Alex Todorovic, Founder & CEO, Arbor

I recently had the pleasure of heading down to Thin Air Labs to chat with Alex Todorovic, Founder & CEO of Arbor, to chat about how he's gotten to this point and developing a Founders Mindset. 

Arbor is a carbon accounting platform that helps companies calculate their carbon emissions with industry-leading accuracy and make data-backed decisions.

Who is Alex?

I am always the first person to say ‘I don't know this’ or ‘I don't know that’, I always try to learn new stuff. I come from a computer science background, got there a little bit later in life. I was doing aircraft maintenance engineering before, but didn't really like it.

Once I started doing the computer science stuff, I fell in love with it very quickly. I'm the kind of person that loves learning when I can use it practically. I just got drawn to the startup side of things, I was working at the Entrepreneurship Center at U of C (the Hunter Hub) for a couple years as their main software guy.

I met a lot of people there, a lot of founders and investors. I found a lot of the founders I spoke to didn't actually have any technical background, and at that point in time, I just thought ‘Well, I feel like I can do this, too’. Then I met my co-founders during school and we connected over having the same kind of drive and ambition, but also the humility to know we need to learn from people. Through the people I had connected with at the Hunter Hub, I tried to sponge as much as I could from.

I'd say in a nutshell, I have a lot of energy and motivation, but I always make sure to take time to learn from mistakes and think about things before jumping into them.

Do you feel like working at the Hunter Hub during school was kind of getting a feel for being a founder? Picking up on what you could prepare for being a founder?

It was a lot of prep, I would say. I talked to a bunch of different founders, a bunch of different people. I started picking up some things about early-on formulation of my thoughts around what should be and needs to be done, but the thing that I always found was that people were always thinking more from a business perspective, and they were lacking the product or the software perspective. I had that side, the software side, but if I could pick up and learn on the business side, then I felt like I'd have a massive advantage.

What I find is, to start a business, the only way that I suggest people do it is to be really passionate about it. There's going to be fun times, for sure, but then there's some pretty shit times. During those shit times that's where the passion kind of gets you through that.

Do you feel like there's anything that was given a different sort of perspective when you were working around the ecosystem about being a founder versus the reality of the situation?

From an external perspective, it looks very glamorous. Your job is you're just keeping everything together, whether it's money-wise, floating, teams, everything. The buck stops with you, which is a lot of pressure, but that doesn't really mean that you are much more skilled than anyone.

And I find that people that get into it for the wrong reasons - and maybe they get misled from an external point of view - and those are the people that generally don't last very long. The ones that get into it and almost reluctantly take on these roles and positions and play the parts with the goal of ‘I want to win and succeed’ are the ones that end up making it through.

How did you land on Arbor?

This was around the beginning of 2020. I was working on my final project, I was still at The Hunter Hub, which was Tech Fest. The goal there was to bring in a bunch of Calgary companies and then introduce them to students so they could hire them. And that went really well, but it was February 2020, like right before COVID hit. With Tech Fest completed, I then left that position. My Co-Founders and I really liked doing programming competitions and hackathons. There was one that ATB put on around open banking, and financial data.

We thought that all the banking apps were the same boring thing. One guy in our group, Danny, said ‘Hey, I'm taking this class right now, and we’re talking about this thing called ESG.’ I thought that seemed pretty cool, the ‘E’ (Environment) part feels a little more confident than the rest of it, so let's maybe pull that out of the data set.

The whole point was to associate any time someone bought something with an environmental score. And so we were actually pulling in transaction data and then pulling in ESG data and tying the two, and it was working. We ended up getting second place and won some VR headsets.

From there, we knew that this wasn’t the final idea, but that idea, that thread seemed interesting.

Then we took that and entered a Microsoft competition around smart cities, smart economies, stuff like that. That’s when COVID hit, we had lockdown, we had time on our hands. We wanted to go crazy into this competition. And around April of 2020, that's when it concluded, we were winning with a more refined version of what we had originally but really focused on educating people on the environmental impact of their products they're purchasing.

From there, we took that a little bit further, but realized even then that doing B2C is tough, you need to have a lot of marketing dollars. And we don’t have anything right now. So we thought, what if we focused on selling to businesses instead and drilled down on the product side of things?

Then I called up James Lochrie, and I told him ‘You're the guy I want to learn from, what do you think of this idea? What are the things I should look out for?’.

He seemed quite interested, he really liked the energy that we're bringing, the fact that we're very adaptable, agile. He said, ‘I'll give you guys a couple months, come back with as much progress as you can, and then we'll go from there’.

We took that as let's work as hard as possible to try and create whatever we could as traction or proof points. And then hopped on the phone again. He led our pre-round after that. We also ended up winning one of the first Startup TNT competitions during that time as well, gave us a lot of traction with the raise.

You said during COVID you were able to just go crazy over this idea, is that something normal for your personality? The ability to lock in and go crazy over something?

