Green Tech: Ted Dhillon of FigBytes On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On The Environment

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ted Dhillon.

Ted Dhillon is the CEO and co-founder at FigBytes, creators of the leading environmental, social, governance (ESG) Insight Platform for strategy, data, reporting, and stakeholder engagement.

Ted is motivated by both the urgency and the importance of enlisting “data with purpose” to fight climate change, improving working conditions, and creating a better future. His previous military experience informs his overall approach to climate change and how he directs FigBytes’ ongoing development. Furthermore, his work with the United Nations in performing relief operations and operations in natural disaster zones has provided him with a deeper understanding and the real need for sustainability.

His leadership focus is informed by the latest trends in ESG management, the role of structure and strategy, and his intent to build an ethical and responsible company for our employees.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I was born into a military family in India. I spent a lot of time in the Himalayas, attending a boarding school there when I was a child. During my time there, I witnessed the destruction of the pristine environment. This was one of my earliest memories of humankind’s callous disregard for the planet. After retiring from the military, I did some work with the UN in humanitarian relief and natural disaster operations before coming to Canada to complete a business degree.

While working in the tech industry was the farthest from my mind, destiny thought otherwise and I started my corporate career at a software startup in Ottawa. I immediately fell in love

with technology and its ability to solve complex challenges and its application to the most pressing and complicated issues of our times — climate in particular and more broadly sustainability — was a logical area to focus my curiosity.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

A friend of mine from the Canadian forces called me several years ago from a trade event in Ottawa and said he was with another ex-Indian military officer. It was like finding a needle in a haystack is what he said. This led me to meeting Sonam Devgan, my business partner in FigBytes. He really brought the technical expertise that was required to make an ambitious idea like FigBytes a reality. Without meeting him through a common friend, FigBytes would never have come into existence.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

After I graduated from business school in Canada in the early 2000’s, jobs were few and difficult to come by. I was looking for work and was fortunate to be given my first break in corporate life by a former Canadian forces officer, who valued the skills that a military career imbibes in a person. Had it not been for that, I would not have experienced what it means to work in a tech start-up and all the challenges that go with it. That experience has helped tremendously in setting up and growing FigBytes to the company it has become today.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” — General Douglas MacArthur

This simple quote has been with me forever. I forget when I first heard it or read it. It was certainly during my teenage days. To me, it means that without a laser-focus on the objective, it is likely that an individual or organization will be unable to achieve its goals. It also means perseverance. Maintaining focus on the goal in the face of all the challenges that may be thrown at us is important in order to achieve it. One should not dither in the face of adversity or barriers that may be thrown up in our journey towards that goal.

I have faced several difficult situations throughout my life, just like everyone else. Getting through bootcamp, military life, making the move to a new continent and country as an immigrant looking to build a new life, giving up a salaried job to start my own company — all of these have been situations where the lessons of this quote have helped me get to the other side.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Firstly, perseverance. Being in this unique industry and trying to change the world hasn’t been easy. But staying the course through those hard times was really important when things got tough or I was told “no.” You have to keep forging ahead.

Second, improvisation. Breaking into ESG was not easy by far. There weren’t many solutions to problems I wanted to solve so I had to solve them with the resources that were available but I didn’t quit, nor did I complain. I made sure to be flexible and find solutions with the available resources.

Third, maintenance of aim. Having a specific goal in mind was very important for me. It allowed me to never give up or lose sight of what my end goal was, so I kept going until I reached it.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on the planet and the environment. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

FigBytes offers the industry’s most powerful and comprehensive SaaS platform for sustainability and ESG, used by businesses and institutions to track, improve and communicate sustainability programs such as climate accounting, climate action, philanthropy, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), supply chain emissions, water stewardship and more.

Sustainability is a fast-growing area of responsibility for chief legal officers, chief financial officers and other C-level executives. A recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found that around 80% of companies had assigned sustainability duties to at least one executive. These duties are complex, embracing a wide range of functions including carbon accounting, DEI, water stewardship and corporate governance. Businesses that start monitoring one aspect of sustainability often find themselves branching out into others

Yet most sustainability solutions allow users to manage only one or two functions. That means sustainability leaders have to juggle a variety of specialized products with different interfaces, workflows and data formats.

How do you think your technology can address this?

