 My name is Sergio Marrero, I'm Managing Director of Blue Ridge Labs out of Brooklyn, New York. So we focus on supporting early stage entrepreneurs that are fighting poverty. I have two very special guests and friends today. Aaron Walker, who is the founder and CEO of Camelback Ventures and also the Roots Plus for Good Fund. And Ariel, it's Burham Ziegler. We've got Ariel Bezzi for short, and she is a program lead at Unleash. So we'll talk about innovation models, supporting early stage entrepreneurs, and hear about all the different approaches today. But how are you guys doing? Yeah, ready to roll? Awesome. First, we'll start with a quick introduction. So Aaron, do you want to kick it off of yourself? All right, sure. All right, there we go. There we go. Okay, I'm not ready to use my teacher voice this morning. Aaron Walker, founder and CEO of Camelback Ventures. I've been running Camelback for the last nine years or so. Really our mission is to try to increase access and opportunity for entrepreneurs of color and women by investing in their companies, but also in their leadership. And in the last couple of years, we have sort of taken on this work to really deal with like equity and fairness and funding because it's great to start all these amazing entrepreneurs and what they're doing, but the capital markets in many ways in my mind are still broke in terms of how money is being allocated to those who I think have a comparative advantage. And so we've been working on that. Sergio alluded to a fund that we're working on. I'm happy to talk about that. And as long as the SEC is not here. Thank you. And thanks for being here. I love starting my morning talking about innovation. And we always start our programming early because we are a global program and we're typically representing 50 different countries at any given point in time. So I'm Ariel Berghammer Ziegler and I'm the lead for the Unleash Plus incubator program. We operate under the broader Unleash program umbrella, which is a platform and overall program to support youth, mobilizing them to create change in their communities and launch solutions in line with the sustainable development goals set forth by the United Nations. And in our program in particular, we are a six month incubator for early stage social impact ventures. So all of our teams from around the world are in some way aligned with the social impact cause in line with the sustainable development goals. At any given point in time, we've got 250 to 300 participants in our program from 50 different countries. So we bring them together under a global umbrella to collaborate to network and to really learn the skills, the tools, the resources and access to global experts and mentors to support them in launching their solutions. And in my role in particular, I wear two hats. I come from Cmonix International, which is a sustainable development firm that implements programs in over 100 different countries around the world and we are Unleash's lead scale partner. So I, on my day job normally, I'm really implementing and working with this incubator program, but then in Cmonix, I'm a senior specialist for our innovation and investment office. Awesome. Thank you both for that. So what we'll do is we'll chat for about 20, 25 minutes, talk about the different, different models. And it was definitely intentional. Blue Ridge Labs focuses on poverty in New York and Erin, your organization focuses on the US and then we have the global perspective and all early stage entrepreneurs with different approaches. So excited to dive in. I wanted to first kick off with Ariel, if you can talk about what, what is Unleash, what do you guys actually do? Thank you. So Unleash honestly is a lot of fun and I actually always start by saying that I started as a global talent who came through their regular programming in their second year. They started in 2017 and a few of us from our innovation team and our global programming joined to really see what Unleash was all about after we heard a lot of really great things the first year. And they started as a program that brings together a thousand youth from around the world in a really inclusive way. Everything is covered. It's a nonprofit organization based out of Denmark that really is trying to create the space to bring youth together to network on the SDGs to teach them about design thinking and creative problem solving really to launch and figure out how to collaborate to solve the world's most intractable challenges. And so from that, Kmonix actually was so passionate about what they were doing and felt like there was such a strong mission alignment that we thought we could actually help implement a broader scale program. So we joined with Unleash in 2019 and helped co-create and co-design the Unleash plus incubator program to really help continue supporting those innovators and entrepreneurs that wanted to actually launch a solution and start a business. And so in our incubator program, it kind of creates as a feeder. You can come out of the regular Unleash programming which now we have the global lab which we're getting ready to launch India coming up one of our first in-person events again that it's been a few years. We just did our first regional lab in Greenland that was really focused on the Arctic Circle and climate change and issues facing those regional countries all represented within that space. We also have localized hacks programming. So we also have ambassadors who then can launch and lead community-driven events in local languages, local countries to really provide the skills and tools and resources at that local level for the issues that they're most passionate about solving and bringing in partners and mobilizing capital at that more localized level. And then for our program, we operate over six months in a couple of different phases. So you can either come through that pipeline through Unleash if you've already been part of one of our programs or you can actually just apply as any entrepreneur that fits our core