 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the session. We're looking forward to our conversation with these visionary leaders who have really done a lot of thinking and reflected on their work as they've become impact investors through the years. Each of them has a different story to tell and I think lots of reflections for us to learn from. Theme of this session is around thinking about their individual journeys and how they have tried to bring together collective influence from their own action in the impact investing area. I'm gonna do a quick round of introductions before that a little bit about me. My name is Urmi Sangupta. I work with the Makatha Foundation. The foundation has been an active impact investor for over three decades. It's deployed a little over half a billion in that space across regions and across sectors. We're very excited to be here having this conversation. Part of my mandate is to help build the field. In that context, we've made a grant to The Impact, which we'll talk about a little bit in the conversation today. But I'm gonna launch off by introducing our panelists. Sitting next to me is Kristin. Kristin is an impact investor herself and also a member of The Impact. She, many of you know her as the fearless leader of Nia and she also works to empower other family organizations and individuals as well as enterprises in their own impact investing journeys and helping them align their investments with value. Josh has been a co-founder of, is a co-founder of The Impact, along with Abigail who's the CEO and Josh has been active in the space for a very long time as a very committed impact investor and brings a lot of expertise and experience as a venture capitalist, his experience in the technology field and then as the CIO of her family office right now. So welcome Josh. We have Martin sitting next to him. Martin is a serial entrepreneur, has spent over 26 years in the spaces of clean tech, energy and as well as high tech enterprises, has close transactions over $7 billion in value. So welcome to the conversation. And then we have Abigail at the very end who is the CEO of The Impact. The Impact is a network of family organizations that are committed to making investments with measurable social impact. So I'm gonna pause there and just go straight into the questions. So my first question is something I would like to hear a little bit from Josh and Abigail on and maybe Abigail you can start off. You know what changes have you seen in the impact investment space over the last decade or so and what do you attribute these developments to? Sure. Well, first off, it's a pleasure to be here with you all today and here at Socap. I think Socap has been a fundamental part of the catalyzation of the impact investing space. So the first time I came to Socap in 2010, conference was a lot smaller and it really felt like impact investing was still this niche area and it was only a small group of people who were thinking about it and some of those people are on this panel today like Kristin and Josh. And I was working at the World Economic Forum and within the World Economic Forum, it was a topic that just wasn't yet discussed. And so we created an initiative there called From the Margins to the Mainstream. How do we harness the hype of impact investing? And I think today it is no longer a hype and you can see that from how many people are here in these halls of Socap, how many people have sophisticated strategies on impact investing and that this really is a mainstream conversation. I joined the impact in 2015 to build it into a membership network and a global community. And over the past several years, what we've seen is that there are so many values that have aligned investors. So many families who have capital that they want to deploy with measurable impact and it's family offices, family foundations and increasingly family businesses. So we're seeing a lot more diversity of investors in the impact investing space. We're also seeing a lot more diversity of impact investment destinations, different sectors, different theories of change and that this really is a part of so many strategies. It's not something that is just an afterthought but it is a main part of the strategy. So the impact investing sector has evolved significantly over the years. We're really excited that Socap has been a great part of this movement as well as organizations like the impact that is bringing families at all starting points into the impact investing conversation and helping them develop investment policy statements to learn the best practices of doing due diligence on direct investments, thinking about intergenerational dialogue and bringing along other family members, working with their CIOs and engaging family office staff and wealth advisors in the process. So we're proud of where we are and I think there's a lot more yet to come. Thank you. Josh, hearing a little bit from you on the same topic of where you've seen the changes through the years. It's pretty much the same. There's always been thousands of people deploying capital. I'm totally kidding. It's, this is really exciting for me for a bunch of different reasons. When you first started coming to this thing is you probably knew like 80% of the room and now I probably know like 10% of the room. And so that in and of itself is exciting. The conversations become a little bit more sophisticated. You start to see more sophisticated sources of capital, more experienced money managers in the room. And so that's just part of the evolution. Like we've, a lot of the early players in the marketplace have reduced some of the risk and there's now data to suggest that this is not crazy. And so, happy to be here. We'll dig