 I'm here with Vinit Rai, Jed, who just prowled the stage really well, says that Vinit is one of the best examples of a fund manager that's multi-lingual within a cultural context. So, yeah, I think those are the words I'm supposed to say about you. I kind of met Vinit seriously a month or so ago in Singapore, and we were on a panel, and we just said, well, you know, I kind of like the way you do things. Let's see what we can do together. And so we're up here to talk about how we might do things together. He does SandCal, the largest event other than SoCAP that's focused on this that's much more entrepreneur-focused and Indian contextual, and, you know, they can talk back to investors to say this doesn't work here and stuff like that. And we have a Western kind of focus here at SoCAP, more investor-focused than SandCal, and we want to explore a learning partnership. If you look on the slide, the story down in the learning and sharing stories about Vinit and me talking and what we're trying to do together, and Vinit has a lot of really good ideas about it. He's thought a lot more about it, and I've responded to it. I think it's some really good stuff that we want to do. This is going to be an announcement of a partnership, and we have a couple things that we want to do. Vinit, you want to describe some of your ideas? First, thanks Kevin, and thanks everybody to allow me to come here and speak to you. SandCal was actually an initiative of Intellicap, which is a company that works across the bridge, tries to do everything that's possible to be done to create value, and the infrastructure that is needed for capital to work. Run by a fairly young set of people and was set up actually around 2002. Today morning, I actually had a chance meeting with one of the persons who was the first investor in Intellicap some seven years back, and he was coming back from a meeting with Alan Greenspan, and I was trying to tell him I normally start my conversations by saying impact investing is contextual, so your learnings of what you are doing in one place may not work in the other place, and it's actually a fairly well-known thing, and he said that when you were talking about investing, and he had heard this from Alan Greenspan yesterday, it seems, that capitalism is cultural actually, and until and unless you want to make capitalism work without understanding culture, it's bound to fail, and I think impact investing has similar context. So what actually impact investing can do in the United States of America is not going to be needed or will be effective in India, and possibly what can be done in impact investing in India is possibly not going to be needed or work in Kenya. Problem is that capital is actually still flowing from west to the east, but the actors are actually all based in east largely, and I think the partnership that we are talking about is emerging from the thought process, that what we do at Sankalp is so different from SoCAP, while the objectives are the same, the process, the culture, the context is so very different that there is a need for a North-South dialogue, and this actually emerged when I and Kevin were sitting in Singapore trying to actually pull fast ones on the limited partners who invest in this space, and it seemed to me that we are actually talking to different languages, coming from different contexts, and doing things differently. So what appeared to me is the right way to move forward is to actually rise, and that's actually what I was telling Kevin, that my last decade, last 10-12 years of my life has actually gone in survival, in trying to serve my own objectives, in trying to serve the objectives of my own institutions. Having trying to be an impact investor, I think one of the first objectives that was actually important for me was to rise above myself, but actually what I did was serve all my interests for last 10-12 years, and for possibly the next decade for our life, we might have to spend doing something which is beyond my personal needs, and I think a lot of people here in this room possibly want to play an impact investing to do that, but we have done the reverse for last decade, at least to serve my needs. So if SoCAP and CENCEL claim to be actually two very large conveners of people who are either participant or actor in the change that we are trying to make, we need to actually rise beyond our personal ambitions of being the largest, the best, the one that changed the world to actually become the dialogue conveners and see if we can create value for each other. So that was the objective with which we started the dialogue, and I know I've gone into a long monologue, but that's what I love, and I love hearing my voice as well. Yeah. I think one of the things we do in the West is create a lot of silver bullets, and in India and the other places, he's working in Southeast Asia and also heading toward Africa with Intellica App and his group at CENCEL, they can know how stuff works there. Is there somebody to install it? Is there somebody to repair it? Is there somebody to install the new one and upgrade it and collect for it? Or are the roads too bad? I ran into all kinds of westerners who were saying, I'm really excited about my new technology, and I wanted to say, well, who's your partner there? Are you partnered with the Bedegas for collection? Or who's your easy partner? Or you're an easy product, and how have you figured that out? And very often, there was a guy last year with really great solar technology, and he'd figured it out, and in this one part of Kenya, the Catholic justice worker was more trusted than both the government and the tribes, and he opened all the doors, and everybody adopted this wonderful solar technology that took out kerosene, and he says, I really knock this. Well, great. Where else is the Catholic justice manager more powerful and more trusted than any other thing? So sometimes, he figured out one valley, but he couldn't figure out the context. He had somebody that opened the context to him. So I think we do a lot of these silver bullet things, but we've got to figure out how it works in India. We can learn going that way, so we won't be white folks with silver bullets saying, do it this way. I think there's a need for white folks with silver bullets. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, absolutely. It's actually very critical in some sense because if I go back, I think there are a couple of things I wanted to add to my own personal journey. And to a lot of you, possibly who actually do not know the cultural context, do not have the skills and still want to make a difference, that may actually sound pretty similar to what you are. So I was actually a guy who was trained to be a forester, and actually before I started the fund and in telecap, I actually used to live in a forest. I was a guy who should hang on the trees and jump like monkeys, but I then one fine day decided that there is a need to change the world, or at least I figured out that there is actually... rural India is 70% of India, and Mahatma Gandhi had said that 70% of India lives in villages, so we should do something about the villages. But when liberalization took place in 1991, we adopted the service model, which basically needs Sikhs' talent and Sikhs' infrastructure, which meant India's growth congregated towards cities. So 70% of India that lived in rural India actually was left behind. So while India grew, this urban India grew by 12%, the rural India grew by 1%, and in 2000, it was pretty obvious that if you don't bring about a change in rural India, 70% of the India would not associate with the growth that was taking place in 30% of India. So like any person living in the forest who thought he was the brightest guy around, and after meeting a lot of people, I realized that you need to create enterprises in rural India and after asking a few questions here, and you can ask anybody who is an entrepreneur around in this room that what is it that you need, they will say we need money. So the easiest thing I could conclude is people need money to start business, and that money is not available. And so in my brightness, I quit my job and started a fund with $2,100 at that exchange rate. Indian rupee devaluation has now made that $1,500 already. So I started with this $2,100, and of this $100 went into setting up the fund, and $2,000 went into setting up Intellectual Capital, or IntelliCap, the company, which I thought would attract the best of the young talent and try to change the world. Now, a lot of people ask me how did you survive a guy from the forest trying to raise a fund whose family in the last 300 years have never been an entrepreneur to actually run a venture capital fund whose definition you learned from Google, how did you survive? Well, it actually then links back to the white man with the silver bullet, because you have the ambition and the passion to make a change, sometimes context and content doesn't matter. I'm one of the brightest example of this context and content didn't matter, because I did not know how to invest, I did not know what financial model looks like, I did not know how an entrepreneur looks like, and more importantly, I was trying to raise money without knowing how rich people look like. So, if I can do it, a lot of you can do it, it's important to be aware what you don't know, and the good part was I did not know how to run a venture fund, so I went and asked very, without any shame to people, that I want to raise a fund, would you invest in me? And if somebody asked me how would you exit? I had actually read a paper from IFC which said 93% of the world actually struggle on exits. I said I am in the majority, we don't know how to exit. So I think accepting what you don't know possibly is one of the best ways in case you want to be those guys who want to become from participant, eager participants to actors. And I think the partnership that we are talking about between Sankalp and Socap is actually to connect the actors who basically we represent, we believe is what Sankalp is all about with the participants which I believe is what Socap is about. And I think that kind of... Like intermediaries, investors, consultants, researchers, all that is good. I think there is a second part of it which I think is a very California thing and I still struggle to connect with that but I actually admire it because I can't connect with it is you can actually discuss and debate things that we cannot even conceive of. So if you come to Sankalp, if any of you have attended Sankalp, you will see we are very focused on doing things in one way. But when I come here, I see faith, ocean, I mean I am actually struggling to connect with all these unconnected, this thing. It may be because you are Socap or it may be because you have California. We have passed up there. We have passed on the infographic. Just follow the path. So I think the white man with the silver bullet is equally important in correcting people like me who talk about spirituality but don't understand it the way you understand it. Well, you know, I moved here from Mississippi. Most of my business career was in Mississippi which is highly contextual. It's kind of like, you know, if you're a Johnson from up the north road, he knows what you can do and what you can't do. And I moved here in 96 and they said, well, you know, I talked about something I was involved in public schools in Mississippi that they didn't like or whatever. You know, in California, you can just eliminate any part of your past you want to and reinvent yourself. So I don't have to be the guy that said I was in Mississippi. Okay, I kind of liked it because I've been going upstream in Mississippi for 20 years. I think that's why we get along. