Entrepreneurship is not for the faint-hearted. Founders must come up with a world-changing idea, put together a strong team, find some cash, borrow some more, publicize their brand, and scale their enterprise at breakneck speed – all while navigating the ever-present threat of insolvency.
Yet there are those who are crazy enough to do it twice.
As climate and sustainability begin to change almost every facet of tech and impact investing, a growing number of successful founders are returning to entrepreneurship to create a new company with a greater environmental purpose. Some are motivated by a personal sense of responsibility to shape a more sustainable future. Others feel the need to leverage their resources and connections to build a more ambitious company. And a small few are even motivated by pride or heroism.
Here are six ambitious and tenacious founders -some supported by 2050- who are going through the revolving door of entrepreneurship to build a new company before climate catastrophe descends upon us.
Rachel Delacour and her personal responsibility
When Rachel Delacour founded her first company in 2009, sustainability was not at the forefront of her mind. When the cloud-based analytics market was entering into its stride, Delacour saw there was a gap in the market to provide data analysis and visualization for marketing and customer service and decided to start a new company, BIME Analytics, doing just that.
After building BIME for 6 years, the company caught the eye of Silicon Valley darling Zendesk, which bought it out in 2015 for $45 million. For Delacour, it was magic. “From one day to another, you can join a big market with lots of customers that you are serving,” Delacour says.
After staying hands-on with Zendesk for another four years, Delacour decided that it was time to step back and take a year out to spend more time with her children. But in between watching TV with her kids and taking a cocktail-making course, Delacour began to read IPCC reports about the climate crisis and felt prompted to reach out to former contacts and stakeholders to ask what she, as a business analytics expert and start-up founder, could do to help fix the problem.
“I have this very unique, very rare chance to have access to a pool of talents from my former company, I have access to capital and money because I know lots of VCs. I have access to journalists. I have access to a great network to do my own market research. I can’t not capitalize on this,” Delacour says.So she began Sweep, a carbon tracking and management platform designed to drive cross-sector decarbonization. She jokes and says she may be a “Judéo Chrétien, you know slash slash slash,” miming a masochistic monk who beats themselves, but she notes that “I have this responsibility to use what I have been capitalizing on, for this.”
Christian Jorge and his wild ambitions
Christian Jorge has always been an entrepreneur. By the age of 48 years old, Jorge had four sons, lived across all of Europe, and founded nine companies.
“I started my first company when I was 22 years old,” Jorge says, referring to IDEO concept, a communications agency for digital and print he founded in 1999. But a decade into entrepreneurship, Jorge achieved remarkable success with Vestiaire Collective – an online marketplace for pre-owned designer clothing. The site became the leading online platform for buying and selling luxury clothing and put Jorge on the map as one of France’s most successful entrepreneurs.
“Vestiaire Collective was one of the first French unicorns,” Jorge said. “It was one of the only French unicorns with a woman on the team and it was one of the only French unicorns to be a B-corp.”
But after Vestiare Collective rocketed in popularity, Jorge set his eyes on something more ambitious. Across all of his social media channels, Jorge published a note titled “creating a mindfulness business,” where he presented an idea for a future plan – how to use food as a lever to address climate change.
After a year and a half of meetings to figure out the purpose of his new company and align the right people, Jorge founded Omie – an online grocery store, which uses radical transparency to show the path food takes to reach our homes. Alongside co-founders Joséphine Bournonville, Coline Burland, and Benoit Del Basso, Jorge intends to transform the food system by taking away the market share of the existing unsustainable system. “We can create a new Nestle. that’s the bet. A major new company, that can be all over the world,” said Jorge laying out the plans for Omie.
He says the only reason he can be so ambitious with Omie is due to his past success with Vestiaire Collective, which has allowed him to attract the best people. “Whatever we have, let’s dream higher than the last dream,” Jorge says.
Caroline Walerud and her sense of calm
Caroline Walerud hails from a family of entrepreneurs. Her mother Jane Walerud was a successful entrepreneur and investor in the Swedish tech market – most notably investing €60,000 in Klarna for 10% of the company in 2004 – while her father founded a number of pricing and strategy consulting firms over the span of his career.
So naturally, after Caroline graduated from Cambridge University in 2011 with a degree in natural sciences, she wanted to do anything but start a business. “I think having entrepreneurial parents almost stopped me from doing it, because I would rather not do what they did,” Walerud said.
Instead, she found herself in a research assistant role and as one of the first employees of a satellite forestry technology start-up. But almost immediately the inextricable pull towards entrepreneurship set in and at the young age of 22, she quit and started her own business.
With three computer vision experts, Walerud founded Volumental – an AI and 3D modeling company, which customizes clothing products to tackle textile waste – and took the role of CEO. Throughout her 20s, Walerud acted as CEO and subsequently executive chairman of Volumental, which proved immensely successful but exhausting.
“I started getting sick a lot, I would have the flu almost every month,” Walerud said, adding, “I hadn’t taken care of myself very well and I just let work eat me up completely. I needed a bit of a break.”
So in 2019, she decided to step back from her role as executive chairman and took some time off to reassess what she needed to do with her life. On the short but ambitious list, Walerud decided that whatever she did moving forward, it would have to fulfill at least one of four things: do good for the living planet through entrepreneurship, be a strong building force in her community, build a family, and find a rich and balanced life.
