In this episode of the Climate Innovators Interview Series, I spoke to Caremiles CEO Kashif Sohail. Caremiles makes an app called EV Club that I’m a user of already in the early access stage. We dig into how the app works but also talk about the way his company is trying to encourage folks to take action by using one of life’s most powerful motivators: money.
Below you will find a lightly edited transcript of the interview for those who prefer to read. If you prefer to listen or watch, this interview is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and as an RSS feed.
Dustin Cote: Welcome back to the climate innovators interview series on Sustainable Advantages. My name is Dustin Cote and I am here with Kashif from Caremiles. Kashif is the CEO of Caremiles. Kashif, why don't you introduce yourself?
Kashif Sohail: Hey, thanks for having me here. So yeah, Kashif or you can call me Bob. That's my Starbucks name. But yeah glad to be here. It's been quite a journey. We've been on this journey for almost two and a half years now. And glad to be here and eager to share what we've learned and hopefully it's of value.
Dustin Cote: I practiced before the interview to say Kashif correctly and I still got it wrong.
Kashif Sohail: That's alright.
Dustin Cote: We're trying! Why don't you tell me a bit about why Caremiles actually exists the first place and what prompted you to start it.
Kashif Sohail: Great question to begin with. I'm not a scientist. I knew nothing about the climate science or the implications of it apart from what we had just general awareness around us. I’m a banker by professional training and a payments expert if you will I've spent over a decade in payments so I’m a banker by profession. I've run groups at Citibank, Barclays. I've been with MasterCard. What I've learned during this journey was the relationship that consumers have with money is practically the most intimate consumer relationship that we have, and as a banker I have been able to manipulate this consumer relationship with money to sell every banking product. There is to sell out across geographies and income levels. So I often use to think what if we could use this ability to turn towards a pro climate behavior. So that was the essence that prompted this inquisitiveness and during the pandemic when I was one of many who had this moment of reflection on where they're going and what life means and in that time I had that moment of madness I quit my job, sold my house, moved to California, and went all in behind this purpose, which is to enable climate action at scale. This is why we exist.
There are three keywords in there one is enabling. I'll come to it at the end. climate action means completely different things to different people. If you have such a broken and divided understanding of anything, how can you do anything at scale? Scale is what I know how to do things as a banker and as a network enabler. So climate action was the challenge, but what we discovered the real problem was consumer behavior and consumer understanding. So we've spent quite a bit of time breaking that down and we've sort of oversimplified everything possible as much as possible so that my 10 year old can get it and she can explain it to my 90 year old mother of what is climate action mentally. So we've oversimplified that and I'll take you through that in a bit. But yeah, that's why we exist. We want to enable climate action at scale climate action should be meaningful. If you are talking about Beach cleanups and recycling drives. That's not our business. We are quite sensitive about the impact that we create. Is it meaningful is it sustainable? And is it scalable? There's a lot of good technology out there.
Even if you got that right tomorrow what's the impact it's gonna land. So that's the philosophy of climate action and scale. We think it's not about, “Hey Dustin, why don't you plant a tree today and feel good about yourself?” It's about changing the habits of billions of people. And that's not going to happen through lecturing or just creative marketing campaigns. It has to be systemic. It has to be consistent. It has to be considered. So we'll spend some time on what scale means to it and now I'll come to enabling. Once you've understood what the challenge is, how do I make that possible for us as consumers? This is the day and age of Ubers and Apple Pay and we need instant gratification and continuous gratification as consumers. So how do you turn those things and enable climate action? I'll take a pause here to get your reaction if it makes sense.
Dustin Cote: I think it makes sense. The scale part of it is really interesting to me because the solution that I'm familiar with from Caremiles is this EV Club app, which really is operating at the consumer scale. It's very difficult to get a consumer-scale business out the door, but once it does it has an incredible amount of influence.
Kashif Sohail: Exactly.
Dustin Cote: You can pull the levers and build the structure and all of that. So why don't we zero in on the EV Club app for just a minute then so my read on it basically as a user is I install the app. I connect my car to the app. So I have a Chevy Bolt. It connects through my Chevrolet protocols or whatever is happening there. I charged my car. It tells me I'm earning rewards for charging my car and I can use those rewards to what looks like do one of at least two maybe three things I can just get cash. Two is I can get basically discounted changing that amounts to cash. Third I can use it to plant trees. Can you kind of walk us through how this is possible? This seems like magic right? I'm not paying any money.
Kashif Sohail: Okay firstly, Dustin, thank you so much for being a user of EV Club. Thanks for taking it for your test drive. Your feedback has actually helped us make a few, improvements already. And yeah, it does sound like magic. Why are we even starting with that kind of approach is actually all tied to changing behaviors of billions of people. So we're actually trying to gain the trust of the users in today's consumer’s noisy environment. It's hard to find any brand which is trusted by us consumers. There's always a doubt.
I've run rewards and loyalty programs for a living for good part of my life. I feel they are actually quite derogatory towards consumers. I call you loyal to me as long as you give me business. So there's something broken there. So we had to regain trust. And there's a long story behind why we got to EV Club, but I'll answer the first question first. how do we make it possible? So there's one clear investment into creating a certain size of a portfolio because the scale impact that we want to do requires a voice that will come through the large user sets and their data sets that we get and we want to take certain policy actions. So we'll come back to the vision in a bit but
There are a few things that enable this function. Number one. The little known fact is every EV user today creates about 20 to 25 dollars worth of carbon credits a year. Even if you and I know that we have this revenue being generated, we don't know how to monetize that so one thing is simply scale in exchange for the value will offer to the user we're asking, “Hey Dustin, I would like to collect your data to do scaling emission monitoring and monetary,” and Dustin usually as a reasonable belief starting when he starts to see cash back coming. Our journey so far has been very consistently focused on one thing that’s winning the trust. We will not get everything right, unconditional apology, and we make it right and get the trust right. So far, I would like to believe we've been very successful in earning that trust. The first part was “What is the catch? You're not gonna give me my money. You're gonna give me some cash back and then you're gonna give me some lousy offers to spend on and then you're gonna charge me fees.” So to avoid this, we have the whole marketplace that monetizes data but our first option is cash out and it's placed in black right up top. There's no fee. We've got users who attempted four withdrawals a day just to make sure it works and then they've written back to us. “Hey, I thought I could call you out on those things. Nicely done. How did you do it?” So we're getting to earn trust.
