#27 | The Quadruple Win: Vikas Garg and abillion's Transformative Business Model
In 2017, after spending thirteen years in the finance industry directing billion-dollar portfolios and hedge funds, Vikas Garg pivoted to pursue his goal of helping create a healthier, more sustainable, and more compassionate world.
Fueled by an authentic desire to create meaningful social change, Vikas put his vast knowledge of data analysis, algorithms, finance, and plant-based nutrition to work and created abillion 🌱, a sustainability-focused mobile app with an e-commerce platform. His audacious goal in designing this community was to mobilise a billion people to save the world, by making better choices for the planet.His goal was to inspire one billion or more people to adopt a vegan lifestyle, or to simply lean into eating less meat and choosing foods that have a sustainable impact on the planet.
“We have an opportunity to think about what we put on our plate and how it can create so much impact for so many things. It is connected to everything.” — Vikas Garg
It doesn’t stop there, however. The social media app encourages users, over a million of them so far across 187 countries, to review food products and restaurants that are vegan and/or sustainable for the planet, including beauty products, clothing, fashion items, and many other items.
Every time a user adds a review to the vast database, they are rewarded with ownership in the company. And that’s not all! Every review also generates a donation to a sustainable non-profit that the user chooses from the app.
Animals win. The environment wins. Health wins. Non-profits win. Sustainability wins. Users win.
In this episode, we discuss:
• Vikas’s background as a vegetarian Hindu born in India.
• HIs family’s move to New York and their transition to a dairy-rich American diet, and the resultant health issues that eventually inspired them to choose a vegan diet.
• Vikas’s decision to leave the financial world after the 2016 US election to create a social media app that had social good as its primary goal.
• The creation of the abillion company and app, and the plethora of ways it helps people, the planet, animals, non-profits, and various aspects of societal health.
• Vikas’s goal to have one billion or more users by 2035.
• The interconnectedness of what we eat and the impact on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s)
