 I'd like to start out with one of my favorite quotes by Maxine Waters. She's a politician here in California. She says, none of us can do it all, but all of us can do something. And I would say all of us can do something extraordinary. Now, unfortunately, at the moment, collectively, we are falling short. The social impact ecosystem is falling short. And that's why we're asking whether or not the system is like a Frankenstein's monster. And why do I say that? It's because each one of us, whether we're an impact investor, whether we're an incubator, accelerator, an entrepreneur support organization, whatever it is that we're doing in this ecosystem, we all have these strategies that make absolute sense for us, right? We have our theory of change. It makes sense for us. We have our investment thesis. We have our sectors, our geographies. We have our instruments. And we've created this Frankenstein's monster of an ecosystem that is incredibly difficult to navigate for the very entrepreneurs that we are all trying to support. So, right. That's why we're here. That's why we're here. So how might we think about this? How might we go about this? Well, I think we have, I have five ideas that I'm going to put on the table right now. And then we're going to, the most of this session is going to be breaking up into smaller groups and hashing this out. So this is not a panel discussion. This is not a speech. This is about us trying to solve this problem or at least put some ideas together. Right, so the first thing is about the capital gap. This is one that we've been talking about for years. And when you dissect it and you think about it, it has a number of different dimensions. One is the stage gap, right? So many entrepreneurs that we work with at Miller Center who are between sort of $50,000 in revenue up to about $1 or $2 million in revenue are in that valley of death, right? They've kind of grown out of the incubators and accelerators and the challenge grants and the microcredit, whatever it is that they can get in their markets, but they're not yet attractive to the more mainstream impact investors. So there's a stage gap. The other issue is the instrument gap. A lot of what's out there, the Global Impact Investing Network talks about a trillion dollars of assets under management. Yet so many of the hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs that we work with really struggle to find even a drop of that. So what's the issue there? Oftentimes it's the wrong instruments. Maybe most of what's out there is a certain flavor of equity that may not really work for the entrepreneurs, for example. The third issue is about what we call kind of the language barrier. Even if everyone's speaking English or whatever other language that you may be speaking, there is this kind of language and way of communicating between entrepreneurs and investors or funders that often kind of misses the mark. And finally, oftentimes what we find is that the funders or the investors are all waiting for somebody else to go first. They're sort of all looking around at each other and figuring out who's going to go first. How might we think about solving this? Well, one thing could be to have a lot more transparency on the part of the funders, like who's doing what, for whom, and why, to reduce the search costs and reduce these transactions costs that the entrepreneurs go through, like wasting time, frankly, in a lot of cases, tracing after money that's never going to materialize. That's kind of one suggestion or idea. Now, the problem of the funding gap is even more acute for those that are typically left behind in the ecosystem, and I'm talking about women, women founders and local leaders. There's a reason why the ones who are able to navigate this Frankenstein's Monservant ecosystem all tend to be the usual suspects and the people who already have networks, they've already gone to the right universities, they're already connected. So how do we dig deeper? How do we get to those entrepreneurs that are constantly left behind? We all know about women, even here in the US, women founders attract less than 2% of VC funding, even here in the US, and this is a problem across the world. I'm really happy to say that the 90 entrepreneurs that Miller Center interacted with last year, 62% self-identify as women led. So, yeah, that's something we're trying to do. We're trying to work on that and many others in this room are as well. Okay, so the next issue I want to address has to do with patience. As you all know, many of the entrepreneurs that we work with and that are in this room are not necessarily operating on this exponential J-curve growth path, right? Many of you and many of the entrepreneurs here at SoCAP are profitable, can be profitable, can grow, can scale, but it's just gonna be at a different pace than where most of the money is looking right now. So the idea to be patient, to understand this growth path, and to meet the entrepreneurs where they are with the right types of instruments and time frames that are there. I think a third strategy to create a more entrepreneur-centric ecosystem has to do with bringing in the corporate players a little bit more closely. So increasingly what we're hearing from many, many large corporate players out there is that for