 Hello everyone, my name is Robin Stefan and I work at a mid-air network which is a philanthropic investment firm here in the Bay Area and we are here today to talk about corporate impact investors and this is not a new phenomenon. In fact as we're going to learn in just a minute, the Catalyst Fund has been doing this for six years, there are many others but this really rose to the top for SoCAP 2017 because there have been a couple notable developments in just the last year and they're here with us today so Twilio.org launched its impact investing fund this summer and actually Salesforce just launched an impact investing fund last week and we're going to dig in. I know you guys have lots of questions about what they're doing so we're going to jump into all of that but first I just wanted to take a step back and say why does this matter for the impact investing market? Why is it important? And so to do that I actually want to roll back the clock and rewind back to 1998 and I know that's nearly 20 years ago and so we have a lot of millennials at SoCAP, feels like ancient history, right? But 1998 was the year that eBay IPO'd and so the founders of a mid-air network, Pam and Pia are a mid-air, actually found themselves with unimaginable wealth and because of their experience in founding and scaling eBay it was intuitive to them that when they thought about how they would use that wealth for social change that they would harness the markets, that they would think about not just grants but also impact investments and when they thought about impact investments they intuitively thought about doing early stage risk capital for innovative companies that have tremendous potential for scale and in fact in the impact investing market there's a real dearth of that early stage risk capital and so when we see new players like those that are sharing the stage today we get really excited because we know that there's a lot of that shared DNA and that there's both the intuition as well as a really special set of insights and skill sets to help early stage companies that can have tremendous impact be able to grow and to have that impact and in fact we're already seeing that so we have a number of co-investments with fellow panelists who will introduce in just a moment including Hustle also in Della which maybe we'll get a chance to talk about and so that's kind of one of the first pieces around why is this important which is we need lots of early stage risk capital and actually Silicon Valley startups are uniquely positioned to be able to step into some of those gaps but there's another piece as well which is to put them a little bit on the spot in a way that they would probably never say on their own but we've noticed that both Salesforce and Twilio really have a lot of influence on their peers and we saw that in part in the way that both really embedded impact into their DNA from the very beginning in with the one one one corporate philanthropy model and that actually today is not something that just Salesforce and Twilio are doing but in fact hundreds of companies have taken that pledge one percent and so as we sit here today with the Catalyst Fund having paved the way for corporate venture to think about impact with Salesforce and Twilio leaning in it raises the question of this is October 2017 what will the world look like in 2020 could we imagine this becoming business as usual so we're going to get to that at the very end including some thoughts around if you're in a similar spot how do you get started but before we do that I want to introduce you to the fabulous folks who are going to be digging in with the conversation with us today so immediately to my right I have Kai Bond who is head of investing at Catalyst Fund and Kai is a serial entrepreneur he has founded three startups in the last three years the most recent pixie tv was sold to Samsung as so as I mentioned Catalyst Fund has actually been around for six years and has made 77 investments which is just incredible so we're really looking forward to learning from some of that track record that you've seen and what's come from that we also have next is Suzanne Dibianca who is executive vice president of corporate relations and chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce Suzanne for those of you who know her is just a leading light in corporate philanthropy we already talked about how Salesforce pioneered this one one one model that was really groundbreaking really that was Suzanne when she had her previous role as both founder and president of the Salesforce foundation also salesforce.org so we're really excited to have you with us as well and last but certainly not least Erin Riley has been for 20 years now thinking about leading social and environmental change at companies that you probably have heard of so Google Yahoo Nike and now at Twilio and so as vice president of social impact and general manager of Twilio.org in addition to leading their work on impact investing she is also unlocking the potential of software developers to code for a better world which I love so I know that we want to get to the hard questions but first let's just set the stage a little bit and actually just start with the question of motivation so Kai I want to turn to you for Comcast why create the catalyst fund what was what was the purpose what were the the key reasons sure that happened six years ago so there are a couple of key reasons you know it's it's an interesting space for us you know as we look at Comcast NBC universal it's very interesting when you look at the the executives inside of the organization and what they value and what we see as good business and you know I've spent a lot of opportunity the opportunity to spend a lot of time with executives across the organization and when you talk to you know what makes for good ratings on TV right it's diversity and inclusion what are the shows that over index in terms of ratings you know this is sort of core to the DNA right like you think about the organization buying Telemundo right we see a shifting demographic in the country and so it's important that as we look at not only established media but new and upcoming startups that diversity inclusion is a key part of the mix and so we see this not only as an opportunity for social impact but real business opportunity and we've seen that impact the bottom line of our business for many many years and so it was key for that reason and I think a big part you know when we just look at the numbers it's you know one percent of venture funding goes to African American and Latino founders right eight maybe nine percent go to female founders and when you look at you know the opportunity to innovate and to sort of go against the grain of what has become normal and accepted behavior we see it as a tremendous opportunity to support sort of what have become underrepresented