Regrow Welcomes Jon Baron as Chief Revenue Officer

Hello, Hola, 你好,

People call me JB though some still call me Jon. I am privileged to be joining regrow as Chief Revenue Officer and deliver on the mission to address the problem of climate change. My early mentors helped me understand the importance of ‘falling in love’ with the problem you are aiming to solve. This problem is one I have been applying myself to since the 2000s and there’s a lot of work to do.

What was my journey to becoming a Regrower? Back in the mid 2000s I was working for Microsoft based out of Hong Kong and responsible for the Asia Pacific region. It’s a vast geographic area, which meant I was on a plane every week. The travel was intense and out of curiosity I wanted to know my carbon footprint and was horrified with the results.

From that day I was determined to make amends for my travel emissions. 

Since then I have campaigned to Bill Gates and his office to tackle Microsoft’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions. I have started three climate businesses including a project development business in Nepal’s Chitwan national park to slow deforestation through more efficient cooking stoves. I have advised climate fintech businesses who are empowering global banks to bring carbon understanding and preventative action to their customers through banking applications. All this was done in my ‘spare time’.

For my day job, my teams and I were building category-creating businesses in complex ecosystems such as retail and food supply chains, data management and marketing technology. The successes we had in those environments came because we cared deeply about the customers and the problems they were trying to solve.

We knew we had to help customers find their path through a myriad of voices which created ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty. The outcomes were ecosystem-changing.

The opportunity to help Regrow customers find their path to net zero as well as maximizing their commercial success is something that fills me with a great sense of responsibility. Regrow has had a major impact in the agricultural industry in the last 7 years but we have to do more. We have to help our customers make a bigger impact before 2030. As our CEO, Anastasia, says, ‘...I think of the last seven years as an investment into building the foundation for scale..’. It’s time to go help our customers to scale their climate impact, that will change the agricultural ecosystem which in turn will change the world.

It’s time to make it happen; it’s go-time.