criteria being youth between the ages of 18 and 35. It's a broad spectrum of youth. Makes me feel not quite as old. And then in that program, we run them through a six-month iteration. We kick it off. There's a lot of intensity, a lot of global connectivity so that they're meeting people from around the world and really collaborating on their sustainability initiatives or their solutions. They get access to mentorship throughout the program. So experience global mentors that are successful entrepreneurs or innovation leaders in their own right to help guide them and support them in the process. And then we have amazing experts like Sergio who join us on a volunteer basis every year to really provide their technical expertise and their networks to help really launch and give them even more access to capital, to technical advice, to anything that might help set them on the right track. I remember when I first volunteered, I signed up and I was like, is this a real thing? And I ended up facilitating in Singapore and it was like a hackathon. If everyone's been to a startup weekend, it's like a startup weekend, but over 10 days and 10 days, 14 hours a day, people going from concept to build. It's up to 1,000 people. There's a lot of energy there. So really cool from all around the world. I wanted to turn it back to Aaron if you could share a little bit about your experience and insight on what is Camelback Ventures and then also what is Ruthless for good? Yeah, definitely. So back up a couple beats because I think it'll give some context to help understand what Camelback is. Camelback is the third company I've started. The first two have come and gone. You probably don't know the name of them for good reason. And the reason I start there is because oftentimes, the story is like you just sort of woke up and you had this great idea and everything worked out. That's often not the case, particularly in entrepreneurship. And in many ways, Camelback is like the thing that I wish had existed when I was working on my first two companies. I had gone to quote-unquote prestigious universities and jobs and all these other things and then I sort of stepped out into the world with this idea and it's like really hard in the way that I wasn't expecting and I'm like, oh, now that I don't sort of have an institution or a white guy behind me and that's just me, people's excitement and engagement looks really different. And so trying to figure out what to do with that. And I thought to myself, could I create a business that would help other folks who were like me and folks that I was meeting who were sort of telling the same story of having a lot of access to what we, at Camelback, call it the three C's, coaching, connections and capital. And so that was really like the impetus for the organization which is can we write early stage checks to entrepreneurs who oftentimes don't come for money and don't have access to financial resources in the same way. So when we think about the racial wealth gap, I mean to me that's one of the byproducts of it is that there are certain segments of folks who don't have $50,000 who just like put into a company to see if it works or don't have an uncle or a friend to be like, hey, here's $20,000, go take a cut out. If you give me my money back, great. But if not, don't worry, I'll just tease you at the barbecue for the next 20 years. And so that was the capital piece. And then Ariel sort of alluded to some of the other pieces around connections, like how do you build that social capital? And so I think about part of part of the camelback journey is that there were people who got me into rooms that I didn't know even existed in those rooms are really where the deal making happens. And so how can we begin to leverage our social capital to help entrepreneurs sort of sort of be in the room where it happens, as they say in the musical. And then the last piece is just the coaching which is I think leadership looks different and leadership can show up in many different ways. And I think we have an archetype of what a quote-unquote leader looks like, but that's just one archetype. And I think there are many others. And so what we try to do is just like honor the different ways that people and leaders show up and then just sort of support them in their own version of what that looks like. And so what does that mean specifically in our work? We run an accelerator program. It is four months. We write $40,000 checks to all the founders, sort of this friends and family for people who don't have it. We use our social network to connect them to mentors and board members and coaches and customers. And we have like a whole coaching module that we implement with them. So we've been doing that. This year is the first year where we do it as a cohort-based model. So this year is the first time we're doing two cohorts. So historically we've been doing one, but this year we're doing two. The other piece of the work is we started something a couple of years ago called the Capital Collaborative. Apparently at Camelback we like Cs. And really it was this idea. When we looked at our portfolio, what we saw essentially was that Camelback fellows were outperforming their peers coming out of other accelerators. They had more revenue 12 months after the program was over. Their impact metrics to the extent that they were measuring them were better, but they were still getting outraced three to one. And I wasn't surprised by that, but it was like deeply sobering. And oftentimes you have the conversation that's like, well, maybe they don't have this. Maybe they don't have that. And it's like, well, here's a six-year data set to say. There's nothing about traction. So either that means that sophisticated investors are not as sophisticated as we think, or that there's some deep bias in the system. I think they're too smart for the former. So I have assumed the latter until further notice. But it's like, well, what do we do with that? And so for us, part of our system's change work is we started