 Hello, everybody. How's it going? Post lunch, are we awake, alive, happy? Are we very happy? So I would love to have two or three people, and don't shout out all at once, but two or three people. Holler, why you, and loud, why you're here, what you're hoping to get out of this session of everything you could do, including staring at the beautiful bay, why is this where you've chosen to spend your time? So you're working with students who want to be employed by an impact employer. Great. I'm here because I run a startup that works to build a more inclusive workforce by partnering with workforce moment programs. And we're bridging that gap between marginalized populations and professional opportunities. So I'm looking to learn more about inclusion in the social impact field. Oh, we're called the Kimbo, the KimboConnect.com. One more. Yes, ma'am. I'm very interested in this topic. I'm a co-founder of Primohera 24-year-old women's development organization in Latin America. And we're undergoing a rededication to the mission and focusing on how we treat each other and how we treat employees that we can't treat each other with great respect and, I have to say, affection. How are we going to convey that to our customers or to the women that we work with? So I just see this as a vital component of a successful social enterprise. That's great. Well, we are delighted to have all of you for what I hope is a, and I'm sure is going to be, a really great conversation. We are going to begin by having each of the panelists talk about an aspect of this topic that they know very well. And we have a couple of follow-up questions. But we also are going to try and get to your questions pretty quickly, because we want to talk about what you want to talk about. So I am delighted that you're here. My name is Ross Baird. I run an organization called Village Capital. We work with early-stage, for-profit entrepreneurs looking to have a positive impact on society. And we've done it for the last five years. We run accelerator programs for companies in partnership with many of the people in this room and many of the people in this stage. We make investments in the graduates of those programs. And we've worked with over 450 entrepreneurs around the world over the last five years. I was, yesterday I heard Anthony Bug-Lavine, who wrote the Impact Investing book, say that he always sees one of his dearest friends in the world, Willie Foote, who founded Root Capital, which is another very well-known organization at these conferences. And they rarely see each other, not at these conferences. But he says, every time he sees Willie, he says he and Willie ask each other a question, which is, what do you know now that you didn't know at the last conference I saw you? Or what are you doing now that you weren't doing at the last conference I saw you? And it's been thinking a lot about that. And if I had to say the biggest evolution at Village Capital in the last year or so and how we support entrepreneurs has been the topic on this panel. I am by no means an expert on this topic. I'm mainly here because I'm curious about what our panelists have to say, and I want to learn. But I will say for most of our early life, we were intensely focused at Village Capital about the impact our companies are having on the world, on low-income people, on the environment, whatever the companies are doing. And we didn't, to be totally honest, for a very long time acknowledge the fact that if you're a company, you are probably having a much bigger impact on your coworkers, where you are, the people who work with you, the people whose lives you're going to affect the most are the people within your company. And we have been very, very lucky to have some great partners who have been thinking and promoting best practices for a very long time. And I will talk more about some of these partners in the introductions. But I just want to say that this is, I'm very excited about this session because we, making progress on this issue, I would say is our biggest achievement of the last year in Village Capital. And I think it is really, really critical that all of us who want to support impact enterprises make being a great impact employer part of that, part of that, part of that objective. So that is why I am here and I am excited to hear why everyone else is here. So I'm, first of all, I would love to, and each panelist will introduce themselves and their answer to the question. But we're not a Huron Gomez of the Hitachi Foundation. We partner with the Hitachi Foundation at Village Capital and a nationwide initiative that we call Source, where we support, recruit, train, help entrepreneurs find investment. And that is entrepreneurship at work. Is that what it's? Entrepreneurship at work is half of what the Hitachi Foundation does and our partnership is part of that. But the other half of what the Hitachi Foundation does is really influenced how we can support our companies is good companies at work, which is developing, identifying, highlighting, workforce practices in great companies across the country. So when we talk to our startup entrepreneurs about workforce practices, and this is your question, Renata, they say great workforce practices are for bigger, better-funded companies that have the cash to help people. We are young, we don't have that much money, we are resource constrained, and I would say most people at SoCAP are resource constrained. So I see a lot of nods here, like what can we possibly do as a cash-poor startup to be an impact employer? So what are some of the lessons you've learned that are applicable to companies everywhere? Thanks, Ross. Thanks for that great introduction and it's an honor to be with you today to talk a little bit about the work at the Hitachi Foundation. And I will get to the question directly, but just to give everybody a little bit of context about the foundation. We were founded in 1985. We are corporate endowed by Hitachi, the large multinational company you may all be familiar with based in Japan. But we are privately managed, so our board of directors are not affiliated with the company. We have one company employee who is kind of an honorary chair, but he does not have a voting role. And so that's allowed us a lot of flexibility as we've developed our strategy and our strategy over the past almost 30 years has really been refined around the role of business and society and particularly around the role of discovering, disseminating and really elevating and expanding business practices that both impact the economic opportunities for low-wealth individuals in the United States to have a better life, but also at the same time, those practices are really also contributing to the bottom line of the business. And we take that from two different approaches and two different lenses. One of them, as Ross had mentioned in our entrepreneurship work approach is really working with entrepreneurs