various reasons, whether they're CSR priorities, their DEI agenda, the ESG, all the alphabet soup of letters, is that they want to engage with social entrepreneurs in many ways, but increasingly in their procurement. So it's actual social procurement, sometimes it's called a responsible procurement. And this is a big scaling opportunity and a way to really support entrepreneurs to grow. And then finally, I think this idea that we need to tailor and think about the needs of the entrepreneur in a way where we are accompanying them. We talk a lot at Miller Center, we talk a lot about accompaniment. And what that means is creating an ecosystem that delivers a seamless continuum of support and access to the right flavor of capital that corresponds to the needs of the entrepreneurs themselves. And the only way to do that is through partnership. No one organization can do that. And so the beauty of SoCAP, the beauty of the people in this room is that we collectively do have that opportunity to partner with each other and work together in ways that are often not that easy, honestly speaking, are not that natural for us. But what could we create, what could it look like if we were all working together and creating those pathways for the entrepreneurs instead of thinking about the next thing I'm gonna deliver into the market? That's kind of the gauntlet. And I'd like to, and my few remarks here with another quote from another hero of mine, Nelson Mandela, and to paraphrase it, that we, it is in our hands. You know, if not the people who are in this room can make a difference, it is, you know, who? Who's gonna fix this ecosystem that needs fixing? So it is in our hands and we are much better together than separately. Right, so how are we gonna tackle this issue? First of all, I want to introduce you to our facilitators. So this is gonna be the end of the, you know, me standing on the stage and talking to you. Now it's gonna be you all talking to each other. So when I just introduce them, if you can just kind of stand up and show where you are. So Daniela, Daniela is over here. She's gonna be leading a conversation over there. Amy is right over here from Spring Impact. Dan Waldron is back there, Dan. Darius, Teeter, yep, right here from Sanford. Zubaira, Zubaira bide right here up front. Senali over here, okay. Manu, Manuel, just here in the middle. And Paul is here. Okay, so here's the idea. Get close to one of those people. It's gonna take maybe a little bit of re-engineering of where you are, spatially. And we're gonna take some time for three questions in the breakout sessions. The first one is, look, we all know of examples of great partnerships or great approaches to help to working together to get out of our silos and to make it easier for the entrepreneurs. So it's not like it never happens. It just doesn't happen systematically, right? So come up with a couple of ideas and talk a little bit about what you've seen in the market that is working because that's always fun to do, that's always nice. But then dig a little deeper. How much more do we need to do? What else might we do to work together, to create that seamless continuum of support for entrepreneurs? And then finally, what am I gonna do? Each of us to reflect a little bit. What can I do differently in whatever power that I have to try to move towards this entrepreneur-centric ecosystem? So, clear? As I used to say, is it crystal or mud? All right, yeah. Yes, 15 minutes per question. So, and there will be a cowbell. Thank you, Jan. That's the noise that will happen when it's time to kind of move on to the next question. All right, everybody. Just have a few more minutes. We wanna kind of wrap this up and kind of cull some of our most interesting insights. Ooh, look at the table. All right. So, how was that? How was that conversation? Any? Interesting. How many people in here are entrepreneurs themselves? Yeah, how many people here are investors or funders? And then how many people here are like, let's say enterprise service organizations of some kind or another? Right. Yeah, so I think what's really cool about this conversation is oftentimes, because so many conferences are basically paid-to-play, so the people who have the voice, the people who have the mic are the people who paid for the session usually. And oftentimes entrepreneurs are either kind of like selling their stuff or they're pitching, right? And that's how you hear the, that's where the voice stays, the entrepreneur. Now, what we tried to create here is that we create a different kind of voice for you all, the entrepreneurs, to be able to say, hey, instead of all of us who are funders and ESOs and whatever, patting ourselves on the back and talking about how awesome we are to have an opportunity for you all to say, actually, yeah, could be better. So I hope that some of that conversation was happening and that's definitely was our intention. I also wanted to just draw your attention to this idea that we've kind of come up with about hashtag so centric, which is short for social enterprise centric, so we're trying to make it a thing. So if you have any social media, you wanna like hashtag so centric, or if you wanna take a picture with the monster with one of these little signs that's here and it's also in our booth