saasha

Absolutely. I just made a job offer to someone right before this call and was explaining to her that like Don't be fooled, you know. Just because we're doing something that's nice doesn't mean that we aren't ruthlessly ambitious and not just because I want you know, like personally, going on that growth journey would be incredible. But because I really believe that the world needs something like Olio as a tool to help us to sort of globally reinvent consumption, an reinvent how we think about the resources that we have. So that we can help to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis and try and get closer and closer to a one point five degree..

Richard

To just to tease that out, a bit more than what you're saying is you want something like Olio to demonstrate that it can achieve those good things and be commercially successful at the same time. Is that right?

Saasha

The good thing is that our impact metrics and aspiration are in direct lockstep with our commercial value of our operations, so the more people who use Olio to redistribute things that would have otherwise gone to waste, whether it's food or other household items. Instead of purchasing new food or items in the primary market, like this is a massive sort of ripple effect in terms of shrinking the environmental impact of how we consume. Without getting too philosophical, so that and the more people that do that, the more valuable than network is, the more eyeballs  that you're looking at. I mean, the more opportunities there are to generate commercial value for investors. So for me, there's no tension whatsoever, and it's not like I need to choose one or the other. By definition, what wakes when I get up in the morning excited about is a billion people using Olio. I mean, I'm without getting too side-tracked into some of the horrifying statistics, but one, for example, is that Just ten percent of the things that are made and purchased each year have a lifetime beyond the value of twelve months. That's how disposable our society is. Now we consume way more than the Earth can replenish each year, and it's getting worse and worse every year. So, we're in this like snowballing situation where within our lifetime we're going to run out of resources or have to make some really scary choices about who gets what resources. So I'm really motivated by the actual ability of a sharing tool like Olio at scale to slow down that path towards, I guess you know that step, that passive inevitability. Am I glad that we've done something that if that happens and we're able to achieve our goals, we have an enormous amount of shareholder value that's icing on the cake.

Richard

I understand and looking ahead you've spoken about your ambitions, but how does it grow from here and where do see yourself? At what point do you say, I've created this thing now and I'll step back and hand it on to someone else? Where does this go?

Saasha

I honestly I can't imagine what else I would want to do that would be as meaningful as the work I'm doing right now. I'm not waiting to exit personally at all, as long as I can, you know, I know that as we scale and we really go on that high growth journey that will need to bring in people who have been on that journey before from outside organizations to help us do that successfully and not sort of, you know make the most common mistakes as we do that and I'm hoping that I can continue to lead that as the COO and head of operations. Yeah, I think for both Tess and I this is our mission is so. It's just really having. I've had lots of jobs and lots of professions and even had another start-up before, which I really sort of believed was really amazing. I feel very grateful and privileged to be working on something that I'm one hundred percent bought into. Sort of every second of the day and can't for the first table future see why I wouldn't be equally committed.

Richard

I think many people listening might feel envious that you found something that satisfies so many of your ambitions and passions and also utilizes your skills and would think to themselves, What can I find and do that gives me the equivalent satisfaction? What would your advice to them be?

Saasha

That's a good question, and now I want to apologize if I sound smug. I'm just really excited. First of all, we're always hiring, so please put your CV on our careers page.  But I guess I would say I can only I can only speak from my personal experience and I found an immense amount of freedom. It's a long story, but I found an immense amount of freedom in drastically reducing my monthly expenditure. So I haven't bought any new clothing since 2013.

Richard

You're getting back to your parents roots?

Saasha

Yeah? I realized that if I didn't have such an expensive lifestyle which I'd accumulated just gradually through years and working in expensive environments. How will I afford to live was a massive source of stress for me that kept me, I don't want to say trapped, but prevented me from finding more freedom in entrepreneurship For a long time. and I realize there are some things that I could do that weren't really benefiting me or bringing me significant value but had but actually were costing me a lot of money. You know, I cycle everywhere. I don't have a car, I mean the this sort of goes on and on. And even at Olio, I'm making significantly less than I made when I left American Express or McKinsey. But I'm so much happier. And if you can find a way to maybe like constrain what it is that you've defined as necessary, then you might find some spare capacity to explore things that would have otherwise felt I guess, outside of the scope of possibility, given your practical financial circumstances.

Richard

That's very practical advice. Saasha, thank you so much for your time is great talking to you.

Saasha

Thank you for having me and just a quick shout out. Make sure you download Olio and go on and share something with your neighbour. It's a lot more fun than you might imagine.

Richard

We certainly will. Thanks again. 

Saasha

Thank you.