 So, I'm very excited. I have the wonderful opportunity to be here with this tree, and four wonderful panelists. I have with me Gene Case, Xavier Helgasson, Morgan Simon, and Darren Dodson. I'm going to let each of them briefly introduce themselves. I wanted you all to know that what we're going to be spending the next hour doing is we're going to be basically starting to build a map. A map of where we think the where we're going and impact investing in order to reach that mountaintop, and I'll explain a little more about that in a minute, but first I wanted to let my fellow colleagues here on my panel introduce themselves to you themselves. By the way, don't be alarmed by the tent flapping. It's all fine. Just think of it as part of the sailing experience that's going on out on the bay. We're kind of sailing along in here. So, Gene, by way of introduction. Sure. Hello everyone. I'm Gene Case. I'm CEO of the Case Foundation, but here at Socap I'm also wearing my hat as a private investor. We invest in people and ideas that can change the world, and we've watched with interest the growth of Socap, the impact investor community, and I'm delighted to be here as part of my first Socap. Thank you so much. Xavier. Hey, I'm Xavier Huggison. I'm chairman and co-founder of Better World Books, and I'm also co-founder and CEO of Offgrid Electric. So, I started Offgrid about two years ago with a vision to light Africa in a decade. So, we're two years into that. We're making some progress, and I'm also a bit of a hopeless optimist, as I told Penelope for better or for worse. Thank you, Xavier. Morgan. Morgan Simon. Thanks, Penelope. I am an impact investor working to bridge the worlds of impact and social justice through a couple projects. One is a transformfinance.org that we launched here at Socap, along with high investments, a single family office, 100 percent focused on mission and community engagement, and the working world of fund for stakeholder-owned businesses. And Darren. And I'm Darren Datsun. From Washington, D.C., I am a consultant of the Board of Trustees at the Calvert Funds, where I advise and run investments into private equity funds in the impact investing space, as well as direct investments into the impact investing space. I'm also a board member at Ben & Jerry's. Thank you very much. So, we're here to try to help launch Socap by talking about where impact investing is going over the long term. But really, what I think we're here to do is, first of all, think about the mountaintop that we're all trying to get to. And as far as I'm concerned and we're concerned, really that mountaintop is what we're calling the good economy. And that means that we have a resilient planet and we have a sustainable and equitable future, both socially and economically, for all of us. Now, that is a mountaintop goal. It's a long ways off. And what we're really here to do today on this panel is help all of us get oriented towards what's going to be happening the next several days for each of you and all of us at Socap by thinking about what some of the pieces of the map look like that are already being created. By no means are we at that mountaintop goal, but we can start to create a map today that shows us where we might be going. To help us do that, we actually have a graphic artist over here. Say hello. And man is going to be helping us. And during our conversation, there'll be moments in time when we'll actually be able to use the screens to sort of see how our map is forming, if this works and if we have any luck. And I know we won't be worrying about your skills. It's more about whether or not we can make sure that real time we see what we're trying to draw. So thank you very much for being with us. So I'm going to start by asking each of my colleagues here a very simple couple of questions. And they've all told me that they like energetic conversations. They are prepared for a little bit of the unexpected for me. But mostly what I'm going to be trying to do again is orient us towards what's been going on and what's going on for them now as part of again building this map. So Jean, starting with you, 10 years ago today, what were you working on? So 10 years ago today is informed by 15 years ago today. 15 years ago I left the private sector where I had been engaged in the technology sector and had helped build a great company, AOL, which was a mission-based company. Its mission really was to democratize ideas, information, access to knowledge and communication as well. And that was a great success. And I retired from that work before the merger with Time Warner and we started our family foundation, the Case Foundation, where I've been CEO. 10 years ago was really an interesting pivotal moment because it was our five-year anniversary. And it was really at that point where I look back and I think, oh, I just got my sea legs then. I spent about five years trying to figure things out, experimenting. And probably one of the most important things we figured out is that we were happiest and most effective when we lived in a blended world. And by blended, you know, we started the foundation believing it was going to be about writing grants. But quickly we realized that our own experience and passion for startups and for entrepreneurs and new ideas and people that can change the world was really going to drive and animate what we did. So 10 years ago I think the realization was this isn't going to be a four-grants play. We'll continue to do meaningful things on the Case Foundation front and we have, through our grant work and through our pro bono efforts. But what really grew and expanded and became an exciting opportunity for us then and remains so today is aligning that with private investment and new companies that have impact and in working with entrepreneurs to try to help their ideas, their passions, their optimism come to play to change the world. Great, so that's 10 years ago. Stay on the 10 years ago. Darren Dodson, 10 years ago, what were you working on? 10 years ago I was just starting business school around the time that Hurricane Katrina was hitting New Orleans and rallying together a bunch of students to go down to New Orleans. First to gut a house and realizing that we were pretty bad at gutting houses. We engaged a lot of alums and funding which became a five-year involvement in New Orleans, moving to New Orleans and then working with the entrepreneurial community with business schools from around the world about a thousand business school students and a small local nonprofit called Idea Village. And that was part of