groups inside of the venture ecosystem fantastic and Erin you guys just launched this summer tell us to give us a behind-the-scenes look about what really drove that decision sure in case you're not whoa in case you're not familiar with Twilio basically we are a cloud communications company that really powers the text video and voice for many of the services you use every day you get an uber and it says you're going to sway or call the driver that's us or American Red Cross uses us to deploy so we really believe that many of the world's problems are both caused and solved by communications and so we want to be on the end of that and empowering companies and organizations that are solving social and environmental problems through communications and so a couple years ago we joined pledge one pledge one percent thanks to the leadership of sales force and so in addition to the product donations and volunteers we committed one percent of our equity to social impact and that was about over 20 million dollars and of course we were thinking about this is going in and out I hope that's okay with everyone so we were of course thinking about doing grants but we also see a very growing part of our economy that is driving social impact but through a for-profit model and we wanted to support those companies as well and in fact you know I think we have a core belief at Twilio that social impact and business value are a virtuous cycle and so we want to support the companies that are doing that and in essence you can think about twilio.org as a social enterprise also so clearly we support that model and wanted to fantastic and Suzanne I want to make sure to get your sense as well you guys just launched last week which is really exciting congratulations but I know you've been doing deals behind the scenes for quite some time now so tell us a little bit about the early days and how this came to be within Salesforce. Sure so Salesforce is an enterprise CRM company based here in San Francisco we have about 25,000 employees around the world we're about a 10 billion dollar company I've been there since the very beginning when we were about 50 people and I ran the like you said the .org for a long time and I kind of personally needed a change and I at the same time as I was looking at like what do I want to do next and I'm sort of a capitalist by nature and I loved working in the nonprofit sector for as long as I did but I started to really think about and with the rise of Tesla and and pulling out of Paris and you know I think everything that we've learned around energy sometimes you can go faster with social problems than the for-profit model both are completely valid but at the same time as I was kind of looking for a change turns out we've become the third largest corporate VC in the world next to Google and Intel and so I sort of had a hypothesis and I and I brought a great woman from Sanford MBA Lucy who's here and did a fantastic job for us to sort of put together an analysis on like is is there a there there if we brought some intentionality to the portfolio could we find great companies in all of our strategic criteria that we still hold and remain true to if we brought some intentionality to it could we find companies that sort of fit energy education workforce development diversity and inclusion as a category for us and apps for social good so turns out according to Lucy and others there was a massive there there there was a lot of low-hanging fruit actually so we've done a bunch of deals we sort of talked about four when we launched but we've done a lot more than that in those four categories and so it was an experiment and it's been great we have great support from the Ventures team in finding these companies and really it's kind of an extension of our philanthropic commitment just in a different market and so you talked about the sectors that you're focused on tell us a little bit more about what your sweet spot is in terms of ticket size what are other criteria that are must have for you when you're thinking about what a good deal is and maybe maybe give us an example I know you you you talked about four of the investments that you were you you have been public with so far maybe give us a little bit of a flavor of one that you were excited about sure so the Salesforce Ventures fund overall has done about close to 300 investments we've got about 200 active investments in our portfolio overall today we are an enterprise software company so we are looking for companies that are integrated to Salesforce built on Salesforce aligned to our values so we're strategic investor and you have to have a you have got to have a tie into our product technology and sometimes we invest in front of but that's sort of the key that's the that's the minimum bar we focus on series A B so we're not really early stage but it's why we love partnering with Amityar and K4 and others who come in a little bit earlier our check sizes have been between about 300,000 and 2 million 3 million say and we never lead rounds so those are sort of the key sort of criteria coming in and then like I said before education and workforce development as a category sustainability as a category diversity and inclusion and broadly apps for social good so just to run you through one of them and actually a lot of our portfolio companies are here um both at this event um but they're kind of all over the world one is Elvis I haven't seen Sally here but she's um I think she's speaking here she's incredible former executive at Merrill Lynch we've done a lot of work at our company around the equal pay for women and what Sally is working on is she's working on the investment gap many times women just kind of lose out on investment potential because we're more apt to just shove money under the under the bed uh versus sort of aggressively invest it so she's been really working on on that and it's obviously very aligned to our company values around equality for women but she's building on Heroku which is a development platform and she's leveraging one of our products called communities to sort of get her communities of women together her financial advisors together with women so that's just one example and sort of how the criteria rolls fantastic and Kai I know that Catalyst one comes in super early stage tell us a little bit about that and what this feed spot looks for you sure yeah so we invest everywhere from you know 50 000 up to 2 million uh we're really sector agnostic you know for us the uh the main focus is can this company scale can it grow can it have meaningful impact and so you know one of the examples of a company our portfolio is job well right and we know that there's oftentimes you know this claim of a of a pipeline issue for talent for african-american and latinos inside of organizations great business you know selling a sass platform great revenue