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, California is a place to reinvent yourself and, you know, then you go to Indiana, you say, oh, maybe I'm not really that, you know. I think that reality check. And we're also interested, you know, there is this opportunity that we've talked about about the foundation. I'm going to go off and talk about that, too. As you've seen here, there's a lot of collaboratives of foundations that are working together here. You know, there's the Packard, it was the kind of leading oceans group that is getting everybody with a sort of different theory of change that's kind of overlapping, like Rockefeller does coastal communities, Packard does sea, and Gordon Moore Foundation does whole ecosystems, and Bloomberg wants to be around the new smart stuff, and there other folks are coming into that space. And we want to help those collaboratives and those discussions carry forward, you know, between SoCAP and then also with the research that, you know, in TeleCAP, 600 people need to do lots of research. So we're going to figure out there is a real clear market opportunity. I don't know how to deliver on it. Our team is not based, we don't have a service orientation, and he's got a business that does, so we're going to see if there's an opportunity to come to market there on something that we can't do that he could provide, and we're going to tiptoe in and try to be, you know, foundations need a certain kind of convening, you know, behind only some people in the room, that kind of thing, and work with you on that, too. I mean, again, the learnings that we have got from the context in which we have worked with, I, again, would be very cautious in saying that we might be able to educate people here with the same thing. It's a brown man with a silver bullet. It may also not work. But I think what we have done and what we have learned is capital alone doesn't work. Knowledge of context is important, but it's actually not, again, a solution for you. Yeah. And therefore, you need to actually build an ecosystem, and every effort that we each, one of our trends, Silicon Valley possibly is the best example of what an ecosystem should look like. The problem is this ecosystem functions at a certain kind of, with a certain kind of context and certain kinds of businesses. So when we went back, and what we tried to do in India was actually a lot of us trying to come together to build an end-to-end solution to come creating companies that are actually focused on base of the pyramid, and yet create successes. So it's not about just creating capital. It's not about taking young, smart people and trying to provide services to young people. It's not about actually just finding few incubators and trying to expect them to deliver results. But actually all of this together, spend together, being working together for a decade for us to deliver certain kinds of results in India. And I think one of the two things that I continue to repeat in every forum that I get to speak to about impact investing is there are two things which are very critical. Patience and impatience with patience. Both the things are very important. Patience is important because results don't come in quickly. But impatience with patience is important because bad things, patiently waiting around a bad egg is not going to deliver you the chicken that you're looking to. So you need to be impatient when you need to be, but you need to be patient to actually deliver the final result. That's actually a very important part. The other part which actually continues to remain a debate is there is a very high number of people who are participating in the impact investing world who believe they can have their cake and eat it too. Now that belief is flawed and it is flawed simply because you cannot generate world-making returns while changing the lives of the people. Not because it cannot be done, because we don't know it can be done. To go with that expectation that you will do it is not necessarily possibly the right way to go in. And I think it is also connected with the materialism that we are suffering with. I think there is a need for us to in general introduce the course of greed management. Now management school education has actually been introduced by United States to the world. I think it's important for the United States the best of the colleges here to introduce a fairly significant course on greed management. I know it's actually a wrong thing to say in a country which actually says greed is good, but at the same time, I think it's time has come for us to possibly revisit some of these possibly things which were right. Maybe greed was good at a certain