In the latest episode of Impact at Scale, we are talking to Lauren Blasco who is a Principal for ESG at AC Ventures and Neels Steyn Venture Architect Director at BCG Digital Ventures. They are the authors of Scaling Impact With Technology. Accelerating ESG Adoption in Indonesia’s Digital Economy, a report that aims to be the baseline for how Indonesian tech companies measure their impact. The report looks at a wider range of issues than just one’s carbon footprint when allocating a score to a company.
 
In a region where many companies see little value in ESG reporting, this is meant to be used as a guide for the future as sentiments and requirements change. AC Ventures applied this methodology to all of its invested startups, none of which were sustainability-focused companies, to see what their impact as a business was. The hope is that this will become as regular as reviewing financial accounts in the future as businesses are being held to higher standards by both the public and investors.
 
Some of the topics covered:
  • Passions kindled at young ages
  • Net impact ratios
  • The outcome of their report on Indonesia
  • What corporates can learn from startups
  • Where the responsibility for ESG should lay
  • Corporate greenwashing
  • How to affect big changes
Some other titles we considered for this episode:
  1. Create a Framework That Would Guide the Way
  2. Looking at Impact as a Whole
  3. We Need a Baseline to Work From
  4. Change Requires Multiple Iterations and Cycles

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Zal Dastur 0:00
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Social Innovation Podcast. My name is Zal Dastur and I’m your host. Today, we’re sitting with Lauren Blasco and Neels Steyn. Lauren is the Principal Head of ESG at AC Ventures and Neels is the Venture Architect Director at BCG Digital Ventures. Now they both came together to author report, scaling impact with technology. And that looks at accelerating ESG adoption in Indonesia’s digital economy, and trying to create a framework for both investors and companies to look at in terms of ESG reporting in the region. Lauren, and Niels, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Lauren Blasco 0:36
Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Zal Dastur 0:38
It’s so great to have you guys here. And there. I got a lot of questions about the report. But just to begin with, Lauren, why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself and how you got here? And then Neels if you could do the same, and then we can sort of start asking a few questions about the report.

Lauren Blasco 0:52
Sure. So I started my career in in private equity, and quickly made the transition to sustainability about 12 years ago, I had the ability to work on some public private educational programs, and projects focused around sustainability, waste, etc. And during COVID, I actually had the opportunity to work with a few funds. And I thought, what better choice than to kind of merge all of my experiences in private equity as well as in sustainability to join a VC fund in Indonesia. And I recently joined AC ventures AC Ventures is an early stage technology venture fund that focuses on investing in Indonesia’s digital disruptors.

Zal Dastur 1:43
And Neil’s What about you? Yeah, so

Neels Steyn 1:46
I’m with BCG digital ventures, as you mentioned, and briefly maybe before I go into what we do here and how I landed here, prior to joining DV, about five years or so ago, I had a career that covered everything from corporate venture capital, to a couple of very short months, that investment bank, but then I decided that life’s not for me. So I actually joined consulting didn’t realize that life was not neither for me. But as I worked at BCG classic for a couple of years, actually, and then left the consulting business and joined early stage startups. So worked in one early stage startup as a as employee number seven. And then after that founded my own company as well. And then it was after that the Divi opportunity came by, and always been connected to the folks at at Divi. And they were saying, hey, you know, BCG, started this, this new venture building arm and we’re having the time of our life, and you should come and join us. And so that was more than five years ago. And since then, I started actually originally in the Sydney office. And then about three and a half years or so ago, moved to Singapore, can help open up our our center here. And it’s been a fantastic ride, I’ve lost, I would say, the last three years or so I’ve been focusing more of my efforts on what we call green tech, which basically covers everything from agri tech. And climate tech specifically has sort of been the two that I’ve been working in in the last three over the last three years. But you know, it was includes broader kind of like green tech categories. So that’s been been sort of my my drive my focus the last two years and increasingly moving forward as well.

Zal Dastur 3:27
So interesting that both of you started your careers at some point in finance, and then found through a path into sustainability. Something I like to ask everybody that comes on this show is Was there something that was a catalyst in your life? Was there some sort of moment that made you feel that you wanted to shift? I know, Lauren, your background is a little bit more in sustainability. You’ve been doing it for a little bit longer. But as I said, both of us went into traditional banking routes, whether that was private equity or investment banking. Was there something that happened that made you think that I actually want to put my energy and effort towards sustainability and climate?

