Exiting Before Pre-Seed Then Building In Climate w/ Puja Balachander | Carbon13

00:00
Puja Balachander
I was in Madagascar, I knew this story start. So we ended up selling to them before we even raised like a proper pre seed route.

00:08
Amardeep Parmar
That's Puja Balachander. She's the executive founder of Devie and she's now building Upgreen while also being the director of venture at Carbon 13.

00:17
Puja Balachander
And we had more than 700 users in our first day and then it just really ballooned and it was a horrible profit, honestly.

00:25
Amardeep Parmar
But for a constant iteration they took off.

00:28
Puja Balachander
But it got to the point that basically we had around 20,000 paying users and like our 30 day retention was like 60% or something. It was like really high.

00:36
Amardeep Parmar
But building it to where they wanted wasn't easy.

00:39
Puja Balachander
I was incredibly burnt out and hadn't basically taken a salary in three years.

00:42
Amardeep Parmar
An early acquisition meant she could make the impact from the original idea while also change her path.

00:48
Puja Balachander
I did like five accelerators, that was the most accelerated startup do like this sort of quasi investing work.

00:54
Amardeep Parmar
She's helped dozens of founders now at Carbon 13 and those companies are making a real difference. And she's got the founder bug herself still. And Upgreen is planning to revolutionise financing for retrofitting buildings.

01:07
Puja Balachander
We're working with like 50 to 60 banks and therefore we have, you know, 50,000 buildings that we're actually doing for you. Growing up, I wanted to be a diplomat. I was super involved in model United Nations. I thought I wanted to work for the un. I was like one of these nerds that, you know, every weekend, I don't know if you've ever watched never have I ever on Netflix. But you know when they do, when they are in model United nations and they go to these different universities every weekend and they represent these different countries and you have to write a position paper and learn about all these different issues, I absolutely loved it.

01:45
Puja Balachander
And so because I love model United nations so much and I was the president of that in high school, I was like, okay, I must need to be a diplomat now. So I wanted to do something in the foreign service. Either be a foreign service officer in the US or work international development or for an NGO or something along these lines wise. And so I went to D.C. For college and studied international studies.

02:06
Amardeep Parmar
So obviously people listening and they realised your accent isn't from here. So where did you grow up before you went to dc?

02:11
Puja Balachander
Yeah, I grew up in California, in the Silicon Valley. And I thoroughly felt like tech was not for me. It was not, you know, I was just out of place. And I was actually a diplomat and I Wanted to do foreign service and I had a. I was one of these like 12 year olds with a subscription to Foreign Policy magazine and the Economist. It was like super lame. But anyway, I was super into that. Felt really out of place and then moved to D.C. For college, so. But yeah, basically grew up in the US and then.

02:39
Amardeep Parmar
Okay, so you're not a diplomat now as far as I know, no. What made you change from that path at the beginning?

02:44
Puja Balachander
Yeah, I mean when I went to college and I was studying international studies and I actually got exposed to that whole sector, what I realised was that they were talking about a bunch of stuff and it was really interesting intellectually simulating stuff, but it was almost like real life model United nations. Like as little as they got down there was how much was actually getting done in real life. And so I got much more interested in the international development space and the policy space and so. But which is more connected to actually doing things and having action. Right. So I, right after college joined the Obama administration and was working in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

03:20
Puja Balachander
And so, and it was totally by accident, like one of my former internship supervisors like joined that office and asked if I wanted to come in as an administrator.

03:30
Amardeep Parmar
What year is this? If you don't give mind this way.

03:32
Puja Balachander
No, no, it's obvious. I'm fine to age myself. I think this was what, 2015.

03:36
Amardeep Parmar
So it was the second.

03:38
Puja Balachander
Yes, exactly. It was the last two years of his administration. So basically joined this completely by luck through a former internship supervisor and totally fell back into tech. Like it was crazy. I went all the way to the east Coast, I was india, I was doing all this stuff. I really wanted to work international development. I really thought I was going to work for USAID or the State Department or move or do something. And I ended up at the Office of Science and Technology Policy working on quite domestic policy issues. But it was actually super interesting because were basically working with bringing in private sector technologists and entrepreneurs often into government to actually do these sort of like internal transformation projects. So one of my projects was at the VA on reducing the time it takes for veterans to get benefits.

04:28
Puja Balachander
Another project was at the Department of Health and Human Services around supporting child welfare agencies at the state and local level to use technology much more effectively because there was a lot of just inefficiency that was happening with case management systems. We worked on improving the U.S. Department of Agriculture's guidance to the state and local level around free school lunch programmes. So super broad base, but all of it was sort of using digital as almost like a Trojan horse for changing bigger things in government. And I really kind of stayed in that space for a while. I then moved to the World bank where I was in Madagascar and working with the Office of National Nutrition or National Nutrition Office on reducing child stunting, but still using kind of similar tools, basically some sort of like innovation consulting, but there.

05:15
Puja Balachander
And then moved into the city of Austin where I was doing very similar things but at a local level. And so I spent a long time actually in the public sector or like quasi public sector if you count the World bank as that. So while I wasn't sort of a diplomat, I kind of did diplomat y things, but maybe perhaps more action oriented versions of those things. So I like to think I still kind of followed through on that in a small way. But what I did find really disillusioning about that was that every four years or every time my work would just be completely undone.

05:49
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah.

05:50
Puja Balachander
So obviously after the Obama administration felt like we had done so much good work, Trump administration came in, literally none of the things I worked on exist anymore. Same thing with the World Bank. When I was leaving Madagascar or not leaving when I wasn't even actually planning on leaving. There was a coup overnight, a bloodless coup. But like every ministry head was replaced and so our project just sort of stalled in the water after doing it for, you know, a year and a half. And then similarly in the city of Austin, actually that didn't happen. I think at the local level there's potentially a lot more resilience. But by then I had gotten into Oxford for the MBA programme which I had applied to earlier.

06:29
Puja Balachander
And so I decided I wanted to take a stab at that and sort of leave government after having done that for the first like chunk of my career.