this program strictly for, and specifically for resource allocators and philanthropy and impact investing to say, hey, when we look at an entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurs are just one piece of the puzzle, but that oftentimes the folks who set the conditions are the resource allocators. And if we're going to get to a more equitable and enlightened place that we need to do work with those philanthropists, those investors as well. And so we've been doing that over the last couple of years. And really our goal, quite frankly, is just to move more money to women and folks of color who are building companies and organizations in this space. And so we've been able to make some small change in the last couple of years. So we work with about 60 philanthropists and impact investors, everyone from institutions like Blue Meridian and MacArthur Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And we're starting to see that progress where they have increased their deal count to those populations by 13% so far, but that's to me dropping a bucket so we still have ways to go on that. So that's all the camelback stuff. I love it. And on camelback, before I ask you about Ruthless for Good, I remember you had a demo day in San Francisco. I was training a group of investors, brought them in there. I, you know, because you're supporting nonprofits and for-profits, very purpose-driven talking about equity. This was before George Floyd and before we started actually talking in the mainstream about racial equity. And I tricked some of them into going. It was great in terms of exposure, but a very powerful event, very moving, hearing the different founders that, you know, got that early-stage support that needed it. So to definitely appreciate that. And I want, you know, to give light to the fund that is starting Ruthless for Good fund. So the next extension, if you want to share about that. Yeah, definitely. So I mean, I think this data point that I articulated around this three-to-one piece sort of led us down two roads. One was this work with resource allocators that, you know, we call the capital collaborative. The other piece was, like, we should just start to find ourselves. Like, why are we sitting here begging everyone else to do the right thing when we could create a vehicle to, you know, help those entrepreneurs and catch them upside ourselves. And so as a nonprofit, you're always, you know, you're constantly asked, particularly, you know, at this stage when we're almost 10 years old, well, what's your sustainability plan? What's your sustainability plan? And we thought to ourselves, well, we, you know, in 2020 we raised more money than we had ever raised before. And so we said, well, what are we going to do with all this cash? One of the thoughts that we had that sort of met a lot of the different things we were trying to achieve as well, Camelback should just be the sponsor and first investor in a fund. And so we did it. We just said, well, it's our money. We don't have to ask for permission. And so we put the first $2 million in. You know, we're 18 million in on a $30 million raise, so we still have some ways to go. But the idea is to invest in education, the future of work in a category that is really a catch-all, but we're calling access innovation, which is just a bunch of fancy words to say. We want to invest in companies that are trying to increase access for communities that have been historically denied access. So we're in particular looking at things like fintech and inclusive health as two starting points for that. So in many ways it's an extension of the industries and sort of sectors that Camelback is investing in, but it gives us a new vehicle to be able to make really significant investments. So $40,000 checks are great, but in this fund we're able to write $250,000 to $800,000 checks and really begin to sort of help those entrepreneurs who quite frankly need it and have earned the investment. So to me it's not about charity. These are just great investments. And because Camelback is an LP in the fund, it gives us an opportunity that if this fund is well and successful that one day we may not have to ask anyone for money. That's it. You invest for good and come back. So great. Thank you. And Sergio, can you maybe speak to that a little bit? Your new work with Blue Ridge Labs. What is unique about it? What are you doing in New York City? Yeah, absolutely. So just to give a little context of Blue Ridge Labs itself, we are an innovation unit of the Robin Hood Foundation. A lot of people know it. If you're focused on New York, they're deploying 140 million a year into nonprofits across New York that are fighting and poverty. And we're the small incubation unit that we test and help launch, accelerate and invest in these early stage founders that are aligned with that. That there may not be the evidence that philanthropy usually needs to back these early stage founders. So example, and I'll tie this back actually to everyone, is when I first met Aaron, I was myself a founder working on a, it was like a text-based solution to prevent dropouts. At the time, this was more than 10 years ago, philanthropy was saying SMS to help stop people dropping out of college. Where's the evidence for that? I ended up in Blue Ridge Labs as a founder. And working on these solutions, and those are the types of entrepreneurs they support. They're like, this sounds like it makes sense. This founder knows there's an expertise here, but we don't quite have the evidence yet to back them. And so we support those early stage entrepreneurs. And then you talked about what's unique about it. Every entrepreneur that engages with our program, we have a community of over 1,500 low-income New Yorkers that every, in the fellowship, they will do user research with them. So they are building with, and I haven't seen any programs do quite the same thing where they're going out into the community, they're interviewing people on their issues with paying phone bills, they're low-income