An Interview With Maria Angelova
Be open to how you might change. If I look back twenty years, or even ten years, what I’m passionate about and how I want to live my life has changed massively. What I knew and what was important to me when I was twenty or thirty, may no longer be important to me now. As you move through different stages of life, remember to stay open-minded.
As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Marco Pimentel.
Marco Pimentel is the CMO at Redbrick, the parent organization to a portfolio of disruptive technology companies. Combining his passions for entrepreneurship and the outdoors, Marco launched his podcast, Someone Like You — ”how to build a business that’s good for the planet,” and founded Unless Ventures to invest in brands that create climate change solutions or produce fewer, better sustainable goods. His commitment to helping entrepreneurs succeed is second only to his enthusiasm for amateur fly fishing — although, he needs much more practice at one of those things.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path and point in your life?
I’ve always been entrepreneurial, even from a young age. Since I was ten or twelve years old, I was operating tiny businesses and really, really enjoying it. Luckily, that’s something I’ve carried through my career, even as a CMO in tech. Entrepreneurship is what created the opportunity for my success in this industry.
I broke into my career path in tech because of an early realization. Around 2008, the tech industry was taking off. New tech companies were springing up and most of these companies were run by people with fairly technical backgrounds.
I didn’t have that technical background, but I did understand business, communication, and marketing. And there was a clear need for people who could tell stories and push business development in these companies. It was a daunting space. But it was also an opportunity that I didn’t want to pass up. I took a risk on this correlation between tech and business that I had noticed and decided, I think I can learn that.
I see the same opportunity with climate technology and sustainable businesses right now. There are a lot of really smart people working on world-changing ideas, but we’re going to need more people with non-technical skill sets to come aboard and support them in all the areas that make those ideas successful beyond the actual technology.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
Back in 2015, Redbrick’s CEO Tobyn Sowden and I had this idea to build technology within the publishing industry. We founded a company called Assembly and started working on the concept. We were excited about the potential of the tech but there was no way we anticipated what would happen.
Assembly became one of Canada’s fastest-growing businesses. In just five years, we had achieved 67,000% growth and were drawing in over 25 million visitors a month. In 2021, just six years after we founded the company, we sold Assembly to Canada’s largest publisher.
That was a major accomplishment and its success was something that kept surprising us. We had planned to quietly build an interesting piece of tech, but we ended up becoming accidental publishers.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I wouldn’t consider it a mistake. At the time, it was an opportunity. My first real tech startup was in the digital coupon space, I planned and funded the entire thing myself. And it was a total failure. But it still helped me get a foot in the door.
I was in the midst of a business that I knew was going to fail when I discovered a competitor who, as far as I could tell, was doing better than I was. So I took a chance and reached out to Tobyn, the now-CEO of Redbrick and my current business partner. I said, “Hey, I want to buy your company.” I didn’t have the money to buy his company — but that email did get me a coffee meeting with him. And that coffee meeting resulted in Tobyn acquiring my business and my partnership with him at Redbrick. I didn’t change the outcome of what I would consider a big, big failure, but that failed venture still led to the most important connection of my career.
It was a cool experience in hindsight and all I did was send an email. Advice that has served me well, especially in this case, is to remember the surface area of luck. The more opportunities you create — no matter how small — the more likely you’ll get lucky with a good one. Sure, most of them could come to nothing or even be a failure, but maybe one chance email or wild idea changes the course of your career.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
This year, Redbrick became a partner with the University of Victoria’s INSPIRE program. INSPIRE connects students with companies in the community, engaging underrepresented students in science and engineering. Students and company advisors are given a four-month term to co-create a solution that addresses a societal challenge, with a special focus on sustainability.
We put our hands up right away, I wanted to be an advisor before they even asked. Redbrick didn’t have an idea for a project yet, but we also knew we wanted to do everything possible to ensure the success of this program. Carving out pathways for more diversity and equitable opportunity in tech is something Redbrick is deeply committed to, and we’ve ensured our values extend into our co-op program. But INSPIRE was a rare opportunity for us to increase support for emerging leaders outside of our company walls.
As much as this program was for students, all the companies benefitted from a fresh set of ideas and a dedicated research student. We actually brought on our INSPIRE student full-time after their graduation to develop their research into a real solution.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
The INSPIRE event a few months ago immediately comes to my mind. All the INSPIRE students were presenting their projects. Each project was the product of a four-month term of research and development spent under the guidance of the company they were matched with.
It was amazing to watch Redbrick present some quite advanced digital carbon measurement research, but I was really impressed to see the collective impact of the INSPIRE program at this event. Watching these presentations, I knew every student would be thinking about creating an impact for the rest of their careers.
It was like a light bulb went on that day for every student — that, wow, business can actually be a force for good. To me, that’s exactly what we need. We need people coming into the world knowing that what they work on and how they spend their time matters. And that, in just four months, they can take an idea and grow it into something truly impactful.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Support B Corp organizations to set a standard for social and environmental responsibility in business.
Create incentives that encourage for-good businesses. We should be limiting how often entrepreneurs have to choose between climate-minded choices and profit.
