 It's such a pleasure to be here and see so many familiar faces, and I'm really grateful that you all came out so early in the morning to hear about social enterprise. So I'm going to kick off by just telling you a little bit about the Sama Group, and I wanted to set the tone for my conversation with Kevin Jones by talking about an experience I just had in Kenya. I just returned from Kenya about two and a half weeks ago. So what is the Sama Group? You heard a little bit about that. If we can just get the next slide up, there we go. So we are a family of social enterprises. Some of you may know us through our largest social enterprise, which is called Sama Source. Sama means equal in Sanskrit. And our mission is to use technology to level the playing field for low income people. We started Sama Source six years ago with a mission to bring digital work to some of the lowest income people in the world. We thought if we could figure out a way to employ people in corners of the world where employment opportunities are really scarce, we could really change the game for poverty alleviation. So we started that six years ago. It evolved into a global outsourcing organization that has employed over 6,000 people and that has moved 25,000 people out of poverty. And we have a model that we call micro work. So we actually work with large technology enterprises, primarily here in the Bay Area, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Walmart.com. And we work with them to take large data projects and break them down into small units of work. And then we train people in low income communities to do this work from local computer labs. And I'll show you a little bit about what that looks like in practice in a minute. Out of Sama Source, we started Sama USA, which is a domestic program that's somewhat similar. Sama USA trains low income community college students and youth around the country to learn how to use their existing skills to earn money online. And so far the program, we started a pilot last year. This program has been able to generate around $2,000 in supplemental income for students who do an 80 hour boot camp. And the average starting income for these students is around $11,000 a year. So we've seen some big impacts using the same philosophy of digital work. Lastly, we kind of went out on a limb and had an idea for the world's first crowdfunding site a couple of years ago for medical treatments. We were traveling through Africa and noticed a huge need for doctors who do surgeries to share word about what they were doing and to be able to attract donors directly. So I'm gonna tell you a little story. This is where I was two weeks ago. This is Mathare Slum in Kenya. Have any of you been there? It's by a show of hands. I love that in this audience I can ask that question and like 10 people raised their hands. So those of you who have been to Mathare know that it's a pretty destitute place. I feel like I've seen quite a lot of poverty in my lifetime and I haven't quite seen something like this. There are open sewers everywhere. The community was built on a trash dump. About 800,000 people live in this slum. And I went to spend the day with one of our workers, a young man named Kevin Kiara. Kevin started working with Sama Source about a year and a half ago. He's chosen to stay in Mathare because he actually has a small house that he owns so he's able to save 100% of his income. But just seeing what Kevin's daily life looks like, it's such a reminder of the power of this kind of work. The kind of work we do is a lifeline for people like Kevin. And there are so few jobs that pay dignified wages in a place like this. So I took a photo of this sign as I was walking into the slum. There's a huge challenge in much of East Africa around labor contracting. Young men get pulled out of these communities to go and work as laborers in countries that are building a lot. And many of them get their passports taken and are part of the cycle of human trafficking. And we wonder, what could we do to prevent this? And I feel like that the core essence of what we do at Sama Group of creating jobs is the long-term solution to this. And these kinds of signs are everywhere in poor countries. You're probably familiar with them. So this was walking in, and then we got to Kent House. And he talked to me a lot about what it was like to raise his daughter in these conditions. He was orphaned at age 10, and his first job in the slum was putting his hands in an open sewer to collect little pieces of metal that would wash in from different parts of the slum. And then he would sort the metal and take them to a local trash collector to make probably about $1.25 a day. That was his first job at 10 years old. And unbelievably, this young man made it through secondary school. He got a scholarship to attend a secondary school outside the slum. And when I visited him, he took out his worn collection of favorite novels, including Moby Dick, and told me that he was a great fan of literature. And that his biggest challenge was that the kinds of jobs available to people like him in a place like Mathare didn't really rely on his brain power. So he was pretty depressed for a while. He