Yann LeMoël
Yann LeMoël is a seasoned angel investor and the founder of Living Labs Federation, a global accelerator with a focus on forging strategic global and local partnerships for sustainable and intentional project development. After dedicating over two decades of his career to the corporate world, Yann decided to leverage his vast experience and expertise to support and invest in “Tech for Good” companies.
I would say one of the things we're trying to do, that's lacking, is connecting all those local people. It's super complicated, like if you're in Mauritius, how do you find the startup in Thailand with your solution? How do you connect to the expert in Singapore to manage your project and help you do it? And those big global collaboration projects are usually led by large organisations, right? You can do it top-down when you have less money, but it's hard to do it bottom-up.
— Yann LeMoël
Interview transcript
Can you provide a brief introduction about yourself? It would be great to learn more about your background and how you got into this field.
Yes, I'm an engineer by trade. My dad wanted his firstborn son to be an engineer, and my family is passionate about sports and nature. This is the foundation that has guided my life. For 20 years, I worked in the aerospace, aluminium, oil and gas industries. I tried to bring common sense, humanity and environmental responsibility to these industries, which are essential to us today. I worked my way up from engineering to a senior position. Eight years ago, I moved to Singapore as the head of the Asia Pacific division of a large German international company.
Where did you come from?
Yeah, I grew up in Monaco and have been living around the world through various jobs. From Los Angeles, Taiwan, Brazil, and Singapore. It was a struggle to try and change the big dinosaurs of huge corporations, and when you want to change the world, a lot of dinosaurs have to disappear. I wanted to have positive feedback, so I decided to focus on helping the new spaces of businesses, organisations, and supporting the new generation in doing this. At the same time, I was travelling and meeting people that fight for change in NGOs, entrepreneurs, angel investors scattered around the world. So I decided to become an angel investor in these activities, and part of an angel investing group. We own some tech companies here in Singapore and I have different interests in other startups in different fields.
I realised that all the systems we have in a traditional economy to boost innovation were not suited for impact innovation. We have to switch to what we call breeding zebras, Triple Bottom Line companies. This requires an early stage intervention that is much more focused on capacity building, being involved to push them, and being able to train them to bring them to success.
So I launched Living Labs, which is about how can we better support early stage innovation. Our model is about saying instead of accelerating traditional innovation like we do in accelerators and incubators, we're going to build acceleration programmes for one initiator and one innovator. We match them, and bring a business model with a long term vision of how can we attack this problem and how can it turn into a business. We also created XR, a network of people sharing the same values on why do we need to boost innovation for sustainability, and what are the key values that we need to agree and be able to face. This is a decentralised network to collaborate and make meetings between like minded people easy.
For people in Singapore or is it global?
We have 900 people across the globe. Most are in Asia, as it's where it all began, but we welcome people from everywhere. So, initially, we wanted to say that there are a lot of people sharing this value and we needed to find one. So, I suggested using a LinkedIn filter to filter out all the people that shared my values. And that's how we came up with the idea of Excel by saying, "Hey, we're gonna write a manifesto and we're 50 of us all around the world contributed to write this manifesto by saying, 'Hey, if you really want to do simulation for sustainability, those are the six values we have to go with.' And with this flag, people say, 'Hey, that's my flag. That's my country. I'm part of that network.'" And so, that's why we have nine people coming along and they call it "fully decentralised, fully bootstrapped." And it allows them to, for instance, out of my companies, I managed the four last people I hired, I found them through eggs. And because we saved a lot of time, you already know those people won't lose value talking to and that's already grown. So, that's the kind of grace it's in, you know, everything about me. Very few questions with no bullshit because we can't afford it anymore. And that's good. Yeah, so, everything we're seeing, I think, matches. I wrote a little email to confirm that. But indeed, we miss a lot on early stage and innovative support, what we call "blended financing." I don't like the term "blended financing" because now a lot of people think it's like complex financial tools and everything. No, blended financing is just about being invented and finding the right way of funding a project for the right location at the right moment. Blending different kinds of projects, equity, revenue growth, philanthropic investing, whatever it is, just been invented. Unicorn series, a series basically received that other model and that's very important for us to say, "Don't be scared about that but find the right way. And the financing is not that complicated.”