an idea and strategy to change the way that business is done by respecting the involvement at a community level for leaders that will eventually become CEOs of companies in different areas of the world. So interesting already. Here are two people talking about what they were doing 10 years ago and it's hard for them to describe it without already describing that things are shifting for them. You know you're both working and thinking and shifting as these as these works are going forward. Xavier, 10 years ago today, were you sitting in a tent like this? I was almost certainly driving a truck nearly as big as this. One of the things about starting a book business where you collect these books and sell them on the internet is you actually have to go get those books until you can afford to pay someone else to do that for you. So I was driving around the Midwest going to bookstores and campuses and loading up books and driving back. Yeah it was very early on in the business. We had just the summer before run our first book drive and realized holy cow there's actually something here and had set about trying to organically expand that. And so we had really actually just hit the first point where we really would have needed impact investment in a dramatic way because the whole business model was to run book drives at the end of the year, sit on the books for the summer and then sell them in the fall. And so of course there's a huge cash flow gap there that we were literally down to our last penny almost every summer for the first probably five years of the business and calling up anybody we knew to use their credit card or to invest in us in some other way. And actually so much of the work when I think about the gap from ten years ago till now was what AOL and everyone else has done in democratizing the internet and information ten years ago I wouldn't have known where to look for an investor that actually could have placed a bet on what we were doing and seen the benefit for that. And now I feel like people are so lucky and I've been so lucky my new startup to have a much broader vision of what's actually going on in the world and it's events like SoC. I'm going to definitely ask you what you're doing today but that's a fantastic illusion to sort of where we're going because so many of us that were here doing whatever work it was ten years ago as you just said we wouldn't have actually known where to look for so many things that today we at least know where to look and we even have models for how to execute. Morgan, ten years ago today what were you doing? Ten years ago. What were you working on? One of the things I'm proud to say is I was collecting books for executive. We didn't know anything about it. Very well I might say. So I have the privilege at the ripe old age of 30 of being able to say I've done impact investment for over a decade because back when I was 19 at Swarthmore College we were filing shareholder resolutions and we had just filed in September a resolution with Lockheed Martin to add sexual orientation to their non-discrimination clause and amazingly enough we won. So that was right when the Wall Street Journal article came out announcing that change and it was the first time that a student group since the apartheid era had actually filed a shareholder resolution on an issue and students started coming out of the woodworks across the country saying this is amazing how do we do this in our campuses and we launched the responsible endowments coalition which is now 100 campuses looking at the 400 billion that's invested through colleges and universities. So foundations are about 700 billion endowments in universities and 400 billion is another massive market that have been really largely ignored after the apartheid era. What's also interesting back then it was SRI and I wonder how many people even know what a shareholder resolution is. This was sort of the old school of impact investment and it's exciting to see what it's become. Yeah. So Xavier today what are you working on? Today I'm I mean in a sense I'm trying to make a vehicle for some of this impact capital to flow into that serves a beneficial purpose you know. Better World Books was very much one of those lucky accidents of entrepreneurship where I had some extra books of my own and my friend did and we sold them online and we grew from that knowledge into kind of building a business in the image we wanted which was something that would do good and would also be profitable. So my new venture is a really different take on the model of how do you get solar adopted at scale in the developing world. You know there's there's more people without electricity today than when Edison first turned on the light bulb which is pretty amazing and actually more people burning oil for light which was the incumbent technology 150 years ago. It's incredible to know that 1.5 billion people still burn oil for light. So we use a prepaid model we use software we use mobile technology we use all these new things to just take on this basic thing of oil for life and our goal is to basically create a vehicle where billions of dollars of investment can flow into countries like Tanzania other African countries and get paid a market return for lighting poor people's homes. So here you are you're a serial entrepreneur 10 years ago you were actually physically driving those trucks to pick up the books. Today you're launching your new startup you're using all sorts of technologies obviously. Can you describe in a sentence what the big shift was for for example informing this new venture. What's happened in other words over the last 10 years that's told you this is what you need to do now. That's that's a great question. You know I think when one shift was is a technical shift. So the same disruptive power that I think you know I recognized and Jean recognized a lot of people didn't the Internet. You can now see distributed energy and we're still in the very early days of that. And so I like being in that where it's messy. It's called they call it the age of ferment. You know there used to be 300 car companies and everybody had their own little way to do it. Yeah. And so I also think I can't you know a lot of entrepreneurs graduate in a sense to being investors or advisors or something else. And so I know I don't have too many more of these in me. So I've got to kind of do one big one. Yeah. Commit to it for a decade. And I couldn't think of a better triple bottom line potential market than than this one because it can be self commercially. And we of course we need you serial