06:36
Amardeep Parmar
So I'm going to come back towards the end about obviously now I was at the govtech conference the other day and hearing politicians talk about tech is very interesting and I roll and if they're listening, I wasn't eye rolling but it's very interesting to see how they're trying to frame it because I think one of the big challenges they had a lot of time is that, well, what people bring up is that it's all well and good to announce, okay, we're going to give 1 billion to Quantum. What are you going to like? And just it was like you made.

07:07
Puja Balachander
You need investments in tech, in the ecosystem, like.

07:10
Amardeep Parmar
Putting their resources, okay, we're going to spend this much in this area. We're going to, we're going to put more programmes to supporting entrepreneurs but then it kind of comes from a top down level rather than working out. Okay, we're doing these pilots and they're working well. How do we make them bigger or those kind of things? So we'll come back to politics towards the end if you've got time. I don't want to shilly-shally around the whole of you.

07:31
Puja Balachander
Yeah, happy to. I think like a lot of what were working on was actually making it so that you are basically applying almost like a product approach to making a lot of those investments.

07:39
Amardeep Parmar
And obviously going to Oxford. So obviously you got the brand name of Oxford. But what made you decide to even do an MBA in the first place? What made you decide that's the next step for you in your career?

07:49
Puja Balachander
Honestly, it was very random. I was in Madagascar. I knew this how all stories start. Yeah, one does as well. So there was this here but like literally I hadn't actually planned to come back to the States but now it seemed like my contract was not going to get renewed because basically the environment, it wasn't clear that our project would even continue anymore. And so I was literally looking at okay, what do I want to do next? And I had like a few, I had a few different hypotheses in a very typical sort of producty way. And I got targeted by an ad for a scholarship at the MBA for the Oxford MBA on LinkedIn or something. So I was like, well, if I could do an MBA for free, sure. And I did not end up getting it for free unfortunately.

08:36
Puja Balachander
But you know, it was what basically motivated me to apply. And the fact that it was more impact focused was something that I was more interested in because I also, the other thing is that I have spent my entire career in government. So I was like, okay, maybe I want to try private sector.

08:50
Amardeep Parmar
Was it a good sliding door moment where you're like, you're happy that you went and the experience was?

08:55
Puja Balachander
My God, my life would not be the same. I think, you know, London is my home now. You know, I've, I built my company. Would have never met my co founders if I hadn't gone to Oxford.

09:04
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah, oh. So you said you met your co founders in Oxford as well. Can you tell us that story and where the idea came from?

09:09
Puja Balachander
Yeah, yeah. So in our first week during welcome week, you know, everyone is like hyper networking. I don't know if you've ever been in an MBA programme. Yeah. But it's like, you know, walking resumes, walking egotistical resumes. We are all like that.

09:24
Amardeep Parmar
There's been influencer events that somebody like, hi, I'm this person. I've got this many followers on TikTok, don't care. Cool.

09:29
Puja Balachander
It was the NBA version of that. And I kind of found this woman who was just like, super different than everyone else. She was a she. Her name is Laura. She was one of the MBA, one of the other MBA cohort members. She had been a preschool teacher in D.C. Before coming to the MBA. And I think me and her bonded because both of us had reasonably, like, atypical paths to get into the MBA programme. I think she being a preschool teacher and me having just come from Madagascar in the city of Austin or whatever, doing some design and innovation work.

10:04
Puja Balachander
And she had this really inspirational visit vision, honestly, where she said that she had been a teacher, she had seen these gaps in early childhood education and more importantly, sort of in early childhood development in general, where, like in her classroom, she's able to do so much to make sure that every child, you know, gets that strong start in life. But, you know, that's not an equally accessible resource, despite all of the research that shows that investments in early childhood education and development have insane ROI over their lifetime. So she wanted to do something in start a social enterprise in early childhood development. And I was like, okay, that's super interesting.

10:49
Puja Balachander
My background is in product and design, so I can help you with going from I want to do something in this space to, okay, this is the thing that would actually make the most impact and here's how we're going to build it. And so I just got sucked in. She was just like a really inspirational person and I thought that her and her expertise was really valuable. And we just started doing the user research right away and speaking to a lot of parents, both in our cohorts and outside of it, policymakers, other innovators. I mean, the MBA is obviously also designed to do that, right? Like, it gives you really a lot of the structure to kind of explore some of those ideas. Pretty soon I was just completely sucked in to the point that eventually.

11:27
Puja Balachander
And I also, I think I really enjoyed the entrepreneurial journey too. I didn't really come in with the intention of doing that at all. I. I thought probably I would go back abroad and still work international development, but maybe do so from like a private sector perspective or something like that. But I ended up just really enjoying it. I loved the user research and, you know, my background was in research and product management and design, and it Just felt like the purest version of that where there's just no other stakeholders. It's literally you're just designing the product that will be the stickiest, most delightful experience. Experience that actually solves your user's problem in a vacuum at first where like there's no investors, there's no business model, like nothing. You're just having that. I found that so energising to start with.

12:13
Puja Balachander
And then once we started pitching and actually working, like actually doing the commercial side too and having to figure out all of those things, I just found it to be such a stimulating challenge.

12:24
Amardeep Parmar
Was this like while you were still on your MBA.

12:26
Puja Balachander
Yeah, yeah. This was during the MBA. This was during it. We had a little bit of like pre seed, not even precede really accelerator funding by the time we came out. And so we both decided to go full time and. But at the same time that I was realising, you know, the whole entrepreneurial journey was really energising for me. It was really draining for Laura to say the least. So ironically, she was the one who had actually wanted to start out doing a social enterprise. So she ended up stepping away. I ended up actually as a solo founder after that point. And yeah, pretty much made every mistake in the book afterwards. But. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a really wholesome start.

13:08
Puja Balachander
We're still like really good friends and she, you know, she stepped away at the time that was right for her.

13:13
Amardeep Parmar
I guess that's one of the interesting things because as you said, where so much the excitement of being grow, especially first time. Was she a first time founder?

13:20
Puja Balachander
Right. Yeah.

