 Alright everyone, we're going to get started here. I hope you can hear me. Great. My name is Randy Haken. I'm with the Gratitude Network and very excited about our panel here. Social innovation, inspiration, and perspiration. And so what we are going to do is, gosh, I love this, we have three incredible entrepreneurs here. I think many of whom some of you have heard about in the past. What I love about these three is the passion that each of them brings to what they're doing, which I've personally experienced with each one of them as we've known each other. And I'm really excited for you to share in that passion. The discussion is going to center around two sides of the startup. How many of you, let me see a show of hands, how many of you are entrepreneurs? Okay, how many of you are more on the investor or corporate side or non-entrepreneur? Alright, we've got a handful there too. Great. Well, for those of you who are out doing it and creating your companies, you know about the two sides of running an inspiring business. One is where do great ideas come from and how do you inspire your team to continue to create great ideas and innovate with the business model, innovate with your go-to-market strategy, all the things that build a great business. On the other hand, for those of you that are doing it, you know that there are moments where you're sweating it out like crazy and you're saying, wow, being in the trenches here is a lot of hard work. So we want to touch on both of those sides because I think all four of us have probably experienced that. And I thought an appropriate prop that I was thinking of bringing for these guys was picks and shovels. But then I thought, no, it could be lab coats and space suits. And then I thought, no, it could be jungle gear and rifles. I don't know. One of those metaphors probably works. So let me first introduce everyone. And, of course, you all have their bios in your online, so we won't go into bios. But Krista Gannon to my left with the fly program, Premal Shah from Kiva, and Sajjan George from Matchbook Learning. And why don't we start by just having each of you start with Sajjan and we'll have each of them just tell you a little bit about not only their organization, but what are they excited about when they get up every morning now? What's coming ahead the next quarter or two for your organization? Okay, so Sajjan, Matchbook Learning, what we do is we try to turn around the worst performing public schools in America, the bottom 5%. And the way that we turn them around is we leverage technology. Every student gets a laptop, digital content, and we create an individual learning path for each student and then train and develop the teachers on how to personalize their instruction for each student. We started in Detroit. We're working with our fourth school there. And what I'm really excited about next is we're pivoting our model to originally we were partnering with districts on their bottom 5% schools and now we just picked up a charter school in Newark and we're changing our model to convert schools, bottom 5% schools into our own charter because we can both sustain our results over a longer period of time but also I think go a little bit deeper and faster. And then we're investing in our own sort of technology ecosystem to bring this, we call it blended learning, blending face-to-face and online instruction together. So we're kind of excited in that sort of technology investment and then tweaking the model so that it can potentially be something that we scale around the country. Great, okay. Premal, we'll let you take this crack, Nash. Sure. Hey, everyone. I'm Premal. I serve as president of Kiva. I think a lot of folks are familiar with Kiva. We started nearly 10 years ago making it easy for individuals to make $25 loans to help support microfinance borrowers worldwide. And in the last couple of years, we've actually shifted the model to look at crowd financing for social good. And social good can be, you know, microfinance abroad. It can be investing in clean energy solutions here in the United States. It can take many forms. And the thing I think I'm most excited about, you know, 10 years into the journey is there's this concept that Mohammed Yunus, the pioneer of microfinance, pioneered back in the mid-70s. He found that when the banks would say no to people, you could organize people into groups, right? And the groups would basically monitor each other, kind of select each other. And if you lend to those groups, typically of women, you would have very high repayment rates because within the village there's this kind of social collateral, reputational collateral. And he did this in a kind of an analog model. And with more and more people coming online all over the planet, and in the next 10 years, the entire planet I think will be online. And I'm curious about a digital version of social underwriting, where we can bring down the cost of capital for the poorest people on earth. Because right now in microfinance, the average interest rate is 35% worldwide, which sounds high to us. Of course, it's better than the village money lender between 80% to 300%, but it's still high. And if you have a 35% cost of capital, then you return on capital when you buy that cow and start that dairy business. It has to be pretty good for it to be a good loan to take out. I think all social underwriting is, is people vouching for people and bringing character back into the equation. And in a day that we're connected through things like, you know, Facebook and the social graph or LinkedIn or Yelp, basically I think there's ways to get people's networks in a more digital form to vouch for each other and through that fill in information gaps where credit scores, cash flows collateral are insufficient for a good part of the world's population. Through that, we can start saying yes to people who here know today at much lower cost. So that's what we're