 Beautiful San Francisco out at third annual convening of the Social Capital Marketplace also known as SOCAP 11 and today we're in for a treat because I'm here with Brian Trilstad who is the Chief Investment Officer at the Acumen Fund, one of the hands down most notorious best known funds in the space. And so before we go any further, for the viewers who don't know what the Acumen Fund is, can you do a quick introduction of the fund? Sure. Acumen Fund is a social investment fund that was spun out of the Rockefeller Foundation about 10 years ago. We raise mostly philanthropic funding but invest debt and equity in early stage unreasonable social enterprises, health, water, housing, energy and agriculture primarily in emerging markets exclusively in emerging markets primarily in South Asia and East Africa. As the Chief Investment Officer of Acumen, what is, what's the biggest struggle to place investments in these markets? The biggest struggle we've had is converting really compelling ideas into investment propositions. So we spent a lot of time working with the entrepreneur to understand his or her business model, really document the assumptions, build the model from the ground up and then take the risk, there's no certainty in this, so we're willing to take a flyer on the business model but we really need to understand what the model is or what the entrepreneur thinks it is over the next two or three years. And I think that's, one of the things that's missing from venture capital generally and we're trying to bring that to development finance is an entrepreneurial, sort of an entrepreneur friendly source of financing. You know, one of the few hammers in the venture capital's toolkit is just to fire the entrepreneur. And we'd like not to be known for that, we really want a customer service. We'd rather not invest in the idea if we think that the person who's leading is the wrong person than to invest in the idea and change people up. So being customer oriented to the entrepreneur and the team and the people they're serving is an important value for us that we think then allows for the referrals to come back to us in a way that is sort of the flywheel. What's the next trend? Where are you moving with Acumen Fund? So the question is how can we continue to invest in a sustainable way while also identifying the patterns of what works and what doesn't work that can be shared? So you're going to see a lot more of an investment from Acumen Fund in the understanding what works both with deeper dives on impact assessments with more open source sharing of knowledge with more case studies, not just of our own portfolio but others that can provide people with toolkit best practices. When should I be a nonprofit? When should I not? What is going to make you place investment in that one entrepreneur out of those hundreds? How do they stand out above the rest? Maybe they have that maybe these other ones don't or what don't they have maybe that these other ones do. Right. You know the hundred entrepreneurs that you meet become thirty or forty who you have second conversations with. So what converts the hundred into thirty is really the character of the entrepreneur. What's their narrative? What's the story? Why do they care about the problem? And you see that the ones who can combine the need assessment with the market opportunity thinking are the ones that we like. I mentioned ethics before you have to have kind of absolutely you know the Ashoka like ethical fiber and there is this notion of persistence and you know is this person going to run through brick walls have they run through brick walls to get into the room so that I can be talking with them. And so those are the kinds of things that help us think about whether or not to have the second meeting. Next on the list is the is the social impact thesis. This is a big problem and are these folks trying to solve it at scale. So we try and understand what the impact is what the you know what the intervention is and why it matters why should we care about why should we use our scarce philanthropic capital on sanitation in Kenya. That's a pretty obvious solution. The third piece is finance. Does this you know will we get our money back. Is there an investment thesis here. And then finally you know I like to say and one of the things that differentiates us I think a little bit from some of our other peers which are doing mostly debt financing is that you know we're really swinging for the fences with every investment. So what we want to do is be able to pick entrepreneurs who can help tell the story of innovation in sanitation or innovation in clean water delivery or innovation in solar lighting. And so there has to be a dimension of a breakthrough around business model innovation as part of it. That usually is what separates the three or four to the one that in the financial model where you finally understand the economics and propose things to our investment committee. I think that makes perfect sense. Well with that Brian I think we need to wrap up. Great. I know there's a lot going on but thank you so much. Well thanks for that. And I really look forward to the next conversation.