Show notes

Throughout history, there have been genuine supporters and sceptics of equity and inclusion. We can all see how the current political climate in the US has deepened the divide fuelling anti-ESG/DEIB rhetoric, leading many organizations, including prominent ones like Target, Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, Ford, Harley Davidson etc. to reduce or cease their initiatives. However, there is room for cautious optimism considering that some of the world largest organisations continue to be committed including Patagonia, Costco, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Eli Lilly, Amazon, Pfizer, Salesforce, Google, P&G, Goldman Sachs.

But, for a lot of people, like Gagandeep Bhullar, Founder of Superhuman Race, a data platform that measures good, it is business as usual. She does not perceive a decline in commitment or interest from US companies. In the 128th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast Gagandeep Bhullar, joined me to discuss the pressing need for measuring and scaling "good" in today's society. She emphasised that traditional measures of success often overlook the value of good deeds, which do not typically yield tangible rewards in the corporate world.

In the episode Gagandeep shares her journey from a successful career in aerospace at Boeing to becoming an entrepreneur focused on sustainability. We also delved into the unique features of her technology platform, which stands out by driving actionable sustainability practices rather than just reporting. As we explored the dynamics of ESG reporting across the world, in India and the built environment, Gagandeep also highlighted the importance of authentic narratives in sustainability and how sectors like real estate are leading the way in adopting these practices.

We also discussed her belief that BRSR is on the path to becoming one of the best frameworks in the world, her exhilarating and challenging journey into entrepreneurship, and two exciting projects: a climate model to predict asset-level risk and a study on the built environment and real estate developers. Fun fact: Superman, Batman and mythology inspired the name she chose for her platform 😎😎😎

If you are interested in DEI, ESG Reporting, and Sustainability, tune in to the podcast to learn how SHR is leading the charge with technology for good. Link in comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good afternoon, Gagan. Wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Gagan: Thanks Sudha. It's lovely to be here.

Sudha: Let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Gagan: I am Gagan Bhullar, and I founded the Superhuman Race. So what I do now is that I run a data platform called Superhuman Race that measures good.

So that is essentially who I am and what I do at the moment. My background is entirely aerospace though, so I'm a math and science nerd basically.

Sudha: Wow. Okay. That's very interesting. We'll talk more about the transition later on, but tell us a bit more about Superhuman Race and how did you arrive at the name?

And secondly, what is your ambition when you set up this Superhuman Race?

Gagan: I'll start with the vision first, and the reason why I started Superhuman race.  When I started Superhuman Race, I was at Boeing, and I had a dream job. So, I was having a lot of fun, but I was also a very young person. And I think I was struggling with the realities of the world that we live in. And I was hoping that, before I get to a stage where I cannot do anything anymore, can I contribute to building a better world? And that's how we started thinking about setting up Superhuman Race.

It's also very interesting that the problem statement that I identified was that good does not get measured. Because as a young person, I started thinking about what does good actually get you, and I realized that it really doesn't get you anything. It doesn't get you promotions, it doesn't get you jobs. It doesn't get you grades. It doesn't get you admissions. It doesn't even get you dates. Like for the most part, jokes are made about good people, right?

I started thinking about the fact that in our world, good is not measured. And so, it, doesn't get scaled. Because I'm a math and science nerd, I started thinking about how do we measure good. So that was where we started. The vision was to build a better world.  When I started building Superhuman Race, I thought that we could do these amorphous data models that measure good, that are completely abstract.

And I believed that, maybe before I'm dead, we'll see billions of people around the world measure good on the platform. What I envisaged is that every individual, every organisation, every country is measuring good and working towards scaling good. So that's the vision that I started with.

We called it Superhuman Race because again, the space of good and many of the examples that I gave you, I think that, especially as young people, it's easy to get disillusioned. So it's easy to see that the narrative is around children dying and there'd be no water left and the planet sort of, not being able to accept any more human beings and natural disasters.

I started thinking about bringing joy to the space of good and that's where Superhuman Race as a name was born. Because I started thinking, what is the closest analogy to someone who does good to protect people or to protect the planet, but is fun, right? So I started thinking about Batman, Superman, Hanuman that comes from mythology in India and that was where we thought that we should be Superhuman Race so that we become the sidekick that makes the human race, the superhuman race.

Sudha: That's incredibly interesting. You mentioned good does not get you anything. You don't get rewarded for it interestingly, I heard this from the head of sustainability on what is the upside to doing sustainability, and he said, you know what, actually there's no upside, but if you look at the downside, there are too many of them, for us not to be conscious of.

And the second thing that you mentioned, which is very interesting, and contradictory you were thinking of something concretely abstract, which I think comes from your background. So how is your platform Superhuman Race different from other existing technology platforms for ESG due diligence?

Because there are a plethora of them that are continuously being launched and bandied about for different things.

Gagan: So that's actually a very good question, Sudha. What the Superhuman Race does differently at the onset is that it is truly an abstract platform. So, the platform has AI and machine learning models for nearly all the industries.

And because we align with SASB for the most part, I'm able to confidently say that 77 plus industries that are covered by SASB, they are also mapped to our platform. Why this is important is because I think a lot of people set out to solve the problem of sustainability. So, we set out to solve the problem of measuring good, but a lot of people set out to solve the sustainability problem from the point of view of reporting, which is not what our platform does. Our platform is essentially an action platform, so there is automated reporting and there's better automated reporting than most platforms in the world because it's fully automated, but that's not what we set out to do.

Right at the onset, the fact that it's an industry agnostic platform, and when I say industry agnostic, it's to the extent that we have deeply funded competitors that are, let's say, working in a single domain like Real estate. And they will have 25 million square feet of real estate on their platform, and we have 0. 5 billion square feet of real estate and real estate is one of the 77 industries on our platform. To that extent, we've built the abstraction to be powerful. And the second is that we don't focus on reporting, we focus on action.

So, the platform comes together to generate action from, actually, our advisor Ashok Pamidi says this, but I'm going to repeat and I'm going to steal what he says, "from the shop floor to the top floor".  So, the person on the shop floor has different motivations, and you know almost a different style of working and expectations from the person in the boardroom or on the top floor. So how do we build a platform that drives action across the spectrum of people and organisations to scale sustainability?

Sudha: That is again, interesting more often than not, these platforms become a way for organisations to say that they're doing sustainability. So by, putting in data they are trying to show that they do sustainability rather than it being embedded in their business purpose or in the operation.

Moving on from Superhuman Race to India and the industry. What are the drivers for adoption of ESG reporting in India? Are the trends different from the rest of the world? Where are we sort of on the maturity curve?