growth great scale but at the same time having a real impact on the lives of african-american and latinos um to find you know amazing work post college and so that's one of the investments that we sort of hold as a an example of the the type of founders we're looking for and and that's just you know again a very good business that's growing and scaling and doing well but has real impact in the world terrific Erin what about fertility or dot org yeah we uh focus on seed in series a and our check sizes are somewhere between 50 and 250 thousand dollars and we never lead also uh and our focus is uh really funding those companies that are solving social environmental problems through communications and the way that we sort of our easy way of determining if a company is using communications in a really innovative way is are they using twillio since we think using twillio is using communications as an in an innovative way so that's a bar um and then one of the elements that is unique to how we have done this and that it was it would have been impossible to do this without uh partnering with some really phenomenal impact investing um uh organizations omidyar k poor capital draper riches kaplan village capital and gates foundation and that really complemented we had we had some expertise in determining if a company is using communications in an innovative innovative way but we needed to leverage all of the expertise and social impact investing from the organizations that had been doing it for so long and then we can also share pipeline and also provide a lot more strategic value to the portfolio companies of our partners so that was an element that really helped us do what we're doing um and then as far as sort of a company that we've invested in that we're particularly excited about um edovo is one of those and it's a company that is helping inmates stay connected with their friends and family outside of prison through voice calls and texting as well as getting educated on tablets for things like geds or a trucker's license so that those inmates can be more well prepared for life outside of prison and both education and connection to family members and friends really reduces recidivism and so um the impact there was super clear to us and the use of communications in an innovative way terrific and I want to transition us to actually talking specifically about what it means to be a strategic investor in terms of what that brings to the table for your investees um in in the impact investing space and Erin let's start with you because you talked about kind of where some of your sourcing comes from and it's been fantastic actually for us as well to share a pipeline um and take a look at different deals and one of the things that we've talked about is actually to your point about having a unique sense of who's using communications to do innovative things but also you actually can see in part based on um the use of the Twilio platform who's getting traction with customers so that seems like something that um for many impact investors in the room is not the case and I would love for you to talk a little bit about what it's like to be a strategic investor in terms of sourcing um and and what you see yeah I think um the benefit I often think that the cash that we provide is less valuable than than a lot of our technical and strategic expertise that we can provide um as far as that value to the companies that we invest in as I mentioned most of them are already using communications in a strategic way but then they get what we call the Twilio bear hug um so we provide additional technical expertise they get early access to new products and features they get favorable pricing they get access to our twilio.org impact core which is basically um a tremendous community of volunteer developers who want to help social enterprises and so it can start off as just an hour long advisory session around a technical problem but could bloom into a full scale volunteer coding project all social enterprises by the way are um are open to use twilio.org impact core but then the uh obviously the the companies we invest in get an extra special sort of love in that regard and then as you were mentioning the value that we provide to our impact investing partners also comes in as a value to those companies because uh companies that come to us and are using twilio and that are interested in funding from us give us permission to share that information with our investing partners and since we have sort of a proprietary glimpse into the promising indicators of a company um through seeing their volume growth on our platform we can share that with impact investing partners and really flag some promising companies but also open more doors for more funding for these companies that are looking for for capital. Thank you and I know Suzanne the beyond capital piece is something um that you have talked about as well and so maybe you can share with us an example of one of your investees where you felt like there was a real win-win and what you saw in terms of that integration what it looks like at its very best. Yeah it's early days for us um we want to bring a lot more human capital to play um we've been so focused on finding deals and getting them done and the last year so just quite honestly um it's it's pretty early but we we know just like twilio I mean obviously from a from a products and services uh perspective we're able to really um help these companies early on whether they're in the beta for for new products we can give them access to product managers frankly we have 150,000 customers um that they can leverage we have a ton of app exchange partners which is sort of our like app store um so if you put your product up on the app store you know you're in front of our whole customer base so really it's kind of access to customers access to the ecosystem we've got like I mentioned 270 uh portfolio companies who have raised money from a whole bunch of other sources and we bring together the whole portfolio pretty regularly so I think our company is just like the other 260 or so that are um they weren't really in the impact fund they're kind of sharing investor networks um but we want to do a lot more on the on the pro bono developer side and like that but I think that's the benefit you get being with a corporate you may have more kind of hurdles to jump into but then you get access to the customer base yeah fantastic and Kai you've already shared with us that you have this super bullseye focus on minority entrepreneurs and that is actually a really hot topic right now in Silicon Valley and so you've touched on it briefly but I just want to address it hold on um which is you know when you think about the impact you want to have on the world why do you put a strong spotlight specifically on minority entrepreneurs sure so you know from our perspective