• What were your biggest learnings at Boston Consulting Group?

I joined BCG at a senior consultant level, having 5 years of experience in consumer products previously. I joined the Financial Services practice (at my request – I wanted experience outside of consumer), and quickly realised I was way out of my depth on industry knowledge. I had to rely on over-delivering on client experience, process management, and just generally being liked by colleagues, clients, and managers; these things saved me.

When I started Envoy in 2013, I knew a secret that few did: workplaces lacked user-friendly, experience-centered tools.

Working at Google in the early days, we had access to a lot of amazing user-friendly internal tools, built by people in the company. We had applications that let us see the bus schedule, find nearby meeting rooms and printers, navigate the campus and where everyone was seated. We even had an experience-focused kiosk for visitors to check in when they arrived on campus. Not surprising, companies like Apple and Facebook built very similar applications for themselves. Why? Because nothing with any decent UX was available in-market. Along with early investors Marc Benioff, Adam D’Angelo, Jeremy Stoppelman, we saw a niche opportunity in workplace tech and set out to change that with Envoy.

What is the future of food? It is the question on the lips of entrepreneurs, investors and those up and down the global food supply chain. From picking to plate, technology is altering how we interact with food. This turn to technology is driven by complex issues such as growing enough food to feed the planet, huge meal wastage, labour shortages and heavy demands from everyone for quicker service of fresher meals that meet complex dietary needs. It is why we are seeing investment into areas like vertical farming, dark kitchens and automation in the dining industry.

In his 2020 BBC Reith Lecture Series, Mark Carney, former Governor of the Banks of Canada (2008–2013) and England (2013–2020), opened with a challenge to the conventions and values of the mainstream finance system. Finance, Carney argued, could no longer rely on the automatic granting of its social licence, enabling it to profit in perpetuity from the professional management and safeguarding of other people’s’ money. Mainstream finance, Carney suggested, is fast running the risk of no longer being fit for purpose if it cannot be seen by the public as helping to solve what he identified as the ‘triple threat’ of Credit, COVID-19 and Climate.

The PayPal news is definitely one indicator of change. But much more radical shifts are already well underway. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has over $80bn locked in it, having started only a couple of years ago. DeFi lets you control your funds while accessing a global financial system that operates 24/7, is highly capital efficient, transparent and automated, and innovates at blistering speed due to the power of permissionless networks. DeFi is still tiny compared to traditional finance, but it will eventually win as surely as emails came to dominate the fax machine.

Seven years ago, I had an idea for an app that would change the way women approach their health and wellness during pregnancy. Six years ago, that idea turned into my launching Baby2Body as a sole founder, and three years later, we brought out our first app. Today, Baby2Body is the award-winning health and wellness app that provides personalized coaching for women in their reproductive years. We have surpassed 2 million members from all over the world, and I could not be more proud of what we have created.

When I left my home country of South Africa for the UK in pursuit of a Computer Science Master’s Degree, I didn’t expect to embark on an entrepreneurial journey.

Investors’ and advisors’ mantra is “focus on only one segment of the value chain”. Those are wise words… Unfortunately, when you’ve seen up close-up the root causes of the insurance sector’s failure to gain the consumer’s trust, you realise it couldn’t be solved by addressing a single value chain segment. The entire value chain and proposition needed redesign. Daunting prospect when financial backers shy away from such an ambitious approach.

What was your vision for founding Cervest? Tell us more about how Climate Intelligence plays into this.
The idea for Cervest was conceived as I was operating my sustainable agribusiness company in Ghana. Although well-funded, we had no way to assess how climate change affected yields and processing assets.  This led me to team up with mathematicians to help quantify climate risk – and that’s where Climate Intelligence (CI) comes into play.

Apple is typically ‘first’ in terms of category defining products and services. They know what the consumer wants and needs well before the consumer does. But in this case they are comfortable slotting in as a fast follower. Klarna and others have trailblazed their way into becoming an already developed fintech solution which, a business as large and powerful as Apple, is comfortable replicating and integrating into their own services. It is both a logical piece of innovation as well as a sign of a well developed fintech market.

Matt Cooper
Chief Commercial Officer of Crowdcube