 I'm going to start, maybe I'll sit here and you can. Have you start by each introducing yourselves for a couple of minutes so maybe you can start. Sure. Hi, I'm Christine, and I'm the CEO of PastureMap. And we build tech for building healthy grasslands. So we work with cattle ranchers, cowboys and cowgirls, to help them make more money and get productive by doing that optimization that we talked about by implementing more regenerative grazing practices rather than extractive ones, which is a win-win-win. Because if you grow more grass, you can stock more cattle per acre. You can use your land more efficiently, which makes the ranchers more money. At the same time, you're building a lot of healthy soil that sucks down a lot of carbon into the grasslands, which is a virtuous cycle that makes them more productive. So we are a tech platform that helps them do that. Thank you, Ugweb. Hi, everyone. My name is Ugweb Mineo, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Solstice Energy Solutions. And so for millions of people around the world, he struggled to manage a backup power supply because of unreliable grids. Solstice is developing the shift, which is a hybrid smart meter and transfer switch that we feel is enabling the next generation of distributed energy management in emerging markets. Our initial target market is actually my home country of Nigeria, where over 60 million people depend on diesel generators and spend over $10 billion annually just to power them. We want to help them use energy more efficiently with our integrated hardware and software platform and help them find cleaner, more reliable alternatives like solar and storage. Thank you, Hedi. My name is Hedi Rajavi. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Kiwi. It's a pleasure to be on this panel. Incidentally, I actually met my co-panelists at the same event last year, so it's good to come to the full circle. So at Kiwi, we are focused on looking at energy consumption and reduction of energy waste through electronic devices that are plugged into the wall outlets. Most people are surprised to know that for a given commercial building, especially the devices that we all plug into the wall outlets consume somewhere between 40% to 60% of the electricity that that building needs. And the Department of Energy actually projects that that consumption is going to increase by about 150% in the next 10 years. So it's a big problem without a solution. You can imagine that we all now have and use a lot more electronic devices than we used to 10 years ago. And it's continuing to waste electricity and waste resources. So we are an energy optimization software company. We allow for the tools that commercial building managers, as well as the occupants themselves, can use to bring new techniques and technologies for reducing that consumption and essentially turning things off when they're not being used or needed. So we have worked with institutions like the San Francisco Airport, a couple of different entities at Stanford, the University of California at Davis, and one of our newest additions to the list is the Levi Stadium down in Santa Clara. So that's what we do. Great, thank you. You all have very powerful visions, and you've already had successes and made great strides in where you're going. But I'm sure you face challenges. So what I'd like to hear about and maybe share with the people here is what are some of the major challenges that you've faced? I'll start, since this is a women's panel. So the first question whether people are explicit with it or not is like, how did this get into cattle ranching? And so at best, it's a bemused curiosity, even though. So I try to get out of it by saying, hey, I have a land use and agriculture degree from Stanford. I've worked on farms in four continents. At this point, I personally interviewed 1,500 farmers and ranchers in the process of building pasture map. And I started as a dairy farmhand. So those are some things that I like to throw out to get ahead of it because there's not a good way to get past people's preconceptions of you other than just that I found, other than just to name it. I don't think I've come up with a good proxy for how to do that in front of investors in the venture world. So I was on a panel for minority female ag tech entrepreneurs in Salinas last month. And what was shocking to me was, and every one of the other four entrepreneurs on that panel, was like, we've been working in the space for, I've been working for four or five years now, and other people off the 10, none of us ever knew anybody else who was a minority female ag tech entrepreneur. So I think visibility is super important, showing up is super important to change people's perceptions of what an agriculture tech, a sustainability entrepreneur, should look like. I also think the venture community needs to do a lot of work on its own to recognize what that is. But as far as what I can do to surmount that challenge is just to keep showing up. And there is a lot of privilege that comes with saying I have three Stanford degrees and I present as an Asian female. There are other parts of me that are outsider status that are not as visible. But so I'm under no illusion that if I were a darker skinned, brown person of color, who was an entrepreneur in rural America going to Nebraska in Idaho, if I were a black woman, a black man, the challenges I would face would be vastly