 Good morning. Welcome. Welcome back. Thanks to those of you who are here for our start. We want to get this busy day going on schedule, so thanks for helping with that. And for those of you who are joining us just for today, welcome to you especially. And those of you who already know each other, look around for the folks you haven't met yet. A couple of announcements before we get going. There were a few schedule changes after our program book was printed. They're posted on the monitor in the back but in particular to note delivering health was moved from Wednesday yesterday to today, so that's on the schedule today and you can see where on your monitor and on pathable. You can also at lunch today hear from an exciting group of mobile tech entrepreneurs at the Vodafone Fastpitch session. That's during lunch in the Golden Gate room and lunch will be served in that room if you're joining that session. Also, our register, our Fabienne, wants me to tell you we are running out of the plastic badge holders. So if you are leaving or if you have somehow acquired more than one, please drop your extra one off at the receptacles at the back of this building or in festival before you leave because we will recycle those. Now we've got a great lineup of folks this morning, several entrepreneurs you're going to hear from, some established, some just getting started and a corporation that's doing great things in the financial inclusion space. So to get started, I'd like to introduce Laila Janna, the CEO of SAMA Source. Laila is the founder and CEO of SAMA Group. SAMA Group is a collection of social enterprises with a common social mission. Since 2008, the SAMA Group has gone on to grow successful social enterprises in sectors ranging from impact sourcing, digital literacy training and medical treatment crowdsourcing platforms. Laila is a young global leader of the World Economic Forum, a director of CareUSA and the youngest person to win a Heinz Award this year. She got her BA from Harvard and lives in San Francisco. She'll be joined in conversation by Kevin Jones. Laila? It's such a pleasure to be here and see so many familiar faces. And I'm really grateful that you all came out so early in the morning to hear about social enterprise. So I'm going to kick off by just telling you a little bit about the SAMA Group. And I wanted to set the tone for my conversation with Kevin Jones by talking about an experience I just had in Kenya. I just returned from Kenya about two and a half weeks ago. So what is the SAMA Group? You heard a little bit about that. If we can just get the next slide up. There we go. So we are a family of social enterprises. Some of you may know us through our largest social enterprise, which is called SAMA Source. SAMA means equal in Sanskrit and our mission is to use technology to level the playing field for low income people. We started SAMA Source six years ago with a mission to bring digital work to some of the lowest income people in the world. We thought if we could figure out a way to employ people in corners of the world where employment opportunities are really scarce, we could really change the game for poverty alleviation. So we started that six years ago. It evolved into a global outsourcing organization that has employed over 6,000 people. And that has moved 25,000 people out of poverty. And we have a model that we call micro work. So we actually work with large technology enterprises, primarily here in the Bay Area, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Walmart.com. And we work with them to take large data projects and break them down into small units of work. And then we train people in low income communities to do this work from local computer labs. And I'll show you a little bit about what that looks like in practice in a minute. Out of SAMA Source, we started SAMA USA, which is a domestic program that's somewhat similar. SAMA USA trains low income community college students and youth around the country to learn how to use their existing skills to earn money online. And so far the program, we started a pilot last year. This program has been able to generate around $2,000 in supplemental income for students who do an 80 hour boot camp. And the average starting income for these students is around $11,000 a year. So we've seen some big impacts using the same philosophy of digital work. Lastly, we kind of went out on a limb and had an idea for the world's first crowdfunding site a couple of years ago for medical treatments. We were traveling through Africa and noticed a huge need for doctors who do surgeries to share word about what they were doing. And to be able to attract donors directly. So I'm going to tell you a little story. This is where I was two weeks ago. This is Mathare Slum in Kenya. Have any of you been there? It's by a show of hands. I love that in this audience, I can ask that question and like 10 people raise their hands. So those of you who have been to Mathare know that it's a pretty destitute place. I feel like I've seen quite a lot of poverty in my lifetime and I haven't quite seen seen something like this. There are open sewers everywhere. The community was built on a trash dump. About 800,000 people live in this slum. And I went to spend the day with one of our workers, a young man named Kevin Kiara. Kevin started working with Sama Source about a year and a half ago. He's chosen to stay in Mathare because he actually has a small house that he owns. So he's able to save 100% of his income. But just seeing what Kevin's daily life looks like was such a reminder of the power of this kind of work. The kind of work we do is a lifeline for people like Kevin. And there are so few jobs that pay dignified wages in a place like this. So I took a photo of this sign as I was walking into the slum. There's a huge challenge in much of East Africa around labor contracting. Young men get pulled out of these communities to go and work as laborers in countries that are building a lot. And many of them get their passports taken and are part of the cycle of human trafficking. And we wonder, you know, what could we do to prevent this? And I feel like that the core essence of what we do at Sama Group of creating jobs is the long-term solution to this. And these kinds of signs are everywhere in poor countries. You're probably familiar with them. So this was walking in and then we got to Kent's house. And he talked to me a lot about what it was like to raise his daughter in these conditions. He was orphaned at age 10. And his first job in the slum was putting his hands in an open sewer to collect little pieces of metal. That would wash in from different parts of the slum. And then he would sort the metal and take them to a local trash collector to make probably about $1.25 a day. And that was his first job at 10 years old. And unbelievably, this young man made it through secondary school. He got a scholarship to attend a secondary school outside the slum. And when I visited him, he took out his worn collection of favorite novels, including Moby Dick, and told me that he was a great fan of literature. And that his biggest challenge was that the kinds of jobs available to people like him in a place like Mathare didn't really rely on his brain power. So he was pretty depressed for a while. He tried many different jobs. He tried making this local alcohol called Changa, which a lot of people are addicted to. He tried anything he could do to make a few bucks a day. And then luckily, he was selected into a program that trains young people in digital work skills. And that program is a feeder for Sama Source. So you can see here, it's a program called Nirobits, and they're all over Africa. And they train young people in using computers and also using computers for relevant kind of job skills. So he learned Photoshop. He learned blogging. And then he heard about Sama Source through our recruiter. Since he started working with us two years ago, his entire life has changed. He's been able to put aside money for his daughter's education. He pays for several siblings to survive, several of them still live in Mathare. And he has a completely different outlook on life. And I think the biggest challenge for people like these is that there's a sense of pervasive hopelessness around jobs. And there's this sense that it's never going to get any better. And I think that the least we can do for them is to fuel their optimism by connecting them to work. So with that, I'm going to invite Kevin on stage and we'll talk a little bit about the evolution of this organization. Great. Thank you. I remember the lemonade. So Lila, we've known each other a while. Let me tell you a story about knowing Lila when she was a real raw startup about six years ago. I guess it was. And I got Lila a little gig to be an intern for a YPO-like thing, small group, support group of really experienced social entrepreneurs. Jim Frokerman of Benetech, Rebecca Masasak of TechSoup, my partner, Tim Freudlick. And so then I was, there was some cause that came along people were donating to. I asked Lila, can you donate? And she said, well, no. And she said, you know, I'm to keep some source alive. I'm actually had to give up my apartment. I'm sleeping on the couch of my former boyfriend. And I'm eating ramen. And wow, that echoing green asked the question, what will keep you going when things are bad doing your mission? So I did this kind of small silly thing. I started giving her a check for $50 for protein every month. Just so, you know, well, you know, put some chicken on the ramen. But, you know, so I've known that, you know, and now she's a success. And actually recently did well enough that you just bought a house here. And congratulations in San Francisco. That's kind of, you know, it shows you up to 10 million in revenues, right? House is kind of a euphemistic term for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. But, you know, the nights when you're on the couch thinking, you know, this is, this is, I've hit a wall. This is not working. What kept you going? So first off, I have to thank Kevin, because I don't even know if he knows us, but Jim Furterman, who he mentioned, who is in that group was our very first client. And he gave us a $30,000 contract right around the time that I got the protein donation. $30,000 and 50. So that's good. But those are the kinds of things that keep you going. You know, I think for me, the constant validation from the point of view of the workers, and I made it a point, even when it didn't make so much economic sense to go back to Africa and talk to local people, it was the only thing that really kept me going in the end that made me feel like, no matter what people were saying in the outside world, and we got a lot of negative feedback early on. I had people literally telling me, there's no way that these poor slum women are ever gonna be able to do computer work. They need food and water and clothing before they can do that. And it was really hard to illustrate to people that the way they could purchase food and water was if they had a job. And there were a lot of sort of... Chair, he minds that, just was getting in the way. Exactly. And I think there are a lot of preconceived ideas about education levels in Africa and now we work all over the world, but people have the sense that people are poor and helpless and not very bright. And you go there and you realize that talent is equally distributed. It's just opportunity, it's not. So what really kept me going was meeting people like our workers. And I remember getting a note from one of them on Facebook in the early days that just said, maybe you're not aware, but the fact that we had work at all, we worked in Dadaab in a refugee camp in Kenya, really desperate place. He said, I don't think you understand the true meaning of what you're doing here. Wow. Because people here are so hopeless. Right. And just the exposure to all of these different ways of working and to the fact that they can be on a level playing field from the middle of Dadaab is pretty eye-opening for all of us. And I kept getting that validation from the people in the field. And even when you're feeling really terrible, you're sitting here in San Francisco thinking, like, my life is not nearly as bad as that. And here are these people who are so grateful. So I'm not going to stop. Yeah. Were there people telling you you should? You should get a job. You're smart. You're capable. Stop being living on nothing. I heard everything from Mary Rich to Moonlight doing this and get a real job to turn it into a big corporate outsourcing company. Because we were doing, I mean, our revenue growth on the sales side has always been really healthy. And we're starting to see really great economies of scale in some areas of our work. And so a lot of my friends were like, why on earth would you build this as a nonprofit? Like, you should build a big profitable outsourcing company. But my whole point in doing this was to use our model to show funders that it wasn't actually so risky to move these kinds of projects to really low income places. And to do that, I thought we had to be a nonprofit. And what caused the wheel to turn, the door to open, that you could afford a small apartment or live a life where you're not just staring at somebody else's ceiling? Well, I'd say the house was actually the Heinz Award. It's amazing. There are a lot of organizations that exist out there to support social entrepreneurs. And it's kind of a random process to get connected to them. But I feel like there was some grace involved in that. In prior years, we had a steady revenue build. We had a really solid management team. We had good audits. And so funders were willing to invest in us because they started seeing that we had the capacity to really do good work. And I remember having several conversations with funders who said, look, doing this work doesn't mean that you have to starve. And you shouldn't feel ashamed to take a salary that allows you to live a dignified life in San Francisco. And especially