and startup companies. And then the second part of our work is our good companies at work program, which really focuses on this issue of workforce and employer practices. And throughout the last few years, we've developed a series of case studies. There's about a hundred of them or so on our website and it's called our Pioneer Employers Case Studies. And it talks about different ways that employers both in healthcare and manufacturing have changed elevated advanced workforce practices that have had positive reinforcement and positive opportunities both for their workers, but also for their customers and for the business around. So all around. So we firmly believe and we have examples that demonstrate that by being attentive and being proactive to your inner core and to your employee base, that that also resonates with customers and also resonates with the bottom line of the business. So it's a win, win, win for all. So I think going back to your question about what from these pioneer employers and their more mature companies have been in business a bit longer, I think kind of the three lessons that we can tease out are vision, culture, and sort of timing and strategy. And I'll dive a little bit into each of those. So as you're beginning to launch your business and think about your products, your services, your strategy, we would ask what really is your vision for your company? What as leaders, what kind of culture do you wanna create? And this doesn't take money. This doesn't take resources. This just takes the opportunity and the openness and the transparency to ask those difficult questions. And I think we found that particularly with entrepreneurs, you are so micro-focused on what you need to get done and trying to cram 36 hours into 24 hours that those bigger picture questions and those questions around kind of culture and who you wanna be as an employer, get lost and put aside. And in our experience, those should be kind of sort of your formative and critical questions and should just take just as much precedence as what widget you are going to be creating and sort of what your sales strategy is. So kind of defining those core values and really aligning those to your business and making sure that they reinforce one another, I think is one kind of critical piece. So it's not in our estimation just about having a social mission and a social impact, but the pioneer employer examples really demonstrate that if you wanna create impact around your through employment practices, they should be developed from the start. A great example of that is New Belgium Brewery for those that are familiar with them based in Fort Collins, Colorado, really well known for fat, tire, beer and all sorts of really fun practices as well. A great, great pioneer employer from our standpoint and also a supporter of Ross's work and our work in source. But they very quickly had discussions around what kind of employer they wanna be and what kind of culture they wanted to create. And they have 10 core principles. The founder comes from a social work background. So she really recognized that the kind of place she wanted to work and the kind of business that she wanted to promote would be better suited and would be more successful if she had the collective contributions from the employee base. I mean they have since grown to 500 plus employees but they continuously go back to the joint core principles that all helped develop and all helped contribute to. And those start with being a successful beer company but then there are different strategies and different approaches on what success looks like and each individual in that company knows what their role is and knows how they contribute to that bottom line and has the support of the leadership to make those decisions. And I think the second sort of piece of the top three examples would be to live an authentic life and sort of respect your employees and just treat them with dignity and empower them and give them the tools and the strategies and the knowledge to make decisions effectively. And recognizing again that those decisions and having that knowledge and those tools and skills will then benefit the bottom line of the business. Again, New Belgium Brewery are big fans of an organization called The Great Game of Business. For those that are maybe thinking about this it's a great resource and they practice open book management so it's not just about allowing your employees to look at your finances but it's again giving them the tools to understand what components they're responsible for and how that one piece really impacts and broadens the scope of the full business. There's an organization called Interface many of you may be familiar with. They're a carpet manufacturer, publicly traded company, fairly large. They are very well known for their environmental sustainability but they have been working on a human capital kind of database to take a look at what their employee practices, how they contribute to the bottom line and they have sort of the pluses and minuses and there's a formula that they're working on that I think is really fascinating that really helps to capture that economic impact. Again, this doesn't require money. It just requires sort of that level of dignity that we're all looking for. And then I think the third one is not as you're launching your business and you're thinking about things not to get stuck in sort of one approach or saying, oh yeah, open book management is really great and I really wanna do that but so I'm gonna force everything into that. I think there are multiple approaches and multiple strategies that you're probably gonna wanna test and that may change and evolve as your business grows and I suspect all of you are in some capacity even thinking about exit and recognizing that exit can be really powerful for your employees if it's done correctly and if they're engaged in that process. So again, it's just from our standpoint, a lot of it is human dignity, human nature and kind of common sense and when those are quantified, all really benefit from that process. Thank you so much. Our next panelist, Frida Kapoor Kline and is a co-founder of many things that she can describe but Frida and her husband Mitch co-founded Kapoor Capital and have backed and seeded many companies that you may have used today. Has anyone taken Uber today? They were there first. So they have really, and Frida and Mitch are among the most respected investors in the world and they have an incredible amount of credibility and they've been using that credibility to really push the technology community to be more inclusive and to be better employers. So it's just one example. We at Village Capital are one of these cash strapped organizations. We can look up our IRS Form 990 and see exactly how much cash we don't have but we really want the best people to work with us and there's an ethos out there saying, you know, risk everything, go