 Hello. Testing. Testing. Testing. Good to go. All right. Please take your seats. Get the last crowd in here. Good morning. How is everyone? Good. A little more energy. Good morning. How is everyone? All right. That's a little better. Some people have had their coffee. All right. Well, hopefully we've got an exciting next hour for you. You should be here for the corporate venture capital and impact investing panel. If you're not, you're in the wrong place. We're going to talk for about 40 minutes. We've got a great group of panelists. We'll leave plenty of time for questions at the end, so please write down your questions as you think of them. Let's go ahead and get started. My name is Leslie Marincola. I'm actually a CEO and founder of a startup, so I'm not on the investment side. I'm on the entrepreneur side. Hopefully we have a mixture of investors and entrepreneurs in the audience. My company designs a technology platform that helps distributors in emerging markets offer life-changing products like solar lighting systems on credit to low-income consumers, so basically off-grid families can pay over time to access solar energy products. We are actually a proud recipient of corporate venture capital. We're a member of the Salesforce Impact Fund, which Claudine will be telling you more about. I want to start by just framing this conversation. What is corporate venture capital? How is that different from traditional venture capital? Basically if I were to sum it up, corporate venture capital is where a business is actually investing directly into a startup. And they're not just looking for financial returns, they're probably looking for a strategic objective of making that investment the first place. So traditionally, corporate venture capitalists will invest into startups that are operating in the industry that that corporation operates in. They work very closely with startups, just like institutional venture capitalists do, to help with marketing, business growth, working with the management team. And there's a really exciting trend happening right now with corporate venture capital in that a lot of corporate venture capital activity is also looking at investments with an impact lens. So not only are they looking for financial returns for a strategic sort of win-win relationship, they're also looking to do good in the world and put their money to use to have a bigger impact. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So got a great group of panelists from Salesforce, GE, Orange, Autodesk. I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves, talk about their origin story, maybe how they got their corporation to think about impact investing in the first place, and then talk about their investment mandate as well. So Joe, do you want to kick us off? Sure, just intro and origin story. Yes, and your investment mandate. Investment mandate, okay. My name is Joe Speicher. I'm the executive director of the Autodesk Foundation. We, how many people show hands know Autodesk in the audience? Right, that's a good amount. For those of you that don't, we are a software company for people who make things. So if you've ever driven in a car, admired a building, gone to a Marvel movie and seen the special effects, you've probably seen what our customers are doing with our software. The foundation's mandate is to take those design and engineering resources and steer them towards positive societal impact. And so we're about four years old. We've been grant making software and leveraging the expertise and kind of intellectual capital of the company to deliver this. In the last couple of years, we've realized that all of the interesting stuff in the climate sphere is happening in the private sector. And so that led us to starting to invest in some companies that can deliver significant carbon emission reduction. So we've done about five deals now. We're mostly in intermediaries. We've done a couple of direct deals, though, and we've been bringing our company and board along with us. So that's my origin story is really boring. I will say one fun fact. I was in the room when the idea for this conference was conceived about 11 years ago. And I helped, I did a little bit of help for the guys who were trying to set this up, Tim Freinlich and Kevin Jones and Gary Bowles. And it's amazing to see what it's grown to. So I'm excited to be here. Great. Thank you. I'm Claudine Imiot. I lead the Salesforce Impact Fund, which we launched officially just about a year ago, actually. And our origin story, it actually goes back to an executive who founded the Salesforce Foundation that became Salesforce.org many, many years ago, actually right around the time that Salesforce itself was still a startup of about 50 people, which is now hard to imagine. It was once that small. She saw in her tenure running the helm of the foundation a gap between what the .org was doing to support nonprofits and then what the corporate venture arm was doing investing in enterprise software companies building the Salesforce platform. She said, I think that there's probably something in the middle there to support for-profit, fast-growing, venture-backed enterprise software companies that also have a social or environmental mission, unless the Impact Fund was born. But it was explicitly placed within the venture's portfolio. So Salesforce has an active corporate venture arm that is the third most active behind Google and Intel, and they have about 250 portfolio companies, over a billion dollars in assets under management, and their mandate is to invest in enterprise software that's strategically integrating with Salesforce. And so their investment mandate