Send us Fan Mail In 2015, Tessa Clarke was told to throw away all her uneaten food on moving day. She couldn’t do it, and ended up smuggling vegetables across the border instead. A decade later, Olio is a scale-up backed by more than $50 million from investors including Accel, Octopus Ventures and VNV Global: a community of 10 million people giving away food and household goods to their neighbours, 100,000 trained volunteers collecting unsold food from Tesco and other big food businesses, and more than 150 million meals saved from the bin. Along the way, Tessa made the kind of calls most founders talk themselves out of. She launched an app that was only slightly better than a WhatsApp group. She waited two years before making a penny. She raised five rounds as a female founder of a tech-for-good business, fighting to be taken seriously in rooms that saw “two girls with a project”. And after years of refusing, she let advertising in, not for the revenue but to push people to pay. Beyond being a business, Olio is a bet against overconsumption, and Tessa is honest about where that bet stands: most of us aren’t ready to consume less, and we won’t be while GDP growth is humanity’s north star metric. She makes the case for redefining what success means, and for why wellbeing economies keep emerging in countries led by women. We get into what each of those decisions cost, the 2023 restructuring that shrank the company she’d only just scaled up, and why she’d rather be alive and having impact than perfectly principled and dead. About Tessa Before Olio, Tessa spent nearly twenty years in the corporate world: a Cambridge degree, strategy consulting at BCG, a Stanford MBA (where she met her co-founder Saasha Celestial-One), then managing director roles at Emap, Dyson and finally Wonga, which she left in 2014. She co-founded Olio in February 2015 while on maternity leave. The company is a certified B Corp, and it has outlived Wonga, which collapsed in 2018. Outside Olio, Tessa writes for Sifted and campaigns for the Better Business Act. What we cover: 00:00 From turning around Wonga to building Olio 02:06 A farmer’s daughter and the moving-day lightbulb04:25 Launching a food marketplace in five postcodes, with a WhatsApp proof of concept 08:03 Flyers and community events before performance marketing 09:31 The one day Olio was a paid app 10:45 Food Waste Heroes: how a food-sharing app with no food found its business model 13:53 Corner shops, then Pret, then Tesco 19:08 Running 100,000 unpaid volunteers 20:37 Business or charity: the decision, and what it still costs 23:57 Raising five rounds against the odds 29:46 2023: scaling up, then shrinking back 38:11 Where profit and purpose actually collide 41:53 Inside the ads decision 42:52 Are we ready to consume less? GDP, wellbeing economies and women in power 47:55 Confidence, gut, and making calls at 40 to 70% certainty 52:05 What Tessa is still seeking Check out Olio. Connect with Tessa.
