 Good afternoon. Welcome. I'm Stacey Bent. I'm the director of the Tomcat Center for Sustainable Energy. I'd like to thank all of you for joining us. It's great to see so many female students interested in exploring entrepreneurship and sustainability. For the students and others who were unable to attend, we're going to be recording the event and posting it online, so still a chance to hear what's happening today. Let me tell you a little bit about the Tomcat Center for Sustainable Energy. The Center fosters sustainable energy through research, education, outreach, and innovation transfer. Our innovation transfer program supports Stanford students, faculty, and staff who have developed a sustainable energy innovation to externalize it so it can start to make a real-world impact. The speakers on today's panel have all participated in our program and then gone on well beyond. Having all of Tomcat Center's programs be inclusive is very important to us. Having more females become leaders in sustainability is critical, which is why we think this event is so meaningful. The Women Entrepreneurs in Sustainability event now in its second year is designed to provide women interested in careers in entrepreneurship and sustainability the opportunity to gain insights from those who've already embarked on this journey. I think everyone here today will find inspiration in the speakers. Every one of them is seeking to make an impact and be an agent of change to global problems. Their pursuits demonstrate a commitment to not only advancing technology, but also changing the world for the better. They embody the idea that anyone can make a difference and serve as an inspiration to future women leaders to apply their education and passion towards sustaining and enriching humanity. This path is not always welcoming to women. Women are 50% of the population and they're earning college degrees at rates higher than their male counterparts. And while the state has seen substantial increases in female founders, only around 20% of venture-backed startups have at least one female co-founder. In addition, these female-led startups tend to receive smaller funding amounts amounting to only 10% of the venture dollars invested globally. It's not difficult to see that there is opportunity for females to participate more, which is why we are here this afternoon to share, to learn, and to find camaraderie with those who have charted its course and are willing to share what they have learned so that others will be prepared and able to navigate it. I want to start off the afternoon by introducing Cattape, our special guest. Cat received her BA from Harvard and her JD MBA from Stanford University. She works tirelessly toward a more equitable and inclusive world by championing social justice and environmental well-being through the advocacy of good money, good food, and good energy. Everyone needs a really good tagline. She is the co-founder and co-CEO of Beneficial State Bank, a community development financial institution whose mission is to bring beneficial banking to low-income communities in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner. She is the co-founder and managing partner of Radical Impact, a partner with exceptional people, where financial success creates meaningful social change. She has a really long list of activities and recognition, so let me just go through a few of them quickly. Importantly, she's the founding director of the Tomcat Ranch Educational Foundation, and I hope I'll get her to talk a little bit about this really special place. She's a board member of the Harvard University Board of Overseers. She's a board member of EcoTrust, a board member of Good Samaritan Family Resource Center, a board member of Forager Project, and I think her newest board membership is Agriculture Sustainability Institute at UC Davis. She's also an advisory board member of Grid Alternatives National Advisory Committee, and closer to home and very important to all of us here, Cat is a Tomcat Center founding benefactor, and she is the cat in Tomcat. So it is with great enthusiasm that I welcome Cat and thank her for coming tonight. So I'm going to ask Cat to come up here, and we'll sit up here in the front. Thank you again for joining us. Let me start off with a question, which is just to tell us a little bit about yourself and the journey that brought you to the very visible position that you have today as an advocate for social justice and sustainability. First, thank you very much for having me here. I'm quite humbled by the invitation, much less experience. All of you could definitely give us your own rich origin stories, and we would learn from them equally or more. So I'll try to stick to maybe a little bit of the unique path that I had into impact investing. And honestly, it started when I was a tiny girl. I witnessed both the advent of television, I'm that old, and also what I think of the civil rights funerals in rapid succession, unfortunately. John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. And for some reason it really moved me, and I couldn't get my mind off of that even as a young person. It was a common national experience that actually had real political ramifications, that the world watched that together, but it has motivated all my work, trying to find my unique contribution to civil rights for all. From there, I will narrate my whole life, but I am also what I consider to be a person who has benefited from privilege. By where I was born in the United States, by the family that I was born into, both of