next door here. So what I'm gonna ask people to do, you don't need to necessarily bring your flip charts, I see you're doing that, but that's cool, but I think that'll maybe take too long if you do that. So here's what we're suggesting is that if all of the facilitators could come up here with me, and the idea is that you would just kind of summarize two or three interesting points and what we're gonna do actually is we're gonna write this up. So we're gonna take all, this is why we ask them to actually write lots of notes so that we're gonna take this and if you want to get a summary of, if you wanna get the document and the summary of the takeaways from this session, then all you have to do is take a picture of this QR code and give us your information and we will send it to you when we write it all up because we actually believe in having real follow through on these kinds of sessions and continuing the conversation with us and with each other. Okay, this is a big gnarly problem that we're looking at. So I think once you come on up with me here, yeah, just I'll come up. And can we just say thank you so much for all of our facilitators? Yeah. Okay, so I just gonna ask you, I think we have a second mic that we were gonna have for them. Oh, you got them, second and third and fourth. All right, so what I'd like you to do is just maybe go down the line and you know, oh gosh, there's so many of us who are like, you can come in a little bit more here and just kind of give a couple, like two or three top line insights that are actions that you felt were particularly interesting to share with the group. Yeah, I think we talked about, obviously entrepreneurs have a diverse set of needs and a lot of people are providing a lot of different services. I think the things that stand out to me were really, it's not about just sort of making random connections or saying, look up this organization. It's who are the other organizations you wanna have long-term partnerships with that you can make very warm introductions and actually hand over and really help your entrepreneurs connect with them as opposed to throwing a list of names or having them sort of cold pitch on a stage to them. And the other piece that really resonated, I think that the group was the idea of creating both a database of the resources and then a hospitalist, an actual person who can sit with an entrepreneur and kind of be their case manager and help walk them through resources and make the connections that are appropriate to their business. Yeah, so like kind of triage sort of, yeah, function, right on. So our team, a little team in front here, we spoke about how do we actually create, how do we look at the silos that are internal to us and external to us and how do we manage them intentionally? And there was a little bit of a conversation around, well, we need more doctors, like general physicians for entrepreneurs who can actually refer them to the right place at the right time. And given there is a lot of them, is there a way to use technology to match the right entrepreneur with the right mentor? And there was another aspect that we discussed which was how do you convert rejections to referrals, right, like every time we send a rejection email, can you actually refer them to somebody in the system? And that's practically impossible to do given the thousands of applications we get, but can we use technology to do that? And also how do you bring intentionality about your succession planning and ensure that these entrepreneurs are feeling healthy and their well-being is taken care of as well? I think that's kind of the summary of our little group here. Yeah, so I think the two examples I've heard is talking about the cohesion between the different actors. And I think we talked on something similar. First of all, the entrepreneurs, they surprised me, really value these support groups between entrepreneurs and how then that is actually sort of a trampoline to start getting into other opportunities and a good link. We did have an interesting debate between the ecosystem builders going deep with a small number of entrepreneurs versus like trying to do little with a lot of them. I know your KPIs are affected by that but maybe that could be something. And I think that the sort of cohesion and the partnerships we were reflecting on the fact if there's a way to get sort of each accelerator or group in a different stage and avoid entrepreneurs going into five or six of the same stage. And I was one of the ones that did a lot of the same stage ones when I was starting. And I think you do get diminishing marginal returns. So how do we ensure like all these ecosystem which is doing amazing stuff can be sort of at a stage level. And I think the final idea which is interesting is how can also investors sort of be more connected to those stages. And one of the ideas is what would investors need to be able to blindly thrust Miller Center's sort of due diligence and just invest once someone has finished that program. So that could create some cohesion. That's really interesting. There's a recent study that's just come out that was funded by Argidius and I think the name of the company is called Snow Melt and they just did this study about how funders, how donors should fund accelerators, ESOs. And