really excited about doing at Kiva in the next phase, is bringing about a digital social underwriting system. Great. Before we move on to Krista, I just want to ask because I think many, many people see Kiva as, you know, in some ways the poster child for social innovation. And yet you just pointed out it's been 10 years. That's a long time for an entrepreneur, right? So I'm just curious as the social impact space has shifted over time, it sounds like Kiva's shifting along with that. Any thoughts on that in terms of what you've observed with the shift and how you've had to steer the boat through that? Well, I'd say just broadly one thing I think, and we witness it here by, you know, coming to this conference, but I'm seeing a general shift of the world moving from wanting to own and earn things to wanting to feel and belong to something bigger. And that could just be a function of, you know, progress as a society of more of us not having to worry about kind of our basic human needs on the Maslowian Triangle and being able to move up to that actualization place. And as we're able to do that, it's clear that purpose, you know, you go to campuses, MBA programs, all around the planet, that purpose is something that is, you know, I think the most powerful force there is. And so one of the things that I'm really excited about is how can we make it cheaper and more efficient to connect great social entrepreneurs who spend way too much time fundraising and the transaction costs and the cultivation costs and et cetera, et cetera, and the information asymmetries. How can we actually use these online platforms, crowdfunding platforms to dramatically lower the cost of accessing capital and supporters to further the mission and do it in a transparent way where not all entrepreneurs are going to be successful, just like not all eBay sellers actually ship the good that you buy from them. But if we keep public reputation scores on all of this, I think people's best character will be shown and will have a much more efficient system. So I'm very excited about how we can use technology to make character visible. Amen. Love that. And I can see the shift over those 10 years because how you described your original vision eight, nine years ago when we first met was completely different. Okay, Krista, tell us a little bit about Fly. Thank you for having me. And thanks for the gift of the next 45 minutes of your life. We really are going to make sure that you walk out and it's a good use of your time. So at Fly, we believe that all our children deserve a chance to become more than their past mistakes. And Fly is working a lot on character and on belonging for kids that don't belong and who are often labeled as having characters that can't be redeemed. And we don't believe that at Fly. We work with kids in the juvenile justice system, kids who have been on probation, kids who are incarcerated, kids who are coming back out into the community, and we help them turn their lives around and help them realize their true potential and play to their strengths. And for me, I'm really excited about a lot of things. One, in the field, there's so much more research now about the brain and neuroscience and the impact of the brain and how that affects adolescents, how the brain is informed by trauma, by poverty. And the high-level takeaway for me is that it is not too late. Our brains are still forming so much in our teens and in our early 20s that our young people can change. And there's a lot more around the science as to how do we help stimulate that change and how do we help support that change and make it sustainable over time. So that's really exciting. In the whole field of criminal justice, we're now actually talking about juvenile justice when we started fly and kids were being incarcerated for life and there were huge issues in our criminal justice system. We weren't talking about issues of disproportionate minority confinement. We weren't talking about issues of young people serving life sentences. And that's a completely different discourse today, which is really exciting. And for fly, what we're really excited about is we have figured out a system that works and transformation is a lot about connection. It's about a personal connection with a human being who helps you connect with yourself. And we are looking at how do you scale that? How do you scale that individual connection and the opportunity for transformation in a way that's effective and that's efficient and that's sustainable? In short, how do we love our kids in a way that's smart and sustainable and has an impact? And that's what we're working on. We've gone from serving 30 kids in one city to now working across multiple cities in two counties with over 1,000 young people. And we're actively working now to expand into another jurisdiction, either San Francisco County or Alameda County. And I think what's really interesting that I also get excited about is this tension between innovation and best practices. Because where the field is really going in criminal justice in a lot of the social sector is prove that you're evidence-based. What's the best practices say about how you effectuate change? And every best practice today was an innovation in somebody's idea or somebody's startup 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. And so trying to be economically viable in a world where funders and the field is really caring about evidence, which is important. Because if you look at evidence, you can really inform your practices. And balancing that with real-time input from clients in innovation, I think is a really interesting tension in the field that is something that's exciting to work on. Do you find the same thing in education, Sergeant? Because we all know education, unfortunately, has not changed a lot. Although the last five years with all the technology and innovation that's coming to that space have been incredible. But