as an unmarried woman in San Francisco, there's a lot of expenses that you have on your own. And I think that that's a huge lesson for me. And I try to tell younger social entrepreneurs, don't try to be a martyr. You're trying to do this for the long run. Wendy, do you really think your model was going to take off? Now you're up at seven-figure, eight-figure revenues. Wendy, do you think it was really going to take off? Was there a sign that just, hey, we're going to make it? I'm still really waiting for it to really take off. Our team is all sitting over here and probably laughing at that. We see a lot of evidence of success, but we're pretty hungry for more. And I think one of the things that has made us moderately successful, I still think there's so much room for us to grow, is just that we have a lot of drive to do more. And we look at the numbers and there's so many, the unemployment crisis in just Sub-Saharan Africa alone is huge. So it forces us to keep going. I think that one pivotal moment for us was when the Rockefeller Foundation last year decided to invest $80 million in digital jobs Africa, which is an initiative that in many ways was linked to Sama Source. We were their first grantee in this category. And I remember talking to their VP of strategy in the early days and saying, look, I really think this idea of bringing digital work to low-income communities in Africa is one of the solutions we can embrace for various reasons. And initially there was some resistance at the foundation, but they have a lot of really smart people. And over time, this evolved into a huge initiative. And I think that kind of validation proves to the world that what's now called impact sourcing is a business model. It's a real business model. You know, not everybody should keep going. Sometimes when you hit a wall, you know the models. You should know the models not working. I rented some driven folks who should have quit a while ago. What do you tell folks like that? Like, you know, maybe it really isn't working. Maybe it's not you. Maybe you're not the right person. What kind of advice can you tell people to not be like you? I think a few things helped us out. One was setting really clear goals and saying if we can't hit these goals, if we can't hit this kind of return on investment, that's going to trigger an evaluation process and put us sort of on, not on probation, but at least on alert that at some point we should stop if we don't start seeing a change because we'll just be wasting donor money. And for us that ROI point was always, I mean, my concept is, are we doing better than going to Africa with suitcases full of cash and giving direct cash transfers? Right, right. And if we're not, you know, if there's no sort of leverage of the model, then we should really reconsider what we're doing. And with all of our programs, when we started Sama Hope and Sama USA, we set really clear targets. For Sama USA, for example, we said if students don't earn at least what it cost to train them per person in the pilot, then that should trigger an evaluation and we should be really careful about expanding or even continuing to fund it. And luckily that program, thanks to the amazing leadership of its co-founder, Tess. Thanks, Tess. That program has, yeah, stand up, Tess. That program has done remarkably well and I think that focus also made the team realize that we have a goal to hit and we have accountability here. How about Sama Hope? Is it hitting its milestones? It is. So we have a goal of treating 1,000 patients this year and we're at about 500 and we have a bunch of things that we're planning for the website to scale it. The challenge, and I'll just add this onto what I said earlier, along with those kinds of metrics, I think you also need to realize that every model has an incubation period and our CFO who comes from Oracle has said to our team, we really think that there's a three-year incubation period. Most things can't really get off the ground and show any traction for about three years and so what we look at is can we fund something for a three-year horizon and is our board comfortable with making a three-year commitment? And I think that's roughly the time that you need to determine whether something's going to be a success. And this is the second year for Sama Hope? This is, yeah. Well, we relaunched the site in November last year so we're sort of counting that as a start and before that there was like $25,000 in funding from an angel, so. Yeah, yeah. What's next? Is there a for-profit spin-out or anything else that you're going to build? So we have three enterprises now which are keeping us really busy and Sama USA and Sama Source are quite similar so we really kind of view those as two programs that are working together. Do it in the US, do it in Africa. Exactly. And what we've realized is that we can use our brand now which has strong brand recognition to start thinking about developing one additional business line that could bring us more revenue. So Sama Source is a really amazing business from the standpoint of how many people it can employ and how fast it's growing but it's not a very high margin business. Low-end digital work is becoming more and more commoditized so it's a healthy social enterprise but we don't think it's ever going to generate profits that can kick back into the group and fund new ventures that we want to start or subsidize the operations of something that's not as revenue-generating like Sama Hope. And so we have a concept in mind, I can't share all of the details but it's in the beauty category and it's in the luxury space and we're evaluating different options for launching a brand that can generate these kinds of returns for the group and I think at that point we'll probably take a break. Yeah, yeah. And the beauty category would be sourcing from some of these same people or jobs for the same people. Exactly. One of the core tenants of Sama Group is giving work and we really believe that dignified work is a solution to a lot of the problems that we see from labor trafficking to sex trafficking to child malnutrition. And so this is a different method of giving work that involves sourcing not digital work but sourcing raw ingredients from low-income communities. And I think that there's a huge opportunity in this space to look at categories like luxury where the margins are really high but typically go to LVMH marketing budget they go to these very large corporations and I think very few social enterprises think about tackling that space. Right, right. The luxury and fair trade thing. Altarico is one of our investees and they have a new truffle that actually has all the social value baked in at that margin. But chocolate doesn't quite cover all the social good. I'm seeing some people do some interesting thing. Nobody's done anything quite big enough yet. I think Maillette is really interesting. I haven't followed the social impact side of that story but I think they've done a really beautiful job of building a luxury brand that also highlights artisans in developing countries. And I think that that's sort of a riff on the traditional fair trade model that's gaining more traction. Yeah, and then you would be the spokesmodel entrepreneur kind of thing for this, whatever you call that. We need to have a product first but yes, that's the goal. Yeah, because I mean people are coming putting you on magazines and then you're giving the money from the photo shoots to Sama source, right? I mean that seems to be where the idea came from. So I will say that and I don't, probably other women social entrepreneurs in the room might have thoughts about this but you know initially I was kind of conflicted about using my personal brand and story so closely tied to the non-profit you know as part of my work and then at some point you just realize that that's your job as an entrepreneur is to use what you have to offer to build your organization and I think because there are so few younger women in tech and younger women in social enterprise in tech we get a lot of opportunities to tell our story and a lot of invitations to panels and being featured and that sort of thing so it did come out of that. We thought well what could we, how could we leverage this more? And what could we do? We're getting so much attention from women's magazines for example and unfortunately the people making decisions about Sama source type work are typically middle-aged men and tech companies in Silicon Valley not reading Marie Claire. So we do, I think we've been sort of market driven and opportunity and opportunistic from the beginning and when we see an opportunity like that we evaluate it. Yeah, yeah it seems like it's really there. You get the attention but then you can source the goods that are incredibly high margin that are going to the same people. And it only works if you have a fantastic team that can execute flawlessly and I'm really proud of our team. We've built it out a lot over the last few years and so I'm able to go out there and do my thing and know that the home fires are burning. Do you ever, you're a role model for a lot of young social entrepreneurs because you've built something from nothing and at sacrifice. What do you tell some other entrepreneurs? I mean do you get into evaluating well maybe you should quit or do you just say press on? What do you tell somebody? They can be wrongly inspired by your example to keep hitting a wall that they can't break down. Well I will say that the things that are most worth doing are the hardest usually. And there were several moments that I could have quit but I remember reading a Ben Horowitz blog post you know he's from Andreessen Horowitz Aventure Capitalist and he has this saying don't punk out and quit. And I think it's often like right after those worst moments that the best moments can come and last year I had a huge issue trying to push this new strategic plan through and there was some disagreement in our board and it was really really really hard. There were several moments when I just thought like I don't I don't know if I can do this longer and I think doing anything requires my philosophy is I'm going to put 10 years into this and see where it is and push through those times. I think the other thing is my grandmother used to say this she hitchhiked around the world after World War II she's a Belgian woman and met my grandfather in Calcutta and she had this motto trust the world and when my parents were getting their first mortgage and really scared she leaned in and told my dad you know fear not the world is beautiful trust the world and I think that's kind of true and I think if you allow other people to help you and you allow other people and you'll be often pleasantly surprised. Yeah you know when I I rented a lots of you know would-be visionaries and that kind of thing and if they're not being followed by people or if people aren't helping and if there's not social capital coming in another thing I've learned from Echoing Green is you know what are your volunteer resources and are people giving you more things now and they did with you I saw something that you were worth some protein Jim Struchman thought it was worth a $30,000 contract I mean that could be an indicator too because the world did show up for you absolutely and I will say like as a as a counter to don't punk out and quit you also have to be rational so if you're really not hitting the goals that you set for yourself and if donors are after three years still having issues even in the you know even if you can show them really good data I think having a clear impact model that you can be rational about really helps then I think that should call into question what you're doing right so it's not don't punk out and quit for anything if a model's not working you need to adjust it but I do think that I think that a lot of people quit prematurely or quit before trying to pivot and trying to build something new if what they're doing is not working and it and I think it's especially true in social enterprise because it's just so hard you know I feel like we have all the burden as non-profit social entrepreneurs of you know tech startups but without any of the upside and so it really is sort of mission and calling oriented work and I think it requires a certain level of resilience yeah you know and you you know there was a gym fructum and around that you could you could reach out to in the Bay Area sometimes it's hard in a particular entrepreneur I was working with a while ago a Native American company called Native Touch they needed to know the distribution for cosmosuticals but you know luckily I could find somebody at social venture network who knew that kind of thing but I realized that's a real hard thing so we've invested in a company called StarCrit that finds you the domain specific mentor that you don't have in the Bay Area what do you do any mentoring to younger entrepreneurs? I do I try to do it more ad hoc and I actually I mentor a couple of the daughters of women on our staff oh wow who are younger and they can come by the office often I really enjoy it and I've been lucky enough to be mentored by a number of amazing people I met Howard Schultz a little under a year ago and in his the way he's built Starbucks is so inspirational to me in terms of our mission of giving work so I feel like I have some kind of a duty to give back it's also tough though there's so many demands on your time there are yeah finding the right ones we have about 45 seconds left what what would you say to a young social entrepreneur looking at you saying I want to be like her I want to I want to grow to 10 million from almost zero what would you what advice how should they follow your path I would say that the most important thing is to clarify your core values and why you're doing what you're doing and then to when you've decided on a model to embrace it with grace grit and optimism grace grit and optimism yep words to live by I like it thank you Lila thank you thank you for the open it's great grace