point of time, but 2008 actually did tell us in this country itself that extreme greed is not good for anyone. And I think impact investing, if we are actually expecting that we will become as rich as anybody who is in the mainstream, then possibly we are really exceeding our briefs. And maybe it's not the right way to go into this space. So if you are looking for mainstream returns, you are looking for mainstream salaries, you want to change the world at the same time, instead of being an eager participant sitting from the far, admiring it rather than being a participant. To be an actor, you will need to make sub-sacrifices and it will be painful. And if you are not accepting of that fact, better be an admirer than be a participant of an actor. That's great. Seth Goldin's interesting point was that Seth Goldin's success was partly that he pushed back institutional capital that was demanding too much and he succeeded because he pushed away the institutionals and found mission-focused capital. One of the things he also did in his deal that was interesting just to get wonky for a minute but he had a warrant so that if the deal really succeeded the investor would get less and if they really failed then the investor could do the gouging that the investor was comfortable doing. But you can only be a pirate if you are on the bottom, if you are on the top the entrepreneur got a better deal. We have to... It seems to be restraining the power of rapacious capital. I think the things happening in the US that are helping us with that are things around collaborative commerce. If people are sharing then they are consuming less and the power of capital to cause consumption is less. I think there are some other things. The maker movement is really interesting here because it's local production, 3D printing and stuff like that. When we are moving our hubs into Brooklyn and Philadelphia we are linking with Third Ward which is a group that sells 3D printers by time and stuff you can't afford in your shop. So there is local manufacturer local food production that is becoming really big in the US. All those things reduce the power of capital and capital is got... They are playing this power game it's not working anymore. You can't really extract the way they imagine the world works so I think it's partnering with you to bring the entrepreneurs more to the fore is totally I think what we need to do as we go forward is continually to make capital a tool rather than being in charge. I have a theory and we discussed it in Singapore it's politically incorrect for me to say it here but I'll still go ahead and tell you this. So I have a theory it's the entrepreneur and the capital has a inverse power relationship. Intellect and power relationship actually. So if you actually try to make a hierarchy of intellectual capital of intellectual capability the entrepreneur is at the top the general partner or the fund manager are at the mediocre level and limited partners are at the bottom. When you if you actually start looking at the power hierarchy the limited partners are at the top the general partners people like me who are mediocre always remain at the center and the entrepreneurs are at the bottom. Of course these equations do change as entrepreneurs become successful but literally this is actually how it functions and the power actually and I actually spend a lot of time trying to understand why does a lot of people who try to do due diligence on you are looking for a certain specific answer. So if you say an answer in a word or in the system it doesn't fit into the question that has been asked you will be tick-bogged the wrong way and you will never get the capital and it was completely amazing to me that you have a checklist way of actually telling me if I'm a good investor or a bad investor while I was actually doing everything from an input and output perspective where my decision making to make investments were very instinct driven and over a period of time I realized that the larger capital you manage the dumber decision making you must have and which actually relates to the power of capital as well. So the larger amount of money you have you have to think less and structure more and therefore there's actually this correlation that I discovered with experience and I think we are moving towards it as Avishkar actually becomes larger and larger and we are moving towards dumber decision making as well internally. Something that worries me and keeps me awake. Being big can cause you to lose things. We're looking at a holding company next time rather than a fund that has to get out. The timing of five-year venture funds or whatever versus impact is sometimes in line. It's really in line right now at Obamacare and Mobile Health because you can change the game with Mobile Health right now around Obamacare to make lives better and working poor in the U.S. They finally count in the system and you can make lots of money keeping poor folks working poor out of the emergency room using mobile apps to help you do that. That's a time bound and opportunity. It makes sense to put that on a venture timeline because I think it's really important that we institutionalize Obamacare because it's at lots of different kinds of risk and we can have a much safer better healthcare system in the U.S. if we throw a lot of venture capital at that and a lot of entrepreneurs and all that kind of thing. But it doesn't happen often that the overlap of the margin and impact are