 Hello. Water. Water. He's a crazy British man. Be careful. Yeah. This will become abundantly obvious in not very long. Water is one of those things that doesn't take up a huge amount of time at organizations and meetings such as this, which I've always found a little bit odd, because at the core of all of our work, no matter what you do, lies the fundamental molecule. So whether you're an education, so if you're an education and you're trying to make sure that these young minds are growing, if they're suffering from lead poisoning or if they're suffering from chronic diarrhea, you are not having the impact that you could have if they were healthy. If you are in food security, obviously, water is absolutely fundamental to you being able to do the job that you are trying to do. If you are an impact investor, and it's my first time here, but I hear there are two of you in the audience. It's worth remembering that for each of the last five years, water has been selected as one of the top five global risks by the World Economic Forum. But the real kicker for me is that three of the remaining four are fundamentally tied to water. Our ability to deliver water at the right quality, at the right quantity, at the right place, and at the right time is absolutely fundamental to our survival. Now that we've got deep, you're probably wondering who on earth I am. My name is Tom Ferguson. I run the Accelerator at Imagine H20. We are a non-profit organization with the mission to empower people to develop and deploy innovation to solve water challenges globally. We are 10 years old, and we've worked directly with 141 companies and thousands more applicants to solve these kinds of challenges. We are affecting tens of millions of lives daily, and we have raised the companies that we have worked with have raised just under 500 million, 300 million of which has come in the last two years. Things are hotting up, so pay attention. But we are here to talk about building and scaling an impact organization in water, and we are in very good company. There are very few people within the water sector that really have a right to talk about this, but one of those people is sitting to my left. Jennifer Schorsch is the president of water.org, and she has previous in scaling an organization, straight out of business school. She joined a coffee company with 150 stores, and eight years later, Starbucks had turned in to the global brand that we know today. She then took her considerable talents to water.org, where alongside Matt Damon and my celebrity doppelganger, sorry, Matt Damon, who is my celebrity doppelganger, should have got that one right, because my celebrity doppelganger isn't Gary White. It isn't, well, not yet anyway. Alongside Matt Damon and Gary White, they have built an organization that has impacted over 22 million people worldwide. So in terms of building and scaling an impact organization, I think we have the right person on stage with me. Jennifer, how are you? I am well. I mean, look at this audience all here to make big change. Absolutely. So in terms of the big changes, I would like to start at your time at Starbucks. So when you think back at your time working within that change, what are the lessons that you keep on coming back to as you build water.org? Yeah. I mean, in many ways, as Tom said, I feel like I grew up at Starbucks, and so there were lots of lessons I was learning steeply. There's probably a handful that I find that I am regularly deployed. We've got some technical issues, sorry. And so I'll just keep talking as Tom gets fixed. And so I think the first one's probably, it's all about your people. It's all about the people. Most of you probably know about the visionary of Howard Schultz behind Starbucks. But many people don't know about Howard Bihar and Orrin Smith. And Howard Bihar did and still does say it's all about the people. And it's really, it's two things. It's about the people that you work shoulder to shoulder with in the mission and making sure that you're putting in place mechanisms to value them. And it's about the people you serve and being very clear on who they are. So that piece was very much ingrained in me. I think the other piece was about being very clear on your purpose. We had a mission statement and it was posted everywhere to be the premier purveyor of specialty coffee in the world. And we had the great pleasure of working with Jim Collins, whom you in the room and those online will probably remember, wrote, built to last, good to great. And he worked with a group of us and in that process, we realized that actually our core purpose was not about the coffee. It was about the experience we were providing and we shifted to define it as to inspire and nurture the human spirit. So being clear on purpose is something that I think I've carried forward to water.org, aggressively innovating. We always felt frustrated that we just were getting to the top of a mountain and little did we know, but Howard saw that there was another mountain behind that to scale and it was hard. We had to become comfortable with discomfort. And then lastly, I think it was about failing forward. Many of the people in the room have had a frappuccino at some point. But what you might not know is that the precursor beverage was called mazgron. It was an awful tasting carbonated coffee beverage. It really was bad. It was overpriced. It failed. But what came out of mazgron was the