basically they have come up with a similar issue because if the people who are funding us are insisting on like big numbers then like you're by definition you're gonna go very shallow with many and may not make that much of a difference for each one. So I think it also, the ecosystem includes people who might fund the enterprise support organizations as well as the entrepreneurs directly, right? So kind of interesting point there. So we had a lot of really good, exciting ideas in our group and I'll share one that I thought was particularly fun and refreshing. Which is the idea of what could it look like to create almost the common app which is in the US every high school student who's applying to colleges has to answer tons of questions much like entrepreneurs do when applying to accelerators and so our group talked about how can we move towards shared data standards, shared language, shared questions so that entrepreneurs aren't having to contort the same information into a million different manifestations for their various opportunities. And then thanks to my group's wisdom learned that Zebra's already working on something sort of like that, so small pitch to Zebra's Unite who sound like they're working on some shared data standards and beginning the conversation around that. We had a pretty interesting conversation and a couple of high level takeaways from that. One was we talked a lot about basically stepping back and saying yeah, we want to collaborate, we want to do more but the first thing we need to do is build relationships and deepen relationships and get comfortable with each other, build social capital. So we don't want to kind of brush forward, it will have more productive discussions and we'll be more productive in doing all the things that I think everyone's been outlining. If we're maybe a little less territorial and I think that was the second point that came up was embracing some of that conflict, allowing it to be part of the creative process, becoming less kind of feeling resource constrained but I think a lot of that flowed from the idea that we need to make sure we're taking the time to build relationships, doing things like SoCAP and meeting people face to face and having a beer and all that kind of stuff, right? And building those deeper relationships enables a lot of the things that we need to do. Nice, I like that. So I want to build on the Common App, I love that idea. In our group we talked about, we had a lot of entrepreneurs on our group and they talked about how every investor has a different way of measuring impact and so the entrepreneur is just running around trying to satisfy competing standards and that's what the Global Impact Investing Network and IRIS were supposed to address but getting more funders, whether they're institutional or whether they're grant funders, foundations or venture funding to buy into that same, and that's what organizations like, we're kind of missing the lobbying group for the social enterprise industry. Every other industry has a lobbying group. Who's lobbying around the legal and regulatory framework and the definition for what even is a social enterprise and each country has a different tax treatment and a different set of rules around who is in and who is out, but who actually lobbies on their behalf and so we had kind of an interesting conversation, should that be university, should it be, does Sankalp itself, could it imagine itself having political power, sorry, Socap, Sankalp also, what would it take to have political power in those spaces, thanks. So our group, I think we started with have an open door and don't have a strategy as your strategy, so I thought that was a really interesting like radically different perspective and we heard from a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of it centered around connection, being generous with our connections even if it doesn't serve us as individuals or even if it doesn't serve our organizational KPIs when it serves the sector and also being vulnerable both as entrepreneurs, there was a lot of, there were a few points around how sometimes it's just being listened to, being heard, understanding that you're not alone and it was pointed out that that's not just for entrepreneurs, it's also for people who are in ESOs. So, and then there was some conversations around listening in the form of collecting data and making that data more openly available in terms of connections or research and best practices for each of us. So I will not repeat what everybody have already said but I guess our insights has been interesting around please let's not waste our time. How important are these convenings? So we can really share our lessons learned, the good things that are happening, the other bad things that are happening, how we can be vulnerable and transparent. I think we still need to ask and listen more how we can learn from failure, like entrepreneurs that have already failed, they have so much knowledge and they can be part of the whole ecosystem that has been really important to just figure it out how we can just let them go back and keep doing new things. Forget mentors, got a sponsor. So sponsorship is a good thing that we should be talking more and deeper and unstructured connection equal to fiesta. We need more that.