into a couple of those things later but I'm gonna. Have at it. Come to Kristen next. Kristen, you've been an impact investor with your own portfolio and you've begun guiding others through Nia's work as well. What is, how has your journey changed through the years with that and what lies ahead? Share a little bit about what you see. Sure. So I think this has been said at Socap. One, I just wanna thank everyone in the audience. There are so many places you could be right now. One of them is outside in the sunshine. So the fact that you're here to join us for this conversation is honoring and thank you. And it's exciting to be here. And I love that main stage is no longer main stage. That's what's really exciting. I think is that the conversations and the meetings that are happening at Socap as Abigail's pointed out, really are happening along different sectors, along different dialogues, geographies, and throughout the entire portfolio. So I think that has changed. It was, and it's still to some degree working with those early stage angel entrepreneurs is still what's considered sexy. And yet I'm really finding a loan guarantee very sexy these days. And of course I hang out in public equities and there's nothing more sexy than public equities right now. So as far as moving the most amount of capital, making the largest difference. So we are seeing some trends and changes. And I think the pool is getting bigger as we know. And are there fears of grainwashing and pinkwashing and advisors saying they know what they're doing when they're not, that is also happening. And yet as more and more individuals, millennials, women, et cetera, consider themselves investors and identify as investors, they will stay true to those values. And of course the people on the stage are here working to make sure that that happens true to what systems change needs to be. Where do you see Nia's work going in the future? Nia, so Nia means intention and purpose. And so we are here to help align capital with intention and purpose. And so to the extent we can do that on a larger platform is what needs to happen. We just reached $109 million in our management. 109, that's right, okay, I got that right. Today we need to be at billions because the minute you have a piece of Nia in your portfolio and are receiving impact reports on a quarterly basis, you then start to say, well, why aren't the rest of my managers supplying an impact report? Why aren't the rest of my managers thinking about impact in this way? And it really can be a tool to talk to your advisor, to family members about what could investment products look like? So we need to become a household name, I think for that to happen. Her reports are great, I get them. Her reports are great, I get them. Thank you. You just had loan guarantees are sexy and we're gonna leave that at that. No, we will come back and dig into that. I'm gonna switch to Martin for a little bit. So Martin, you recently sold a business and you're building out your impact investment strategy. Tell us a little bit about what's been easy in that journey, what's hard, what lies ahead. Sure. So my experience in the last 10 years in terms of impact was all of my direct investments. So I had a company in renewable energy and developed large scale solar power plants mostly here in California. Some of the power plants power about 10% of the city of LA. And now as I exited that business, one of the motivations for me to join the impact was to understand in a peer to peer network how to invest my passive investments in a sensible way. But the most passionate, I'm still on direct investment. So the reason why I divested from the last company was because there's a clear shift in the market. In the last 10 years of power plants we developed, we and others were kind of in a niche. And since it's clear since 2016 that solar is ready to get from a niche to mainstream. The question is just how does it work? And one of the parts is the topic of this conversation which is how can we mobilize funds on large scale. They're $270 trillion in institutional money in the western vaults and only a tiny little fraction goes into renewable right now. And it's not that there is a lack of interest. I think that there's a big interest of interest I think that there's a big interest of institutional money to invest into the transformation in the electric sector. It's the question are what are the hurdles for so that we can mobilize those funds. And some of the hurdles are like the growth markets are non OECD countries. We're engaged in Asia for instance in addition to the US. And investors face challenges like the or we developers as well as investors face challenges like offtake agreements or arbitration being paid in US domination or in Euro as opposed to the local currencies. These make the deals so much more complex you get less investors that are interested. On the technical side the question is how do we what is the system architecture to deploy renewables in order to decorbonize an entire power grid. And you will accomplish the decorbonization if you deploy it at the lowest cost but what is the lowest cost? That's not a simple answer. And finally a lot of the big institutional investors they want to write big check size they want to write like 500 million they want to engage with 500 million and larger checks. So you basically need to aggregate your projects to reach to the check size. So none of this is rocket science and we as well as a lot of other people are working on this and I'm pretty optimistic that country by country these problems are getting addressed and I'm quite optimistic that this transformation which is about a 13 trillion dollar transformation is going to happen much faster than most