alike. It's a real brief window. I think I'll actually connect what you just said about U.S. to India's economic woes right now. We have a rupee devaluing pretty rapidly and sharply and so therefore the government is scurrying around for cover trying to actually look at what is it that we cannot stop from importing and we figured out India's electronic goods actually, surprisingly. While oil is actually a necessity, there's no reason for us to actually import gold and electronic goods and then there is a lot of time which has been spent trying to understand why don't we produce electronic goods. It's simply because we have never invested in trying to create infrastructure to produce electronic goods. So at this point of time, Indian government is actually talking about setting up a venture fund which will actually invest in... to be able to evaluate as much as we possibly don't need to but this is actually one way, like exactly as you said you can actually have capital trying to create new ideas to solve these problems whether it's in U.S. But they can all impact your main economies finally and it totally depends on and that's why I think in some sense impact investing is nothing but a transitional activity. Things that start as impact can over a period of time move to mainstream and there's a mainstream venture capital fund managing partner who sat on the stage in India and said the difference between impact investing funds in India and mainstream funds is one claims to give lower returns the other gives lower returns. Yeah, you know in mobile health I think actually the impact funds there's lots of typical venture funds jumping into the opportunity you know people with type 2 diabetes chronic diseases of the working poor but I think we could add cultural literacy to that to get wider adoption more quickly because suddenly the voice of the poor folks is the most important consumer voice in the health care system. So you have to have entrepreneurs that know how to listen to poor folks as if they're the most valuable customers which is they don't really teach you that at Stanford you know at Stanford at Harvard they teach you know you don't know the last name you're made and now you have to start treating poor folks as if they're valuable customers. I think it's going to it's curious to see what if you sprinkle an MBA into a cultural literacy demanding situation and see what comes out I think they might change a little bit too. I have lately developed a soft corner for Stanford because they are doing a business key study on us. They are. I would agree with you for a second. They make the best silver bullets they do it's great they just got to figure out you know now that the poor folks have to adopt the behavior change that is you know where they managing their chronic diseases better through mobile apps and things they have to have to learn to listen to folks they hadn't listened to before it's kind of a I don't know it's kind of a flip for them maybe I mean we have been actually doing a one way flow of information maybe if the audience want to participate yeah can we open this up for questions and things we can talk a long time but what do you want to ask anybody we have mics and things okay great good if you were not bold we would consider ourselves amusing and keeping going so that's good hi my name is Lloyd so I've actually taken a mobile help with our borders course I stand for it and so it's appropriate for me to ask the question and I've worked with the city of San Francisco and trying to figure out a few deserts here and so last year I participated in a design jam where I had teammates I lived in the Tenderloin here so one of the poor neighborhoods and you know taking a design taking a concern design perspective what they wanted was a access to a local grocery store but from a you flip it from the investor perspective the margins for fresh goods and produce vegetables it's so low that even though I know what the residents in the community wanted that's not what makes sense from a return on investment whether it's short term or medium term how do we end up bridging that you know from a healthcare to a commerce which are different industries and at the same time serving the needs of you said the poorer residents in the community yeah I have an example we our hub is right at 6th Street I've worked with folks you know the caravan folks out of TechSoup doing mobile stuff there's some problems that you can solve with mobile in 6th Street and one of the ones that they just rolled out is a thing called safe night and it's in every night in the U.S. there's 6,000 or so women who need a place in a battered women's shelter than there isn't one they got a grant from Microsoft and some other folks to use latent hotel rooms around cities and somebody could donate to put up $25 and you could give a night and then it's also secure because nobody's supposed to know where she is so I mean there are places where complex social problems with the transaction are really equal mobile food deserts are not there's too many other, there's moving stuff so there's one that Tenderloin Technology Center is rolling out now that's really cool is a mobile app and homeless folks in San Francisco have smart phones and it's where there's a meal now and where there's a bed now throughout the system and with the problem of updating some places that work some places you know it's a good technology moving stuff is not a mobile problem moving data, moving