grit and optimism so thanks Kevin and Lila and you're going to hear Jim Fruchterman's name mentioned again believe it or not we did not plan that quite that well to know the connection between Sammas Samma group and Jim Fruchterman but he's going to come up in a little bit to talk more about his leadership and now we're actually going to bring on nine up and coming entrepreneurs to do quick pitches they are finalists for the Gratitude Awards and we're excited to have partnered with Randy Haken and the Gratitude Network team this year to bring these awards to the stage so like to welcome Randy and Lindley Sides and the nine entrepreneurs as we get these stools set for them the and they're going to give you just a taste of what their enterprise is about and then you'll be able to get to know them better at the innovation showcase in the Impact Hub over there during the day and you'll actually be able to vote for your favorite so this afternoon we'll announce the three category winners as well as the people's choice winner so Randy all right thank you Liz in the words of a great social innovator that I look up to good morning San Francisco the Gratitude Network was essentially set up to identify nurture and then help grow incredible social innovators around the world both non-profit and for-profit and so what you're going to hear on stage today is nine incredible incredible stories a number of people have asked me where does the name Gratitude come from and I guess it's borrowed from a book that I know a number of you have read in which it's stated to whom much is given much is expected to whom much is given much is expected and so the spirit that we have at the Gratitude Network our team and all the people that we work with is about taking what life has given us and giving something back I think a great example of this is SoCAP in general and I wanted to thank Kevin Jones and the SoCAP team for making it possible for us to highlight some of the entrepreneurs who are here every year some incredible people who are we now have a chance to recognize and you'll hear from each of them Lindley? Thank you and good morning I'm Lindley Sides and in leading my own social venture the Glue Network that is a platform where companies engage their customers and employees and giving to good causes I work with large non-profits and small social ventures across categories and around the globe and through that work I have seen the power of entrepreneurship to create solutions that are innovative impactful scalable and self-sustaining so I was honored to work with Randy last year to create the Gratitude Awards and then to work with SoCAP this year to expand upon them so this year's Gratitude Awards were open to organizations that are early and growth stage both non-profit and for-profit ventures that could be located anywhere in the world we were thrilled to receive over 500 applications to the SoCAP scholars and Gratitude Awards programs and we've accomplished the daunting task of narrowing that pool down to 32 semifinalists and then to the nine incredible finalists that are here on stage this morning and from this pool four winners will be selected and announced on this stage this evening at six o'clock we first want to thank our panel of expert judges who brought expertise from our three categories as well as from non-profit, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship and investing we want to thank them for their time and effort and expertise in narrowing down this pool and choosing our finalists we also want to thank our screeners who are not on the slide but are listed on the Gratitude Fund website and a few of whom are here so thank you to all of these participants for your help in this process so a little bit about our three categories last year in our first year we focused on education and our three winners are still doing well and growing in Kenya, India and here in the U.S. Why education? We believe education is truly foundational that improvements in education result in greater success of all non-profit work that is done in a region and this category spans primary, secondary, higher and adult education and over the last two years we've seen some an incredible variety of creative solutions in this space and have worked with a number of them and are looking forward to adding another one or two to our portfolio this year. This year we've added two new categories one is health and wellness which is clearly an area of great need to reduce suffering and cost and deaths due to preventable causes and so forth this category spans traditional health health tech and clean water and we've seen some very creative models and solutions and we're excited by the the ones that we've seen this year in our first year in this category. We also added the category of community development in keeping with the SOCAP theme this is a broad category that includes hunger, shelter, substance abuse, microfinance, multidisciplinary programs the key is that community led improvements tend to be very positive effective and long lasting and we've seen a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial spirit coming from individual communities and we're we're looking forward to supporting a couple of those in the coming year. So at the end of the day today one winner will be announced from each of those three categories and then there will be a fourth winner that will be chosen by you the People's Choice Award you will hear from the nine finalists here in just a moment you'll also have the opportunity to talk with them in the innovation showcase in the main hall until two o'clock this afternoon voting will be open until three and the way to vote is go into Pathable open this session scroll to the bottom and click session poll and it only takes a couple of seconds to vote for your favorite so please cast your vote for the the venture that you believe is the most innovative has the greatest potential for impact and where the the founder has the skills to scale and grow and organization so it's with great respect that I hand it off to our nine finalists beginning in the category of health and wellness with Nora Health I'm Katie Ash and I'm co-founder of Nora Health we train patient families with health skills to improve outcomes and save lives the baby in this photo is Anup I met him two days out of open heart surgery in Bangalore, India when it was time for him to go home to his rural village a nurse came over and gave his parents an eight minute shotgun lecture about everything that they needed to know to keep Anup healthy and safe keep in mind that they were returning home to a rural village that was two days travel from the nearest health clinic they only had elementary level education and they returned home from that hospital completely horrified we saw this situation play out over and over and over again and I had experienced it myself as a caregiver for loved ones feeling completely helpless and statistics say that the majority of people in this room have provided care for a loved one at some point in their lives we think that this is the largest one of the largest unmet needs in health care we take this highly motivated compassionate resource the family members and we train them with medical skills to be highly effective at providing care for a loved one we design and develop mobile tools so that when those families go home they have the support that they need we started out in one facility in Bangalore, India earlier this year but we're already in nine major urban hospitals in India we've trained over 9,000 family members and most excitingly we're seeing a 36% reduction in complication rates the started out as a class project two and a half years ago at the Stanford Design School when we were a team of graduate students but since then we've built a team that has decades of both health and tech experience if you're excited about what we're doing if you want to help us scale if you know an organization that we should be partnering with come find us we'd love to work with you thank you two minutes on the nose does anyone know what the largest mass poisoning in human history is it's the arsenic and fluoride water crisis across India in Bangladesh affecting over 200 million people and leading to one in five deaths in Bangladesh alone you can't see or smell arsenic but if it's in your water you'll get arsenicosis an incurable cancer causing disease leading to death my name is Minhaj Chattery and as a Bangladeshi American I always wondered why people like my grandpa passed away to do this crisis as a fuller bright scar to Bangladesh I found 60 percent of all water projects to fail because jobs aren't being created and customers aren't paying to run the systems I've launched Drinkwell to transform this crisis into opportunity for entrepreneurs living in these affected communities we've developed the world's first indigitously produced filtration technology capable of cost effectively removing arsenic and fluoride from the source groundwater tube balls unlike reverse osmosis the current best practice we reduce waste by six orders of magnitude each system doubles an entrepreneur's income creates three jobs and reduces household medical expenses by up to 85 percent our team has experienced deploying 200 systems across four countries and most importantly we've found that people are paying for our water and it's not because of the massive long-term health and wellness benefits but because in the short term we give people smoother hair less briny fish tastier rice and whiter whites that ladies and gentlemen is vanity and that nuanced understanding is how we drive social impact to these 200 million people we're Drinkwell join us as we make arsenic and fluoride poisoning history an average Indian lives 14 years less than an average American I'm Shelly from Sevamog and we address this gap by fundamentally transforming primary healthcare via mobile clinics and an online telehealth marketplace our mobile clinics serve low-income consumers in groups on an annual subscription model for just $10 per year patients get comprehensive primary care medicines and supplements and most of this is delivered on their premises we use technology heavily to manage health outcomes we also operate an online telehealth marketplace through which internet savvy consumers can get video consultations second opinions and in clinic appointments from participating healthcare providers along in the platform along with new revenue the providers also get access to the same technology that we use to manage our patients and our health outcomes we currently have 6,000 annual subscribers all paying from four states in India and in our marketplace we have more than 300 healthcare providers so if you would like to partner with us please come and find us afterwards thanks 83 days that's how long it took for my students reading levels to finally catch up to where they had been before the summer these are my first graders the day it happened Karina Maya Senaya Carlos and Travis my name is Alejandro and I'm the CEO and founder of Springboard Collaborative I spent two years as a first grade teacher in one of Philadelphia's most impoverished neighborhoods there I became angry that my kids and millions more in low-income communities face chronic summertime reading losses in elementary school that account for two-thirds of the achievement gap in high school this is symptomatic of an even deeper problem low-income parents have been left out of the process of educating their kids children spend 75% of their waking hours outside of the classroom and yet our nation does shockingly little to capture educational value from that time for low-income kids Springboard closes the reading achievement gap by coaching teachers training parents and incentivizing learning our primary offering is an intensive five-week summer program that combines daily reading instruction for pre-K through third graders with a weekly workshop training parents to teach reading at home in an incentive structure that awards learning tools to families from books to tablets in proportion to their kids reading progress since launch in 2011 Springboard has grown its reach from 40 to 1200 kids through major vendor agreements in two cities this summer our scholars replaced what would have been a three-month reading loss with a 3.4-month reading gain they'll go back to school this Monday having more than doubled their annual reading progress in schools with fewer than 10% of parents showing up for report card conferences our weekly family training workshops average 91% attendance by training parents and teachers to collaborate Springboard puts kids on a path that closes a reading achievement gap by fourth grade in a nation that uses fourth grade reading scores to plan prisons this changes everything parents love for their children is the single greatest and most underutilized natural resource in education this is the key to giving all children the opportunity to learn regardless of whether they're at a school desk or the kitchen table whether the calendar reads January or July join us in changing out of school time from a barrier into a springboard for our kids thank you good morning everyone my name is Rebecca Harrison I'm from the African management initiative we provide practical and affordable learning tools for African managers and entrepreneurs but I want to start this morning by telling you a story about a man named Simeon Simeon woke up one morning at his home in the rural eastern Cape of South Africa with chest pain he walked to the nearest hospital where an excellent doctor immediately recognized the symptoms of heart disease took him to the ECG machine to run a test but the machine was out of paper so she sent him home this is a true story I don't know what happened to Simeon but without wanting to trivialize it it's quite possible that Simeon died because no one restocked that machine this is not a health story it's a management story it's quite possible that Simeon died because of a basic avoidable management failure