Founders Everywhere: Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli
Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli is the co-founder and CEO of WATS, the waste reduction platform for businesses.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
“One man's trash is another woman's treasure,” a timeless adage that resonates with the ethos of WATS (Waste Administration + Tracking Software): transforming waste into valuable insights and opportunities for businesses. By implementing robust waste management practices, businesses can reduce operational costs, minimize resource depletion, and bolster their reputation as socially responsible entities. WATS not only quantifies the carbon footprint of waste, they also deliver action oriented steps to reduce impact. In a world increasingly shaped by environmental regulations and consumer demands for corporate accountability, WATS guides business operators, facilities managers, and sustainability teams in their new and ongoing engagement with waste reduction and the circular economy.
WATS co-founders Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli and Laura Rosenshine share a unique passion for waste management and sustainability. As self-proclaimed "garbage nerds" and seasoned waste experts, they have been deeply entrenched in the world of commercial waste and sustainability for over a decade. Their journey began with a focus on composting, which gradually evolved into a broader understanding of materials management and waste reduction principles. Their interest in waste was not merely a passing hobby, but a lifelong commitment. Meredith, WATS CEO, shares more about their dedication to sustainability and their vision for addressing the global waste crisis.
What's WATS North Star?
Our North Star is waste reduction. We’re really focused on using data to move towards facilitating and simplifying waste reduction for businesses.
Why is WATS going to win?
We’re not trying to change a system that’s already functioning but needs improvement - we’re *creating* a functioning system. The waste management industry hasn’t changed much for a very long time, but now that there is more recognition of the constraints on resources we are presented with an opportunity to change the way we manage materials. Laura and I have been working in waste for 25+ years and we’ve been physically elbow deep in waste, so we understand the nuances of materials management. The waste industry is complex, with many interconnected layers that include the physical waste itself, social behavior, rising costs, the shrinking number of landfills, and the demand for more data. One of the seismic shifts happening today is in the expectation of data transparency: visibility, reporting, and accountability are becoming the norm, but these are not the traditional ways of the waste industry.
What sets WATS apart?
WATS dual focus on both measurement and action sets us apart. We've developed data ingestion, automated reporting, and easy to understand insights that support the data-driven decision making that companies need in order to take control of their waste management programs.
How does WATS inspire “customer love”?
Over the last six months, WATS has been focused on scaling our capacity to ingest and compare waste data to help our customers make business decisions rooted in data. By comparing multiple data sources WATS recently identified high potential cost savings in waste collection costs across multiple locations for one of our clients. For another client, WATS digitized an antiquated internal and Excel-based invoice data entry and analysis process, driving 50+ hours of monthly time saved for our stakeholders, and dramatically simplified the process for them to target efforts cost reductions, information sharing, service right-sizing, and fine avoidance across their 400+ locations.
What’s one of the greatest challenges you faced founding WATS?
We’re non-technical founders, who were compelled to enter the venture-backed SaaS world with our low-code MVP. We developed our MVP with the help of a technical person in our family because we were frustrated with the limited tools we had access to as waste consultants. Once we saw what we could do with software, we knew this was how we could have a greater impact. We wanted to get waste operations and waste reduction solutions into the hands of orders-of-magnitude more people than we were reaching at the time, and that drive forced us to do something that we had never done before.
Any book recommendations?
"Scaling for People" by Claire Hughes Johnson for operational guidance and "All We Can Save" by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson for inspiring stories of climate action.
Fun Fact: I speak some Arabic, but it's mostly words about trash. I lived in Lebanon for some time, working on a project that became my master’s thesis and then returning to found a non-profit.
Check out Meredith with Becky Yang on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Trash Talk, Listen now on Apple & Spotify and find to all our past episodes here!
