 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here early from lunch. And my name is Aprajita Garwal. I'm hoping the room would fill up, and we would have to do another round of introductions midway through this panel. So my name is Aprajita. I live in Mumbai in India. And I work with IntelliCap and run a forum called Sankalp Forum, which is a little like Socap, works in India, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. And our primary job is to help build social entrepreneurial ecosystems. So we work with a few hundred social enterprises over the years, over the last 12 years. We've worked with them in various capacities, supported them through hand-holding, capacity building, helping them become more investable, and showcasing them to investors. I have three of our social enterprises here, people who we've had the fortune to work with quite closely. So I'll go with a quick round of introductions and then ask them to talk about their companies. So I'll go with Rustam first, who's on the left-most side. Rustam is the founder and CEO of Boond. Boond is a company that is into distributing solar products, and they create rural entrepreneurs and work in a few difficult geographies within India. His company has impacted over 50,000 lives in India, and it's about a little over two years old. Then we have Manik, Manik Mehta. He is, OK, the names here might not necessarily all correspond to who we have on stage. But Manik is the co-founder of a company called Leaf Innovations, or Leaf Variables. And his company works on producing women's safety and family safety devices that can be worn as jewelry. He's just out of his graduate school two months ago. Yeah, approximately. And he also works in India. But his product is slated to go global. Then we have Lohan, and I'm, did I get that right? Yeah, yeah. OK. And he works in Rwanda. He runs Kigali Farms. He's the founder and CEO of Kigali Farms, which produces mushrooms. So I'm going to leave it at that and then ask them to talk a little bit more about the business. So, Rustam, shall we start with you? And if you can talk about your business. Mic is not working. Yeah, is my mic on? I hope so. Yeah, now it's better. So like I said, it's hard competing with the fly-by going by. So thanks for coming. And thanks to Prajita for the invitation. So this is actually a good picture, where we are. We do solar energy access in Indian villages, which basically means we set up solar power plants, which drive microgrids, and give electricity to people who live in the off-grid areas. These people are typically, like you see in the picture right now, people living mostly below $2 a day. And they have no electricity, so they have a lot of problems in their productivity. So we've been doing this for four years now. And it's nice to be in San Francisco. And we are trying to raise another round of funds soon. So our website is boon.net, if anybody is more interested. So finally, thanks. Manik, what's the big idea that you're working on? So at LEAF Innovation, we thought we believe that everyone deserves to be safer. That's why we made the product safer. So right now, imagine a girl walking down the street and she feels danger. What she does, she just takes out the jewelry and double taps it. And it sends an alert to our server. From there, we forward to our friends, family, police, who can then life track you via the mobile application. So we are working on a women's safety solution as of right now. We want to move towards kids' safety and the family safety in its overall entirety. And specifically in the developing, in the developed worlds too. Because it's a case where everything is on the global scale. We have 6 billion people and we need at least protection for all of them. What's happening in Syria or Turkey, everyone needs protection and everyone needs safety. Our thought process is if we can enable communication, if everyone knows there's something wrong, that problem is going to be solved. If no one knows, there's no chance of that problem being solved. So what we are doing is enabling communication so that the safety and the security increases. Currently, we're in a fundraising round. We are looking to raise somewhere around 500,000. Why mushrooms? Mushrooms are both something very new and innovative, believe it or not, in Africa. But they're also something very old. Mushrooms have been cultivated in Asia for over 1,000 years. In Europe, in the US, it's a much younger crop, only about 150 years ago, did they start working on mushrooms in Europe about 100 years in the US. And in Africa, it's sort of brand new. It's just a cottage industry right now to the point that all of Africa, with the 1 billion people in there, produce less mushrooms. In fact, three times less mushrooms than all of Australia. And that strikes me as not right. They eat mushrooms. Mushrooms are eaten in the countryside. Mushrooms are imported in cans from China, oftentimes in the cities. And so there's something to be done there. Maybe should I say why mushrooms? Yeah, why mushrooms? You might say, well, fine, they don't do mushrooms. What's the big deal? They just don't need to do mushrooms. But in fact, because you probably think mushrooms is that little white thing I find in my salad, sometimes that's not really interesting. And you couldn't be more wrong, because mushrooms are actually extremely, extremely nutritious. I'm not talking for all mushrooms necessarily, but oyster mushrooms, which we're working with now, and button mushrooms, they're really rich in protein, all the essential amino acids, zinc, iron, and there. So from a nutrition point of