we're dealing with a quite antiquated system. Yeah, it's really hard. Education is, in many ways, one of the last sectors to be transformed by technology. And it's a very hard space to innovate because in education, they're used to seeing what's the data, what's the evidence that shows that your innovation actually works. And usually, for education-type evidence, that involves a longitudinal study which involves several years, which no startup or innovative idea can meet in the timeframe that they're presenting the idea. And so the industry tends to be very risk-averse. Even though they say they're open to innovation, they're very risk-averse. And your own best practices, generally because you're a startup, only has a very short tail. So there's this constant tension around, we want to innovate, but your customer is very risk-averse. And the data supports some level of evidence, but not the kind that removes all of the risk. And so there's this constant tension around trying to innovate an area in a space that is very resistant to change in general. And also there's a vulnerability because it deals with children. So they don't want a lot of risk. And they don't want to expose something that isn't completely proven or tested. And so a lot of startups in education, in general startups have a very low success rate in education. It's even thinner because the customer is just not willing to accept the risk level that innovation requires. Now all three of you, just thinking about this, not only had careers prior to this, you had all kinds of opportunities you could have gone into, but yet you're passionate about what you do. And I'm going to turn this one on Premo because you had a nice job at eBay, as I recall, prior to all this happening. And hey, you could have just lived the rest of your lives, the rest of your life out in corporate land. But something was driving you. I'm curious, what was the initial spark for you that got you so excited about what you and Matt created with Kiva? Well, I think we all have something in our past that was our original why, why we do what we do. And for me, my parents were raised in India and I'm one of the winners of the birth lottery. They were able to immigrate to the United States in the mid-70s. And because of that, my brother, sister, and I, and this became very clear to us when we'd go back to India to visit family, we had access to opportunity that other people, just by virtue of the family that they're born into, do not. And we know that talent is equally distributed across the planet. Opportunity is not. We know that and we're reminded of that when we travel especially. And being at PayPal and eBay, one of the cool things was, what eBay allowed was complete strangers to connect with each other and do commerce safely. And PayPal allowed people to buy and sell and pay each other. And why couldn't you do the same thing when it came to a microloan of having strangers lend to strangers but sustained by trust? And how do you do that? And that was something that I was very curious about and luckily, you know, I was able to go on a sabbatical while I was a product manager at PayPal to work out in India and try to prototype the idea. And it failed the first prototype. I posted up on eBay a test borrower and the eBay legal department took it down. They had no idea that I was an employee of eBay Inc. because I had like Salsa Boy 20 and like an anonymous handle. But it was illegal to solicit loans on the eBay website. It was an early prototype. But yet, you know, why not just create a real website that was dedicated to that? So that was a little bit of around the origin. But it's really a connection of kind of what was just something that, you know, sat with me ever since, you know, those first trips to India as a kid with a realization around new capacities through technology to connect one another and, you know, when we can connect, that creates an empathy and when there's an empathy, there's a generosity. And that's all we're trying to unlock on the Kiva platform. Yeah. Saljan, you also had a day of job at one point, right? Before you became an entrepreneur. But what on earth would make you go try to figure out how to reverse what's happening in our education systems today? Yeah, so I started the first half of my career. I did corporate turnarounds. I worked for a Wall Street firm that we went into companies that were in crisis and turned them around. And I had a lot of passion for using those turn around skills. But I didn't necessarily have passion for, like, and we did a range of industries from retail to manufacturing to tech. I wasn't necessarily passionate about those industries, but I was really passionate about turnarounds and using my turn around skills. And it just became apparent, like why not apply my turn around skills to a really pressing problem that I could get really passionate about and that problem was education. And what I found was, when you combine your passion for the skills that you use for an industry or a sector that you're also passionate about, that passion becomes a currency and an energy flow that I never really accessed in my corporate days. It started to magnify the impact of what I was doing, both in the people that we were attracting to match book learning, the types of beneficiaries we were serving. So it had this sort of 10x sort of impact on my career from moving from the sort of corporate for-profit world to the social non-profit world using the same skillset but applying it to education that candidly was sort of intoxicating. And you and I had a talk about awakening of the heart. Yeah, we did. What's it been for you? Well, I mean, I went to law school, really convinced I wanted to go and be a litigator in the criminal justice system and actually be a district attorney or a judge and help put people in jail to make the world a safer place. And on a whim, when I was doing my first year of law school