now management is not a sexy topic it doesn't pull up the heart strings it's not a very socap topic but it's absolutely critical bad management can be catastrophic good management can be transformational the problem is that in Africa over 90% of the roughly 10 million managers have no access to high quality training and development resources at the African Management Initiative we're working to change that we deliver practical accessible locally relevant learning tools to managers and entrepreneurs we're developing the first ever social learning platform in Africa so think Coursera meets Facebook with an African twist designed with mobile in mind and for an environment where bandwidth is often constrained we've secured exclusive partnerships with Africa's three most prestigious business schools think the harvards of Africa bringing world-class African management education to potentially hundreds and thousands of small businesses and critically we've developed a peer accountability tool that will help those managers apply what they learn on the job that's the most important part so we'd love to tell you more about how we're working to unlock the potential of the continent by empowering one million managers over the next decade thanks for listening my name is Brian Hill and I'm the president of JL Education Solutions when I was growing up my father taught in Folsom Prison here in California and at night he would bring home the essays of inmates and he'd read them to us and I distinctly remember feeling of the hopes and dreams of so many of these individuals and being so disheartened that so much human potential was locked up by that age I had no idea that my dad's class was only reaching a small minority of a very large population 12 million Americans cycle through our system each year which means that one in 28 children currently have a parent that is incarcerated this will have devastating effects both on our society and financially the 74 billion dollars that we spend on corrections in this country somehow leads to a 50 percent recidivism rate meaning that half will return a short time after being released what are we doing with a time that we have this literally captive audience that is driving such abysmal returns right now we're showing daytime television Jerry Springer and the Price is Right this is not a formula for success especially when we know it works educational vocational training when provided to inmates reduces recidivism by 43 percent and that's even when controlling for things like background and motivation moreover every dollar we invest in these types of programming reduces the cost of the government and to future expenditures by four to five dollars within the first three years but it is expensive to do these programs it is operationally challenging and it is politically difficult to spend money in this space this is where jail education solutions comes in we set up secure wireless networks in prisons and jails provide tablet technology that allows inmates to engage in educational vocational and treatment programming on a daily basis inmates can rent or earn these tablets and achieve tangible outcomes like a GED college credit and time off of their sentence all at no cost to the taxpayer moreover they can only begin their progress while they're online but receive short-term incentives that help them earn entertainment options on the back end for as a short-term carrot now this program will reach 20,000 just next year where my dad's class reached just 30 moreover my dad's course was cut back in the 90s and with financial budgets now it will never come back jail education solutions is exactly what America needs right now we must stop the revolving door so join us in helping unlock the immense human potential perpetually behind bars thank you morning my name is Samir Ibrahim I am the CEO and co-founder of Sun Culture based in Kenya we help farmers grow more while spending less on the left side of the screen there's a man named Peter Peter is a farmer and he was our first customer ever before meeting us Peter was like most of the other 450 million smallholder farmers in the world forced to grow very low-value crops like beans and potatoes because he cannot afford irrigation systems to grow high-value fresh fruits and vegetables irrigation systems are too expensive and more so the recurring costs associated with irrigating like buying diesel for your water pump was just too expensive for Peter and because of that on Peter's one-acre plot of land he made $600 per year in one year Peter made less than half of what each and every one of you paid to be at this conference now this is a problem that's affecting smallholder farmers around the world and we're changing that Sun Culture designs themselves solar-powered irrigation systems that make it cheaper and easier for farmers like Peter to grow food our systems combine the cost-effectiveness of solar-powered water pumping with the efficiency of drip irrigation giving Peter access to an affordable irrigation solution that removes most recurring costs for him now Peter is using our system now and he's making $18,000 per year that sort of impact is what we want smallholder farmers around the world to feel and we can do it so if you'd like to learn more about our funding needs and working with us to impact the lives of smallholder farmers around the world we'd love to speak with you thank you does everyone here remember their first job for me it was Starbucks my senior year of high school and I didn't know it at the time but that job actually prepared me for a lifetime of employment I learned things like responsibility and how to show up on time and be a part of a team and the value of hard-earned money but what if you never get that first job opportunity and you're young you're creative you're full of ideas and energy but you're frustrated because the only ways you know how to survive are stealing selling drugs maybe prostitution well this is the problem facing over half a million unemployed youth in slums in Kenya but what if we could find a way to provide that first job opportunity to hundreds of thousands of youth all over the country what difference would that make at livelihoods we've seen firsthand the power of a single job opportunity to change a young person's life forever and we believe in the power of young people to change the world we operate a door-to-door distribution service to sell socially transformative products like solar lamps and clean-burning cook stoves and we use a daily consignment model so our sales agents get products on consignment and they don't have to take a loan or any financial risk but can earn an income and learn valuable sales and professional skills we've already trained over 600 young people and opened in four slum locations across Nairobi and we're growing in the first half of this year we've trained more people than we had in the past three years and over the next five years we plan to become financially sustainable by opening 32 locations and changing hundreds of thousands of lives a job means hope purpose confidence and that is opportunity and that is powerful so please come and talk to me and find out how you can take this opportunity to invest in our youth because they will change the world but it's our responsibility to make sure they know that they can thank you morning everyone think about the shirt that you're wearing think about the phone in your pocket these things were made by people right they're not made by machines so what do you know about those people and the working conditions that they face every day not much right but the brain and that and maybe that's okay but the brands that you're buying those clothes and electronics from also don't have good transparency into what's what those workers are facing every day and that's the problem last april over 1100 workers died when the factory they were working in in Bangladesh collapsed on top of their heads why partly because those workers are invisible right they they saw cracks in the walls several days before the factory collapsed but they had no channel to report that to decision makers to anyone who had the power to stop production there's a simple solution to this lack of information and lack of transparency mobile there are nearly as many mobile subscriptions as there are people on the planet today so we have this incredible channel to connect the workers that are making our favorite products to the companies that are buying them eventually to us labor link does that we use the transformative power of mobile to give voice to workers workers trust us with information about child labor about sexual harassment about excessive overtime so they're reporting this information to us anonymously and through feedback loops we give that information directly to decision makers and we've been able to address these issues in real time in the last four years we've gone from reaching 100 workers to over 125,000 in the next four years we're trying to reach over a million because we believe that every worker should have a free and anonymous channel to report directly to decision makers about their working conditions and needs please join us vote for labor link and help us give voice to the global workforce thank you well wow how would how would you feel how would you feel if you got to get up every day and work with these nine I'm like a kid in a candy shop right now that's what the next year is going to be like for our team so we are so excited and so thankful for all of you and and also for our 32 semi finalists who were just an incredible batch and as I said before a soak up attracts just a wonderful mix of people amongst whom we find young people like this who we want to give a voice to okay final reminder here on the audience vote if you haven't had a chance to go to your bitly address or unpathable we'd appreciate your vote that's a tough call I couldn't do it good luck to you and thank you we'll see you tonight for the awards wow as randy said it's really inspiring to hear these folks and I knew they were great but I hadn't heard them pitch yet so please do vote and you have to be logged into pathable and you'll see the session poll link that's that's one way to get to the voting link and obviously the instructions are also on the flyer that was in your chair this morning so while we reset for the next group I mentioned earlier that we had Lila Jana mentioned how important Jim Fruchterman and his organization was to her start and we're going to actually hear from Jim and Betsy Bowman and Penelope Douglas about the leadership and the transition at Benetech so we didn't know about that connection but I think it's illustrative of the growth in this whole space the number of connections we see over and over between folks who've started and folks who've been around for a while and have helped each other and how important that is for us to connect with each other and to share our knowledge and learning and you also have the opportunity to do that with these nine entrepreneurs you just heard from as well as to our entire scholarship cohort of entrepreneurs we mentioned yesterday that you can engage through StartGrid in seeing what our entrepreneurs might want to know and how you can contribute some of your knowledge and experience to them so I hope you'll do that now I'd like to welcome our board chair Penelope Douglas to the stage along with Jim and Betsy it's right out here this morning good morning everybody well um I'm very excited to talk about a subject that's important and also a subject of some passion for me personally and professionally and that's the topic of founder's succession and I'm really excited to have two great colleagues on stage with me Jim and Betsy I'm going to let them each quickly introduce themselves to you by saying just a quick word about themselves something that's important for the audience to know about you and then I'm going to have Jim briefly introduce us to Ben and Tech so um Jim give me a a quick who's Jim entrepreneur turn social entrepreneur and I'm really passionate about technology I am a deep geek deep geek that's true Betsy well engineer social entrepreneur it's true we have some things in common but definitely lots of years in high tech and a more recent social entrepreneur great thanks describe Ben and Tech to us so Ben and Tech is Silicon Valley's deliberately nonprofit tech company and that means we're successful by definition by the way and what we do is we write software products for where the market's going to fail so the technology exists there's this great social application and a regular venture capitalist would say what's the worldwide market for helping disabled kids or human rights groups we build those products that off the shelf tools wouldn't be well suited for basically solving can you give us an example give us a product or two so our biggest product and the one we'll be talking about today is Bookshare and basically the thumbnail sketch is Amazon meets Napster meets talking books the blind and dyslexic but legal so our goal was to reinvent the traditional library for the blind and dyslexic using two innovations one the e-book so digital text instead of human narration the cost to create a book like that is a hundredth of of what it would otherwise be and for example that's what samasaurus would do for us and the second innovation was crowdsourcing so we actually turned over creating a library to the community of people with disabilities parents and teachers to build that library so that any kid who needs a book to succeed in school and can't read a regular print book gets it in a digital forum that talks to them might be in large print or in Braille but far more books far cheaper that's the goal and how global is your reach right now well you know we have users in hundred countries that sort of typical thing but bookshare has been really focused in the United States because of intellectual property stuff our other projects are majority outside the U.S. in human rights and environment our two other