13:20
Amardeep Parmar
And when things start changing and it's like you say at the beginning, the vacuum is sure, right when you're just working on an idea, but then once other stakeholders come in, there's all these different pressure from all these different places and then the pressures on the founding team change. Right, and how did that conversation go or how did you manage to navigate that? Because I'm sure there's some people listening right now thinking maybe this co founder team is going to work out, but I feel too guilty to walk away or I feel too. What about if I say I don't want to do it anymore and then the other person feels like they're gonna blame you.

13:51
Puja Balachander
In the lurch? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know that first of all this was not at all a smooth task. You know, like it was very much, you know, who knows how much Laura agonised before she told me that was the case. I mean she was Literally getting ulcers from stress. Like I think it was actually, you know, physically not healthy for her to continue doing this. And so. And of course I noticed, you know, I noticed that she was getting really stressed. I noticed that there because at first actually she was the CEO and I was more like a chief product person. So I think one is like knowing yourself, knowing the other person, being really open and honest about those conversations.

14:28
Puja Balachander
So now with my co founder who like ended up being my co founder on the last startup as well, like after some time, after I spent some time with this as a solo founder and made some of the wrong decisions, I made a right decision and then we had a new co founder who was great. But because I had made that, I had gone through that sort of like stressful process not just with Laura, but with a couple other co founders, ex co founders. Now that we, that I went through that journey with, I really learned to basically just have these really open and honest conversations quite often.

14:58
Puja Balachander
So now like me and my co founder have this thing called like a coffee chat and we know that if we ask for a coffee chat we need to like drop a truth bomb, you know, where it's like, you know, for example, like he was abo bait.

15:09
Amardeep Parmar
Is the whole we need to have a chat.

15:11
Puja Balachander
Exactly, exactly. It's like, ooh, like we might be breaking up, but it's one of those where it's like most of the time it's not we're breaking up, it's, you know, something needs to change and that's usually a positive thing. And then I think even if it is, okay, maybe now we're breaking up, we both know that we have each other's back, that like we would never just like disappear tomorrow. It would be like a way of like managing a transition as well.

15:36
Amardeep Parmar
Hello. Hello. Quick interruption to let you know a bit more about BAE HQ. We're the community for high growth Asian heritage entrepreneurs, operators and investors in the UK. You can join us totally free@thebaehq.com/join. There you'll get our CEO structure in your inbox every week, which is content, events and opportunities. And so with Devie, right, so once you took over as CEO and you said you were working at the business model, you're trying to work out these different things. Let's get back to the show. And so with Devi, right, so once you took over as CEO and you said you were working at the business model, you're trying to work out these different things. What was it? Where did it get to before you went into acquisition afterwards?

16:20
Amardeep Parmar
But what was it that you figured out and how were you able to build a product that people loved.

16:24
Puja Balachander
So on the product side, Laura is a teacher. Her specialty is she will watch children play in her classroom and she will assess their developmental level and then plan activities that will move them up. So whether that's social, emotionally, in terms of their just fine motor skills, it could also be in terms of their executive function, like, it doesn't matter. But she will. She will basically assess what level they're at and then plan an activity that moves them to the next stage. And so what we thought was, okay, what if we just digitise that? Like, we use AI and computer vision to basically analyse children playing, identify, like, their developmental markers and, like, base that against a database of these activities that we could pursue.

17:07
Amardeep Parmar
This is also AI before, it was cool as well, right?

17:09
Puja Balachander
That's actually true. You know, like, towards the end, were doing, like, natural language. It was like basically a chat bot, but it was like were using natural language to interact. The entire thing was basically like a chat interface. So were doing LLC.

17:23
Amardeep Parmar
So technically, we just copied you.

17:24
Puja Balachander
Yeah, literally. Exactly, exactly. But, you know, obviously if we had ChatGPT at the time, we would have been wildly more successful. But even at the very beginning, were using, like, computer vision, trying to. Trying to identify those kind of markers. Honestly, one is that technically, that's crazy hard because obviously children move in so many different ways. Like, can you really tell? It really does take, like a human, I think, at the end of the day to be able to tell, you know, is a child feeling sad? Are they feeling upset? What could actually be the. What, you know, how are they dealing with conflict? You know, like these sort of things. In the young, longer that a child gets, the less.

18:00
Puja Balachander
The more, in some ways, the less subtle it becomes, because it's like just a cry or not, you know, but also potentially the more subtle it becomes because actually, you know, you have to sort of learn the way they specifically communicate those things. So anyway, one was that was really technically difficult. But more importantly, we didn't even attempt the technology first. We just did a WhatsApp thing where we would basically, we recruited a bunch of parents in our MBA cohort and got them to just take pictures of their kids, send it to Laura. Laura would identify them manually and then give them some activities to do. And because were like, okay, this is exactly what the actual tool would do. Let's just test it, like completely manually.

18:40
Puja Balachander
And what we found was that the parents would be like, this is super interesting, and then text her in the middle of the night, being like, hey, my Kid isn't sleeping, what do I do? Because they knew they had like an expert on B dial, basically. And so suddenly that was the value proposition. Like really, like the games weren't nice to have, you know, this was the like, need to have the real pain point. So were like, okay, that's what we should lean in on. So were like, okay, how do we make this sort of expert level coaching more accessible? And then we worked with a local organisation in Oxfordshire that worked with young parents and we like offered that as a service to them. So they were our pilots organisation, basically.

19:19
Puja Balachander
So they got like the 10 parents signed up or something and then we started offering that coaching from Laura. And then people started actually like divulging quite difficult things. Like it really became clear that it wasn't just about whatever the children were doing and questions they had. It became about like really parent mental health too, about how stressed they were and how difficult life was and, you know, they were navigating issues with their relationships and like all kinds of things. And so we realised it actually needed to encompass both the parent kind of wellbeing experience as well as the children's. Not just Q and A, but also activities and all of these other things. And then were like, also, it's not scalable. Like Laura isn't scalable. So we need to start actually figuring out how we do this. Like, we scale up this coaching.