people think and it's basically because it's a trade-off without regret so it's not that renewable is not only clean but it's clean and cheap and whenever you have that value proposition it's going to be a strong motivation for the utilities to go and buy either solar or wind add storage to it etc. And that to me is something where I feel like I can still have a direct impact and where a lot of funds can be mobilized. I think this is really exciting because Martin you built this business and you built it to be impactful in the energy space and now you're saying what's the next iteration of my impact and thinking about your portfolio and new markets and you've had an incredible career and you continue to push the envelope on impact. Martin thinks cash is sexy because he just sold his company. All forms of capital at this point are front and center so I'm going to leave it on that. Coming back to you Abigail just sort of building a little bit on things that Martin touched on you know you've seen engagement with families across countries and across areas of interest through the work that you're doing with impact. What are some of the exciting trends and changes you're seeing that will help us sort of get past all the hurdles that Martin talked about and where we see you know sometimes they somebody you know a network like they packed taking specific sort of initiatives and putting them together and sometimes just sort of responding to interest in the amount of members to do certain things. I'm really glad you asked this question because it allows me to highlight the project that we undertook with the support of the MacArthur grant which is a heat mapping survey of the impact investing space and what we heard from our members 32 families replied was that water overall globally is an area that families and asset owners want to invest more in but there are not enough opportunities. Food and agriculture closely follow but also that a lot of families feel like they're not getting the expertise from their wealth advisors and from you know in-house staff on impact and that is holding them back from being able to deploy more capital meaningfully into impact investing. So what I see in the future is that a lot more investment professionals will have this impact expertise and a lot more banks and wealth advisors will be in a position to help their clients make more impact investments. So I'm really excited about that change and thank you to the MacArthur Foundation for continuing to help us with this research. We also have been working with the Omidyar Network on a project called Collective Influence because we realized that when and we've heard from our members that when one person goes to the bank and says listen I'd like to divest of private prisons or I'd like to understand the climate change risk of my portfolio their advisor might say that's interesting but we don't have that much demand for this kind of product for this kind of service but when you have five or ten or fifty people clients influential clients coming to you and that voice is unified and you keep hearing the same interest in the same demand you're going to address that. So through the impact we're able to listen to all of our members aggregate their voice reflect that back out to the market and change the way that service providers RIAs and private banks and intermediaries are engaging in the impact investment market serving their clients and make sure that we are able to get more impact product more impact services out there and mobilize more capital toward impact. And I think those are two distinct examples of two different areas where we know there are constraints that are holding back greater participation and greater engagement from both sort of newer actors but those who are already in the space and who want to be doing a lot more than they are able to do right now. I want to come back to you Kristen and maybe ask a little bit more specifically from your vantage point you know where do you see the most compelling opportunities for investors to sort of you know join forces or harmonize their voices in order to catalyze market level change. Sure so I would say particularly from people like us on this stage who have by definition I think joining the impact we have more than enough and so by making sure that we're asking ourselves how much is enough and really ready to deploy everything more than what we have and what we need for our own families is going to be really essential. So and I know that things are tricky in the U.S. with healthcare being so uncertain we all want to you know save a little bit both for our parents and what is it so I would say that we're going to have to get healthcare policy down so that we can all actually answer how much is enough how much is it going to cost us to live this lifetime so let's tackle healthcare I know that's another panel somewhere else but it does influence how we think about what we can deploy in the U.S. then really recognizing where the numbers the financial industry isn't serving people or planet I think we're all here because we agree about that no offense to the beautiful white men in this room and on stage but with men controlling over 90% of our economy we're really going to need to find more balance so what can investors do we really need to invest in balanced teams the research is there that they're more innovative the revenues are there that oftentimes they can better investment but it really is where we collectively can put our dollars into women people of color founders and diverse teams and then of course when we can intersect that with environmental sustainability I think that's where the returns are going to be that's where the alpha is going to be