 And we're still waiting on one or two individuals, but I think we can get started. My co-moderator, Priya Krishnamurthy, unfortunately, isn't able to log in at the moment, so you'll hear my voice for a little bit longer than anticipated. So apologies in advance. Well, welcome everyone to the SoCAP Virtual Open 2020. My name is Nareen Das from Addison Gateway, and I am co-moderating the session with Priya Krishnamurthy from 200 million artisans who will hopefully be joining us soon. If you're wondering whether you've come to the right place, well, this is where you should be because today we're going to be discussing the new frontier of entrepreneurship and impact investment. Reimagining the potential for the artisan sector. And why is this important? Well, the global creative economy encompasses every possible manifestation of human creativity, be it the arts, crafts, culture, audiovisuals, design, food, new media, publishing, broadcasting, and much more. It generates over two trillion US dollars in revenue, creates nearly 30 million jobs globally, and is growing at almost 12% annually within developing economies. The global artisan economy, which is also known as the hand worker economy, is a sizable contributor to the UN sustainable development goals, and is a huge subset of the creative economy, which is expected to grow to almost a trillion in revenue by 2023. For not many might know this, but in countries like India, after agriculture, the artisan sector is the largest source of employment. And unofficially speaking, this sector supports the livelihoods of over 200 million people, just in India alone. So the numbers aren't that different in Africa, Latin America, and even Southeast Asia. When we're talking about this next frontier of impact, we want to invite you to join us to understand the potential of the artisan sector as a driver for sustainable development, and how and why it can present an opportunity for investors, funders, philanthropists to shift their portfolios towards greater impact. And hopefully we hope to present a few different business models that can showcase that. So we promise you that your time will be well spent with us because not only do we have entrepreneurs joining us from all walks of life and different countries. We also have some amazing names from the world of impact investment joining us to share what they believe is an incredible area of opportunity. So we're really thrilled to have you here today and we'd like to say a big thank you and acknowledgement to Ellen Fish from the Sprout Enterprise Network in Thelonia, who is really instrumental in bringing us together as a collective here on this platform. Just a quick housekeeping tip, please do feel free to post your questions, even during the supplement in the chat box. We plan to reserve 15 minutes at the end for Q&A and we'll try to get to as many as possible. So with that, I'd like to begin by introducing our entrepreneurs who bring a real depth of experience building artisan enterprises. Joining us here today are Rashmi Barthi, co-founder and CEO at Avni, founder and chairperson of EarthCraft Cooperative and the founding director at Avni Bioengineering Private Limited. Avni was founded in Uttarkhand region of India in 1997 to create livelihood opportunities for rural women and men through traditional craft, clean energy and farm based activities. EarthCraft was then established in 2005 as a producer owned cooperative to produce and market high quality textiles in natural fibers and dyes. They are also reclaiming wastelands and increasing biodiversity by working with farmers to cultivate natural dyes, natural dye powders and extracts, non-toxic art supplies, wood stains and other sorts of applications of plant based colorants. Aasha Abbas is CEO and co-founder of Future Shoes which is a sustainable footwear enterprise. Each of these amazing shoes is handcrafted in a traditional workshop by a group of artisans based in the Sangla Hill region of Pakistan. These artisans are passionate about using their skills to support their families and community. Aasha is a software engineer by training who spent over a decade working at major tech companies and has combined this passion for shoes and skills and data analytics to create future shoes. Hedvig Alexander is co-founder of Powered by People. Powered by People is a B2B platform connecting handmade and natural cosmetic producers in low income communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America and connecting them with international buyers through digital production and traceability tools and access to financing. Prior to this Hedvig was founder of the Far and Wide Collective, an online marketplace that connects the world's most exceptional artisans with buyers across North America. Hedvig combines this background in international relations and data technology to help elevate the sector. And last but certainly not least, we have Salime Har-Cruces who is executive director and co-founder of Shaki Shea, a glass studio that creates glass pieces made from hand blown recycled glass collected by the local communities surrounding the Oaxaca area in Mexico. As a part of its ongoing efforts to reduce its environmental footprint, the studio has designed a heat recovery system to reuse waste heat and is pioneering the use of biofuels to fuel the furnaces and eliminate dependence on propane. Salime brings the straining in industrial engineering to bear at her work here at Shaki Shea. So as you can see, these entrepreneurs have created enterprises that support livelihoods through innovation and technology solutions for logistics and data, R&D around biofuels and supporting livelihoods in the agriculture sector as well. So let's turn it over to our entrepreneurs and Hedvig, we would love to start with you. Could you tell us a little bit about why creating these digital tools and the use of data and technology is really critical for the sector? Just given your experience with far and wide, where did you see the need and opportunity around digital literacy? I was mostly focusing initially on selling handmade products in the market, marketing to the North American audience, which actually went very well in many ways, but what was really difficult was to give enough support on the ground to help the different organizations scale their production, to communicate better with them, to share the sign better with them. And so I felt and also helped them get access to financing. And so that's really where I'd seen my co-founder do, Ella Pinovich, who had established Shopsoko in Kenya, which was a developer app that had created this virtual system where she could basically a virtual factory where she had all the artisans that were working for her jewelry. They were all dispersed in small workshops across Cabera. She could communicate with them and really managed to make a business more efficient. And so I really saw how the sector was really not connected enough to digital solutions and to financing. And then I think we kind of had to look under that, what are the reasons. And again, I think even the access to financing was quite linked to not only to the digital solution, but the idea of having a more professional