housing, access to credit for dealing with the issues of finding a job after you've come out of jail. So dealing with real issues and developing solutions with the community you're trying to serve. So that's a little bit about the work that we do. So thanks for asking. I want to switch gears as well. And Ariel, if you can, I'm going to switch it up. If you could share a little bit more about some of the founders that you've been working with. I understand one of them's here. If you can share more about the early-stage work you guys did with them and where they are now. Absolutely. And I think your point about community is so poignant and you're talking about kind of that cohort model because I think for us, especially in that early-stage space, I think especially anybody who's been a founder, you know it can be really lonely or you're setting out a path on your own and really trying to navigate and what happens past that idea, what happens as you make it through each step. And I think for us, Unleash is all about creating that community and that support and global network to stay with you. So even if you're done with our six-month program, you stay part of that community. You can still tap back into the mentorship, the access to the experts, to other entrepreneurs and innovators around the world. You constantly see people on our global community saying, hey, I need a tech developer who can give me a little bit of time or a graphic designer. And it's pretty phenomenal to see that people are so moved by the community and their experiences that they're willing to give back that time. They want to stay invested and connected. And so your point about Mike, I don't think he's actually here, but really want to call out one of our phenomenal teams that came through our original cohort in 2019 is they originally were Akari. And Mike Mitchell is one of the SoCAP entrepreneurs here today and is featured. I hope you get a chance to actually check out some of his work. But they started looking at a sustainability problem with an invasive species coming out of South America and originally we're looking at jerky. They established a fish jerky concept to look at overfishing, an intentional overfishing of this invasive species and really looking at kind of a holistic supply chain around selling this product. And they came through our program in 2019. They were one of the awardees that won and have actually pivoted. But they took all of the skills and the tools and that connection to the community and now are actually transformed into pesy pets and shameless plug for them. Their pet traits are actually awesome. My dog loves them. They're his favorite trait. But it's really phenomenal to see that in our program for them part of coming to the program was that actually was not working like the product market fit wasn't there but they were then able to really pivot and adapt and now we're having quite a bit of success and then tapping into those networks leads to access to other opportunities and you can build on that. And I think one of the best examples that we have and really where Cmonix is trying to stay committed to that longer term support is a group out of Tanzania called Navfeed. Phenomenal female founder who's a microbiologist by trade turned entrepreneur who is launching well she's created and found actually these micro I am not a microbiologist but she has created new forms of organic waste transformation into sustainable fish feed that has like a higher protein content than anything else on the market. It's revolutionary. She has now created and formed two different forms of bacteria that previously did not exist in science in darsaline and arguably without these global programs she might have just continued to do her scientific research in a lab but instead through these networks they're now scaling and launching their products out of Tanzania and we're looking at opportunities for them to make that jump and they're now engaged in programming across Africa and Cmonix actually awarded that team as one of our awardees. So we support as a program partner we help run the incubator program and on the other end we also create usually somewhere between five and twenty five thousand dollar awards for teams that we really believe have potential to scale or fit within some of our core priorities in the organization and then we provide them continuous ongoing support, mentorship, access so that way as they kind of come out and are really trying to launch and scale they have a little bit of that community and that buffer that's a bit more intentional as well as some of that seed funding and when Navfeed came out they were looking for literally five thousand dollars to just help get their equipment off the ground they had done all of their testing all of their research back in the lab everything that they needed but they could not get access to the five thousand dollars that they needed just to get the equipment to actually start producing the fish feed pellets and to most of us sitting in this room five thousand dollars like you could probably go find that from somebody in the next five minutes if you really needed it. You might have friends or family like Aaron mentioned that you can tap into maybe but for those that don't have that access they can just reach into their pocket and bootstrap five thousand dollars and maybe a couple of weeks they don't have people to tap into that's preventing them from entering that market no matter how phenomenal their innovation is no matter what their business model could be or the impact it could create so for us in Unleash and especially through Kilmonic's work and as we increasingly look at the investment side we're really looking to continue to support and fuel more support to these types of entrepreneurs that have the potential to change. That's great I remember going and speaking with the team and being amazed that I'll say my bias of being in the U.S. saying all the innovation is here and it's going out and that's not true. We just don't