 I'm Shuyin and I'm an investment principal at United's Impact. We're a venture capital firm with a dual mission of improving the livelihoods of the working poor and generating a strong financial return for our investors. So today I want to pose the question, what if venture capital looked different? And I don't just mean more diverse, although that's also an important issue to me and I'll touch on that later. But also, you know, what if venture capital was not just about outsized returns but can you also build companies which serve the poor, disrupt systems, rewrite the rules? So I'm not sure how many of you watch the TV show Silicon Valley, it's one of my favourites. Even if it's a little too close to home sometimes. And in many episodes they, you know, satirized this claim amongst many Silicon Valley startups that they're making the world a better place. But what if you could actually invest in companies, which we're doing that? So at the heart of our investment thesis at United's Impact is this idea that in many emerging markets systems have evolved in ways in which the structures disempower the poor. So for example, due to market inefficiencies in many situations, small holder farmers only capture a small proportion of the final retail price. So our question is, how do we ungame the system, so to speak, such that these farmers are able to get their fair share of the economic value? So for example, we've invested in a company called Varsha in Indonesia. It's an agricultural supply chain company. And in general, you know, market-based interventions in agriculture work in kind of specialty or premium crops, right? It's the only way that, or many people perceive that it's the only way in which, you know, appropriate margin can be passed all the way down to the farmer. But in Varsha's case, the founder had this vision to reach 100,000 farmers by 2020. And he realized that that would be impossible if he was doing it in a specialty or niche crop. He decided that also, you know, what if I could do this in Mays? What if I could do this in a staple value chain? So what Varsha does is it works across the entire value chain. It provides profit sharing financing, which is also sharia compliant. It provides access to high quality inputs. It provides training on agricultural best practices and off-take at an above market price. And in this way, it's able to deliver a 65% income increase on average to farmers over the past three growing cycles. It's currently working with about 6,500 farmers in various parts of Indonesia and is looking to scale that to 100,000 farmers. It's got a very nice modular solution. And they're also planning to take that into other staple crops such as soybean and rice. One of our other investments is into a company called Mclinica, which started off in the Philippines. And what they're doing is they're building a digital network of pharmacies in Southeast Asia. And in doing so, they're able to provide real-time, last-mile data on what people are buying over the counter at these pharmacies for the first time. And this is incredibly valuable information both to the big pharma companies but also public health organizations, NGOs. And in that way, the impact can be really transformative, you know, in terms of tackling things like counterfeit medicines, disease outbreaks, supply medicines, things like this. A few other investments. I'm in an online education company in Vietnam. I'm an employee benefits company also in Vietnam, which provides 0% financing to factory workers, a bunch of things, mum and pop stores in Indonesia. And for us, it's really exciting to be working with these entrepreneurs with this vision to treat the working poor in innovative ways. Shifting gears a bit. So as you might know from my personal stories, as I'm not actually from, or I haven't taken that kind of route which is typical for a venture capitalist. I didn't found a tech company. I didn't, well actually even worse, I'm an ex-management consultant and many people don't know what we're good for and sometimes I kind of agree. I look a bit different from the typical venture capitalist and I find it quite amusing when I receive all these communications which say, you know, Hey Bro or Dear Gents and Dear Mr. Tang and I'm sure some of the ladies in the room have also been there and you know, it's just like, well if you're asking me for money please take that kind of 30 seconds to do your research. So you know, it's 2017 and I think the venture capital industry still looks a bit like this. I mean, you know, depending on which kind of source you consult anywhere between 5% to 10% of decision makers in the venture capital industry are women and you know, that's not actually moving in the right direction. So you know, we're serious about changing that. We're setting up one of the first funds, perhaps the first fund for investing in high growth women led businesses in Southeast Asia. That will be launching this year and we're super excited about that. In my personal capacity, I founded a startup called Invest with Impact which is a talent agency for the impact investing sector. So you know, really industry is the people who work within it and we wanted to play a role in shaping that and ensuring that kind of diverse voices are heard. So we work with impact investors, universities, talent themselves, corporates to kind of tell them more about impact investing and show that there are many different pathways into the space. So you know, that's just a little bit about kind of my work and my story and you know, I generally do believe that the venture capital industry you know, when it celebrates kind of diversity of background and experience, ethnicity and age it will be a better thing. And so I want to end you with that same question that I started with which is, you know, what a venture capital we're different. I'm James Song. I'm managing principal at FairCat Partners. We work in Myanmar. Born and raised in New York. Also run a startup called Mithra and Deer Labs. My story is very different. My pathway is very different, very non-traditional. I graduated in 05 Harvard University. Thought I would end up doing a PhD there and becoming a professor. I thought that was my career path. So I want to Fulbright to do HIV research in Uganda. And the first year there, since my background was in psychology and it was a psychological intervention to boost CD4 cell counts in HIV positive patients, the first year there I saw a lot of people, a lot of my patients that I was seeing dying because their HIV was progressing to AIDS very quickly. And there's a concept in medicine called co-morbidity meaning you get a disease while you have a disease and that disease in Uganda largely is malaria, which weakens the immune system enough where HIV progresses to AIDS. And there's really nothing I could have done about it, you know, as an HIV researcher. So, you know, I started looking into the issue. I had a chance after my Fulbright year