whom went to Stanford, graduated in cherished education. The care that they gave to me, my race, my national origin, even as my gender, which has been disadvantaged in the past, I have lived into the era where it is seeking parity. So that is a real responsibility to recognize that. It was compounded in getting to go to really good educational institutions, not coming out of them with a massive amount of debt, choosing a life partner who was very good at investing. And I have to acknowledge that the returns to capital are way more powerful. And also just having the privilege of a life experience where I could be in public service and work for a lot of nonprofits, because we were not income stressed as a household. So all of that really matters. And it also matters to have, to live in a state of learning where you can take in a lot of new information and decide over time what you think happened in this life. I am not a financial fatalist. I don't think capital markets edict what should happen. They just produce what does happen. And I am a real critic of how we have allowed capital to a grand eyes and horde return in this country and in this world at the expense of labor. And that means people and planet. And I also am painfully aware that absent other stresses that are in many other people's lives, it's my responsibility to get fully on the game board. Unfortunately, I'm married to a guy who feels the same way. So we met in graduate school. We came out together. He built a hedge fund called Feral on Capital Partners. I worked on a massive number of non-profit boards. I did get early advice coming out as a JD MBA who was worried about the civil rights that Martin Luther King himself had said if we don't guarantee economic access and opportunity, the legal and political rights that are so hard fought and won won't be meaningless. So Michael Kicnik who at the time, I always give him credit. He and my husband get total credit for this encouraged me because I come from a family that was in banking to think about starting a bank one day because banks and the financial system drive a lot of outcomes. So throughout the next 20 years after graduate school, Tomville Feralon, we raised a family of four children. Very lucky in the company that we keep. We had our hand in democratic politics. I sat on a bunch of boards. We were honing our view of the world, if you will. And then in 2004 when John Kerry was not elected president, we did not go to Washington DC. And we decided we had to be all in to the efforts to and I'll just sort of synthesize Tom's mission statement is to act politically to avert climate disaster and restore broad prosperity. And that kind of sums up where we are. We took a little time to try to get focus and that's where the good food, good money, good energy came in. Those are massive systems that are highly interconnected and interdependent. And we decided to stop everything else we were doing to get to start operating entities at the core of each one of those three verticals and take significant management responsibility for them. So at that point we co-founded Beneficial State Bank and I have become CEO and then co-CEO. Tom founded Next Gen Climate, now Next Gen California and Next Gen America. And he takes a very strong political activism role and we started Tomcat Ranch Educational Foundation trying to move our big ag and food systems towards an optimization model and away from yield maximization. Quite a story. You've touched on a few things that I want to sort of probe a little bit more deeply. So one is on the beneficial bank and also radical impact. They have similar objectives but somewhat different approaches. So could you say a little bit about each and what you see them, the vision for each of them in the long term? So I have to admit when we went to start a bank it was on a hunch that somehow the banking system was not serving us and that it's very powerful. But our original mission was just to design a bank that was super aligned in the public interest and run it well and create a new category in banking called beneficial banking. Shortly into the history of the bank we realized because of the great recession that we had to change the banking system for good, full stop period, nothing else will suffice. Banking if you think about it at least as a metaphor is the original and most powerful form of crowdfunding. We pool our idle cash, our deposits in order to finance the world we actually want to live in. That's seen as an economy but that economy drives deep and lasting societal outcomes. It's not that a specific deposit funds a specific loan but all deposits fund a lending practice and it does it in a very powerful way. We as the public decided to give banks FDIC insurance federal deposit insurance corporation insurance so that banks can recruit up to $250,000 of any person or organization's money risk free. You cannot lose it and the reason you cannot lose it is because the FDIC insurance fund would cover those monies if the bank were to fail. That's ultimately backed by the American taxpayer. That results in the lowest cost funding in the American economy absent securitization. Our cost of funds at the bank right now is 50 basis points. That's very low and it comes to us readily because people are trying to park their cash. In addition it's a very disciplined model. We have 13 exams a year. Not necessarily disciplined to what we want but we know exactly what we're doing. Any bank knows exactly what they're doing and then the last thing is it's recycling. When you lend money out