different. So I think that it's incumbent upon all of us to just show up as we are, to be visible, and walk through the doors that we have open to us because of the different measures of privilege we have, and then turn around and kick them down for other people. My rant. OK. Big laugh about you. Thank you for laughting that over to me. I will piggyback off of some of the challenges Christina has laid out with being a woman in entrepreneurship and especially being a woman of color, an African-American woman. I think you mentioned earlier that about 10% of startups that are venture-backed have women on their starting team. There's only about 11 African-American females who've ever raised VC funding over $1 million, and one of them in the past several years just happened. So visibility is important, and having communities like this is extremely valuable. That's been one of the challenges I face. But also doing business in Nigeria, where the startup ecosystem isn't as developed has been pretty challenging, especially being a woman and being young. That's been probably the key challenge. I have a co-founder that is a white male, and I think that's been extremely valuable for me because we've had this great relationship where he really understands some of the challenges and can kind of come in and play a valuable role while we're trying to navigate a very young ecosystem abroad, so I'm fortunate in that way. Thank you. Hedy, do you have anything? Yeah, I'm going to piggyback off of what was already said to some extent. My co-founder, Jennifer, so we have a team of female co-founders also young, so we also face the same skepticism when we are dealing with customers, investors, whatever you may think. But to the point of my co-panelists, the more you show up and the more prepared you are, the less likely it is that that is going to continue to be a problem. More on the personal front for me, I come from a different background. I did my PhD here at Stanford in bioengineering, looking at computational modeling of blood flow, and you may think there's probably no direct link between that and energy efficiency, but I promise you there is. I got to live in Germany on a two and a half year long expat assignment, and as soon as I got there, I realized that energy efficiency and energy is looked at very differently in the rest of the world in the US, and so that's where my interest in energy and sustainability came from. So starting Kiwi and working on this problem has been a great challenge in that I continuously learning. I've had to get exposed to a whole new field that I wasn't familiar with, but that's what makes entrepreneurship great because I think even if I were part of the same, if I have the same background, you go through building a company knowing that you don't know everything and you have to just continue to learn even more than a year and a half into it, I'm still learning, maybe not on the specifics of sustainability anymore, hopefully I've graduated a little bit from that, but whether it's enterprise sales to fundraising to anything else, there's always new things that come up and so it's been great facing that challenge. So you already have acquired a lot of wisdom, the three of you, from the experiences that you've had, but I think people would be very interested in knowing if you have advice for anybody who is thinking of starting a company. So maybe we'll start with you, Hedy. Sure. My advice would be do it. It's rewarding and it's amazing, it's a lot of hard work. I remember when I was thinking about this and I've always had an interest in entrepreneurship, there was this sort of little voice in the back of my mind that always thought, okay, it's gotta be looking for the perfect project, the perfect idea, the perfect solution, the perfect time, and that perfect is not gonna be there, it never happened. So if you're thinking about it, just go ahead and jump off the cliff and you'll figure it out along the way. That is, I think the biggest learning that I had and the biggest inspiration that I had when I first started working on this, that it's okay to not have figured everything out along the way, you do it as you go. So that would be my advice. Don't be concerned, just do it. I got started on this path taking CEE 246, Entrepreneurship and Civil Engineering and one of our advisors had told me if you're going to take this into the real world, I hope you're really ready to deal with rejection frequently and not buy into this glamorous entrepreneurship, CEO lifestyle, and that was clearly, which is not at all. That was clearly the best advice that I got hands down because while you might be really passionate about your idea and think that everyone should buy into it, you have to be aware that it's a long road and you face rejection a lot and you have to just be ready to pick yourself up and keep going and have a great support system around you and I think had I not been told that, it might have been more of a painful journey than it needed to be. I would echo you already have what it takes just by being in this room, you're asked Stanford, don't doubt that you have what it takes. That's not the issue. It was really helpful for me to take a bunch of entrepreneurship classes. When I was here at Stanford, I took the Lean Launchpad class for a steep link at the GSB, there were a couple of formation of new Ventures classes. There's ETL, just to see more people who are