Yeah, I think all of us from the founder side are like that. We share that kind of the same energy. If someone tells me that I can't do something, that's the best way for me to do that thing. I find that motivational.

I found a lot of people, especially in the first couple of years we were doing this, were very quick to dismiss what we were doing, but we could see the momentum shifting year over year, the conversations from the sales side became a lot easier. We’re still early, in terms of a global market, but it's just become so much easier to communicate because everyone seems to have become more educated around it.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is that gut instinct and trust in yourself even when others may be dismissive. How do you navigate that?

You have to base it off a few things. Ultimately, when you really don't know, you just have to trust your gut. Your gut is there because it is telling you something that it's pulling from some deep recess in the back of your mind, that you have an experience that is leading you to this feeling. So generally, whenever I am really stumped, I would just go with my gut feeling, and usually I'm not insanely wrong. Most of the time, if you just go with your gut, it might not be the best answer, or the best pathway, but it'll be one of the decent pathways to go, and at that point, you're happy.

As part of the process, I like to de-risk my choices as much as possible. I really rely on mentorship, I talk to my mentors about a lot of things, try to get multiple opinions on things. And then, rely on a lot of historical data as well. Looking back on how similar decisions worked out, really trying to learn from your mistakes. If you do all of those steps, and you still don't know, you just gotta go with your gut. For me, my mindset is I'd rather have something fail or get a no as fast as possible, instead of taking forever to decide on a pathway.

It really does just kind of come down to cowboying up.

Being a founder is a lot of that. There are so many things where you just have to do something you maybe have never done before. But no one else is gonna do it. I remember when we were doing our first raise, we didn't have lawyers. I just found a template for a SAFE agreement and learned that thing front to back. I have no legal background whatsoever, but I knew more about this document than anyone else.

I think a lot of times, if you trust yourself, you do the right process, you do whatever you can to make the best decision possible, it's pretty rare that it'll be some sort of catastrophic outcome.

Do you feel like this kind of mindset has transferred into your personal life as well?

I feel like for most of my life, I've been a laid-back person but, especially in the last year, I've had to go face-first through all the walls. It really enables you to feel like you can do anything. I'm four years in now, but I feel like I've lived ten years in that time.

A lot of people really struggle with fear of something happening, going wrong. And I had the same fear, but once you get enough of those no's you become immune to it. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone’s not going to come to your house and break your knees or something.

Where do you think that determination and purpose comes from?

I think it's because it's Arbor, but you don't have to own an organization to feel it, I think.

It literally just comes down to the mechanics of what are you doing? Let's say you're working in a large org, but in a division that's truly working on something spectacular. I think if you feel a sense of ownership of what you're doing, it will lend itself to that purpose side. The thing that always sucked for me, and I find this with most founders, is being in a larger org and the stuff that you're doing never really equates to any sort of real-world intrinsic value.

How do you balance that want to kind of go crazy, but not burn out?

I don't even know if I've fully cracked it, I was really bad in the first couple years for taking a chill day when it came around. I would have a day that's pretty lax and I felt super guilty and antsy about that, I’d just think I need to be doing more. Now, I've gotten to the point where I think I will take that lax day, because I know the next day or a couple days later, it's going to be insane.

Those are the moments where you have to recharge your batteries. There’s stuff about generals in war, where their number one objective would be to get sleep whenever they can. Because there's going to be long stretches of time where you're not going to be able to sleep at all.

The other thing is, like, you've got to just do stuff to turn your brain off. For me, it's going to the gym, playing sports, video games, stuff like that. Those are the things that help me actually decouple my brain from thinking about work stuff.

I think you need to be intentional about the disconnection, like, when it's time to. I think a lot of people fall into that trap of doing more all the time. You can't always be doing more. Sometimes doing more means just chilling out. All the things you contributed up until now haven’t all of a sudden disappeared. You've done a lot, take some time to recharge, and then you can get back into it.

I think where I learned that lesson the hardest was through computer science at school. Sometimes I'd be sitting there for, like, eight hours in the lab trying to fix a bug, and I just could not figure it out. I get home, I'm just fried. I come back the next morning and figure it out in five minutes.

What are you proud of?

I think the overall journey, I think the resilience that I've been able to showcase to myself. When I grew up, like, I didn't really have a whole lot of self-confidence, self-belief. I just wasn't very good at school. I always had other interests and stuff like that.

Whenever it was something that had realistic applications, like how to make an app or something like that, I just got so dialed in to it. I think from there, building my confidence up to a point now where I'm a lot more like, what's the worst that could happen? I've had to go through some shitty things, where. you feel like if you get this win, it'll mean X, Y, and Z for your organization, but it doesn’t happen. Or maybe if you don't get this deal, you have one month left. And the deal doesn't go your way. What do you do then? To get to that point requires a lot of resilience.

Thank you, Alex.