make nothing, it'll all work out in the end and that is great if, for example, you're in a position where you don't have debt from undergraduate or graduate school. So this idea of bootstrap, bootstrap, is wonderful except for it excludes a lot of people who are not in a personal financial position to do that. We're working with Frida to try and figure out ways that we could structure employee benefits as a company of Village Capital and we came up with student loan assistance as an employee benefit and when we went out and recruited people for roles, all of a sudden it was a completely different and we thought much stronger candidate pool who were interested in that. Even though, again, we don't have a lot of money to pay people, we're meeting people where they're at. So that was one idea that we came up with together that we're, you know, we hope that there are lots of little things like that, that cash straps, startups, non-profits, et cetera, can do to be more inclusive. So Frida, similar to the question to Renata, what are the key, take this how you will, do's and don'ts or key lessons if you want to be an inclusive employer that you've learned from your work? Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. So I wear a few hats, Ross mentioned K-Port Capital and we co-invest with New Schools Venture Fund, we have a lot of ed tech companies in our overlapping portfolios, we're an investor in new resource bank, so I have conflicts with just about everybody on the panel. So in addition to that, I started something called the Level Playing Field Institute, which is a non-profit that runs a summer math and science program for low income under represented students of color. We've been doing this for 11 summers, it's a residential program, and it was done for many reasons, it was done to help diversify the tech ecosystem, but it was also done as a specific example for everyone who says, oh, it's a pipeline problem, it's not my problem, it is we say, okay, we're gonna build a pipeline, but we're also gonna demonstrate that there is plenty of talent out there that most people would choose to ignore, overlook, and throw away. So I'll give you an example, and we're not doing slides, so I can't show you, but a couple weeks ago I got an email with two photos, and this is from a young African-American woman who went through our SMASH program and came from a high school with somewhere around a 50% dropout rate, so first of all, she didn't drop out, she finished high school, and then went three summers at SMASH, and then got into MIT. And so she sent me, and she's one of probably a dozen of our kids that are at MIT, but the two photos she sent me, one is her walking across the stage graduating, and the second is a photo of her diploma, which is a double major in physics and nuclear engineering, right? And I think to myself, how many tens of thousands of African-American girls just like her, are we letting drop out of high school, let alone or sending to these failure factories? And that's a collective problem, especially for anybody who wants to think about impact. So when we invest in a tech startup with social impact, so our stance, we have a couple of stances, one is we believe that every business has a social impact. Some happen to be positive, many happen to be neutral, and many happen to be negative. And so that framing is really important, to say you have an impact, now let's look at what it is. Similarly, as an employer, you're negative, neutral, or positive, and maybe some of all of those things across different dimensions. It's not that it's just for big companies. If you're an employer, you're having an impact on your employees. You're taking a position on how to treat employees. Whatever, if you decide that you can't pay enough or you can't help them with student loans or you can't help with childcare, you're making a choice about where resources go and where resources don't go. And so one of the things that we ask our entrepreneurs to do is a social impact plan for their business. We also ask them specifically for a diversity plan for their business. And how, and especially since most companies that define as impact, focus on low income communities of color. And we believe that if your employees don't look like the people you're serving, you are missing out on being as effective and profitable a company as you can be. It's just straightforward business issue to us. When we look at an ed tech company, for instance, and none of the founding team ever went to a public school and yet the entire purpose of their ed tech company is to help public schools. We say, hmm, how's this gonna work out? And how can you possibly know how to do that? One example that we like to give, and you may have seen they were on the front page of the USA Today business section a couple of weeks ago, is Frederick Hudson from Pigeonly, which is a company that is radically changing the cost of phone calls to and from prisons. That was a three to $4 billion a year industry. People were completely exploiting prisoners and their families still in this day and age to charge $4 a minute for a phone call. And the example, and Frederick himself is formerly incarcerated. And the example I give is you could put Bill Gurley from Benchmark and John Doar from Kleiner Perkins and name any other Sandhill Road VC. You could put them in a room for a year and they would never come up with this business. So think about who's at the table? Who's at the founding table? Who's at the funding table? Who are your employees? Because that's where your ideas, your innovation and the future of your business are gonna come from. Thank you so much, Frida. Up next is Chantel Poulsen who is with New School's Venture Fund, which is probably the best education technology investor in the world. And they are really well regarded. I mean, if you wanna get corporate speak about it, you can call it HR, but it's really more the kind, I mean, when you're a startup, HR is really no more complicated than the kind of employer you're going to be. And they have a really great reputation for how they work with their companies and how they build their teams. So Frida works at the ecosystem level and at the company level, but just spoke about more ecosystem level. Chantel, I'd like to talk to you at the direct company level. What are some things that you have seen go well or not go well from portfolio companies as they try and be good employers? Is this working? Okay, so thank you for that introduction. So again, Chantel, New School's Venture Fund, we've been around for about 15 years and we're a nonprofit venture philanthropy. We invest across education. We actually started out mainly investing in charter schools and we're the early kind of movers in that space. And we also do some teacher development work. And then the piece of the work that I do is early stage investing in education technology companies. And so from a nonprofit