entrepreneurs. So we may not let you graduate. We need back rubs. Today. What are you working on. Well I mentioned that the Case Foundation turned 15 this year. And as part of that effort we took time to stop and reflect and look around and look back both at our work and the work of our partners. And we're eternal optimists just like Xavier. But I must tell you it wasn't necessarily always a good picture for an optimist. A lot of the social issues that we've been investing in for 15 years. And in many cases our pure organizations for over 100 years things weren't necessarily better. It became clear that in many ways in many sectors and many issues and causes the old way wasn't working that we needed something new. And we really started looking at their work talking to them looking at our own areas of effectiveness and realized it's time for a new paradigm a new model. And we began an initiative known as be fearless together with many fearless partners. And it really tried to articulate or put principles around the way of working that leads to transformative change. And we hired a firm and they basically went to school on the effective movements on where social change had taken place and there was impact. And what did that look like. And it included a couple of principles and I'll just run through them very quickly. Starts with the big idea. I think you just heard him say he doesn't have some small old company in Tanzania. He's lighting up Africa in the next 10 years. That's a big idea. And when someone starts with a big idea they usually achieve more. It involves taking risks experimenting early and often and trying new things too often in the philanthropy and investor space people get really comfortable with what they know and they're unwilling to branch out into something new. The third principle principle is probably the most important and that is except that failure might be an option. And if you fail fail fast and fail forward and make sure that those around you learn from your failures you're talking about it you're transparent and particularly in the philanthropic and public sector this is much much needed. You don't see innovation without risk taking and wherever there's risk taking there's a risk of failure and not to hang your head. The serial entrepreneurs we know who built great companies have stories littered along the highway of failures that happened that then enabled them to break out. And it involves collaboration what we call reach beyond your bubble and letting urgency conquer fear. So was that work actually that really helped us commit to getting deeply engaged in impact investing and going to school and it turns out we've been intentional investors around impact for well over a decade but we didn't know this impact investing sector existed and I said how could we be so engaged and so passionate and we didn't know it existed. So we spent the last year very excited by Sonal Shah who was director of social innovation at the White House and Sean Green who was innovation head at the SBA has joined the foundation and worked together with many of you in this room were the pioneers and took things forward before we arrived to learn and to figure out what might a really big idea around impact investing look like. So to me this is just fascinating and it's so much about what we need to sort of hold ourselves accountable for and to at SoCAP both those of us convening SoCAP with those of us participating which is you listen to what's happening today versus what's happening was happening 10 years ago from the first two of our panelists and you hear this amazing exposition of both how technology and information and knowledge is being shared much more rapidly in our space how people are really now able to learn from one another we have multiple successful models but you but listening to Eugene I realized that we're also still needing to educate one another about what models there are I mean here we are very sophisticated foundation very sophisticated people and still looking for you know the ways to share that knowledge and also be educated so I really appreciated your comments Darren today what are you working on today I'm working on trying to change the world in three different ways one is one is through infrastructure so through the hub network is a chair chair the board for up DC in terms of build so with the administration coming in and creating this huge movement of change how do we sustain that change and create a home for change so that we don't lose momentum so that that was one of the and we don't lose a young generation that's been engaged and it's cited so that's part of it also out of the experience of New Orleans one of the things that was significantly lacking after we put over a hundred thousand hours of time of 33,000 different professionals and business school students and into entrepreneurs and got them ready for the capital markets the we call it the donor so the capital go from the east coast to the west coast and not stop in the middle so we needed people that had a different investment thesis to go to smaller markets that could have incredible entrepreneurs and to take more risk and to learn about these markets I had the opportunity to join the Calvert funds and the special equities team to focus on New Orleans where we have two investments but also other broken underserved markets throughout the world and then the final piece is really a structural piece through looking at sort of like what do you rob the bank why do you ride the banks where that's where the money is looking at corporations as the where all the money exists and thinking about theories of change and also exit strategies within the impact investing space that lead to values intact exits which is why Ben and Jerry's has been such a wonderful learning experience and being part of that team so one of the great things that you're experiencing today at least I think it's fantastic because again it's part of getting to the mountaintop is here you have a young man who's sitting on the board of Ben and Jerry's and to me that that wouldn't have happened it I don't think it would have happened certainly not 20 years ago and I'm not sure about 10 years ago but you know it's really exciting to see that that is something that is a commitment that you've made through your work with Calvert special equities but it's it's aligning with the work that you're doing to really sort of think about these transformative structures and the hub is an example of a transformative place so place-based technologies educating one another about models