20:09
Puja Balachander
So we started to actually try and script it. So we would go. So then we tried to take everyone through like a very similar scripting process and we take them through like activities and I don't know, there's like these softwares you can use to basically like programme a decision tree type chatbot. So we tried using that to like do the first versions of it. The first ones were complete shit. And like, over time though, we got like, it got stickier. Basically. People were like. Our metric at the time was where people like making it through seven days of like chatting with Debbie every day basically. And once we got to that point, then were like, okay, it's worth actually even productizing this. And then we made it into like an app that actually like the. The release of our beta coincided with the lockdown.

20:59
Puja Balachander
So it was literally like the week that it happened. And suddenly all these parents were. Were trapped at home with their young children that they were like, not expecting to have to spend this much time with really. And so, you know, our. The app which I had literally said, don't even bother with putting it on test flight and stuff. Like, let's just put it on the app store. No one's going to find it anyway. Like people will. Will just only the people. We find it anyway to do to be our initial beta testers. But it literally got put on a couple of these like Google Docs that the moms were sending out as like resources for moms stuck for parents stuck during lockdown. And we had like more than 700 users like in our first day. And then like it just like really ballooned.

21:41
Puja Balachander
And it was a horrible problem, honestly. It just had like the minimum functionality. Like there was no way someone was going to stay on there for longer than like a week at most. And it was because. And we had like. But it ended up being like such good data because obviously so far we had only really gotten like quite anecdotal data from small sets of parents. This time we had like hundreds of parents using it in this tiny amount of time. And we had like basically this little section that just had the different topics and stuff that they could work on. So it was like social and emotional development, behavioural issues, like fine motor skills, parent well being, whatever. There were like some segments, some topics and like some wild number, like 80% of people that came went straight to the behavioural issues.

22:27
Puja Balachander
And maybe it was because obviously they were in lockdown and people. Kids were having more behavioural issues of course, as a result. But it was just really obvious like where the need actually was. And so then were like, okay, let's drill down deeper into that. Anyway, I'm going to skip a bunch of this product stuff because it's interesting. But you know, it was like very incremental in that way. Eventually what we came up with was like, then we hit. So we got to a reasonably sticky point. Then were like, okay, we actually need to monetize this. At this point, it's a completely free app. Completely free. Because were just like I said, purists. We were really just trying to figure out like, what is the thing that would be sticky? What is the thing that people really want?

23:06
Puja Balachander
What's actually going to solve their problem? And we had this. Of course, when we pitched investors, were like, oh, it'll be freemium, whatever. And. But actually then once we tried to monetize it, one idea we had was monetizing it via early childhood education. So basically like daycare centres would pay for it for their parents. Basically what we found was it was like not possible. And then were, we decided through health care was actually the best way to do it, because actually this was sort of like health adjacent, I guess, like in a more holistic way in terms of supporting new parents. But what we knew was that we would need like way better data on our impact in order to ever be, you know, procured by a healthcare system.

23:47
Puja Balachander
But it also came in at the time that I had a new co founder, another new co founder, not the technical one, but she was a child psychologist and she was a professor of child psychology. So we started just digitising, basically putting our content but into these sort of psychological frameworks that she had already, you know, like therapeutic frameworks that they used. And so we could basically call it almost digitising child psychology and making it accessible to parents. And so then we had like the excuse to be able to actually charge people for it. And then we also made like a tiered system so we had like a social support element and then we had like experts in the loop as well. So like it was a long journey in terms of like both figuring out the product, also figuring out the business model.

24:32
Puja Balachander
Most of that time were not paying ourselves or like paying ourselves extremely little. But it got to the point that basically we had around 20,000 paying users and like our 30 day retention was like was like 60% or something. It was like really high, you know, so it was a sticky product and it was like people were paying for it and it was, you know, the unit economics were not profitable at the time, of course, but you know, they were paying the amount that should become profitable at scale. Right. So, and then basically we got offered to be, by this point, I will say I was incredibly burnt out and hadn't basically taken a salary in three years.

25:10
Puja Balachander
And so we got this offer basically to integrate with this child welfare, well, with this nonprofit actually that sold software into state and local child welfare agencies. And though it would have never been my first choice to sell at the like at the time, I think both because of like my mental health, but also the fact that they just offered so much more impact and scale. I think like it would literally go from being a sort of yummy mummy app for UK moms to being a, you know, prescribed by social workers for the state of California, the state of Georgia, the state of Massachusetts, you know, like the scale of impact also the, like the profile of person we would even be serving would just be so much more aligned to the reason we started the company.

25:57
Puja Balachander
Yeah, that like, it just felt like almost a no brainer that this was the way that we wanted to go. So we ended up selling to them before we even raised like a proper pre seed round. So I think it was, you know, it was definitely a learning experience in every way. Probably not like super lucrative financially for me or anything like that or any of our early investors, like, you know, nothing like that. But in terms of the impact and scale it was definitely right. And I think, you know, now it still exists and that's really exciting.

26:30
Amardeep Parmar
So you mentioned there about that hire and thanks for sharing the journey about the different iterations too. But once you got like that acquisition there and they brought on your software and they bought on, that made a bigger impact. Did you stay on at the company or how was that transition?

26:43
Puja Balachander
Yeah, yeah. So I was there for like 18 months. I was brought in as basically their director of product. So it was not just this product basically that I was working on. It was like quite a few other ones as well that they were working on with the state and local child welfare agencies. I'm not going to lie. The other ones were a lot more boring, you know, but my one was the best obviously. Obviously. But they were also, you know, like they were also really impactful. You know, they were all basically supporting these vulnerable families and like enabling states to support these vulnerable families. But most of the time they were not like, they were more about navigating services that existed, not so much about, you know, providing a service in and of themselves.