standpoint, our mission is to improve the educational opportunities for low income students and students from underserved backgrounds. And so with that lens, that is also how we are looking at our companies and our investing. So a lot of kind of can mimic what Frida has said in terms of what we look for when we're working with entrepreneurs. So I think the first step is really through the diligence process. And so we're learning also from Frida about having entrepreneurs really focus on that social impact and diversity, but also understanding what the motivations are of the team. And I think we're not a you touched on this. And is it a priority of that entrepreneur, of that CEO to build team and culture? And so where I've seen this go well is when an entrepreneur is already talking about that at the very, very early stages and talking about how they wanna do team formation, how they wanna build a culture that really reflects their values. So one of the companies that I can give an example is a company called Schoolzilla who's also a co-investor with us with K-Pore. And the entrepreneur from day one has talked about her vision for building a team that really reflects the students that she's serving. So they're actually a B Corp and they're really focused on, again, low income underserved students, often students of color. And she's really thought about, how do I go about building a team that will reflect that community? And so part of it, like I said, is thinking about that as a priority from day one, but also kind of putting in practices into place. And one of the things that she mentioned to me is I think you also echoed Renata is starting early. So part of the thing, if your founding team is all homogenous, it's very difficult to then think about diversity or bringing on people of different backgrounds too late. Cause part of the issue is being able to track people that may look like them kind of early on. So she's thought about bringing in people who can then tap their networks to bring similar voices. The other thing she's really big about is just group think. And so part of her understanding is that having a homogenous employment base really leads to group think. And so that's why she's really thinking about different perspectives. Another nugget that she had just told me is in her kind of recruiting practices, just really being thoughtful about messaging. And really, so they're going over their messaging, making sure there's no hidden biases in their messaging, making sure that, for example, on their website, I think you kind of touched on this too. Who are you deciding to show on your website? So for example, they're not showing all of their employees. So they're bare hand picking what employees that they're showing to kind of show a diverse set of people. And again, just around the wording, what word you use in your job descriptions, just that level of attention and detail really goes a long way. And again, this is showing that it's a top priority for the CEO to kind of be that vested this early on when as a startup, there's a million other things that you can be thinking about. Another great example in our portfolio, what I would say would be something called Locomotive Labs and they are creating apps for kids with special needs. And actually the founder started this out of her own passion because her son is a special needs student and didn't have great technology tools for education. And so actually what she's really thinking about is having an inclusive work environment as a mother of a student with a special needs. And so what she does is she's actually creating a flexible environment for mothers who maybe are taking some time off of work because to work with their students or to work with their kids at home and giving them work that they can do with the company on a flexible arrangement. And so what that means is maybe flexible hours. What that means is sometimes the mothers can bring their students or they bring their kids to work with them. And again, just thinking about what are ways to have a work environment that's really inclusive for even mothers or people who are really close to that product. So again, thinking really early on. In terms of things that I have not gone seeing go well is kind of being disconnected. So your great example is you're wanting to do maybe public schools and you're kind of just kind of disconnected from your user base and aren't doing anything to get close to that user base. And so we like to use a term kind of proximity. And so if you're not from that user base, if you don't kind of understand the needs, it's really hard to kind of be on the other side. And so it doesn't have to necessarily always be you have someone on your team that had that experience. That is great. But another thing that we've seen is people spending time in those communities, spending time with those populations that they're really trying to serve. And again, this goes back to messaging. And so sometimes I've seen what goes wrong is if you have a message saying you're trying to reach a certain population, but then your, I guess your ads or your copy doesn't really reflect that population, that can also be kind of a signal or it just kind of contradicts itself. So I think that's the other kind of watch out is that making sure that your messaging and whatever pictures you're using really reflects that kind of user base. Thank you so much. Last but not least is the employer, the entrepreneur. Vince Ceciliano, CEO of New Resource Bank, which has a great reputation in our world for workforce practices. And Vince, I know it's not easy, but speaking, and you can tell us more about New Resource Bank in this answer, but tell us about what you have learned about building a great place to work. Thank you, it's great to be here. And I guess everything I've learned is not to do it the way I used to do it a few years ago. And pulling this together for talking today was a great opportunity for me to figure all that out. New Resource Bank is eight years old and we believe that community resources can be used to achieve well-being for the community and the planet. So if you think about that, community resources, that means we don't have to go far afield into the securities market. We have local resources that can be used to achieve well-being. What is well-being? We could all spend some time defining that word and you would have ideas immediately what that looks like for people, for the community and the planet. So I didn't use the word banking at all in that whole thing, but that gets into the how we do it and what we do is the banking side. So it's an unusual mission and we've been through a very hard time. We were created in 2008, sorry, 2006 and the recession hit in 2008 and we really dove downhill and had a lot of problems with our loan portfolio, a lot of regulatory issues and we came under a lot of scrutiny. The whole executive team turned over. I came