big areas great but see do you want to add anything about the social enterprises of benetech before we move to the founder topic yeah I think I think and this this will probably come up more in our conversation but you know bookshare has become a foundation for other things we can do so we're in over 20,000 schools and districts in the United States and that means we can provide more services so it becomes a really interesting foundation for the other things that we can do to to drive impact that's great thank you so here's here's the interesting story this is a story about about succession planning but not necessarily in my mind a typical story at least not as I understand it from spending some time now talking to Jim whom I've known for some time and to Betsy first and foremost there's a kind of an interesting Socap landmark part of this story because it turns out that Jim and Betsy met at Socap in the first one the first Socap 2008 and I'm sure when they met each of them had something on their minds that drew them together I'm just guessing Jim that maybe what was on your mind had something to do with building this massive social enterprise and being a founder and CEO what was going through your mind as you came to that for Socap up into that moment we had about three roughly million dollar social enterprises and we had just won a 32 million dollar contract from the federal government so six and a half million dollars a year so Bookshare went from a million dollar year social enterprise to a seven million dollar year social enterprise and as the founder and by this time I've been doing this for 15 plus years in different forms I was kind of a little straining at the seams and so I was thinking about how to solve this so I had so we maybe six or nine months in we were we needed a lot of help you know we we outsourced a lot of our stuff to social enterprises like Sama source and digital divide data but I was worried about succession and I had talked a lot to senior social entrepreneurs about succession and heard a lot of horror stories you know how the second CEO after the founder had completely flamed out in year one how the COO didn't work out and I had already tried to hire a COO and had failed a few years earlier and so I was thinking well what else might that be and so came to came to socap met Betsy and basically identified a different kind of succession plan where instead of hiring a COO someone who kept the trains running on time hire someone who is more like me an entrepreneur an engineer to just important to me as a geek but someone who could actually run an organization be responsible for the strategy build a product line in that sector and also offer my organization a succession plan rather than someone who maybe didn't have the outward facing responsibilities and so and I think that's what we got so Betsy why were you sort of able to be lured into this into this conversation what were you thinking about when you were meeting up with Jim yeah yeah I came to Socap I had heard about it through just looking on on the web my company had been sold some months before I went to Africa did some volunteer work and was really looking to get back into social enterprise I had started a social enterprise before and had sort of gone back to the dark side for a while so I wanted to come back to this and I thought what a great place to do that this sounds like my people and I felt like I met my people here at at Socap and one of those was Jim somebody said oh you do tech and he does tech you should meet I came here thinking I know I can do consulting because I was doing a fair bit of that with some women entrepreneurs and such and then Jim tells me well look at our website and so for me the fact that it was a general manager position and had a lot of external focus was critical because I had actually turned down COO kinds of jobs I am much more comfortable being kind of in this bigger picture and with with a lot of external focus as well as running the trains so that was a big part of it for me I if he had come and I met him and he had a COO role I would have thought it was interesting because Benetech I found extremely interesting but it will probably wouldn't have gotten me I think you just highlighted a couple of really interesting points Benetech is a really alluring company it's you know it's a great success story and I know if I had been in your shoes you know it would have been hard to stay clear-headed actually about you know well gosh if Jim wants me to come work for him I'd almost do it no matter what he tells me he wants me to do you know I mean it can be that kind of conversation we've all been there in this in this world of kind of you know we're passion and mission are so closely aligned with business interests so I can't imagine it was as easy as you two have just described it you meet at Socap you know you carve out your roles over a a beer and you're on your way and Betsy you told me a little bit about you know how you really needed to be super clear with Jim about the job you wanted and I think there was a little bit of of a of a dialogue about that can you can you bring a little more of that forward for us there there was and I would also have to give tons of credit to the rest of the senior team at Benetech who were very singularly focused on Jim really needs to hand this off and I heard every day for my first few months you know Jim really needs to hand this off let's make sure this is happening and for me I never felt that he wasn't in fact there was one point after about a year where I said can you stop now I kind of I kind of have enough you know we can can we slow this down a little bit so but one of the things that Jim asked me one of the best interview questions that I ask all the times for the end of the interview process which is what can I do to make you successful in this role it's a great question and I said we have to mind meld and I have to not only work with you internally but I have to see what you do externally in all of these different venues and he was very great about that so so again you've raised a couple of really to me what a really important points you know you were in a real dialogue and it was it was definitely a dialogue of peers and the senior team clearly deserved a lot of credit for also being very focused on this for you and with you so I think those are excellent points Jim from your standpoint during that first year with Betsy was were there times when you realized that you were still too founderish or too you know not letting it sort of happen the way you actually wanted it to but couldn't quite let it was there any of that kind of stuff going on no because I I I had like had that failure mode like a few years earlier where I didn't let go and that's why the prior COO had left okay so that because I didn't hand over any control and and I'm a sort of ADHD and I really kind of and I'm kind of the serial founder who's not as good at operations more good at creating and the way Benetec structured I can go off and do new things I don't have to like get rid of Bookshare I can go off and do other things so my roles shifted so I got to do things like learn about how Washington worked because winning a the largest ever special ed award is a novice bidder right turned out to create gigantic political problems and I got phone calls from Washington saying I hear you have horns in a tail and bribe the program officer where are you and I'm like I didn't know I was supposed to lobby Washington right and I got to work on a treaty for the last five years and we got an international treaty to make sure able to expand globally and so I got to be like an international diplomat but like play at it and that's great because it kind of kind of plays to my hyperactivity doing new things and what Betsy's job was is to say this is a moment for Jim to play a cameo role or this is a relationship that Jim has owned for 10 years and he can't abandon this we're going to do this jointly until this person gets comfortable with Betsy being the primary point person does that sound like the same landscape you remember in that first year it does though we remember our meeting at Socap quite differently which we're happy to tell you later that that that is very true and I think some of those long-term external relationships have been have taken the longest to really transition over because you know Jim's been in this particular field for now 25 years and so these people have known him a long time from and told me great stories but you know it's so that has definitely taken some work and we still have to work at that sometimes well it sounds like you two have a lot of fun together which I think is also a really important part of the equation I think you and the entire team actually you know find moments for fun if you've seen the three of us getting ready backstage actually you shouldn't have seen the three of us getting ready backstage because there was there was such a lightness and buoyancy and and sort of spirit to us wanting to come out and talk to you that and I think that's critically important for building these complex enterprises because this is this is hard work these are very complex we're all business people at our we started as business people who who became entrepreneurs social entrepreneurs and therefore I think we know really well how hard this is because these are very complex value propositions so can you share with us very quickly when you need to get back to that spirit of levity that we were able to find backstage what do you do for one another we we wrote a song together yeah and performed it that's true you know do you want to do that now in our remaining no no but uh but you know I think I think it's really important when I went to Comdex which was big conference I was a tech entrepreneur for seven or eight years and I went to a party with Comdex right 1500 of my closest friends not right and when I got to the social sector everybody was lovely and everyone cared about social change and they were nice and I went wow I want to do this so so my my advice to people is go to the parties because we have to put social into social entrepreneurship well said okay Betsy you said something when we were talking on the phone that I think would be a great place for us to close which was it was it was again the business and social entrepreneurship perspective and it was about how the combination of the two of you and this kind of unique it's this isn't succession planning in the textbook sense I mean you didn't go to your board and start a process and end a process and all that but you described it as a growth strategy actually can you can you describe that for us I can I it really it's been a growth strategy on two levels one we talked about the growth strategy within my program area so taking bookshare and I've been able to come up with new products new visions new ways to take that and it's grown or X or something in that time at the same time though because Jim was able to focus on other things it meant that our human rights program had more wind in its sales it meant that Jim could help start some new things at a benetech level like our benetech labs initiative so it really has field growth I think across benetech not just in one area and I think the other thing that's worth mentioning is you know I used to be where everyone looked for the vision and the leadership and that was kind of the last thing that kind of changed I'd say that took like three or four years but now you know Betsy has actually set the vision for where all of our literacy in education projects are going and when people come to me and say can you basically you know give us a pearl of wisdom I say well either you should talk to Betsy or I will channel Betsy briefly and then you should talk to Betsy and I think that's a really important transition because a real CEO type leader is the person responsible not only for the operations but also for where are we going how are we going to raise fresh money who our new customer is going to be and and now I get to be more of a cheerleader for that as opposed to the originator of that this is a huge point and a great point to close on because the not only the respect that you're showing one another but the clarity about how to continue along a vision as well as a strategy path is critical and thank you so much for for telling us about this we managed to do that right on time I want you to know we're at zero zero zero zero on our wind down clock thank you both so much for being with me I really appreciate it yeah all right thank you thank you thank you it's now my pleasure to introduce our next conversation and I'm going to introduce Dan Shulman he's the group president of Enterprise Growth at American Express this is a division of American Express that's working to raise awareness for and address the issues of financial inclusion in the U.S. and globally Dan has led American Express's financial inclusion efforts which include the development of banking alternative and prepaid products for the financially underserved called bluebird and serve and advocacy efforts like the new documentary spent looking for change which I hope all of you have already seen or going to see or going to get online and see it's a fantastic film so with that I want to welcome Dan who's going to be in conversation I think with our own Kevin nice to see you that's great thank you thanks right so just to set the stage he's the corporate in the jeans and the boots and I'm the entrepreneur and the coach just we like to look like something different Dan I'm really excited that you are here and talking about financial inclusion you know we can make money reducing the cost of being poor and not making money off the poor and it's exciting that American Express and other folks you know PayPal is here and other folks have real revenue targets around a mission where the market overlaps with justice doesn't happen every time fair trade you have to subsidize some of the cost with this that's actually you can