tried many different jobs. He tried making this local alcohol called Chang'e, which a lot of people are addicted to. He tried anything he could do to make a few bucks a day. And then luckily, he was selected into a program that trains young people in digital work skills. And that program is a feeder for Sama Source. So you can see here, it's a program called Nairobots. And they're all over Africa. And they train young people in using computers and also using computers for relevant kind of job skills. So he learned Photoshop, he learned blogging. And then he heard about Sama Source through our recruiter. Since he started working with us two years ago, his entire life has changed. He's been able to put aside money for his daughter's education. He pays for several siblings to survive, several of them still live in Mathare. And he has a completely different outlook on life. And I think the biggest challenge for people like these is that there's a sense of pervasive hopelessness around jobs. And there's this sense that it's never going to get any better. And I think that the least we can do for them is to fuel their optimism by connecting them to work. So with that, I'm going to invite Kevin on stage and we'll talk a little bit about the evolution of this organization. Great, good job. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Remember the lemonade. So Lila, we've known each other a while. Let me tell you a story about knowing Lila when she was a real raw startup. About six years ago, I guess it was. And I got Lila a little gig to be an intern for a YPO-like thing, small group, support group of really experienced social entrepreneurs. Jim Fruckerman of Benetech, Rebecca Masisak of TechSoup, my partner, Tim Freudlick. And so then there was some cause that came along. People were donating to ask, Lila, can you donate? And she said, well, no. And she said, you know, I'm to keep some source alive. I've actually had to give up my apartment. I'm sleeping on the couch of my former boyfriend and I'm eating ramen. And I was like, wow, that echoing green asked the question, what will keep you going when things are bad doing your mission? So I did this kind of small silly thing. I started giving her a check for $50 for protein every month, just so, you know, well, put some chicken on the ramen. But so I've known that now she's a success. And actually, recently did well enough that you just bought a house here. And congratulations in San Francisco. That's kind of, you know, it shows you up to 10 million in revenues, right? House is kind of a euphemistic term for that. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. But the nights when you're on the couch thinking, you know, this is, I've hit a wall. This is not working. What kept you going? So first off, I have to thank Kevin because I don't even know if he knows this, but Jim Furterman, who he mentioned who is in that group, was our very first client. And he gave us a $30,000 contract right around the time that I got the protein donation. Oh, $30,000 and $50,000, so that's good, good. But those are the kinds of things that keep you going. You know, I think for me, the constant validation from the point of view of the workers. And I made it a point, even when it didn't make so much economic sense to go back to Africa and talk to local people. It was the only thing that really kept me going in the end that made me feel like no matter what people were saying in the outside world, and we got a lot of negative feedback early on. I had people literally telling me there's no way that these poor, slum women are ever going to be able to do, you know, computer work. They need food and water and clothing before they can do that. And, you know, it was really hard to illustrate to people that the way they could purchase food and water was if they had a job, so, and there were a lot of... Sure, he minds that, just was getting in the way. Exactly, and I think there are a lot of preconceived ideas about education levels in Africa, and now we work all over the world. But people have the sense that people are poor and helpless and not very bright, right? And you go there and you realize that talent is equally distributed, it's just opportunity that's not. So what really kept me going was meeting people like our workers, and I remember getting a note from one of them on Facebook in the early days that just said, you know, maybe you're not aware, but the fact that we had work at all, we worked in Dadaab in a refugee camp in Kenya, really desperate place. He said, I don't think you understand the true meaning of what you're doing here. Wow. Because people here are so hopeless. Right. And just the exposure to all of these different ways of working and to the fact that, you know, they can be on a level playing field from the middle of Dadaab is, you know, is pretty eye-opening for all of us. And I kept getting that validation from the people in the field and, you know, even when you're feeling really terrible, you're sitting down in San Francisco thinking like, my life is not nearly as bad as that. And here are these people who are so grateful, so I'm not gonna stop. Yeah. Were there people telling you, you should? You