GRESB at 15: From early days to new ventures | The Pulse by GRESB

This episode is the second of a three-part mini series celebrating the 15th anniversary of GRESB. The episode focuses on the career paths of early GRESB team members and where their journeys have taken them today. The conversation reflects on GRESB’s growth over the past 15 years, the evolving role of ESG in real assets, and insights into the future of sustainability and data collection. Watch below, featuring:

Can’t listen? Read the full transcript below. Please note that edits have been made for readability.

Roxana: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the second of a three part mini series covering the origins of GRESB, as we’re celebrating its 15 years anniversary. My name is Roxana Isaiu, Chief Product Officer, and I’m joined today by two of my former colleagues, Ulrich Scharf and Luc van de Boom. We haven’t worked together in a few years. That doesn’t mean we haven’t met in a few years, but it’s typically around a dinner table or a few rounds of drinks. And it’s been really impressive to follow your trajectories, your careers over the past few years. I’ll let you introduce yourselves for everybody, but to frame the conversation a little bit. The reason why we wanted to have you on The Pulse is because, as we’re taking stock of the impact of GRESB over the last 15 years and the evolution of the market, we’re looking at multiple dimensions in which we believe we’ve made a positive impact. And one of those very important dimensions are its people. And not just the people that work at GRESB directly, so former employees, but also individuals throughout the industry.

And, I remember very vividly when I started, when Ulrich started, even when Luc started, the whole concept of a Sustainability Director was very rare, the talent pool of ESG was very limited. And that situation is quite different now, which is fantastic. And you are two people that left GRESB to start their own very successful ventures, still very much focused on the area of impact, and we would love to hear more about that. So, welcome, and I’ll hand over the floor. Ulrich, would you like to start?

Ulrich: Yeah, thanks, Rox. It is definitely a pleasure and also like really funny to be here and have this reflection moment of what we did together. So I’m Ulrich Scharf, I’m the Managing Director and Co- Founder of SkillLab. We make modern labor markets and education systems that are skill based, and I will later explain a little bit of how that relates actually to the work we did at GRESB at the time. To throw it back to my GRESB time, I think I was employee number one, a long, long time ago. So it’s amazing to see 15 years later where the whole thing is now. With that, I throw it over to Luc.

Luc: Thanks Ulrich. And amazing to be on this call with you guys, who would have thought 15 years back that we would have been on this podcast together. And it’s amazing to see how much has changed in that sense. I’m Luc van de Boom, I’m based in Amsterdam, Co- Founder of Scaler and Chief Business Officer. We’re really focused on enabling the data transition and the ESG transition at real estate managers, helping them to navigate through GRESB, for example. So really related to GRESB still, but also all these other frameworks and regulations that are pushing up. So enabling that data collection part and the challenge that the industry is facing.

Roxana: So, Luc, Scaler is also GRESB’s partner. So we continue to work together in different capacities. Tell us a bit about how the idea of Scaler came to be and what part of your previous experience led to the realization that something that Scaler is providing right now is required or needed by the market participants. And how do you think the evolution and the need of GRESB complements that? And feel free to take an arch into the past and maybe reflect on some of the early days, early moments, as you do that.

Luc: Yeah. I think it comes down a bit to what you mentioned in the introduction. The whole concept of a Sustainability Expert, Director, or CSO, has evolved really quickly and where you’ve seen platforms focusing on helping exactly those experts or consultants in our space, that is a particular focus that we have. But our focus at Scaler and the gap we saw in the market is really making sure that every stakeholder in the real estate industry is enabled with easy data collection features with the insights that they need to make the right decisions on a daily basis. And that really comes down to a narrow edge in terms of user friendliness on proactiveness that you can achieve within the platform. Reflecting on how we created that vision around data architecture really comes down to my time at GRESB as well. Having worked at a small company, I think, I’m probably the sixth or fifth employee. It was a small team dedicated to make a global impact, which GRESB is still so focused about. But that also meant my personal goal was influenced so much with that, not only from an energy transition perspective, but also from a startup vibe and making sure that even with eight people back then you were able on a global scale to change and to form a market that wasn’t there yet. People weren’t able to collect that data. People had all these challenges, when it came down. They even didn’t know what E, S, and G stood for or sustainability. And I think that, for me, made my personal dream and vision to, with a small team, with a startup, with a scale up now, but, change the world a little bit to a more positive impact that we really need.