just like you a few years out who did it and there's no magic to being an entrepreneur. Most of it is grit in picking yourself up and failing and then listening. So listening to your customer and being obsessed with your customer. Like I love Ranchers, I just love people who steward the land. Like it makes me really excited to go serve them. I think there are other ways to start a company but you have to find your guiding, that guiding heart of why you're doing what you're doing which is gonna get you through the rest of it. But it's not, you do not lack the fortitude. It's mostly just doing it. It's not, there's no magic to it, just do it. I think people would be interested in hearing a little bit more about your company. So where is your company now and what are your future plans? Okay, so we launched out. So I started prototyping actually our first at Tomcat Ranch who was our first customer like three and a half years ago and just listening through Steve White's class on what our customers wanted and really resonated with this win-win-win proposition of building healthy grasslands. And then since then it really hasn't, the core of that hasn't changed. It's just that's our mission. Our mission is to make Ranchers money while building healthy grasslands. And what's changed is the how and we've just by talking to thousands and thousands of customers developed our features. To turns out that creating a ton of data and delivering them like a perfect solution for how they should manage those migratory herds is that's a little too much for someone who spent 30 years doing it and knows that he or she knows it better than you. So we just help them with individual decisions, keeping records, tracking where the herd has moved, looking back at the history and then saving them tasks. Like saving them, putting a tree fell on a fence, two hills over, I've put this down and tasked it to one of my interns or one of my staff. And if I can save the manager three hours of their time, I can elevate their intellectual capital, their human capital to be thinking more strategically about how they manage the grasslands. So that's what we do now. So there's been slight feature pivots. We now are in 6,000 ranches in 30 countries and just building towards monetizing more of those. And I'll leave those there. It's still a long way to go. So Solstice is still early stage. We haven't formally launched. We started off with the support of the Innovation Transfer Grant from the Tomcat Center about this time last year. And we were really looking to build solar and storage systems that were easily integrated with the backup power sources at Nigerian homes and small businesses use. But in the process of talking and listening to customers, we realized that there was a lot of gaps and challenges even before trying to deliver them solar or storage alternatives for their homes coming in the form of metering and revenue collection. And so we had already built a hardware system and software that allows our systems to run better and manage energy from multiple power sources. And so we decided to run with that because that's what the customers wanted. We ran a pilot project last October in Lagos, Nigeria with homes and property managers. And again, the feedback from the user and understanding multiple people in the energy ecosystem told us that we needed to make some more modifications to the hardware. So again, being ready to be told you need to do something differently, something you have to get used to. So right now we're finalizing those hardware modifications. We're doing testing. We finished software and mobile MVPs. And we'll be entering a beta phase in June. And we're really excited because we've already sat down with the CEO of the two largest real estate development companies in Nigeria, three huge solar companies as well, who are all really excited to help Nigerians use energy more efficiently and integrate cleaner alternatives. At Kiwi, we are about a little over a year and a half into the process. We launched our product about a year ago this time. Since then, we have been in more than 10 buildings now. And we are continuing to grow that customer base and in the process. As it was mentioned, it's a continuous growth for the product and the company. So we take input from our existing customers. From our prospective customers, we modify our product. And our product contains both a hardware component as well as a software component. We don't manufacture the hardware ourselves. So we essentially partner with different hardware vendors. And so we are building new hardware partnerships, expanding our base for allowing to serve our customers with different preferences for the hardware options. And then we are adding additional capabilities into the software. And essentially at this point, we are heads down into sales sales sales and enterprise sales with sort of fortunate coincidence. We landed on Levi Stadium and initiatives that our technology is very, very helpful for sports facilities. So it's been a great adventure to start looking into that space, getting to know that. We are now a team of four and we are continuing to grow the team. Wonderful. I wanna make sure we have time for questions for the audience. So let me ask Kat to come back up here. And you can have my seat. So if anybody has a question, I would just ask that you use a microphone or I think we'll bring the microphone to you. So just