when you look at the uh you know the demographics of the population and and where we live and the time that we live in um it's critical to actually have all minds at the table I think when you get any sort of myopic uh train of thought it's very limiting and so you know for us the long-term vision is you know how do we take uh every single voice that's out there and actually cultivate you know innovation from voices that have been unheard for a long time and so it's critical for us to to sort of grow I think as a society as a whole to have diversity but you know we work very closely with female founders fund BBG you know we look at diversity inclusion across the board um while our focus is is uh you know particularly on the diversity aspect I think you know we've done deals with every single person on the stage um and in the end of the day everyone looks at the founders and says the same thing this is a great founder this is a great business that will have real impact um and that's where we try to focus fantastic and you've been doing this the longest you have only been at Catalyst Fund for one year but as a fund you have you know 70 plus investments under your belt that's right what are some of the what are the some of the unexpected challenges I think it's the you know the same story if I went to the valley and talked to early stage investors you know you're talking about 50k checks into what are sometimes first time founders uh those issues don't go away right so we actually share a very similar sort of ethos it's great to have you know Comcast Ventures and Comcast uh overall you know 60% of our portfolio has some sort of strategic integration with Comcast NBC Universal um and we're very proud of that and you know I think really the um you know what you know to piggyback on what we've seen earlier and mentioned is even if there isn't a strategic integration that happens right you talk about a $50,000 check and maybe a $250,000 round in early stage business isn't always able to scale at the pace of an organization that has over 100,000 employees right and so it's sort of critical for us to figure out what that pacing looks like when we can bring folks into the right executives in the room and actually have an integration because if that fails that's only going to hurt our our effort longer term down the road and as you look back um who do you tend to see at the table in terms of co-investors? Co-investors it depends on stage we've done a lot of deals with the K-Pors uh as I think represents about 15% of our deal flow overlaps um you know we are you know starting to see more and more sort of microphones focused on diversity and inclusion uh but we've done a lot of work with Y Combinator uh we've done a lot of work with 500 startups so we look at that sort of post accelerator phase uh as as one that's really ripe for us uh to go ahead and invest with so we're proud of the the accelerator partnerships that we've had and as we scale you know continuing to work with um other corporates as well as venture funds to take it to the next level. Yeah and the and the reason I ask is in part because you started with these you know really startling statistics about how rarely you see minor entrepreneurs get VC funding and so thinking about the fact that you are going in with the early stage capital that they you know that it's the hardest to get and specifically focusing on a part of the market that gets overlooked then I could imagine that sometimes you've gotta you know kind of bring people along with you. There are a lot of angels out there who show us love so we're happy for them as well. Fantastic fantastic and Suzanne I know that you guys are just getting started but you've been working internally um for some time now from that experience of starting the conversation with your corporate venture shop what advice would you have for others that are just getting started what did you learn from that experience? Yeah I think um you know we learned a lot actually um first is you know we're in a big corporation so we have to we don't want to ask for a pass actually we want to be really aligned to the strategy at first we sort of thought we would ask for a pass especially in education because when I was at .org we put 30 million dollars in the San Francisco public schools to wire them up and give them tablets and they have nothing to run on the tablets you know it's early days in ed tech in some areas but you know I didn't we didn't ask for a pass and we found great companies anyway so you know that was one thing the the other thing is you know we thought healthcare um we have iot big iot practice big AI practice big partnership with IBM and Watson and uh as a company and we really were looking at the healthcare market and then we realized we actually don't really know anything about healthcare um it's not really our core competence we we um we have a great healthcare vertical in the company who actually sees these smaller companies and ISV's better probably better for that vertical to be driving it so we took healthcare off the list and we added workforce development to the list because um we're doing a lot it's a company who's made a billion dollars in AI acquisitions over the last 18 months um we are we're very focused uh in addition to sort of bringing AI into our CRM platform really being mindful about the whole conversation around jobs that AI is going to disrupt and is disrupting uh right now so we have something called Trailhead which is an online learning platform for for free and one of our companies in our portfolio is called Veritas and they're integrated with Trailhead and they're doing sort of a skills passport for students it was founded by a veteran a lot of vets come out of the military highly skilled but don't know how to translate that into job recs um and so we were we just found huge alignment with the workforce development um kind of value in our company and and like doing less about what are we saying about it and more what can we do about it so we kind of flipped out for what we know about that's really helpful and and you mentioned at the beginning some of the things that you thought might happen but didn't with regards to um the strategic alignment within corporate ventures did you did you think about and did and what was the conversation like in terms of thinking about strategic alignment with the foundation was that just a completely set aside from the beginning or is it something you considered and decided against yeah it's a good question when i was at dot org um we did our first two investments uh through ventures and a couple of our partner companies what great company called classy uh that i love it's just one example who does um uh sort of crowd source fundraising for large NGOs so that's kind of our first foray into it it's kind of why we have a um a gray category called apps for