was up to go back to the States and do more research and then apply to PhD programs. And the problem was, you know, like these mosquitoes were being bred in still pools of water. These still pools of water were caused by blocked sewage pipes. These sewage pipes were blocked by litter, rubbish and mostly plastic bags that people have bought something with and then thrown away because they needed the product but not the plastic bag. So I decided to learn everything I could about plastic recycling and open up a plastic recycling factory and it was the first modern polyethylene plastic recycling plant in all of East Africa. And then we, over the next three years, built up a East African wide kind of collection network, a very gray market worked in spite of authorities who always would try to ticket us or stop our activities because we weren't officially sanctioned by the city and we didn't have this maze of, we didn't go through this maze of permits and approvals that you needed to do anything in Africa. So that was very difficult for us. And in 2010, after I received a Masters in Neuroscience, I realized I couldn't grow the business anymore, meaning we started to recycle so much plastic we needed to start importing it into Uganda and the Ugandan government was very against bringing in what they perceived as garbage into their country. So I knew I had to take an exit and then at that point with the neuroscience background, I sold everything and I started an oncology research-based biotech hedge fund in New York. But during that first year, I also got a call about Myanmar to look at the, it was the KFC Master Franchise License deal for the country, which I thought was a very good deal. And it's just the terms weren't right. They were very not American terms, very Asian terms and I couldn't fill it. But I knew a lot of people in the region, so they said, why don't you come and look at other deals? And so I did. And the thing is, the reason why I started from when I graduated is because during my time in Africa, I was there for five years, I would travel through into Asia to China and Taiwan to buy machinery and I would often stop in Singapore and I would meet a lot of people in Singapore over the years. And I realized in 2012 that a lot of the people I met in Singapore were not Singaporean, but they were Burmese working in Singapore because they couldn't work out of Burma. After meeting with them, looking at deals, one of the things that I got involved in early on as an undergraduate was supporting this orphanage in Myanmar. It was a friend in Singapore, you know, it was something she was very involved in. So she said, James, just send $10 a month, you could help these kids. I said, it's no problem. And then over the years I had paid enough money where I sent six of those kids to university and I wanted to know what happened to those kids. So during my first visit, I paid a visit to the orphanage and I realized none of the kids were there. I know two were trained as engineers, one went to school for medicine, but they weren't there. They all ended up going to Dubai because at the time in 2012, if you were university educated and you could speak good English, you were paid about $75 a month. That was the going salary. But in Dubai, the sweet floors at a shopping mall, you got paid about $600 a month. So that was a very good opportunity for them. So I understood the economics and why they left. But I also felt it was unfair. I looked at these kids and I realized, I'm coming from New York, never been to this country before, and I get to see the best deals that they had to offer. But these kids, they grow up, they work, they get educated in the country. They would never see these deals. And I thought there was something very wrong with that. And during my time growing up, I saw the Berlin Wall come down and I saw the opportunities in East Berlin when everyone left. I saw the opportunities in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union. And I thought Myanmar was very similar. There were opportunities to take there and they weren't being properly explored and there was a lot of crony capitalism. There still is. And I thought a lot of value was being left on the table by not investing in these people. So today, when people ask me what I do, I start off by telling them the truth, the very basic truth, which is I support this orphanage and the kids in it. And I think that is where, in my philosophy, that is where real investment comes from, investing in people and the things that they could produce. So we ended up forming a private equity fund in 2012. The first American private equity fund in Myanmar. Some of the first successes we had, we brought in STADA, which is a German pharmaceutical manufacturer, built the first pharmaceutical plant that wasn't owned by the government. We built a dairy factory to make baby formula for women who couldn't produce nutritious milk for their babies. And then over the last couple of years, I've seen the quality of the deals deteriorate. Not that you can't make money there, but as a country grows, it gets overheated and a lot of people start making the same thing. So there were a lot of five-star hotels being built. And I understand being the first, but being the seventh five-star hotel, I couldn't get into investing in something like that or being the eighth or the twelfth cafe in town serving Italian coffee. It just didn't make sense to me. So last year we formed an angel investment group. We thought we would invest in more high-potential founders in Myanmar and look at more deals that were more inclusive of the people there and deals that were more innovative. And we just couldn't find a lot of sophisticated partners to invest in because the issue is it's no problem giving seed money and it's no problem for them to build technology. But at some point they're going to have to raise a Series A or B in Singapore or Japan. That's where all the money is centered in the region. And we couldn't put our teams against Singaporean teams. We couldn't set them up to fail in that way because just they weren't good enough as founders in a global system. They just weren't up to par. Just to give you an idea, in 2013 there were zero Facebook years in Myanmar just because there was no internet access. Today there are over 50 million Facebook users in Myanmar and that is just in span of a couple of years. But that also means Myanmar passed over that whole part of the internet where everyone got an email address. So instead of email, people pay a shopkeeper who will sign up for a Gmail account because they don't know about Gmail who will open a Facebook account for them. And that's how it works in Myanmar. So we thought the way to really solve this is not to try to fit Myanmar into a traditional system or a traditional structure but really build organically from within the country. So right now we run a startup called Mythra and Dear Labs which uses predictive analytics to