raise your hand. We have a question over here. Thank you. Will Mack, would you talk a little bit more about what that means in particularly with regard to trying to meet global food needs for the growing population? I'll just take a bite at it. But so the food needs for a global population is very, very important, but sometimes also used as a red herring. There is quite a lot of food production in the world and it's important to ask of what and where and how is it distributed because it can work against us too. So I would argue our aid policies in Africa managed to keep an entire continent down for a while because we dumped a lot of bad egg crops there and fed into corrupt foreign aid in some cases. And the massive amount of yield maximization in the United States setting has actually led to increasingly more of the food supply not being edible by human beings. It's animal feed or biofuels feedstock. So I think we're fighting a very uphill battle against what has become the financialization of food systems. If you think about where the return goes in the food supply chain, very little if it goes to the land steward on the one end and a lot of it goes to the financial markets in the form of commodity futures trading revenues. Use why the big financial firms are so interested in it. So it is going to be a rather big shift and I think we're using every tool in the toolkit. We have a big buyer demand strategy where we've recruited the school districts in California that serve a third of the billion meals served every year to warrant that they will buy from California producers which creates enlightened self-interest and new constituencies. But also it pre-ordains those foods to be much more likely to be non-processed, non-preserved, cooked from scratch. One of the biggest food vendors in the school meal system in California has formerly been Taco Bell. So we have to get political about some of this and say, you know, a billion meals should be producing the supply chain that we want and the student outcomes that we deserve, not vice versa. Just add a couple of numbers to that. So 40% of the food in our food system in modern countries is wasted. So we don't, we get you hear statistics being cited a lot of, oh, we need to double the food production. We don't need to double the food production globally to meet global demand. We need to use the food system more efficiently and waste less in the supply chain. In the developing world, 90% of the food that is produced is actually produced on small family farms. And so it is a, I think a misconception that small family farms cannot produce enough food to feed the people who live off of this land. And the Stanford Educational Farm is a great example of a four-acre plot where Patrick Archie tries to demonstrate how a family on four acres can produce an abundance of food if you manage the soil right. In the first world, a lot of our acres, the most fertile land in the Northern Great Plains in the Midwest is like Kat said, not growing food. It's growing commodity grains that are used for livestock feed due to a policy of many decades of subsidizing that corn. And a lot of that system is propped up by subsidies. It's propped up by agricultural businesses that are selling chemical inputs to make a lot of money off of this whole, like, beast of a system that's come up from the original, originally it was for subsidizing through the Great Depression. But now we have an oversupply of this corn that is actually not the corn that you and I would recognize and many satellite food processing industries that produce over-processed food that is making us unhealthy. And I personally think a lot of that land, that acreage can be turned back into productive, healthy soil. And there are emerging, more and more studies that are showing that instead of depending on chemicals to fertilize land and extract nutrients from it and then, you know, exterminate everything else that's not the crop that you're trying to grow, you're just like adding a lot of petrochemicals into that soil and actually degrading it over time, leading it to erode what farmers, many farmers who wouldn't call themselves organic. Like, they're one of the biggest organizations is called No-Tail on the Plains in Kansas, like the center of Kansas that is growing healthy soil instead. And when you increase the organic matter in soil, you can get yields that are at or very close, like 90% of conventional. So don't let anyone tell you that, like, organic is a niche or like, we should maybe stop using some of these buzzwords because they've become greenwashed. But soil health is something that I think can bring together multiple groups. And it's kind of a neutral term that people can get their arms around. Okay, I'm investing in the soil. The soil is a bank for food. And if I invest in the soil health, more food will grow from it instead of stripping it for the nutrients. We have another question here, thank you. Yes, hi, thanks for coming to speak to us. My question is also food related, kind of piggybacking off of what you just said. And I'm curious to know, because I've heard that No-Tail agriculture has these co-benefits for soil health and carbon storage, but also subsequently can require more pesticides and more herbicides because the tilling process can actually reduce the pests and the weeds that are present competing with the crops. So from a trade-off perspective, do these