process in the system with financial records and so forth. And that's really where we thought, let's try to create a new business, tying together what we see isn't there, but also using things from Ella's previous business that the technology part of it and expand that not only to one type of production and one brand, but to the entire sector. So that's the background of launching Power by People. Terrific. Thank you. And could you just share a little bit more about digital literacy and why, you know, you're so passionate about that as well, particularly for the sector? Yeah, I think the sector is really, really very, very analog. I mean, you can be handmade, but you don't always have or also have to be analog. And there are so many opportunities to get people more digitalized. I mean, actually just conducted a survey, which lots of people on this call helped us with and supported by the Mascar Foundation. And it actually seems that many artisans have access to mobile or feature phones. So they have consumer style apps like WhatsApp or Facebook. But that doesn't translate into enterprise software. Only like for some 8% has an ERP, 14% has a CRM, a customer management system, and less than 50% have any kind of accounting. And I'm not only talking a cloud, I'm talking desktop and cloud. So it's a sector that really doesn't have a lot of data. I think that really disables the sector also to present itself. I feel we are always, not that it's a competition, but I think we're always losing out to healthcare and education and other sectors that are as impactful as the handmade sector, perhaps, yes, certainly. And I think it's because we don't have enough data and we can't make the right arguments for why the sector is worth investing in when we all know in the sector that it is. And so I think digital tools that more automatically collects data that can then be aggregated and shown in surveys and presented to investors and donors and philanthropists would really help the sector greatly and also of course make it more efficient, which is the whole idea of it in the first place. Terrific. Thank you. So moving from an example of data to Rashmi, you know, how you've really integrated rural development very holistically integrating crafts and agriculture and the environmental sustainability as well. And I mentioned just a little bit about the natural dyes and I wondered if you could share Rashmi a little bit more about the work that you do with the, with the natural dyes and pigments, you know, and how this supports agriculture and how, how are these sort of initiatives funded. Yeah, well, we started our work with natural dyes about 21 years ago. And one of the core of our work is creating livelihoods in very remote Himalayan villages. So working with handmade textiles and reviving craft was one of our initiatives. And we found that dyes formed a very crucial part of it, including water and energy. So we decided to work only with natural dyes initially, because looking at the soil and water pollution caused globally by textile industry and the various other colorants that we use. As the textile enterprise sort of got established, we found that natural dyes by themselves were a large business. You know, the global dyes and pigments business is about $16 million or something. Yeah, so we were looking at, we were looking at how to get a small section for the farmers. So we were connecting the farmer and color. And slowly as we started working with natural dyes and purchasing it from farmers, they started protecting trees. So it had a direct impact on forest biodiversity. And the cultivation of Indigo especially had an impact on wasteland reclamation. We found that Indigo not only improved the quality of land, it also allowed people to cultivate isolated pieces of land, because pests don't attack it. And looking at the changing consumer behavior where they're looking at sustainability and a more eco-friendly solution, we feel that it's a very good business for small farmers across the mountains and even the plains. And so our business basically, the EarthCraft Cooperative runs on its sales and small loans. Avni Society raises some grants for infrastructure development and capital, for capital investment basically, and also for the upscaling part in terms of professional hires. So this is how we've been working so far. Yeah. Terrific. Thank you. So that's a really great example of using different types of models, business models as well to address some of those issues and needs. Shifting gears a little bit more now. Afshar, we'd love to turn to you and hear of the entrepreneurs presented today. Fuchsha Shoes is the newest or youngest enterprise that we're showcasing. And we'd love to hear just a little bit about how it came to be, but also how your background, particularly around data analytics has really helped you create and set up an enterprise like this. Jeremy? Okay, perfect. Yes. So hi, everyone. I'm Afshar. So I started Fuchsha back in 2016 after, you know, I discovered this beautiful artisan made products from my off my trips. I was traveling a lot and I was meeting these amazing groups of artisans all over the world. I would bring them back their stuff with me to Seattle, which is where I was located working for tech companies here in the area. And then, you know, always found my self in a situation where people will come in and ask where the products were from. I had paintings, shoes, bags, mostly stuff that was inspired by very different artwork made by indigenous crafts people. So that led me to look into this industry and I learned about the potential and, you know, like the scale. But I was also very surprised that nothing has been done in this space for, you know, so long. So I ventured out and since I am from Pakistan, I had a lot of fun. I have seen upfront in person how these different regional artisans are located in different parts of the world. And the idea was how do I connect these artisans that I have access to to the global consumers. So we started off with a marketplace idea, but very quickly pivoted to shoes. Shoes happened to be a product that we picked so much more traction on by bootstrapping. And just we just had a lot of customers that would buy dozens of shoes all at one time. So we decided to get the product right, get it made, you know, scale it from coming, build a supply chain that is built. That is backed by artisans who make shoes and beautiful embroideries and get it. So fast forward, we have sold over 15,000 pairs of artisan made shoes and we are growing 500% year over year. And, you know, we're building this thing, building our production and supply chain capacities. With your question around how my data analytics background has helped, even though we are in retail and fashion business, it's an e-commerce business primarily. So having that understanding of deep, you know, data and going at the granularity of the data, understanding different target segmentation for the customers we should be reaching out to what kind of messaging resonate with them, what kind of images resonate with them. Marketing is a strong part of what we do storytelling. So just being very efficient in our e-commerce sales funnel has