27:24
Puja Balachander
So, so maybe it was like a bit less, slightly less of an interesting problem as a result, I guess. But that being said, you know, like, I think for me personally it was a difficult trend. It was, it was a good transition at the very beginning because it was just, I could finally sort of like breathe, you know. Like it was very much first of all within my comfort zone of like doing the product management type stuff and like a quasi public sector environment. Like I knew exactly what to do, you know, after being like in such an ambiguous environment for so long. And then on top of that it was like relative, you know, it was pretty much a 9 to 5 after working like 16 hour days for so long. And I also had a team, so that was really exciting.

28:09
Puja Balachander
Like I could actually, you know, rely on other people to do things that were paid and you were like all of these things you take for granted if you don't, if you haven't done the founder journey and then. But then eventually I think, you know, I got to the point that I was getting bored basically where you know, I felt like the product had pretty much been integrated into the current user whatever offerings. Also that to be honest, the product was probably not their first priority, like Debbie was not their priority. It was like the other products were much more their moneymakers. And so it just felt like, okay, you know, also my passion project is not even the thing I'm necessarily spending the most time on or that I'm spending the most of my effort on.

28:47
Puja Balachander
So it felt like the right time to leave. Of course I also had like a minimum time that I had to stay there, but. But yeah, basically like I stayed about 18 months and then I decided that I wanted to go and I. And I wanted to get into the climate side. I wanted a new challenge and I thought that especially because from the research I had done in climate tech, I didn't feel like with my background where it was more mostly software, mostly product, like design, I didn't even really see myself as a commercial person at the time. I thought that I wouldn't be that useful in like a climate tech startup. I thought it would. I would need to be like an engineer, someone like a scientist, like someone like a bit more with some harder skills basically.

29:30
Puja Balachander
And so I thought maybe I'd be more useful on the investor side, kind of having gone through the whole raise process and all of that myself. So, yeah, then I joined Carbon 13 because they were recruiting for someone to start their venture Launchpad programme, which is an accelerator. And so I was like, I did like five accelerators. That was the most accelerated startup I know, exactly what was useful and what was mostly not usable, you know. And so I was like, oh, this is like a chance to actually apply what I learned, but also like learn the climate tech space, work with a bunch of founders, do like the sort of quasi investing work. And I joined Carbon 13 and it was really the right decision for me.

30:06
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah. How has that experience been from switching from that founder role to obviously then working at a larger company and then on the investment side because I think we see a lot.

30:15
Puja Balachander
Right.

30:15
Amardeep Parmar
A lot of people want to get into the investment side because they kind of glorify in different ways. How has it been sitting a bit on the side of the table for you?

30:21
Puja Balachander
Getting to the investment side? Because I was starting an accelerator, I think it was, first of all, it was more entrepreneurial because I was pretty much left to my own devices to just like start this thing from scratch. So that was quite exciting. Was feeling like I really had so much autonomy to create that and do what I wanted to do and use the company resources basically to make it happen. So at first it was probably like. It was a little bit. I was like, really? No one is going to give me any more guidance than this. And I was like, okay, whatever, this is what I'm used to. So it was actually like, really, in that way, quite comfortable for me to be able to do that. And it felt quite entrepreneurial eventually in terms of.

31:03
Puja Balachander
And then in terms of the actual investment analysis and like that whole process. And even, like I remember on Devie, like, very specifically, like, the 10% of my job that I really enjoyed was either like, the strategy stuff around, like, you know, market analysis, that sort of thing, or it was like the product stuff where I was really deep in with the customers. You know, often the strategic, more intellectually stimulating side is like 10% of what you do, like 90% is like, this person won't respond to my email or like I'm setting up some CRM or something boring, you know, like, most of the problems you're solving are like unsexy problems.

31:32
Puja Balachander
And even, like I remember on Devi, like, very specifically, like, the 10% of my job that I really enjoyed was either like, the strategy stuff around, like, you know, market analysis, that sort of thing, or it was like the product stuff where I was really deep in with the customers. And I remember at some point an investor told me, like, you're going to need to hire a head of products because you need to be on, like, the external side. Basically everything I hated doing. He was like, you have to do more of that and hire someone to take away the only part of your job you like.

31:59
Amardeep Parmar
Like, this is why I did most well, me and Gurvir, I was CEO then he was well Co CEOs and all those different things. It's like UBCO and all the meetings I should. Fun stuff.

32:10
Puja Balachander
Exactly, exactly. So basically someone was telling me, you'd be CEO and do all the meetings and everyone else will do all the fun stuff because they're supposedly better at that stuff. And I'm like, fine, I guess. But it was not the stuff that was really energising for me. And so I do really like that as an investor, you're pretty much exclusively working on the fun stuff. Like you basically get. I get to learn so much about. So the other thing that I think, like was maybe something I didn't expect. So after. After working innovation and government for so long, I had been working on so many different problem statements. You know, like, I worked with the veterans, I worked with free school lunches, I worked in Madagascar with nutrition, you know, like, completely different stuff. And I loved that level of variety.

32:56
Puja Balachander
And three years of just working on early childhood development and parenting, I was like, oh, my God, I've become the parenting lady. Like, I'm kind of over this, like just thinking about one problem all the time even. And so actually going back to having that level of variety and having that level of stimulation I thought was really energising and refreshing after coming out of that, like, founder space of, of being like really in the operations. Eventually though, of course, you know, like, you get the itch of like, okay, but, you know, I can't actually do anything.

33:30
Puja Balachander
Basically, I'm just, you know, you're moving money around and of course you're like giving some advice and like enabling, you know, it can be argued that of course, like, you're actually making more impact by being an investor or running one of these programmes because you're having like such a broad impact across many, you know. But for me personally, I think I still have like quite an action oriented, sort of like operator itch in me. And so I really felt like, I feel like I need to have the direct impact, even if macro level, it's not impact as impactful as if I had a little impact on many, you know, now.

34:01
Puja Balachander
So anyway, I still think that actually right now I might even have the best of both worlds where, like, I get to do the Carbon 13 stuff most of the time and I get the really stimulating, interesting work, but I get to work on my startup on the side as well and actually, you know, solve the problems and do the operational work as well. And so right now I feel like I have the perfect balance. But, you know, I think that it was both really energising but also, you know, I guess less satisfying because, you know, you didn't have the action part of it.