Lauren Blasco 4:07
Sure, I think that, probably around the age that we graduated University and was in school, we were going in towards a finance path, which was just kind of a natural progression of where perhaps we saw that we should be. As a child, I was very passionate about sustainability. I, if I look back, I think my second grade project was all about invention. And my idea was to invent a machine that would suck waste in garbage out of the ocean. So I think I was just very passionate about sustainability as a as a child and entering into a space into private equity that was focused mostly on hospitality. I saw that sustainability was really just starting to scratch the surface more on the infrastructure side. So I just stayed the path with that until I saw that there was actually opportunities within sustainability and then quickly made the transition.

Neels Steyn 5:04
It’s amazing actually, you know, the the reference to sort of the childhood references right, and how I guess some of the some of these things always date back to to one’s formative years. And for me in that aspect, actually also, I grew up by privileged in the sense that we, you know, having grown up in South Africa, we always had, as a family, great passion for for spending time in, in nature, and whether that be on the game farm at the national parks, you know, that we were able to go to was, I guess, like, ingrained in me from a very, very, very early age, so much so that, you know, when I was a young kid, when everybody asked me what I wanted to grow up to be, when I grew up, I wanted to be a game Ranger, right. And so that was my, that was my passion when I was young. And so I guess Fast Forward number of years, you go through sort of life and all its motions and things. And you come up to a point where you realize, oh, I’m sort of mid career now. But I still have passion for for whether that be sort of the environment or planet sustainability. And there’s an opportunity to merge what I do in my day job together with that passion, right. And that opportunity popped up about like, like I mentioned about three years ago, and it was just fortuitous in that manner. But it’s something I’ve grabbed on to and something I’m you know, sort of wake up every day realizing I’m incredibly lucky to be able to do

Zal Dastur 6:25
just to now talk a little bit about the report, it’d be great if maybe Lauren, you could introduce the report and sort of the the main idea and thinking behind it or like what was the inspiration for you to put this together, because I believe it is one if not the first of its kind for Indonesia.

Lauren Blasco 6:43
So when we set out to write this report, the idea was to create a framework that would guide the way for tech companies and investors, who see a paradigm of ESG and Impact Reporting on the horizon in emerging markets. The goal was to publish the most in depth data driven report to date on Indonesia’s tech ecosystem and digital economy. The report was titled scaling impact with technology. And it uses a net impact ratio, to quantify precisely how effectively a group of companies turns resources into positive impact, we can get a bit further in depth on that and the choice of the net impact ratio and the platform etc. At some point, I’m sure well, we’ll get into that a bit further. But Neil’s maybe you also want to add any context basically, from from your perspective.

Neels Steyn 7:42
I guess for us, it was an incredible opportunity to partner with Lauren and the team at AC ventures on this fundamentally, because, you know, having a positive impact is is core to our values at BCG. And what I do at Digital Ventures is, is sort of, you know, building new technology enabled businesses for that purpose to have a positive impact on the planet. And so the ability to partner with ACB on this on this report, but also then bring the just the capability of BCG around the in depth reports and studies and things and knowledge base that BCG already had that we could draw upon for insight into the Indonesian economy, the Indonesian consumer, the growing micro and small, medium enterprises and the drivers of sort of the, I guess, like digital enablement in the Indonesian economy, we could sort of tap into all of that knowledge, bring some of that into into the report, and then combine it with the fantastic work that Lauren and the team did on looking specifically at ACBS portfolio and analyzing the internet impact that their portfolio specifically has. And so yeah, so that’s, that’s why we got involved. And that was sort of the contribution that we had. And it was phenomenal to partner and go through this journey together. To be quite honest, I also learned a whole bunch of new things through this and Lauren prefer to sort of the net impact ratio to something new that I learned along this journey. And I think some things you should definitely tell you more about.

Zal Dastur 9:16
I asked frequently, people, anybody that’s in the space, you know, how do you quantify how do you measure impact? Typically, the companies that I asked this off are ones that are the impact is built in the company or like, for example the company is the reason is to have a positive impact. Whereas with the companies that were in your list that AC Ventures has invested in you we’re just applying a methodology to a business and then seeing how that fared. So I’d love to know more about how you came to those scores, what the ratios actually mean and look like because I did see that for each category that was both up positive and the negative score and I guess you kind of took the accumulation of both the established score and you said across the portfolio, I think you’re positive 37%, which is great. But I’d be very curious to understand what that means, how you looked at these companies and how you came to that score.

