Tessa Clarke, Co-Founder @ Olio

Tessa, welcome to the podcast. If you could just start off by telling us a little bit about what you do and a bit about your company, Oleo.

Yeah, so I'm co-founder and CEO of Oleo, and Oleo is an app that exists to tackle the enormous problem of waste in our homes and local communities. And we do that by connecting people with their neighbors so they can give away rather than throw away their spare food and other household items. And so you can lend and borrow everyday items as well instead of buying brand new. And then we also have something called our Food Waste Heroes program where we have 80,000 volunteers who are members of our community who we train online and match with their local business, which could be a supermarket such as Tesco or Iceland or someone like Pret à Manger or a corporate canteen. And those volunteers collect unsold food from those businesses. They take it home, add it to the app so that food can then be requested and eaten by their neighbors instead of thrown away.

Yeah, how did the idea for Oleo actually come about? Like, what made you actually want to start it?

So I guess there's a couple of relevant points here really. The first is that I'm a farmer's daughter and I grew up on a farm in the northeast of the UK. And through my upbringing, I learned just how much hard work goes into producing food. So I absolutely hate and despise food waste and have always gone to great lengths to avoid it. The light bulb moment for OLIO came 8 years ago now when I was living in Switzerland and moving back to the UK. And on moving day, the removal men told me I had to throw away all of our uneaten food. And obviously as a farmer's daughter, I was not prepared to do that. So I instead bundled up my newborn baby and toddler and set out to the streets with this food, hoping to find someone to give it to. And cut a long story short, I failed miserably. So I very despondently went back to my apartment. And when the removal men weren't looking, I smuggled the non-perishable foods into the bottom of my packing boxes. And that was the moment where I just thought, wow, Tessa, you really are going to crazy extremes here. But to me it felt sort of completely criminal to put perfectly good food in the bin. So as a result, I resorted to cross-border smuggling of food instead. And that was the moment when I thought, why isn't there an app for this? I knew there was an app for absolutely everything else. Under the sun and couldn't believe wasn't a simple app where they could connect people with their neighbors, they could give away rather than throw away their spare food. And I'm thrilled to say that we've now got almost 7 million people have joined OLIO.

Wow, that's an amazing sort of starting story. Obviously spurred from your background as a child and upbringing. But how about maybe the tools you developed in your career and also maybe what you needed? You had this idea. What was missing for you for it to become what it is today?

So I think my sort of entrepreneurial journey has been an interesting one. So it is worth saying that I founded OLIO in my late 30s. So I'd had a pretty extensive career before I did this. I didn't even know what an entrepreneur was for much of my life, to be honest. But I will say that in the last 5 years or so of my corporate career, I had this growing itch to have a real positive impact on the world. And to do something entrepreneurial. But I have found that having had a 17-year corporate career beforehand actually gave me a lot of really, really valuable tools that I think have increased my probability of success as an entrepreneur, because I have seen, having worked at organizations of all different sizes before OLIO, so I've worked at a FTSE 100 media company through to Dyson that was 15 years old. Through to a fintech startup, 7 years old. So I've seen businesses at different stages in their journey. I've seen all the mistakes that have been made. And so that was very helpful when you're kind of building the foundations of your own organization. You've got a view as to roughly where you are going to. So I think having that corporate experience was an important tool in my toolbox. I also spent 3 years as a strategy consultant and I did my MBA at Stanford. And so have a really solid grounding in strategy, and that is an invaluable skill set. And that's why I would always recommend to anyone who, after university, who perhaps isn't sure what they want to do, that going into consulting can be a great entry job because it teaches you these fantastically powerful strategic tools that will stand you in great stead through not only a corporate career, but also an entrepreneurial career as well.

On that recognition, recognition of skills between you and your co-founder, how was it decided that you'd be CEO and Sasha would be COO?