Yeah, it sounds better to have more of an organic, and realistic approach to fuel the finances needed, rather than having standard boxes that should fit everyone.
Exactly as I see it, when people ask us, "Okay, what's your business model? Like, how do you make money?", that's not the right question. The right question is, "What is our impact? How do we monetize it? How do we make it up?" And it's our problem, and we always find a way. Once you have the person that wants to solve the problem, the initiator, and you bring in experts, if it's a true problem, we'll find a way to finance it. Yeah, and so sometimes we have revenue share, sometimes we have beautiful solutions, sometimes we buy a solution and we resell it, sometimes there's other ways. We always find a way. What is never the issue is, as soon as we can find and match bubbles, most of the time we raise the funds super fast.
This gives us a good opportunity to ask our next question: how do you define impact from your perspective?
Let me summarise: it's the ability to have a positive impact on environmental, social, and economic work. Having an impact means understanding that any activity affects one of these three areas. Sorry, environmental, social and economic goals and basically having an impact is to be conscious of one's footprint or, or when you say, "Gosh, I was talking in French all afternoon, sorry, I have to get my contribution to that or influence or impact on this on those ecosystems." And as a new corporation, what we look for is, you have your Venn Diagram of sustainability. Do you have your business model that will tell us if you have the fuel to achieve your impact? And you have a governance that's going to show us that you have the proper organisation not to lose your North Star. So I think it's actually about being conscious of what your impact on the world is. And what is the purpose you want to put it on? What is the target you set to achieve? So what I mean is that some companies probably have an economy that they target to have an impact. They want to make more money, whatever. But they also have a social impact that they don't recognise. So it's being able to recognise the three kinds of impact you might have, the ones you want and the ones you want to mitigate or eliminate. Having an impact is both positive and risk mitigating. Again, great, sorry, long answer. I struggled to find my words.
No, this is good. Based on your experience and expertise, can you provide an example of a successful impact project you have been involved in and walk us through what made it successful? Thank you.
Let's stick an example on food waste, which will illustrate the methodology of living lab and clarify it for you. There was a startup in Thailand that was selling methods and tools to help restaurants reduce their food waste generation. They had a very efficient system and in just three months, they could increase the profit of the restaurant by 10 points just because they generate less food waste, so they don't have to buy as much raw materials for the same throughput. It's a very good business model and I think that's one of the key things we have to tackle in this world.
They were having a prototype with three restaurants and it was working well. They had feedback on their track record, the impact on CO2 and data, and they were trying to find VCs and Angel investors to get the money to scale. But they always said they needed more traction.
So what we did is, we are present in Mauritius and we connected to the Mauritian government. We told them they wanted to do a nationwide sustainability and environmental impact programme and we suggested they look at food waste. We gave them KPIs that were easy to publicise and direct. However, we wanted to change their local economy to make it more sustainable, not just sell a programme. So we proposed that the Thailand innovator integrate their solution with a small company in Mauritius and do a pilot with 10 big hotels on the island. The Mauritian government found a sponsor for the pilot and after six months, they saw the results.
The first thing was that they could privatise it and the government could find ways to reduce food waste on the island. Second, the local company, Foodwise, had a business model that made more money when they fought against food waste, pushing the economy into a virtuous circle. Third, the startup innovator could go back to his investors and say they had traction with 10 more hotels in the Indian Ocean region of Thailand. And fourth, a large NGO or international organisation for French speaking countries said they loved the idea and didn't wait for the end of the pilot, launching a pilot in six new countries.
So a Thai startup had traction with 35 hotels and the impact was huge. The overall project only cost 60 thousand dollars and it was just connecting the right people and making it up. We also did an incubator programme for young future entrepreneurs of all the Indian islands of the story for Indonesian islands, like Madagascar. We brought an expert on venture build data Design Thinking and everything to give them all the tools. At the end, there were three finalists who launched companies and the winner from a very small island managed to raise 90k. The total project cost us only 30 or 40k, but that's the kind of impact we have. Our strategy is to disrupt projects like this and not to do 20 of them to show that it works with very little money and connecting the right people globally.
It sounds like you were trying to tackle food waste, but also look at that issue and how it can be a solution for another part of the ecosystem, such as creating business for local communities. Therefore, it is always beneficial.
