My Story

I’ve founded Malava to continue searching for the answer to a simple question: What’s required for us to do the best work of our lives?

My name is Mark Pastore; if you’ve got LinkedIn, you can find my profile here, or if you’d like to read my personal user guide, you can find it here.  I am a three-time entrepreneur with experience across diverse industries. I was part of a team that built a software business from 4 to 350 people, through multiple product launches, key customer and partner acquisitions, four rounds of financing and an IPO. Pursuing a lifelong dream, I built (and operated, for twelve years) a beloved neighborhood Italian restaurant. In the midst of that journey, I jumped into another completely unknown business: boutique food manufacturing and retail. The thread that connects my experiences is a love for exploring the possible, via designing and building new businesses. For now, Malava is a solo enterprise, with aspirations to grow in accordance with our ability to make a positive difference for our clients.

A longtime passion for climate change has led me to focus Malava on Climate Tech. Prior to my business career, I spent a year as a research fellow at the Office of Technology Assessment, working on the first Congressional report on climate change policy (Changing by Degrees, 1991). The work steeped me in climate science and highlighted the challenges and limitations of public policy levers. My subsequent experiences in the private sector instilled the belief that entrepreneurs hold an important role – and responsibility – for delivering solutions that can change the world for the better.

Malava is also firmly grounded in the lived experience that most business management, as we practice it today, is built upon 100-year-old habits and assumptions that hamper our ability to be nimble and go fast, especially as businesses grow. In today’s complex, unpredictable world we need a correspondingly adaptive and human-centric form of management that better harnesses human potential at global scale. Our ambition is to help today’s climate tech startups find and travel that path.

Mission

Helping climate tech businesses increase their capacity to deliver solutions that change the world for the better.

Operating Principles

Audacity is usually worth the risk
Complexity calls for flexibility > consistency
Most information ought to be open
People are fundamentally good