So the day we agreed to work together and found Oleo, we actually spent some time dividing up every single function of our newly formed business. Now that might sound a little absurd, but there's just two of us and we're deciding who's going to take HR and who's going to take legal and who's going to take marketing, who's going to take product, who's going to take engineering. But we really did. We went through these sort of, you know, 10 or 15 so functions that can exist in a company and we divided them between the two of us. And we were very clear that doing something entrepreneurial where the stakes were so high, that now was not the time for one of us to sort of have a go at something we'd always really rather fancied. Now was the time for us both to play to our respective strengths. And so while Sasha and I do have a lot of overlap, I think I've got the skills and I enjoy the types of activity that come with the CEO position, which is broadly much more kind of externally facing, perhaps more focused on the vision and strategy and stuff like that. And Sasha is a second to none, unparalleled, brilliant operator, super, super efficient, great at sort of getting stuff done. So for us, it wasn't a contentious discussion at all. It was a very, very important one to have, I think, far too many founding teams avoid that conversation because it's a difficult conversation. It can be a difficult conversation to be had, but it is really important. And part of that discussion as well was we said, how we're going to work together is we're both going to empower each other to have responsibility to sort of run our functions, run our parts of the business. But on any major decisions, we will touch in with the other one. And through me taking on the CEO role, we recognized that if we were to ever be— found ourselves unable to make a decision, we agreed that as the CEO, I would have to make the ultimate call. Now, I'm very pleased to say I haven't had to sort of make any of those sort of CEO calls because Sasha and I are just remarkably aligned on things, but it's a really important discussion to have at the beginning of the relationship, not when you're in a slightly sort of frantic, stressful environment. Environment.

Yeah. And, and what you found at the company, it's important to build a team. And as a young student, you know, currently founding my own startup and hoping to build a team in the future, I was wondering what your, your management style is. How would you describe that? And why do you think effective team management is so important for the performance and wellbeing of team?

So I would say that this again is something that I really learned through my corporate experience. I saw what best practice and also really not great practice, looks like, in terms of recruiting, building teams, retaining and managing people. In terms of my personal management style, I do think it's really important that you need to have a style that's quite authentic to you. So no one is, you know, there is no one model of leadership. You need to sort of play to your strengths. So my sort of leadership style is very much about coming up with a clear and compelling vision, then communicating that really clearly to everybody, getting people excited about it. I'm just a naturally a very passionate person, and I think that can be quite infectious. I then like to empower people to really kind of own their domain. So I'm definitely not a micromanager, but I do have, you know, high standards. I will give people feedback, and I think an ability to give honest, direct, supportive feedback is critical when you're building a team. At all stages of business, but especially at the early stages of a startup.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's obviously this comes from years of experience as well. This has been derived from, but what about other factors that are maybe this management style, which is highly tuned? Where does that come from?

Lots of learning, really. I think you've got to be incredibly humble. I think you've got to have a growth mindset. So I have learned from all the people that have managed me in the past. And I have observed myself and I've looked at what has brought out the best in me and what has not brought out the best in me. So I can remember fairly early on in my career having experience where I had worked with two different managers and one of them really sort of commanded respect through fear. He was fiercely intelligent and extremely direct. Then there was another manager who really, you performed for him kind of out of love. And I realized that I perform much better when I'm operating in an environment where I feel safe. And where I'm doing stuff kind of out of love rather than out of fear. So that's one thing, for example, that has really shaped my leadership style. I think also very naturally, I dislike conflict. And so I tend to have a very consensus-driven leadership style. Now, that doesn't mean to say that it's always by consensus, because sometimes you've just got to take an executive decision. But broadly, I think the best results come when people understand what the end goal is. They're then empowered to pick the right path to get to it. And you build teams that have sort of collaboration in their core and in their DNA.

Yeah. And in your team earlier, you stressed the importance of diversity with 28 different nationalities across, across a very wide age range. And you also highlight, you know, how you have such a high percentage of low-income, female, disabled, and LGBTQ employees. Why is this so important to you? And how do you think this diversity has benefited your company?