It is part of the acceleration process and it must be changed. My goal is to train new entrepreneurs and transform the economy to make it more sustainable. I strive to create local impact and foster local entrepreneurship, allowing them to continue and grow in this ability.
Obviously, this is a great example of how different approaches can come together to create an impact. You mentioned that one of the key elements is to be well-connected to the right people. In addition, what do you think makes this collaboration successful? From your experience, what kind of government governance model would you suggest to ensure that it's a win-win situation for all involved?
I would say one of the things we're trying to do, that's lacking, is connecting all those local people. It's super complicated, like if you're in Mauritius, how do you find the startup in Thailand with your solution? How do you connect to the expert in Singapore to manage your project and help you do it? And those big global collaboration projects are usually led by large organisations, right? You can do it top-down when you have less money, but it's hard to do it bottom-up. That only goes to show that those are the kinds of projects we're working on with IUCN and everything else. It's hard to do in Montana, you need someone like me who loves increased portability for work, who are able to connect to start from when he went to the Amazon rainforest because we travelled all over the world but weren't right when the issue arose. We will do it and we will get it done and you're talking to your organisations and we're doing this, but it comes to a point where nobody wants to manage small projects. Let me explain that. We're working at UCSD and on the Great Wall. I don't know if you've heard about this project, but they managed to raise over $500 million for the firm to profess to you when distributions shows that they are five and they know how they can split it into the country that will receive 50 Millions and with banks, they're going to manage the project. The problem is that nobody wants to manage projects that are below one to two million because it's too costly. But when you do very early stage and short version development, as I said, most of our projects are below 100k or 200k. And that's where you're super efficient. So can you track the money from the top and that's why we have the current gap or people struggling on the ground and themselves and going in noising themselves. They can do large big infrastructure and large big sustainability projects carried by the UN or whatever, but there's no way to bring this money down to the bottom. And then when you do this constantly, in fact, we are built to excel in the UN. So those 500 million in the end, it's the sum of all those impacts. That's where we have a gap right now. And we're seeing a lot of projects looking at this and I think that's kind of where you're going. How can we address this? We're looking at solutions on web three, decentralised finance and equity solutions. But for me, that's the big problem: being able to grow from the top to the root, staying global and being able to manage small budgets.
Great, thank you. Do you have any comments on the governance model? With all these different players in the ecosystem, is there a system set up that would provide a good foundation for collaboration?
Simona: It's not only about co-creating solutions, but also true engagement in the governance from everyone involved, including those receiving funding and those owning the funds (capital). This includes ownership of the decision-making process and allocation of funds. We must also make it more distributed and valuable, as we gain value when engaging with external people. This is one of the core areas of interest.
That's what I call intentionality. And that's a topic I've been working a lot on; I do conferences and this is to be able to talk about ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) sustainability and the environmental, social and ecological impact. And as I said, proper governance is key. Not to lose sight of the long-term goals when the quarterly numbers don't hit and you forget to put the social element back in, right? So you want appropriate governance not to make that happen. There are a lot of models we're developing and that depends on the place and the extent that there are a lot of models on collective management and connectivity so that they don't forget, you know, when you're small farmers that associate themselves together, the typical activity like a cooperative.
Exactly, maybe that's like you over to […] over lunch. We're on a project in India on […] acres, a small island in a […] where the aim of the innovation and the startup is about weed farming. And their model is to bring the clock to a cooperative woman to do the farming and to have an academic coming along for all the knowledge about how to do it properly and everything, and it's a shared management, it's a shared governance.
Incorporated cooperative. I think that's good governance. What I liked, and I think we're missing, is what you used to have when it was family owned businesses. I used to work in companies where 25% of the company was owned by the employees and that makes a lot of difference. You have so your shoulders to make judgement that we're owning part of it, the employees earning money and owning part of it. And, and you're even at the Board of decision sometimes you can have third party NGOs, for instance, and about Hong Kong are all in or all out to make sure that if you're indeed your impact is to be able to do that without impacting on the environment, whatever it is you choose to have. You put the right control to make sure that happens. But it's not a straightforward answer, because I always go back to intentionality as soon as you're clear on your impact and the purpose you want and what do you want to achieve? And you express that clearly in transparency, the governance to make that happen. It's kind of automatic. You see what I mean? I see a lot of incubation. You have a great incubator that launches new startups and everything from day one, the causes as to what was that was the first requirement before saying where they want to do what you see when you see what I mean. So the trick you have is that you're dealing with huge organisations and changing governments. That's very problematic.