helped us quite a bit in building all of that traction, running a B testing. So, you know, it's all data analytics at the end of the day. Perfect. Thank you for that. So a great example of using those skills and, you know, how you can really build an e-commerce platform with handmade products as well. So Salibi, we're going to turn to you next. And, you know, again, you've been heavily involved on the R&D side, you know, with your craft around recycled glassware, looking at biofuels and things like that. So we'd love to hear just a little bit more about how you have developed that R&D around the biofuels and how you're supporting other craft industries such as pottery as well. Could you share just a little bit about that experience too? Yes, of course. Thank you everybody for joining the panel. Well, Shakiche started as a business for helping the local economy of Oaxaca, Mexico to convert waste glass into new products, crafts with blown glass. We started around 2012, we were confronted with an energy crisis because propane gas, which is used for melting oven, was the price was rising like incredibly. And we learned that 85% of glass studios in Mexico shut down like that. And we were probably logistics. And so my partner, Christian Thornton, and myself, get to research on renewable energies. Therefore, we found out that recyclable was being dumped and contaminating water rivers in the city. So we found out that he had this as propane. So to the Mexican science of technology. And now we are using the off-cycle vegetable oil in our ovens for glass. What we were doing that we learned through non-profit organizations here in Oaxaca who started approaching us that there are other artisans who are in need of this. If you actually, if you take a look at a lot of crafts in the world, they require energy. For example pottery, ceramics, even tiles, which is not just a, it goes a little bit away from the artisan world. All the ceramics that we see around energy to make chocolate, we need energy to process. To look as sort of in the fire process. And by mezcal makers. It's an industry and it's creating a lot of jobs. But at the same time it's polluting. Of the mezcal making is going to our streams, water streams. And so what we did is what one of the challenges that artisans have is the access to have hands or funds for technology development. They know a lot about the temperatures that they need. So Christian and I decided to create a search and develop for shakik shakik. Well, shakik shakik. Yes, Jesus from… We mad technology transfers. And now they were helping all makers to adopt in technology. technology. So basically, for new ovens, highly efficient in keeping the energy, the heat inside. That's terrific. Yeah. On the other hand, their environment is better. And so that's how we're helping them improve true technology. And we've seen that they're more open to new things in difference to the past, artists as closed-minded, willing to change people. Nowadays, the new generations are big and people's ongoing. Terrific. Thank you, Selime. Yeah, that's some great examples of using technology for sustainable energy as well. So just shifting gears once again, a big part of this conversation is really around impact and social impact, but also measuring impact. And I wondered if our entrepreneurs could talk a little bit about how they define and measure impact. And so, Hedvig, I'm going to ask you once again if you could just share a little bit about that. Impact is really important. And it shouldn't be the last thing you try to measure after you've done all the other things, which is often the case and for lots of very understandable reasons. So I think as a new adventure, you have the opportunity to build this in. And again, also, lining up to the sustainable development goals is extremely important to quantify the impact. And there's some people on the panel who are very good at that. And I think, again, technology can be incredibly good at this. And I think there's also a build opportunity. The software we have created in its current form by whoever manages the production of the goods that are being made. And they can then use that to put their orders in and they can then distribute one or many orders to as big a network as possible. My co-founder Ella had 2,500 small workshops connected to her. So there's really no limit and it's a way to communicate well. And I think this is where there is an opportunity to extend this all the way down to the Artisan. And Nilam, who's on this panel, we're doing some piloting with Industry Foundation where we have been working with their production management teams. And they have 5 Hubbards. They have a Hubbards spoken model, she can explain that obviously much better than I can in Bangalore. Oh, it looks like you went on mute. You put yourself on mute. Sorry, I'm so sorry. I was just saying that with Nilam in India and Industry, one of their businesses, Greencraft, producer on businesses, Greencraft, we have the system we've designed now extends not only to the production manager and the 5 Hubs that normally produce where women can come every day and produce. Now, of course, when people are locked into their homes, it has to be extended all the way down to the individual Artisan. And we're in the process of just very possible. We're using WhatsApp for business, which is quite elegant. So we didn't have to hold new app in a short amount of time. And so what they have done is they've bundled 10 houses with producers in one. And then the technology is technically going to be all the way down there. So I do think this is obviously early days, but there really is this opportunity to measure all the way down also with mobile payments. I think this is only going to be stronger with COVID and certainly beyond. And so I think there was a whole new opportunity to measure impact in a very granular way at the individual Artisan level in the future. Thank you. So I'd like to ask some of our entrepreneurs as well, what their ask is, you know, of this audience and this panel here or this group here at the SoCAP virtual. And you know, if there was one thing that you would like for people to, you know, think about and what your ask would be as an Artisan enterprise, what would that be? So Rashmi, I'm going to ask you to just respond to that if you could. Rashmi, looks like you're on mute. So we are looking for this enterprise because we work in a pretty remote area. We're looking for interim support for the COVID situation right now, because the sales have gone down, it has impacted the business. So we are looking for about $1,15,000 for that. And we are also looking for upscaling the business because we are working with natural dyes and creating different applications in woodstains and art supplies and so many other things. So we would like to upscale that business with infrastructure and training and many things. For that, we are asking about $700,000. And we've uploaded some one pages for that. Yeah. Terrific. Akshay, what might your ask be of this audience? So for us this year, we have seen some explosive growth. We are building production supply chain capacities, now in Pakistan, where we can hire more artisans, have our