So this is something Sasha and I are extremely passionate about. Inclusive is our number one company value. We've only got four, so they're easy to remember, but inclusive sort of heads the pack. I think having both of us have come from very unconventional upbringings, sort of myself being sort of having spent the first third of my life living and working on quite an isolated farm, Sasha being the daughter of hippies from the Midwest in Iowa. So we've both got quite unconventional upbringings. We've both then been women in business and we've managed to get to pretty senior levels. And so we've, I think, spent much of our life sort of being the outsider. And that sort of outsider mentality, I think, very instinctively makes you want to kind of bring together and corral kind of other outsiders because you recognize how much talent there is that to date has just been kind of locked out of the important conversations and the important rooms. And to me, it's just extremely obvious. Again, you just need to look at nature to understand that diversity builds strength. And in particular for Olio, when we're thinking about building a business, we want 1 billion people to be sharing by Olio by 2030. The only way we're going to be able to deliver on that is if we have a brilliantly diverse team who are as close to representative of our end users as possible. And one of the key things that we've done to be able to fulfill that objective of ours of building a really diverse, inclusive team is that from day one, Oleo has been a remote-first business. So we've never had an office, and that has made recruiting diverse talent, relatively speaking, pretty easy, because the minute you remove that constraint of someone having to commute into an office in central London, boom, you access just this enormous pool of talent that for a very long time has been overlooked.

Yeah. And I think the hybrid debate is something that's a huge topic at the moment. What may be some of the challenges you face on this? Obviously you get the diversity aspect, so it's positive. What are some challenges of maybe the remote-first model that you've come into?

I mean, honestly, from our experience, it's been all upside. Um, but you have got to do it sort of in the right way. So You need to make sure that you have a very clear mission. So at OLIO, we recruit not just for mission alignment, we recruit for mission obsession. We recruit for people who truly embody and live our 4 company values on a day-to-day basis. And then we screen for people who sort of out of choice would prefer to live and work in a remote-first environment. And when you do all of those things together, then you get just outstanding results. And obviously I'm co-founder of Olio, so you might think I'm a bit biased, but our employee satisfaction survey, we run that twice a year and our average scores on most of the answers are between 8.5 and 9.5. So I absolutely do not buy the statement that a lot of people make that you can't build culture in a remote-first environment. That is just absolutely categorically not true. But you do need to be excellent at communications. You need to make sure that you've got sort of the systems and the tools that enable you to stay extremely connected. And as we've scaled, we have recognized that as we need to bring in perhaps younger team members who really appreciate that sort of interpersonal connection, and perhaps they're not, you know, they're living in a flat with flatmates, it's not the ideal environment for remote working from. So as we have scaled, we have started using a tool called Hubble, which, and we give our team members a certain number of sort of credits per month, which they can use to access any coworking spaces anywhere in the world. And for roughly half of our team members, they don't use it at all. And for roughly half the team members, they really appreciate having a coworking space that they can go into. And we have sort of clusters of people in different cities and they will often liaise and agree where they want to go and, you know, meet up with one another face to face.

Yeah. And if diversity inclusion is something that's very important to you as a company, I imagine something else that is very important is sustainability, given the nature of your company. Why is that so important to you? And how important do you think it is for all future founders to have that in mind whenever they're starting anything, as you know, for their mission statement to be sustainability oriented?

I mean, I just can't be more frank about this. The climate crisis is enormous. Things are way worse than we have collectively woken up to, and quite literally the fate of humanity is sort of on the cards. And I really passionately believe there's nothing more important that we need to work on. I also believe that the sustainability revolution will make the digital revolution and the industrial revolution before it will make both of those seem like a walk in the park. You know, the industrial revolution took place over centuries. We're gonna have to completely reinvent absolutely every part of our work and our lives. And we're gonna have to do that in decades, not centuries. So I believe that there'll be no business within next 10 years, say, that unless they have profit with purpose, their core, unless they well on the way to being truly sustainable, I believe they will lose the license to exist. Society will no longer tolerate businesses that are extracting profits at the expense of people. People and planet.