34:36
Amardeep Parmar
So did we get into your new startup as well? So she said you're on five accelerators, you're running the accelerator programme for Carbon 13, there's a lot of accelerators in the UK and some of them are good and some of them are not so good. If you're a founder who's being courted or you think, okay, I'm going to go to apply to. Trying not to name anything by accident here.

34:56
Puja Balachander
Yeah, exactly.

34:57
Amardeep Parmar
If you go this year, not that one. How can founders tell which accelerators they should be applying for that are worth their time? Are there any things that you would kind of advise them on there of, like look for programmes to have this or have that, or is it just sometimes you just don't know until you get on it?

35:14
Puja Balachander
I think a huge part is the network. So first of all, I think the fewer zoom programmes you have to attend, probably the better. Like I'd say the best accelerators that I've done have been the ones where there basically is a person who's your sort of guide to all things in that place and they're providing really deep support and basically pulling in other resources as necessary. And so I feel like the closer you are to that model, like generally the closer you are to a good accelerator because it's effectively like a good advisor but with a lot more resources as opposed to, oh my God, I have to sit through another like MBA 101, but worse like session.

36:02
Puja Balachander
And it's literally like the tax you pay for getting what tiny amount of money they're giving you is literally how I felt about most of these things. There was one programme that like, so there was this, there was one programme that I can't even remember what It was called now that I thought was actually quite good. It was even though they made us sit in these sessions and stuff, they were with like world class people. You know, they had like the Stanford Professional professor talking about like product market fit and like they really got like the best of the best from each place. And so in that case I was like, okay, fine, it's maybe worth it. But most of the time I think it's like inversely proportional with the number of sessions you have to attend.

36:41
Puja Balachander
And then I think the other thing to ask about, to look at is like the network of those people and like how many actual connections like that they're actually facilitating. And then finally like, who is going to be that point person? You almost like, you know, there are a lot of like these career accelerator managers that have actually never done it themselves, like, are not founders, you know, like they're basically just programme managers. I think, like just look for the person and just see like, would you want to work with that person all the time? Do you think that they would really come up with something really of high quality? You know, that's kind of like also a filter.

37:18
Amardeep Parmar
So it's actually quite hard to talk about this without accidentally throwing shade on people, isn't it? Because, like I'm thinking about like, I can't say I shouldn't say that because that person will know. So it's interesting. But I think like you said with the session, so we've worked our mentorship programme right now, right? It was our way of testing out and accelerating in some ways. So we're doing different things and getting that feedback to then work out how do we make it better for next time. And we intentionally didn't call it an accelerator because we know there's so many accelerators out there that aren't living up to the hype. So it's called a mentorship programme. It's give you a mentor, one to one, who's aligned with you in your industry. And then we tried out workshops. Okay, people aren't attending all the workshops.

37:55
Amardeep Parmar
Why are they not attending? Is it not good? Is it not. Is it actually the time and what is it? And it's. I think it's kind of looking at as a startup prize. You said where. Where we're trying to figure out what is it that's valuable to these people and focus on that and have experiments and take the feedback. And one of the funny things, sometimes you get the feedback and you implement it. And between the cohort. So we said last time they all wanted a group where they could chat, and they made a group for people to chat in this cohort. And none of them chatted. I was like.

38:20
Puja Balachander
Exactly. Everyone says that. Everyone says that. They're like, oh, I want to connect with the cohort more.

38:26
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah.

38:26
Puja Balachander
And then none of them ever tried.

38:28
Amardeep Parmar
It was like, oh, we did it.

38:28
Puja Balachander
But it's like, watch what people do, not what they say. Right? Always.

38:32
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah. But obviously while doing your. While running the accelerator, you came up with your own idea that, you know, building as well, like currently on the side, but go where is where it's going to go. Tell us about that.

38:43
Puja Balachander
Yeah, So, I mean, I was at Carbon 13. We did a cohort. Our second cohort of the Launchpad was built environment focused. And don't get me wrong, like, everything was super interesting. You know, it just happened to be that when we. I was doing all these interviews, like hundreds of interviews with startups that were, you know, applying to the Built Environment accelerator. And I just noticed this gap where I was like, okay, everyone is telling me about analysis software, like planning, but what about actually doing them? And then when I spoke to people in the industry, I found that actually they really didn't have any plans of doing any of these projects. And I thought that was super interesting. I was like, okay, why? You know, like. Like, what are they planning for then?

39:27
Puja Balachander
Why are they even buying the software if they're not planning on doing anything? And part of is compliance, part of it is, like, just signalling, I suppose, and part of it is just kicking the can, right? They're like, eventually we will do it, you know? And so. But what I really found was that it came down to, like, financial viability. So I've learned so much about real estate finance, you know, since starting this, but basically it came up to, it came down to financial viability. Like when they're structuring these portfolios, they need to give a certain yield. That means they literally can't spend a month above a certain amount of capex, which means that you literally like cannot do most of these energy efficiency upgrades that should be done. And it seems like a win, right? It's a relatively cheap de risked technology.

40:11
Puja Balachander
It's like, you know, it's going to save you money. It's actually not in this case it's like with the. Because there's a tenant and landlord split between the person who actually owns the building and who's in it, the tenant gets the benefit, not the landlords. Actually they don't. There is not as much as an easy win because you don't get necessarily the energy savings. And then like you're. It's also being done in a relatively shrinking market. So were particularly looking at commercial real estate and retrofit and you know, after Covid, people are mostly not using offices in the same way that they were. And so the valuations have come down really far. And you know, there's. So actually there's even less appetite to invest on top of that than there was at any probably other point.

40:57
Puja Balachander
And so there's so many of these systemic reasons and yet everyone is like, oh, I'm offering you like this deep retrofit plan. And it's like just felt so wildly out of touch with reality when I actually spoke to these funds that I was like, okay, this seems interesting, I want to try that. And at first I just had this like super. I had a few simple ideas what I thought were simple ideas. And like as soon as, and at first they were like working relatively well. Literally none of them have lasted. None of them. Not a single one. So one was that, okay, what if you just corrected the landlord tenant misalignment.