not losing track of the fact that there's still a lot of need to pass information rapidly among us those are some of the themes that I'm hearing emerging Morgan what are you working on today so many folks here knew me as the CEO of tonic for the last three years and still serving on the board and this is a community of global impact investors and in my tenure there had the opportunity to review about 500 deals led 30 investments was very engaged on the early stage side and that gave me a lot of opportunity to think about the word impact which is really not value neutral or well-defined as we know the Merriam Webster definition is to make contact or impinge upon especially forcefully right whether that's positive or negative in perfect human beings over time so as I started to really deepen my thinking there and conversations like so cap on this of seeing it really being built up by investors and entrepreneurs speaking about our impact on poor people out there somewhere and they're not in the room right so I started to really become engaged in questions of how do I take leadership from the communities that I'm serving and how do I create pathways for other investors that are interested in sort of leveraging this philosophy so we came up with a couple principles around that the idea of incorporating communities and design governance and ownership of enterprise making sure we add more value than we extract as investors and that we're balancing risk and return to investors, entrepreneurs and communities so I'd say that all my work now is really aligned around those principles through three different projects so one is transform finance dot org a nonprofit we just launched to help engage investors on social justice work and for community leaders to be able to access the resources in this room so I'm a founding chair and there's a team Andrea or many in a Maca Agbo who are doing great work there and then I'm also working on the investor side with pie investments as I mentioned so 100% mission aligned portfolio that really wanted to put those three principles into action and think how we could really do our work differently to be accountable in the investments we make and then finally the working world is a fund for work around enterprises in Argentina and Nicaragua in the US and supporting their investment practices. Brendan Martin the founder is amazing he may be here I know he's speaking Wednesday at 5.30 on the cooperative panel so if you want to learn more about that work I'd recommend checking them out and I won't take the time here but they were really the organization that piloted the model of non-extractive finance of how do we make sure that we're really adding more than we take out from poor communities. So I guess it's been my privilege to be able to engage these principles through the investment work that I do and I see my work is really just trying to ask the right questions of how do we engage communities more deeply in this work and then have the privilege of being in communities like SOCAP to try to engage in that Okay so as moderator I'm sort of blown away here I'm trying to think about distilling this amazing amount of work the body of work that's going on today versus 10 years ago and one of the reactions I'm having is that each of you has sort of exponentially increased sort of the body of your work from what you described 10 years ago from driving a truck to you know harnessing these technologies for this scalable solution etc etc among the four of you. I'm going to take a quick pause and see if we can show what the map is showing you so that we can see it up on the big screen. I don't know if that's possible perhaps not the mountaintop. Okay so we do have things going on on our map. I just wanted to see how the journey was going. We'll take a look at it again later the actually no I won't tell you that story I'll keep going the there's an interesting question that I think I'm going to try to ask you and you've got to help me ask it properly okay because it's a difficult complicated question we were talking about a little bit backstage it's the question about time frames and it's the question about you know the need to be incredibly impatient as an entrepreneur but also the need to make sure that you're aligning with capital that's patient for what you need to do. It's about vision versus reality you mentioned it a little bit Jean when you were talking about what happened after five years at the case foundation and it's so important to our work that we start to figure out how to educate one another not only in the context of models that work but models with timeframes that work not only models with timeframes that work but models with timeframes that are described correctly so that you understand the difference between what we mean by the entrepreneur's time frame the investors time frame and we know where this is going so I'm going to ask each of you to try to highlight where a part of your own working world your work today where you see timeframes as critically important to you right now and then tell me why okay and I'm going to have to ask each of us to try to be succinct but that's the question I want to challenge you with so when whoever thinks they can take that one on feel free to give me a nod and I'll let you go first Morgan and bear with me if any of you if I sort of have to go tell me more or cut it off so I think I think of it as two ways is sort of a serial entrepreneur so the first organization the responsible endowments coalition it's its 10 year anniversary next year no one from the original board of staff is involved and that to me is kind of the greatest victory that we built a movement so big that it didn't rely on anyone person and I could definitely see tonic moving down that path as well as a community of investors so I think sometimes this sort of entrepreneurial attitude of I am so at the center of this thing I can't imagine never stepping away that we need to have leader full organizations we're not so focused on the sole entrepreneur so that these things have bigger lives than us as individuals so I'm proud to be on my third organization in 10 years and knowing that the others seem to be on a good trajectory my other thought on timeline and I think this is where is I get older I get a lot more patient and there's sort of the tradition of the youthful inpatient activists I'm really actually thrilled for our movement that what back in the day in the 70s was considered this absolutely radical practice of screening your investments SRI is considered very boring right now right