Yeah, definitely.

And it's important for everyone to stay educated. What about yourself though, in terms of Oleo? You had this light bulb moment in a way, 2015, but was this— did sustainability come with that? If so, did you know about the problem as much, or did that come later, knowing that you could solve that? I'm not solving it.

Yeah, so I can remember at university learning about climate change and global warming and all those sorts of things. But then I sort of went out into the business world after that and largely forgot about it all because it just was not being considered or discussed anywhere as part of mainstream business or lifestyle or culture. Thankfully, that has started to change really quite rapidly. I'd say over the past 2 years, really. Certainly for me, when I founded OLIO, I had that experience with not wanting to throw away food. The first thing my co-founder Sasha and I did was to research the problem of food waste. And that was what then took me on my sustainability journey. So with the problem of food waste, we discovered that globally, one-third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away, which is worth over a trillion US dollars. Alongside that, we have 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night, who could be fed on a quarter of the food we waste in the Western world. And the environmental impacts of all that food waste is absolutely devastating. If it were to be a country, food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. After the USA and China. And that's because a landmass larger than China is used every year to grow food that's never eaten. Sorry. So that was obviously a hugely sort of shocking experience. It then opened my eyes to the concept of, I guess, kind of waste more broadly, the climate crisis more broadly. And I'm now absolutely convinced that in addition to having the climate crisis, which broadly is sort of discussed about in terms of sort of carbon problem, we have two other equally pressing crises that need to be addressed. We have the biodiversity crisis. So, you know, we have basically destroyed and driven to extinction roughly kind of 70% of other species. And then we have the resource depletion crisis. So at the moment, humanity is consuming resources as if we have 1.75 planets. And so Earth Overshoot Day is on the 29th of July. So that's the day in the year in which we've used all the resources the Earth can replenish in a year. So the current status quo is clearly unsustainable, and this is something that myself and Sasha, we've really kind of committed our lives to addressing and changing. And that's why, as we've been on our, our own personal journeys of learning about the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the resource depletion crisis, learning about sustainability more broadly, that's why The OLIO remittance proposition has extended beyond just food waste. So we now connect people with their neighbors so that they can give away other household items as well. And they can also lend and borrow everyday items instead of buying them brand new, because the reality is we don't all need a cat carrier and camping chairs and disco balls and air mattresses. We need to be lending and borrowing things instead of buying things, and we need to be using the resources that already exist in our local community. So yeah, it's been quite a journey. And then on a personal level with my family, I've spent the past 5 years trying to dramatically reduce our footprint on the planet, trying to lead an increasingly zero waste lifestyle, which has really transformed the way we eat, the way we shop, the way we live. The great news is it has made us healthier, wealthier, and happier.

Yeah, and to me it appears that, you know, sustainability and having as big an impact on the climate was a big inspiration behind maybe starting your own company and doing it yourself. But I wonder, was there any other inspirations for founding your own company and sort of being your own boss, given the prestige of your previous job roles and the companies you worked for? A lot of people would say that's amazing, but you obviously had this extra desire.