41:32
Puja Balachander
So you just basically took some of the savings that the tenant achieved because the landlord invested and returned them back to the landlord so that they would still get a payback period, but over a longer period time potentially. I literally laboured under that assumption for like a long time trying to make that work. But it was crazy difficult. So one was like, every time we go to a building, like let's say you get one landlord on board, they own 100 buildings. Each of those 100 buildings has like 10 tenants. You now have to convince all those 10 tenants to pay you a portion of their energy savings in order to even start on a project. So just made our go to market process so much longer that even though it felt like it was a no brainer, it was just like impossible.

42:16
Puja Balachander
Like it moved our CAC like crazy. Then I think the, that, so that was one like very closely held thing I had to give away. Then the other was that, okay, if you get enough scale of these projects, you can reduce the cost a lot. So let's say instead of doing like, it was like weird to me that like, why are they doing a deep retrofit on a single building when they could just take one technology and just wrap it across a bunch of them? And then that would in theory be like a much more efficient way of rolling these things out and you could bring the cost down too. Also crazy difficult. Like that's not the way the installation like market works and that's not the way they like procure this kind of technology.

42:57
Puja Balachander
And it's seen as like actually inefficient because you're not, you're disrupting tenants many times rather than just once, you know, so. And you're also, they're aiming for a specific EPC level. They're not just aiming to get technologies in as cheap as possible, you know, so it just like so many things that felt like such a no brainer, like why aren't they doing it this way? Of course, like over the course of actually trying to do this, you learn that there is a way. And I think we, to be fair, I think we still are doing it much more efficiently and we are still like using nuggets of some of those initial ideas, but the initial ideas are completely gone. And I think one of the other things that I wanted to do at the very beginning was around like the financing.

43:40
Puja Balachander
So we wanted to like it wasn't even some. I really thought that we wanted to work with SME landlords. So the ones that owned like maybe 5, 10 buildings at most and were mostly occupied by other SMEs and that those were the ones that were really the, I assumed like the big guys would basically fund it themselves eventually and make it happen, you know, but these were the ones that would be left behind. That, that was the gap in the market. And what we found was like, went through this whole process, we figured out all the interventions that needed to be done at the time. We even had that tenant thing. So we convinced all the tenants to actually pay us a portion of their bills and everything and then we tried to get.

44:19
Puja Balachander
The landlord went to the bank to get like a loan for the actual amount to cover the upfront costs. And the rate he got was like 15% because it was seen as like asset financing, basically, like SME asset financing, not project financing. And so that was like, okay, the project died at that point because, like the cost of financing was just too high and they didn't have like that kind of cash lying around, basically. And so just like at every step there's like something new. And now actually we've transitioned where so. So at first we made a pivot to like actually work with like the large asset owners and investors.

44:53
Puja Balachander
Now we're at the point where we realise that's like a really difficult to scale model because operationally it's so difficult, like I said, for the reasons I just mentioned, the installation stuff is really difficult. Whatever. It's not very efficient, basically. And so now we're really focused on the financing gap. So we're almost back to a problem we encountered at the very beginning where we're like, what if we actually just came back to that and how would we solve that? And now we're focusing on unlocking projects, financing for retrofit. So it's like just been so many iterations of that idea. But the initial kernel came from Carbon 13, where I was like, okay, so many companies are pitching me this analysis, but none of them are happening. And that problem hasn't changed actually.

45:35
Amardeep Parmar
So we're coming towards the end of the podcast now as well. I mean, I think of course one of my proudest accomplishments is probably scaling Devie. What are the things that make you most proud? What are you most happy about from your career and like all the stuff you've done so far?

45:44
Puja Balachander
I mean, I think of course one of my proudest accomplishments is probably scaling Devi. I think that was really, you know, it's probably something that will have impact on these parents and on these children. And it's. It's something that I'm really proud of. And I think it's like finally actually reaching the families that, you know, were Laura and I's vision to actually serve in the first place. I did an Arangetram. And then we came back to it, which is really exciting. I think that was the first one second accomplishment. Oh my God. I don't even know if I have that many accomplishments to talk about. I think probably my second one was probably in high school. I did an arangitram. I don't know if you got it. But it's a big damn performance. Basically my swerve there from like, go Devie. So it's in.

46:27
Puja Balachander
So I learned Indian classical, Carnatic music and Barthanatium.

46:31
Amardeep Parmar
Basically my swerve there from like, go Devi. And then.

46:35
Puja Balachander
But this was genuinely just. This was genuinely nearly as hard, but basically like, yeah. So I did this like, like two and a half hours solo dance performance that I prepared for like, well over a year. And like, you know, I'm not one of these people that like physical grace and coordination comes naturally to me. So I just felt like, you know, most of the time, especially, you know, academically, like, not to like feel snobbish or anything, but, you know, it doesn't. I don't have to work that hard to be good at school or to be good at like, most of those sort of like bookish type things. I think my instincts are reasonably good, but, you know, doing something physical like that, it's like the opposite. I have zero instinct. I have like no natural ability.

47:18
Puja Balachander
And actually being able to need a ball now to throw it hit my face. Hit my face. Like, I have no reflexes. Like, you know, like, I am known as being an uncoordinated person and like to then do like a two and a half hour, quite intricate, you know, like dance performance was just like really difficult for me. Like, it did not come naturally at all. So for example, I was a Bhangra dancer. And so, and still like, you know, performed and did well. So I think that's probably my second proudest accomplishment. And honestly, I don't think I have a third. I think I was on my two.

47:53
Amardeep Parmar
But it's also interesting because, like, I think a lot of people forget is that when you do something like. So for example, I was a bungo dancer. Right.

47:59
Amardeep Parmar
So the compute sort of stuff.

48:00
Amardeep Parmar
Right. Like, that's actually how I know my co founders because me and his wife used to be in the same team. Oh, so cool. Doing those things like that and training hard for competitions and things. It's actually, it translates in terms of the discipline, the resilience, the mindset and those skills can go across and sometimes we forget that.