by the folks in this room and in the same way when I've heard some sort of the thinking around well we're finally getting enterprises off the ground at all and finally convincing people that you can do impact investment now you want to insert this whole angle around incorporating communities and design and ownership and can we just get one thing off the ground before we try to push it further and my hope is that you know this is this is our decade right if it's going to be a trillion dollars moving into the sector over the next 10 years that's five times official development aid that completely shifts the way that most of the world experiences development so this is our opportunity to define that well to make sure it grows in a way that we feel really good about and I would love for the things that we're saying today to look really boring in 30 years so that's that's my goal. Okay so let me see if I can paraphrase to make sure I got all that I got the first one was about being a founder who's willing to think immediately about succession it's about having the institution the organization the enterprise be more important than the person and all of us being attentive to that as part of all the models we're creating for a good economy for a social capital future that's robust and resilient and the second point that you made was really about your impatience in a way it was about the fact that you see opportunity in the in the trillions of dollars that are going to come our way in this next decade and what you were saying this is the decade so you're seeing you're seeing a 10 year horizon to get some big excuse me shit done is that that's funny because I see that as patient maybe relatively I guess I feel more I'm much more interested in how do we make sure we're doing the right thing so that when we expand it to that trillion dollars rather than racing to hit that goal and then look back and say did we really have the impact we could have achieved okay so since that was a great conversation as well about patience versus impatience and I heard Xavier and Jean talking a little bit about this in the in the green room in terms of investing and having a long term but also allowing that impatience factor Xavier I'm gonna let you go next if you're ready there's so many time frames but I'm gonna give me a couple well no there's so many awesome things to talk about there and actually I won't go into it now because on Friday we're talking with good capital and some of the other portfolio companies about how that actually worked and what I'll say I mean I was trying to think what is not obvious to people who aren't entrepreneurs or at least haven't you know this is probably my fifth startup even though you know they've gone to different scales and so doing this enough times I realize you should actually be very patient for profits and a very patient for profits in the startup whether it's a commercial one or an impact one sometimes even patient for growth or customer acquisition or or beneficiary growth whatever that is but you should not be impatient for proof the your entrepreneurs should continually be proving to you that what they're doing makes a difference that people care and that it can be replicated and scaled in an economic model that works and the more I think the more people look at that rather than you know some impact investors I mean are gutsy risk-taking early-stage you know investors others are more like low-return long-term bankers and those are two very very different profiles and when you when you speak to one when I speak to the banker I realize I'm not always speaking exactly the same language well and and beautifully said and sometimes I think our investors and as someone who's been an investor among other things myself I think sometimes we're still trying to sort that out you know we're trying out models still and I'm going to ask Darren a question about this in a minute so so you know the entrepreneur education of the investor in the context of proof is a wonderful paradigm actually to think about so you mentioned in the in the green room something about the same subject but sort of thinking about it from your perspective and that same idea about the impatience for proof but patience in terms of investing but will you tell us how you think about time frames sure well I think it I think when we look at big opportunities and particularly when you're trying to move a class so let's talk about impact investing more broadly not one company not one startup not one issue if we're trying to grow the impact investing tent we really need to urgently march toward a tipping point and we're I think a ways from it I think that there's a lot of pillars and things that are going to be needed we have a beautiful core right now and I think that core is represented at this conference and you know usually when you're talking about these things you say we need a bigger tent but we literally need a bigger tent for future conferences but I do think it's very very early days and in the be fearless principles that I talked about before I mentioned the last one is let urgency conquer fear and I think investors need to see the urgent needs and the urgent opportunities to bring them into the game and I think we need to broaden the number of players that are here with us from a specific startup and specific venture standpoint what I was saying to Penelope is it's really unusual in our experience with startups and companies we've invested in that they look anything like what they did at the beginning if you take a three or five year look at them usually they go through a cycle or two and they pivot to figure out this proof that Xavier was talking about so I think we need urgency in terms of getting us out of our comfort zone as investors and jumping in and trying some new models and backing some companies that are trying to change the world I think we need patience as investors as we watch them pivot and find the proof model and in impact investing more broadly I think we need to recognize that it's a very very early days and there's a lot we need to build to seriously grow the tent thank you Darren in terms of time frames what comes to mind you've listened to the other three tell me what comes to mind for you Jeff Allener was one of our earlier investments seven generations is about the way that I think about it yeah it's a in terms of the infrastructure necessary to support how many people in the room are under the age of 20 there we go can we have some hands so that worries me right because they'll be here when we're gone right and