we have the founder of recycle bank with us today Rondon and Ron welcome to the show thank you for having me so tell us about how you started recycle bank for those who don't know I'd always had a passion for social policy in the environment and I'd started my career in management consulting where I got a great background in technology and business process and I had reached the point in my career where I wanted to merge those two interests and I was going back to business school at Columbia and I had a conversation with a
friend of mine from high school we talked about whether or not you could reward people for recycling when that motivate them to do it and something just triggered in my mind and I spent the next 7 to 8 years of my life building a company that that does that and what does recycle they do at its core recycle bank rewards people for the amount that they recycle so we developed a technology that records the amount that your home recycles and then we reward you for the amount that you recycle with the hope that that's going
to motivate you to recycle everything which saves your city money so what is the business model for recycle bank recycle bank's business model is that it rewards people for the amount that they recycle and that helps cities save money because the more that you can divert it from the landfill the more cities save money and so we get paid by cities to help them reduce their landfill disposal costs we also have an ad engine our core business model since the beginning has been recycling but in the past few years we've expanded beyond recycling to reward
people for energy reduction water reduction using public transportation how do you actually measure how much someone is recycling we have a technology that goes on to the recycling truck that records the amount that your home has recycled and then you can log on to our website at recycle bank comm and just like you're looking at your bank statement you'll see each winkie recycled and how many points you earned and you can use those points to shop at local and national businesses historically what kind of impact have you guys made on the recycling industry the impact
has been significant for a few reasons the first reason is that recycling rates are very low in the United States and so the opportunity for a major impact is significant the other reason why we've had a major impact is when people can actually see that you're tracking their behavior they're more conscientious about what it is that they're doing how did you get the company off the ground without initially raising from professional investors I had a successful career in management consulting prior to go into Business School and creating my company and so I had some savings
i depleted all of that and then I was fortunate to get a small seed investment from Columbia University and a recycling company in Philadelphia so that was helpful and then the third thing that happened that was really important is there's a great company called cascade engineering that manufactures recycling carts and equipment for trucks and their CEO believes in social entrepreneurship believes in the merger between corporate ideals and environmental ideals learn about what I was doing and via handshake gave me about a half a million dollars worth of carts and equipment for a truck you're now
teaching a class on social entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School it's an amorphous term to many how do you define it I think there's a number of levels to social entrepreneurship so at the first level if you start a business and you employ people you're providing a social benefit and then it builds on from there in terms of how are you treating those people are they vested in what you are trying to accomplish as an entrepreneur and a business person who are you buying from and at the top level it involves being a triple bottom-line business
which means your profit your social interaction with the community and your interaction with the environment are all intertwined and you can't really pull them apart it's all one so why is social entrepreneurship still sort of a stepchild when people in the media and everywhere else you see it why is that there's something that happened in American culture over the last 40 or 50 years where people thought that greed was good and you needed to be out for yourself and company should only be focused on the specific bottom-line the point is ladies and gentlemen that greed
for lack of a better word is good greed is right greed works and I think what people are realizing now is that actually is not good business and during that same period of time there's been a lot of companies that operated completely differently and people looked at them and said oh you can't be successful that way but now people are recognizing that they were successful they were successful over a long terms what are some of the other companies that our social entrepreneurship company that people ought to know about method cleaning products seventh-generation revolution foods happy
baby there's a lot of companies out there that are doing well by doing good after six years of running this company you transitioned you're on the board what was that transition like but it's an emotional time when you've been a founder and a CEO for six or seven years of a company the platform was in the right place to hand it off to somebody to enable them to be very successful and come into a situation in which they could continue to scale what is next for Ron Donen I've invested in a fund called the collaborative
fund that is focused on collaborative consumption I've started a another venture which is focused on deploying renewable energy technologies to sports stadiums and athletic facilities and I'm a seed investor in other entrepreneurs that are trying to do what I did seven or eight years ago and need some financial assistance Ron thank you so much for coming in great to have you on the show thank you for having me
