CFP #7 – Tessa Cook

Creative Forces with Guy Kilty

Tessa Cook is the co-founder of OLIO, the smartphone app which connects neighbours and local businesses so they can share surplus food rather than throwing it away, and since its launch in North London in 2015 it’s now being used by hundreds of thousands of users in more than 30 countries. After leaving the family farm in North Yorkshire Tessa went on to study at Cambridge and Stanford and enjoy a successful career in business which included stints at the publishing group Emap and the technology pioneer Dyson. In this episode Tessa explains how she learnt a lot about entrepreneurship by watching the way her parents worked, how she suffered from ‘impostor syndrome’ at Stanford, and how she worked on a number of different company ideas before experiencing the lightbulb moment that led to the creation of Olio.