social good because that category helps the dot org team and the public sector team both um as it relates to education and workforce development that's where the dot org is very focused and they have big practices there so um a lot of times we look we look with the higher ed team for uh for deals that are companies that are kind of plug into their different apps where we have something called the non-profit starter pack that we built when on the dot org team for NGOs to use and we're we're always looking for add-ons and extensions to sort of existing products so um it's very aligned to the strategy at dot org sort of thing and erin given that you've built your impact investing fund in a different part of the company what advice would you have for your peers who are thinking about starting with impact investing fund and might initially be starting with what they have traditionally thought about as the philanthropic dollars within the company yeah i think uh the big surprise lesson learned i had was i thought um working with our executive leadership they would be more favorable to investing since they're so sort of bred and they know that world so so well but the issue was that they know that world so well that they know that at the seed in series a level of funding there is a pretty high failure rate for companies and so they thought what happens if we invest in a company in 18 months down the line it goes away because in the commercial sector that experience was that that company goes away and you've lost whatever you put into it versus if you put it that same money into a grant you would have something to show for it that was the the sort of pressure the question and the answer that really struck a chord which thank you omidyar this is we this came in a conversation with omidyar is that um for social enterprises even if that company closes its doors in 18 months you may still have helped 5 000 Kenyan rural farmers increase crop yields through voice based lessons that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't invested so that that social impact still remains even if that um if that company closes its doors so i think that was one lesson the other sort of quick lesson is if you end up doing this this type of investing through a donor advised fund which is what we do make sure you leave enough time for the donor advised fund to do due diligence because they are the actual legal investor so we kind of pushed timelines a little too tightly because we just didn't know yeah and i actually that was something that i didn't know that it's awesome that so tides can run donor advised funds for impact investing um maybe a few other um do they just happen to be sort of a local but they're a global organization and so when these guys take a percent of their equity which if you're whatever stage you are as a company i would encourage you to join pledge one percent it's double my line i totally agree yeah three thousand companies now right but when you take a percent of your equity and you move it over you can use it for charitable or impact giving and it's like a really cool new model that we didn't know at dot org at the time and i would say i was just on a call with you know a dozen other social impact leaders in tech companies sort of our peers last week and i mentioned we rolled out this impact fund that's doing investing and every single one of them said what really you can do that and so i think the message to silicon valley corporations is yes it's possible even if you thought it wasn't possible a year ago things are progressing and i recommend doing it through a donor advised fund because then it's actually a lot smoother it you capitalize on a lot of their already established infrastructure we use tides and yes if you set aside one percent equity profit revenue to fund social impact do grants but make sure you also do investing because it's actually in our experience easier than we thought it would be i think that's great advice and one of the things that because we see time and again that when people are just getting started with impact investing figuring out how to do the deals and whether that's going to be in-house or outsourced is one of the things that that they really get stuck on and so knowing that you can do it through a daff i think is is a great tip and actually tides and also impact assets which is also another vehicle for doing that also local are both here and there's a couple panels around that that's okay so that's a great note on which we're actually going to start to turn to all of you i am sure that there are questions lots of them popping up so just please um we're going to have a microphone come around to make sure that everyone can hear the question why don't we start right up here thank you austin and please stand up and introduce yourself to your question as well as quick contact so quick question my name is abri ruby i'm a co-founder of something called the africa expert network big believer in strategic ventures from the corporate side how do you think we can get emerging market companies the biggest of the world say like a dangote to launch a dangote ventures so because the emerging market companies giants behemoths they can interact in their markets and often have more impact within their local supply chains but at least in the african context i'm seeing very little movement on large african corporates creating ventures arms so love the thought on how to share the next steps for that as it diffuses that structure how many of you are doing are looking at emerging markets as part of your investment we're sort of accidentally looking at emerging markets climate change is in particular it's a global issue right i mean so is workforce development education we happen to know more nationally about that but the climate investments we've done have been um and gaza was one of them and they're they're an amazing company i think you guys were in that we weren't but energy access is uh is yeah we didn't bring intentionality to it we're not going to bring intentionality to it we're not one of those big african companies we're not a b2c company um i think to erin's point and maybe kai you have a different point of view about this but um i think there's just a lot of education that needs to be done with these companies that you can use charitable dollars to do for-profit investing i don't know what the vehicles are in africa for it i didn't even know there was a vehicle for it in the u.s so i just think there is a big miss in information especially with the like a lot of these foundation heads yeah i mean i would ask if they're doing grant funding say why not investing partly because then you get it you get at least a chance that it goes back into the fund and you can do even more impact out of it and also on that note to the power of being able to use those philanthropic dollars