view, which is what drove me to do this in Rwanda, they're a true powerhouse. But then there's a really good business fit, in fact, with the region. And when you think about Rwanda in particular, as you know, it's a small country, very densely populated, which really means that people have very little land to work with. Most farmers are stuck needing to make a living. They're farmers because nobody will give them a job. So then you have to make your own food and that makes you a farmer all of a sudden. But you're really stuck having to make a living for your whole life from very little land, which on top of that over there happens to be pretty poor soil. And mushrooms sort of sold for that because one of their key characteristics is very, very high yields. For on a stage like this, on a stage like this, a little less than a stage like this, a farmer could make a dollar a day. So a stage like this is about 1% of the landholding of the famous one acre farmer, right? So 1% of the land could be a mini cash crop. So that was a big idea for me. They don't need good soil. You can grow mushrooms right in this room. In fact, be a very nice room for growing a lot of mushrooms. They don't need good soil. And the reason is that in fact you feed mushrooms. Mushrooms, they're not plants. That's the big thing, the one-on-one thing to remember mushrooms, they're not plants. So they don't photosynthetize. They do not get their energy from the sun. In fact, like you just an hour ago and all of us, they get their energy from digesting organic matter. So when you're farming mushrooms, what you're doing, you're basically making their food. And their food happens to be organic waste. And even in poor countries, there is a lot of waste to go around. And if you look at the wheat field, half the biomass of the wheat field is a straw. We don't have straw into a nutritious food. And another really interesting factor is that it turns out mushroom growing is really well suited for women. Because mushrooms need, and it's not a heavily physically demanding job, but they need attention to detail and tender loving care, I like to call it. Women tend to be better at that than us men, which is another really interesting dimension. So Loha, you were running a successful micro brewery before this, and you've had a fairly successful career behind you, and you had a choice to literally put a pin on any place in the globe and do your next big thing. Why Kigali in Rwanda? And what took you there? And what are you trying to achieve in terms of your vision there? You're right, I was in the beer business before, which I can tell you, if you want to make friends, it's a great industry to go into. I never had as many friends. It was a lot of fun, but at some point I figured the world probably has enough beer. Would it be something more useful to do? And it was a long thought process, but I read that book by Jacqueline Novograz, some of you maybe read the Blue Sweater, and it was a big eye-opener for me, because if you read the book, she got her big moment, her aha moment in Rwanda. And I had, as a young man, gone through the region, maybe 10, 20 years before that. And I saw the same poverty she did, but it did nothing for me. At the time, I don't think I had a lot of empathy. I'm like, OK, well, they're poor. That's just the way it is. And reading the book, it just was an eye-opener for me. I'm like, oh, there's something wrong. And now I've become a good businessman, and maybe I can put these business skills to good use. And I was eager to do more business, but have a positive impact, and that's why I became Rwanda. And I'm glad you brought the beer, because very briefly, here's one mushroom. Here's one fungus that's widely successful around the world. It's yeast. Yeast that's used to make beer is actually a fungus. I don't know if you knew that, but it's important. I went from liquid fermentation to solid fermentation. It was not that much of a life-changing. Great. Manik, your company is yet to go to market, right? And you have a few other co-founders who work with you. What's the big idea you're trying to drive? And as you try to take it to market, where are some of the challenges that you're seeing right now? I mean, obviously they may change when we meet next year at Socap, but right now? So there are quite a few things. I'm like five co-founders. We started together. So we were reading out this book. It's called Abundance by Peter S. Demandus. A lot of you guys might have heard about it and read about it. And it said, if you have to take a society from tier zero to tier one, what all things you have to do? And I was reading it back in India, and I was realizing this fact, me and my co-founders, that safety is such a big fact. And without safety or freedom of speech and movement, nothing else can change. And we were all from engineering graduates. I'm from Delhi College of Engineering. My co-founders from IIT, Delhi. Like we're the top most college from India. And we thought if we guys can't solve this problem, no one else across the globe can. So we thought of working towards it. That's how it formed a year back. And then within six months, now we are all engineering graduates. That's the best thing. So we had everything done in-house, hardware done in-house, software done in-house. Everything can be managed by us, and the quality can be controlled by us. So the quality control is what we are actually good at. Being back in India and everyone thinking that hardware is only made in US or in European nations. But being able to control what we are working on and how we are working is the major thing. And coming to