transactions is an easy mobile problem and then finding, they did latent inventory so I'm really interested in it but it's cool technology it doesn't work everywhere figure out how to do shipping distribution and receiving in a whole different way every organic problem company has that kind of thing distributors suck I wouldn't comment because he's an entrepreneur and he's on the intellectual hierarchy much above me sir I have a question over here I'm behind you the problem that keeps you up at night about the pitfalls of scale and the pitfalls of growth can you tell us what ideas you're having about solving that problem while you're losing sleep yeah so what keeps me awake well I think one of the fears and very simple fear is actually to become dumb and I actually see a sense of it as the number of people increase and then come out of capital and the management increase instead of following the instinct we are actually worrying about the fears I've always defined that investing any good investor should actually be focused on what he controls the outcomes and the outcomes are actually seen as returns and impact you make so I have never really bothered either about the return nor about the impact I only focus on whether I can actually find a good entrepreneur if he's trying to solve a good problem that actually has a business case to it and if my capital can make a difference these were the only three questions we ask the larger we are becoming and the further I'm going away from actually doing that activity I'm realizing transferring this very mediocre thought process to very intelligent people is one of the toughest thing I have come across people question everything and say the financial model doesn't justify your instinctive decision making so taking input based decision to create value versus outcome based decision making is something which keeps me awake and I really don't have an answer because all the management institutes really makes you focus about outcome and I think the societies in the world like the western societies that a lot of eastern societies want to emulate are very focused on output metrics rather than the input side while the best and the brightest of yours are still focused on the input side but in general the metric that is to the average like us is to focus on the outcomes and I think that's basically a challenge that I have not been able to put my hand around I have four things that bother me we have to work within we have climate change we have oil the end of cheap oil and a looming food crisis it's pretty global and then I think the thing that I liked about what they did in Singapore is they think the biggest risk is the haves the have nots getting mad at the haves saying if there's no path upward I'm coming to get yours and I think that's a pretty they all have some kind of timeline around those so I think we need to solve the inclusion problem absolutely we have about a minute left I want to also express that I'm really glad that the Canadian minister is here and so we're about it or in but we're starting a partnership neither one of us really knows how we're going to work with the other but I think we have things to learn from each other so we're trying to be kind of oh yeah we have a quick question hi Kevin I'm here from Lebanon and I was fortunate enough to actually be at Sankalpa as well in Mumbai and coming from the Middle East we're actually really excited about the amazing stuff that we saw at Sankalpa and the stuff that's happening in India and the amazing sort of breath and energy and enthusiasm and entrepreneurs etc and of course there's always room to grow but I just want to sort of counter that it's not just a sort of white man silver bullet that can go and solve things but we're also really looking to India and looking to build bridges between the Middle East and Eastward and was wondering in terms of some of the key things that you guys have been doing there that could be of benefit to other developing countries whereas sometimes I feel like coming from Silicon Valley which is where I grew up sometimes there's gaps because entrepreneurs, innovators here don't always understand some of the core issues that are troubling that are problematic in some of those developing landscapes Take about a minute That's to you I think part of the reason both of us are on the stage and Kevin was nice enough to let me come on the stage was that we actually believe that today we have actually between Sokap and Sankalpa what we are doing we have figured out some things that can actually be taken forward now again the context is important whether we can do something in the Middle East that can create significant value I think the learnings that we have with all the people here and what we have what you saw in Sankalpa as well is there something that we can pick the best from both the sides and takes to the Middle East and possibly to Africa that's what we are trying to do is what we are trying to plan a late night mail from Kevin actually called it Global Impact Investing Information Network G-Triple-IN G-Triple-IN and I think that if we can actually come up with something that can create or take the debate and harmonize the differences that we have on what impact is and what investing is and where capital will go and what kind of impact we should make we might have created something that could benefit all of us much beyond what we are doing in Mumbai and San Francisco so I'll end with that Thank you