filters down to the Impact Fund as well since we're part of their portfolio. So that means is the Impact Fund, I'm still investing in enterprise SaaS. I'm looking for companies that have a strategic integration to Salesforce or have plans to build one. And in terms of deal mechanics, they also look similar. So we don't invest in anything super early. Series A to Series C is our sweet spot. But on top of the business and financial diligence that I do, I'm also looking for demonstrable social impact or demonstrable environmental impact. And we have four focus areas. So the first is education and workforce. The second is sustainability. The third is diversity and inclusion. So that looks like people, ops tech, as well as financial inclusion platforms. And then the last bucket is enabling technology for the social sector. So, software solutions that are serving nonprofits and foundations. Hi, my name is Moses, Troy with Orange Silicon Valley. As a show of hands, who here knows Orange, or has heard of Orange? Awesome. Well, I joined the firm about a year and a half ago. And candidly before that, I hadn't heard much about the company. In large part, we don't have a consumer brand here in North America. But just to kind of set up kind of who we are a little bit. So the audience kind of level sets on that and then drive down into a little bit of our investing activities. Orange is a large global telco, headquartered in Paris. We have about 280 or so million mobile subscribers. Of which about 130 million are on the African continent. So Middle East, North Africa, and West Africa in particular. We generate about 41 billion euro on the top line. And have about 150,000 employees globally. And one thing I just wanted to kind of add into kind of the mix a little bit is, we spend about $7 billion in capital expenditures to fund growth for our business. We also have a budget of around 700 million for innovation activities. And driving down to our office more specifically, we've been in the valley for about 18 years. We started out as a pure R&D unit. So our office of about 40 or 50 people was primarily involved in writing patents. And over the past several years, we've evolved into kind of this more open innovation architecture that a lot of corporates have in the valley. Our office is a mix of technical resources and sort of business development resources. As we were engaging with the proliferation of all of these startups, we launched a fund called Orange Digital Ventures four years ago. It's a 150 million euro commitment. And we're engaged in four areas, Enterprise Cloud, IoT, FinTech, and hardware. And so we have pursued impact investing through the normal course of what we do. It's a very new topic for us. So my engagement here is very much kind of a learning process in terms of how we think about impact in the context of what we do. And looking forward to sharing more. Well, good morning everyone. I'm Robert Wells. I lead the new market development team at BE Business Innovations. We are part of the GE corporate structure, not any of the line businesses. And we include the corporate venture capital teams that do healthcare, energy investing, advanced manufacturing, and software. We also have our corporate licensing, which manages our IP portfolio. You can imagine GE has a lot of IP over the last 100 years. We also have a new co-creation team in our group as well. And then my team, which has really taken the mantle of social impact and social entrepreneurship forward, we came late to this space. We had a foundation that was very active in a number of related areas. But our mandate has been to see how we can move from philanthropy and corporate social responsibility into sustainable business models in the world of social impact. We are interested primarily in the healthcare and energy spaces right now. Quickly overlaps between the two, and many of you in here know that there are a lot of interesting overlaps between the two. We started a program with the Miller Center down at Santa Clara University in Sub-Saharan Africa for maternal and child care. Two years ago, we've taken 10 companies through that accelerator. Excuse me, about 25 companies through that accelerator. And one of our metrics we look at is how those companies do over time. And they've raised about 10 million in investment grants and debt and equity as they move forward. So that really said to us that there is a there there in the space. And so we've now built it out into a more robust platform which incorporates one part of strategic partnerships and shared value partnerships like with Miller Center, one part we'd like to do in investing. One part we'd like to do in new co-creation, leveraging off some of the activities of our foundation over the years. And then the last part is real thought leadership to be a convener, to use GE's brand to hopefully encourage other corporates to be more active in the space as well. Awesome, thank you very much. As I said, a great group of panelists, let's talk a little bit about, this might be a question on the minds of fellow entrepreneurs in the audience or other institutional investors, what are the challenges and the opportunities and advantages of having CBC, Corporate Venture Capitalists, on the board or investing in a company? So talk about the pros and the cons and let's be real about both of these. Leslie, do you want to? Sure, yeah, so Corporate Venture Capital as Leslie kind of kicked off is a way in which companies pursue, in the context of early stage deals, investments in new emerging companies. So ourselves, we typically target Series A and Series B rounds. And I think there are several key advantages. I think, of