it's also where our economy needs to go in my humble opinion thank you no and and you know Josh curious if you can build on that here from the way guys there you go we need our beautiful white men I mean we need everybody working on that I love that you just called me beautiful like can you call my wife and say that I also you're going to say this in some form but to really ask ourselves the question what is the risk of not doing this investment and really shift the way we're thinking about risk but if this woman of color doesn't get seed capital from me where else is she going to get it and those are the types of questions that I'm asking myself and I encourage the rest of us to really think about what is the risk of not deploying this capital right now yes no I think I think those are all sort of thought provoking and difficult questions to ask Josh you're not off the hook yet so the question to you is you know when you picture areas that you wanted to focus on impact investing you know education energy and safety security what drove you to that and what were some of the challenges you saw in trying to be so focused and you know we know that opportunities are had to find and it is even harder to sort of be the first actors to support entrepreneurs who are starting these journeys I mean at some level I didn't know any better I started making impact investments when I was 26 years old and so I've been doing this for 15 years my journey was a reaction to the events at 9-11 in Ground Zero and so my history was I was working in finance and I was working in technology and I was going to make a lot of money and then I was going to turn 80 and I was going to become a philanthropist and live out my values and there were lots of people who showed up for work on the morning of 9-11 that were on the same path and they never got there and so it was one of those gut-check moments for me like what would the world have said about me if that was my last day and I didn't think my answers were good enough and so I set out to find entrepreneurs that were working on tech solutions to prevent the next 9-11 and fortunately I got backing from the Wile family from Citigroup but there was no term of impact investing like there were no other managers that we could hire to represent our values in the marketplace and so it was really an experiment for a few years without me knowing what the risk were and without really internalizing how hard this was going to be and we just kind of put limited amounts of dollars to work and started to do deals and we iterated over time and ultimately built out a team and a series of funds and lo and behold the world is heading in a direction which allows our jobs to be easier which is pretty awesome but it was always personal and it's moved around quite a bit and so what started as a reaction to 9-11 is now very much about my kids and my family we have an instance of stroke and so a lot of the resources that my wife and I are deploying now are related to brain health and rehabilitation and so there's a nimbleness to this conversation and so you gravitate to things that are pressing at the moment at hand and I'll always pay attention to the environmental ecosystems and healthcare as you mentioned but there's always going to be acute things as well and so that nimbleness has been really important for me and my family over the course of these 15 years I'm sure you've seen many other investors start this journey do you see that they have a good set of resources to help them figure the way forward or is it more informally mentoring that people like yourselves have been doing for many of these investors I think it's getting better I'd like to believe the impact has played a role in that specifically for single family offices that's really where the impact came from and so one of my co-founders is a guy named Justin Rockefeller who's not here today obviously but Justin's family decided in 2010 they wanted to put 10% of a pool of capital into impact investments and two or three years had gone by and because they were with a certain manager and they were in cominkled pools and there weren't enough of those investors asking for impact oriented investments they weren't able to deploy any money in that strategy and so Justin called up other folks that he was close to and asked what does this mean why am I hearing this why is this so difficult and we pulled together a bunch of friends and fellow travelers and started to collectively answer that question and the end result is building this organization and now we have members in 18 countries around the world and so it's a long winded way of answering a question but it's a question that fortunately less of us are asking as a result of having the experience of Kristen and Martin and others to accelerate our journeys thank you and I think there is tremendous wisdom and knowledge in knowing that once you have groups of people that are coming together the impact is one and we have several other networks in the field that are pulling together different groups of investors in trying to figure out how to make all of this much easier and much more easy to sort of engage with not just in understanding but in actually making the investments so Martin my next question is to you I know when we chatted you talked a little bit about seeing as an area for action now this theme around intergenerational equity can you talk a little bit about this and your experience in your perspectives sure so I have two kids daughter with 30, son with 24 and for us the question was how can we integrate the kids into the family office and they first were very engaged merely to understand well what is the wealth level in the family office once they had that