own embroidery units in-house, where we can hire more women artisans. We have a seed round open. We already have traction on it. We're raising million dollars. And we're just going to pump in this money in growth. Super exciting. Thank you. And Selime, what might your ask be of this group? Selime, it looks like you're on mute. Well, while Selime is coming along, before we transition, there you are. Okay, go ahead. I don't know how that happened. We are carrying out work already, but we will teach more and more artisans. Then a scale industry is growing. Others need to do new design. It's happening all over the world. It is industries, artisans. It just can grow. I think we would be able to learn more about artisans, actually. I'm talking to go to stopping immigration. Terrific. Thank you. Wonderful. No worries. Thanks Selime. So before we segue to hear from our investors here on this panel, we'd love to just take a couple. We have a few minutes to take a couple of questions for the entrepreneurs. So if anyone has any specific questions, if you'd like to put them into the chat, that would be great. And we can just take a couple of questions before we segue into the next part of our conversation. It looks like quite a few people here know of each other or know each other, and it looks like a lot of great connections are happening on the chat as well, which is terrific. So Priya, I'll hand it over to you and I'll let you take it from here. I'm going to jump off for a quick bit so that I can let Luni join as well. Thanks Noreen. I had a bit of a struggle to get into the session. Audio wouldn't share but I'm finally here and I'm really excited to meet all of you. You've heard from some amazing entrepreneurs who are driving real impact on ground and not only are they embedded in the SDGs, they're working in industries and sectors as diverse as retail, agriculture, energy, technology and lots more. But let's turn to the investors, funders and intermediaries who've seen value in investing in this sector. I'm joined by Audrey Selyan, the director of Artha Impact, which is the Impact Investing Arm of Trianta Capital, a dedicated advisor to the Singh Family Trust. Since 2007, their initiative has been focused on alleviating poverty and creating sustainable livelihoods in India by investing in early stage impact enterprises. Kayleen Alvarez is the CEO of Athena Global and the managing director of Biduk, Indonesia. Athena Global provides advisory services for impact investing and using money as a tool for positive social change. Biduk is a de facto funded lending platform for small and growing businesses in Indonesia with a focus on women-owned and women-led businesses. Looney lives, I hope you're back. Can I see you? Are you back? Is he back? Yay! Okay, good to see you. Looney is an entrepreneur, author, mentor, advisor and investor. He is the CEO of Pledge, an accelerator, a conscious company accelerator helping mission driven for-profit companies through the complex path from idea to through revenues. And finally, Neelam Chipper is a Schwab social entrepreneur and the co-founder and managing trustee at Industry Foundation, an India-based organization tackling the root causes of poverty by creating an ownership-based, organized, creative manufacturing ecosystem for micro-entrepreneurs. Welcome again. Thank you, everyone, for being here. And this is quite exciting. We've already heard some amazing stories. I'd like to start by touching upon some of the issues that the entrepreneur has brought up. And let's start with perhaps the motivations that drive you as investors. Neelam, perhaps let's start with you. Would you like to go first, given that you wear both hats, that of an entrepreneur in this sector and now an investment intermediary? Hi, everyone. You can hear me? Yeah. And scale within this. So just happy to know that I've been elevated to investment intermediary. I'm largely a practitioner, yes. But I do believe that co-practitioners will have to move into the investment intermediary role. I think that's quite logical eventually. Yep. So essentially, we have always believed looking at the volume of artisans in the country and in the world that we have to really look at models for scale also. And the beauty of creative manufacturing is the fact that it's smaller batches, it's agile in terms of design and creative input, and that's its trend. And how do we scale it, the sector, so that it becomes more investable in without losing that property? So that's super critical, right? That you do not lose the value of the sector. But you retain that and you can scale it. So I think we have some examples in place for that. It's taken us very, very, very long to get there, almost 30 years. And we are also sharing these techniques now. So essentially over the years, we learned that scale would only come. So the typical village size anywhere in the world, if we've all read the Israeli writer Yuhal Noah Harris, is 300 people, right? It's 300 people in a village. So it's the same in India, it's the same, I'm sure, anywhere in the world, right? So we work with small clusters of women who are scattered across rural India. And so we were originally working on them, working in hubs or spokes of 50 women each, then they supply to a hub. In COVID, we realized that it was impossible even getting them into that 50 person spoke. So now there's a lot of home based work as Hedwig was saying. And I think the biggest asset we all have with scale today, which is investment, because as investors are, it's very tough to find very small investors, it's not easy, right? And it's easier in debt, but it's very tough in seed and acceleration. But I'm very happy to say there are some people on the panel here who are a voice for that, which is fantastic. But by and large over the years, we've noticed that investors tend to look for a little size, right? And therefore, we are able to build producer collectives, producer companies in India, which are formal companies of 2000 women, 1000 women, but they work in small clusters. We also have taken this route having experimented a lot with the small orders that the issues with global supply chain, right? I mean, there's a no forced labor, no child labor, a minimum wage. And I don't think this is a forced compliance on the sector. I think this is something the sector values, right? We would love our artisans to not be under forced labor conditions. We would love our artisans to earn above minimum wage, et cetera, et cetera. So therefore, it's a mutual requirement between intermediaries and global customers and buyers that if we want all these compliances to be met with, there's a certain cost of running a profit center, right? And we've discovered and we're looking at sweet spots and sizing. And it's looking like a collective of say 1000, 2000 women can do about a million dollars of revenue annually, right? So we are saying that we just did the math, a collective of 3000 women can do close to a million dollars a month, literally a month, right? So we can do 12 million dollars, 10 million dollars with 3000 women, and therefore what we realized, our key realization and learning has been go for big B2B, go to the larger brands who are also