your second question, that's about going towards market. So we realize this fact that this is not a really Indian issue. So we have a lot of pre-orders coming in from Europe itself. And there's this whole need in Africa, Southeast Asia. And in Socap, I realize in US, all the campuses and everywhere, it is a big need. So how do we cater to it? And that's the reason why I'm raising funds so that I can build the infrastructure around it so that when I am ready, I can start a huge launch so that I can cover global base at one point of time. So you travel from US to India or US to South Africa, you don't have to keep on changing your cell phone or keep on changing your things. It's the same hardware working everywhere. Great. But it's a difficult market to start up. And India is not really highest in terms of doing business. I'd love to know what were the real challenges in setting up? Setting up a company, starting to get it off-ground, were there any specific unique challenges that you saw? One of the challenges which I personally faced was the fact that to getting things done in India is still a huge problem. The bureaucracy is still very slow. It takes time to get things done. And also the funding part. When I came towards Silicon Valley and I visited all the campuses and everyone who's working out here, it's easier to get the money in flow to work on things which you want to. Back at home, it's still a problem. You might have a brilliant idea. So what we did was we became innovative. We started going towards all business plan competitions around. We won 10 or 12 of them across the globe. And that's how we started out because we didn't have money to do things. And even right now, money is a huge problem. Rustam, would you want to talk a bit about the big idea that you're driving and the kind of impact you hope to drive with it? Sure. So we are sitting in a room with probably 16 lights staring at us. And we have barely 50 people. So that's really funny and ironic because about a week ago, I was in a village which has about 16,000 people, about 800 households. And they probably used less lights than we have today. So that's the irony, which is kind of strange and which hits us on the face. And once you've seen the dark side, it's fairly easy to comprehend the problem. I'm a graduate of the University of California in Irvine, which is in Orange County. So it's down south. And after working in Deloitte for a fair bit of time, and I lived up on Clay and Franklin just 10 blocks down the street, you kind of desensitize yourself to actually global problems. So like Laurent or Manik here, I went back to India, which is my home country. Spent some time in the village. And it was appalled. I mean, in the morning you wake up, you have sanitation issues. You don't know where to go or how to do what. In the afternoon, you need water. And there's somebody who will have to go all across to collect water to get it for you. In the evening, by 5, you basically wind up whatever you're doing because you're in the dark. And the big problem is it's not a few handful of people. It's about 200 million people in India alone, maybe about 350 in South Asia. So that's incredible, huge. But what's more interesting is it's not just a problem. It's an opportunity. Because energy is the foundation for any kind of economic growth. It's the platform. So I look at it as opportunity. I look at it as the fact that we have some skills that we can push there. And it's a market waiting to open up. It's a market which is easier to capture the value in. So that was the logic behind starting. We spent a lot of time fighting the government. Now we actually joined the government and worked together with them. We spent a lot of time trying to raise funds. We raised around. And a fair bit of time actually understanding the need. We just spent our life there because that's, I think, the biggest challenge with most entrepreneurs, especially the ones who are frequenting SOCAP, need to understand is this is all great. But you have to spend a substantial amount of time with the people down there to understand what they want. And that was the biggest aha moment for us is the whole demand process driving the design. And then the demand process also structuring the business model around what we do. So I guess that would be my answer. And what kind of capital are you looking to raise? I mean, what sort of money do you need to make it all come together? What kind of capital? Like one which is green in color. No, but yeah, we're trying to raise up. So this would be sort of our series A, which is we raised a seed and a little bigger, about half a million dollars last year. But we're trying to raise about three to $4 million, which sets us, which gives us the power to set up microgrids in at least 350 villages across a couple of states. It also lets us enter into new territories and build on the technical expertise. Because the other big problem with energy access for people who know energy access is there's not a substantial amount of technical competence on the ground to actually deliver these solutions. So while you might make a weird shaped light sitting in a lab over here, it's hard when it breaks down to get it fixed. And that inherently kills the value of the whole product. So a lot of money will actually go into creating that ecosystem, because our approach is basically to build the whole ecosystem around servicing, around affordability, around even getting design feedback. So that's what we'll do. Right, Manik, for you, what kind of capital you talked about it briefly, but since you had to go to market. And I think one