inside I felt like the level of interest wasn't the same but when we talked about well what should we do with passive investment should we just let the wealth manager allocate it and it's a black box for us or are we concerned about where these funds are invested and that's a dialogue that they found interesting and I feel like that to me was a moment of reckoning to say okay well maybe that's the way how we can have this intergenerational dialogue and have our kids integrated into the family office and it's not just me and my wife talking to the wealth advisors and investment advisors and talking about allocation and etc but basically having this dialogue among the four of us and so by definition they will bring in their value which is obviously they have a different up coming and a different viewpoint and that to me is a very interesting view and I found that powerful and both after kids have participated in next generation events of the impact and came back very inspired so I think it's a good way to disrupt that dialogue and make sure it has some more meaning to it my kids have done the same thing and they're nine and six and so it's not they have as much if not more expertise to contribute right so I'm going to go back with a question for each of you now and Abigail will start with you same question I want to sort of think about this so if you think about members in the audience who might be thinking about ways to catalyze their own portfolios and their own work in a more strategic way what advice would you give them I would say above all I'll start with what you know so if you have a particular passion or background in food or in fashion or in energy that's the natural place to start with your portfolio as well to start evaluating investment opportunities over to that I would also say that you don't need to be a billionaire or centimillionaire to be an impact investor or to be thinking in a more impactful way about your decisions if you're an entrepreneur you can be thinking about how you run your organization and how you make how you allow your employees to be more impactful so one of the things that we've done with the impact is created impact investment opportunities through the 401K and so we worked with HIP Investor for them to help our 401K provider offer impact screened portfolios to our employees each team member can feel like they themselves are also an impact investor we also thought hard about where our money sleeps at night it's not just in a regular bank account it's at a B Corporation bank that serves the Bronx and Harlem and small entrepreneurs that otherwise wouldn't be able to get a loan from a Chase or a Bank of America so little decisions like that can have a huge impact and there are also retail impact investment platforms like aspiration or ethic and people can make these decisions at much smaller levels than impact members and that's something that I just want to emphasize even though the impact is a network of people who have an incredible incredible resources at their disposal to be more impactful it's not something that's only for the elite and with each decision that we make consumption, investment we can all be more impactful one of the premises of the impact is that you should the Margaret Mead quote never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world often that is what has changed the world and people here in this audience can change the world as well so start with what you know see what opportunities are out there you know loan guarantees can be sexy and 401Ks can be sexy and just the way that you operate thinking about how to weave impact into your enterprise into your everyday decisions and when you one day create a portfolio to exit from and start to create a portfolio like Martin you've really made it and it's exciting but for the rest of us let's start with where we are now and be as impactful as we can with our everyday decisions thank you Martin I think the one key takeaway from my side is to think about can you do some direct investments every time I have invested money on my own that's when I usually made the best returns also when it comes to impact you can measure the impact direct and you don't need to rely on somebody reporting you how well your funds are doing that's obviously something the wealth advisor investment advisors won't recommend you to do but the my experience is if you rely on someone else to do good while doing well then you always are dependent on that on that individual and yours are dependent on the reporting system et cetera now you still it's still required to do all that but I see a lot of people that are rather relying giving funds to someone else than having to self confidence and say if I'm passionate about something then I'll use a portion of my funds and I'll invest in myself and I'll work on what I'm passionate for Josh, your words of advice yeah so I would tell people to not be afraid to be vulnerable part of what makes this dynamic work is that we are transparent with our fears and our motivations and things that we understand and quite frankly things that we don't if there are things that are intimidated about impact investments, ask other people around you who may have a little bit more experience or a little bit more insight and be willing to take risk. The most important lessons I've learned come from when I've lost money not from when I've made it and so if you can take a little bit of risk and iterate on that process and figure out what works for you and what types of entrepreneurs are a good fit and what types of companies provide you with the best possible experience both financial and otherwise it's never too soon to get started whether you're 6'9", 24 or maybe 41 it's 29 