I did, yes. I had this growing entrepreneurial itch for about 5 years before I sort of took the leap to do it. And that was really kind of prompted by the fact that I was fortunate enough to be sent on various very inspiring leadership courses by my various corporate employers. And I can remember so vividly sitting in the audience at these events, listening to these people on the stage telling all these incredible stories about the businesses they had built, the positive impact they were having. And I can remember being so inspired by what they were doing. And then I reflect on myself and I've just felt so uninspired by what I was doing. And I reached a point where I was kind of sick and tired of not being inspired by myself. And I also knew that if I were to die tomorrow, whilst I'd have a great CV, I wouldn't feel like I was proud of the impact that I had had. So it was becoming increasingly clear that I wanted to do something I could be proud of. And I also wanted to do something sort of under my own steam. But the reason why it took me so long to take that leap was I made a bit of a mistake, which was that I spent all that time wandering around thinking I don't have an idea. So, you know, I can't possibly become an entrepreneur because I don't have an idea. What I've retrospectively realized is I was going about it completely the wrong way. What I should have instead done was to look for a problem that I wanted to solve. And if I had done that, I'm sure I would have taken leap much more quickly than I did. I think the other thing that made me take such a long time to pluck up the courage, quite frankly, to make this transition was the fact that there were just no role models for people like me in entrepreneurship. I, you know, at that time was in my mid-30s and I had a child and a husband, and the sort of projections of entrepreneurs that you see absolutely everywhere are these kind of young guys in hoodies that have dropped out of an American university, living on a diet of ramen noodles, and who were kind of coding all hours of the day. And just no part of that description felt relevant to me. And I'm pleased to say that over the 8 years that I've been doing this, I've seen a really promising shift in terms of the sheer diversity of startup founders that we're now starting to see.

Yeah, and you obviously took this big leap to start your own company, but that isn't, you know, you've been doing that throughout your career, you know, going from company to company. So maybe you were used to it then. So if we could talk a bit more about your, your corporate career and how that was, I wonder how was it like transitioning from each job and how did you know when it was time to begin the next step of your career for like us young students about to enter the job world?

Yeah, I think the first thing I want to catch is sort of what you said about sort of starting areas of being a big leap. On the one hand, it is a big leap, but actually I think through thinking of it as a big leap, a lot of people get put off by it. The reality is that starting a business is not a big leap. You just need to take one tiny baby step today and follow it with another baby step the next day, another baby step next day. And it might be sign up for an email newsletter or read a blog post or go talk to someone, or then the— I don't know how much it is nowadays, but you know, the amount of money it is to incorporate your company at Companies House. Businesses are built by just taking lots and lots of baby steps day in, day out over a long period of time. So it's not actually a massive leap to take. So then in terms of how did I know when to move in through my sort of corporate transitions, for me it was, I was very much thinking, am I growing here? And have I sort of, where on the growth curve am I? And if I, you know, there's that kind of S-shaped curve, and if I'm near the top and I'm topping out and I feel like I'm not really growing anymore, then now is the time for me to move on. And I also would, you know, the inverse of that is if there's no opportunity of growth, I would move on, or if there was great opportunity, I would stay for a longer period of time. So my longest period of time where I stayed somewhere was 7 years because I could see that it was just that constant growth progression, and I knew that I would only get that permission to grow because I had built strong relationships within that organization. They would sort of take a bet on me, whereas an outside company probably wouldn't. However, when I did eventually leave that company, say after 7 years, I left not only because of the lack of growth opportunities, but also because I was really worried that I didn't want to become institutionalized. 7 years is a really, really long time, and there are so many different ways of doing things in the world. So that was an important motivator to me. I've always kept an eye on sort of how long I'm working somewhere because I know that, you If someone shows up with a CV of 6 months here, 9 months there, 15 months there, it raises lots of red flags and question marks. So you do need to be quite strategic. But I think that what a lot of people do not do is when they are interviewing for a job, they don't really ask many questions through the interview process to truly help them understand what is that company like, you know. So you need to be asking questions about the company culture, ask the interviewers to describe what the company culture is. What 3 words would you use to describe the company culture? What sort of people get ahead here? How are decisions made here? Those sorts of things are all questions that you need to ask so that you can then avoid going somewhere, hating it, and having to jump on really quite quickly. I think the one thing that I would say is a mistake that I made is that because I was very fortunate to go to an excellent university undergrad, then I managed to get a job as a strategy consultant with BCG straight out of university. I immediately had a good CV, which meant that I had headhunters contacting me a lot about roles. And on the one hand, that's amazing, but there is a significant downside of that, which is that I was retrospectively sort of quite lazy. I avoided the hard work of figuring out what am I truly passionate about. Again, you know, what problems do I want to be working on? What sorts of organizations do I want to be working for? And so I worked for companies that, because I'm also someone who can naturally get excited and curious about most things, I ended up, you know, I've always enjoyed my JIT work and I've always enjoyed it, but I regret that I wasn't doing work with purpose much, much earlier on in my career. And I think if I'd taken out that time to really think about what I want to do, I would have figured that out.