FigBytes has developed the most comprehensive ESG and sustainability platform on the market — full stop, with an extensive portfolio of solutions including:

Climate Accounting: Helps reduce climate accounting costs, improve data accuracy, and shorten reporting cycles by automating data collection in a unified ESG reporting solution.

Water Stewardship: Assess and predict water risks based on accurate data tracking and analysis to highlight hotspots in green, blue, and grey water footprints.

Philanthropy: Companies can streamline and better manage their corporate giving programs alongside their ESG and sustainability initiatives. Organizations can focus on giving back through charitable contributions such as donations, volunteerism, sponsorships, in-kind donations and more.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Typically DEI programs and data are internal initiatives or goals managed by HR which often become siloed from an organization’s overall ESG tracking and reporting process. FigBytes DEI solution removes these barriers and ensures the tracking of metrics pertaining to employee retention, representation, employee resource groups or DEI committees are part of a holistic ESG view.

Supplier Transparency: Organizations can centralize supplier ESG data in a single view enabling them to understand their performance and make improvements.

ESG and sustainability is increasingly the centerpiece of compliance and reporting efforts. No bundle of siloed point solutions is going to be able to keep up. FigBytes is looking over the horizon to see the sustainability challenges that are coming, and making sure our customers can improve the metrics — and the practices — that matter most to combating climate change and making a positive impact.

Can you tell us what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

The motivation for growing FigBytes stems from a deep passion for creating a more sustainable future. During my time working with the United Nations on various humanitarian relief efforts around the world, I saw the impacts of climate change firsthand. That experience sparked my passion for sustainability which grew into a fascination on how technology can play an instrumental role solving complex problems like sustainability.

At FigBytes, we believe making positive changes for the planet is possible. The more organizations we can help on their sustainability journey, the brighter our collective future will be. I am in the unique and exciting position to support organizations around the world at every step of their sustainability journey. Knowing that I can make a difference motivates me to keep going, even when it’s hard to do so.

How do you think this might change the world?

Climate change is the great challenge of our time. It will take the work of hundreds of thousands of businesses, governments and institutions carefully and consciously changing their practices. But to change those practices, they first have to measure them.

This challenge goes far beyond carbon management. The signs of water crisis are suddenly everywhere. The Colorado River, which supports the entire Southwest United States, is at record low levels. The Sierra snowpack that supplies Northern California with drinking water and nourishes the agriculture of the Central Valley, is shrinking at an alarming rate.

Water, we might say, is quickly becoming the new carbon. Earlier this year, the state of California announced that businesses and institutions would need to halt irrigation of decorative grass. There is every sign that that regulation is just the beginning.

The effort of tracking and managing resources like water and carbon will only grow. Regulation will only become more intense and far-reaching.

That is why FigBytes’ unified approach to sustainability is so important. It’s why FigBytes already includes features for water stewardship, alongside its powerful capabilities for carbon accounting, DEI and much more.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

Find people who are interested in solving the same problem as you: We provide solutions to companies that have sustainability goals they’re trying to reach such as net zero or being a better steward of water. Businesses and institutions who have these goals and can see the big picture are the ones that are willing to do what it takes to achieve success. The same goes for employees who are creating the technology to enable these companies to reach their goals. Any challenge is more easily solved if all goals are aligned and everyone is working toward the same outcome.

Identify the problem and how it affects society as a whole: You need to make sure the problem you’re aiming to solve is something people care about. If it’s not, how are you going to make them realize it’s something that is affecting them too? Providing a solution to a collective problem that is easy to use increases your chances of having more people pay attention.

Establish a clear picture: The best tech solutions solve problems. You have to take a step back and determine what goal you want to achieve when introducing a solution. Making sure you establish what is needed to create your technology from the very beginning is super important.

Connect data with purpose: You need technology that allows you to capture and collect data from your customers and connect it to their strategic goals. For us, the ability to connect our clients’ data to ensure that it follows regulations is extremely important, especially in the ESG space, where some companies greenwash or “purpose-wash”. In order to drive positive change for people and the environment, we made sure our clients had a data-driven approach to sustainability.

Make it easy — everyone likes for their life to be easier: Your technology needs to make life easier for your users. Nobody likes to work harder. For FigBytes, we designed our platform to make ESG and sustainability data gathering, reporting, and engagement easy and accessible for our clients. Our platform simplifies and automates many of the complexities around ESG and sustainability and this further encourages adoption of the platform by even more organizations.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can learn more about FigBytes on our website, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.