Show notes

Throughout history, there have been genuine supporters and sceptics of equity and inclusion. We can all see how the current political climate in the US has deepened the divide fuelling anti-ESG/DEIB rhetoric, leading many organizations, including prominent ones like Target, Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, Ford, Harley Davidson etc. to reduce or cease their initiatives. However, there is room for cautious optimism considering that some of the world largest organisations continue to be committed including Patagonia, Costco, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Eli Lilly, Amazon, Pfizer, Salesforce, Google, P&G, Goldman Sachs.

But, for a lot of people, like Gagandeep Bhullar, Founder of Superhuman Race, a data platform that measures good, it is business as usual. She does not perceive a decline in commitment or interest from US companies. In the 128th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast Gagandeep Bhullar, joined me to discuss the pressing need for measuring and scaling "good" in today's society. She emphasised that traditional measures of success often overlook the value of good deeds, which do not typically yield tangible rewards in the corporate world.

In the episode Gagandeep shares her journey from a successful career in aerospace at Boeing to becoming an entrepreneur focused on sustainability. We also delved into the unique features of her technology platform, which stands out by driving actionable sustainability practices rather than just reporting. As we explored the dynamics of ESG reporting across the world, in India and the built environment, Gagandeep also highlighted the importance of authentic narratives in sustainability and how sectors like real estate are leading the way in adopting these practices.

We also discussed her belief that BRSR is on the path to becoming one of the best frameworks in the world, her exhilarating and challenging journey into entrepreneurship, and two exciting projects: a climate model to predict asset-level risk and a study on the built environment and real estate developers. Fun fact: Superman, Batman and mythology inspired the name she chose for her platform 😎😎😎

If you are interested in DEI, ESG Reporting, and Sustainability, tune in to the podcast to learn how SHR is leading the charge with technology for good. Link in comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good afternoon, Gagan. Wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Gagan: Thanks Sudha. It's lovely to be here.

Sudha: Let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Gagan: I am Gagan Bhullar, and I founded the Superhuman Race. So what I do now is that I run a data platform called Superhuman Race that measures good.

So that is essentially who I am and what I do at the moment. My background is entirely aerospace though, so I'm a math and science nerd basically.

Sudha: Wow. Okay. That's very interesting. We'll talk more about the transition later on, but tell us a bit more about Superhuman Race and how did you arrive at the name?

And secondly, what is your ambition when you set up this Superhuman Race?

Gagan: I'll start with the vision first, and the reason why I started Superhuman race.  When I started Superhuman Race, I was at Boeing, and I had a dream job. So, I was having a lot of fun, but I was also a very young person. And I think I was struggling with the realities of the world that we live in. And I was hoping that, before I get to a stage where I cannot do anything anymore, can I contribute to building a better world? And that's how we started thinking about setting up Superhuman Race.

It's also very interesting that the problem statement that I identified was that good does not get measured. Because as a young person, I started thinking about what does good actually get you, and I realized that it really doesn't get you anything. It doesn't get you promotions, it doesn't get you jobs. It doesn't get you grades. It doesn't get you admissions. It doesn't even get you dates. Like for the most part, jokes are made about good people, right?

I started thinking about the fact that in our world, good is not measured. And so, it, doesn't get scaled. Because I'm a math and science nerd, I started thinking about how do we measure good. So that was where we started. The vision was to build a better world.  When I started building Superhuman Race, I thought that we could do these amorphous data models that measure good, that are completely abstract.

And I believed that, maybe before I'm dead, we'll see billions of people around the world measure good on the platform. What I envisaged is that every individual, every organisation, every country is measuring good and working towards scaling good. So that's the vision that I started with.

We called it Superhuman Race because again, the space of good and many of the examples that I gave you, I think that, especially as young people, it's easy to get disillusioned. So it's easy to see that the narrative is around children dying and there'd be no water left and the planet sort of, not being able to accept any more human beings and natural disasters.

I started thinking about bringing joy to the space of good and that's where Superhuman Race as a name was born. Because I started thinking, what is the closest analogy to someone who does good to protect people or to protect the planet, but is fun, right? So I started thinking about Batman, Superman, Hanuman that comes from mythology in India and that was where we thought that we should be Superhuman Race so that we become the sidekick that makes the human race, the superhuman race.

