Green Tech: Lizzie Horvitz of Finch On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On The Environment
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
Machine learning is moving in an incredibly exciting direction of quantitively solving for data scarcity and information. Instead of spending hours on what materials are best in sneakers or what packaging is ideal for shampoo, we do all the upfront work for the consumers and brands to make their lives easier.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”.
We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lizzie Horvitz.
Lizzie Horvitz has been passionate about sustainability since the age of 16 and has focused her career towards mitigating climate change in the private sector. She started Finch in 2020, which helps decode products’ environmental and social impacts and incentivize consumers and brands to make better decisions. She has a BA from Middlebury College and an MBA and Master of Environmental Management from Yale University.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio with an older sister, my parents, and a lot of dogs. My mom is a bleeding heart animal lover, and my dad is a pragmatic lawyer & businessman, which was a really lucky mix for the career I chose. We were always surrounded by a lot of people — mostly friends and family — and everyone had such an interest and curiosity in the world around them. I think it’s a Midwest thing — people are genuinely interested in other peoples stories and are incredibly kind.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Within two months of starting my company, I had to go to small claims court. I purchased a domain on GoDaddy to create my first website, and the payment had to go through Escrow. It turns out, the domain wasn’t available to sell but they still let the sale go through. I had raised zero money and used my savings to pay for this domain in the first place and suddenly was in a legal battle with this individual seller, GoDaddy, and Escrow. Each party pointed fingers at the other and I never got my money back. This certainly wasn’t something I expected to be spending time on within weeks of starting a business, but being a founder is certainly not all dreamy work.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Before Finch, I had an incredible opportunity to work for a company based out of Indonesia, Singapore and Hong Kong which replaced single-use plastics in the to-go industry. Brian Reilly started the company. Two months after I started the job, Brian promoted me to Chief Operating Officer. I had never worked at a startup before and had zero experience or confidence doing the role to which he just promoted me, but he had a hands-off approach that gave me the room to thrive and I ultimately had the confidence to really lead the company. I would have absolutely never started my own company had it not been for Brian’s encouragement and management style. He tragically died recently, but I hope he knew what an impact he had on so many of us.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My grandfather always used to say “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to have time to do it over?” As I’ve started my company, those words couldn’t be more true. I think a lot of people focus on big picture and tend to cut corners at the less sexy work and then are put in a rough spot around tax season when they haven’t been accounting appropriately, or when they’re finally ready to fundraise and realize they don’t have proper branding and marketing. Spending appropriate time and resources from day 1 will save so much time and stress down the line.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Self-confidence — it sounds cliché, but you really can’t let anyone else tell you what you’re capable of. I had a terrible boss once who accused me of title inflation, would only let me join meeting if I took notes, and kept me at the bottom rung at every opportunity. That type of behavior could really get to someone early in their career, but I had to tell myself every single day that I deserved better and it was worth finding a team who you didn’t need to spend so much time convincing.
Open to feedback — I am a big fan of radical candor and believe if everyone said how they felt most of the time, we’d be in a pretty good position. If I have food in my teeth in a meeting, I’d hope to God that someone tells me. Similarly, if someone thinks I’m sucking oxygen out of a room or micromanage, I should take that into account.
Networker: I’ve taken every single introduction anyone has ever offered, and I’ve sent more messages on LinkedIn to strangers than I can remember. The worst case is that someone won’t respond. Even if you feel like you wasted 30 minutes speaking to someone, you never know what type of collaborations will come out of that introduction in the future. I cold-emailed the co-founder of Honey which was a longshot, and he ended up investing in Finch.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on the planet and the environment. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
We’re solving a two-fold problem. First, consumers are becoming increasingly demanding of transparency in products and the majority of them don’t have a proper way to learn about their impact — they’re either reading wonky academic papers, which aren’t meant for the general population to understand or they’re reading bloggers which often aren’t based in fact or data. Particularly around sustainability, there are so many opportunities for greenwashing and words that have absolutely no meaning, like “eco-friendly” or “chemical-free.” Simultaneously, brands of all sizes are scrambling to understand how to share the right information with their consumers, and what their willingness to pay is for more sustainable products. Finch is providing that transparency to the consumers and brands. Through a browser extension, rate products on a scale of 1–10 using a machine learning model and attributes that we’ve scraped from the public domain.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Machine learning is moving in an incredibly exciting direction of quantitively solving for data scarcity and information. Instead of spending hours on what materials are best in sneakers or what packaging is ideal for shampoo, we do all the upfront work for the consumers and brands to make their lives easier.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
At 16, I spent a semester in the Bahamas at The Island School and my world was turned upside down. We lived completely off the grid, grew the food we ate, and couldn’t shower if it didn’t rain. This was 2004, and climate change wasn’t at the center of conversations like it is today, so I really saw the solution before I fully understood the problem. While I worked at Unilever, I had friends and family coming to me all the time asking questions like “what exactly is a paraben? What diapers are best for my newborn?” Simultaneously, I had friends starting small companies asking what steps they should initially take to reduce their corporate footprint. I spent months and months looking for the right information to share that was digestible but based in data. At some point, I stopped searching and started building.
How do you think this might change the world?
Climate change is going to be solved in a myriad of ways. It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s not lost on me that a big part of that solution will be on the infrastructure scale, decarbonizing our grids. But consumers and brands deserve to play a role in this and can start making better decisions without doing hours of research.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
We sell aggregated data to brands and have an incredibly strong privacy policy to ensure that individual data doesn’t get in the wrong hands. The potential drawback was if another company sold individual data without proper consent from consumers.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
- Build a team that can fill in your gaps. I’m non-technical and while I had the idea for the overall vision, I needed others to execute it. I’m learning a lot, but wouldn’t have been successful without my team.
- Understand your users. Before we even started building, we did a series of Facebook tests to better understand who, if anyone, would use our product and how we could find them. The last thing you want to do is build something only to realize no one wants it.
- Follow Brian Chesky’s advice on early curation. We don’t need to scale to 1 million users immediately. Have a small set of them who love your product so much they’re willing to shout about it from the rooftops, and don’t worry about if it’s not scalable. Once we find what that product looks like, we can figure out what parts are scalable.
- Reid Hoffman says if you aren’t embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late. Make sure you get your product as soon as possible so that you can start iterating immediately.
- Don’t let perfection get in the way of good. When we see the most successful companies, we realize that all of them took years to reach that level of success. Patience is important, so understand that you’re building something that may take 7 years to reach its peak.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I love Dr. Ayana Johnson’s Venn Diagram advice. It’s three circles, and the first is what brings you joy? Like what gets you out of bed in the morning? The second is what is the work that needs doing? Eg. Climate or justice solutions. The third is what are you good at? What special skills do you have? In the middle is what you should do. If you’re missing any part of those three circles, it will likely lean to burnout or failure.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I’m a huge fan of Katie Couric. I was honored to be featured in her newsletter a few months ago, and I nearly lost my mind. Katie has heard stories from so many incredible minds throughout the world and I think in order to make a positive change in the future, you need to understand where we collectively come from and the historical context. She’s able to connect on such a personal level, which is also a trick. In order to change people’s mindsets, we need to find common ground.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Green Tech: Lizzie Horvitz of Finch On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.