see it doesn't mean it's not there Unleash building those pipelines that are so important. Your model specifically is global what elements of what you're doing do you think are supporting this global entrepreneur network that you're building? Thank you and I think anybody who works in the innovation space you probably are familiar with a bunch of different labs there are a lot of phenomenal local ecosystems out there so by no means do I think or propose that we are the only ones doing what we're doing. We're absolutely not but I think we really try to mobilize partnerships and we look to find ways to elevate and collaborate with those local ecosystems rather than replace or silo and so I think for us every time we're going into a new area or even the hacks that I mentioned where entrepreneurs or social change makers are really empowered to also take our methodology and really take that forward they can also tap into those local ecosystems I think in a different way where it's bringing people together so instead of competing for resources or competing for support or visibility it's more enabling and empowering that local ecosystem which hopefully directs that capital or the funding in a way that's more effective or efficient for change but I think also the global nature of our program is part of what is so unique because in any cohort as I mentioned we may have 40 to 50 different countries represented at one time so an average Saturday for me is you know 200 young people from around the world all on one call together collaborating working together meeting with mentors from something like Camelback Ventures but also somebody based out of Singapore's innovation that we have in one of their universities or from Costa Rica working at Deloitte on the future of health tech I mean that's just like a small microcosm of an example but what you can get by bringing all of these folks together and especially in a virtual space in some ways the pandemic has enabled this to a whole other level because we can actually facilitate that on a weekly or daily basis for them to share that knowledge for them to share those connections and the networks and I think one of the other things that we have come to see over time is that there's something powerful albeit perhaps structurally wrong that comes with the credibility of being part of a global program and so when these entrepreneurs maybe stand alone in Darsalim or in rural Mexico and they're seeking to access capital or get that support for financing or even access alone alone they may be denied alone they may not be recognized as someone that is going to be trustworthy enough for a loan they may not even have access they're too high of a risk but all of a sudden you put them in our global program and we have global recognition in a brand surrounding it or like for our teams that come through Comonix we've had multiple of our teams tell us it was our connection to unleash and then the support from Comonix that got us access to finance because to those you know to Erin's point that have the resource allocation ability they look at that and they say okay maybe this isn't as risky we're willing to take a chance whereas maybe three years ago if it was the team standing alone they wouldn't do that so I think that for all of us we have a responsibility to really think about how do we push for a paradigm shift and make that change and recognizing that innovation and the potential for scaled impact can happen locally and it can be community driven like you were saying Sergio in New York but also how can we continue to support and enable programs like this that are also helping them throughout that way and really enabling that ecosystem to support them thank you thank you for that you I know you just mentioned a few companies that have benefited I wanted to give Erin if you want to share an example of a company that has benefited from from your program and in launching I appreciate you sharing that area a lot what you said resonates well I'm thinking in particular that we have in common called Wiggle Room their New York City based company started by a woman named Jamie Gin Lewis she is in the early childhood space and really had this idea for what would it look like to create a marketplace where parents who work non-traditional jobs could find child care and this market in particular was intriguing to me because I'm a parent I understand the pain of trying to find child care but in many ways I don't work a non-traditional job like I don't work in the retail sector where I'm subject to dynamic scheduling and I don't know what day I'm going to be working every week until that week and so if you're trying to find child care what do you do and one of the things I didn't know that I learned from Jamie Gin is that almost half the children growing up in this country the people who are their caretakers or their parents or their guardians they work non-traditional jobs and so when we're sort of thinking about the future of this country half the children, their parents or whoever is taking care of them are trying to figure out what to do with them every day how can they have an enriching and loving experience and quite frankly the most formative period of their life and so Jamie Gin's idea was to create a marketplace where these parents could find child care particularly in home-based child care centers so in cities like New York you know I lived in Brooklyn for several years we sent our kids when they were born to like a home-based daycare right across the street from where we lived and you know it was great and oftentimes those businesses are run by you know women of color and they're small businesses and they are the last to pay themselves because that's a really hard business to run and so her thought was hey well if I could create a marketplace where on the one hand I can help these parents find the child care that they need and on the other hand we can help essentially these small businesses that are oftentimes under capacity find more capacity to