Lauren Blasco 10:18
So we partnered with a company called the upright project out of Finland. So their platform creates the net impact assessments at AC ventures. And I think as a sustainability professional in general, we really value third party platforms, because it really gives you a lot more transparency. The upgrade project is a platform based off of products and services. And it also gives a benchmark to other indexes or companies in the same space. So as you mentioned earlier, AC ventures and its portfolio delivered 37% positive net impact ratio. So to give you an idea, like another benchmark within this space would be kind of the NASDAQ small cap index, which is 29%, or the s&p 500, which is 2%. Working with a platform that values the impact based off of products and services kind of allows you to do any type of business because you’re always going to be comparing the same the same things, whatever product and services your business offers, it then backtracks into the impact that those products and services has, whether that be positive or negative. As you mentioned earlier, you could see kind of the positives and negatives on the report because it gives you both the positive and the negative, and then it gives you the average of the overall based on your products and services.

Zal Dastur 11:39
Is there any company that came up as a surprise, like anything that you didn’t expect to come out being much more positive, or maybe even much more negative than you expected?

Lauren Blasco 11:51
are companies that are more financial platforms, or around FinTech or SMEs, they came out much more positive than I was expecting. I think the reason for that is that their core business doesn’t really have much of an environmental footprint, but then their, you know, knowledge distribution, and their job creation. And all of the different social impacts are actually very, very high. So for example, coin works is one of our companies came out very, very high. So I think when you work with a system like this, or do any type of baselines across the portfolio, you always get surprises. In our case, we had a lot of positive surprises. So all of our companies scored very well. Again, even just looking at some of our agri tech companies. So for also, for example, in farms is agritech farming platform. And they also scored extremely high, given the nature of their farming practices, because they do really value ESG into their overall strategy. So introducing things that they can reduce their overall carbon footprint, like having refrigeration facilities in their distribution centers, versus doing daily logistics actually helps them bring down their carbon footprint, and less reliant on petrol. There’s things that come up that I guess when you just look at a business from the outside in without getting really deep into the products and services that the business offers. Yeah, I think you always get surprises. And fortunately for us, we had a lot of very positive surprises with our portfolio.

Zal Dastur 13:28
And there were four main categories that you track, which is society, knowledge, health, and environment, are you guys and maybe you can take to each but just able to dive a little bit into what you were looking for in each of these categories. Like particularly with ones that like society and knowledge, which seem a bit esoteric, I guess, health and environment, maybe it’s a bit easier to understand. But the first two in particular, it’s hard to kind of put a number on that.

Lauren Blasco 13:56
So yeah, so maybe I’ll jump into society and knowledge. So society and knowledge are both more driven on the s of ESG. Society comes from jobs taxes, societal infrastructure, societal scalability, equality and human rights. Knowledge comes from knowledge, infrastructure, creating knowledge, distributing knowledge, that mound of human capital used for the products and services that the business is offering. knows, I don’t know if you want to dive into to health and environment. If not, I’m happy to jump into it as well. Okay, so I’ll jump into health. So health is looking at physical disease, mental disease, nutrition, relationships, meaning and joy. So to give you guys a couple of examples within the house space, if you have a e commerce business that’s selling sunscreen, sunscreen, allows you to be outdoors in nature, etc. So that would go more into a meeting. Enjoy Also, if we’re looking at the Agrotech, businesses and farming that would also be into nutrition, then moving on to environment. So you have your GHG emissions, your non GHG emissions, your scarce natural resources, your biodiversity and waste. So depending on what type of business or company, the products and services are, this would develop their environmental footprint. So for a lot of the financial platforms that I mentioned earlier, their environmental footprint would be very, very small. Again, if we’re talking about a e commerce platform that focuses on cosmetics, their footprint would actually be much larger on the environmental side.

Zal Dastur 15:44
And it’s interesting, because this report is clearly not just looking at, you know, how big your carbon footprint is, for example, it’s trying to be a little bit more holistic, in terms of its views, and the proximity, or at least relationship to the UN sustainability, sustainable development goals. So trying to cover a wider range than just saying, the environment or carbon.

Lauren Blasco 16:12
Yeah, I think when we set out for this report, it was kind of to look at impact as a whole. So if we look at ESG, it’s It’s incorporating everything into that not just the environmental footprint, I’d say, as this is kind of a phase one approach. So kind of creating a baseline for all of our portfolio and capturing all the impact that each company is having holistically. And then Phase two would be more of a deep dive into the carbon footprint that each company has and creating strategies around that.