in Chicago at Northwestern, I got asked to volunteer in juvenile hall. And very honestly, I went because I thought it would look good on my resume. And my life was totally changed by those young men. And over and over and over again, their statements to me would start with, if only. If only someone cared about me, if only I'd known how much trouble I could get into. I wouldn't be here. And I was just so taken that they weren't at all what I expected and so taken with the lack of people signing up or walking into the facility to help and do something about it that I really felt that I knew too much to stand by and do nothing about it that I had to do something. And so that desire to help answer the wise. And quite honestly, for a long time I didn't think I was the right person to do it. I was a white woman from the suburbs who grew up in a nice family and who am I to come in and try to help with this problem. And so I just went back to the young men and asked them that very question. And they said something to me that's really stuck with me. They said, if you really listen and you really care, we don't care what package you come in. Please go do something about this. And so it was their ideas that then became the foundation. The core programs we run today at Fly came from their suggestions and their inputs. Fantastic. As I'm sitting and listening to this, I'm just thinking for those of you in the audience that are entrepreneurs and there were quite a few hands that went up, connecting to that thing that you're most passionate about. When I teach at UC Berkeley, that's kind of what I see my job as. If I can get those students and most of them are MBAs or in their late 20s, early 30s, if I can get them to connect with something they're passionate about, like these three, that's it. So I ask you if you're, I know you're here at SoCAP, you probably have connected. But if you haven't, or if you know of someone that you can help connect more, I think that's where the spark for entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has become just an incredible movement around the world. We're really fortunate right now to be in one of the capitals of the world for entrepreneurship, the Bay Area. But the rest of the world wants what the Bay Area has, which this spirit of entrepreneurship, this spark is this passion when somebody really thinks about what moves their heart and then apply the business skills and the MBAs and all that stuff. Okay, let me move on to organizations because I know all three of you are now, as opposed to when you started, and possibly the startup was in your garage or in your bedroom or out of your first office, but now all three of you have a staff and a team. I'm curious, how do you continue to innovate when you may not be the only innovator? And how do you get the team to think about innovation? That's a great question. And I think it's about creating an environment where innovation is something that's welcomed and encouraged within this tension of best practices, how do we prove it, how do we repeat it, how do we scale it? So I think depending on the phase of growth you're in as an organization, we've had really honest conversations about innovation recently because every year there's a new program designer, a new tweak or a new something we're trying. We've said, you know, we've really got to scale this core model because these core programs together we think drive to impact that's the most scalable and sustainable. So how do we really dig deep and have the innovation be how do we do this better, faster, more efficient as opposed to be innovating around a whole new idea? And so trying to define where we want to be innovative right now during the particular phase of our growth as an organization is something that's been really important. And it's interesting talking to founders. I think every founder is very different. For me, I don't think I'm, there's types I've met that I really admire and am jealous of at time. They've got so many ideas they can't keep up with them. And so I think getting in touch with who I am as a leader has helped. Like this is my one idea I think for this, my job on this planet was to do this. And I'm going to do it to the best of my ability to bring in people who are smarter, more creative and more thoughtful than I am to take it to the next level. And so that's a way that I've been trying to think about innovation that it can't rest with me. It needs to rest in the environment as much as I possibly can. Other thoughts? Yeah, well, I think innovation is, you know, really the discovery and meeting of true human needs. And the first step is listening. And we all know that, but it's very hard when you're building to really keep that in the front. And we're blessed at Kiva in working with a network of hundreds of social entrepreneurs all around the planet who are out there innovating. And our job is to be a resource engine for all of you to help you raise that 0% interest capital to go further. And what we've learned is, you know what, sometimes the way we structure our loan programs isn't working. We need to think about revenue-based repayments. There's a group called Navica that works with artisans. And it's just a lot easier for artisans to pay once they're in the money and they've sold their art. We've worked with groups that work with farmers and they need grace periods because the farmer can't pay until they've actually harvested and sold their crops in the market. So much of it is a constant tuning of maybe an original thesis by listening and really going out to the network that we're here to support. The social entrepreneurs now, what we're hearing is, I mean, you run the Gratitude Network. And the Gratitude Network, what was it? 300 people applied to get a scholarship to... Well, 500... Socap has used 500 applications from all around the world, plus, and then we narrowed that down to 130 and then narrowed that down