Roxana: Thank you, Luc. Ulrich, I’ll turn to you to talk a bit about the social dimensions, because obviously when we talk about ESG, we talk about the S as well and I know that in the real estate industry there’s a temptation to focus a lot on net zero, on decarbonization, and embodied carbon. All extremely important topics, but the social aspects of this industry are also very important and you took that and applied it in a slightly different way. So can you speak a bit about that and what influenced that decision? What motivated the start of that venture?

Ulrich: Yeah. I mean, 2017, when it became clear to me that it was time to move on to the next chapter of my life beyond GRESB, I thought long and hard about what did I actually learn in the last couple of years? And for me that piece of magic that GRESB performed was to take something that was very elusive at that moment, ESG, you know, it existed in marketing brochures at the end of the day. And to turn it into really structured data that is benchmarked and became a huge industry enabler, right? So many companies, so many organizations that do fantastic work in sustainability are able to do it because there is a baseline of real, reliable data on ESG that’s done in the same standard. So my reflection of, okay, what did I actually learn here? Was really this core idea of how can I use technology and modern systems to take something that’s right now very, very elusive and turn it into structured data to build amazing services and products on top of it. Right. And GRESB did it for a benchmark that stood very firmly between the institutional investor and the fund manager. In our case, we took it to a completely different industry, meaning labor and education markets.

And we asked this basic what if question of: What if we can use skills as a universal language to describe what a person can do, what you learn in a specific training or what are the requirements for a job? And really go from this concept of everybody having a different CV or certificate for something to one structured data language that allows to reconnect all of the different pieces. And you know, that’s, let’s say technological know- how, and more on a motivational level, I can only kind of confirm and underlie what Luc just mentioned. Having that experience as a young person that in a small way, you can literally change the world, with a very small team, if you have the right idea at the right moment and a lot of high quality folks around you, that’s extremely empowering. Realistically, most people never have that experience in their 20s. So we were extremely blessed and fortunate to have that. And then to take the confidence out of this that, if it worked with GRESB, we can also do it in different contexts.

Roxana: That could almost be a closing statement for anyone that is looking to start their own venture and have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to have their own impact in this industry. We all know. It doesn’t come easy. There’s a lot of hard work that builds the foundation of any new organization. And I think we can consider ourselves lucky enough to be able to do that in a field that has also a very strong impact. One of the purposes of this podcast is to offer a reflection on the past, but also to offer an opportunity to look ahead a little bit. So, I think you both looked back and reflected a little bit on the early days. Is there anything that you see in today’s market that you think, “Wow, I really didn’t expect this to happen when I started working in this field.”

Luc: I can take that one. For me, it is really like looking back 10 years first, but, how quickly we’re moving as a market currently towards something that had to be done maybe 20 years ago, right? Like we have to do something that, for example, financial data management has done over the past 50 years. We kind of squeezed the industry into getting to that point within, preferably yesterday. So in a couple of years. And I think there’s a lot of friction and a lot of positive push actually, but it is up to the industry, up to GRESB, up to industry associations, to guide that towards the right direction. And that’s why I also think GRESB has such an important role to play. Still, and back in the days as well.

I’m really positive in that sense, that we’re, as an industry, but also maybe as humankind, are able to solve those challenges that we still face and that we’re trying to solve. But we need to speed up things. And my personal goal is that technology or a good data architecture within our platform can help facilitate that or enable that transition. And I’m just really positive that that push is really fast at the moment, although it frustrates sometimes a bit as well, but with regulation, and with people actually wanting to make that positive impact and that intrinsic value that we’re creating across the globe, I’m really positive that we can push the industry and the whole market forward in the right direction.