that it gives a lot of flexibility in terms of what you can do not only from grants and not only investments but a lot of flexibility in terms of what returns that you're darkening as well um we had a bunch of other questions let's see where the mic is um let's go over here uh in the fifth row to the right hi there uh great talk so far so i i've got an internal external question so so i work in a corporate we do a lot of grant making particularly into sub-south africa and um i know the question when i go with my plan around this is going to be why don't we just put more money into grants and and how do i build that case and i've heard a little bit about that and um but the second thing is is um and attach that is how actually do i find for you know the right um investments um because i know that i've got predictability in terms of my my grant making i know how many will fail give or take i know you know we're funding hundreds of grants um so i'm just wondering whether you could speak both to that internal angle in terms of building the case but also um you know kind of how we actually put that money out into into the field yeah i think you know from my perspective we we have a lot of uh r&d that goes on across the organization and really you know one of the key tenants that we look at is this is an opportunity for r&d at a scale that we would never be able to accomplish right some of the challenges that are coming in and and the um the founders that are pushing the boundaries uh and so why not be a part of that right what you know we look at disruption across the industry we see it happening every single day you know particularly in the space that we're in and i don't think that anyone here is is um you know uh unique in that way but you know we see it as as an opportunity to get early view into what's going on in the future and be very close right you're taking a board seat uh you're an advisor role um if there's a partnership integration and so i think there's a certain aspect around investing that allows you to be closer into the organization at least in the way in which we handle you know the strategic integrations and so if you're taking a very strategic approach um you know my my case would be be a part of the disruption and then incorporate that and see how you actually uh can benefit the company in the long term from it yeah i think the one thing that i would just add um to that quickly is just to take the angaza um uh basically what they do is they create um they make it very affordable for uh for solar and solar products uh that you can pay with sort of micro payments and uh why we knew we could help them was because their distributors were using Salesforce and they were actually asking for integrations um so we knew that we could bring our product and expertise in a in a really unique way because it was kind of market driven so that's the kind of thing that sort of corporate vcs can sort of have an eye to versus independence and then as far as the second half of your question um how do you develop your pipeline my like best advice is go find other impact investors that you can partner with um that are aligned with both your stage and your focus we found our buddies to to hold hands with but the but you can do a survey and i'm happy to send you like the long list of all the different impact investors we took a look at but basically find the one that's most analogous to what you're going to be looking for and then it it's so natural the deal flow because it's so um it's like a true partnership we both benefit each other because we're getting capital to our priorities and we bring the strategic you know partnership like all of that type of um and so i would say find those those partners who know more than you do about that pipeline yeah and there's a lot of people aren't building on Salesforce or aren't integrated or B2C and we just flip them back over to you know great folks who don't have that requirement yeah and i think what you'll find sorry is that you know for us in particular there's no sort of getting elbowed out of deals right and you see that a lot of time in venture and you know if uh you know Amity R came to us and said hey you know we think this is a great deal we can we can bring you in for another 50 000 right and and we would love for you to help out and figure out to add value there's a lot more camaraderie around the space and a willingness to support one another whether that's financially through access and tools platform and services so it there's an interesting uh dynamic that happens across the board with the the type of investments you're working on and just to to bring a perspective as well you know when we think when you ask the question of why not just do you all grants you know from our perspective if you're thinking about maximizing the change you want to have in the world it just makes sense to use every single tool in your toolbox to be able to have access to the right type of capital for the problem that you're trying to solve and frequently and to be clear impact investments are not a silver bullet so we still absolutely need grants um and and it's critical to think about where it's most appropriate but in the right instances you because of the fact that scale requires more capital it is um sometimes uh uh easier to scale if you're investing in a company that maybe on day one can't attract commercial capital but you help them to prove the business model to a place where they can then tap commercial markets to be able to get to that scale and don't have to just rely on on philanthropy alone so scale is a really big piece there I think. We have questions over here let's go into the fifth row in the back. Hello my name is Anaisa I'm an impact investor and I was wondering if you have an exit strategy or for how long do you see yourselves investing in each of these companies and talking more about the long-term partnership or watch which type of exit strategy you might have in mind so I'll take this one you know we we sort of try to pledge to all of our companies that will continue to follow on with capital in each round um hopefully it gets to a point where it's actually you know pushing the boundaries of what we can actually do but you know with Comcast Ventures as a fund you know we've cut you know checks in the tens of millions so you know we just actually announced a deal yesterday out of catalyst for Ross Intelligence it's an artificial intelligence company focused on the legal industry was our largest check to date the main fund came in and actually contributed to that as well right so it wasn't solely a catalyst fund deal and so there's a nice sort of alignment there from the main fund and you know in terms of exit strategy you know we typically are not acquirers of the businesses that we invest in while we do have partnerships it's it's very very infrequent