specific part that I wanted to understand from you when you look at startups and startups like yours, you know, what are the pitfalls that entrepreneurs should be aware of when they are starting to raise capital? So there are two kind of things, you know, you can raise too early, you can raise too late. So that's what happened before we even actually formed the company we raised around. It was a competition, but we raised around. So that was a little too early for us in our stage. And right now, when we are looking to raise, we are looking in the middle of a, like what he said, right? The middle of a series A and a seed, because we have pre-orders to cater to, and we have a global market and a global distributors coming towards us. So how do we cater to that? So it has to be a middle of things, and if it's not done right, then you face problems like what I'm doing right now. Right. Running around here and there. Lahore, for you, you're in the middle of a capital raise yourself. Right. Where do you see the challenges? How difficult or easy has it been? It's been difficult. I have to say it's been a very difficult process. That's cost me about 15 months right now. And I was probably naive in the process at the beginning. I used to be an investment banker. We hit back when at the beginning of my career. And so, you know, I'm good at making forecasts and stuff, and it looked plain vanilla. What we're, just a little word though before I explain. What I talked about earlier was oyster mushrooms. And oyster mushrooms are really amazing. They're great social vehicles, again, because growers can grow them on very little space and so on. The market for it is not ginormous. So we need to give ourselves a little bit of time and we're racking our brain and finding solutions for that. We need some time for that. On the other hand, we noticed that what the customers, but a lot of the more upper end customers wanted was the button mushroom, you know, the traditional wide mushroom that we've all been eating. Now, and that one there's demand for, you know, that's what we would substitute for imports and so on. But that one requires a little bit more capital. So once we decided to go into button mushrooms, so I'm seeing oyster mushrooms and button mushrooms as the two wheels of a bicycle right now. We've got the oyster mushrooms are incredibly social and that's really the mission of the company. I didn't leave my life and the nice job I had before to become a button mushroom, just a button mushroom farmer in Africa. That would defeat the purpose a little bit. But the oyster mushrooms are there because, you know, that's a lifeblood of company. That's what I really want to be doing. At the same time, you have to recognize you need cash flow and there's demand for button mushrooms and the two mushrooms do share things, you know, they're not the same things that they're like, I don't know, wheat and maize, you know, they have a lot in common, but they're different. So, but for the button mushroom, however, we do need capital and that I thought was going to be really easy because you can show very nice cash flow, very easy to reimburse the loan. So, I just went to commercial banks. I don't know if it was a mistake or what, but it's been a year and a half. And, you know, I told you at the very beginning that what we're doing is both very old but very new. And I'm telling you to commercial bankers sitting in Africa is very new. It's much too new. And innovation is nice until you're asking someone to fund it because then it becomes all of a sudden not nice at all. And it's understandable. They don't have a precedent and so on. So, maybe I became too engrossed in my idea of believing in it and I couldn't quite convince the bankers. It didn't help that a lot of those, you know, the credit analysts in the inside somewhere in the bank building have probably never eaten a button mushroom in their life. For them, they were asking to analyze the most exotic product that they've ever seen. So, it took a long time. Then I went to talk to some social investors and they're funny because they have tunnel vision. They all have different agendas and you don't always know what it is and it's not like their website is going to explain it honestly. But they're looking at my bicycle thing and some people focused on the oysters and said, that's really beautifully social but you're never gonna make money with that. And then other guys look at the button mushrooms and say, that's really great business but that's not so social. And then they're not really putting two and two together the way I'd like to do. So, it's been a hard process. Right now we've found someone who actually gets it. I think the expression is grog-sits. Really gets what we do. So, I think we're at the end of the tunnel. Though I've said that before in the tunnel, we're still there. So, I think it's all coming together but I had to then understand the needs of the people across the table from me. I realized that we're looking for about $600,000 but given that I realized it was going to be impossible in the channels I was looking for, I really looked at the business but I'm like, okay, how can I reduce the ask so that at least we can get going, reduce those button mushrooms, show the banker what it is, how it works, that it sells and so on and then go look for the second phase. So, we cut the investment in two phases and now we're only looking for about $300,000 and some of it we're likely to get as a grant from someone and the rest then we can finally get us a loan. Right. So, I'm going to come to another critical issue and because we're all working in