Let us be your tomato plant

Eating a sweet juicy red tomato gives you so much.

It gives your taste buds a treat, your body nutrition, and leaves seeds for more plants. More tomatoes.

It keeps on giving as you play your part in its survival. It's actually a pleasure for you to help. It needs harmony.

We want our company to be a family of tomato plants.

My co-founder Louis and I have worked on 3 tech startups now, each in a different sector. But one commitment they have all made is to explore and build better Internet business models that Pay It Forward.

Having working online for quite a long time, we get so disheartened still by the general lack of innovation in Internet business models.

The novel opportunities the Internet allows to operate radically different businesses is so exciting. Practices like deeply invasive advertising are outdated and are a residue from a bygone pre-Internet era. There are new practices to explore that are better for all of us.

Values are built into the very code and operations that we are creating at Ordaloca.

For instance, one question that we always come back to is how to reward users for their role in helping us succeed? Shareholders without shares.

I’m not talking about utility. Obviously, we always aim for perfect user experience, functionality, support etc, but that's just good business. However, there are many ways to offer additional value at both the personal and community levels.

As an example, we are going to look to bring back a model called the Lagom Shelf. In short this is an idea we had on our first startup, to place a cap on our share of profits and feed the excess back to the communities that created them.

Or maybe it's the fact that we are trying to bake reusability and collective actions into the platform from day one. We believe it’s possible to introduce circular concepts into our everyday habits and feel the benefits at the same time. It shouldn’t be a chore for us all to change our behaviours, to ways that are vital for the planet's health.

These things cannot be tacked on afterwards.

Values are baked into the very code and operations that we create at Ordaloca.

And our long-term interest in B Lab’s B Corps Movement and more recently in The Bento Society, is getting us to double-down on our impact objectives, values and how we can measure our way to fulfilling them. We commit to keep thinking, listening and trying out ideas if they fit our purpose of helping local communities flourish and prosper.

So one by one, we hope to feed you all delicious tomatoes very soon.

* Yep, I know it's not all hunky dory with tomatoes, but that would ruin the vision :)