make money smartphones big data reducing the cost of being poor financial inclusion that's new and so we we've had corporate sponsors before you're one of the first who has actual revenue targets around things that the entrepreneurs in this room would be working at things that the village capital financial inclusion corridor working at so that's new why is American Express there why is this now a corporate goal why does this make sense as a business well there's a saying that inspires me every day that that's expensive to be poor and that couldn't be more true in the financial services arena the things that you and I take for granted cashing a check paying a bill sending money to somebody you love um they're incredibly time consuming and very expensive for a huge population here in the United States and across the world there are over two and a half billion people in the world that are financially excluded from the traditional financial system here in the U.S. incredibly there are anywhere between 70 and 100 million adults almost a third of our population that don't have access to bank accounts and so when they want to cash a check they're hard-earned money that they've gotten some working two or three jobs they have to go to a check cashing location stand in line for 30 or 40 minutes and then just to give them cash the check cashing location takes anywhere between two and four percent of their check to give them cash right and then when you have cash what can you do with it you can't do anything really with cash you can't pay your bills with it so you have to go to another location stand in line for another 40 minutes and get a money order to pay your bill so for a typical cable bill that might cost 50 dollars you pay 11 dollars to get a money order to pay that bill and with technology that just doesn't have to be the case anymore we actually can dramatically reduce the cost simplify the experience take all that unproductive time away and create kind of alternatives to what traditional banking is and do so profitably mm-hmm so for us you know my charge coming into America express a couple of years ago where how can we rethink financial services because of what's happening with technology and what I found is there is a huge population that needs this technology and it inspires us to create different and innovative ways of thinking about products right has American Express done any official sizing of the market of financial inclusion in the U.S.? well in the U.S. alone I'll just give you a couple of statistics and you can define in any way you want the FDIC defines us at about 70 million Americans who are either unbanked or underbanked as when underbanked means you use things like a pawn shop or a check gassing location you may have a savings account but that may be it the study just came out that anywhere between 50 percent to 65 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck right so that's the size of the problem what about the size of the market opportunity what what if you're doing things like reducing the $11 out of $40 cost of paying a bill and the hour and a half cost what's the economic opportunity to so this population spends about $1.3 trillion of spending the U.S. alone so you know the myth that you know they're not disposable income is completely wrong but what the fees and interests that the underserved population pay last year alone was $89 billion so like bounce checks you know the checks you write and and you bounce I don't know how many of you have seen a actually the tees and seas of a checking account recently but the typical checking account terms and conditions is 110 pages long which is two times Romeo and Juliet and the only thing they have a common is they're both sort of a tragedy in their own way so Americans spent over $30 billion last year on bounce checks on bounce checks $30 billion and a lot of banks still do what's called high low sorting so if you have three checks that come in one for $10 is one for $50 one for $100 they'll cash the $100 check first to put you into overdraft immediately so you have $40 in your checking account so they get three overdraft fees instead of maybe one that might have occurred and so institutionalized predatory it's there are a lot of bad practices they're not there payday loans are probably the worst of them all with interest rates that can be you know 20 times credit card rates that can be anywhere up to 300 400% interest rates from that so my thought is that technology can take that $89 billion that's spent right now and you know sort of the personal goal we have is how can we return half of that back to the underserved population how do we take that $90 billion and save at a minimum $45 billion because the problem is it's not that people don't have revenues don't equal expenses it's that the cash flow is very uneven right revenues may be coming in when your expenses are low and then you can get hit with a you know a car accident a leaky roof whatever medical emergency and then once that happens and you have no savings you go into this downward spiral and so if we can return that money back into the economy back to people and then start to encourage things like savings you know we might be able to make a real dent in the issue and for AmEx you know you have kind of an exclusive brand with the brand comes privilege is one of your things these are folks who are not privileged how you've been kind of exclusive brand how do you brand and tell the story around financial inclusion and then you're even putting on a movie here yeah how does the brand and the story fit in yeah well there are a lot of conversations around that at the board level and at the senior level in terms of what does it mean for us to rethink what our brand stands for and our brand is always stood for you know in my view sort of integrity security service not necessarily mass affluent although our most famous products you know our charging credit card and the black card and that kind of thing are obviously at the mass affluent but the company is 164 years old I mean it started as a freight forwarding company and there's nothing less sexy than freight forwarding we basically sent overstage coach and the Pony Express packages from one coast to the other coast for people that were going out west and needed to move things and that was it was an express yeah right it was literally that's where it came Wells Fargo and American Express were together and created this and so the brand has not always been mass affluent it started off more populous than that but the issue for us is that technology is fundamentally changing financial services right now if you stand still you will fall behind and honestly we could now for the first time with technology think about new segments of the population in ways that we never could do before and serve them with a great value proposition and that to me was the key big data smartphones make the forward market software platforms smartphones and then relationships with a bunch of retailers to reimagine what banking could be out there and you can do that profitably but be a consumer champion at the same time and so our whole idea was and the rallying crying the company was move our brand from being exclusive to being inclusive and that was a big step to the company and the time that it's a pivot for some huge company huge pivot for American Express but when we saw the success we were having with some of the products that you mentioned you know it really started to resonate and it's inspiring quite frankly to be part of a company that's actually trying to address financial exclusion yeah and why the movie you've got it they've got a great documentary that that is showing here why tell a story about it why why tell the story of the need the way this movie does and if you haven't seen it you should see it we're showing it yeah so the documentary is called spent looking for change we worked with Davis Guggenheim who some of you may know of he did an inconvenient truth and waiting for Superman and what we really wanted to do is that people hear statistics around financial exclusion right you know like 70 million people or 89 billion of fees and but most people do not understand that this isn't just about you know the very lower income level this is really about the new middle class is the way that I define it every single one of us in this room either knows a friend or personally or a family member who is struggling right now in some way shape or form more now than before absolutely it's happening in my family it's happening to everybody we all know somebody and what we wanted to do is with this documentary and I encourage everybody to watch it it's 38 minutes long it doesn't take a lot of time but we released it on youtube because we wanted we didn't want to do whatever there's a lead film for the whole thing so it was like let's release this free of charge on youtube just about 18 million people have seen the document 18 million people which is I have to say we had a couple of members of a couple of senators and congressmen put out press releases saying you know all Americans should see this and the reason we put out the movie and there's nothing about America's version there it's like at the very end and there are credits that say we have to sponsor it but it was to put a human face on the problem because if you really want to start a conversation about financial inclusion and have it be a real issue it's a little like I saw some of the presentations that some of the folks did this morning and they tell stories about individuals and it makes things come alive and what I think to really address this problem there needs to be a whole ecosystem that comes together it can't be government we can't rely on the government to address this problem they don't have the resources to go and do it or the way and it's a very divided you know very partisan body right now and so to expect them to pass legislation of some sort that is going to fundamentally fix financial exclusion I just don't think we can count on that I also don't think we can just count on academia to put out research papers although they put out extremely important bodies of work or the non-profit world this has to be a partnership between government regulators private enterprise public NGO that kind of thing and so we wanted this conversation to start with this and we wanted people to not just intellectually get the problem but emotionally get the problem and we show this at the consumer financial services board the CRPB and to their board and after the film ended like the the head of it said we have to take a couple of minutes just to compose ourselves because it's heartbreaking when you see what people go through it really it can bring tears to your eyes and you know you're a big company and you want to figure out what to do next and and where to move so you're doing a lot with AmEx Ventures working with startups tell me how that works yeah and then you make a decision so we've got a couple of things that we are trying to do I mean one of the things is that we do have some resources within American Express to leverage against this problem and we are doing a financial inclusion lab in which we are asking academia to submit research which we will fund and that website goes live later today we also set up a venture arm here in Silicon Valley in which we look to invest in companies that are promoting financial inclusion we've we've set up a hundred million dollar fund out here we look at kind of a couple of areas but financial inclusion is our one of our biggest we just closed our first round in a company called Signify yesterday I think we announced it this morning right Signify works in seven developing markets where they on an opt-in basis from customers look at cell phone records and do an algorithm to look at credit worthiness because as many people know traditional FICO scores and you know your credit worthiness scores they don't look at things like your rent payment or you know what's your most recent record I mean there's a lot of things they exclude and therefore people can't get alone at a reasonable interest rate because so much of the data is not used and so we think that this is just one very interesting model of many to support in looking at all of the different forms of data that might form sort of a different type of scoring methodology to extend credit because if you can extend credit to somebody at reasonable interest rates or an installment loan capacity as opposed to forcing them to go to pawn shops or right give up their loved items or or go to payday lenders right or title loan companies that's a good thing right so big data lets you extend the credit yeah exactly and your co-investor there is a mid-yard network yes one of our long and supporters here but also been involved with it forever right so did you this is your first investment it's also obviously your first co-investment out of this thing how did you have to figure out how to partner how to make the deal work and come to terms well we have a venture arm out here there's six people out here in Silicon Valley incredibly experienced in looking at the right entrepreneurial community the startup community we looked at over 300 companies last year for instance and so we encourage anybody who's working in the arena of financial inclusion uh to submit to us we look at all of them we to screening criteria around it and uh you know we want to invest in quite a number of companies in the arena yeah yeah so we just have a little bit of time I can see in the clock where will this be in five or six years what do you see happening so I think we're entering that era of the non-bank is the way that I think about it where you can do like the bank branch infrastructure is such an antiquated out-of-date concept it's incredibly expensive bank branches you know thousands close every year where do they close all 97 percent in neighborhoods where the medium income is below the national average right all right so they're putting bank