Zal Dastur 16:44
That’s very interesting, because obviously, that would be a natural progression that phase two of how do you do to decarbonize? How do you lower the impact of everything, especially from a negative sense? On the planet? Do you see that companies are being more attentive to this nowadays, maybe in the last like three or four years?

Lauren Blasco 17:08
Definitely, companies are looking at their carbon footprint and how they can create strategies to reduce it, whether that have to be some sort of modification in their current strategy, or just looking at things a bit more longer term and putting goals in place for short and long term timeframes.

Neels Steyn 17:27
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think also, I can just speak from the other end of the spectrum, right. So we work with a lot of corporates in the corporate venture building that we do, of course, right. And, and on that end of the spectrum, it’s become an increasingly hot topic, you know, driven, primarily, I guess, you know, from to two factors, two angles, one is like investor pressure from the top, and then the other angles from consumer pressure from the bottom. And then in other parts of the world, of course, you have more sort of little horizontal pressure, like more regulation coming. And so you know, companies need absolutely needs to get ahead of the curve. But what is really encouraging to hear is also you know, that this is happening on the sort of early stage, startup side of the of the spectrum as alright, and there you have, you know, a lot of organizations and companies also working with, with early stage startups and the venture community, trying to drive and instill action and best practices from from an early basically, from an early stage, where you have the opportunity to a be more thoughtful around which suppliers you start to work with be how you design and set up your operations and your processes, being able to do all of that from day one in terms of the choices you make when you’re building a startup, as opposed to when you’re a multibillion dollar organization with global supply chains, and it is way more costly, perhaps to start putting in measures to decarbonize your supply chain.

Zal Dastur 18:56
So Neil’s I mean, I’d like to talk about that a little bit more, especially from the corporate venture building side, these are corporates that are coming to you to kind of develop either departments or whole separate companies, with the idea of being a little bit more sustainable or a little bit more planet positive. How does that then feed back into the parent company in terms of the changes and moves that they’re making to decarbonize or to have a more positive impact?

Neels Steyn 19:21
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. Right. So I guess like one, one good example to speak to with regards to sort of the question that you’re asking is, we very recently built and launched a essentially carbon accounting platform here in Singapore. And it’s been publicly launched in public now together with with all them in a business called telescope, right? And fundamentally, the question that there had been grappling with for a very long time being very much ahead of the curve and very progressive in terms of, you know, for the last couple of years already calculating their carbon footprint across all of their supply chains and the whole business is It’s a how do you do this in a way where you can get more accurate in terms of the data that you’re capturing, so that the you can get more confidence in the actual number that you’re reporting, and therefore, being able to then be more precise and concise about reduction and mitigation strategies that you that you’re putting into place, right. And so together with all on we built this, this telescope business, which is essentially a, you know, like I mentioned, a carbon accounting platform that works with large corporates to help them calculate the carbon footprint across their scope one, two, and three, and to your question, specifically, so you know, all I was very much customer number zero, effectively gonna call it that for telescope, helping them therefore getting more accurate emissions calculations, and getting greater confidence in the actual score that they’re reporting. But now also, having built telescope having built on that experience, and having built on that knowledge, is able to then also go to other customers and provide the software as a service to other customers, other large corporates and enterprises, who are also embarking on similar journey.

Zal Dastur 21:08
So what are you both hoping to see, as a result of this report? What are the changes that you’d like to see or impact that this report would have?

Lauren Blasco 21:19
I guess the the main pointer is that more and more companies actually do baselines, so that they can create a strategy and understand what they’re doing very well. And also look at how they can improve and create strategies around that, that baseline because I think without a baseline, you really don’t know where you stand, and you really can’t manage something that you don’t measure.

Neels Steyn 21:46
Absolutely, and for me, I would build on an ad that I think is incredibly encouraging to see the first of such reporting in sort of in our part of the world, and specifically in Indonesia, then, but the broader Southeast Asia context, and I think what this will catalyzes other venture funds to follow and also do do similar reporting of the, you know, broader ESG impact of the portfolio driven by I guess, like, also investor pressure, I think increasingly more and more sophisticated LPS will will request these types of reports from, from the, from the GPS. And, and it’s fantastic, because it as Lauren mentioned, I think it gives us the baseline, it then means that, you know, if you once you have a baseline, you can start to manage, you know, once you’ve measured what, what is what exactly your starting point is.