you better get 99% of it back or you'll be out of business in short order. That means that our impact accumulates. This is a very very powerful system and right now I would warrant there are probably $12 trillion of deposits rolling around in the American economy alone. This is bigger than just about any industry you can think of and it is driving outcomes but not the ones we want. So unfortunately the banking system is dragging a train of misery over the same period as the Great Recession which is a short amount of time. We lost nearly five million homes to foreclosure representing a transfer of wealth from those with the fewest resources to those with the most in breathtaking time. One third of bank tellers are on some form of public assistance. That is a shocking transfer of a private cost to a public resource from some of the companies that are the most profitable in the world. Communities of color have taken it on the chin way disproportionately. The biggest banks have put in the last 10 years $250 billion into coal finance. Coal is nothing without coal finance and albeit that we need to be very careful about what coal communities and coal miners do next. They deserve the prosperity that everyone does as well. Coal is a dead-end business. It's bankrupt. It kills people in their 40s and it's tilting us towards climate disaster. So this is the train of misery we have to stop and that's why I say when we started the bank it isn't enough just to be a good bank and a vast system we have to change the whole system. The bank and radical impact are designed with public interest in their DNA. Their common source of capital is charitable. So 100% of the economic rights of beneficial state bank are owned by a public charity that's permanently governed in the public interest. Cannot be controlled by a private individual. It is appointed. The board is appointed by three other public charities and at the end of the day if the bank distributes profits it can only go to that public charity. It's called Beneficial State Foundation. So it also has bylaws that say when it gets profit it has to reinvest that into the low-income communities that we serve in the environment upon which we tend depend. So if we have crowdfunding in the public interest on the front end we have virtuous profit taking on the back end. I'll come to a close here in a second but it's important to understand the design features. The second design feature is the lending practice. If we're crowdfunding we should be assiduous about what we're lending to. On behalf of our stakeholders our stakeholders are not just our equity shareholders they are customers, transactors, depositors, communities, the planet, etc. And so we insist that 75% of our loan dollars are in the hands of the new economy. Those are either borrowers producing something we desperately need like affordable housing, renewable energy or they're aligned in the public interest as well like B Corporation's worker cooperatives or they're simply communities that were previously starved of capital both financial and social political capital. Low-income communities, women and minority-owned businesses, the nonprofit sector. We count up the loan dollars at the end of every quarter. If they aren't 75% in those hands we get pretty agitated and fix it and if the other 25% can't work against social justice or environmental well-being that's a preponderance model. We're trying to drive towards the new economy as fast as we can. The third design feature is just an extension. We are radically transparent. You can find out anything we do, what it means, how it's measured, why it matters, anything. We are a B Corporation, third highest rated in the U.S. We are a CDFI, hard to get from Treasury. We label ourselves according to just corporate practices. We measure our greenhouse gas, landfill and water, footprint and reduce it every year per FDE. We pay 150% of living wage in all markets fully benefited and we will not finance fossil fuels. It's important that we make those warranties so we show up right but it's most important to our theory of change. We cannot replace the banking system. It is far too vast. In 10 short years we've grown to 860 million and asset set seems like a massive number to me. That is so many zeros away from Chase and BFA who are well over 2 trillion in assets. The Veterans Administration is only 69 billion in assets. These are massive institutions. They're not going to pivot. It's not going to be possible. So we have to give the large regionals what they need, a playbook of how to take market share to migrate deposit, equity and human capital to a better model and they can do it by mimicking the warranties and the assurances that we make. And we're seeing signs of that already. DAPL, Dacot Access Pipeline, big shift to deposit capital, divest invest. All those wonderful point of the spear organizations know what they're divesting from. They have a very poor menu on what to invest into. And human capital and I want to say this while there's all this beautiful human talent in the room. We run an internship program every summer, not unlike the Tomcat Center, where we recruit people I guarantee you from top universities and business schools who never thought they would go into banking, but they recognize what a powerful tool it is. And they come to work for us for nine weeks in the summer. We offer eight to ten slots and we now get 200 applications for those slots. So it's beginning to happen. That's great. You've talked about good money. I want to maybe just turn to good food temporarily