She started a venture capital firm with her parents called Walerud Ventures, and then became the co-founder of another start-up Airforestry – a drone company that thins forests by sawing off weak trees and flying off the trunks, eliminating the need for forest roads and carbon-emitting machinery.
“I feel very value mission aligned in that sense, and that creates a calm in me,” says Walerud.
Aleksi Tukiainen and his search for meaning
When Aleksi Tukiainen was studying engineering at Cambridge University, the prospect of having a machine learning start-up was very seductive. So in 2016, he decided, along with co-founders Vishal Chatrath and Dongho Kim, to start a new company Prowler.io – a decision-making platform, which used probabilistic modeling, reinforcement learning, and game theory to solve virtually any problem a company had that was too complex.
The Cambridge-headquartered company became one of the hottest machine learning start-ups and eventually garnered a $100 million valuation in 2019. But when the company’s business model bloomed solutions that were too expensive to keep running, the founders decided to spin out Prowler.io into several smaller ventures and focus it as a machine learning tool used in the automotive industry.
Following the restructuring, Tukiainen found himself questioning his role in the company, ultimately feeling that he was no longer needed. “It was basically an opportunity to take a step back,” Tukiainen said.
But while Tukiainen was resolved on founding a new machine learning company, he was hesitant to start anything unless it would steer the world away from climate catastrophe. “My wife and I are both from Northern Finland, in the arctic circle,” Tukainen says. “You go on holiday and go ‘what am I doing in my life? What am I working on when all this stuff is disappearing?”
Tukiainen has since started a new company, this time with his wife, called Climate Aligned. The firm uses machine learning to analyze bond issuances and act as a rating agency to map out the risk and return of any green-labeled bond. And since starting the new company, Tukiainen says the agency has given him much more comfort about the future. “Action is the weapon against depression or anxiety,” he said.
Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss and his chase of the latest Paradigm shift
Eric Quidenus Wahlforss had never heard of a start-up until he moved to Berlin in the early 2000s. When the venture capital scene was in its early days, Quidenus Wahlforss found himself designing a small web project that helped activists and artists get crowdfunding.
The project became a secret network where members had to be invited to join and pay membership fees to be able to submit their ideas for funding. The membership dues would then be amalgamated into one collective pot and users would vote every day to decide which projects would be funded.
The idea was revolutionary and Wahlforss, along with his research partner Alexander Ljung eventually ended up writing a book called People, Profiles & Trust: On interpersonal trust in web-mediated social spaces on the idea. After disrupting crowdfunding online, Wahlforss and Ljung then looked at the music industry. Out of frustration of not being able to share their own music online, Walhforss and Ljung thought of the idea of SoundCloud – a music-sharing platform that became one of the earliest audio streaming sites to exist.
“We had entered [the industry] when the paradigm shift hadn’t really started yet with streaming and access,” said Wahlforss. Before SoundCloud, little innovation had happened in the music streaming industry, bar the exception of radio, whose mass adoption happened over 100 years ago.
But after 11 years at Spotify, Wahlforss felt that there was little innovation left that could happen to the music streaming industry. “If I look now, almost four years after I left, not a lot has happened in the industry, or with SoundCloud either. It is stagnant.”
When Wahlforss began looking at what the next changing industry was, he set his eyes on bikes. Wahlforss says the mass adoption of bikes happened around the same time as radio, and since then there has been incremental innovation and no revolutionary change. That is, until the electrification of the bike.
“That’s going to take over everything,” Wahlforss says. In 2020, he and Alexander Ljung started Dance, a subscription e-bike company, hoping to leverage the growth of the electric bicycle and use his understanding of the online community, to be a part of the next paradigm shift.
Andreas Saari and his latest beginning
Andreas Saari started Paebbl, a carbon mineralization firm, at the age of 28, making him the youngest serial entrepreneur on this list. But even with his short and very extensive history, Saari knew Paebbl was the thing he had spent his whole life preparing for.
“I look at everything that I have done up until now as a training ground to learn how to become a better entrepreneur,” Saari said.
When Saari was in his second year of his bachelor’s degree, he started Wave Ventures, a student-run venture capital firm, which grew to be the largest of its kind in Europe. “Young people investing in other young people made sense. They would have better access to know who would make a better entrepreneur,” Saari says.
While running Wave Ventures, Saari got a full-time job at Slush, the tech event run in Helinski each year. But even while working concurrently with Slush and Wave Ventures, Saari was anticipating the day he could step down to start his own company. “I already knew all the time that what I want to be doing, and what I need to be doing, is building a company that somehow addresses the carbon in some way.”
So after a begrudging promotion to CEO of Slush at the age of 25, he started to set up a new company with his brother, which he believed would be the foundation for where he would land after Slush. “That would be the space I know I could do my life’s work.”
The initial plan was to create a technology to turn atmospheric CO2 into energy generation devices. But after a lot of research and many feasibility studies looking at how to make a profitable business, he decided to turn his efforts towards carbon mineralization and from there, Paebbl was born.
Saari shows no fear or nervousness about the future. “Starting something new is solving a set of problems and assembling a group of people. There is nothing complicated in it.” And most of all the prospect of starting something new will always attract Saari.
“Creating something, somewhere where there wasn’t there before, is just incredibly fun.”