in in the middle of that as did one of my colleagues here, I think Bill Peterson, our Chief Credit Officer. And it was a tough time and so it was a real turnaround time. I want to talk about pressure and I see Stephanie also one of our colleagues, a lot of pressure to fix things and go forward and as we succeeded, as the company turned around, we started doing, we did our first employee opinion survey and so actually let me step back and say my framework for this is a triple bottom line concept, but a different use of the word triple bottom line and the first bottom line is a great place to work. You've got to make it a great place to work. If you make it a great place to work, it'll be a great place to bank in our case or a great place to do business. That's a second bottom line and if it's a great place to work and a great place to do business, then it'll be a great place to invest. That's a third bottom line. So different use of that phrase triple bottom line. So how do you make it a great place to work? And I always would say that I want this to be a great place to work but saying doesn't make it happen. And we had our first employee opinion survey, I guess it was 2011 and we were still kind of in the danger zone and the survey came out okay. It certainly wasn't great, it wasn't terrible. And then in 2012, now we graduate from all our problems and we get out from under the regulators and things are going well and it's like hooray, hooray, we're going forward and we have our next employee opinion survey and it's pretty bad. And well, how can that be? We've all just conquered the mountain, we're up here, we're doing so much better and the employees basically say in many ways, life is not so great. And that was a real wake up call for us and it led me to realize that there's an outside in and there's an inside out to making a place a great place to work. So the outside in is what are we doing in the company to make it a great place to work? And what I learned from that was a lot about shared leadership and planning. That it really wasn't good enough for me to get up and talk about mission vision values and strategy and all that but we really had to figure out a way to get everybody involved in unpacking that at their level not only for today but as we grow and go forward. And one of the tools that we have used which has really been great has been the business canvas model. I don't know how many of you know that but it's a way to really diagram your business, break it down and it's very clarifying, very engaging and we've done that with all our employees and it's really been terrific and out of that have come a lot of ideas and we've really broken down our planning to a much more horizontal level throughout the company. So this idea of shared leadership and planning and tolerating some level of chaos. Just allow stuff to happen, allow ideas to happen. So that's been sort of the outside in part that I've learned through this process. We can take certain responsibility for creating an environment that helps make it a better place to work. But the inside out part for me is just as important and we have an expression that you've all heard about I want to do good and do well. And the idea is still the bottom line is doing well but I want to do good but I want to do well. So the bottom line is doing well and I think there's a problem with that. And that is that really from an individual's perspective I believe the perspective, the stand should be I want to be well and do good. And being well is a much different concept. It means that I am not rooting my sense of security and significance in the marketplace and my accomplishments in the marketplace and what you think of me and my title and where I live and what I drive. It's not about my accomplishments and the approval of others because that's the model of competition not collaboration. That's the model that separates and discriminates and says I'm up and you're down and distorts and generally does not build community. And whereas when you move into the economy of well-being now that's a collaborative model. That's a model that says I embrace community and I have values instead of my values being money, sex and power, their generosity and service and loving relationships. Quite different values and I could continue describing those two different economies but the economy of well-being says I care about who you are as a person, what you're wiring, what are your passions, your value, your potential in life and how does all that come together? How do you stand in the middle of all that with a position of personal power and then go to work and then try to change the world. Then go to the marketplace and use the marketplace to do good but don't be used by the marketplace and don't be defined by the marketplace. So this whole idea of it's both outside and inside out to create a great place to work. So I think that's really what I've learned over the last couple years. It's great, thanks so much Vince. So we have about 20 minutes for questions, just keeping an eye on time. What I would love to do is hear from as many of you as we have time for and so I'm going to have one rule for Q&A and that is only one panelist can answer each question. So if you are interested in a specific panelist's perspective on an issue, you are allowed to ask Vince or Frida a direct question or a whole panel, you can ask them a direct question. But we will try and get more perspectives on more questions to keep it moving. So you can ask whichever panelist jumps in first or you can direct it a specific person. So this is a question that I'd love to open up to everybody but especially since Vince was speaking kind of along these lines. I wanted to ask this the right way. So a lot of times for us working in small teams with entrepreneurs or with really small founder groups like a personal shock that could happen to your team, somebody gets sick, something happens, whatever can lead to a huge shock for the rest of your community for not just for you and your team but also for your customers, your customers' customers, everybody, all your partners, things like that. How do you, when you're trying to do as much good as you can and you yourself are going on all cylinders too, how do you inoculate yourself against some of these shocks? I know it's a broad question but it's something that's constantly on my mind and on our team's mind. You don't inoculate yourself against shocks. You have a plan B and a plan C because the shocks are gonna happen and we find that a lot when we work with younger companies is they have just a plan A and there's no backup, there's no downside scenarios. So you plan on shocks. So you have to plan on some, whether it's redundancy among the team or backup ways to get something done but you can count on them happening so that may not be the answer you're looking for but I think you have to plan on them and that you're gonna