should get a job. You're smart, you're capable. Stop being, living on nothing. I heard everything from Mary Rich to, you know, Moonlight doing this and get a real job to turn it into a big corporate outsourcing company because we were doing, I mean, our revenue growth on the sales side has always been really healthy and we're starting to see really great economies of scale in some areas of our work. And so a lot of my friends are like, why on earth would you build this as a nonprofit? Like you should build a big profitable outsourcing company. But my whole point in doing this was to use our model to show funders that it wasn't actually so risky to move these kinds of projects to really low income places. And to do that, I thought we had to be a nonprofit. And what caused the wheel to turn, the door to open that you could afford a small apartment or live a life where you're not just staring at somebody else's ceiling? Well, I'd say the house was actually the Heinz Award. It's amazing that there are a lot of organizations that exist out there to support social entrepreneurs and it's kind of a random process to get connected to them, but I feel like there was some grace involved in that. In prior years, we had a steady revenue build. We had a really solid management team. We had good audits and so funders were willing to invest in us because they started seeing that we had the capacity to really do good work. And I remember having several conversations with funders who said, look, doing this work doesn't mean that you have to starve. And you shouldn't feel ashamed to take a salary that allows you to live a dignified life in San Francisco. And especially as an unmarried woman in San Francisco, there's a lot of expenses that you have on your own, right? And I think that that's a huge lesson for me. And I try to tell younger social entrepreneurs, don't try to be a martyr. You're trying to do this for the long run. When did you really think your model was gonna take off? And now you're up at seven figure, eight figure revenues. When did you think it was really gonna take off? Was there a sign that just, hey, we're gonna make it? I'm still really waiting for it to really take off. Our team is all sitting over here and probably laughing at that. We see a lot of evidence of success, but we're pretty hungry for more. And I think one of the things that has made us moderately successful, I still think there's so much room for us to grow. It's just that we have a lot of drive to do more. And we look at the numbers and there's so many, the unemployment crisis in just Sub-Saharan Africa alone is huge. So it kind of forces us to keep going. I think that one pivotal moment for us was when the Rockefeller Foundation last year decided to invest $80 million in digital jobs Africa, which is an initiative that in many ways was linked to Sama Source. We were their first grantee in this category. And I remember talking to their VP of strategy in the early days and saying, look, I really think this idea of bringing digital work to low income communities in Africa is one of the solutions we can embrace for various reasons. And initially there was some resistance at the foundation, but they have a lot of really smart people and over time this evolved into a huge initiative. And I think that kind of validation proves to the world that what's now called impact sourcing is a business model. Is a real business model. Not everybody should keep going. Sometimes when you hit a wall, you know the models. You should know the models not working. I rented some driven folks who should have quit a while ago. What do you tell folks like that? Maybe it really isn't working. Maybe it's not you. Maybe you're not the right person. What kind of advice can you tell people to not be like you? I think a few things helped us out. One was setting really clear goals and saying if we can't hit these goals, if we can't hit this kind of return on investment, that's going to trigger an evaluation process and put us sort of on, not on probation, but at least on alert that at some point we should stop if we don't start seeing a change because we'll just be wasting donor money. And for us that ROI point was always, I mean my concept is, are we doing better than going to Africa with suitcases full of cash and giving direct cash transfers? Right, right. And if we're not, if there's no sort of leverage of the model, then we should really reconsider what we're doing. And with all of our programs, when we started Sama Hope and Sama USA, we set really clear targets. For Sama USA for example, we said, if students don't earn at least what it costs to train them per person in the pilot, then that should trigger an evaluation and we should be really careful about expanding or even continuing to fund it. And luckily that program, thanks to the amazing leadership of its co-founder Tess. Thanks again. Thanks Tess. That program has, yeah, stand up Tess. That program has done remarkably well and I think that focus also made the team realize that we have a goal to hit and we have accountability here. How about Sama Hope? Is it hitting its milestones? It is. We have a goal of treating 1,000 patients this year and