to 32 and nine of them presented this morning on stage. So I'm guessing that the 30, right, you had to say no to 21 people, but they made it to the final and they were so good. They were good. I'm wondering what we can do to make it easier for... because there's limited slots, make it easier for more people because they've come through a process so far to actually access low-cost funding and then ideally continue to live another day and then crowd in impact investors who are looking for that 7%, 8%, 10% risk-adjusted IRR and then crowd in the capital market, so on and so forth. So I think for us just even coming here and talking to you all, we're realizing, geez, there's still big gaps and if we can lever these trust networks, I mean, you've done so much due diligence on at least the final 30, certainly the nine who are going to get exposure here, but the other 21, how do we... that's that constant process and keeping the deck clear to listen so that you're not so busy just doing the thing, tuning your current thing, that's what we really struggle with. One of the reasons I left the venture capital world was because we'd see 1,200 plans a year and we'd fund two companies and that just isn't leveraged. That's not... the model's got to be inverted. This is beautiful. So I think everyone would totally... would love to see you come out with your next level. And the innovation has to be in the due diligence process because it seems like until you can reduce the diligence and monitoring costs dramatically, you can't keep saying yes to more people. So anyways, we could... this is the kind of conversation that I'm sure we're all having in whatever form and then the question is, is how do you actually start instantiating it in some kind of small test? The only thing I would add to the conversation that may be different, I agree with Chris's point, you have to create conditions. I think where a lot of entrepreneurs make a mistake is they try to create the conditions for innovation for their organization. So whether that's open office space or co-location Monday morning meetings or brainstorming sessions or following what Pixar does to review how they critique their scripts, what I've found is actually innovation works differently for different people. And so part of my job, the leader, is to really understand the learning style of each of the people that works for me. Are they an extrovert? Are they an introvert? Do they work better in groups? Are they better at problem identification or risk mitigation? How do they express themselves? How do they articulate themselves? Because if you take a person who's an introvert and you have her kind of brainstorm with a group live, processing as they go, they're not going to be innovative. And you're not actually helping them. So really understanding their learning style and creating space for each individual person to be innovative and then figuring out how and when you sort of pull the group together and pull it apart. Sometimes you need one person that's really good at just writing a brief to say, can you nail the problem here? Can you write in two to three sentences? And then having another person, can you then, once she writes that, can you respond and react to the draft? And then you have some other people to say, okay, I need to suspend you for a little bit because I know you're going to say there's five problems with the way this is written. But we can't address those now because we actually have to go wide before we go deep again. So I think one of the key things is understanding how innovation works for each of the people that work for you. And oftentimes they don't even know themselves. So you have to go back to their learning style. How do they get inspired? How do they work best alone, quietly? Do they engage better in groups? And once you figure out their learning style, then you can then begin to manage their workflow and their set of tasks. The other thing I do is to make sure that within the tasks that they're doing, I try to help them prioritize those tasks so that they're having space to be reflective, to be contemplative, to hopefully catalyze some ideas. So also, I think a lot of the other mistake we make is instead of just uniform creating a set of conditions, the other mistake is we don't realize that we sometimes require people to be innovative and yet there's actually way too much on their plate for them to be innovative. And so helping them sequence and prioritize and building in space for them to reflect on their work is a key driver I've found to help increase the innovation of our organization. I want to make a point on this idea of assessing people's learning styles or leadership styles before engaging them in some aspect of the creative problem solving process. There's a tool that you might all enjoy taking a look at. How many people have heard of Strength Finder? It's a Gallup organization. In fact, the original author of Strength Finder was working at Gallup, left and then Gallup embraced him. Strength Finder, which I've used with boards that I've been on, I've used it with management teams, I've used it with my own teams, it's really helpful way of getting a sense of what those leadership styles and learning styles are. I use it at Berkeley as well with the students. And there's a new version of Strength Finder coming out this month focused on entrepreneurship. And so if you keep your eyes open for that new book, it's a great way of assessing yourself or your team or your board or someone you're trying to mentor or someone you're investing in. Okay, next question. I want to ask about the perspiration side of this. Now as Christa was taking notes, I was looking over her notepad, is she writing down an inspiration or a perspiration? Right, I process, I remember by writing, so I was writing you both down. Can you just give us an example of a point you got to in your company's evolution or several points where