So one thing is carbon credit monetization. Then, if you're an EV driver, I also have a Chevy Bolt in the house, the major expenses we have are changing tires, insurance, and whatnot. If I get to know Dustin drives a Chevy Bolt, which is two years old that has driven this many miles. He will be needing a set of tires and you’re prompted an offer not your name being sent to somebody else. Our team does a curation of offers and they're brought to you. We believe you'll be needing a pair of wheels soon. How about this offer? This is at this price. Swipe left. We’ll have it delivered to you and installed tomorrow or whatever taking money from the wallet balance that you already have, or swipe right to tell us why not? So there's insight going back to the advertising industry, which is currently in huge turmoil because every time Samsung or Apple or Google change their security parameters, there goes your entire digital marketing strategy. We have to help the advertisers bring the right value to us EV users and ensure EV users are not thrown out into the wild to go fend for themselves. That's our basic model.
The overall revenue model, at a parent company level, is we've got a variety of businesses. Some are focused on businesses some are focused on consumers. There’s a balance of revenue streams coming from different products. Just wanted to answer that question about how we make it possible without revealing too many business secrets. Our IP enables us to monetize connected car data. That is where the secret sauce lies. So I'll take another pause here Dustin did that make any sense?
Dustin Cote: Yeah, it does. I think that there's a couple of bits to it. the carbon credit thing is kind of a direct one. The ad network piece of it I think is really interesting. Some people kind of, especially maybe in the audience for this, might shy away from an ad network. They might be like, I don't want my data being used, but the reality of it is that ad networks can make a lower barrier to entry for people as well. So when we watch TV, TV can be cheaper because they put ads in so there's part of that as well.
Kashif Sohail: Yeah.
Dustin Cote: I like it and then obviously data is powerful, it's a lifeblood of a lot of companies. So it makes sense, collect the data, process the data and maybe Caremiles is a bit of a data factory that is processing a lot of data for all of these connected cars that are around talking about charging habits and how old the car is and things like that. it's pretty smart. I like it. If I could pivot us a little bit to this sustainability as a service. I saw that on the website. I thought it was a kind of an interesting moniker. Maybe you can give me the two-minute version of what that is.
Kashif Sohail: Okay, so I'll go start with my oversimplification. Remember enabling climate action at scale. To oversimplify the world is getting hot we need to cool it down. The best method proven to humanity available today is reforestation. Yes, there are a lot of other technologies that we are exposed to but for scalability, nothing stands better than reforestation. We know we get trees into the ground and get them to stay there long enough to matter. Why are we getting hot in the first place? More than a third of emissions are coming from transportation.
So if you don't solve for cars, you don't solve for climate change period regardless of how many trees you plant. Look at John Doerr’s Speed and Scale philosophy. Electrification of transportation is number one, so we have to solve for cars. If you don't put your money where your mouth is, nothing really happens. You need money to get the world to go around. We talk about three things trees, cars, and money. When I talk about sustainability as a service platform, we do a whole bunch of things from impact measurement to campaigns and to green products, but just like EV Club is a direct-to-consumer product, Green Check Out is our business product which embeds reforestation into everyday consumer payments. That's a story for a different day, but there our clientele is large banks, big airlines, e-commerce Industries and how they embed green products into their ESG strategies. How can they turn ESG from an expense center to a revenue center? That's sustainability as a service. There will be a lot more products coming down the line on both vectors, but our focus in the US is a hundred percent on EV Club for now
There are exciting features down the road. Some are turning up this year. And yeah, I would say please keep using the app and sharing your feedback with us and help us make us better for everyone.
Dustin Cote: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean I'm gonna keep using it. I got to basically offset my charging fees for the months of December and November using it. So, it's great.
Kashif Sohail: There you go.
Dustin Cote: Let me ask you one final question about Caremiles: what's kind of the biggest blocker? I know you’ve got a hundred balls in the air as a kind of a startup but what's kind of the thing that holds you back? Is it something inside where you have operational you just need to scale and execute or is there something that like the magic wand kind of question right where you wish something else would happen?
Kashif Sohail: I wish our collective trust could be more positive. There's a lot of distrust as individuals towards CEOs government officials large companies. I think that is the one thing that holds the whole climate action back and us improving. If I filter below that as a company what holds us back is really our ability to get out there fast enough to matter. We know our technology can solve a lot of challenges, but you can only do so much in this much of time. So that's the challenge that we have to grapple with all the time.
Dustin Cote: That's a different answer than I would have expected at first. So I appreciate the new insight as far as EV Club goes you can find it in the App Store or Google Play I believe is that right?
Kashif Sohail: Yes, it's available on all the major app stores. You can also visit our website at evclub.app and you can download it from there as well. It's available for download in the US for now. And yeah, please take it for a ride and drive real change.
Dustin Cote: Yeah, so everybody if you have an electric vehicle, or if you don't but you're a UX designer and you just want to get feedback, do that, too. I think that's all useful. Anyway, I appreciate you taking the time Kashif and we'll talk again another time.
Kashif Sohail: Thank you very much.
A Conversation with Caremiles CEO Kashif Sohail