soil conservation practices require more carbon input overall and do they require more pesticide, herbicide, chemical inputs, too, compared to conventional methods? And the second is more policy related. So I know the farm bill subsidies are a huge distortion on incentivizing farmers and investors to grow more commodity crops like corn and soy. And I'm curious to know how much, how far can we meaningfully go without changing the farm bill at the very core level of trying to reduce some of the subsidies that are distorting the markets. And if there's a limit there, what do you see as the best political strategies for changing the farm bill itself? I'll take a break. So we're working a lot on soil science which has been a very contentious and co-opted field for some time. Who knew that the soil scientist conventions can be so filled with controversy they literally have fights? The National Fertilizer recommends is what basically has culminated from a drive towards industrial agriculture. That is the annual recommendation based on a black box of data that's industry owned about how much input of any sort, primarily nitrogen with all the rest, the average farmer or producer needs to put into their soil. It holds to a view of soil as a vessel as opposed to a living system. And there isn't any scientist who would agree that soil is a vessel and not a living system but a lot of the science has been co-opted. Even soil's testing is way behind. It only knows how to judge what's in the vessel or what's not. And so you'll get, you'll see these, it's a form that probably someone from the USDA helps you fill out and understand about what you need to put back in the soil because you took it out. We have commissioned 14 of the world's leading soil scientists to rework what is an appropriate methodology for soils testing, viewing soils as a living system, a base of natural capital. And they're publishing that paper this spring. We have also looked at, so the Farm Bill is a hard thing to change. It's politically controversial to try to change it. People take a whack at it. And it's enormously complex as a bill. It has a lot of very good things. It has a lot of conservation resources and so on. But it has gone a long ways away from what was created after the dust bowl. The dust bowl was not a wind phenomenon. It was a mining of soils phenomena. Created massive erosion and huge human diasporas. Also very political because they weren't just white, poor rural farmers. Massive numbers of people, particularly former slaves were set adrift when we unleashed the soils issues related to the dust bowl. As a result of that, FDR and others actually crafted the soils conservation principles which actually I think hold pretty solid today. I'm not a scientist, but I think they're probably pretty decent. We just started dismantling and not observing them anymore. And we got the Farm Bill as a result, which is a poor incentive because it incentivizes and immunizes farmers to just produce yield. If you produce yield, you will get paid sort of thing. It doesn't matter what it is you're yielding necessarily from a human standpoint. However, there's a glimmer of hope that we see because there is a protocol in the Farm Bill to introduce new insurance product. You can propose a new insurance product. And it could be not based on yield, but on soil health. So we're actually working with, I think it's called the Metropolitan Group or some ubiquitous name like that. But anyway, to see if we can't propose a new insurance product in the near term and then recruit landowners to move towards that, to get paid for producing the system we actually want, not the one that's harming us. Add on to your question specifically about the practice of no-till and the emergence of pests. I would caution against thinking about soil as a factory, like that you put in inputs and you get out outputs. It's not, it doesn't lend itself well to that kind of reductionist like chemical formulas, which is what most of activists is trying to do. But what we have to recognize is that soil is a living ecosystem. And so what you're trying to create is more life. Often, like we've seen in California coastal graphines, when you're trying to bring in more life, you want more microbial life, right? You want which support nematodes, which support little bugs, which support big bugs and earthworms are in there and then there are birds. So you're trying to stack a lot of species on top of each other. So thinking about it from that lens, not disturbing the soil makes sense, right? Because you create that soil structure because there's a multiple species of animals, critters living in it, microscopic and above. And then the emergence of pests, I would ask a question, what does that tell you? So often when you're doing soil remediation, you will see indicator species come up in the first year and people will be like, oh, there's thistle, like there's weeds, we have to spray everything. And then you're back to square one, right? What you're not seeing is that actually you're creating succession of life. And this is what the USDA NRCS has now come around to, right? It's the recreation of a ladder of life and ecosystem. And so if you have an abundance of one thing, is there a natural predator? What parts of the food chain are you missing in that ecosystem rather than spraying it all and starting over again? So we are a little bit over, but I'm hoping