going to morph in the next 10, 20 years, because everybody's buying sizes is going to shrink gradually because that is what technology is going to make happen, right? Amazon nowadays places orders for just 300 pieces. When people like Gap were placing orders for 300,000 pieces, that's what the power of technology is going to enable, which is going to be a huge asset for our sector in the years to come, right? But how are we going to get some sort of aggregation done? So that's the thing we are trying to sort out. And so we focus on B2B sales a lot, which is supplying to global giants, say like an IKEA or an H&M or a Target or a Walmart, because these guys do a lot of artisan sourcing, a lot, right? And so we work on it. So what you're saying is that while model models can coexist with scalability and scalability is not really, you know, it's a myth that this sector cannot be scaled. That's essentially what you're also driving at. So that there is place and there is place for different models and different kinds of enterprises to coexist within this sector. And thank you. Thank you, Neelam. I think the work that you're doing is incredible. So thank you for sharing your story. I just want to be mindful of time. So I want to bring in Kaleen at this point. Kaleen, given your experience and given what we've heard from the entrepreneurs earlier and your own experience in this actually around and especially working with women entrepreneurs, what do you see are the structural challenges for enterprises to access finance and how is Biduk responding to this? And what more can we do? No, thank you, Priya. Let me try to answer your questions in the order that you asked them. So first, let me address some of the structural bias around gender lens investing. Listen, it can't be any surprise to anybody at SOCAP that there's huge systemic bias against small and medium enterprises, but particularly disproportionately against women entrepreneurs and women founders. And that is just basic things like women not knowing bankers or financiers. It's not who they hang out with, right? Or women often don't have collateral to pledge for a loan. Women tend to run less formal businesses in terms of record keeping and that makes bankers kind of crazy. And that ironically enough, the types of businesses that women start tend to be the sectors and the types of businesses, bankers and financiers understand the least, right? So we have all kinds of structural barriers that we bring to the table. And then when we talk about women in the creative economy, listen, the creative economy businesses make up about half of all women entrepreneurs worldwide, right? And women entrepreneurs tend to work in the creative economies because these are the things that they know well. And in many cases, these are the things that it's culturally appropriate for women to go into business doing. But again, the other side of that is that these are the businesses that financiers understand least. And so it just exacerbates the financing gap. Another structural issue, and I mean no disrespect here, but for the last 50 years, donors, DFI's and philanthropists often talk about women as beneficiaries, right? They're never taken seriously as credible clients, especially when we talk about women of color. And that whole nomenclature of calling women beneficiaries when it comes to finance, it just reeks of, it's just derogatory and reeks of privilege. So I think as financial institutions, one of the first things that we can do when talking about funding women in the creative economy is to treat them as clients first and foremost, and focus on providing solutions that meet their needs and their wants as legitimate entrepreneurs, but not as beneficiaries. When it comes to financial services, women are a huge untapped market segment. And yes, they want different product structures and repayment capacity. And yes, they look at risk differently. What we do know and what the evidence bears out over and over again, is that women are not excessively price sensitive. What they are is that they demand value for money. And as financiers, very few financial services providers know how to provide that as a value proposition to a small and medium enterprises, and in particular to women. Women are very, very relationship based when it comes to building their business. And that definitely extends to the types of financial intermediaries women entrepreneurs want to work with. Men are much more transactional. And that is something that bankers are much more used to. And so I think it takes time to build trust with women entrepreneurs, but that's not a negative or a fault of women. As financiers, we have to be able to meet these incredible women entrepreneurs in the creative economy, at least halfway. And so to answer your second, the second part of your question, how do we do this at Beeduck Indonesia? So just as a bit of background, Beeduck does only unsecured lending. About 70% of our portfolio is to women entrepreneurs. We are industry agnostic, but because we have a strong gender focus, a lot of our entrepreneurs are women. And all of our loan sizes are between 10 and 70,000 US dollars for 12 to 18 months. We have very, very flexible loan structures. That's sort of our bread and butter. And our approach is to fundamentally partner with the women entrepreneurs or the entrepreneurs that we're trying to work with to build trust that goes both ways, not just that us trusting that the information that we're getting is real and legitimate, but we want them to trust us and that we are a partner in helping them build their business. And another reason that we do peer debt is that, listen, these small businesses have had to fight way too hard to get the business to where they are now. And I do not want to take away their equity at this stage, right? I want this to be pure debt. And so just let me give you a really practical quick example. So we made a loan to a female entrepreneur in Indonesia, and she has a very successful business called Echo Doe. And she works with over 200 artisans and micro farmers from all over Indonesia. And they create these really cool like gift baskets that are also made in Indonesia. And she puts like organic coffee in it, and this really cool chocolate and amazing spice mixes that Indonesia is really, really known for. And then she puts in these like cool batik home goods and stuff like that. And it's been very, very successful for corporates as gift baskets, but also with souvenirs at some of the more high end retail. And what we found under COVID is that she really rose to the top as a leader and showed her resilience in changing her B2B model to a B2C model. And we really wanted to support her in that. And so for her, what that meant is taking the artisans that she already had trained and pivoting to producing PPE. And so for her, she started to get a lot of orders in PPE to produce PPE. But as a result of COVID, the payment terms were really changing. And when we looked at her cash flows, we saw an incredible amount of volatility in her cash flows because of the purchase orders. Pre COVID, she was getting about 30 to 50% down on an order and payment terms were net 10 after delivery. And