branches in rich neighborhoods taking them out of poor neighborhoods and but the great thing is we don't need bank branches anymore we don't need to go to a bank branch to cash currency to get a checking account you can do all of this now in the palm of your hand with a smart phone or even a feature phone through text type of uh functionality and software platforms and go to a retail store and have a cashier be sort of the equivalent of what a teller used to be and so this idea of the post office maybe doing something there's some very innovative thinking about right you know how you can reimagine consumer financial services and I think it can be extraordinarily powerful in solving this issue if we if we all come together around it yeah that's great we could talk more but it looks like we're out of time okay thank you very much it's an honor to be here thank you have a great thank you thank you very much great thanks for that and at SoCAP we always like to take an opportunity to celebrate growth and development in the social capital markets and to have sort of milestone announcements and with that I'm going to welcome Daniel Epstein from Unreasonable to give you an announcement thank you all so much I have two announcements in three minutes so I'll start with an introduction first off I'm nervous secondly I'm the founder of the Unreasonable Institute CEO of Unreasonable Group and today proudly announcing partner in Unreasonable Capital but before I tell you about those announcements I think I should take a second to rationalize a seemingly irrational name which is Unreasonable at George Bernard Shaw the Irish playwright is famous for saying that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in adapting the world to himself therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man and woman of course if George Bernard Shaw is right then in a world where a billion people live in absolute poverty another billion people don't have access to clean drinking water in a world where two and a half million children under the age of five passed away from a preventable ailment like diarrhea last year if George Bernard Shaw is right if all progress depends on the unreasonable person then it is our belief that we cannot afford not to bet on unreasonable people that's what we've been doing at Unreasonable Institute and Unreasonable since day one so three years ago when I was on stage we then had one organization at Unreasonable it was the Unreasonable Institute we are an international accelerator for early stage entrepreneurs tackling seemingly intractable problems fast forward three years to today and under the leadership of one of my partners Teji Ravi Lochen the institute has scaled so we now have programs in Unreasonable East Africa we have Unreasonable Mexico we have Unreasonable Institute we've launched Unreasonable Media Unreasonable ISEA and we're seeing about a thousand entrepreneurs apply for our programs each year and we select 40 we've worked with roughly a hundred entrepreneurs with operations across 40 countries and they're doing incredible work and in short the reason I bring all this up is because we have fantastic deal flow and so today we were launching a sister organization called Unreasonable Capital it's an early stage investment fund that will invest directly into entrepreneurs across emerging markets solving these seemingly intractable problems we have already placed one deal and this week we'll be closing our second deal and we're looking to grow that fund very quickly so anybody here who's interested in investing into emerging markets into incredibly fast moving startups solving impossibly hard problems we'd love to partner with you but I promise two introductions or two announcements the second one is we have a belief out of Unreasonable that if we're actually going to have a chance in hell at putting a dent on global poverty we have to focus our efforts on reaching adolescent girls living in poverty there's 600 million of them you all know the numbers and so this fall in November we're launching the world's first accelerator dedicated to entrepreneurs who have the potential to impact millions of girls in poverty we're calling it the Girl Effect Accelerator it's in partnership with Nike and the Nike Foundation and we would love to collaborate with anybody here on that program that program also becomes a deal flow engine into Unreasonable Capital so if you're excited about investing into emerging markets if you believe in the importance of girls we'd love to collaborate thanks so much thanks I'm all for the Girl Effect for sure so great so next up we have Denay Ringelman from Indiegogo and these days it's really hard to find someone who hasn't run an Indiegogo campaign or contributed to one or enjoyed a product that was funded through Indiegogo or just shared a campaign through social media as the first online funding platform to launch in January of 2008 Indiegogo pioneered the industry and has grown to be the largest global funding platform with more than 200,000 campaigns as a leader in the tech industry Indiegogo's founder and chief development officer Denay Ringelman is focused on supporting the continued evolution of social funding and social entrepreneurship Denay has been listed on Fortunes 40 under 40 fast companies top 50 women innovators in tech and Elle magazine's most influential women in the tech list we're honored to have Denay here to speak with us about how social funding is changing finance for good please welcome Denay Ringelman Hi everybody how you doing this morning good all right it's actually really special for me to be here because my whole the beginning of my life essentially in social entrepreneurship began with Socap it actually began with good capital and Kevin Jones he hired me thankfully to be an intern for a couple months and so it's actually really cool to kind of be back in the world and be speaking up here today so I'm excited to talk to you today about about social funding a lot of people call it crowdfunding I actually think it's a terrible word for the industry but we can talk about that later but what I want to talk about today is how we're actually changing finance for good and this is both permanently and for the better double entendre totally intended but to give you some background you know many of you guys have heard Indiegogo we're now at it it's like old news you know we're in every country we're distributing millions of dollars every single week to every industry entrepreneurs artists causes you name it if you have an idea you can use Indiegogo to raise money and where Indiegogo came from was this place of wanting to democratize access to capital my co-founders and I saw ideas going unborn every single day not for lack of heart and hustle not even for lack of an audience but simply because they didn't know the right people and so we wanted to blow that model up and make you not have to be dependent on knowing the right people and that's why we created Indiegogo and what actually Indiegogo became in the early days was this incredible alternative form of finance I would actually like to say that when the credit crisis hit back in 2008 and 2009 that actually helped Indiegogo because it forced people to look outside of banks look outside of VCs look outside of the traditional financial systems to see where else can I get money to get my ideas off the ground but then when the crisis you know subsided I actually started to get a little worried are we a counter-cyclical company are we gonna die when the economy comes back and actually the exact opposite happened that's when really things started to flourish and the reason is is that Indiegogo isn't just addressing the most obvious risk which is financing risk when you're an entrepreneur a social entrepreneur trying to get your idea off the ground what we've actually found is that Indiegogo also addresses the two other major risks that you face when you're trying to birth an idea into this world and that's market risk and execution risk and it's exciting because this is this is why I think Indiegogo is here to stay and why social funding is gonna be part of the entire fabric of finance and actually make finance a lot more sustainable so what do I mean by market risk so what is what is this actually what am I actually saying so a great example this is gravity light there's a light that these designers out of London had actually created a light where 30 seconds of lifting creates 30 minutes of energy they saw it as an alternative to kerosene in the developing world a lot safer and a lot cheaper they couldn't get a venture capitalist to call them back so what did they do they did an Indiegogo campaign and they raised $300,000 and in the process basically validated that they had a market kipatch same thing what they did is they actually had raised some money but they used Indiegogo not just to launch the product but actually to build a brand they ended up raising over $500,000 it's a kipatch that if you put on your arm it emits the signal it makes you invisible to mosquitoes much better than mosquito nets but they used Indiegogo not just to launch a product and raise the money but actually to build that brand to reduce that market risk same thing with Kinoma Create this actually was an idea which is a JavaScript toolbox where it was created by Marvell which is a $5 billion company but they used Indiegogo as a way to build a community around the product before they actually launched so thereby creating that market before they launched same thing for Lavame a mobile showers for the homeless when they launched their Indiegogo campaign they actually proved that this was something that could stick and a whole bunch of cities started calling them saying when can you come when can you bring your mobile showers to my city and Solar Roadways a lot of people have heard of this one too young too young yes young people in the middle of their life inventors out of Idaho had were passionate about saving the world they believe that if we could actually put make all the roads across the world solar powered and cover them with solar panels we could actually reduce the carbon emissions by 85 percent and make the roads a lot safer at the same time so they ended up using Indiegogo no it's going to cost trillion no it's not going to they used Indiegogo to raise two million dollars and no it's not going to just cost two million dollars to change all roads across America and the world but it was basically the beginning and it actually put their idea on the map and actually earned them the respect from the press from the media from partners from people who are actually now focusing on trying to make this idea happen so those are examples of how these campaigns have used Indiegogo not just to raise the money some of them didn't actually even need the money but actually to to build to create that market and thereby reduce the market risk prove that they have an idea that is worth worth coming to life in the world on the execution risk side sorry for the blue line here we have plenty of people who are now using Indiegogo again they have the money or maybe they don't have the money but what they're doing is they're using it as a way to get smarter faster to really test all of their assumptions and therefore refine their product market fit before they actually launch their idea Skybell here is a perfect example it's a smart doorbell video doorbell this guy had a whole roadmap of the features he wanted to launch and based on his Indiegogo campaign and based on the feedback from his funders he completely switched a lot of the prioritization of which features he needed to launch same thing with Cooley Cooley which is a superfood snack these young girls discover Moringa which is a very special element that can actually it's very healthy and cheap and they're launching these new bars they use Indiegogo to raise the $52,000 but they actually in the process learned who their early adopter segments were it was yoga moms shopping at Whole Foods which was an hypothesis but their campaign actually confirmed it same thing with Nick's underwear this is high-tech underwear out of Canada women come ask me what that means later it's awesome and this woman was super excited about launching her underwear line and she totally she had three she had three versions of her underwear and she was convinced one was going to be a best seller and but she threw in a third just because she thought it was cool and sexy guess which one became the most funded perk on her campaign it was the third one that she thought of as an afterthought so she actually completely discovered who her customers were and actually the customer mix and she reshuffled her whole production schedule based on the demand proven in her Indiegogo campaign same thing with Jibo this is the world's first family robot they've raised almost two million dollars that Dr. Cynthia Brazil out of MIT launched Indiegogo campaign simply because she wanted to learn who her customers are and what they wanted to use this family robot for in her mind she thought it'd be like the personal assistant for the whole family well what she learned is actually most of her funders are dudes and most of them don't know how to cook and so they're going to use this robot to learn how to cook and that's why and they wanted someone to talk to them and tell them what to do how to follow the recipes she had no concept that that was going to be the use case but she learned that all through launching this idea letting people fund it and tell her what they wanted to do same thing with Misfit Shine these guys are actually here from the Bay Area they launched an activity tracker and the whole point of it was to have an elegant solution to tracking your calories and your workouts and all this kind of stuff so it was going to hide in your clothes and totally be hidden in the process he actually learned when he launched his Indiegogo campaign he actually offered his shine in different colors and actually learned that people were willing