Starting the newsletter with Simona Simulyte is more than appropriate to celebrate Father's Day. She took over her father’s company at 12 due to her dad’s illness and started to run a business making spare parts for cars.

But overall we are covering three recent episodes here ranging from nature-based business philosophies to city emission-tracking software to growing diamonds in a lab.

🎙E73 How Nature Can Guide Us to Build Sustainable and Innovative Businesses

🎙E74 Helping Cities Solve Climate Challenge

🎙E75 Diamonds Are For Everyone: Changing Diamond Industry with Adamas One's Jay Grdina

🎙E73 ♻️ How Nature Can Guide Us to Build Sustainable and Innovative Businesses with Simona Simulyte

In addition to her early-age head-first dive into entrepreneurship we covered a wide range of related topics:

🌳 How life-centric business models can create value for people and the planet

🌲 Why Lithuania is becoming a hotspot for innovative startups and social entrepreneurs

🌳  What are regenerative organisations and decentralised business models and how do they transform the way we work

🌲  How she launched the ChangemakersON network, a community for tech for good products, by leveraging traditional business experience and partnerships

🌳 ESG reporting helps expose greenwashing by measuring and documenting criteria, but companies need to be transparent and set clear agreements.

🌲 The importance of listening to intuition and following nature's lead in business.

🌳 Despite trying to copy nature, we've already made copies of nature before and are now returning to sustainable innovation.

Simona is a true role model for anyone who wants to make a positive impact in the world. Appropriately, we met on the sidelines of Impact Day festival in Tallinn. If you are interested in learning more about Simona and following nature’s lead in building businesses, you can listen to the full podcast episode from this link.

🎙 E74 🏢 Helping Cities Solve Climate Challenge with Kausal

How can cities track and implement their sustainability goals? How can software help them reduce their carbon footprint and become more resilient? How can startups work with the public sector?

These are some of the questions we explored with Sonja-Maria Ignatius, co-founder of Kausal, a Finnish startup that provides local governments with a software platform for tracking and implementing sustainability measures.

She shared with me her story of how she went from being a climate specialist in Helsinki to launching a global startup that works with over 40 cities, including San Diego and Zurich.

Kausal targets expansion in German-speaking markets and in North America with fresh seed funding of 880,000 euros from an investor consortium including Innovestor and Spanish impact fund Zubi Capital.

If you are interested in learning more about Kausal and how they are helping cities become more sustainable, you can listen to the full podcast episode from this link.

E75 💎 Diamonds Are Forever or Diamonds Are For Everyone?

We were thrilled to hear how the diamond industry, known for blood diamonds and environmental disasters, is changing. Jay Grdina's Adamas One Corp is one of the pioneers in the lab-grown diamond business, which is revolutionising the old industry for good.

Adamas One, which is expanding production and pushing not-mined diamonds in sectors like semiconductors and jewellery, owns the original 32 manufacturing patents for lab-grown diamonds, a sector which has taken a massive chunk of the North American diamond market over the last few years.

The diamond mining industry is known for environmental and social problems. In some countries proceeds from diamond sales have been used to finance wars, creating a 'blood diamond' name. One of the latest environmental (and social) disasters occurred in the diamond mining town of Jagersfontein in South Africa last fall.

"People that traditionally might not have gone and bought a mined diamond, whether it's eco reasons or social reasons, or other reasons. We give them an alternative, where they can avoid those atrocities or mindset issues that they have, and come over and buy an environmentally conscientious diamond," Grdina said.

If you are interested in learning more about lab-grown diamonds, you can listen to the full podcast episode from this link.

ps. 75 episodes is a nice landmark, but we are also planning even bigger landmark celebrations for later this month. /drum-roll/