From Landfills to Leadership: Svanika Balasubramanian’s Journey to Pioneering Global Plastic Action with rePurpose

Svanika Balasubramanian is a visionary entrepreneur whose background and career are rooted in her commitment to creating impactful change. Born in India and raised in Oman, Svanika’s family has a rich history of activism. Despite their efforts, she observed limitations in achieving widespread impact through non-profit work alone. This realization propelled her to pursue studies at Wharton, where she explored business models capable of scaling impact. This led to her founding rePurpose Global, the world’s leading plastic action platform dedicated to addressing the global plastic pollution crisis. 

We invested in rePurpose Global in 2023 and are excited about the work they’re doing by empowering the informal recycling sector and leveraging technology and innovative business models to enhance sustainability and efficiency. Recently, we asked Svanika a few questions about her founder experience.

What’s your most proud moment as a founder? 

Svanika: A few months after launching our first product, we got an email from one of our clients saying she was attaching an extra check with that quarter’s payment. She said something along the lines of, “I think the value we’re getting from this is much higher than what you’re charging for it, so I’m doubling our payment.” It was an extremely validating moment because as an early-stage startup founder there is so much doubt and confusion. I think that was when it felt like we’d really clicked onto something big.

What is the most valuable thing you’ve learned in building rePurpose Global?

Svanika: Pattern matching and being able to adapt learnings from across industries. I used to think our sector and our products were extremely unique (and perhaps every founder feels that at some level), and so I carried this responsibility to figure everything out for myself. But the more we scale, the more I realize how much there is to be gained from just observing the world around us. Most mistakes we make, many people have already made them and figured out a better solution. So, we don’t always have to learn by doing.

What keeps you up at night?

Svanika: Semi-regularly: Opportunity Costs. As a startup, everything is constrained – time, money, and bandwidth. So, every choice we make comes with heavy opportunity costs around all the other choices being deprioritized. I just hope I keep improving at having an instinct for the right decisions at the right velocity. 

Regularly: my constant inbox backlog whose management I haven’t quite figured out yet.

What has been the hardest obstacle to overcome as a founder?

Svanika: Delegating and zooming out to scale as a leader. There is an excellent article by Ali Rowghani on the Second Job of a Startup CEO that encapsulates this struggle. I love being in the weeds; I love being able to get my hands dirty building things. But I also realize if I’m always doing things, then I’m not really spending enough time figuring out how to get us to the next level, and we’ll start to plateau.

Why rePurpose Global?

Svanika: In all honesty, serendipity. My cofounders and I were working on our senior thesis at Penn on the informal waste management economy. We got a few small research grants and spent all our holidays wading through Asia’s largest landfills and dumpsites for a year. If I close my eyes, I can still see the towers of garbage rising into the skyline, feel the heat from burning plastic, and smell the rotting waste.

It was a truly transformative experience, getting to see the underbelly of our consumerist culture and the disastrous consequences on human well-being. I think we got a little obsessed with the problem, and it didn’t feel right to just submit our thesis and leave things as they were. It took many more years of trial and error to build rePurpose into what it is today, but we always knew we had a part to play in changing the system.

What’s the most important trait you look for when hiring someone to the rePurpose global team?

Svanika: I’m still learning and evolving here, and this might change as we get better at fine-tuning what fits with our culture, but here’s what I see right now as being the most important: do they want to be consequential? In the work that they do, in the relationships that they build–people who look to be consequential in all the little things and the large things tend to have much more of an intrinsic motivation to deliver great quality and grow with hunger.

What are the top 3 apps used on your phone today?

Svanika: I just checked and got a little shocked looking at my screen time – Messenger, Slack, Spotify.

Learn more about rePurpose Global at repurpose.global and follow Svanika on LinkedIn.