they aren't here now and there to me that's part of how we look at our education system in terms of educating about the values of the world that we'd like to be intact when we're all gone something incredibly important that folks like Nifty and other other folks are working on but again with hub like the strategy of having infrastructure throughout the world that could support these ideas to grow that's connected in a way where people can share information and best practices and failures is something that's really excited but I think that's you know I think that's a hundred years of hard hard work of sharing across generations scars and learnings of of building great companies and who you know Ben and Jerry's took 35 this is our 35th anniversary of being a company that's in business one of the most profitable ice cream businesses that is all about social impact and then and then all about sharing this philosophy with other portfolio companies within Unilever so how do we and then Calvert going from one to 15 billion where it is right now around 12 or 13 didn't happen overnight either with the great vision of our founder Wayne Silby it's a path and all the answers aren't clear it takes a lot of people across generations to achieve well and one of the things that you're really drawing out for me anyway is that and actually you and Gene each alluded to it is there's a pioneering aspect to impact investing that makes some of us believe that this has been going on a long time and therefore you know it's relatively evolved and each of you in your own way was saying no, no, no we still haven't even reached the tipping point you're alluding to it very directly and Darren is talking about it very much in the context of if there's nobody in this room who's under 20 then you know that's a time and timing and timeframe issue in and of itself we haven't yet created the opportunity nor have we created the structure that's truly intergenerational you and I have talked about this a lot and truly multi-generational we in theory care a lot about it but so far you know we're not able to really embrace that in a way that a lot of our enterprises do actually through their products and services better than we do trying to embody the work yeah and I would use two examples to drive that home that really sort of it was a aha moment for me as we were thinking about how do we grow the impact investor tent together as a sector my husband and I made a commitment to the giving pledge long before we did that we'd already made a commitment to give the majority of our wealth away but we joined that group really to try to be a model of you know what you have you want to give back and one of the first things we did together with the Omidyar folks was we had an impact investing breakout now the giving pledge gatherings are off the record so we won't name names but we will say that it was remarkable to me the sophisticated investor sitting in that room that it had remarkable successes in their own companies and in companies they backed and one of them said oh my gosh what is this I've never heard of this what's impact investing and there were several people around the room who nodded their heads and said yes and to me I think when we get out of that sort of first inning that's not going to happen anymore because people who should know need to know influence bring resources will know secondly we were at the New York Stock Exchange talking to the head of the New York Stock Exchange and I was talking to him about impact investing and he said what's impact investing I don't know this term what does it mean and so it's just a reminder you know when you're deeply engaged in a movement or your own sector to think the world knows but the world doesn't really know and I read that because I am an optimist as many of you are it's all goodness right the world is ours to go conquer but we have to be aware that it really still is the first inning well I want to engage you to talk anytime you want to I don't want to continue to just call on you but we've got about 20 more minutes and we've got a couple of things that I want to make sure we touch on one of them is and make sure that you say it as loudly and as many times as you need to to get the point across if I'm missing it in any way because I'm just trying to go along for the ride with you but there's sort of this context of a tipping point that we brought up and all of you have been nodding your heads as Jean's alluded to the fact that we need to have the sense of urgency to get to the tipping point so the first thing I'm going to ask each of you to chime in on if you wish is when will we know when will we know we're there when will we get when will we know we're at that tipping point the tipping point that that we're alluding to today in this conversation when we sort of realize that it's not going to be in a tent in sort of a bubble that we appreciate and understand not only the language of impact investing but that we're participating in it the two of you in the middle are deeply focused actually all four of you are deeply focused on this being very much throughout the communities and stakeholder groups and client groups that you're focused on it has nothing to do with just investing and hoping for impact so how do we know when we've gotten to that tipping point let me let me say from an entrepreneur's perspective again I come from the more the commercial anchor a lot of lot of friends who are soft anchors are good soft software e-commerce pure commercial entrepreneurs and you know when they go raise money when they're starting their company they go on angel list and there's a vibrant community of 20,000 you know accredited investors looking at the deals coming through and I want I like that one I like that one then when they're there at the next stage they go hit sand hill row there's 20 venture capital is lined up and they can play the dating game and especially if they're you know what they're doing is compelling enough you know impact investing still much more bespoke and it's still much more kind of oh I heard somebody's has impact in their name and I'm going to go call them up and see if they will do anything that looks kind of like what I will do so that may be one way that we know when there's multiple term sheets on deals where the investors won't make any money that might be one way we know and by the way for those who are interested tomorrow night we're having a session on the operating system for the good economy which is really intended to start the discussion about what are some of those