to fund the black version way more than the silver version actually willing to pay $50 more for the black than the silver he learned this all by swapping perks in and out and seeing what people funded and what they didn't and also in the process this funder said he said what else would you guys like and he said we really want bracelets and necklaces and he started to fight with them saying well the whole point of this is to hide in your clothes why would you want to wear it and then he realized he was fighting with his customers which as an entrepreneur you know that's very bad thing so he said okay I'm going to get humble for a second let's prove it and so he threw up a perk mid-campaign of bracelets and necklaces and it got claimed overnight and he completely unlocked a whole new revenue stream and accessory line etc that he never knew existed all because he ran this campaign in a matter of weeks so he likes to say Indiegogo made me so much smarter faster no matter how much money I raised I'm always going to do an Indiegogo campaign to launch a product and this is one of my favorites this is Miss Possible this is a recent campaign actually out of two young entrepreneurs just graduated college they totally believe that like dolls are awesome but we need more options than just Barbie and if we want to get more girls in the STEM why don't we make dolls that look like Marie Curie or Jane Goodall or Rosalind Franklin and so they've launched Indiegogo campaign they raise money to launch their first doll which is modeled after Marie Curie but they've turned to their funders to decide what's next who are the future products so all of us are now voting voting with our dollar on which dolls are coming next it's a great way to market test so as you can see when you create a campaign and you invite the world to be part of the ideation and creation process and you allow them to vote with their dollar literally what products what features what colors at what price you don't just raise money and reduce financing risk which is incredibly important invaluable but you actually reduce the market risk which is the risk that you're making something that nobody cares about or not enough people care about and you're also reducing execution risk which is maybe you're solving a real problem in the right way you're just not getting the product market fit right you're charging too much you're including too many features what have you and so Indiegogo has become this really flexible and open and quick and easy and fun and intense way to learn all of this in just a matter of weeks and so what's the what are the benefits of this then it's more than just you know what are the benefits of having less risk in the system clearly that that's a positive so what we're seeing now is we're seeing these campaigns actually using Indiegogo as a way to attract investment capital so when you reduce your market and execution risk you actually make yourself look better to the venture capitalists to the banks of the world gravity light and this possible both got an investor interest out of their Indiegogo campaigns lava made got a hundred thousand dollar grant from Google and Scannadu actually which I haven't talked about which is like this doctor in your pocket a medical tricorder which is literally from Star Trek days but they made it a reality they used Indiegogo to raise 1.6 million and right after that they actually were able to close a 10.3 million dollar series A round but it's also being used not just to attract a traditional capital but actually to close the capital so I actually met Tinkerbotz which is a robots for kids in Germany and the guys behind that were actually able to close a million dollar venture round because they had written Indiegogo into their roadmap and the venture investors were not willing to put the money in to their company unless they knew they were going to do an Indiegogo campaign to product test before they launched same thing with Jibo their investment was partially contingent as well so attractive investment capital close investment capital the third is actually to make you spend your investment capital more wisely so like I said with Kate with a kite patch they had raised money from the Gates Foundation Misfit Shine had raised money from actually a venture capital seven million venture capital and Konoma Crate came from a five billion dollar semiconductor company they used Indiegogo to really understand what products they need to build what features they need to build what pricing they need to do so they actually are spending whatever capital they already have in a much more efficient and smart manner and lastly I'm running off out of time here is it's also a way to stay independent so we're now actually starting to see people completely bypass the traditional financial system we have Nix that went right and got got picked up for distribution out of her campaign in Hudson Bay which is like the Nordstroms of Canada this was a first-time entrepreneur maker she got her product through her first Indiegogo came right into this into this big retailer which is like the dream when you're a clothing manufacturer Cooley Cooley got right into Whole Foods and Sky about completely past the venture world completely Apple came calling to them saying we want you in our home home get store when we launch so the question is does this mean traditional finances are going away what's their role is this their future don't get nervous guys if you're an investor this is what I'd like to say who's an investor and no one raises their hand no I don't think so and this is why I'll hold you in suspense for a little bit longer what's happened is is what Indiegogo is actually proving is that cash is becoming a commodity so whether you can get cash from the crowd or from an investor cash is cash it doesn't really matter and so what matters then is what else can the sources of cash bring you so clearly the crowd can lower your execution and your market rest so what must the traditional finance are bringing and they do bring they bring relationships they bring expertise Indiegogo took traditional venture capital I know it is definitely beneficial so the key is what we see is the two types of capital whether it's the crowd capital or traditional capital actually working hand in hand together and the way we see that doing is in two ways one is as Indiegogo being an incubation platform and two is Indiegogo being a market testing platform what I mean by incubation platform is that what we're seeing is because traditional venture investors governments etc are looking at Indiegogo to try to find ideas that are market validated they're bubbling up to the top and they're actually using Indiegogo as a sourcing in the discovery platform so that's why Indiegogo is literally in a merit-based fashion bubbling up ideas to traditional capital so that they can have better ideas to actually invest in and the same thing on the market testing platform we're now seeing companies you know like I said venture capitalists requiring that the when they make the investment that their portfolio company actually run Indiegogo campaign before they they launch so that they're actually launching a product the world wants and not just a product they think the world wants so the new role for traditional financiers that is one of amplifiers so we used to like to say that you know traditional finance and finance is broken because it's inefficient and it's inefficient because it's riddled with gatekeepers and gatekeepers are just inefficient ways of allocating capital but what we're doing now is we're actually turning traditional financiers into amplifiers so when they're discovering ideas and putting money into them off of ideas that have already been community validated they're they're bringing them out to the world and they're what I like to say they used to have two jobs one is to bet right and one is to amplify it's the betting part that makes their job really risky and it's the betting part that makes them want to say no more than they say yes and so because we reduced a lot of the risk from the equation and we get to we get to allow them to say yes more than they say no and then they actually get to do the job which they probably the amplification job is the job that is the thing that probably attracted them to become an investor from the beginning is they want to say yes they want to help companies launch and thrive and grow so overall what's happening is we're creating a more healthier financial ecosystem because we're getting more ideas going we're enabling faster failure which is actually we all know is a very good thing if you can't raise money within a few weeks if you can't prove that there's a demand for your idea if you can't your product market fit right then maybe you're not ready or maybe that idea isn't something the world actually wants and so you can move on to the next thing and not waste the next two years of your life and all your life savings on something that was never going to see the light of day and then the ones that get through the ones that the world is actually funding are the ones the ideas that the world wants the ideas are better that are coming to life and the way they're coming out the way they're bubbling up is in a much more merit-based fashion it's based on true market needs it's not based on what a few people traditional investors or gatekeepers think the world wants it's actually based on what the world wants because the world is actually involved in voting and as a result then we're going to have less waste because a lot of on the physical side the products that are coming out are the ones that are actually wanted and when you do an Indiegogo campaign you completely mitigate the risk of over-production and under-production so you actually you produce exactly the amount that that people want so in the end this is how I think Indiegogo is changing finance for good it's both permanently making it more sustainable by reducing risk and for the battle better which is allowing more ideas than merit-based fashion to bubble up to the top and exist and that's all I got for you thank you thanks for that so we've heard the importance of story and a variety of settings so far from entrepreneurs and the stories of their journeys as well so take a second and prepare to engage in storytelling actively yourself we're going to bring Ed Edmo back of Wisdom Elder and he's going to engage you in telling a short story remember everything moves within its own beauty and within its own time everything has a spirit is as important as you and I remember everything moves within its own beauty and within its own time everything has a spirit and is as important as you and I everything moves within its own beauty and within its own time Everything has a spirit, and is as important as you and I. Tuts my way, that's Ness first for good morning, Tuts my way. A long time ago, there was a young boy named Snake. He had arms and legs. Snake liked to run races. Snake liked to climb trees. But most of all, Snake liked to jump off the cliffs into sand. It was Snake didn't like anything he would say. Oh, I need your help. When I go like this, make noise like a snake, everyone. All together. It was brother or sister that did something for Snake. Snake didn't like it he would say. It was aunt or uncle that did something for Snake. Snake didn't like it he would say. It was mother or father that did something for Snake. Snake didn't like it he would say. Even if it was grandma or grandpa did something for Snake. Snake didn't like it he would say. One day the village went to another village to hunt, trade and fish. Snake ran a race and lost. He took the other races. They fixed him something to eat. Could have been a bowl, a salmon, eyeball, soup. If he didn't like it he'd tell her cooks. They sang him a new Indian song. He didn't like it he'd tell her singers. They told him a story like I'm telling you. A new and different story. If he didn't like it he'd tell a storyteller. What he can do about that Snake, he makes us ashamed to go visit. Even when he visits you sit still. You eat what you're given. You don't act rude. What do we do about that Snake every time he loses a race? He says eat something he doesn't like he says. This is to a song he doesn't like he says. This is to a story he doesn't like he says. All the time he says. We hate to take him along he keeps saying. The night when I was quiet in the village everyone was asleep. The medicine woman snuck into Snake's lodge. She took out a knife. She cut off Snake's arm, put Indian meds on him and healed up. Cut off Snake's leg, put Indian meds on him and healed up. Cut off Snake's other leg, put Indian meds on him and healed up. Cut off Snake's other arm, put Indian meds on him and healed up. Even get your hands up home. All night the night the people of the village say Roll Snake. Roll Snake, Roll Snake, Roll Snake and sing a medicine song. It's a song that helps me say it to everyone. All night the day Roll Snake. Roll Snake, Roll Snake, Roll Snake and sing a medicine song. Everyone says it all night the day. Roll Snake. and sing a magic song a little bit louder all night they sing a magic song all night they and sing a magic song all night they and sing a magic song all night they and sing a magic song all night they and sing a magic song boy that's a long night huh all night they and sing a magic song snake was long and round you know how snakes look today and you threw them down and he slithered away beneath people's feet snakes they remember what people did to them long long time ago what do snakes say when they see human beings nowadays thank you but tell us to have respect for other people so thank you for the respect you give me have a good day thank you everyone okay so we're gonna wrap it up we have our evening plenary tonight at 5 30 we'll be starting promptly again and after that don't forget our big party tonight over in the impact hub at Socap and look forward to seeing you in sessions throughout the day thanks