Establish and fund community programs, like INSPIRE, that ensure there’s a funnel for people working on impact projects.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think this might help people?
This year, I launched my podcast, Someone Like You. I host conversations with founders who are building climate solutions, creating sustainable products, or finding their own way to impact climate change and preserve our natural environments. Climate action at this scale is as much about entrepreneurship as it is the actual technology — so we dive deep into both aspects.
At Redbrick, we recently launched our latest project as a continuation of our work with INSPIRE. Digital Scope helps companies calculate how much CO2 their digital assets produce. The CO2 emissions from digital traffic, online transactions, and data storage are staggering, especially for software, tech, or SaaS companies — even just businesses that have a large online presence. As more of these businesses spring up, it becomes increasingly important for them to understand their digital carbon footprint.
Digital Scope is built on the idea that the more we understand, the easier it is to take action. Similarly, the mission of Someone Like You is to highlight the changemakers and why their climate solution or business is needed. But what they’re doing is also exciting and opportunistic. So my hope is that someone will listen and decide to do something different with their career, whether it’s making their startup more climate-minded or feeling bold enough to scale their own solution — but I hope the stories that founders share on my podcast encourage others to change their path.
What you are doing is not easy. What inspires you to keep moving forward?
What inspires me to keep moving are all the small wins, the conversation with someone who says they listened to an episode or the student who’s continuing their INSPIRE project on the side of their desk. All these little things have an impact. You just need to wait.
We built a big business at Redbrick, but hearing that one person felt motivated by a podcast episode feels so impactful. You can’t just brush these little things off because they’re what keep you going. And with time, these small wins add up to a much bigger long-term impact, it just takes some time to see that.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
Remember the surface area of luck. I had the privilege to access the kind of opportunities that made my career, but I did try to broaden my opportunities and create more surface area for good things to sprout. I make that practice part of my regular life. Every month I take odd opportunities and throw them at the dart board to see what happens. A bunch of them are going to fail or not turn into anything. But you never know.
Think long-term. Everyone wants results right away, and for younger people especially, it’s harder to think long-term when you don’t know what long-term looks like. Instant success won’t be your greatest achievement in the same way that long-term progress can be.
Failure. Have you heard the saying, “fail fast and pivot?” Embrace failure and make sure you use those failures as opportunities. My biggest failure became my greatest success.
Impact comes in many forms. You can have an impact in your everyday life, your personal sphere, in business, and in friendships — all of that impact is meaningful. Sometimes, you try to keep your eye on the prize so much that you forget that it’s right in front of you.
Be open to how you might change. If I look back twenty years, or even ten years, what I’m passionate about and how I want to live my life has changed massively. What I knew and what was important to me when I was twenty or thirty, may no longer be important to me now. As you move through different stages of life, remember to stay open-minded.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Well, I don’t think of myself as a person of enormous influence. But if I could inspire people to do something, then I would want them to become climate leaders in anything that they do.
You don’t have to be a climate entrepreneur, but you can be a climate leader. I’m a CMO of a private company that is revenue-driven, and not specifically focused on climate philanthropy or solutions. But I’m finding ways that I can make a bigger impact from that position and be a climate leader at the same time. I hope that more people feel inspired to take ownership of their skills and interests and find ways within those spheres to make their own unique impact.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have two life lesson quotes, the first one is from the founder of North Face, Doug Tompkins: “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”
We need kids to have experiences of the outdoors cemented into their memories, especially in such a digital world. I hope my kids (and others) embrace our natural world and that will give them guidance on how to tackle change and deal with digital life.
The other life lesson I first heard from Chef Jose Andrus, but it’s a Robert Egger quote originally: “Charity seems like [it’s] always about the redemption of the giver, when charity should be about the liberation of the receiver.”
If I think about our planet or climate, some of the impact work or charity — especially when it comes to big business — seems self-serving when it should be about liberating us from a future we can’t survive. With INSPIRE and my podcast, I hope more people enter their careers understanding how to direct businesses toward creating real, positive change.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them.
I don’t need to go for breakfast or lunch with him. But Yvon Chouinard, I would like to be on a river fly fishing with you.
I’m inspired by how he shows the world that business, environmentalism, and philanthropy can all be successfully intertwined. And how, with a clear vision and intention, a business can be a force for good.
He may be the founder of Patagonia, but he’s also an excellent fly fisherman and I have some technique questions.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
The best place to find more of me is on my podcast, Someone Like You. I have conversations with eco-founders, business owners, and sustainable thinkers who’ve steered away from the regular path to create a climate solution.
We talk about everything from their business model to their niche of climate education. It’s very purposefully a mix of entrepreneurial discussion and insight into some incredible climate solutions because I want these interviews with founders to inspire people to build a business that’s good for the planet. I hope this podcast offers practical advice while also demonstrating that all it takes is one person to create big change.
Beyond the podcast, they can also keep up with my LinkedIn or rdbrck.com for everything else I’m working on in the tech space.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Marco Pimentel of Redbrick Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.