Sudha: That's incredibly interesting. You mentioned good does not get you anything. You don't get rewarded for it interestingly, I heard this from the head of sustainability on what is the upside to doing sustainability, and he said, you know what, actually there's no upside, but if you look at the downside, there are too many of them, for us not to be conscious of.

And the second thing that you mentioned, which is very interesting, and contradictory you were thinking of something concretely abstract, which I think comes from your background. So how is your platform Superhuman Race different from other existing technology platforms for ESG due diligence?

Because there are a plethora of them that are continuously being launched and bandied about for different things.

Gagan: So that's actually a very good question, Sudha. What the Superhuman Race does differently at the onset is that it is truly an abstract platform. So, the platform has AI and machine learning models for nearly all the industries.

And because we align with SASB for the most part, I'm able to confidently say that 77 plus industries that are covered by SASB, they are also mapped to our platform. Why this is important is because I think a lot of people set out to solve the problem of sustainability. So, we set out to solve the problem of measuring good, but a lot of people set out to solve the sustainability problem from the point of view of reporting, which is not what our platform does. Our platform is essentially an action platform, so there is automated reporting and there's better automated reporting than most platforms in the world because it's fully automated, but that's not what we set out to do.

Right at the onset, the fact that it's an industry agnostic platform, and when I say industry agnostic, it's to the extent that we have deeply funded competitors that are, let's say, working in a single domain like Real estate. And they will have 25 million square feet of real estate on their platform, and we have 0. 5 billion square feet of real estate and real estate is one of the 77 industries on our platform. To that extent, we've built the abstraction to be powerful. And the second is that we don't focus on reporting, we focus on action.

So, the platform comes together to generate action from, actually, our advisor Ashok Pamidi says this, but I'm going to repeat and I'm going to steal what he says, "from the shop floor to the top floor".  So, the person on the shop floor has different motivations, and you know almost a different style of working and expectations from the person in the boardroom or on the top floor. So how do we build a platform that drives action across the spectrum of people and organisations to scale sustainability?

Sudha: That is again, interesting more often than not, these platforms become a way for organisations to say that they're doing sustainability. So by, putting in data they are trying to show that they do sustainability rather than it being embedded in their business purpose or in the operation.

Moving on from Superhuman Race to India and the industry. What are the drivers for adoption of ESG reporting in India? Are the trends different from the rest of the world? Where are we sort of on the maturity curve?

Gagan: So this is actually again a very good question. I think that at least the driver that I have seen to be the most common driver for adopting technology for sustainability from our point of view is investors asking for data driven disclosures.

So I would say that 100%, not 99, not 95, not 90%, 100% of the clients that we work with today were either trying to access capital, reduce the cost of capital, or just continue to engage with their investors. So that was the single most important motivation that brought most of our clients to us. And I have never yet met a sustainability professional who's trying to acquire a platform that is motivated by either regulation or investors till date. Having said that, I think that in terms of the level of maturity in India in particular, there's a book that Amartya Sen wrote that I read when I was a younger person, ‘The argumentative Indian’, and I think that in order to be argumentative, you have to analyse and explore and debate.

And I see that, across India sustainability professionals and I think that has given them an edge in terms of being able to learn very fast. So, a lot of the Indian sustainability professionals that I have the good fortune of working with today, I've seen that they are able to actually spotlight business successes that are a result of sustainability investments, which is something that one doesn't see commonly, actually, like even you shared the example of the sustainability quote that you mentioned.

So that is exciting, I see that in India, once people are getting it, they are actually trying to not just invest in sustainability, but they are also able to spotlight how those investments are driving better business.

Sudha: At the macro level there are so many anecdotal stories about how companies are struggling to report or that the quality of reporting is not great. How has been your experience? From the conversations I've been having I see that sometimes there is a head of sustainability and suddenly that person is supposed to be in charge, but then the functional heads and the leaders don't necessarily report and that person doesn't have the authority. What are you seeing? Is it seamless for a lot of organisations or some of them, what is your experience?

Gagan: I think a couple of things on this. One is that sustainability requirements and reporting have become onerous over the years. And I don't want to comment on whether it's fair or unfair that they are as onerous as they are.

It's just the fact of the matter that if you have to submit a CSRD report, it's going to have more than a thousand KPIs on which you need to report data. If you're a complex diversified business, it could be data from different industries spread over different locations, right? I think that the requirements have definitely become onerous to the extent that the sustainability professionals and companies now need to report on the detailed KPIs that relate with their business, which could, like I said, be geographically or across industries, it could be diversified.