we're at about 500 and we have a bunch of things that we're planning for the website to scale it. The challenge, and I'll just add this onto what I said earlier, along with those kinds of metrics, I think you also need to realize that every model has an incubation period and our CFO who comes from Oracle has said to our team, we really think that there's a three year incubation period. Most things can't really get off the ground and show any traction for about three years. And so what we look at is can we fund something for a three year horizon? And is our board comfortable with making a three year commitment? And I think that's roughly the time that you need to determine whether something's going to be a success. And this is the second year for Sama Hope? This is, yeah, we relaunched the site in November last year so we're sort of counting that as a start. And before that, there was like $25,000 in funding from an angel. What's next? Is there a for profit spin out or anything else that you're going to build? So we have three enterprises now which are keeping us really busy. And Sama USA and Sama Source are quite similar. So we really kind of view those as two programs that are working together. Do the US, do it in Africa. Exactly. And what we've realized is that we can use our brand now, which has strong brand recognition, to start thinking about developing one additional business line that could bring us more revenue. So Sama Source is a really amazing business from the standpoint of how many people it can employ and how fast it's growing. But it's not a very high margin business. Low end digital work is becoming more and more commoditized. So it's a healthy social enterprise. But we don't think it's ever going to generate profits that can kick back into the group and fund new ventures that we want to start or subsidize the operations of something that's not as revenue generating like Sama Hope. And so we have a concept in mind. I can't share all of the details, but it's in the beauty category. And it's in the luxury space. And we're evaluating different options for launching a brand that can generate these kinds of returns for the group. And I think at that point, we'll probably take a break. Yeah, yeah. And the beauty category would be sourcing from some of these same people or jobs for the same people. Exactly. I mean, one of the core tenants of Sama Group is giving work. And we really believe that dignified work is a solution to a lot of the problems that we see from labor trafficking to sex trafficking to child malnutrition. And so this is a different method of giving work that involves sourcing, not digital work, but sourcing raw ingredients from low income communities. And I think that there's a huge opportunity in this space to look at categories like luxury, where the margins are really high, but typically go to LVMH marketing budget. They go to these very large corporations and I think very few social enterprises think about tackling that space. Right, right. The luxury and fair trade thing. Altarico is one of our investors and they have a new truffle that actually has all the social value baked in at that margin. But chocolate doesn't quite cover all the social goods. So I'm seeing some people do some interesting thing. Nobody's done anything quite big enough yet. I think Myet is really interesting. I haven't followed the social impact side of that story, but I think they've done a really beautiful job of building a luxury brand that also highlights artisans in developing countries. And I think that that's sort of a riff on the traditional fair trade model that's gaining more traction. Yeah, and then you would be the spokesmodel entrepreneur kind of thing for this, whatever you call that. We need to have a product first, but yes, that's the goal. Yeah, because I mean, people are coming, putting you on magazines and then you're giving the money from the photo shoots to Sama source, right? I mean, that seems to be where the idea came from. So I will say that, and probably other women social entrepreneurs in the room might have thoughts about this, but initially I was kind of conflicted about using my personal brand and story so closely tied to the nonprofit as part of my work. And then at some point, you just realize that that's your job as an entrepreneur is to use what you have to offer to build your organization. And I think because there are so few younger women in tech and younger women in social enterprise and tech, we get a lot of opportunities to tell our story and a lot of invitations to panels and being featured and that sort of thing. So it did come out of that. We thought, well, how could we leverage this more? And what could we do? We're getting so much attention from women's magazines, for example. And unfortunately, the people making decisions about Sama source type work are typically middle-aged men in tech companies in Silicon Valley, not reading Marie Claire. Right, right, yeah. So we do, I think we've been sort of market driven and opportunistic from the beginning. And when we see an opportunity like that, we evaluate it. Yeah, yeah, it seems like it's really there. You get the attention, but then you can source the