course, one, there's a market signaling effect to the extent that it makes sense for your company and the markets that you're trying to go into. And so, for instance, if a company wants to work with Orange in West Africa, that's a very positive signaling effect to the extent that that fits a business model. I think two is, we have on the ground brand, infrastructure, people, intellectual capital, marketing resources, etc. That can really help scale these businesses, particularly those that are B2B. And then really, I think, of course, is leveraging the various resources that we have in our office where we do proof of concepts. We have a very strong technical team, so we work in partnership with the companies that we invest in to actually test the efficacy of the actual businesses and what they're trying to achieve. And so I think we have, I think corporates have a very meaningful role to play to scale impact. And I would love to see more of that. Happy to take that one too, Leslie. So most corporate investors are, like Moses described, investing with a very strategic angle. There are a few out there who may not, so GV, for instance, for this portfolio, they're just investing in great both enterprise and consumer tech companies. And there's no mind about whether there's a strategic integration with Google. But with Salesforce, as with Orange, we are very pointed in that strategic angle. And that is, I think, both an opportunity but also limiting factor from our own ability to invest. So it means that my lens of opportunity is narrowed because I'm looking for companies that are potentially going to integrate with the Salesforce ecosystem. And I say potentially because we're investing as early as Series A. A lot of the companies that we're talking to are not yet prioritizing Salesforce as an integration. I mean, there are a lot of product integrations a company has to think about. And it's obviously a question of when it makes sense to integrate with any given platform out there. But usually, it's around the time when they start to hear from customers. I'm on Salesforce. I see how your solution would tie really well into how I'm using the CRM or maybe another cloud. What could you do? And that's actually how our conversation started with Ancasa, with Leslie's company. We started talking. It was a really customer-driven conversation from Leslie's point of view, hearing from her own customers that they were eager to see a Salesforce integration. And that's probably going to be the most successful path towards that. It shouldn't be something that we come up with or that our own product team comes up with. It should really be driven by a company's customers asking for an integration with that platform. In terms of the benefits that I think we offer as a strategic investor, we're generally complimentary and around. We're not, we don't write term sheets. So we're not competing to lead around. We're usually coming in as a nice differentiated additive to other institutional investors. If there are other strategic in the mix, they're probably going to be different from Salesforce. There's probably not going to be a Microsoft or an Oracle. But we usually don't come in with our own competitors. So we're offering kind of our own special knowledge. And with that comes access to the platform. So if you build an integration with Salesforce, that means that you ultimately can sell with Salesforce. And that is a huge opportunity given the ubiquity of our platform increasingly around the world. It also means access to our talent. So we know that our entrepreneurs are often struggling with things like how to scale sales or how to improve their pricing strategy. And we have some of the best people doing that for Salesforce. And we are thrilled to connect our portfolio companies with that kind of internal talent. In terms of challenges, I think in years past, CBCs have gotten a bad rap for moving really slowly. And I hope that's changing. With Salesforce's model, we try to move at the same pace as institutional investors. We do actually about 100 deals a year across the whole venture team. So it's high volume investing. Then we're not kind of the slow-moving model with that I think a lot of people associate with CBCs of the past. I'll add one thing to that. I think nothing to add to the value that the corporate partner can bring because it's leveraging the analysis expertise. But one of the things that I do is I try to, all of our investors, investment partners, I parade them in front of our executives pretty regularly to be like, how can we not be investing in this? We actually had an event last night and one of them asked, can I please be dismissed? So I think that in some ways I, like Robert was saying earlier, dragging the corporate parent into impact investing, I think that that can probably be a drag on some of the, some of the investors. But I think that that's just an opportunity for growing the market. Yeah, a lot of what you guys are saying really resonates with me. Again, from the entrepreneur side of the table, when we started talking to Salesforce, for example, it was a decision, you know, should we engage with a CBC or not? And ultimately we decided it was actually a pretty easy choice from our perspective, not always an easy choice for many companies, but from our perspective, the strategic advantages of working with Salesforce, because we knew we wanted to do Salesforce integration and actually accelerate more of our customers to use Salesforce, it was a total win-win relationship. So we ended up actually expanding our round beyond what we had originally set out to raise and, you know, took their investment, not for the