They also have to report on things that are outside of their business in several cases. So work that's happening with communities, materiality often captures physical risks and so on, I think that it is onerous, it's hard, and the data is distributed across organisations, sometimes across multiple organisations.

So I think it's impossible to do it without using technology. Having said that, the technology to do this has existed even half a century ago. So half a century ago, a magical tool called Microsoft Excel was born, which is able to capture data, and it's able to visualize, and it's, able to do all sorts of things.

So the question remains, why is it still a challenge And I think that's where the actual understanding of the sustainability space matters. So one is that a lot of the KPIs are very technical within their own domain, whether it is calculation of carbon emissions, whether it is calculation of pay parity, it could be LTIFR, which is like the safety parameter, you have so many different, extremely technical parameters that need to be calculated.

So that complexity doesn't give any single individual or team any confidence because you cannot be competent across so many different domains that are all technical at the same time. And I think the second part of the reason why it has been hard to do this is because in some cases, the data has never been captured by the company because, it has not mattered till date. So now suddenly that data becomes important because somebody is evaluating performance on the basis of these parameters.  And so if the data does not even exist in the company till date, how do you educate stakeholders in terms of what is the data, how should it be collected? And then how do you educate the consumers, which could be board members or C suite executives, that this data matters? And how do you contextualize it against core business KPIs so that it starts informing, business decisions in meaningful ways. I think that there's a wide spectrum of difficulties, which is why any technology platforms that don't bring a core sustainability expertise with them are unable to scale no matter how good the tech is.

Sudha: So, you have certain mandatory things in the geography, like in India, if you're India based, if you're a multinational, you're already reporting on so many things.  In India, there's a BRSR, I think it's at a very nascent stage of development, because from what I see and how people are reporting, the reporting is quite vague.

If you're the company, you can say you are going to be ambitious about your carbon capture or whatever journey without actually making a real commitment. What are your thoughts on that, on the BRSR?

Gagan: So I think actually the BRSR has evolved significantly in the last few years.

So I think the first few versions, which were known as the Business Responsibility Report, BRR. Very, like you said, but I think that it has come a long way now in terms of not just intensity calculations required by companies, but also intensity based on pay parity in the sense of PP, across different currencies and so on.

So I think that there's a steep rise in maturity that has happened in a very short period of time, which I think the credit goes to SEBI for this.  Today the BRSR, the new format of BRSR is actually a very robust format, especially when you put BRSR core on top of it, which is probably one of the most comprehensive value chain reporting formats outside of the EU that exists in the world today I think.

In that sense, there has been an evolution. But I think that the challenge still remains that a lot of these formats are self-reporting based and there's really no peer benchmarking that is provided by the regulator themselves, right? So whether it is the EU or whether it is India or whether it is any part of the world.

 What the frameworks like BGSI and such do is that they rank and stack people based on certain criteria. But what the regulations do is that they just take the disclosure. So nobody really knows because there are no benchmarks. I think that bad data does not get filtered out at all.

There are no penalties for bad data today. I do think that will also evolve, because obviously, these are just the first few years of that type of data coming into the organisation, so there's no benchmark that has existed so far. In terms of track, BRSR is probably on a fast track to become one of the best frameworks in the world today.

It has come a long way in the last few years, maybe industry segmentation is something that the government is already thinking about because one sees initiatives like CCTS being announced where they've already said that there'll be nine mother industries where there might be targets and then how does trading happen and so on.

And a lot of this is also based on math actually. So SEBI which is administering this has come up with very, very scientific ways of assigning those targets across industries and on. So I actually see this as a sunrise sector in India at the moment.

Sudha: Yeah, I mean, India definitely deserves a lot of praise. It's mandatory to report. How important is it, Gagan for businesses to have an authentic narrative on ESG reporting and sustainability? Considering, the EU green deal is coming and greenwashing is going to be penalized. We also have seen legislation in India around greenwashing, around consumer segments, et cetera. What are your thoughts on this?

Gagan: So, I think that historically companies that have even had a narrative, if they haven't had the data, it doesn't fly in the new world anymore. So, I think that the biggest opportunity that I see for any company today, regardless of whether it belongs to a hard to report sector or a consumer sector. I think the opportunity is good data.  Across the spectrum, whether it is export of teas, which is like one of the oldest commodities which is being exported or it is hydrogen for power, which is one of the newest commodities, I'm seeing that especially as it relates with the EU importing...