Running the marathon with a 20 kilo backpack: the story of the founder of Otaria

In that company, Simoné saw firsthand how SMEs that wanted to advance in sustainability hit a wall: without an area or their own expert, they had to hire external consulting for each topic, carbon footprint, waste, biodiversity, and pay for the same thing again the following year. They never built internal capacity. That, he says, bothered him enough to want to resolve it.

• What was the problem you detected that led you to found Otaria?

“An SME that wanted to make progress in its carbon footprint had to hire an expert consultant, and the following year hire the same thing again. It was not building anything: it was delegating something that for it was strategic to a third party.”

“That bothered me enough to want to resolve it.”

The first version of his company was called Decarbonite and it only lasted two months: he realized that the market already had enough players focused only on carbon footprint, and that what was missing was something that unifies complete sustainability. That’s where Otaria was born.

Before building anything, however, he had to go through what he describes as the first big pain of entrepreneurship: interviewing dozens of professionals, doing surveys and taking a carbon footprint diploma to validate that the problem was real, before writing a single line of code.

Simoné is uncomfortable that they call Otaria a startup. He has been told that a startup should not do consulting because it does not scale, and he understands the argument, but he insists that the best solutions for his technology come from working one-on-one with his clients.

That is why he built the company on three pillars: consulting, training and, only at the end, technology. The tool is not the end, he says, but rather the means for an SME to build a capacity that it did not have before.

• Why did you choose a self-management model instead of traditional consulting?

“It has to do with long-term efficiency, not short-term: I do not seek to derive the shortest possible time in support, as a SaaS would do…

… traditional but that my clients stop needing me. When someone tells me that they stopped calling the consultant every year, for me that is a success.”

That same principle, delivering trust and responsibility before control, defines his way of leading. He says that if something goes wrong on his team, the mistake is always his as the leader, never the person he delegated to.

Today Otaria has accompanied more than 40 companies to measure and manage their impacts, and recently became the first B company in Chile, and one of the first in Latin America, certified under the new and most demanding B Lab standards.

Simoné notices that most of the events in her industry occur after seven in the afternoon, a time that, she says, has little gender empathy: in most of those photos men appear, because it is their partners who usually stay behind to take care of the children. For a time he punished himself for not being in those spaces. Not anymore.

• What is it like to combine being a mother, being married and leading a company?

“It’s difficult. You never finish turning that wheel, because they are extremely demanding roles, almost all of them 24/7. While others go at the speed of light and you see them in all the events, I learned to stop punishing myself for not being there. I choose my battles very well…

…I prefer to get a certification that validates what I am building, rather than publishing that I went to such an event.”

He dreams that, in five years, using Otaria will be as simple as opening email: that no SME will need to have it explained to them how it works.

When asked what she would tell Simoné who had just joined her first big company, she doesn’t hesitate: to trust the process, that she was going to fall and it was going to hurt, but that she was going to build something that would be worthwhile.

He wouldn’t change anything about the path taken, not even the setbacks, he says, because each of those pains ended up being, in the end, pure training for what would come later.