this requires participation and it's active and so part of our goal as people deploying capital without understanding risk in a perfect way is to reduce risk for other people because we can afford to take that risk like we've asked that question how much is too much and for that excess amount we can do things like take risk that reduces risk for others or attract additional talent to the marketplace because they know what there's capital waiting if they show up and all of those things are designed to bring efficiency to the ecosystem in ways that I think everyone will benefit over time Thank you Kristin Sure so things that we're thinking about at NIA are how to make our own internal practices really exciting and so we became Gen Certified Gender Equity Now Certification and doing that process was so empowering to my staff they were really excited about it we have a manual now that we actually had a lot of the best practices that we were already doing now we know the research behind them and I say this because it's not only in deploying our money of course feel good about where you're banking feel so good about that those loans are staying in your local community that they're going to the women's small businesses that you care about for sure make that move but also in our regular practices and how we're building businesses and how we're talking to people about what is impact and how can we lead that impactful life so definitely the businesses we choose to do you know pipeline with even where we're doing our consumption makes a difference as far as getting started with some smaller investments I love Investibule on the platform between $100-$1,000 can get people started and one of the other ones is Crowdfund Main Street and I love these because one they're small dollar amount so you can everybody can get started there but also women and particularly women of color do better fundraising on some of these crowdsourced platforms so we can't ignore them when we're trying to shift capital systems some of these are going to be really important and then the other one is just like this panel is about the impact and being with others and doing this work together when you're breaking up with your bank bring a friend bring one there's actually a group of women in New York I'm forgetting their name at this moment they have t-shirts they bring cupcakes they have a break up with your bank party and they definitely bring their friends and sometimes the tellers at the bank have been known to video this because they are all excited about these women being empowered and leaving and going back to doing their thing so this can actually be fun work and it could be community building work and every dollar makes a difference so the time is now and we're all here and I actually during my day job I'm also a money doula so I will hold your hand and support you as you do this work if that comes up. Thank you well somebody from here will come up to you and speak to you about that right after the session. I'll hold the qualifications whatsoever. That's good to know. So I am going to take a minute maybe to ask just sort of one question of which I think would be interesting for people to hear and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience. We've all touched upon sort of thinking about what impact you want your money to have create and support. I'm curious about just doing around and we're not doing definitions here by any stretch but when you say impact and when you talk about impact you know measurable impact with your investments going back to the language from the impact Abigail what does impact mean to you and just sort of how you think about it not very doesn't have to be perfectly phrased but I think that's helpful for people to hear as they think about what they want to be doing with their own resources. Kristin do you want to lead? I'm happy to. So we're always having impact and I think we know this and I think it's been said in this conference in different places. Every investment has an impact so it's not whether we're going to have an impact but will it be positive, negative will it be the impact that we're intending to have and so just being really conscious and bringing it back to both the intention and then the execution but that it's not like we can just sit with some of our money in wherever it is that's actually status quo income and economy doing largely a large amount of destruction if we're not actually looking at that money so indexing really is probably the demise of our economy so moving the money out of those traditional places and putting it into something conscious that is an incredible impact. Thank you. So for me it's relatively simple and so there's two components of the phrase and so it's investment and so I'm putting money out with the expectation of getting more back and it's designed to have an impact. I spend most of my time dealing in early stage technology in the areas of safety and care, education, environmental companies but increasingly I'm interested in making non-venture investments globally and one of the ways I'm doing that is by leveraging the network and taking up on the expertise of folks that have really strong domain expertise and really strong local relationships in places like Chile and Brazil and other places and so I expect my portfolio will get more global but impact investing exists in virtually every asset class every sector multiple return profiles with different strategies most of my time is spent on product and so these are proactive solutions where the company's core product or core technology is affecting change but that's just one example of ways you can make it work for you. So we have kind of structured it in three categories in