grow from that ultimately even though it's painful at the time. Great, thanks. Other questions? Yes. This is a question for Frida. The entire panel so far seem to have really focused on companies that have self-selected good behavior that have either had founding teams that are diverse or are prioritizing proximity Chantel as you were describing but as a wielder of a great deal of capital in the market and a great deal of influence, especially in the venture space. I'm curious, do you think about changing behaviors? Perhaps like you encounter a company for example that is not exhibiting behaviors or diversity in a way that you like to see. Do you think about changing the types of companies that you work with? Like I would think about an Uber for example. I don't think anyone would inherently think of Uber as a particularly diverse company or a company that particularly prioritizes employees and not that they don't but maybe there's more of a neutral. How do you think about engaging with companies that aren't self-selecting positive behavior right off the bat? It's a good question and sort of the lens I bring to this is a lens of hidden bias. Which is if you think about what we've learned from advances in neuroscience is we're all wired to be biased and what distinguishes us is those individuals and therefore those companies that choose to systematically investigate and mitigate those kinds of biases. And so whether somebody's interested in that perspective or not, I think many of you may be aware that the big tech companies out here have been releasing their diversity or their lack of diversity data more appropriately or more accurately and that doesn't happen by accident. Those numbers don't happen by accident and they don't reflect a meritocracy. And so you've got to start having a conversation, as Chantel said, I mean things that get baked in at the beginning there is no substitute for that. But then I think there are things that very well-meaning people miss. So for instance, there was a really fascinating study recently where looking at girls who stay in computer science and don't. And what's the critical mass of girls in the class that makes a difference? So it turns out that even more than critical mass which is important is the environment as deduced from walking in the classroom and a subtle change or a change as subtle as a classroom with Star Trek posters had more dropouts than a classroom with nature posters. So how many of you have done an audit of your physical environment and what's on the walls? What does the space convey? So I think there are lots of different layers that we can look at as we look at what informs people's employees decisions but then also I think it's really, you asked specifically about behaviors, I think it's really important to come up with a code of conduct. And not a politically correct bunch of stuff, absolutely nothing that an employment lawyer has ever touched because that will be the kiss of death. But what do you really wanna live by? What kind of workplace do you wanna create? And many of the tech conferences have actually come up with codes of conduct about what's okay. Where's that line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior? Because you don't wanna kill humor, you don't wanna kill morale, but you don't want to inadvertently allow things that systematically exclude people. So I don't know if that's... Add the data point about the dog-friendly workplace. So we are a dog-friendly kid-friendly workplace and many places aren't and I think it makes a huge difference. I'd much rather have an employee who isn't worried about his or her kids getting home from school safely or who they're hanging out with after school or are they doing homework? I mean, look, one of the things we do, so we've got K-Port Capital, we've got the K-Port Center, we've got Level Playing Field, we've got these geniuses that teach in Smash, what better place to do your homework, right? So having kids and dogs running around in office, I think is fabulous for morale and good morale is fabulous for productivity. All right, thank you. Other questions? Yes. Thank you, hello. Let's see. My question is based off of time management and capacity and we are one of those startups that, I feel like, kind of hiding this, but no. One of these startups that are just pushed to our max and I'm noticing as one of the only staff that we just don't have time to get to the things that we wanna be doing to create the type of staff that we are supposed to be doing. And I was just hoping for some advice on how to finish the HR process, how to get the retreats going, how to be able to make it a priority to afford it as a startup, get the attention that we have to start doing these things. And maybe the answer is you just gotta make a priority, just gotta do it, but that's not helping us move forward with those steps. So I was just hoping for some advice on how to deal when you're at capacity. So I think it can be overwhelming to think about all the steps that you needed to take. So maybe just doing it in bite sizes and taking smaller steps. So and think about ways to do things cheaply or just to integrate little pieces of the HR process. So you just like mentioned a retreat and maybe in your head you're thinking we have to go somewhere, I have to rent out space. And so all those pieces start to become overwhelming. But a retreat, like for example, we actually open up our space. So some of our companies just come to our space. It's a new space. We open up our conference room and they'll have a retreat in our conference room. And so it's somewhere's off their campus, but it's not far. They can come and get away from the office and then have some free time to brainstorm. So it's still a retreat. It's the step in the right direction in terms of creating that team building, those team building activities. And it's not like we have to find the funding to rent a van, to go somewhere. So I think just taking some of those baby steps will help with the process, such as one example. I would say, is this on? I would not say that you are trying to develop an HR process because I think just framing it that way is going to never get done because who wants to develop an HR process? It's like the kiss of death, as many have said. And I can't echo enough what Chantel was saying. Just take it into bite-sized nuggets and just keep asking the question, what kind of an employer do I wanna be? How do I wanna come to work and what kind of values do I wanna have? And I think it's sort of just framing it from a different entry point will release some of your stress, potentially around that. And I also think just very briefly, investing a little bit of time and energy into it upfront is gonna save you oodles in the long run. I was gonna say, yeah. The seal is broken, but this is an important question. So two things I think that are great. One is sort of, I think you're getting at