after COVID, she had to put 100% of the money down in order to get the production done. And then her payment terms were net 30. So what we were able to do for her is to really look at her cash flows and structure alone, such that she kept the principle for as long as possible. And her payments were ballooned. So she only paid a tiny percent of the principal back on the first payment, a little bit more on the second. But she kept 70% of the capital until the very, very last payment. And what we also did is we structured so that she repaid us when she had the most cash in the bank, not the least cash. And she was ecstatic that we were able to completely customize a product that perfectly meet the needs of a woman entrepreneur in the creative economy. And if I have a few minutes left or just a minute left, Priya, can I answer your last question about what can we do? That's okay. Yes, quickly, quickly. Listen, I think, first of all, two things, pipeline and just where we have to meet the women. So I think in pipeline, I don't buy this notion that there's no good women entrepreneurs out there. But we have to stop hosting pitch events at fancy hotels in downtown cities at eight o'clock on a Thursday night and expect women to show up there. That is our own bias. And the second thing that I think that we have to do is meet the women where they are, not where it's convenient for us. And that includes understanding the businesses that they're starting. Thank you, Kaleen. I'll vote for that. Meeting women halfway, meeting entrepreneurs halfway, and not calling them beneficiaries, but legitimate clients. Yeah, I mean, 10 points for all of that. Thank you so much for sharing this. Audrey, I'll come next to you. Given clearly, there's a diversity of entrepreneurs working across development priorities in this sector, solving on ground challenges in industries, as varied as retail, agriculture, energy and lots more. Is that a challenge or an advantage? And as an impact investor, what are the opportunities this sector presents to you? Thank you, Priya. And thank you, everybody so far. This has been really a great session. Just from our side, just one line of context. As a small private player working in the Indian impact investing ecosystem for about 12 years now, our positioning has evolved a little bit, but primarily we are equity investors. And our logic and rationale is primarily one informed by long termism, patience and high engagement to the extent that we're able to add value. But then we also do equity because India is not a debt friendly country for those of us that are categorized as external capital. And it would be fair to say that we're all struggling with kind of the debt starved entrepreneurs that we're trying so desperately to be supportive of. To your question, Priya, I think it's so challenging. I actually see the diversity of the entrepreneurs. Of course, there's richness. There are so many different models being tested out. There's the bright side and the dark side of that diversity. The dark side is that it's a challenge because there are some investors, sorry, there are some models and sectors that are just that much more difficult to engage with and to invest in. And I would say I've been thinking about it about, you know, the perceived effectiveness or viability of an intervention is likely a function of a few factors. One, it's always going to be a function of the existing concentration of players indicating whether there's an abundance or a scarcity of capital for these kinds of entrepreneurs. So I dare say that the capital pool available for artisanal businesses in India is nowhere close to the high levels of concentration that it should be. But that in and of itself already creates, there's buzz and there's sometimes ill-formed opinions based on anecdote and not actual rigorous analysis that then discourages people from engaging. The other factor that I think affects people's perceptions of these opportunities is the size of the ticket. It comes back to where it's always clear, as Neelam said, that the smaller it is, the harder it is, the relatively more expensive it is. And so and then so you find yourself asking, oh, you know, is this artisanal business and its model? Are they asking enough? Is this is this enough to tip the model towards scale and whatever that means? And oftentimes, if women are at the helm of these enterprises, you'll see just intrinsic conservatism in modeling and projections. There's no cowboy, you know, shooting just, you know, from the hip. There's more calculated care and that doesn't necessarily inspire, ironically, perversely, the confidence that it should, simply because you see much smaller asks than should be asked. There's also the question of the likelihood of a structure that is well governed where models and margins are relatively easy to understand. That's not always the case in certain sectors, particularly where different government programs and state subsidies and other types of public interventions, excuse me, come into play. Finally, I think, I don't know, like the, in terms of the investor mindset and the approach, the perceived effectiveness of an intervention is going to depend on the wiring in the brain of the investor. And that's also a function of like thinking about, oh, what's the opportunity cost? It doesn't always mean that someone's asking, well, I won't do this because like, where's my financial return higher? I mean, in our little alternative universe of the social capital market, presumably impact investors are asking, well, where is my impact higher? I mean, we hope, right? In our experience, I'll end with this. As an investor that equally weighs the likelihood of sustainability of a model, like we're perfectly happy to wait three, five, six years to see a model tested and flexed to be able to find its footing. But I'd say we're doing our best to engage where our capital can truly be a support. And a big part of that is like the art part, not the science part of this. And so this harkens back to Kayleen's words, like a few minutes ago, we've, we've seen so many struggles around deal tables. The moment the going gets tough and the control issues rise to the surface, as soon as things hit the fan and someone has to crack open the legal agreements that you never thought you wanted to read again, this is where the approach, that's where it just shines through. And finally, I mean, one of the things we're trying to do is just, I guess, I do, I do think it's an, it's, it's an intrinsically different approach to investment strategies for impact. We're trying to get folks to co-invest, work together and share diligence. We share diligence ourselves. We try to encourage others to do the same. And our hope is that some of these like barriers and some of these like parameters and factors that make it harder to engage, particularly with a difficult sector, can be broken down when you see your peers active. So happy to expand on that later. I hope that sort of answers your questions. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. No, my mind, it also seems like what we're missing, the sector and the opportunities within the sector seem to be built around perceptions and anecdotal evidence. And perhaps we need to have more forums or, you know, bring to the fore the kind of opportunities that are already available in the sector, the fact that there is possibility for scalability, and the fact that a lot of enterprises with are actually creating impact on ground and they are like ground if supported, right? So that's, you know, we perhaps thank you for sharing the challenges that you're facing, Audrey. And this is really where Looney comes in with his accelerator, because he's already started investing in this sector and has a lot to share on how we can build out what is, you know, I mean, Looney would love to hear more about your accelerator, Fledge, since you've already started investing Afshan is part of your accelerator. How do you assess these investments? What factors are driving your funding decisions? What does a typical investment look like? Or is it a grant? Or is there a typical? And how do you know I'm packing in a lot of questions? We'll get through as much as I can. I know. Yeah. And so we'll start with how we find these things. To be clear, Fledge is a global network of impact accelerators. So it's not just the one I run in Seattle, but we have partners around the world that run similar programs. And because we're global, we see, we see entrepreneurs from pretty much everywhere. It's been like 140 countries. And we're impact focused, not specifically to this sector or any other sector. We just want to see every one of the goals solved. And so we get applications in every, every part of the SDGs. And what that means is we're kind of a microcosm for what happens in the real world, which is every one of these entrepreneurs is competing with every single other entrepreneur in the world for capital. Because we invested in Fuchsia Shoes, but we chose that across, that would have been a year ago, we chose that across 350 choices, 400 choices. And we thought that was one of the best seven to invest in. And there were others in other artisan companies in there, but only a handful. The other one she was competing against were food and ag companies and energy companies and whatnot. So how on earth do we narrow it down and choose it? It comes down to three criteria. Team impact and odds of success. So it's a for profit fund, pledges an accelerator and investor. And so we care about earning our money back. We do that when our graduates succeed. And I'll tell you the structure in a second. And so we have to bet on a great team. So we want to vet the team and the founder and make sure that we think they're going to succeed. They have to have as big an impact as we think is reasonable for them to have. That could be something that works in a few cities, but is incredibly impactful in a few cities. It could be something that is incredibly impactful globally. And it could be that we just want to, we love the model and we want to see the model succeed. And then we want to see it replicated. We want to see lots and lots of copycats. Kind of the opposite of the Peter Thiel model of winner take all. We don't want winner take all. We want models to be proven out. We want anecdotes to be told as stories of success. And we want other people to say, hey, that looks great. Let's do that too. And that's all gets wrapped up in terms of odds of success. There's lots of subcriteria in there. And then how we invest is pretty simple. We invite companies to come to an accelerator into one of our cities. We do that for typically, historically, two months in person because in person works so much better than virtual. And while they're there, they're working on their business strategic plan for two months every day while they're running their business because everyone's running a business now. We're not taking ideas. We're taking real businesses. We hand each company $20,000 in cash. Plus all our help. And in exchange for that, we're taking some ownership as equity, except we're structuring it as redeemable equity. They use 4% of future revenues to buy us back out at a higher price than we paid. We're looking for a 2X return. And that's a 2X return over 7, 8, 9, 10 years. Not anything soon. Pretty patient. But the key piece is it's based on revenues. So if they grow their revenues and grow their business, we get paid back. The more we help them, the faster we get paid back. And we know they can pay it back because it's based on revenues. So if they have no revenues, they pay us nothing. Revenues go down. They pay us less. And then your last question was on how we measure all this. That's the tricky part. I'm talking about that at SoCAP for the seven years I've been coming here. We use three methods. One, we do measure gender. We don't screen for gender. We don't choose based on gender, but we do add up how many women run companies we have, how many women co-founders, how many companies run by men that are specifically helping women. So we report on that. We're about a third. And so we're upset that it's not half, but we're not picking for them. And so of the great companies, about a third run by women, we measure it based on the SDGs just because we're so broad. We do a histogram of which SDGs are we solving for. And the third one is one I spoke about at SoCAP 15, which is we use the Pinchot impact index. I'll throw that in the chat window, which is a way to take all of this diverse impact and boil it down to a number. And it takes like 10 minutes and it comes up with the number. And once you have a number, it's no longer fun. But we do it anyway. And I think I answered all your questions. Thank you. You did. I believe you did. I know we're running out of time and we want to make sure that we get enough questions from the audience. But I'm just going to ask one quick question of all of you and maybe we can keep this brief. What would you like to see change in this sector for it to be elevated as an investment opportunity overall? Quick thoughts. Who'd like to go first? No, I can, I can go. I mean, I'm going ahead. I already spoke the longer. Scale, scale, scale, scale. Yes, I'd love to see some scale. Yeah, thanks. Without and it's possible to do it without losing the ethos of the whole sector. It's really possible. Yeah, thanks. Collaboration on the financing side. More deals share. Yeah, we need more proof. We need more stories of more success so that more money flows in, because ultimately we're lacking capital. That's what's holding us all back. That was the same thing. If any of us is going to survive COVID, it's going to be through collaborations and partnerships and more of that. And we need an evidence based understanding as financiers of the business, the businesses in the creative economy. Yeah, just a willingness for investors to be able to help fill in the gaps. No, no single entity has all that it takes to capitalize the diverse, you know, the multiplicity of needs. And so there's grants and there's debt and there's market making and testing and all kinds of different things and different kinds of money are needed for that. And it's all there. It's just we're not, we're not, we're not in sync. And just a very quick, quick, quick question. I know a lot of there's been a lot of discussion around the fact that we