Welcome to She is the Change, your go-to podcast for celebrating the trailblazing women who are redefining the boundaries of tech and cybersecurity. In each episode, we sit down with fearless innovators, leaders, and change-makers to explore their journeys, the challenges they've overcome, and the groundbreaking contributions they're making in these dynamic fields.
This episode we are talking to Tessa Clarke. Tessa is Co-Founder & CEO of Olio, an app tackling the climate crisis by solving the problem of waste in the home & local community. Olio does this by connecting people with their neighbours so they can give away rather than throw away their spare food and other household items, and lend and borrow instead of buying brand new. They also have over 100,000 volunteers who collect unsold food from local businesses such as Tesco, Iceland and Holland & Barrett, and redistribute it to the community via the Olio app. Olio has grown to over 7 million users in 63 countries and its impact has been widely recognised, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted Olio as a "beacon” for the world, and by Vivatech who awarded Olio "Next European Unicorn".
Prior to Olio, Tessa had a 15 year corporate career as a digital Managing Director in the media, retail and financial services sectors, and she met her co-founder Saasha whilst they were studying for their MBAs at Stanford University. Tessa is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world, and about ‘profit with purpose’ as the next business paradigm.
Tessa’s TED talk about the power of sharing has been watched over 1 million times, and in 2023 she was awarded the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award, the longest running award for female business leaders.