or for a moment. So the Tomcat Ranch, it's a very interesting living laboratory and actually some of our Tomcat startups have actually tested some prototypes and tested things out there. Could you tell us a little bit about the Tomcat Ranch and what its mission is? It too has evolved. This Tomcat Ranch is 50 miles south of San Francisco on the coast of Pescadero. It's naturally would have been part of the migratory corridors of the great ungulate herds, mostly elk in California. And once again, we had a hunch that something was desperately wrong in the food system, starting with the fact that it wasn't largely producing food. It was producing poison for people, but aided by a lot of investigative journalism, most famously led by Michael Paul, and we started looking into what was wrong with the food system and how could we play a role in migrating it to something that was far more beneficial for people and planet. In order to talk about the ranch, I really have to talk about the Serengeti. If you look at the source of the great bread baskets of the world, the Serengeti, the Yukon, the Great Plains, the Eastern bread baskets of Europe, even the Central Valley, which was its own Serengeti, sort of ported two camels, two lions, three elephants, etc. That was the basis of grassland evolution in concert with animal migratory herds, and it produced one of the strongest sources of our natural capital that is renewable, which is called soil. So those herds pulled by rain that pulled the grasses, followed those rains and grasses down California and then back up again. And as they went, they had evolved to their conditions. First, to have these are multi-species herds, large herds, and ungulates means they can convert the most efficient converters of cellulosic fiber, which is really photosynthesis, into muscle mass, which is a different form of energy, which is called food if you eat it. But anyway, they were evolved to migrate together in multi-species herds and to have their babies all at one time. When you have your babies all at one time, first you can start moving all together and it's confusion to your enemies. The predators don't do nearly as good a job as getting a high percentage of those babies all at once than they would if you trickled them out around the course of a year. The predators provided pressure for them to bunch together and graze as a pack and to move quickly. So they don't eat a lot. They do a light grazing and they move on. They leave behind maneuvering and stamping that's very important to the soil community that also evolved with the grasslands. And that's where the real action is going on. Plant mass above ground is equivalent to biomass below ground and in these areas of migration, those were largely perennial grasslands, huge root systems, enormous root systems, and microbial highways. So all the micro-ryzomal highway provides territory for the microbial organisms to move along and exchange with the plant's carbon. And that's why there was so much carbon in the soil. The plant uses carbon in photosynthesis and exchanges carbons and sugars with the microbial organisms who harvest for them the minerals and nutrients they need from the soil. And in that exchange, an awful lot of durable soil carbon was created such that the estimates are soils used to be 11% carbon. They are now on average more like a half to one and a half percent. And if you wonder where the other that difference went, it went into the air and oceans where we can't tolerate it anymore. So I'm sorry to take us back to sort of geologic history, but it's really important. It's what we're trying to do through scientifically based and monitored grazing land management practices is push that carbon back into the soil. Along the way, we are not maximizing. Soil is a living system. Agriculture needs to be an optimization system, not a maximization system. When you maximize for yield, you get industrial ag, which is really not serving any of us. So we optimize on the ranch for greenhouse gas re-sequestration. That's what the soils building is doing. Biodiversity, which is so important to a healthy evolving ecosystem. Water quality and retention, animal welfare, human nutrition and economic viability. Because if we don't start returning more of the return, the financial return to the stewards of the land, we're going to get more of the same outcome, which is complete denuding of our natural capital base. We run a life cycle model built by PW Price Waterhouse Coopers. I'm in acronym free zone. To study what it is we're doing now, what we predict it will produce in five years and against the counterfactual, which is the most polite version of the combined animal factory operation system you could imagine. We recruit other land managers, public and private, into the land management regime and the scientific monitoring to try to collect ever more data about what it is we're actually getting done and how we can migrate more and more acreage first in California than elsewhere back into regenerative agriculture. And we do hire interns and fellows and we've had a wonderful connection with Stanford, both the Tomcat Center and also the D School throughout. So if you hear about it, come visit us. We probably have 80 events a year. We're a learning laboratory. We've got to be part of a political cabal to take our food system back. Thank you. We're actually going to move now to the next portion of the event, but we're going to have a cat back up here for questions at the end of the afternoon. But first, let's take a moment and thank Cat.