improve education to get someone where they could do serious damage like an ordinary person learning, coding, different programming languages usually takes anywhere from 18 to 24 months if you screen for just a couple of personal factors and then you teach them coding you get that down to three and a half months. So it accelerates the program and it seems very far fetched at first but you have to think about it this way. You have a child and let's say that child is 8 or 10 years old. You realize this person, this kid is talented at soccer more talented than anyone else in his class. So you say maybe I should hire a coach. The coach says this kid has a lot of talent. Maybe you should hire a professional coach because by the time this kid is 18 or 19 he has a chance to be in the World Cup if you do it right. But if you think about it nobody does that for talent, you know, across the board. So in America specifically we test a lot for math and quantitative skills and verbal reasoning but we leave something called spatial reasoning off the table and if you could imagine for a moment if I took a bottle of water, drank a bit out of it and then kept the bottle tilted and asked how much was left. There would be an immediate calculation of how much I drink and how much was left in the bottle and that kind of intelligence we ignore completely but we found through our research that those actually make the best software engineers and nobody's screening for that and always putting the programming courses in front of those people. Nobody's challenging them the way they need to be challenged. So for instance, again back with the athletic talent if you challenge that child in a way that they can adapt to it that they have the capacity to adapt it they can realize the potential of their talent and we leave a lot of that on the table across the board in education. I do a Myanmar, I invest in people and I try to make them better and I try to put money behind them. Do you ever encounter like why are we investing in Myanmar? Where the heck is Myanmar? Because most people I've done this academic study most of the VCs in the ASEAN region if you counted how many invested at least 30% of their portfolio in their own country you'd get maybe five. People don't want to invest in Myanmar, period. You need to find people who will meet certain barriers and you need to walk them through the barrier. So I'm going to speak to you very tactically right now. You need to find people of the investment people within the investment universe people who will commit to visiting Myanmar. That's first. No one will invest in Myanmar unless they first visit or at least will commit to visiting and that we've seen to be true. So they visit you do an investor tour and then they'll want to talk about terms and look at some investment projects that you have so you show them those and then everything from there is kind of easy. Now the thing is this is the way the investment space works you're welcome to disagree but this is my view from an outsider raising money inside the investment world and not I'm a neuroscientist I need to cast a very wide net because in a place like Myanmar only 5% of all height net worth investors or family offices would ever think about investing in Myanmar. They have to go first before institutions will invest in Myanmar so you need to capture that 5%. So family offices they have very specific conferences that they go to to talk about family office best practices and for height net worth investors today what I would do today if I was raising a fund again is Facebook darkpost making commercials on Facebook and targeting specific ultra height net worth individuals going to specific conferences so for instance the monaco yacht show you know a very specific type of person goes or now I do not recommend ever exhibiting there but you could Facebook darkpost that one particular area of monaco and send your message out there and it will cost you maybe 3 cents a view that's how cheap it will be so you could spend $500 and just carpet that entire event and it's a very cheap low cost high return way of marketing that thing so that's tactically but the other thing is building commitment to an idea and that starts like I said getting them to visit do you feel there's a growing interest from the local conglomerates families even government when you explain to them the cause and the potential impact that it can have on the national population? I think there is a positive shift I think while a lot of our investors are LPs are from I guess Europe, US etc we do actually have a large number of Indonesian families who invested into our fund they've run kind of large family businesses and we gradually see that that there are more kind of allocations towards philanthropic type purposes I think the challenge is that a lot of it still goes into traditional charity and I think there's this myth that Asians don't give in the same way I think they absolutely are giving but often it's still more traditional philanthropy this idea they've got one part of their portfolio which is really about maximizing financial return which is about maximizing impact and I think that is there but when you're trying to do both they're like how can that be so I think it's more about changing that again telling the story and showing them here are the specific types of companies which do this I think it becomes much more real when you're actually seeing these examples my experience has been very different I feel like there's a plundering up but it's there they want to do some version of rent seeking land grabbing where they want to get as many resources as they can for as cheap prices as they can where there's some kind of sophistication or knowledge arbitrage between the investor and the asset owner and then they want to sit on it and try to make as much money because they're a little bit sophisticated whether it be from technology or other so there are deals that happen in Myanmar where some investor will come in and say give me this plot of land I want to buy it for this price, a very cheap price and then the Myanmar government will say why do you want this piece of land it's just junk, it's a bunch of rocks you can't really do anything with it and then you realize they have geological expertise there's gold and that's why they're mining there now a lot of environmental destruction so there is that kind of arbitrage going on it's been my experience and I can only speak about my experience personally is that we haven't had any investor impact or not that wasn't first interested in investment returns and that's why that conversation about Myanmar which is the fastest growing economy in the region, that's how that conversation started I mean I agree to say that we were there and that this is going to be this huge shift in capital markets taking place I don't think that day is coming any time too soon but I think small steps and I think that's what keeps me optimistic