ZELP is developing a wearable halter for livestock that neutralizes methane emissions and has the potential to make a significant difference to greenhouse gas emissions. I worked on four main projects:
- Updating and restructuring ZELP’s business plan for a Series A investment round adding structures from newly agreed contracts, extending the model to include a balance sheet and cash flow and adding capabilities for sensitivities and scenarios. Given the startup stage ZELP is fundraising, a key activity without which the company would not be able to continue.
- Building a short-medium term cash flow model for ZELP to track its spending, cash positions, and manage runway before additional rounds of funding are required.
- Designing a grant application strategy, including applying for three government grants of which so far one has been approved. This should allow ZELP to continue to develop their product without the need to raise additional funding in the challenging COVID-19 climate.
- Developing a market research approach, including evaluating external providers, translation services, and writing questions in order to be able to establish target markets for low-emission beef and dairy products and data to show a market for potential investors.

During my time at ZELP, I was consistently able to apply the learning from my EMBA course to the tasks I undertook. Although I had a background in financial modelling, in corporate finance, I became practiced at applying my knowledge to different industries and companies, which meant that I could quickly understand ZELP’s model and update the relevant areas. I had never believed that persuasion was a strength of mine, however I took what I had learned in Personal Leadership and Success and applied it to grant writing, which proved a successful tactic in raising grant funding. Throughout the internship I took the lessons I learnt in Introduction to VC and attempted to make the materials ZELP was producting as attractive as possible to potential VC investors, including adding tangible milestones and relating numbers back to market sizes. The most surprising lessons I was able to apply were some of the behavioral economics I learned in Introduction to Marketing, including how to present options in order to favor a particular outcome, which was applicable when putting together a market research survey.

There were several challenges I faced during my time at ZELP, the most notable of them being remote working due to COVID-19. Given the current engineering focus of the company, the majority of employees were all working from the office, however as I was focusing on work which I could do from home, I did not go into the office until the government relaxed their restrictions. This resulted in it being slow to get to know the team and reduced communication with the team. The fact that ZELP was such a small and young company was also a challenge. Having worked at a more mature startup/scaleup I was used to larger budgets and resources, such as data sources and reports, which were really not an option at ZELP, meaning I had to spend significantly more time searching for data than I was used to. The early stage also meant that there were limited processes in place, such as in market research where we were addressing translation, which had never been considered at the company. I needed to research and put together a plan on how this would be approached, which gave me a lot of freedom and opportunity to make a difference but was different than I was used to.

This internship was an invaluable experience to add experience outside of the music industry with a goal of moving my career into climate change mitigation. Given ZELP's potential world changing technology and their location in London, I can’t imagine an opportunity that would have been more perfect for me to apply many of the transferable skills I have gained in my career so far and through my EMBA than this internship. I was able to confirm many of my beliefs during the internship, including that I prefer working at small earlier stage companies than larger companies, and I am far more content when I am working towards something I really believe in and can really make a difference. I also gained tangible knowledge around methane and carbon emissions, some of the current mitigation strategies, carbon pricing, UK government policies and objectives around climate change, and a huge amount of other information that I would not have gained without this experience.