systems that will really make the capital flow more efficient make the deal flow process less frustrating make the etc etc who's next when will we know where the tipping point out of 500 deals we had one time that we had competing term sheets and I was so excited this is great victory moment I think so I want to take it from the angle of there's a tipping point of impact investment is a real phenomena and then for me personally it's the impact investment having the right kind of impact that we know that it's really serving the people that we wanted to serve so for me I think that would look like a couple different things of having similar to the U.N.P. or I sort of standards created by investors for investors of can we have community accountability standards for impact investors and what that should mean could we have equal community presence scholarships training programs for leaders the same way that we do from entrepreneurs that come out of business schools but have really that access point for all and then an open conversation about what are the lead priorities and some visible successes within those areas so to make that a little bit more concrete one of the big areas that you see often an impact investment is job creation job creation globally can often mean jobs that are in the two to four dollar range and it's statistically the issue is not an unemployment problem globally it's an employment problem it's that being employed and poor sucks right and that we need to really focus on job quality or that in the U.S. context a black man may make 80 cents to the dollar of a white man but the bigger issue I mean as bad as that is is that black families have 20 times less assets than white families see even the wind is upset about this so that means that even if you created jobs at the exact same level 20 generations later you would be in the exact same place right so that's part of why groups like the working world doing an emphasis on worker ownership since home ownership has not been proven to be the greatest asset building strategy as late of using business ownership as a way to really help people of color in the U.S. be able to achieve some equality and that's really coming from messages from social justice movements of here's our priorities maybe job creation isn't the only thing we want to look at okay impact investors how can you support us with your resources so that's some of the sorts of interchanges that I'd love to see happening more that to me would be a tipping point well there's an interesting creative tension here that the commercial approach which is really really critical that Xavier's focused on when he talks about the tipping point of being able to complete the capital cycle that he needs and your focus on the need for these agreements related to investing principles across stakeholder investor groups and it'd be very interesting to sort of see it on a map someday when we do reach the tipping points whether we've reached those two at the same time or whether one comes before the other or exactly what the order of events is as we get to that tipping point exactly and I wouldn't say they're not incompatible they're absolutely and absolutely not and it'd be very interesting to see whether they actually support one another as I believe they will well I mean when you think about it my own view coming to this in recent years is that it's a marketplace whose ecosystem is not fully developed I mean as an investor the very things you rely on to inform you and help you invest don't exist around impact investing there isn't an exchange there isn't a rating system there isn't clear data even to tell us what the performance has been of the exits and that's something we're going to look at building a collaborative around so that we hope we can bring a little bit of that knowledge to the market in the next year I mean there are just a number of things that if you were to really call this a marketplace they don't exist yet and so we're really trying to fly this plane while we're building it and that's good we just have to make sure that at some point if we really do have a tipping point in mind we've built the plane but we have to do the pick and ax work of building the ecosystem around this and from a you know one term getting more than one term sheet what I would say from an investor standpoint is deal flow you know if you're going to make an investment you don't want to impact investment opportunities you want 30 to compare to make the one and I think deal flow will continue to be a challenge as we grow the tent well actually each of you sitting here we wish we could now start down the deal flow conversation if we had time we would because each of you has a lot to contribute to that but this is a slightly different take on it but Martin Luther Canyon always talk about non-violence or non-existence and I sort of see impacted vesting as a tool and that tool to kit of he was talking about nuclear proliferation at the time but the point at which I think people get incredibly serious about it is when there's an acknowledgement that we're placing problems that challenge the and cause increased volatility to the overall financial markets through instability in the world so if you look at places like Egypt or Tunisia and even you know social unrest and caused by famine and all these other things that could be you know in fact my friends on Navy SEAL teams are really interested in impact investing right because if they if there aren't solutions met by their ways they end up in very different and difficult situations so I think I think engaging people in the Army in defense around solutions that are impact oriented the relationship between the impact industry and aid in the State Department are also very interesting to look at you know because we end up paying it for it on the backside with the Defense Department if we don't pay for it on the front end with and that's a challenge to the entire stability of the financial markets in the world as we've seen in recent years that was a great point I have a stepson who's a in the military and we're actually working at the Pentagon right now and he's so much more interested in impact investing now that he's at the Pentagon it's really really interesting but it's for the same reason it's because he's assessing security and it's fascinating alright so that's that's where we sort of see some opportunities for tipping points I don't know what it's like for all of you out there by the way but if you're sitting up here with the tent flapping behind you the reason we all keep going