And if we sort of go back even further to the time you were in education, you started at Cambridge, which is a highly competitive environment. You were studying social and political sciences and managed to achieve a first-class degree. How did you deal with university life? Did you find there were any struggles you had to navigate? And, you know, how do you reflect on the whole experience?

Well, it's interesting because I've sort of been to university twice. So Cambridge at the regular time, sort of, i.e., after your A levels, and then also then in my 20s, I think it was 26, 28, I went to Stanford in America. So I had two very different learning experiences. So the Cambridge one was actually really quite isolated. It was sort of, here's a stack of 15 books you've gotta read this week, locked away, um, writing and studying. I found the subject matter fascinating. So I did sociology and politics and social anthropology and philosophy, and absolutely loved the subjects. But retrospectively, I think I would have preferred a much more interactive format than the sort of, you know, once a week tutor meeting and a few lectures. I did work incredibly hard at Cambridge. I guess sort of I'm a farmer's daughter. I knew I didn't want to be a farmer or farmer's wife. I knew that my education was sort of the way out of that. So, so I did work very hard. I also partied very hard as well, made lifelong friends. But what was really quite liberating was going to university again in my late 20s because, and it was a totally different experience because at that point everyone was there, was there because they had chosen to be there. They'd proactively chosen to be there. They'd worked really, really hard to get in and they'd done it because they wanted to do it. Not because society expects it of them, not because their parents told them to. And it creates a really different environment actually, where everyone has really chosen to be somewhere. And as I say, the American teaching format is way less hardcore than the UK. You know, you do exams every 5 weeks and they're open book, whereas obviously, you know, Cambridge, your finals was sort of 2 years worth of material, closed book. So it really was night and day. But I really enjoyed both of my university experiences, learned a lot from them. Yeah. And I kind of probably love to go back to university again at some point as well. There's so much I still want to learn about the world.

Yeah, and you went into consultancy from that. And again, a common theme, you know, from the outside looking in is that your career was mapped out for you. It never seemed like you were lost. It seemed like, you know, you just went from job to job without confusion. But I wondered—

Well, no, I've got to stop you there because I was always, you know, the kid sort of through growing up, I never had any idea what I wanted to do. It frustrated me that I didn't know what I wanted to do when it felt like so many of my friends did know what they wanted to do. Part of my problem as well was I had no role models. So I lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, so I literally had no clue of what jobs could be. When I went to university, I came out, I was none the wiser. That's why I went into consulting. And I will honestly say that it was only when I founded Olio, so my late 30s, that I finally sort of figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up. So it took me a very, very long time. Now, you know, probably roughly half of people know what they want to do and they're super clear on that. And I've always envied those people. But then there's this other group of people who don't know what they want to do. And sometimes that can be confusing and overwhelming. And I definitely recommend that sort of carve out some time to figure out what are your passion areas, what are your unique skills, what topics you're drawn to. But then the other thing I would also recommend to people is a lot of people get, I guess, sort of blinded by the options and it's just really unclear. Like, how do I decide between a job in sales or a job in marketing or a job in product? And a lot of people, I think, actually sometimes kind of overthink these things, especially if your first job, you just need to sort of go get a job. And that through that process, you will then learn what you enjoy, what you don't enjoy. All these words will suddenly start to have meaning and context and make sense to you. All these job titles will suddenly mean something, because you've just got yourself inside an organization, you've started to start that learning journey. So I often think kind of don't overthink your first job. And then the other thing to bear in mind when you think about your career, certainly what I've seen is that people's sort of big leaps in their career tend to be when they move company. So that tends to be when you get that kind of step change in salary or title. And if you stay too long in one company, then actually often the companies do take advantage of that and your career doesn't progress as quickly as it probably should if you're the kind of person who wants to progress your career quickly.