goods that are incredibly high margin that are going to the same people. And it only works if you have a fantastic team that can execute flawlessly. And I'm really proud of our team. We've built it out a lot over the last few years. And so I'm able to go out there and do my thing and know that the home fires are burning. Do you ever, you're a role model for a lot of young social entrepreneurs because you've built something from nothing. At Sacrifice, what do you tell some other entrepreneurs? I mean, do you get into evaluating, well maybe you should quit, or do you just say, press on? What do you tell somebody? They can be wrongly inspired by your example to keep hitting a wall that they can't break down. Well, I will say that the things that are most worth doing are the hardest, usually. And there were several moments that I could have quit, but I remember reading a Ben Horowitz blog post, he's from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capitalist, and he has this saying, don't punk out and quit. And I think it's often, right after those worst moments that the best moments can come. And last year I had a huge issue trying to push this new strategic plan through and there was some disagreement in our board and it was really, really, really hard. There were several moments when I just thought, I don't know if I can do this longer. And I think doing anything requires, my philosophy is I'm gonna put 10 years into this and see where it is and push through those times. I think the other thing is, my grandmother used to say this, she hitchhiked around the world after World War II. She's a Belgian woman and met my grandfather in Calcutta and she had this motto, trust the world. And when my parents were getting their first mortgage and really scared, she leaned in and told my dad, fear not, the world is beautiful, trust the world. And I think that's kind of true and I think if you allow other people to help you and you allow other people in, you'll be often pleasantly surprised. Yeah, I rented lots of would-be visionaries and that kind of thing and if they're not being followed by people or if people aren't helping and if there's not social capital coming in, another thing I've learned from Echoing Green is what are your volunteer resources and are people giving you more things now? And they did with you. I saw something that you were worth some protein. Jim Structman thought it was worth a $30,000 contract. I mean, that could be an indicator too because the world did sell out for you. Absolutely and I will say as a counter to don't punk out and quit, you also have to be rational. So if you're really not hitting the goals that you set for yourself and if donors are after three years still having issues even if you can show them really good data and I think having a clear impact model that you can be rational about really helps, then I think that should call into question what you're doing. So it's not don't punk out and quit for anything. If a model's not working, you need to adjust it. But I do think that I think that a lot of people quit prematurely or quit before trying to pivot and trying to build something new if what they're doing is not working. And I think it's especially true in social enterprise because it's just so hard. I feel like we have all the burden as nonprofit social entrepreneurs of tech startups but without any of the upside. And so it really is sort of mission and calling oriented work. And I think it requires a certain level of resilience. Yeah, and you, there was a Jim Fruchterman around that you could reach out to in the Bay Area. Sometimes it's hard in a particular entrepreneur I was working with a while ago, a Native American company called Native Touch, they needed to know the distribution for cosmeceuticals. Luckily, I could find somebody at Social Venture Network who knew that kind of thing but I realized that's a real hard thing. So we've invested in a company called Starkrid that finds you the domain specific mentor that you don't have in the Bay Area. What, do you do any mentoring to younger entrepreneurs? I do, I try to do it more ad hoc and I actually, I mentor a couple of the daughters of women on our staff who are younger and they can come by the office often. I really enjoy it and I've been lucky enough to be mentored by a number of amazing people. I met Howard Schultz a little under a year ago and the way he's built Starbucks is so inspirational to me in terms of our mission of giving work. So I feel like I have some kind of a duty to give back. It's also tough though, there's so many demands on your time. There are, yeah, yeah, finding the right ones. We have about 45 seconds left. What would you say to a young social entrepreneur looking at you saying, I wanna be like her, I wanna, I wanna grow to 10 million from almost zero. What would you, how should they follow your path? I would say that the most important thing is to clarify your core values and why you're doing what you're doing and then to, when you've decided on a model to embrace it with grace, grit, and optimism. Grace, grit, and optimism. Yep, words to live by. I like it. Thank you, Lila. Thank you. Thank you for the help. It's great.