run a better business then it's a win-win you have parents who are getting the child care that they need you're having these small businesses to be at capacity so that often the women who are running these businesses maybe they will never become you know obscenely wealthy but they will be able to make you know 50, 75, 90,000 dollars a year as opposed to poverty wages because they're just not at the capacity to you know when they pay themselves last there's not that much left and so Jamie Jinn went through Blue Ridge Labs back and went through our program and then has been one of the first investments we made a couple investments in this fund one of the first investments that we made in the Ruthless for Good fund and I know we're also investing together on that Sergio so that's like one great example to me of you know an entrepreneur who was able to sort of go from Blue Ridge to Camelback to our fund and then I know that there's some other fund work going on at Robin Hood as well Thank you for sharing Matt she was able to in the beginning she didn't have a concept came into the fellowship went through the process of interviewing a lot of low income New Yorkers and then also a tremendous amount of experience launched the concept and then you know later ended up getting that seed funding she needed and then it's come full circle now we're investing you know for profit impact company in a later round so it takes an ecosystem of different programs to really get these early stage entrepreneurs to be successful to launch and get to the next steps and I'll so many entrepreneurs I'll there's one one I wanted to mention from our program that just like we're hoping Jamie Jin is in this vein as well but you know we have all different types of entrepreneurs in the Blue Ridge Labs program nonprofit and for profit one of the newest is called unlock labs and when the founding team was going through the catalyst program the co-founder was in jail like actually incarcerated and they were building an educational program to train folks in jail to have to have tech skills and you might say okay like so what like give them computers or you know they're not allowed access to that they had to create like almost an instance of the internet behind the firewalls so that they can test and learn and some of them are coming out getting jobs that are paying you know talk about 50k plus which you know for them that's exactly what they need that's the challenge of coming out of out of jail and then you can't get a job because you've had a record like you even though you've served and paid your time you're still you know suffering and can't integrate into society so they're doing great work and their early days right now working with a few and on the for profit and still impact we had a student or a graduate of Stanford University come out do a fellowship program he was you know interested in creating an impact organization and wasn't sure what to build first you know and then focused on EBT electronic benefit transfer and ended up saying interviewing folks and understanding that it was very difficult to use you know your your benefits to buy food and created what is now propel gotten over 50 million dollars in funding from the likes of Klein and Perkins and Andres and Horowitz and they started out you know of the lab so it's where we're super excited and proud of of the entrepreneurs that come through but enough about us we appreciate you coming here and listening now we're going to want to open it up and use the last few minutes for questions you know I think that there is one of the things that I have started to think about more and more my work at Camelback is like the impact of what a black woman her name is Chloe McKenzie she's a researcher calls financial trauma and you know how that impacts you know people you know but particularly you know women and folks of color who have like a really sort of sorted engagement with the financial system you know and I use that in the broadest terms and how does that begin to manifest itself in how you think about fundraising how you think about paying yourself or not paying yourself how you think about paying other people and so I don't know if I have the complete answer to that but I think it's something that I'm thinking more and more about as we work with entrepreneurs on fundraising as we work with entrepreneurs on financial issues is to say like yes we can sort of you know to stuff but I think we also have a responsibility to really think about what sort of impact financial trauma has had on those folks and how do we build how do we build learning into that so that it can be a place of healing in some ways because like I think it's necessary for people to really figure out like what do they want to do and how they want to engage in the system so that's like one thought I think there are other models out there obviously we talk a lot about VC and all that and that's really a small percentage of fundraising there are firms that are engaged in revenue-based finance obviously there are sort of traditional banks who are doing certain things that are CDFI so like VC is great but it's really a small small percentage of the funding market that takes up an outsized space in our dialogue I think this is a really important topic and I think well I've seen at least in the years that I've been working in this space at least some progress and more attention being paid I think for us we really talk about intentional inclusion and if you're not being intentional and if you're not actually making it a point to focus on you know any aspect of diversity and inclusion you're really leaving it to chance and on the east side our entire program really operates on a diversity and inclusion and equity model globally and it's a huge part of our core but what we still see globally is women being left behind whether you are even here in the US or Tanzania or Singapore it doesn't even matter what market you're in women are still being left behind and so we are actually in the