I don't even know if we've done any acquisitions of the companies we've invested in so we look at the traditional paths of you know a company pushing to go public which is sort of the ideal and then leveraging our network to you know figure out which acquisitions in the ecosystem make the most sense but we continue to follow on you know round after round all the way through usually at least to see and we don't we don't follow on generally speaking we try to sort of catalyze at a certain stage we like and I'm trying to really prove to the Ventures team and frankly the industry that we don't have to take concessions on on time or return so again it's still pretty early for us but we're going in with that sort of hypothesis Twilio we invested in as Salesforce Ventures right they had a great IPO recently so the the 200 active companies in the portfolio the the 70 or so that are sort of no longer active have pretty much all had exits acquisitions or IPOs and we're hoping for the same thing in our fund and we've got somewhere around 50 percent of the portfolio companies that have taken the pledge which is cool because then like Twilio they're able we're able to kind of multiply that impact through grants and social giving and stuff yeah I mean similar amalgamation of answers we do hold off dry powder to do follow on investments and we're looking for the traditional ways of exit not necessarily looking at an eye for us acquiring it great but we have a question in the back hi there thank you I'm Ella Goodwin with Vision Spring I just want to say first of all thank you Salesforce you we've you've we have been using you guys for about 13 years now I love vision and so so thank you very much and our team in Nigeria is just getting into the system my real question though is how has how has your approach to impact investing shifting or shifted or modified your approach to grant making particularly with looking at a portfolio approach understanding and assessing risk and thinking about organizations that are receiving grants particularly those of us who are in the social enterprise space who have a hybrid blended business model right where we've got philanthropic capital and we have earned revenue but we have some of us and we're product market fit stages some of us are in early growth some of us are just beginning to scale but we're on we're on grant funding and I get at this like psychological dissonance where there's a lot of discipline and KPIs oriented around impact investing but a portfolio approach to grant making and risk management in a grant portfolio may or may not be translating and I'm wondering how it's influenced your approach to both funding mechanisms yeah it's a good question and we might be unique Twillio maybe a better answer to that I mean part of I kind of created a little bit of a dark not a dark wall but a thick wall just on behalf of the dot org team because it's kind of a pain in the neck when you've got a new leadership team and then you've got your founder kind of running around sort of telling you what kind of giving you advice and but you want to let them stand on their own two feet so I kind of had to just because of my history in the company I had to kind of go do my own thing for a little bit while and kind of let them stand on their own very different than somebody who's kind of emerged together in this space I think now after a year we're starting to come back together around that question but largely it's you know the the foundation used to do technology and innovation grants they don't anymore I you know I kind of wish they did but I'm not running it anymore so where they've really focused is around education and workforce development and that is where we're in the conversation right now about the for-profit where does it make sense to make a grant where does it make sense to make an investment so we're we're kind of backing into that partnership but you know these guys really started from a very different place and they didn't have the kind of baggage that I had there's sort of two elements I think to your question one is sort of internally how has it influenced our grants process and then also maybe how are we interacting with the organizations that are coming to us with that hybrid model so internally I smile because truth be told the rigor that we were putting into the the investment analysis and and due diligence prompted us to be more rigorous with our grant analysis and I smiled because I've been doing grant giving for 15 20 years so you'd think that was just like the DNA but I think maybe I just was lulled into thinking I knew how to do that but now we make sure that some of the the rigor that we're doing with the investment due diligence we're doing that with our grants and then the other element of how we interact you know the the organ I'll just be really candid the organizations that come to us and talk about the hybrid model um I would advocate that an organization come to us and choose before they talk to us because otherwise there's the risk that that organization sounds less serious about being a scalable for-profit business which is where we are directly focused in our impact investing and so so there are a lot it seems like a growing trend that there are these these hybrid models but when you come to me and say I just want your money tell me which one I should like go for it doesn't sound you're like you're as serious about either type of model and so to have your answer very clear on why you have both options and which one you think is best for the type of approach that you're making to us I do do you coordinate at all with the philanthropic side yeah so you know on our end we actually have a large grant giving organization that the social impact team and you know it's funny because we see deals that come in and we're like we're actually a better fit over here right and so and they do the same thing and they send it back to us and you know they've supported organizations nations well as a big one fast forward venture for america and those are organizations that I think are phenomenal I sit on the advisory boards I help with but they wouldn't be a venture investment for us and so it's they run completely dependently separate lines of management reporting structure goals and objectives and it's worked really well we we share we talk but completely separate independent different offices the whole night great I saw a number of other hands we have one right up here hi my name is Anita Akinam today I'm sort of talking about a bi-local initiative right here in San Francisco called One Bayview we're trying to actually put it in a hundred million dollars worth of retail leakage that's left the third street corridor my issue actually is you touch a little bit on this as an entrepreneur how do I get into the pipeline like what does that look like who do I talk to