need to find different ways to measure impact and impact, you know, open up, bring in the qualitative into the quantity, along with the quantitative when we're talking about impact measurement. Is that something that you're as investors also willing to look into because that is also quite a sector to any kind of creative enterprise and their work? I can start. So for us, or if you would like to go for it. Yep. For us, absolutely. I mean, we have all kinds of impact measurements and we look at not just counting women, but valuing women and also valuing the jobs that they create, not just the number of jobs, but the wages in the jobs and the pay gap in the jobs. So I think that absolutely being able to tell the story of the impact is critical and something that we need to do better. Thank you. If there's anyone else, if you have any thoughts, otherwise I'd like to bring in audience questions. If there are any questions from the audience, let's have them right now because our entrepreneurs are here as well as our investors. So it would be great to get that going. If not, I still have more questions. Lina asked the interesting question about rural versus urban. So what I'm seeing is a mix of companies based in urban areas and companies based in farming communities. And in the case of the artisanal companies, I'm presuming that's going to be more urban than rural, but I don't know. I'd love to hear the rest of that that people tell us. I think any other questions? Is that Kate, Kaleen? Are you just seeing rural artisans or is it all in Jakarta? No, so interestingly enough, we're seeing a lot of rural but with processing facilities in Jakarta. And in fact, I should just say we just closed our first round of investment with friends of Talonia and Ellen Fish to do nothing but develop products that build the linkages between rural artisans and access to markets in Jakarta. So watch this space. That's exactly the gap that we're trying to fill next. Any other questions? Let me see. Do we have other questions? Because I have another one if nobody has a question. So okay, I have a question. I will use our questions. There's about around the two month accelerator as it is harder. Lina says my question was around the two month accelerator as it is harder for rural. Lena, would you like to expand on that? There was someone else who posted or she asked earlier like how on earth does a company leave their business as its founder, leave their business for two months? We get that question a lot. And the answer is two reasons. Two reasons why it's important to do this. One is first time entrepreneurs don't make enough time for strategic planning. They work on their business every day. They work on their problems that they're having, their daily problems every day. And they don't take the time. They need to think about what's going to happen the rest of the quarter or the next year or onward. And that never happens. And when they don't make that plan, the bigger company never happens because they haven't planned for it. And so taking that time in two months seems like an endless amount of time is really useful and really powerful. And the only way I've seen people make the time to do that is to burn jet fuel and get on a plane and go to a new city. And to pick on Afshan, she's based in Seattle and so she was not there every day for two months and she got less out of the program than the other founders who came in from Africa and elsewhere who had no choice but to work on their stuff for two months. And she's doing great, but she didn't do what the others were doing in the room. And the second one is we've gotten a whole lot of feedback as we've moved along in more recent years, companies with more traction and more business, that the CEOs have been getting really good by having this opportunity. They're getting much better at being managers because they've had to hand off the everyday management to their number two and they've had to hand off the oversight to the rest of the team and they do check in on them every day, but they're only able to check in on them, they're not able to micromanage them. And so they're learning that difficult process which usually comes much later when you're at a hundred people in your company and they're learning it while it's 10 or 15 people on how to delegate and let the team do what they want to do. It's possible Priya is frozen. She could be having network issues. We got three minutes left. I'm going to make a pitch at the end here since we can. Since Ellen brought us all together, Ellen Fish runs Friends of Talonia, which invests in companies like this. And I have a non-profit on my side. I wear another hat which is called Realize Impact. And Friends of Talonia and Realize Impact just did a partnership where we spun up a philanthropic investment fund, the Rise Fund, in order to invest in companies like this. And it's philanthropic. We'll take donations from donor-advised funds, from foundations, or straight brand new donations if you want. We'll take your appreciated shares in Amazon if you'd like to divest from that. You get a tax deduction and we'll turn those into investments into companies like these. And then when there's a return, we'll re-donate 99% of whatever comes of it back to your donor-advised fund or into a new one if you don't have one or whatnot. The money stays in philanthropy, but we'll put it to work doing investments in the meantime. And contact Ellen Fish if you're interested in that. Yep. And while we are making pitches, while we are making pitches, we are making a pitch to raise working capital for some of the collectives which are supplying to global brands. So we find there's a huge dearth of working capital once we reach scale. And so also I think the technology for the working capital is super critical. So once work with the powered by people, we also work with proof-of-impact on a more transparent system to show the investors on debt, especially how their money is flowing through the system. I think technology is going to make that more seamless. And so yes, we work with Montcom Capital in the Bay Area who has set the instruments up to get the debt money in and out of India. And there are instruments that if you do provide debt, you will get a coupon of about 7% to 8%. If anyone's interested, please do let Ellen know, I mean for our collectives. And you should be able to get your money in and out of India in a year. Ideally it's three years, but there's also an instrument right now that you could get it out of the country in a year. So I'll park that here. Thank you. Terrific. Well, it looks like we're just at about time. And I wanted to say a big thank you to each of our panelists here today for joining us and for sharing these amazing stories of what they're doing and having a broader impact within the artisan economy more specifically. We've added some information about the networking lounge as well as Ellen's contact information in the chat. So please do feel free if you're able to join us at the networking lounge after the session as well. So with that, I think we are exactly at time. So thank you all so much. Take care. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye all. Thank you.