that we can take a few more minutes for everybody's time. We had also gotten some questions ahead of time from the audience, so I wanna ask one, and this is maybe more for Uguam and Hedi because it's, and maybe Christine as well. But what advice do you have for how to turn an idea into reality? So this is even before you think about, go out there and start a company, but what advice do you have about that? I can take a crack at that, but please join in. So I'm a strong proponent of the school thinking here at Stanford and also the lean launch of thinking in that if you have an idea, if you recognize a need, the best way to first go about turning it into an actual product or making a change in the world is to really go talk to people who you think you would be solving that need for. In isolation, we are all very good at imagining things and so one of the biggest learnings for me has been to know that in order for us to be successful as a business, we need to make sure that we are listening to our potential customers. So really talking to as many potential buyers, as many potential customers as you can to really hear people understand what, whether the idea that you have in mind is really resonating with what they're experiencing on a day to day basis. And if that's the case, then that's a great sign and that's the thing to go for it at that point. As an engineer, I tend to think very technically and it's easy to feel like I found a technical solution so I must have solved the problem, but when you go and engage with your users or potential customers and buyers, you start to get a better understanding of non-technical issues which tend to be a huge barrier actually when you try to start a company. And so again, I would double down on the thought that you really need to submerge yourself in the problem and really understand it and go to the market trying to learn from your users or your customers instead of trying to go and push your product or your idea onto them. And it'll do you a great deal of good and save you a lot of time. And so we've done that and I think it's been really valuable. Also, not only talking to your customers and your users but understanding the entire ecosystem. I know for me in Nigeria, there are stakeholders who I never anticipated would care about what I was doing, but do and can have a huge impact on the success of my business. So that's important as well. One final question which also came from the audience and this is actually for CAT. So we have people, prospective founders of new ventures in the audience here. If they are thinking about how to best position themselves and develop themselves, what do you look for in the projects and people that you invest in? So I'll take it, Radical Impact Partners is the early stage venture fund that we developed alongside the bank. Partly because banks are not the appropriate financing vehicle for startups but if we wanna produce a new economy gets me filled with a lot of startups. Either experienced teams who were doing something they never did before or ideas that no one ever had before. So we started the venture fund and gave it the same three verticals but we also insisted that it be transformative first, that it be hit financial benchmarks because it was finding transformative ideas and sustainability and innovation that works which also answers the scale question because if it's really transformative and it's really gonna take over from the market it's gonna scale fast too. So we are looking for that systems approach. I'll give maybe two anonymized examples. A largely goom tree organization wanted to reintroduce these into degraded citrus lands so they had a cheap real estate plan gonna do this sort of plantation version of a better tree producing high value proteins and seed cake for animals and so on. And we said it's awesome that you found this great tree but it's reinforcing old systems. We don't like plantation systems because they lend themselves to industrial scale homogenous plantings. It's not integrating into the other systems that are important like water and carbon and solar and everything else in a way that's meaningful and it's perpetuating the capo system. You're just giving them a feeder seed cake to their credit. They went back and at our urgings and started thinking about it as an integrated cropping and grazing scheme that gave resilience to the producers and onsite feed that didn't need to go to the capos and worked in combination with one another. Remains to be seen, they're still sort of in basic research or a food company that's trying to reconstitute the indigenous rights of tribal reservations who always supported the Buffalo. We exterminate the Buffalo as a political action. So giving them back the market for smart protein bars based on the Buffalo which is the best on Gillette for prairie perennial grassland communities. That has real political repercussions. So we don't just look for a good idea to be perfectly honest. It has to transform big systems. It has to be political. It has to recreate distributed power, not concentrated power. We want nothing to do with concentrated power schemes. So it means that we say no to a lot of companies that really have a great idea but they're gonna find somebody else to get that done. Thank you all very much. Please join me in thanking these four and thanks very much for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. Thank you.