the perspiration was really starting to come, you had to dig deep and it was kind of a trying time and just curious what brought it about, what you did about it, how you accommodated for it, etc. So it's been smooth selling for all three of you. We're done. There's so many different moments. I kind of think of the board, staff, funders, clients, you know, there's probably the moment when we lost one of our first clients to a violent crime. I remember that very clearly and sort of that realization that we're dealing with really tough stuff and risk rewards are really high and when our clients are successful they could still be, they could still lose their lives and when our clients are successful they could still lose their way and take somebody else's life. So I think that moment was a very grounding moment for me getting that first call and knowing this is real and also just being so renewed and so inspired by this is all the more reason that our work matters. This is all the more reason that we deserve a life so much better than that. So I think for me what's interesting... Perspiration became the inspiration. As I think about a lot of them it often has. You know at that time when I thought I had this really great idea of how do we maximize, can we scale faster and provide two programs much more quickly as opposed to sequencing one after the other. So we invested a lot of talent, we invested some of our major donors and we experimented in three different communities and the results came back and said wow, not very good results. Not maybe the best idea. Chris Steadman we went back and we looked at a lot of research around adolescent brain development and change management and that we were essentially putting a lot of resources into young people that we hadn't inspired to change in the first place. And so if we're not first inspired to change it's going to be really hard to have a good impact and effect on then taking them through the change cycle. So big learning for me to sit back as a leader and go okay that was if that failed to turn it around. So I think for me when I think about the moments of perspiration, a perspiration that's been the hardest, it's been when you feel like there's more that you want to be able to do and you can see it and you haven't quite gotten there yet. Or you wish the conditions could be a little bit different and you can see the power you have to change it but you can't change all the conditions to make it exactly how you want it to be. So what do you do in that moment? You fight for it and you remind yourself, it's interesting I was thinking a lot about the whys and the philosophy and how I didn't know the word social entrepreneur. I mean I remember the first time I was in Amina I'm like oh I'm an executive director that's kind of a cool sounding title. I grew up in a law school in time that wasn't a part of my vocabulary it was my mom and my dad's statement to me always leave your campground cleaner than when you found it. So I think you go back to what are your core belief systems that are driving you and if those belief systems are still in place then you have to move and you have to keep trying you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and I think the issues that we are all working on we don't have the luxury we have to take care of ourselves I'm a big believer in taking care of ourselves and having boundaries and we don't have the luxury to step back and say we can just take our time. Our young people are depending on our best thinking and best effort so that's why I just like this is game on let's go. Game on. I think with any social venture that you're starting for the first few years you're constantly faced with failure and it's a lot of it has to do with perspective. Our first school we launched was with the district it was a bottom 5% school after two years it got an award from the state from the governor as a reward school being given to those schools either in the top 5% or with a trajectory like one. Same kids from the district came back and said this is awesome thanks very much we're not done. We can take it from here same thing happened with our second school after two years went from having only 7 out of 832 kids proficient on the state exam to the top 5 of all schools in the city in terms of performance gains and they said we got it from here anytime the customer had a much lower bar for the kids they felt were right and it was incredibly demoralizing it's almost like you're being penalized for actually performing well and the thing that's helped me the most the perspiration piece is this little reminder that you know what I'd actually rather fail at this than be successful at anything else my big criticism for a lot of non-profits is they're not swinging hard enough if you listen to their pitch or their vision or their model they've got almost zero chance of actually solving the problem that they're addressing their model just isn't going to solve the problem they'll talk about statistics 8 million this or 5 million and you're like there's no way you're going to scale to reach that so I think part of it is we got to swing for the fences because you know why else are we in this if we're not actually trying to solve the problem eradicate whatever it is but then you also personally have to say and the worst thing that happens is we don't get another opportunity but we swung as hard as we could as fast as we could I think I can live with that versus I can continue to sustain ourselves or the organization at a very mediocre level of well we didn't totally turn around to school we made a few kids lives better and we got them from the bottom 5 to the bottom 20% well that just isn't I don't think that's worth your life's effort and just reminding yourself at least for me it's okay if I fail if we set the bar high enough and we fail I can live with that I love that philosophy if we could get a floor mic down here