How the Erb Network Shaped My Summer of Discovery

When I decided to spend this summer testing a business idea instead of taking a formal internship, I didn't have a product. I had a hunch: that companies navigating sustainability disclosure are not lacking substantial amounts of data or better software. What they need is judgment. Ten weeks and over 20 structured conversations later, that hunch has become Koru Reporting, an early-stage venture at the intersection of accounting, sustainability reporting, and disclosure. Specifically, I'm working to help companies facing new requirements like California's SB 253/261 figure out what's actually material, who owns a given metric, and how to report it credibly, without needing to bring in a Big Four firm to do it.

None of those conversations would have happened at this pace or depth without the Erb network. It started with one warm introduction from Managing Director Melissa Zaksek, and became a chain: one contact led to the next until the majority of my substantive calls traced back to an Erb connection in some form. I spoke with sustainability practitioners, in-house corporate responsibility leaders, Big Four audit professionals, venture investors, and Ross faculty whose research I hadn't previously known existed. 

A conversation with Erb Institute founder Stuart Hart reframed how I think about market segmentation entirely, distinguishing companies that need real persuasion from those that are already values-aligned and simply lack the infrastructure to act on it. One Erb alum, now working as a hands-on sustainability consultant, gave me the single finding that confirmed Koru's entire model: even with sophisticated ESG software already in place, clients still spend more than half of every reporting project's time on manual data cleaning, because the bottleneck is never the software, it's getting messy internal data into a state any platform can actually use. 

This insight reoriented Koru's whole model, away from "build better software" and toward relationship-based consulting paired with a tool I'm building myself, rather than either a pure product or a generic advisory practice.

I started keeping a running tracker of every call, and was able to cross-reference each new conversation against the patterns I'd already heard. Nearly every practitioner I spoke with independently confirmed the same need, regardless of industry or company size. I also learned that "more" is rarely the right instinct: the practitioners furthest along in this work had all, independently, moved from tracking dozens of metrics to a tight handful tied to real decisions. The same lesson showed up again and again, in industries that otherwise had nothing to do with each other.

I also learned to hold my own assumptions loosely. I came in fairly convinced of one target market and left with a more precise, and different, understanding of it. No one told me outright I was wrong, but enough conversations complicated the picture; the original framing didn't align with reality. As I continue to explore this space, I now track every recurring pattern as a numbered, evolving thesis rather than a settled conclusion, precisely because so many of my early assumptions didn't hold up. This lesson in adaptability is something I'll hold close to me outside of Koru, too: the idea that being right matters less than being willing to find out fast when you're wrong.

What I'll take from this summer, more than any single finding, is a real appreciation for what a well-connected, generous network does for early-stage work that cold outreach simply can't. A cold email gets you a meeting, if you're lucky. A trusted introduction gets you candor. Nearly everyone I spoke with through an Erb connection was willing to be direct with me in a way I don't think a stranger would have been. Thanks to that candor, Koru's direction today looks meaningfully different, and more honest, than it did back in June.