Business student’s switch from start-up success to impact investing
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When I started Pápydo, my sustainable gift wrap company, it was a sort of wait-and-see project after graduation from my undergraduate degree. Like a lot of people, my co-founder Katharina Lehmkuhl and I were frustrated with wading through mountains of gift wrap at Christmas. We knew much would go to landfill and couldn’t be recycled.
We found a solution: paper made from grass fibres, printed with biodegradable colouring. These weren’t things we invented: our innovation was packaging the technology into products, branding them, and building relationships with customers. We were profitable from the first year. But we ran a very, very lean organisation; we didn’t hire anyone. I did a few internships while doing what you might call gap years to build up the business.
When it came to next steps, I wasn’t sure of a masters; I just wanted to see where I could go. I decided it would buy me time to grow the business while building skills. Nova School of Business and Economics had a great reputation, and was in Lisbon, so meant a real lifestyle change from a small Swiss town. It also offered Cems, a programme that lets you spend a few months at — and get a degree from — a partnered university in another country, as well as doing other courses in cultural skills and negotiation. It was the perfect place for me to start.
The biggest event of my time at Nova SBE, though, was outside the school schedule: Pápydo appeared on Die Höhle der Löwen (The Lion’s Den), the German version of Shark Tank, the US business pitching TV show. I spent most of the first year preparing for the broadcast just before Christmas, after which there would likely be a surge in demand. That meant sorting logistics, products, the website and hiring.
The broad selection of courses helped with that. I’ve always been interested in combining business with impact, so I chose courses around impact investing, social business models and innovation management. The proximity to professors motivates you, and I had one-to-ones and practical assignments. You’re in an entrepreneurial bubble, pushing forward your ideas. I was one of the few that had founded a business, so I shared that experience in class.
Sales surged following the broadcast, growing three- to four-fold over the year. But we had to balance working life and studying — had we quit school when we got on to the TV show, we might have made even more money.
Because of that I don’t think there’s a tangible connection between the success of the business and the masters. It’s mainly about interactions, particularly with professors who were helpful in supporting me and believing this could be a category winner. In the words of one professor, we were inventing a new category, which really stuck with me.
I graduated in 2023. After that I spent six months full time on the business. When you sell gift wrap, you generate 80 per cent of revenue during the Christmas season. The aim from the outset was that the business be self-sustaining — and it became so quickly. We merged with a competitor and, although we are still involved in a limited way, it mostly runs by itself.
That has meant I can apply my experience and what I have learnt to something else. The spring after graduating, I joined AENU, a venture capital firm based in Berlin that invests in climate tech. In some ways that’s where the lessons of the management masters really come in. António Miguel is the founder and managing partner of a VC fund called Maze, based in Lisbon. He runs the impact investing course at Nova and is a gifted teacher. He introduced me to the scope of impact investing by making it tangible — using real examples and bringing in people from his fund.
We went through a whole practical exercise of looking for a start-up opportunity, pitching that to the rest of the class and so on. It made me realise it’s not just venture, you can think about green bonds, charity even, when thinking about impact. That made me — and I think the whole course really — want to go into impact investing.
I love my job. As a business person, looking at innovation driven by technology can be tricky but we can wrap our heads around it. We’re focused not only on climate tech, but on a broader question: what will the future look like?
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