Zal Dastur 22:36
So I just wanted to go back to something Neil’s that you mentioned. And, you know, it’s something that I often think about where you said, there’s investor pressure from the top, there’s public pressure from the bottom, and there’s kind of this lateral pressure from the government. Well, my question is really, in your opinion, where do you think the responsibility for this change should lie? Is it expected that things will only change when consumers demand it? Does regulation have to change? Or is it only when investors start applying that pressure? Are companies really going to start acting? So where where’s the responsibility in this trifecta here?

Neels Steyn 23:12
Yeah, I mean, I think I think what I’m incredibly encouraged about is that there’s a greater realization that this is all of our collective responsibility, right? And fantastic that there are certain forces moving first, you know, so like investor pressure, or consumer pressure in certain industries are sort of the first forces moving. But ultimately, it’s all about collective responsibility, right? And I think that realization is starting to really permeate through and everybody realizing, okay, well, you can’t really do it by yourself. And certain instances of certain industries, you do need government policy or regulation, to help drive and stimulate that kind of change, or in other other industries, you need consumers to start adopting and choosing for your product if and demonstrating basically, their pressure through the through through their purchasing power. Or in other industries, you need investors to also then sort of be the first ones to move to drive, drive that change by where they put their investment dollars. But more and more, I think it’s it is absolutely a collective responsibility. And it’s great to see that that that is happening and that is taking place and that collective responsibility is starting to permeate through all these various sectors and various sort of parties that you mentioned.

Zal Dastur 24:31
And, Lauren, your thoughts on this?

Lauren Blasco 24:35
I agree. I think it’s kind of across all spaces. Looking at it from a VC fund perspective. We definitely are seeing the investment community asking more more questions. You’re already seeing I’m already seeing the movement from general exclusion list to requiring ESG consideration and impact philosophies. And also at the same time we are also So trying to put our portfolio companies on the best footing possible prior to the inevitable regulations happening. So I think, again, as as Neil’s mentioned, it’s coming from all directions. And I think that it will be a collective effort to get to where we all want to be.

Zal Dastur 25:16
I think my personal issue with this whole space is when you look at something like fossil fuel subsidies, where you’ve got the companies making billions of dollars for their shareholders and hitting record profits, and you’ve got countries like Indonesia, for example, which heavily subsidize fossil fuels, because there is a direct correlation between the price of petrol and how likely it is an incumbent politician is going to be reelected in most countries. So there is that there’s a very strange dynamic there where even a poll a politician that might know what they want want to do, has no choice because they need to be in power in order to enact power, so therefore continues with the subsidies that are then only generating larger profit for the fossil fuel companies who then can use that power for lobbyists and all the other things that they do to maintain their control in this system. So there’s a there’s a really weird dichotomy that I see between what is good for the collective human species and how people are choosing to enact that. And I know that’s not a question in there, but it’s just, you know, something that’s like food for thought.

Neels Steyn 26:26
Yeah, no, you’re right. And it’s but I think the thing I always come back to is that these things happen. And in sort of that they require multiple cycles and iterations. Right. And so unfortunately, it’s not just a matter of we all sort of switch and make a decision today, I think, as you mentioned, there are certain cycles of things happening. And so you need to go through the cycle to get to the next inflection point of a cycle to be able to enact the change, or do the iteration, and then it requires another cycle, but the momentum is in the right direction. So so that’s, I think that’s the positive thing, right. And that’s sort of that’s the hopeful thing. And that’s what we got to build on. So building on momentum is sort of the thing that that every startup founder, and venture builder will always tell you, like, get behind it and drive that momentum. And so I think that’s what we’ve got to do.

Zal Dastur 27:11
It is what every startup founder lives and dies by pure momentum. So where do you guys stand, and the only because there’s been so much in the media recently. And actually, I think that’s a good thing, talking about companies, greenwashing, and how you’ve got the major oil companies telling you about how they’re trying to be green. And when you dig a little deeper, you find that most of this is masquerading, the best example I can give is one company that was selling a cardboard bottle with the idea that this is meant to be more sustainable. But if you cut the cardboard, it’s just basically cardboard wrapped around a plastic bottle. You know, what’s your opinion on that in terms of how companies are getting away with it and where we’re seeing consumers act a bit smarter?