coffee extract that made frappuccino in the stores and in bottles scale. So a failure became a multi-billion dollar business. And it was only because we learned and failed forward. So those, you know, it's all about your people. Be clear on your purpose. Aggressively innovate and fail forward. That's probably what I've taken most into water.org. That's super helpful. I'm very disappointed I never got to try mazgron. Yeah, I've got a four pack in my attic. Oh, my God, maybe it's got better with age. That's really helpful. And we're going to come back to a couple of those. But I want to talk now. One of the things we get really excited about in water is people who come into water from outside, right? People who come into the sector. Usually people grow up in it and go all right, but come in with a skill set from outside and bring their knowledge to bear within the water sector. So when you got out of Starbucks and you were thinking about the transition, where you were going to go next? What, how did you, how did you choose water? And how did you choose water.org specifically? Sure. So for me, water really kind of came from two things, an interest and an indignation. On the interest side, I had always had an abiding interest in the environment and in women and girls empowerment. And the more I learned about water, the more indignant I became because girls drop out of school for lack of access to watering sanitation, sanitation especially. Women can't work. Kids get sick and die more than a million a year. And, you know, it sort of struck me that one day I thought to myself, you know, on what planet is it okay that our girls go out at night to relieve themselves for privacy and they don't come home? So there was an interest piece and there was a deep and kind of growing indignation and it's what still gets me out of bed in the morning. And then in terms of water.org, it's funny because I don't think I realized it at the time, but I wanted my time to matter and I wanted to make a difference and I wanted to do it in an organization that this is the hindsight part. It turned out I went there for the reasons that I went to Starbucks. So there was a big challenge slash opportunity. There was a fundamental compelling model for scaling that was exciting to me. There was visionary leaders and team and people that I wanted to be around. Like you've presented me as an expert, but I'm learning every day and I have the immense pleasure of working with really great people, not just within the organization, but in partnership across the sector. It strikes me that one of the things that water.org has done best is something that all organizations of all stripes and colors and types is that one of the really difficult things to do is focus, right, is to decide what you're going to do, but actually more importantly what you're not going to do and then think about how you differentiate relative to a customer pain point and then go and deliver that thing. Is that a fair reflection? And do you, is that definitely the case? For us, that's definitely the case. And I think when Tom introduced water, you know, water is just such a big topic and we need big brains and good thinkers and innovation in it and you, Tom, and imagine H2O are doing a great job of that. For us in terms of just the focus, I guess I come back to those lessons at Starbucks a little bit. And if you take Howard Bihar, HB's message about love your people and know your people, know your customer, it might be worthwhile spending just a moment on who that person is for us because that creates a real focusing element for us. So our customer is someone like Lenaritia, whom we met in the Philippines, who pays $60 a month. It's about 25% of her income to access safe water from a water vendor who comes into her village. Now, Lenaritia has a municipal water system that runs not too far from her house, but she can't afford the $200 of upfront capital that she would need to connect to that system. The utility doesn't think she can be a paying customer. The banks don't think water and sanitation is something that can be lent for. And so our insight and what we've really focused our time around is enabling affordable access, affordable finance to someone like Lenaritia. So we work with largely financial institutions. We take our expertise in water and sanitation and a grant. We will grant that to help them build the capacity and the lending portfolio for water and sanitation and they will lend Lenaritia that $200. Now, in about a year's time in her case, she paid the loan back, so her $60 monthly cost is now $5 a month. She has safe water at home. She has more income and she has more time. And so the idea is about taking that philanthropy and using it to give a hand up and not a hand out and to realize that people living in poverty are not equally poor, that they can participate in their solution. So that piece, that focusing piece is really, really important to us. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just hearing you talk about this, there really is very little difference between the startup founders that we work with kind of day in, day out and the way you're looking at it. You're essentially just an innovation organization, not just an innovation organization. And you're saying, what is the problem you're trying to solve? Exactly. Standing your customer's shoes and say, what is their challenge? And don't try to fix it for them. Help them address their own challenge. It's such an important insight and I think that this is something that people often lose sight of is that actually the trust, I mean, it's as true for your clients as it is for your own people, right? You wouldn't just go and solve your own people's problem. You've got to give them the tools to go and let them get on with it. So you see it as the same thing for your clients. Yeah, we do. And I think that, again, kind of harkening back to those lessons from Starbucks, I think that, what's your purpose? Like what is our purpose? Our purpose is about enabling access to water and sanitation, but we're doing that through affordable finance. So we're focusing on people who live on $6 a day or less and we're focusing on using philanthropy catalytically. So we can use a small amount of donated funds to mobilize significant amounts of commercial capital and that blended approach is what we feel is really important. There's a $90 billion a year gap between what the World Bank estimates is needed to put just in place the infrastructure for water and sanitation and what is available through philanthropy and aid. And so we're focused on that. We're using philanthropy catalytically and in terms of just results, the $30 million that we've deployed for this model, which we call water credit, has helped mobilize $1.8 billion in capital and that's money that's going to the hands of people living at $6 a day or less who otherwise would not have access to water and sanitation. And it took us 25 years as an organization to reach our first million people and seven years later, it's now 22 million people. So there's a real scaling effect when you can use philanthropy in a way to crowd in more capital and scale the impact. For all you fans of hockey sticks in the room, there's one for you. This conversation would not be complete without talking about where everyone always walks into a wall, right? There are always challenges and failures. Can you talk a little bit about the fail forward element and how you've seen that? Yeah, I can. So I think the biggest failure where we had to fail forward was around the initial iteration of water credit. We tried to make loans directly and we loaned to an institution then on lent to emerging community-based organizations that were emerging utilities. And what we didn't realize is that they didn't have the business skills to understand how to build a sustainable utility in that case. And there wasn't a culture of repaying repayment. So we failed forward to India where there was an infrastructure for microfinance. There was an infrastructure for repayment and we were able to pilot it there and scale it to 12 more countries globally. So this doesn't work there but where is actually the structures that we can move it over? And we think we have a better chance of... It's fascinating rather than just pulling the plug completely which would have been some people's approaches. So we've got two minutes left. Oh boy. All of these faces out here have already benefited from your expertise but if you want them to take two or three things away with them from once we're done, what would those be? What do you think that really lies at the core of this scaling question? I would maybe leave folks with three things to take away. So one is choose water. You know, we have to put in a plug for the essential molecule. But you know, we've talked about the need and I guess I just wanna touch on the opportunity for a second and maybe it gets back to that indignation I talked about but it's estimated that women and children spend about 200 million hours a day and you heard me right, a day in collecting water. And I guess would ask you all to think about what if we unleashed that power and that potential that we could help those individuals transform that cycle of poverty into a cycle of opportunity? And I just can't even imagine what 200 million hours a day for women and girls around the world could result in. So choose water, bring your talent, whether it's water or something else, bring your talent. We need scalable business models. There are models that exist that can be funded and that there are others that can be creative, created. And so we need, as I said, big brains and good thinkers on this issue. And then I think I'd say bring capital. We didn't and won't have a chance to talk about how we think about capital but we need philanthropy, we need impact investment which we also have a sister organization that we piloted and stood up called Water Equity that is an impact investment fund, focusing fund manager, focusing on water and sanitation for people in poverty. And we need balance sheets. We have a global credit enhancement facility that we're launching this year. So choose water, bring your talent and bring your capital. I told you she was the right choice. We are out of time. So if you want to know more about this, Jennifer's going to be around for a bit. I know one of her board members, Tony Stainer, is here. There are various people wandering around to do with water. There is Tony. I didn't know that. Hi, Tony. I thought you might do that. And then we have a session on Thursday at one o'clock about investing in the best or you've never heard of, water, so all come and crush the room. But it leaves me to say this has been an absolute pleasure. And please welcome me. Please join me in welcoming Jennifer Shaw. Thank you. Thank you.