and what resources are available to like to individuals and entrepreneurs like myself and others in the room so that's a great question so lots of entrepreneurs sitting in our audience today they're excited to see new entrance to impact investing if they want to be on your radar tactically what should they do so you know reach out right so linked in social media submitting through our website I mean personally I take a look at everything that comes through the door and whether it's a direct fit for our fund you know you go to our website you'll see what our investment philosophy is it's very broad so to the extent that you know it's it's a warm introduction is always a great way but come and find me after stalk me online you know those are sort of the ways that I think make the most sense for us yeah and we have we now have a page on the ventures site which is you know you can sort of put in your interest we're always looking for great deals you know you have to have a sales force vision right like a technology vision some kind of connection to our products our values and I sort of talked about the stage we're not angels or seed but you know talk to your your if you're a little bit later on you know talk to your early investors we're always getting we're getting more deals from our but that's the first thing that we started to do actually before we funded any companies was just sort of create the the landscape of great lead partners you know like Omidyar and and Emerson and so many others so that's us super simple at twilio.org at the bottom of the page it says contact so you just can submit contact but I would encourage you to be very explicit about whatever corporate investor you're approaching how exactly you are using the unique assets and technology that that company offers to advance your mission because you will be more likely to appear aligned with the strategic vision of the company and the funding if you if you can state that right up front yeah and maybe just one point I'll make clear is like if you're a customer of sales force like it doesn't count we have a hundred fifty thousand of them or maybe more now but we get that question all the time you have to be thinking about sort of a unique way like the distributor's idea with Agatha or the community's idea with Elvis or the workforce development trailhead match with Veritas that's just a common culture where they're like well we use sales first can we apply we are thankful and grateful for everyone who uses sales force but we need a little bit more than that to sort of be able to sort of power companies further faster great and we are just about at time so i'm actually going to give each of you a chance to just share some final thoughts with the group today and in particular if you choose to tell us a little bit about where you hope to be five years from now so I know both of you know both of you are just getting started I know that Catalyst has been around for six years but you just joined the fund just a year ago and so tell us a little bit about what the future looks like pardon me so you know we we hope to be at over a hundred companies funded you know we would love to deploy the remainder of the capital in our first fund and raise another fund and continue along the path that we're on you know we're always looking for great founders we're always looking to support the community so to the extent that you know we are not a fit for the investment philosophy and where you are please come and talk to us we're happy to help in any way we can yeah and I think for us we want to um you know our the the guy who runs our m&a and ventures portfolio the guy named johnson morje and he when we were sort of launching the fund he said well we're going to deploy the 50 million in two years which of which we've already you know deployed about a fifth of and you know we've just brought on a amazing executive in Claudine and I was hoping she wasn't thinking well what the hell is going to happen to me in two years but the truth is what we want is we want we would love to see some great exits at some level we really we want to see some massive social impact and so we're creating our matrix right now on what is that driving I would like to double the size of the fund in two years and actually I'm really committed to helping the portfolio increase their founder pool for more women and diverse CEOs it is not a criteria in our fund it just happens to be that more than 50 percent are investments right now or women and minority founders just tend to maybe have more of an inkling in the in the social space I don't know if that's true or not but that's another outcome for me is we were like well we increased you know women 400 percent in the last 12 months we did across the portfolio but it but the impact fund had a had a big role in that so that's another sort of place that I want to be in really helping the whole ventures portfolio move forward because there's going to be deals that we find that that aren't really in the impact space but because we're now in this network that we can sort of push you our AI fund or our trailhead fund or like that fantastic and what does success look like for you plus one to what you guys said but I I'm gonna do a bit of a call to action for all the investors out in this audience if you have friends or colleagues who are at corporations that are doing grant making go talk to them and encourage them to do investing and more importantly offer to be their partner offer to be that person that someone here said how do I figure out how to do this how do I get pipeline you know like these you have power to basically take this model and supercharge it and so that vision in five years is that everyone who is doing grant making is also doing impact investing because in that's what we're doing and so we believe in it and we want more of that to happen in the in the corporate world but overall also yeah we started at 15 years in these guys started at like day one which is awesome and the last thing I would say is take the pledge really seriously it's gonna if you're an entrepreneur if you're a venture capitalist we've got every kind of category of people it's super easy to do you can just pledge time you can pledge right up but I gotta tell you there is not one person I have ever met that has regretted it and just a moving a little bit super easy tides can help you do it many people can help you do it just take your little part of your equity as a startup and just move it and then don't think about it and then when something happens you get acquired and you get a public all of a sudden you'll have this big chunk of cash to give back and it's amazing I love it that's a perfect place for us to stop a powerful vision for where we're headed a clear called action so please join me in thanking our incredible panelists for a great conversation today