our family first is the direct investment for what I talked earlier about in our company Bright Night which is basically renewable energy projects the second one is more philanthropic and where we use a family foundation we try to be in theme of where we can add more than just writing a check for something like all of our projects or most of our projects so far have been in Bangladesh where we also developed a solar power plant and we were able to fund like midwife programs vocational training for midwife programs where we were really surprised about the impact to a community that one midwife has and she goes back to her local community or having local medical clinics specifically designed for for women and children and though it's not energy related the clinics are powered by solar obviously and batteries but still it's not energy but because we have the local knowledge in the country we could do something far more efficient and with a direct impact compared to just writing a check to an organization and then the third one is the passive investment and there as I said that's where we had the intergenerational dialogue with the kids in terms of defining the screen and one of the surprises when we had the first first time we defined the screen and then the investment advisor came back and said showed us the companies that were excluded even Apple was excluded and some other companies that was quite awakening for us. Thank you. Abigail. I think this question of what is impactful or what is positively impactful is a really good one and it's a very timely question for me. I became a mother four months ago. That was a very impactful Q slide show. Don't get me started. But now it has become a lens with which I view everything. Is this going to make the world a better place for my daughter and hopefully she'll live to be 80, 100, 120 who knows but I think about what different things I do will, what kind of impact that will have on her when she's a teenager when she's a mother, when she's a grandmother and I think at the heart of it is are we leaving the world in a better place than we inherited it and are we able to feel proud of what we're doing for our children and grandchildren. That's a question I think that we can debate for a long time but on that note I'm going to open it up for questions and show of hands we have two people with microphones in the back so we need a moment for them to get to you just one over there one over here you want to go first Abigail back when you were writing margins to mainstream how far did you think we would have come at this point and are you pleased with how far we've made it hmm that's a that's a great question so we published margins to mainstream I think in 2012, 2013 from the World Economic Forum and I remember my boss at the time asking me what would success look like and at the time I said well if we could get like the largest asset managers into the impact investing space like the Black Rocks and the Vanguard and the really large private equity firms Bain, TPG KKR and that time they really weren't in the impact investing space it would not be the mainstreaming of impact investing we have come past that point but I don't think the impact is deep enough and I do think there is you know there is some greenwashing and impact washing which is normal whenever something you expand access or you expand the reach of something it will be tweaked adapted, molded to those current actors and players and what could work for them so I think we are where I thought we would be but it shows that there is so much more work for us to do in creating greater transparency, accountability and making sure that the right intentions are there and the right transparency and accountability is there to make sure that impact investment is actually having the most positive environmental and societal impact I think we had a question on the back Hello my name is Marianne Beister I run a midsize family foundation and I am interested in your opinions of donor advice funds in our case we have some of our funds with community foundations and also with commercial donor advice funds and we are finding the opportunities for impact investing is limited it's not that it doesn't exist but it's limited and I'm interested in your views of how that's going to be changing with commercial DAFs and community foundations I have some thoughts about that so first of all thank you for thinking about your DAF and where it's invested I would say that is one of our largest pools of stranded assets right now a lot of times you sell a business or have a liquidity event and you get a tax write-off parking it in a DAF and then maybe some grants come out of it and maybe not but there's really very little thought so the fact that you're being thoughtful about it we need more people doing that there's some really wonderful DAFs Tides RSF impact assets just to name a few and then for those that aren't wonderful yet Capshift is coming in and developing a product line for the fidelities of the world that haven't really thought that out so that industry is being disrupted as we speak your voice and everyone else's who has a DAF jumping in there and saying we need better and then just really conceptualizing what is this money for and that is really our potential for catalytic capital so both on the grant side expanding the field of impact investing but also getting it to the deep impact so that's what I see so far the work is really exciting I think it's a perfect place to experiment I have a DAF with impact assets and my family is on the board of National Philanthropic Trust and so we're intimately involved in these conversations and I think it's completely logical that DAFs wind up having more impact