Bulgarian entrepreneur Lubomila Jordanova has a huge online following, but don’t call her a LinkedIn influencer. She is first and foremost the CEO of her startup, Plan A, which helps businesses address climate change. Everything else is a byproduct of pursuing this mission.
Founded in 2017, Plan A is a green tech startup that makes carbon accounting software, and raised some $44 million to date. But unlike its many competitors, it focuses on precise actionable insights — most of its 150 team members are engineers and data geeks.
Talking to the Selected podcast at Slush 2024, Lubomila explained why she speaks at events so often and the message she’s there to convey.
ROI first
Lubomila had an impressive 200 speaking engagements in 2024, and has more coming this year, including 4YFN 2025. But don’t think she says yes to everything: She receives dozens invitations a week; and when she says yes, there’s a good reason.
As a self-described “incredibly commercial person,” Lubomila is extremely ROI-driven. “I never go to an event if there’s no angle where I can support the team, be it for hiring, be it for sales, or especially an announcement for a particular product we’re doing,” she said.
Small events help
Lubomila is now speaking at high-profile events, but she started small, and still sees value in pitching at meetups and small competitions, even when there’s no prize at the end of the experience.
“People will just give you feedback — and quite harsh feedback — on what you can improve,” she said. “It teaches you how to go in front of an audience, to formulate your sentences, explain to someone that something is important, or at least convince them that they should listen to you, which is by itself quite difficult.”
Shaping the narrative
Lubomila doesn’t speak at events where she needs to convince people that climate change is real, but she still has some evangelizing to do, especially to shape the narrative.
Plan A’s ethos, she explained, is to make sure that the conversation “is driven by science and facts, and also by positivity, which is not the usual case.”
Business-minded
Plan A’s offering goes well beyond compliance, Lubomila said For its 1,500 clients, the key is to “understand how their value chain will be transformed, how much money they can save by being good to the planet, but also to their own economical performance, and what it will take for these steps to be implemented.”
Plan A also decided early on to be industry agnostic, and now has big-name clients across a wide range of sectors — such as Audi, BMW, BNP, Chloé, Deutsche Bank and others. Using AI, it built a set of data points and benchmarks that can help these companies “skip steps” and become sustainable as fast as possible.
Speed will be key for industries to take action on time. “If we look at tangible action that can be implemented at scale, we’re talking about 2035 to be a deadline for industry to shift,” Lubomila said. Urgency is there, so if you see her on stage at some event or stumble upon her social media posts, pay attention.