Goterra's Olympia Yarger spruiks “maggots in a box” to attract eyeballs to her food waste management biz

Goterra founder Olympia Yarger started farming insects as feed. Now her startup is converting waste for Australia’s most progressive companies, and looking to scale internationally. I caught up with her on the sidelines of SmartCompany’s excellent Growth Summit in Sydney earlier this month.

Simon: You’re growing and scaling your business in a really exciting way, you're winning all these accolades, you're doing amazing things, you're well backed, you're at an inflection point from a scale perspective, and you beautifully articulate your very scientific concept in a way that the person on the street trying to get their head around it would be able to understand. How?

Olympia: Well, I think the challenge for climate founders is that the understanding or imagining of what the climate change world will be is varied to a person globally, right? 

So nobody actually agrees yet on what is going to happen. Are we going to be screwed or is someone else going to be screwed? Ocean front properties? Us? And so as a company that's going to deliver an impact on this world that we can't agree on, one of the best ways you can think about it is to foundationally serve the customer in the market without necessarily worrying as much about the climate story as you are about solving the problem, right?

Simon: Why do you talk about maggots in a box?!

Olympia: When you're thinking about a circular economy business that actually solves a problem to the customer, just do that! Do not have long arduous complex discussions about the theories and the science around what you're doing. We don't talk a lot about the actual technical capabilities of maggots in a box. We use the phrase maggots in the box to get people excited in a bit of a clickbaitey sort of way of talking about it, but all we're really doing is converting your food waste into a high value product and it's going to cost you less to do so. 

And doing and understanding that is easy for customers.

It's cheaper, there’s a better outcome, sign me up. 

This is a passion thing. We're really passionate about saving the world, not just passionate about cool tech. And that is a differentiator from fin-tech right? 

Like nobody's passionate about fin-tech in the same way as we talk about climate tech. It's a bigger investment because it’s a bigger product than a SaSS. And the payoff, the investment perspective, is over a longer horizon. 

It’s a longer horizon because this is first of a kind stuff. You don't get to put forward a million dollars, stick three dudes in a WeWork and expect to get out a 10 X return in five hours because the rate of return has to be commensurate with the speed of innovation. 

It took us years to learn to fly, right?

And then when we did, nobody cared about it for another two years. The Wright brothers did it and they didn't even talk about it for two years.

And so we have to measure the metrics of success differently.

I think the investor world is getting there, but we've got to remember that investing in climate tech is like a two minute old situation, and so we're all still running on old modalities around how to fundraise.

Simon: Can you tell us about the proof points? The places you’re servicing? 

Olympia: So, we've got customers now that are multinationals and that's been a huge validator, where we say, this is an idea that matters. If you have brands that are multinationals and they’re globally recognised, then your credibility extends past Australia's boundaries. 

So Barangaroo, Lendlease, Melbourne Airport, Hyatt Regency, those brands carry our brand because their credibility carries ours, and it carries them outside the Australian context. And I think those things are really important as far as who to partner with first when you try and build those foundational levels of valediction. 

Simon: How do you sell the commercial benefits as well as the climate benefits of what you do?

Olympia: Well, bettering our climate or saving our climate is better business. But we’re only ever focused on the end state, right? So it's like: if you do this, then it saves the world. That is very hard to translate into a balance sheet or a bottom line or a quarterly outcome for the decision maker. So you should deliver real returns to your customers, not altruistic returns or green checks or greenwashing returns, but better returns. We deliver better returns because we're logistically closer, which means we're cheaper. 

And so you are cheaper, and it [your product] has a better outcome. That is inherently what customers are all looking for today. If you're delivering on circular economy, climate change technologies, your [customer] should do that by default because solving these problems is a better outcome. 

Simon: How are you thinking about scaling up? It sounds like you are interested in Southeast Asia but a lot of people within your business are saying USA?

Olympia: I believe a lot in the emerging markets and I believe a lot in Southeast Asia and how it's growing and developing, and I just think there's so much focus on the US because that's been the destination market for us [Australian companies] for forever because it's a captive Western population, so it's an easy translation. 

But Southeast Asia, particularly in the climate space, is so interesting because those guys are building their infrastructure today. For tomorrow. They're not trying to retrofit old infrastructure. It’s exciting.