developing markets and emerging economies, you know, how do you balance building a successful business, a successful profitable business and impact because most of the time, you guys are raising money from social investors, impact investors, everybody has their eye on the impact that you create, the jobs that you create. How do you maybe, Ruslan, if we can start with you and you can tell about how do you balance that bit? You're always starting with me with the hard question. Right. But so, I mean, we have a turnover about a little more than a million dollars right now and we do make profits and I think that's very important. I think if you call yourself a business, you have to generate revenue because you've got to pay salaries, you've got to grow and you've got to do all that. So I think that's primary, especially in the area of energy access where we work in that we need to make money. But we make impact and we've clearly defined it in three ways and that's defined through our team and also to the investors. Number one is the communities we work with and that's very important. I could be selling solar in San Francisco and making a lot more money, but I choose to sell it in off-grid areas in India which makes me social and not a commercial. Number two, the kind of products we sell in. I could sell cigarettes in the village and make a ton of money, believe me, or maybe beer and get it from my friend here. But I don't choose to do that. I choose to actually sell solar power plants. So that makes us pretty much social. And the third is the vision of the core team is aligned because I was also an investment banker. Seems like the worst job to do before you start a company. So I was working out of Singapore and selling fixed income bonds. But the fact is the core team's complete vision and the inclination and the opportunity cost that they left behind to do this is the third factor which makes us social. And I think we've encapsulated the definition in just these three primary terms. Who do you sell to? What do you sell? And what's the intention of the core team? What's the sacrifice they're making? And that makes it very simple for us. We don't go around saying that we're gonna cross subsidize or we're going to somehow star or sell my first bond, child or whatever. But we make it very clear that these are the metrics and if investors like these metrics, great. If they don't like it, then you don't like it. I mean, it's not everything to be like. And how crucial is creating impact for women? I mean, is there a specific focus around that in your business given that you work in villages? I mean, it's like Laura mentioned. Women run enterprises or women led managed enterprises are more sustainable and especially in developing countries because women tend to be more loyal to what they are doing. They tend to actually do it much better. So we do have a fair number of women and we regularly have trainings for setting up women entrepreneurs because what we found is if the entrepreneur is a woman, she tends to be more on the educational front. So she'll educate the person about solar energy, about the need for clean energy, about the need for access and be a little softer in the commercial front which is actually great for the penetration that we do. And of course, I mean, it's also gives us the softer edge because it's a very commercial market. So I think it's fairly important for us. Manik, I know women's safety is built into your business itself but you're also looking at the family safety market and how do you look at creating impact? What are the specific metrics if you guys are already thinking through those in terms of women impact and the kind of impact that you hope to generate? So as he said, women impact, so I'm just taking a line from Rustam. Women impact is very much important and how you do that because women is the one who's running the family out there. So that's the reason why we went for women safety first and rather than kids are in elder safety. Those products are already selling out there and they're good. So why women's safety? If you can secure the core of the family, that's how you move forward. You get those few things secure and then you start moving forward because it's more about giving freedom and empowering them so that they can travel at night, they can travel when they want to and we feel safe, you know. Feel that people will know if there is a problem out there. Feel that there is a way out to go at night and just be there, work at a nighttime in a BPO or do anything of that sort. So that's what we realized at that point of time and moving towards the family safety, you know. It's just not, so you start with women and then there's the kids safety that comes in and the safety angle overall in the developing nations, even the developing nations, you know. People, kids get kidnapped every eight minutes. That's a United Nations statistics across the globe. A woman has had 12.5 seconds. So that's huge. We have to sort those issues out before we even think of moving towards solar cities. They are brilliant. The idea is nice. Everything's amazing. But the basic question is if we can't provide freedom, where else would we go forward to? Freedom is very basic need. At least I believe so and I really love what the solace and the echelons of the world are doing because that's how you move forward. But it's a freedom. Let's make them safe first. Let's make them safe and then think of all the problems. Lohan, what about you? You employ women in the value chain, right? They are the ones who are usually the mushroom farmers. Yeah. Does it go beyond that? Does it