investing options because if you've already earmarked money for cancer or for healthcare or for whatever your cause may be attacking that through multiple tools in your tool belt and using for-profit lenses and philanthropic ways to effect change seems to increase the likelihood that you'll make it dead Thank you Martin Abigl do you want to add to that on the DAFs now? Are the questions is one question here? Hi this is Asha Jadeja from the Motwani Family Foundation we've been in Palo Alto for about a decade now and so far just like Michael I've been an entrepreneur we see myself and I like to work with companies on the ground and the founders are just two founders at what point in a family office do you transition from this I'm having so much fun working on this or on the solar panels or on water purification at what point do you say you know what I need to step back now and start thinking of an organization building it's an exhausting thought I tried it a few times and it's I don't know how to begin and I just heard that Leonardo DiCaprio from it had a foundation in LA ran into exactly the same problem and literally just shut the doors and ran away so for a lot of family foundations this issue is real and I think I mean I'd love to have your thoughts on this Thank you who would like to go first Josh you want to try I'm not sure I'm 100% clear on the question can I repeat the question see if I've understood what you're saying is that as an investor yourself there is value and excitement around touching and feeling and knowing the investment opportunity and doing it out of a personal interest but it's challenging to know when to step back and do it in a more structured and strategic way and not just looking at some individual things that excite you and that are interesting to you personally is that an okay interpretation of the question okay so when do you move from individual specific you know one of things that interest you to being a lot more thoughtful strategic and deliberate about how you deploy your business I don't think those things have to exist in opposition I have a grandfather and he was at work every day until he was 95 years old and so there's no timing in life let's say I have to transition from being an entrepreneur to being a facilitator or an allocator of capital and some of the largest quasi-family offices in New York City are people who run hedge funds and virtually all of their worth is in their business and so I don't think that tradeoff necessarily exists it has to do with where you want to spend your time that being said there is a pattern amongst the families in our ecosystem that there are different breakpoints in life that cause them to reevaluate their appetite for risk and it typically has to do with health situations of the family it has to do with emergence or growth of the next generation and so as you have kids that you want to empower to start making decisions about capital there's a decent likelihood that they're not going to care about all the same things that you care about and so giving them the voice and the tools to allow them to express themselves in ways that will allow them to succeed and thrive as individuals and as allocators of capital themselves often means splintering in terms of focus and so rarely will they want to have the same path that you've chosen or any of us have chosen and so it just kind of happens organically and it's different for everybody but I don't think that that tradeoff exists where you have to say look I want to leave my heart behind and stop being an operator and focus on making sure the diversification occurs I don't believe in that No and it totally depends on the goals of your family office right so as long as your money is deployed that in something that's meaningful to you that you feel is responsible to people on planet keep doing what you're doing and to the extent that you want to really focus your energy on that but want some of it deployed in other areas then you can hire an expert for that you know like if you want money deployed in an asset class that you're not working in you can have that done right you can have it all that family offices can have it all we should probably talk offline because it's so individual it's so individual about all of those choices structures reflect need and so it really depends on the complexity of the you know the family office that I run we have 50 plus LLC's and 23 members of the family right and so that level of complexity requires an ecosystem to manage it there are plenty of families in our ecosystem where the total family is four people and in that scenario you don't need the same level of complexity and often there may not be a DAF for a family foundation or the type of infrastructure you'd see in multi-generational families and so it really depends on what the needs of the operation are as Kristen mentioned thank you okay we are at time so I'm going to and I also don't see any hands for questions so I'm assuming we're done I'm going to say a big thank you to our panel for sharing the expertise and the experiences reminding us about how important this is and how much we can do you know wherever each one of us starts Kristen you said it now and I think it's really resonated with me the time is now those of you who are thinking about these opportunities you know act and there are many many different ways to act we heard about some of them today but I'm sure you know over the course of these days and thinking and engaging with this you will see and you know figure out different ways to do so by no means I think what we are saying is everything about everything I think there's a lot to learn big thank you to the panelists for sharing the wisdom thank you