like this is because we're not actually quite sure if it's us or if it's the tent so please bear with us if we have some strange expressions on our faces it's very interesting experience and I'm actually sort of enjoying it one of the things that we need to do is create a sense of urgency for us here at SoCAP and I asked my fellow panelists before we got together today to help figure out how to articulate how to hold SoCAP accountable both those of us again responsible for managing and putting on SoCAP but also for all of us here because we're all here together for the next three or four days so really trying to exhort SoCAP so now you're sort of focused on SoCAP what would you exhort SoCAP to try to do undertake be more about take care of better try to translate into more of a systems approach anything that comes to mind to you that we can hold ourselves accountable for while we're here so that this isn't just a one-time conversation so that we are offering disciplines or methodologies or systems or agreements that will get us closer to these tipping points that you've described because you're all describing a similar type of tipping point even though you described it in very different terms so what would you exhort us all and SoCAP to make sure we try to further embody embed put in place help structure etc. and whenever any of you is ready to answer that with whatever the most important ideas that comes to mind let me know and I'll call on you and meanwhile maybe we'll see how our map is doing you have this unbelievably difficult task and we're going to actually be able to take advantage of building the map later so that by Friday we can bring it back to life but I don't know we can take a quick look how's that map going well maybe we won't we'll take a look at it later oh there it is oh goodness okay where's the tipping point can you point to it with your fantastic okay so there's the tipping point that's what we're focused on right now so what would you exhort of SoCAP what would you ask of SoCAP what would you ask of the people and of the convening Darren brought up Martin Luther King and it was Martin Luther King who talked about the fierce urgency of now in the civil rights movement but he also talked about seeing mountaintop and what happened as people embraced the fierce urgency of now is they linked arms and they knew together they were climbing to the mountaintop and what I tried to describe about our own journey was we were on that mountain but we didn't know other people were we didn't know that maybe we could hook ourselves to each other and go faster farther together and I think if we as sort of the communal SoCAP not SoCAP the organization but all of us who are passionate about this work see ourselves as ambassadors and as people who are willing to extend this movement you know I think that's really an important beginning we need much more of a spotlight much more of a megaphone much more of sharing of practices out there pointing to on ramps and getting people started by literally hand holding them to join this effort I mean to me that really would be the biggest gift of this kind of a gathering Thank you Yeah, I would just say from my perspective echoing Jean learning by doing I think whenever I've been to SoCAP before and I meet people there's some people that are doing and there's a lot of people who are still kind of dipping their toe in the water and they're from maybe a more mainstream institution and they're kind of trying to figure out what to do in this space maybe they want to start a company maybe they're an MBA and they're trying to figure out if they want to work in this sector or be a management consultant and I would say the way we're going to build this sector is we're all just going to have to learn by doing a bunch of us are going to fail a few of us are going to succeed and we'll all learn from that iterate and we'll be to the next stage a bit quicker The true meaning of practice that be practice-oriented practitioners practice doing Morgan I think my two thoughts are around risk and community building so building on what you're saying a common phrase we use in tonic was we are the ones we've been waiting for that there's no sort of looking outside and from that perspective there's a lot of risk there's a lot of risk in this process at the same time people in the context as well tonic would often ask are your investments market rate and say do I get to lose 20% like what do you really mean by that the same when we look at impact investment well how does this compare to external markets let's make a great market and particularly for those coming from the philanthropic side if I make a donation my rate of return is negative 100% if I make a PRI at 3% I just got 103% return that's fucking phenomenal right that's really great work so sort of redefining how we look at risk from the perspective of people whose objective is to create change right if we can sort of go in with that mindset I think that helps us now we're working from an investment practice of really helping us realign on how we see risk in a role in developing the sector the second piece in terms of community building which is so essential I know there can be the propensity at SoCAP those of us who've been here for years we know and love each other but really all making an effort to get to know someone who you haven't met and who doesn't look like you and also thinking about who's not here and who might you be able to bring in the future or how can you help in expanding the community thank you I need about two minutes at the end Darren so I'm gonna ask you if you'll also weigh in sure what would you exhort SoCAP to do? you can probably guess where I'm going with this I would dare SoCAP to have as many people under the age of 20 and then actually explain the third over the age of 60 and under the age of 20 with as diverse balance sheets as possible is my wish for SoCAP and I think the intergenerational conversation may bring about the solutions to a lot of the problems that we're really struggling with thank you very much so I'm actually going to take my lead from Jean and because I think it's time to do this I'm actually going to ask every single person in this room to stand up including us okay everybody has to stand up Jean you're the one who suggested this how did you describe what we should do? to me jump now I didn't know it's spontaneous you need a link there I think just in order to close this out properly everybody should what should they do Darren now? now is the time now is the time one more time now is the time