48:15
Amardeep Parmar
Right.

48:15
Amardeep Parmar
They think, I've never started a company before because, like, what have you done that's really hard in your past and trained really hard for it and then been able to achieve it? And if you can get into that mindset, you can transfer it across.

48:25
Puja Balachander
Exactly.

48:26
Amardeep Parmar
But we're looking at. So what we're doing now is that so over 200 episodes in and we're getting people on 200 episodes later. So be in two years time. And what I want us to hear is like in two years time, what would you love to be able to sit here and say it's been your proudest compliment the last two years?

48:40
Puja Balachander
I mean, I hope it's that I've scaled upgrade and that we've actually got a financing product in the market that is financing retrofits for small land, for small and medium size landlords. So basically that own under £10 million worth of property. We're aiming to be able to retrofit 500 to a thousand buildings a year or finance the retrofit of 500 to a thousand buildings a year. So I think that's going to be my. I hope, I hope we're at that stage by the time I come back.

49:10
Amardeep Parmar
So actually this morning somebody who was episode four came on and what I got them to do is listen to the episode from originally.

49:16
Puja Balachander
Oh my God, that will be so new, I'm sure.

49:18
Amardeep Parmar
And so it's like what you got to do now is if coming into this time is listen back to what you've just said and then we can see like is that where you're at or what happened or pivoted and what.

49:26
Puja Balachander
Yeah, exactly. What iteration are we on now? It's probably completely not a financial product anymore, but let's see.

49:31
Amardeep Parmar
And then like longer term. Right, so where do you hope one day that you can get upgreen to?

49:37
Puja Balachander
I mean, I hope that we are actually financing this stuff at scale. Right. 500 to 1000 buildings is barely making a dent in the problem. I mean, I think, you know, to some extent we have a bit of a timeline. You know, five years, 10 years is really the max that we can be waiting to do it, to do a lot of this work. So I think hopefully we're working with many more banks. So for example, my assumption right now is that for each bank we'll be looking at 500 to 1,000 a year. But ideally, you know, we're working with like 50 to 60 banks and therefore we have, you know, 50,000 buildings that we're actually doing per year. I think that would be, for me, that would be like, that would be success.

50:18
Puja Balachander
Or you know, we've actually been acquired or integrated into either a really large asset manager, someone like Blackstone or something where like they have a massive number of buildings that we can just roll this out into or like a bank that has a massive commercial mortgage portfolio or like a large commercial real estate portfolio and they're able to roll that into that. So I think like anything that will help us get to that get to that carbon mitigation faster because there's a time value to the carbon that we're mitigating will be the dream for me with upgrade.

50:51
Amardeep Parmar
Okay, so we're going to move on to quick fire questions now. So first one is who are free Asian heritage or British Asians in the UK that you think are doing incredible work and love to shout them out?

51:01
Puja Balachander
Amazing. So there's Dhruv and  Preethi. They are working on Anzen Walls. They're basically working on decarbonizing the built environment. They have a much more efficient heating, cooling and air filtration system that they're working on that's retrofittable especially in the places where heat pumps aren't suitable. So I think they're working on incredible things. They've just raised the big round. I mean their doggedness and what's the word, just the determination is really impressive. The other is Joyeeta, she's running Samudra Oceans. She's, they do robotics for ocean farming, specifically seaweed farming. Again I just think someone who's so incredibly determined, so resourceful also literally always has time for like a text to make sure that you're okay somehow. Also, I mean she's just like an incredible founder and I think this is her second or third company.

52:00
Puja Balachander
You know, she's been around, she's very accomplished and experienced with this. And then the last one is Shruti. She is at Manny AI. They're working on basically optimise using AI for factory optimization but, and automation but enabling them to basically do on demand manufacturing for textiles and fashion. So at the moment basically people vastly overproduce the amount of textiles that they should be. That, that they. Because they a can't like forecast it accurately. But also it's just not economical to do smaller batches. But in their case because they're automating all of these different parts of the factory process using AI and optimising it, they're enabling them to actually do this on demand manufacturing and enabling them to reduce a lot of the textile and clothing waste that's going to landfill currently.

52:58
Amardeep Parmar
Awesome..So like three, well, four great founders.

53:00
Puja Balachander
There's, there was. Okay yes, two of them are a team but yes, and they are both salvage.

53:05
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah, I always say three and people always kind of like well the co founders, it's fine. I'll let people get away with it.

53:11
Puja Balachander
I'll give it through. I'll give it to. No, no, I can't choose. I can't choose favourites.

53:15
Amardeep Parmar
So. And if people want to find out more about you and what you're up to, upgreen and Carbon 13 as well, where do they go to?

53:21
Puja Balachander
They can go to my LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest place to reach me. But you can also reach me at etupgreen.com.

53:28
Amardeep Parmar
And is there anything that you need help with right now that maybe the audience listing could help you with?

53:31
Puja Balachander
Yeah, I mean, at the moment we're looking to connect with engineering firms that actually implement retrofits. So actually not just. I won't even say just engineering firms. I'm saying if anyone, you know, does building upgrades or retrofit upgrades to or actually implements these projects, we are trying to get data partnerships with them because we literally cannot keep. We are trying to. We are implementing projects, of course, as well, but the speed at which we need to build that data set of projects to be able to build the financial product like we will never keep up with. So we're trying to partner to basically capture some of that data and work with them in a really synergetic way to bring the financing to market that will enable them to do more projects as well. That's one.

54:16
Puja Balachander
The other is, of course, if you know of property investors or asset managers that are looking to improve the EPC levels or the energy efficiency of their building stock, then put them in touch. We're also trying to connect with banks at the moment. So anyone who's doing this green financing and can potentially partner with us on the project financing proposition is someone we're looking to speak to.

54:36
Amardeep Parmar
Awesome. And then been so great to have you on and hear your story. Have you got any final words?

54:42
Puja Balachander
Final words? Thanks for having me. It's been great reflecting.

54:46
Amardeep Parmar
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time. 

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