I wanted to open up to the audience to see if oh great any questions? I have plenty more that I can ask here and we've got just a few minutes separating you and food so who's got a great question I'd just like to comment on the Gallup that is actually ready online you can actually go to Gallup entrepreneurial strengths and you can take it for $12 wow very cheap it can really help you so I just wanted to add that great good to know thank you I'm blown away by the gratitude the love in the panel and in the room this is really the convergence I come from Bolivia and in Bolivia I think we're a country where we're one of the more indigenous nations in the Americas and in the world and there still are cultural traditions and ways of living and of being that are not so occidental in the sense that they're not so mind based and so I think the kind of thinking that's coming out of India and out of other parts of the world is absolutely fundamental for this truly holistic approach to understanding human progress I'm blown away by the panel it's one of the best experiences so far here at Socap and I've been working for about 15 years now on the philosophy of development and the intersection between the philosophy of development and the philosophy and digital philosophy how you create the deep underlying structures for transforming the intangibles and building tangibles how you take values and beliefs and attitudes and transform those as the foundations for sustainable entrepreneurship sustainable organizations and a sustainable world so I'd love to connect with you all thank you very much you know I was reminded as he was talking that one of the great things about Socap is there is things going on at the 20,000 foot view that are where we're trying to connect the pieces of money and meaning and there are things going on at the perspiration point of view and everything in between so if you look at the schedule for these three days it's just packed with everything in between and I think it's wonderful because you know sometimes you want to think strategically about what we can all do to shift large corporations, shift government, etc and sometimes you want to you know you've got to worry about perspiring it out and trying to overcome taking risk and overcoming failure any other thoughts from the audience Hi my name is Jen Grecki and I'm with Zawadisha and I feel like one of my greatest something that contributes to revolution like dripping sweat is the fact of wanting to innovate and wanting to be in an environment of innovators and being held back by people who are incredibly risk adverse or people who are very pleased with the status quo. I'm wondering if you have any advice on how to navigate those systems especially when those people might be your board of directors they might be your funders they could be very many people and so how can you overcome that? Well I think two pieces of advice and we bump into a lot of walls at Kiva and sometimes the ones that are saying it's probably not worth innovating because maybe there's wisdom in that so just honoring both sides of both points of view one is just really trying to have that deep honest dialogue around the why with your board member your funder and first starting there so with a funder it can be a really weird dynamic but you're really an agent of the change that they want to see as well and it's an equal relationship in re-establishing that. I think the second thing is it's very hard to say no to the idea of a test and so when you can smallify the problem when you can kind of just say wait how can we just ring fence it over here and test it all of a sudden I see heads nodding because failure is okay but it's a test to fail cheap right so fail fast, fail cheap, fail forward that whole thing and so the usage of tests that can help validate a hypothesis in an intellectually honest way where you can be also dispassionate and show that you don't you're not going to push through anyways I think that really helps create an intellectual honesty and trust fundamentally if you're overlapping on that why question that's what I found to really help I've really seen a lot about trust and how important trust is especially working in the criminal justice system we work really closely with all sides of the system and are trying to get all sides to work together and I always remind myself that I can never put enough value in time in pure human connection and trust because the more that I can build an authentic relationship with people especially those where our ideas different the most the more I can be able to then get to a core belief that we have in common or build trust so that when you go for this let's try this let's try this let's think about this there's a greater likelihood of success and so and that's sometimes hard to do especially when you're feeling such a different philosophical approach that can be pretty exhausting so I think having a good inner circle of folks that can kind of boost you up as you're going down that path and remind you that there's it's worth it can be helpful too I'm gonna and I'll ask a final short question here just thinking about trust and some of the other things that you've been talking about one of the themes that many of the panels and sessions have talked about is this concept of mentorship within social impact space obviously mentorship works in any space but particularly here and particularly when you're talking about both inspiration and perspiration it's almost like you need support on both sides I'm just curious if mentors have been an important part of what the three of you have gone through and just maybe an example from two or three of you of a mentor and a little bit about how do you find somebody you know the folks that are out there are as they grow their business they're gonna need different kinds of assistance how do you actually reach out and find the mentor give us some quick stories