process of co-designing with our women founders that have come through our program and are currently in our program a next iteration how can we better support and we're really trying to actually employ our own innovation methodology to work with our users as Sergio is explaining Blue Ridge Labs does in using the community what are their experiences the barriers, the obstacles, what are the challenges that they're facing whether they're early stage or those that are looking at scale or maybe they've received as you're saying that maybe initial access to capital maybe they've made it even five years in but where do they go from there and where are they hitting those ceilings and then how can we iteratively design programs and support at least within our scope and space and then working with other partners in the community to really elevate these issues and be very intentional about how can we better support no one single investor or partner or organization is going to be able to solve this but I think we really do feel like by being intentional at least raising this and letting people know this is not a check the box we've made progress in the last few years so we've solved this issue there is a long way to go and I would also really stress that part of the conversation needs to continue to be to Erin's earlier point this is good business these aren't just organizations and founders that it looks good we're supporting because it has a nice social impact there is a commercial element to this it's good business, it's good for the economy those are good solutions and there are markets out there for these businesses and so if we can create that space and enable access to capital and access to the resources that people need at every stage I think we're going to see a benefit globally throughout the economy so one is to that point you know there is a he's an economic journalist he wrote a book called the riches of this land a couple years ago and in the book he wrote about different things but there was an academic study looking at the economic growth since 1960 what can we attribute it to and what they found was that 40% of the economic growth since 1960 we can attribute to having more inclusion across race and gender in the workforce so to me then the way I translate that in my mind is what would it look like if we could have more space if we could be more inclusive across race and gender could we have 40% more impact than we're having right now could we have 40% more economic equity than we're having right now so that's one and then two you know the young lady could just ask the question around fundraising I also want to say there's work to be done for educators so oftentimes you feel like crap as an entrepreneur because it's not translating and one of the things that we've learned in the capital collaborative in our funder work is that sometimes it's just like the structures weren't set up for you to succeed anyway so one of the things that we talk about in the program is some research that we found so we can't take credit for it but oftentimes women get asked what the report calls prevention questions how are you going to make sure that this bad thing doesn't happen and that men get asked promotion questions tell me how awesome this is going to be how big do you think the market is going to be and so then if you're sitting there in an investment committee and you have you're looking at two companies say one is started by someone who is a woman or non-binary and you're looking at someone who is a man and all your notes for the dude are like this is, you know, how great it could be what the potential is and then all your notes for the other one is how they're going to prevent all the bad things from happening which one are you going to probably choose so I say I say all that to say that I didn't want to sort of leave this conversation sort of saying that the onus is only on the entrepreneur because I do think that there is an important onus on investors to sort of look at how they're approaching entrepreneurs and even just sort of using this example of the questions that they're asking and how something small like that that maybe you don't think is making a difference is actually making a huge difference awesome we'll take one more question and we have to close it out the fund is a barely a year old so we we look at all the companies that go through camel but the fund does look at all the companies that go through camelback we've invested in we made seven investments two and probably a third before the end of the year will be from camelback but we're not limited to just investing in the camelback pipeline you know obviously the accelerator serves as a really great pipeline and kind of you know place for the fund to find great opportunities but you know one of the things that we saw even before we had the fund is just that there were entrepreneurs who would come to us and we were like you're an awesome entrepreneur this is an amazing idea or company you don't need to be in another program but the only way I can write you a check is if you sit through this program and so we had to say no or maybe they said it's not the best fit and I had to respect it totally made sense to me and so I'm actually excited because now we have the opportunity as opposed to just sending someone a rejection letter and saying you're too late we can say hey we have a sister organization that is making precedency type investments go talk to them and you know maybe it's a yes but at least there's an opportunity there that's exactly what's happening at Blue Ridge Labs we have the catalyst program that people are applying to we're helping them and they're finding product market fit we're giving them money and then there are these companies that are just further along that aren't a fit but a great investment so shameless plug that you're an investor an impact investor looking for profit investments tap these impact programs there are for profit companies that are doing great things so check multiple boxes