the same point, spend a lot of time hiring the right people. So that's something you're gonna engage in anyway. So how do you do that? How do you, I mean, are you in a hurry? Is it just competency? You know, what about character? What about chemistry? What about commitment to what you stand for? So there's three other Cs there other than just competency. And I have learned, I mean, we're in a mission oriented business and we really had a tough time finding bankers who had values that aligned with ours. So fine, lots of people with values, lots of bankers, but we couldn't find bankers with values. And so, you know, we had a period of compromising. You know, we just had to hire bankers. And then later we realized, oh, we sort of tip too far that way. We also tip too far the other way. So we just take a lot of time up front on the hiring. So that's one thing. The second thing would be the values. I mean, everybody should have values and values can either be something that's on the wall that are stale in a kiss of death or you can really, by choosing just two or three values and really making it clear that these values are here because we know we live by these values when we do the following. And here are six examples of what it means to live by the value of transparency and you enumerate them. And everybody gets really clear. And then everybody has the authority and the power internally to say, wow, does that fit our values? Those are two things for me that are pretty easy to do up front without creating a process. I was just gonna say really quickly. I don't know how many employees do you have. So as soon as you think you can do it in some way that's safe and it might be an anonymous kind of survey or something set up, but I think you wanna ask people for tell me your best day at work here, what happened, and tell me the day you thought about quitting what happened. And you can do that with six employees. You can do that with 6,000 employees. And that's what's gonna give you and that's much better than an HR process, right? And that's gonna give you, that's the perfect nugget that Chantel was talking about that'll tell you what to do. The absolute worst thing you can have is a company where people feel like they have to check themselves at the door. But we don't know what that is for each of our employees. And so guess what? We ask them and then we don't have to guess. Since we are all breaking the rules on this I have a quick answer to that too. You've really just beaten the game. Very, very tactical. Probably the best time management advice I've ever received. And there's a difference between urgent and important. And you're always doing the urgent things and then you can never get around to the important things, right? And best advice I ever got was, and I still do this, is every night put three important things on a post-it note. And if it's any bigger than a post-it note it turns into a to-do list and nothing gets done. And do those three things the next day no matter what. And I've been doing that for probably a year and a half. And it has gone a long way to helping solve this problem. Yes, I have, yeah. I prefer friend. Okay, well thank you very much. Very enlightening. We're a little bit of a different company. Early stage, we're B-certified Corp. We have supply chains across the globe. And so we work with virtual teams and many of them don't know each other or they've not physically been present here in California. Do you have any advice as to, as an early stage company, how virtual teams can actually benefit from interaction, not only just the leader, but amongst the other partners in the company itself. Maybe some do's and don'ts. It's one of the hardest things to actually get a grip on even though they do know that one of our core values is to honor all the people along the way and behind the scenes. So love to hear any of your responses. Thank you. So it's a great question. It's a difficult question. And I'm a big fan of Patrick Lynn Sione's book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And at the bottom dysfunction of the team, i.e. if you lack trust, you can't become a high-performing team. You can't go through all the other high-functioning parts of the team if you lack trust. So when you're in different locations, it seems to me that the biggest challenge you have is how do you build trust among people who don't see each other and don't know each other. And that takes some creative thinking. I mean, I hadn't experienced this past week where I was leading a planning seminar in a company that had offices in six cities. And so half the people were on Skype and on the phone. And that was a challenge for me. And I realized we had to spend a lot of time up front. How do we build trust among this group, even though they kind of slightly know each other? And we did some storytelling. We did a variety of different exercises, which were real eye-opener to everybody in the room and on the phone, because they didn't know anything about each other. So this is cross-cultural as well. I don't have the exact answer how to build trust, but figure out trusting exercises that you can do through media to help people get more comfortable because you want the output that they're going to assume positive intent about everybody else on the team. If they can assume positive intent when they go to a situation, instead of when something happens that they disagree with, instead of thinking you idiot, they're going to say, well, that's a good person. I'm sure she had something in mind. I just don't understand it. Great, thanks. So the question I have is both in the hiring process and kind of retaining values over time. So startups don't have constraints, like monetary constraints in hiring people. And even if the founders have strong values and want to impart or find those values in other people, the combination of diversity, of finding people with diversity that have strong values and at the right price can be extremely challenging. So it sounds great. And as a founder, I believe in those things and we've predicated our company in those. And by the way, we intend to have a treehouse as an office in reference to your nature versus a Star Trek comment. But the question is, how do you balance all of those constraints when hiring and do you provide as thought partners, as investors, do you provide ideation and resources in thinking those things through? Yeah, I think that's an important point in terms of really leaning on your investors because like you said, you can't necessarily prioritize those things. I think what an investor brings to the table is maybe a new network. And so as you are kind of trying to think about all those different constraints of the why or the pool, the easier it is to basically address a lot of those constraints. So I think as an investor, yes, we can open up pools. We can think about different pipelines or think about different programs