go beyond, you know, just providing livelihood? Maybe you can elaborate on that. Well, so, you know, it wasn't designed as a women-centric business per se, but what we found, we didn't particularly try to encourage women more than men to get into the business, but what we found is that a great majority, two times as many women are mushroom growers. So two-thirds of our growers or employees too happen to be women and so we looked into it a little bit and yeah, it seems to be better suited for them. It's what I said at the beginning, the tenderloving care, the attention to detail. It does matter. Mushrooms have really high yields. They grow over, they grow really fast. You know, you're in the mushroom house, but things can go wrong really fast too. So you could get an infection of parasitic fungus or bacterial infection or something. What's really important in those cases is to detect it quickly and weed out the bad ones. If you catch the problem early, you're gonna be all right. If you let it go a little bit, you're gonna probably might lose your entire production. And that's where probably women tend to beat men out a little bit. There's another interesting dimension, but I can't really make a claim or I don't have hard data about it, but we have a couple of customers, ladies who come and buy mushroom powder. We also dry mushrooms and sometimes mill them into powder. And so we had this customer who repetitively came to us to buy a half a kilo, a kilo of powder, which is quite a bit and it's a bit expensive. So we asked her why, and she used it for her kids, for her kids and she put it in a porridge and things like that. And then she was adamant that she had a baby and she was breastfeeding. And she was adamant that it improved her milk production. And so the mushrooms might be a galacta-gogue. I looked up the terms, it's a galacta-gogue. I googled it, I never found any reference to mushrooms being galacta-gogues, but maybe because nobody ever looked into it. So we're going to look into that. That would be an interesting dimension, really. The number of children they have in Rwanda, that would be a very useful product. So, going back to you, Alon, do you see the scope for taking your business model to other countries or other geographies? Is there a conscious attempt to do that? Yeah, yeah, totally. At the moment, we're talking about exporting mushrooms across the region, but if this takes off, yes, it should be regional. There's no particularly good reason why mushrooms would travel from Rwanda to Nairobi to Kampala. And once it gets going, there's other locales around the region where either competitors will set up shop or we'll do it ourselves, depending. But yeah, at the same time, I think there's a logic to concentration. There's a really interesting stat. So you've all seen button mushrooms, and they're produced here in Watsonville, California. But the biggest state, the biggest mushroom producing state in the country here in the US is Pennsylvania. And there's an interesting stat, it's like 47%. So half of all the mushrooms grown in the United States come out of just one county in Pennsylvania. And so there's enough, seeing that in other places too, where it tends to be a concentration, I think it goes back to a fact that really excites me actually, is that the reason there's a mushroom industry there is because some guy decided to start it, some entrepreneur, some they decided to do it there. It could have been somewhere else and then that other community would have become rich. But no, it was there. In case of Pennsylvania, there was, I think it was Amish countries, there was a lot of horsemen who were around and some Italian immigrant families, they remember doing mushrooms back home and they put two and two together and boom, now it's a $365 million a year business in that county alone. And I've seen the same thing in Spain and in Holland, you have a lot of concentration. So what I'm hoping is, when I started this, I was looking for something where Rwanda might have a competitive advantage. And now I'm envisioning like the north of Rwanda becoming like the center of excellence of mushroom growing for the region, but with a hub and spoke system where there would be growers everywhere. That would be logical. Fantastic question. Manik, for you, do you see once you get to market and I know the product is not necessarily for India, where do you see sort of your footprint in the world? How global is this going to be your product? So we have already gone global to be honest. We already have a distributor from Europe who has have a good letter of intent of a sizable order, to be honest. And if we have to look for global in the security domain itself, everything that's internet of things and variables that are coming up is going to be linked to the internet. And the security of that is also going to be a huge challenge. So you have to have privacy security and all those things in place. And that's where our long-term vision lies. We have to secure you guys from everything out there. And that can only be done if you have everything out in open and if everyone knows there's a problem, that is the whole point. Everyone gets to know there's a problem, the problem's going to get solved. No one knows about the problem, the problem always remains. Pristam, for you, I know India is a challenging country itself in terms of building a company like yours. There's tons of competition. Where is the uniqueness and where do you see the next phase of growth happening or scale happening for you? That's a good question. I mean, it's a perception that there's a lot of competition. But the