Getting to Net Zero: A Conversation with Christian Arno

Kimon and Richard speak with Christian Arno, founder and CEO of Pawprint, about how companies can effectively achieve sustainability goals.

As a young child growing up in Aberdeen, Christian was interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. His first venture was in comic book sales, and his first clients were his parents and schoolmates on the bus. When his father learned more about the finances of Christian’s venture, he shut the enterprise down, an early lesson in “regulation.”

For university, Christian attended Oxford, where he studied languages. At around this time, the Dotcom boom began, and Christian created a website advertising translation services. He began to receive customer inquiries, and soon enough, was able to establish a revenue stream from recurrent clients.

The most important thing that Christian learned while building Lingo24 was how to take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization). Christian was able to land bigger companies despite a lack of experience. Searchers would find his professionally-created website, purchase services, eventually leading Christian to start hiring employees to accommodate the growing demand.

In the 20 years of running the company before exiting, Christian was able to grow Lingo24 to a maximum size of 230 people with a peak revenue of around $50 million in a year. Despite this success, Christian felt it was time to move on to another venture.

In the mid-2010s, Christian’s father, formerly an oil and gas entrepreneur, reversed course and became a climate activist with Extinction Rebellion. Through conversations with his father, Christian came to believe that the second act of his career should attempt to address the environmental issues that threaten him, his father, and billions around the world.

Christian’s new company is a software platform, Pawprint, that educates, motivates, and aligns employees of companies around sustainable development goals. The CEO of a company signs up, creating accounts for employees. The employees are placed into teams where they compete to reduce their CO2 emissions. The CEO is able to set various financial or non-financial awards for the best-performing employees.

Pawprint doesn’t just track the results. It also gives employees various actions and pieces of advice, over 500 in total, to improve their environmental impact.

Christian talks about his passion for Pawprint and the excitement of working on project with social impact. His big piece of advice for entrepreneurs: Start doing what you care about as early possible. Don’t wait!

Links

• UN SDGs
• BCorp movement
• Unbabel Buys Lingo24
• Pawprint

About our Hosts:

Kimon Fountoukidis:

Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. He founded both companies in the mid-90s with zero capital, and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. He is passionate about sharing his success with others and working entrepreneurs of all kinds to help them achieve their goals.

Richard Lucas:

Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser for years, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels. He was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991, where continues to invest in promising companies and helps other entrepreneurs realise their dreams.

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