Roxana: So training education and upskilling individuals towards an environment where this becomes mainstream is one of the keys that unlocks this challenge. That goes straight into Ulrich’s courtyard because it’s probably what you wake up thinking about every day. So, what is it that you’re mostly focused on these days? What is one of the main challenges that you’re dealing with at the moment that you would like to see unlocked maybe over the next 15 years?

Ulrich: We’ll start with SkillLab and then move over to where are the parallels to GRESB. In short, we want to transform how labor and education markets work. And we think that those traditional approaches of thinking in degrees and job titles just marginalizes a lot of folks on the labor market. You know, I often describe as our target group as everyone that’s not going to get the next job through LinkedIn. And I think LinkedIn is a fantastic tool and it works for many people in the world. But, when you look more at the medium and bottom end of labor markets and maybe some people that are a bit lost, we established in kind of infrastructure that just marginalizes a lot of folks in labor markets. And we want to change that and the way we do it is by describing a person or a piece of education or a job as always the skills that are contained within. By using a universal language to describe very different objects in the labor market, we can kind of reconnect them and therefore transform how labor markets work. And the impact of that should be that every person on this planet has a clear pathway to meaningful employment. So that’s the mission and that’s what we work on. To draw a bit parallel here to GRESB and, you know, to look forward to what should happen in the next 15 years. In many ways, it’s quite similar. In both cases, we’re talking about a transformation of a space. We want to transform labor markets. GRESB is pushing to transform the real estate and infrastructure industry around sustainability.

To make that transformation in an age of technology possible, you need consistent data language that is robust and reliable and allows to create a lot of connections within the ecosystem. So in many ways, GRESB is doing a lot of infrastructure work that then allows other stakeholders and organizations and people to do their job. I would often think that nobody wakes up in the morning to do, let’s say ESG reporting, but there’s a lot of people that wake up in the morning and want to transform real estate assets. And they need the reporting and data infrastructure to do so. What do I hope to see in the future? It’s that that ecosystem is just going to get more and more robust. When we started out, you know, it was essentially academic research that proved that there was a connection between financial returns and ESG performance. The next 15 years really established ESG as a kind of mainstream aspect of the real estate industry. And I hope that in the future, when we think about non financial reporting in terms of ESG, that that industry is as sophisticated and interconnected as many parts of the financial industry. And that will happen because a lot of really smart people are working on it. And there is now also a lot of push, not just from the industry, but also government actors to make that happen.

Roxana: Thank you, Ulrich. Luc, closing statements from your side?

Luc: I think the three organizations that we have been discussing are all just really focused on enabling the industries that we’re focusing on. Enabling that people who work in Australia learn from what is happening in the US or in Europe when it comes down maybe to regulation. That we’re not making the same mistakes as well, from a data architecture perspective. Or is on how we use those tools together. And that for me is just my personal goal as well. But like, let’s collaborate together, whether it’s through SkillLab or what GRESB has built over time or what we do at Scaler to enable that data collection and analytics in a meaningful way and the reporting side. I think if we can keep doing that as an industry, collaborate on the things you’re doing best and solving in the market, we will be able to solve the challenges in terms of climate change, in terms of decarbonization, and I truly believe in that. Otherwise I wouldn’t say it, but we have a long way to go. So let’s all put our shoulders behind it and make sure that we deliver.

Roxana: Well, good thing, like Ulrich said, there are a lot of very motivated, dedicated, and smart people coming together and working on this. So, there’s a lot of hope for the future and a lot of excitement for a pace of acceleration. And I can only hope that 15 years from now we can get together again and maybe reflect on what was said today. Thank you for being strong supporters. Thank you for continuing to be great GRESB ambassadors in different capacities and for doing your part of the work when it comes to educating, training, upskilling, and growing the ESG tent in all its dimensions. And with that, we’ll wrap up. Thank you all for listening.

Ulrich: Thanks for having us.

Luc: Thanks Rox.