that you can go to that may already kind of be filtered and screened for those values that you're looking for. And I think, yeah, I think just really having a direct conversation with your investors. So I know I talk to my companies all the time and I really know, okay, you're looking for this person, this type of, these types of values, this type of diversity profile. And so I'm always kind of searching for that people. So it's not just you searching, but like put everybody else to work. That's kind of in your ecosystem. We are also at Capewood Capital, we are hiring a portfolio services diversity person because we recognize that it's hard and it takes longer and it's so important to us that we're doing that. I wanna raise one question in consistent with what Ross and I have done on the student loan pool. You don't have to change your comp structure to do things like to decide to create a level playing field by just having a student loan pool available for those who need it. You don't have to, because you're helping one or two or three employees with student loans doesn't mean that all of a sudden everybody gets an equivalent raise. We are not all, we don't show up at the door of our employer all with the same background and all with the same circumstances. And I think sometimes we confuse treating people the same versus treating people fairly. And treating people fairly means taking into account their different circumstances. And some of us show up at the door with student loans and responsibilities to help support extended family members and some of us show up with trust funds. And that's a real difference and you wanna be sure that your hiring practices and your comp structure don't inadvertently screen out one group or the other. These are decisions that CEOs can make about how much money they're raising and how they're distributing it. I think there are many things inherent in startup culture that are inherently biased and exclusionary, including very low salaries that for the upside and as Ross said, it assumes that people have a safety net and can take care of emergencies now. It assumes that people are young and healthy and single, which is a huge set of diversity issues right there. We had one entrepreneur who you'll understand why we didn't fund him who said, well, to save money and to keep our burn rate down, we live and work together and it just is a hassle to have girls around. So we thought it was a hassle to fund him. So, but you know, just if you think about these things, I said it with a certain affect, but you can imagine somebody actually making a case that this is an incredibly efficient use of capital. So I think you just really wanna think about all those assumptions. Yeah and I mean, if you do things like that, if you meet people where they are, it's really motivating to the team. So there are members of our team who haven't been to graduate school or who don't have debt and before we set up the pool, I talked to my current co-worker saying this is a benefit I want to offer and these are people who would not participate in the benefit and the response was incredible. People like that is great. I am so excited to be working for a company that does stuff like this. So it's really motivating to employees to do things that are good for employees. That sounds like a stupid comment. So let's get a couple more questions, yeah. I work with a lot of startup companies and I'm especially in the tech industry. I've heard similar things to the thing that you just mentioned. What are your thoughts for companies or founders that have started wrong or tried to do their best but somehow completely missed it entirely? And just kind of what your thoughts are on, how do they course correct or more importantly, how do they regain the trust of their team and their team members? Well, as I think everybody up here has said, it's much easier if you bake it in from the beginning and that's why those of us who are investors can really lead you down or encourage you that that's a good use of money. But certainly as Vince's experience speaks to, you can mid course correct at any point. I think it's best done and easiest to do when you understand it as a senior person or a founder and you explain it as inherently linked to the success of the business. That is a much easier thing and a much easier conversation to have than we have this abstract principle that we would like to do. All right, we are fast running out of time. Sorry for the questions we didn't get to. I would like to close and have, to go back to the phrase at the beginning. If we are at SoCAP 2015, each of you can say one sentence. What is something that would happen between now and SoCAP 2015 that would get you very, very excited about the way companies make an impact as employers? I, SoCAP 2015 would have a full thread of these conversations and I think they're starting to get there and I think that we're starting to recognize it as a field, but I would like it to be the norm and not the exception. Oh yeah. I think I would like to see that the very definition of a successful company is one that treats employees well and that you simply can't succeed, you don't get funding, you don't get escape velocity unless you treat employees well. So I would love to see the demographics of this audience change even more to start reflecting kind of what we're talking about and the people that are in this room having these conversations are the ones that traditionally may be one of the thought of kind of the social sector as a place of employment for them, so. And I will just say, by the way, in response to this question, that when that terrible employee opinion survey came out, I was target number one and so that was a real learning experience for me, coaching all kinds of things to figure out, wow, what had I done and as well-intentioned as it might have been it didn't really matter and so really changing a lot of things starting with me and that was a whole process. So it can be done, I'm great now. Just kidding, just kidding. But what I'd like to see the next conference, I would like to see this idea of pushing this to a personal level in people's lives, i.e. that we want people to be well to go out into the marketplace and so what does being well look like from a personal perspective, all the dimensions you can think of? I would like to see that as a focus of this as a panel somewhere next year. Great, well thank you audience. Big round of applause to the panel, thank you very much. I think this is an important conversation, I look forward to continuing many iterations with all of you, thanks a lot. Real quick, if you want to ask questions to our panelists, is there on the way out? Socap has asked that that happen at the back of the room and not on the stage so that the next panel can get geared up so I don't know if you guys are around for a couple follow up questions but it's great if that happens over there.