We like to ask all our guests the same question and it often changes from maybe the time they're at university and where they are now. But what is your definition of success right now and how has it changed over the years?

So when I was at university, my definition of success was society's definition of success. Which was go to the best university and then get the best job you can coming out of university. And certainly at Cambridge, the definition of quote unquote the best job you could get was consulting or banking, maybe a kind of civil service job, maybe a sort of Procter Gamble or Unilever entry-level role. So it was just very clear how society defined success. And in the absence of any other idea of what success was for myself. I just followed what society said. What's really interesting, as I've got into my 30s, and certainly as I'm in my 40s now, I've noticed that people are, you know, we don't sort of hunt as a pack anymore. So in your first few jobs, you have this really strong sense of awareness of your classmates and where they're at, and it does all still feel a bit comparative, whereas now everybody is so much happier because everyone's kind of peeled off and carved out their own path that is authentic to them and makes them happy. And so for me, what makes me happy is doing work with purpose every single day. You know, I could be earning 5 times, 10 times more money than I am right now, but I wouldn't change that for anything. You know, the ability to wake up every single day and know that you're helping to solve one of humanity's largest crises and know that you're doing work with impact that's affecting real human beings on a daily basis for me is priceless. I do see far too many people, it breaks my heart, who have allowed their parental expectations to shape their career, and that's really, really sad because if there's a mismatch between their parental expectations and what that person is uniquely good at and brilliant at, then it leads to just a lot of unhappiness and underperformance. The reality is you'll be most successful in your career and your professional life if you focus on what you enjoy, what you're passionate about, what you're good at. And that might not be what your parents expect of you.

Yeah, and I think that's a great message for anyone looking forward into their career. And you've given invaluable advice throughout this interview, but I was wondering, is there one last message that you'd love to tell your younger self, or maybe as you see younger people coming to your company or applying to a company, one overarching piece of advice you'd like to leave people?

Yeah, I think there's two really, if I can be sneaky like that. Um, the first one is that all the things that made me weird and different when I was at school and university, where there's a great pressure to conform, all those things that made me feel weird and different back then that I suppressed have in my later life turned into my superpower. And I've observed that for so many people. So, you know, kind of harness your inner weird because that is your superpower. And then my second thing really would be, I remember, so it was a very good university friend of mine said this to me anyway, said this to me at one point when I was facing something particularly challenging, I can't remember what it was now. It's a bit of a cliché, but she said to me, feel the fear and do it anyway. And I think that's really, really important because the reality is the only thing that is holding you back is yourself. You know, other people might not promote you or push you forward, but they're certainly not going to hold you back. So feel the fear, do it anyway. What's the worst that can happen? And I think having come from quite a practical, humble upbringing, I just, I constantly think, I'm alive, I'm healthy, how bad can it be? And again, I think a lot of people allow themselves to get really wrapped up by, for example, society's definition of success and just lose track of the bigger things. So I think just keeping yourself constantly grounded and reminding yourself of the things that you do have, you should be grateful for, again, helps you think, well, actually, failure isn't gonna be the worst thing in the world.

Well, thank you, Tessa, so much for that message. I think it's really inspiring. And thank you so much for your time and your advice and walking us through your illustrious career and hopefully much more to come in future. We'll be keeping an eye on Oleo and hope you'll make that 1 billion soon. Yeah, thank you so much. Pete, any last words?

Yeah, again, just a big thank you. And you know, on this podcast, we have all different kinds of people, you know, students and successful people. And I think you've sort of encompassed a lot of, you know, the student view and, you know, somebody who's doing well with their own business. And it's very inspirational for me to see, and I'm sure everyone will find it inspirational as well. So thanks again.

Amazing. Thank you for having me.