Neels Steyn 27:56
I mean, I’ll give you my opinion, my opinion on that is I think you will always have those elements of society trying to short change something for the benefit of for their own benefit, or trying to, you know, free ride in a way that that sort of benefits them exclusively, and maybe, you know, leads to sort of short term profits that they may make, you always find that regardless, that’s I think it’s human nature. Right. But when it comes to the broader general sort of topic around greenwashing, my perspective is always like, you’re able to have an impact and drive change when you have a seat at the table. And rather than sort of trying to stand on the sidelines, point fingers, I think that more practices and things need to be surfaced. And we need to we need to have transparent people who who do the hard work of bringing transparency to the set of issues, but really to have an impact and drive change, you’re able to do that when you have a seat at the table. Right. And, and I think the examples of you know, activist investor groups getting together lobbying, lobbying at ATMs getting themselves elected to, to corporate boards to then help drive change from the inside. I think those are powerful examples of how, how we need to think about this, you know, so once you come across these examples, rather, rather than thinking, Okay, well, so a transparency, great, bringing the highlighting these things, bring it to the surface, fantastic. But if you really keen on on having an impact and driving change, it’s like, how do you get involved? How do you get a seat at the table? And how do you sort of influence from the inside is always my perspective on these things.

Zal Dastur 29:30
Lauren, what are your thoughts? I know that you’ve, you’ve sort of seen this maybe a little bit more than than most in your experience?

Lauren Blasco 29:36
Yeah. So I think that it’s a clear issue, but at the same time, it speaks to the growing importance of ESG. That said, from a startup perspective, it’s usually the starting point of their journey. So you know, everything for a startup has a specific focus. They’re very dialed into what their exact company is based off of So ESG, or their carbon footprint, usually is kind of like a secondary focus. So perhaps because of that, and because they are very much still in startup mode, their ESG journey is just starting. So whether they are focusing on reducing their plastic or being zero waste or reducing their carbon emissions on their logistics, as long as they’re transparent, I don’t necessarily think them being called out for greenwashing is the right thing. They are starting their journey, they’re being transparent. And as any other startup, they’re kind of learning as they go. So there’s really, there’s really no, no clear path to this, it’s starting their journey. That said, I think for large companies or, you know, multinational conglomerates, there’s really no excuse because they do have the resources. And as meals mentioned, getting a seat at the table to drive that change.

Zal Dastur 31:02
I mean, I also think that you know, the world that we live in, you cannot expect anybody to be 100%. Right on everything. And I think part of the problem that may be the environmental space has had for so long is that it was really dominated by very extreme views. And those extreme views made it seem that if you didn’t comply 100% With all of these views, then you were not part of the team, where I think there is definitely a space for people to say, hey, you know, I’m making changes, or I’m trying to impact change in my own way in the area that I have power and control over, versus trying to change every aspect of my life to meet this requirement. And I think we’re starting to see more and more people adopting kind of what works for them. And the same with companies, companies are looking at, you know, what can we do? Okay, we might not be able to if we’re a logistics company, we might not be able to only use electric vehicles, but can we reduce our packaging? Or can you know, there are different ways that you can approach the problem, considering that the problem is so large?

Lauren Blasco 32:12
Yeah, agreed. I think you’re totally spot on with that. And I think a lot of it also goes back to, you know, what we talked about in the beginning is creating a baseline. Once you have that baseline, you can address those issues and see, you know, where you can move the needle the most, like you mentioned on logistics, and Evie, I think every logistics company would would love the opportunity to be able to kind of snap their fingers and switch on to evey, but it’s just not possible, right? You can’t you can’t implement something like that overnight.

Zal Dastur 32:43
And you can’t do that without significant infrastructure change, for example, from the government and other large corporates that have to get involved in creating the whole ecosystem to make that work. Exactly. And even more. So when you start talking about electric vehicles. It’s great. Where is the energy that that electricity is coming from? Where is that being generated? Because if that’s being generated by coal or other fossil fuels, then that yes, it helps a little bit, but there’s also a much bigger problem as to where we’re getting our energy entirely. So you know, there is a much bigger systems systems play here.

Neels Steyn 33:18
Yeah, no, you’re right, I guess comes back to the earlier point of like, the iterations and the cycles, right. So first, we got to electrify everything. And then, you know, change the grid. We can’t wait for the for the grid to change before we start electrifying everything right. And so, yeah, iterations and cycles is sort of how we will get there.

Zal Dastur 33:38
I want to thank both of you so much for being on the show. I really, I really learned a lot particularly about the report. I will leave a link to the report in the show notes. So anybody else that wants to go and read it can click through there and check it out. But yeah, Neels Lauren, thank you both so much for your time. Thanks. So