Influence is if you're bringing investors and they get their word to say and they can change the ruling of it, but changing over the Romans. What we tried to do is there is no one owner, it belongs to nobody and to everybody so your doors define your activity. You want to talk in week six? You can do it. You share whatever you want. In Europe, what you're just saying is that you endorse the values and you can talk in its name. The problem we had with that is we wanted to grow too big too fast. Until one or two people organically grew and the decentralised governance worked very well, it was a married basis and we tried to enforce it. It's not about reaching out to do our own thing, tick tock, we don't care about that. What have you done on which project? I have been collaborating and you kind of have merit points for that. So the more you get merit points, the more you have your voice to see the organisation of the system. So that works well. The issue we faced is that we were so successful with this manifesto a lot of people came and endorsed it and then you're like, up to one or two people it was great because we were seven and 50 and all active and there was a big dynamics and people quit their job created new ventures that are law, and then you have seven other people that come within three months now. You have to mark them you have to admit and that was the issue. So decentralised, I believe a lot. You need to have a mission, you know, you need to have a common vision. And so that's the manifesto for new people, but also it has to grow in a controlled manner. All of the three different governance questions. Yeah, I think that's what I see and shared shadow management, internal management cooperative and a fully decentralised option.
The point is not to avoid it, but as long as you have a true intentionality, which is a clear vision from purpose to impact, this is a way to achieve it. It's like a business model; you'll find it. I mean, we need to serve the planet. We need to do it, and as soon as you have a good way and it runs out, we always find a way to finance it. If you have a business model, you don't need to question it and you try to have an impact or you invent a story of impact. That's another problem. Now, if you're going to Washington, as long as you're doing it the right way, it's pretty easy. And how do you like to connect everything?
In terms of governance, you mentioned having a long-term plan that goes beyond the generations working on the project now. You also spoke of identifying key people who will devote their time to the project. How should you issue that commitment?
Unknown Speaker 42:33 As you said, we didn't really care because the beauty of decentralisation is that it's beyond our control. So we set a global goal of boosting innovation for sustainability. We pooled experts, students, whoever wanted to join in, that was our common ground.
If you are the proper model, I often posted sometimes that I received a report and oh, this group did that. They created this framework and they produced something. It's awesome living by yourself. But if you imagine one year after creating that tension, only one year after the CEO, whatever it is, he knows whatever email is sent by anyone, you're in total control.
Here I was discovering decentralisation, exploring data, decentralised autonomous organisations, and groups getting together to start. I love it. It's awesome. It's terrible if you want to keep it in control, but as long as there is a clear vision. I wrote a white paper on this position. That's why when I created living labs, basically you need five things if you want to do translations. The first is consensus. What is the goal? What are the values, where do we want to get? The second is a common communication platform, so people can talk in the same language. Third is a knowledge base, so everyone is seeing the same thing. Fourth is a financial hub, so people are rewarded for their work. And fifth is an expert pool, so you can access resources as needed.
If you want people to collaborate, they need those five hubs. The first one, the consensus, is the foundation. I believe in this, people far from the money, and operations came to me because of selling and one night via the compass. The compass is hard to find because you want it to be far from anything metallic or electronic. That's why we need foundations.
Yes, to your earlier point, if we're looking at the wrong metrics, we won't be able to create impact. How do you evaluate the potential impacts of your work or investment?
I'm writing another white paper on this right now. Well, it all boils down to two intentions: the first thing is, what is your set of values? What do you believe impact should explain? Environmental impact, social impact, economical impact, model and governance - those are the five for us. It's important to decide what your set of values are; for instance, socially or decision living lab is to see that the social impact is about the well-being of individuals, not about creating jobs. It's not about it's about well, then the question is, then how do you measure that?
