University of Sydney MBA Sustainability Club: Earth Guardians and Start Up Club present

Expert Panel: Sustainable Start-ups

Date and time: 5pm-6pm, Wednesday 26 August 2020

Where: Zoom

Join us for our next virtual event to discuss the experience entrepreneurs have when creating sustainable start-ups.

Hear from these founders and CEO on what it is like to navigate founding a start-up, how they are helping address sustainability issues and learn how you can support sustainable start-ups

Guests on our Expert Panel include:

Eric Phu, Co-Founder and CEO at Citizen Wolf (fashion)

Eric spent 10 years managing digital agencies in Australia and China, with global brands such as Sony, IBM, Philips, Jaguar, Volvo, McDonald’s, P&G and Unilever.

Feeling there was more to life than encouraging mass consumption, Eric left the corporate world to start a private consultancy focused on interesting projects that made a global difference for the better.

Eric and co-founder Zoltan were inspired to create clothing with better outcomes for customer, worker and the environment. Citizen Wolf combines algorithms and on-demand manufacturing to create the future of fashion today: made-to-measure, ethical and planet friendly.

Citizen Wolf won a Good Design Award Gold in the Fashion Impact category (2019) and was also named ‘Innovation Champion of the Year 2019’ by the National Retail Association, as well as being a finalist for ‘Best Ethical Fashion Brand’ at the prestigious Prix de Marie Claire (2017).

Eric has also been on the Global Steering Committee for Education and Communication at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Mel Fyfe, Co-Founder and CEO at blakthumb (urban farming)

Mel is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Blakthumb which provides an end-to-end controlled-environment agricultural (CEA) model. Blakthumb exists to build food security and urban resilience by integrating commercial scale, sustainable food production into urban environments.

With Blakthumb, Mel leads the company and leverages her expertise in policy and planning, major projects, food systems and infrastructure development to create the framework to effectively enable controlled-environment agriculture in urban environments. Recently, Mel led the development of Blakthumb’s research report, Cities that Feed Us, which was developed to create an action plan to help Australia become global leaders in urban food production.

Mel has over 15 years in government and private sector Senior Executive roles. Her public sector career spanned local and state governments with senior roles in strategy at Transport for NSW, urban renewal and major project interfaces at City of Sydney Council, and leading the transport and infrastructure portfolio for the Barangaroo Delivery Authority.

Mel holds a Bachelor of Arts and an Executive Master in Public Administration from the University of Sydney, and a Master of Planning from UNSW.

Dale Schilling, Founder and CEO at Hillridge Technology (insurance)

Dale has over 20 years’ experience in natural resource development and operations management across Australia, Japan, the US, Germany, Singapore and Indonesia.

Hillridge is the result of Dale's desire to arm the farming community with financial tools to better manage their weather risks, having witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of extreme weather on his family’s wheat & sheep farms in the Millewa and the Eyre Peninsula.

Prior to Hillridge, he steered oil & gas projects and operations for Mitsui & Co, Ltd, a large Japanese trading company, and later, led The Boston Consulting Group’s global mining operations topic. He has an MBA from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Economics from Kyoto University.

See our last session on Sustainable Business Recovery here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8hCj5nqNiQ&feature=youtu.be