first generation was just products. So there's a lot of products, of course. There's a lot of solar lamps made in China. There's actually a whole city which makes it and exports it all over. But our differentiating approach is we don't go as a product company, we go as an ecosystem company. So we'll go to the village, we'll understand, we'll have people who are trained to understand the demand, people who are trained to assess the technical requirement of the village and then set up the right technology for them. Of course, based on solar power. So this could be a microgrid if it's a congested community who can't individually afford a solar panel. It could be individual systems which are financed by a bank. It could also be a water pump which has water which is on a pay-as-you-go meter. So individually. So that fairly differentiates us. And on your topic of how do we grow and how do you replicate, I think the concept of every social entrepreneur is you're more passionate about the problem you're solving and the idea you have. Rather than the number of branches you'll set up and I don't know if I'm speaking alone or the number of thousands of people who work for you. So that's what's exciting for us is people copying the model or wanting to replicate it and take it to do it wherever they are and that's great for us. I mean, we are in it because we philosophically believe that energy is the fundamental, one of the most fundamental problems that people are suffering from and it's a huge paradigm generational problem. My dad studied under Streetlight and he was one of the biggest bureaucrats of the country because he slogged his life through studying outside Streetlight, studying in neighbor's houses because he didn't have electricity and thanks to him I'm here. Similarly, there's a generation of people who are in millions of households trying to just come up to a certain level and who need that first park of light, who need the basic energy services provided. So I think the goal for us is take it, take the model, if it works for you, go implement it in whichever country you are. I'm more than happy and that would be the real successful stuff for us. Great. I think we're going to, we have about 17 minutes remaining, we're going to stop here and see if there are questions from the audience. I don't know if there's anybody with the mic. Okay, fine. We have energy issues here too, you know? Yes. Hi, this question is for Monik. How do you make sure that you're addressing the root of the problem, so that is the perpetrators themselves to get that to lessen rather than putting the onus on the people that are victim of the perpetration? So what we're trying to do is build a community out there. You know, it's a more of a community effect and it's a more of a models thing to, you know, you just can't go and put the perpetrators in jail, keep on piling them up in jails and hospitals. First, you have to root it out from the community. So you get everyone involved in it. You get everyone to be their protector for that person. You get everyone out there. If I'm sitting here, if something's happening out there, I go out and help that person. That's the first part. As soon as we do that, then we start working towards the society. I hope I answer your question. So I'll interject there. One of the things that he's also trying to do that the company's also trying to do is, is create a reporting mechanism with, with police and they're piloting that with, with the police in a particular city and seeing how they can actually have direct, you know, signals sort of go out to a police station and that could help with a rapid response time. But I think it's still very early. Yeah, it's still being done back in New Delhi, but that's the plan of action. Your friends and family know, your police knows and there's people around you know. So that's the whole thing. If everyone knows, that will be solved. And if everyone knows, that problem won't arise again. Any other questions up there? Great. So one last round of questions for all of you. Where do you see, you know, your company in about 10 years from now? And Dursam, if you don't want to go first, maybe. Yeah, no, no, no, that's fine, that's fine. So the name of the company is Boond. And Boond in Hindi or Sanskrit means a drop of water. And conceptually, that is what we want to be. We want to be the drop of water which goes and spreads across and there's multiple droplets all over. We want to mainstream the fact that energy access is important. We want to make a strong statement and we want in 10 years time that gets into the political establishments as well as the funding scene that giving people access to energy is a fundamental solution that has to be worked on even before you industrialize your country and wanted to become a superpower. Even, I mean, there are more, I mean, this is appalling statistics, but there are more gun manufacturers than there are more people who make solar electronics. And that is a shame. So hopefully in 10 years we can move and change that. And so we are just a drop of water, just to signify that this can, the first drop of water to quench its thirst. And in 10 years, hopefully we won't be required. I mean, we shouldn't be required. I mean, we should be moving on to other bigger problems. We should be working on something that's in the Abraham Maslow's pyramid of needs slightly above that. If we are still sitting and electrifying villages with small solar systems after 10 years in India, God help us. The Indian population is 67% under 30 years old. These people need solutions today, right now, right at this moment. If they don't, they'll find some other solution which probably will not be good for the whole world. So in 10 years time, we want to be a company which obviously is established in solar and doing whatever we are in a much larger scale. But we want the philosophy to penetrate the decision makers, the policies and the investors. We want them to really understand that, you know, this is not just something you do to cleanse your guilt and feel happy about and report it in a nice document somewhere. It's something that's fundamentally essential for even your next generation. Mani, 10 years. 