And again, that's why I'm talking about the value is going to be another different topic. Carol Ryff (psychologist) kind of tried to call us what leads to well-being and you see six main factors. Moments of feeling of belonging. So now we have five high levels. Yeah. So what we're going to explain about you as an internal one is going to be the impact on your project. If I can connect that to those, then we'll be okay.
There is a nurture drawdown on energy consumption because we won't be able to reach the 1.5 degrees or even 2.5 degrees in any way - the more you produce, even if it's clean energy, the more and more it adds up to more and more emissions. So for us, the environment, how do you contribute to the global joule of energy consumption? So you have the Kaya equation if you're familiar with this, we have a derivative for the backlash. Think of that telementoring environmental impact you have to be able to put in those buckets contributes to new and green energy. Do you propose a product to contribute to the reduction and consumption of your energy on what you're doing? Do your product or standard the footprint of India
If you're a big b2c company name, a big, big environmental impact when they're just sitting next to people we would put it under this prism. It's hard for them to say why this new chocolate bar, how do you contribute? And that's how we do it. So it's important as soon as you have this set of
values, what you're telling me you're telling me your Well I'm here to create new jobs, yes for what we do contribute. Why you would that any KPIs is open sowe offer framework is this
The KPIs for the companies and you think like the match, and we believe it's fulfilled and intention, and I don't return and we don't set up KPIs. When you deal with food waste, it's easy, runs a food safe. As you mentioned, avoiding drinking for some time, it's a bit more educated.
So actually, the KPI is not so different sectors is actually on the individual. We go to you anyway. They don't have anything to measure.
Then you go into the big references B Corp. But once suppose and what you want to contribute to then you can attach all your personal KPI and say, B Corp is the one I stand by on it. As long as you can explain that story. I trust you. That's good. Financial impact. It's pretty easy, straightforward. That's a good thing. The guy's a unicorn. They're very good at that. Promote Norton and Kaplan, balanced scorecard for North America planning and financial impacts. We use that and that's it.
We have one final question: What individuals can make major positive changes, and how can technology contribute
When we look at a solution, it's always like, "Can you do it with no tech? Can you do it with biotech tech, using shale? Can you do it with low tech and then you go into tech, everything's following back to my emergency on drawdown on energy consumption and being more efficient with energy. So, the subject can be great, but we were all using tech for me, to be safe and ready to use it. It's global communication. That's the best. That's where we make the whole difference. The fact that we were able to create an incubation for a younger generation is brilliant. To a web cafe, that's incredible. It's just incredible. And we did this and why is there still a challenge even if the tech is here is that you look at it beyond things that's physical we need to unlock, called circular supply chain. We cannot run the physical world in the world that's contributing to environmental impacts. We have to localise it, we cannot make it in China and sell it to Nike there. We make it so everything is equal in value. And if you think there should be global access to knowledge, existential angel, it's basically condition based. When we're done with globalisation and the economy over the last decades, it's exactly whatever stupidity won the world. But at the same time, be able to access knowledge. If the league rules are pure, scientific, or access to capital as the very number of various places you can go is a brilliant idea. Not too bad for you. You can have a distributed study in Silicon Valley, you're already raised money. And that's crazy. So for me, I'll tell you before talking about how AI can solve the problems we have. We have tons of tech, we overuse and underuse or overuse but not properly. So for tech, sorry, I keep saying AI and machine learning will not, they will save the amount of technology available, just people no matter what I mean, it's very interesting.
If you have any confidence in your passion and what you can do, it's best to do it by the closest to actual. If you had a magic wand, you could do something for everyone in the world.
Companies, agencies, individuals, families, and teachers all over the world who have the intention to create impact and leave the planet in better condition than before—what would you like to do? What would that look like? To help everyone move from intention to action, increasing awareness of vision and awareness of the existence of activist others is key. People don't just want to say we need to connect global leaders, but rather, they want to understand what made the most difference and what can be done to make a lasting change. When we look vertically across the different layers of society, we tend to be treated differently, and that can be talking to a billionaire or a project of a small person. We can bring ideas that never crossed and just connect them to make change. So getting to the social layers of society like the humans, this is utopia, right? It's about super rich people trying to find solutions rather than what I was saying in the forest. They're giving so many and they're struggling because they don't know if you can help them. So it's about cutting to social learning and you can bring this awareness in the existence of other people for every problem.