on this several things I guess in terms of finding mentors I think a lot how you structure boards really important by design I am not the board chair I sit on the board but I'm a member as well as being the CEO of Matchbook because I want a board chair to set the agenda for the board meetings and to really use the board I think a lot of times entrepreneurs set up their boards in a way they're not really designed well for mentorship they're not designed well to govern they're designed well to be a good sounding board maybe and maybe get some advice occasionally but I think part of attracting good mentors is showing that you're coachable and part of showing that you're coachable demonstrably is to say I'm willing to actually give some control and authority over to you I should be managed I should be governed so that's one and then in addition to the I also have some advisors I've just found people that are experts in the field of education that have developed friendships over the years and I just ask them A would you be an advisor and B I will meet with you twice a year I'll come to you I'll schedule what it is I want to talk about would you spend basically two hours twice a year and I can run some strategic things for you and generally if you have a relationship or in your space and they're passionate in this case about education it's very hard for them to say to say pretty no to say no to that so I think I actually just think being being very tactical and strategic about who you ask and then what you're conveying when you're asking people will be willing to mentor somebody if they feel like that person is giving them some level of influence or authority in their life or in their work and just be just articulate that in your ask and you'll be surprised how people respond you know one of my I have many deficits one of them is I get so attached to an idea and we have some folks from Keef on the back and probably annoyed them in the in the kitchen you know just what do you think of this what do you think of this and sometimes and you know you ask the question around you want to innovate and you feel like there's these keepers of the status quo and you're frustrated and the inspiration comes from that two pieces of advice from two mentors one is the head of the media network who is Keef's biggest funder and for a while there it took a while to get funding from those guys I mean like a long time for Keef and we felt like we're so perfect and they had good reasons but I had a hard time identifying with those reasons and the head of the media network said you know Prem will remember that the relationship trumps the issue I thought that was really wise because chances are you're going to come back here again next year and next year and next year and if that funder says no that board member says no I think just kind of remembering that the relationship can trump the issue or should trump the issue that's really important because so much of what drives us I think in this room is passion and that can blind us so that's been helpful and then the second is from my board chair who is a real mentor to me she advises me to slow down to speed up and I think there's real wisdom to that so there's a beautiful Native American saying that says you have to slow down and let your soul catch up to you which is something that I often remind myself of I think what's really important is that mentors are everywhere and they take all shapes sizes and forms I do not hesitate to go to my 16 year old gang members and ask them to mentor me to better understand the gang mentality what's happening on the streets what do they need what are they getting what are they not meeting with the COO of Cisco and asking for his advice about leadership and board development I think one of the pieces of advice I got from one of my mentors once was Krista you're a really good consumer of advice and so I think it's really important in a mentor relationship that listening to the advice and figuring out like a buffet what works for you what do you want to take and what do you want to leave and what is the reason for that people come into our lives for a reason and it's our job to figure out what it is and why and what they have to offer our mission and our cause and so I'm constantly looking for what's the reason that I've been connected with this person and what do they have to offer me and how can I be a good consumer of the gift of their wisdom and how can I apply that to my life and then just having no fear I went up to when I was starting fly it was actually the same meeting where I realized my big brothers big sisters I said you believe in mentoring right yes would you have an executive director you're mentoring you're a mentoring organization no well can that person be me you know what was he going to say at that point like okay and so then to your point being prepared and using their time well has been a really great place for me but I'm really great I would not be where I am without mentorship and I think I can't imagine a day where I won't need to be mentored I think that it's a constant evolution and so it's always about how do I maximize the amazing wisdom that is around me and help use that to further the work that I'm doing great attitude and I want to thank all three of you for in general just a great attitude of gratitude I would say but thank you just before we wrap up I wanted to remind you on some of the chairs next to you still have the information about voting we had nine presenters early this morning my sources tell me that three of them are neck and neck which means that if you get a chance on the other pavilion when you're having lunch in the middle section in the innovation section all nine of them are there and they'd love to meet you and talk to you about what they're doing I want to thank the lighting crew for the perspiration and of course our entrepreneurs for the inspiration thank you guys