It's the holy grail of entrepreneurship: start a business, scale a business, sell a business and live a comfortable life of leisure. However, as most entrepreneurs are do-ers, the idea of cruising towards retirement doesn't hold universal appeal. So, if you sell your business but you're not ready to hang up your boots, what happens next ? If you're Cork-born tech entrepreneur, Donal Daly, you simply turn to your next idea and start over.
To date, Daly has been involved in eight start-ups, beginning in the 1980s with Expert Edge Computer Systems when he was in his twenties. Six of these businesses were subsequently sold (the seventh is still active and the eight is brand new) with the most high profile sale taking place in 2019 when Altify, the sales software development company Daly co-founded in 2005, was acquired by Texas-based Upland Software for a reported €76 million.
“When I started my first business I was in the same boat as most start-ups,” he says. “I had no money and there was no VC community as such then. All the focus was on staying afloat and paying my employees and my bills. When you acquire some money, that changes the perspective. You can take a longer-term view. Vision would be too grand a word when you’re starting off. It’s about survival. Having a sense of wanting to achieve something bigger comes later.”
Daly in now at that "bigger" point and his latest venture, Future Planet, is leveraging AI to help companies tackle climate change and make a dent in solving the environmental crisis gripping the world.
“One thing is very clear,” he says. “The planet is burning and someone has to fix it, so it may as well be me that’s trying. I really want to move the needle on the climate problem.”
Sustainability objectives
Future Planet is a sustainability transformation platform which Daly and supply chain expert, Ingrid De Doncker, launched in October. It helps businesses to define, map and ultimately deliver on their sustainability objectives and to do so faster and cheaper than traditional sustainability audits which can take weeks to complete.
“We can reduce the time involved to less than a day, saving time and resources and speeding action,” Daly says. “This really matters because businesses can play a crucial role in meeting the net-zero target by reducing their own emissions.
“Tighter mandatory restrictions on emissions are inevitable and the stakes are very real for companies. Apart from climate change being a collective crisis for humankind, failure to have carbon targets in place can have a negative impact on access to capital, the ability to attract new investors and retain customer loyalty and to attract top talent.”
Daly says a major stumbling block for businesses is that they see corporate climate action as both costly and complicated. “Our mission with Future Planet is to be part of the solution, making it easier for companies to build a clear roadmap and achieve their sustainability targets while still delivering on their commercial goals,” he says.
Asked if there is a common thread to his start-ups, Daly says they have all been about identifying a significant problem and solving it at scale in an accessible way.
"I'm good at simplifying really complex tasks. For example, my first company was involved in launching the first technology platform for a life insurance company in Ireland. Altify was set up to fix the sales training market because I thought it was fundamentally broken and a lot of time and money were being wasted.
“My businesses involve applying and structuring knowledge and using technology to make it easy for people to do whatever it is they need to do.
“I’ve been building cloud-based software applications for over 20 years. Future Planet is another one but the domain is different. We may be only around a wet week in terms of our launch, but we’ve been building the platform for a year and a half and the product is up and running and active at industrial strength.”
In charge
Daly enjoys solving problems and starting businesses, but he’s not precious about always being the one in charge. He recruited a CEO for Altify two years before the sale and he’s now looking for a CEO for Future Planet.
“If it hadn’t been for Covid I probably wouldn’t have been in so deep for so long without putting a team in place,” he says. “I have no issue working 60 or 80 hours a week but not on operational stuff. That’s not where I can have maximum impact at this point.”
Daly is low key about his achievements which also stretch to writing six business books, including three Amazon best sellers, while in 2005 he founded the Altify Foundation which is focused on human rights and social injustice with climate change now very much on the agenda.
“It’s really important that governments do what they do. It’s really important that businesses do what they do. But each one of us can look after our own couple of percent change while we’re waiting for the bigger change to happen,” he says.
“With respect to the planet, I believe that people fundamentally want to do the right thing. But they don’t know what to do or how to go about it. To me it’s a knowledge-based problem that needs solving.”
