Increasingly, startups are required by their investors, venture capital partners, and employees to share metrics that relate to sustainability.
<aside> đź’ˇ Important note: For a concise overview of suitable metrics tailored to different stages of company growth, from pre-seed to Series B, please return to the 'Recommendations at a glance' section in the general section of this toolkit. This page is designed to guide companies beyond the early stage.
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The checklist is designed to give you an idea of what the gold standard of information would look like and the kind of data that may be expected from your company in the future.
This may seem like a daunting list; we would recommend prioritizing key metrics that align with your company’s growth stage, size, and objectives.
As a later stage company, there are a few standards that are worth familiarising yourself with:
<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/098e064b-a7b5-45df-98c5-07ea6ded3de5/Antler_Sign.jpeg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/098e064b-a7b5-45df-98c5-07ea6ded3de5/Antler_Sign.jpeg" width="40px" /> Materiality Finder - SASB
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The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is a non-profit organization founded in 2011 to develop sustainability accounting standards.
SASB's mission “is to establish industry-specific disclosure standards across ESG topics that facilitate communication between companies and investors about financially material, decision-useful information. Such information should be relevant, reliable, and comparable across companies on a global basis.”
SASB standards are used by companies around the world in a variety of disclosure channels, including their annual reports, financial filings, company websites, sustainability reports, and more. This is likely to be the standard for ESG reporting for listed companies in the future. So it is worth taking note of the potential future requirements.
For each industry and subsector, SASB has – in a yearlong multi-stakeholder process – identified those sustainability fields where companies of that particular sector usually externalize their impacts and that are thus likely to affect the financial condition or operating performance of these companies: Materiality Map
<aside> ⚠️ This is a little too detailed, but it is worth comparing to the Antler materiality map to see the different aspects of materiality as your company matures.
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<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/4c72be85-eae1-4dae-8e8c-277a7fc34fcb/Antler_Sign.jpeg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/4c72be85-eae1-4dae-8e8c-277a7fc34fcb/Antler_Sign.jpeg" width="40px" /> Materiality Map - MSCI
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ESG Industry Materiality Map represents the current Key ESG Issues and their contribution to companies' ESG Ratings. It is part of the MSCI ESG Ratings transparency initiatives, through which they have made ESG Ratings of companies accessible to the public.
Many investment firms who invest in public markets will use these ratings to score companies.