10 years from now, no one will have to talk about security and safety in the way which I am talking about. 10 years from now, he'll be my age, first of all. That's awesome that he's 22 right now. Incredible. So from, as Rustam just mentioned, you know, 10 years from now, we shouldn't be solving these problems. 10 years from now, we should be solving the next level of problems. There are huge lot of problems arising. There's huge in medical space, healthcare, everything else. But let's just kill this problem in the next three years and make the world safe and then move forward. That's what we would be. We would be an innovation company. That's the reason why we kept the name Leaf Innovation so that we can be as simple as possible and as innovative as possible. So we take the big problems, which are huge, solve them and move forward. Wow. I don't think we're gonna, I didn't set out to solve malnutrition. I'm just hoping to make a small dent. So in 10, 20 years, what I'd like to see is, you know, I'm retired, I'm fishing somewhere. I'm watching TV and maybe there's a documentary about the mushroom industry in East Africa and you see like, you know, tens of thousands of people making a decent income from mushrooms. And it's not completely a pipe dream. In China right now, there's a million small farmers that make money from, so out growers, make money from growing mushrooms. It's a big number and it's actually a relatively recent number. If you look at the stats that's come up in the last 20 years, there's actually, you know, there's a lot of food safety concerns with China right now. So a lot of the mushrooms produced in China are for export. But there's consumers around the world now who are like, you know, a little skittish about food safety in China and they're willing to pay a premium to get non-China products. And so I think for Africa, there's a market share to grab there. So I'm hoping that that happens. That would already make me very happy. But another thing that I haven't talked about yet today because I didn't want to confuse people, but there's a lot more to mushrooms than the edible mushrooms that we know. In fact, fungi, there's an immense diversity of fungi that are everywhere in the world. In fact, every breath you're all taking right now, you're swallowing, you know, probably a few hundred spores of various fungi who hopefully won't come to anything in your bodies. But fungi, they're all around us and some of them have really interesting characteristics that have absolutely nothing to do with eating. I'm thinking of one in particular thing called trichoderma, which tend to associate with plant roots and essentially acts as a natural fertilizer. It's not a fertilizer per se, but it helps the plants fight off other fungal diseases or bacterial diseases. It helps the plants that have been colonized by trichoderma have a much healthier, much deeper root system. The basic technology to make trichoderma is so easy because right now trichoderma is a pest for me. Trichoderma is a very aggressive fungus and it's attacking oyster mushrooms. So I'm trying to get rid of it. I once met a guy at a conference who said, hey, I'm in mushrooms too. I said, what do you do? He goes, trichoderma. I'm like, you crazy? Trichoderma, I'm trying to get rid of him. Then he explained it to me that in fact, it's like used in organic agriculture to, you know, if you don't want to use chemical fertilizers and so on. And remember I told you earlier that there's a few million people in Rwanda that have to make a living from their one acre or two acres of land. I mean, imagine that you and your family having to make your entire living from that one acre of land your whole entire life. I mean, when I realized that, I was like, I had this second aha moment and I still think the edible mushrooms that we've been talking about and that's the business right now are really important. But we can go a little step further and start working with autofungi, which are, you know, it's more subtle. But there we can really impact millions of farmers because in Rwanda to put it very simply, and I'm thinking that's probably true of other African countries, there's just not enough money to go around to buy the fertilizers that are needed and you know, anything that farmers need. So those are fertilizers, call them that, to simplify. That could be produced in country. You don't need foreign exchange to buy them anymore and that would be cheaper and could be distributed through the agro systems, agro dealer systems throughout the country and impact the lives improves the productivity of the one asset they do happen to have is that little patch of land. So that's where I'd like to go. Yeah, no great inspiring stories and I think you all have a lot to achieve, a lot to do, I think great vision out there. Privileged to share the stage with all of you and I think we'll bring it to a close in case there are any other questions, please catch these guys offstage. And thank you again, thank you Mr. Manek Long. Thank you, thank you so much.