money, actually, but for the strategic advantage of having that relationship, so. Yeah, I want to add a little bit to this too, and we come from a different place. And it's interesting to look at the companies here, and you've got two companies that have been around a long time, one's been around a really long time, which is us, and Orange has been around, I lived in Paris, it's Orange to me, has been around a while as well. Two new companies, very different to deal with companies in their own life cycle in that sense. And our corporate venture capital team, it really was, has been a struggle to bring them into the space. Not that they don't want to do it, but their legacy venture capital. So they came out of GE Capital, yes, we came out here to be strategic like you guys did and open on Sandhill Road, which we did, but we're still part of General Electric, you know, and there is a reality in that when you're trying to break through that historical culture. There's a lot that's good about it, I'll get to that in just a second, but one of the things that, for example, was within our own company, constantly came up with, well how do we do diligence? How do we do governance? How do we take part in a company that's 6,000 miles away from where we as the investor team are? And that's been a hard speed bump to get over, just to be candid about it. And then the second piece of it was, well, you know, in this social impact space, we are given a capital allocation by the company and we are expected to have a return on that at a certain level. You're telling us that we won't get that return, but we can get strategic or we can get brand recognition, but still, we're tasked by the company of having a return on capital at a certain level. We've got some solutions to try and get around that, but that again is part of the legacy and also investors in most companies are compensated by how they return on that capital. So that's been kind of tough hurdles for us to get over to try and retrofit a legacy corporate venture capital team as opposed to if I had my druthers, we would just create a new team from scratch and then we could start with all of the metrics and all of the things that are relevant to those of you in the room. But we're getting there. I mean, we're slowly but surely inching our way and going forward with it. I think the benefits of the companies are, GE's been in Africa for over 100 years, for example. That brings with it a huge amount of experience. So we're able to help our companies that have been through the Miller Center program, understand supply chain, understand legal, understand government relations, understand marketing, understand communications in the context of people that have been doing work in the continent. So there's a lot there to do, but it just takes getting over that historical legacy for some of us to be able to do it. Yeah, and that's a great segue into the next topic that I think we should dig into. Just when you think about the returns that you're looking for from investment, there are financial returns, but the reason we're all at SoCAP here is to think about impact returns as well. I'm sure you've all heard of the term greenwashing, this is when a company sort of portrays themselves as having an environmental impact when really it's more sort of PR and publicity more than the actual actions of a company. The same term that we're using for the impact space, so impact washing. How can we ensure that your company is actually, or sorry, your money is being put towards an actual impact in the investments that you make? And how do you measure that and ensure that you're achieving your impact returns? For us, as I said before, it's we're looking at carbon emission reduction and we're at such an early stage. We look at such early stage deals, seed, series A, that it's all pro forma. But we're working with partners, with intermediaries who have really strong, I would say like infrastructure around this. One of whom is an organization that we've partnered with for a long time called the Prime Coalition and they have a methodology for assessing pro forma carbon emission reduction and they run all of their pipeline against this model. And so it's great for us. We get to see, okay, this is the potential benefit from an impact perspective. I think it gets real fuzzy when you start looking at the social impact side of it. Yeah, I'm envious that you have just one sector and a sector to you that has a very, very clear metric. Yeah. Production agree on that. It's so nice. Well, hold on, we try on our grant side to look at the impacts of the social impacts and the best we can do is like lives benefited. So it's tricky. Yeah. Yeah, so because we're looking at, or maybe even more different sectors, it's not quite that simple impact, impact never is. I believe strongly in both the bottoms up and a top down approach. So what that means is from a bottoms up perspective, I really need for the entrepreneur to be able to articulate what's the primary impact objective and outcome that he or she is trying to solve. It's actually amazing how many pitch meetings I come to where that's not very crisply articulated. So to entrepreneurs in the audience, just a little tip, make sure you know how to say that and that you are, and you say it with passion and conviction. Sometimes they get a blank stare and so, but it's important because A, it shows that there's a North Star for impact at the top of the company and guiding the whole business model. But also I think it's important that the company is thinking about an impact outcome that makes sense to them to measure. They may not be able to measure it right now. So it might be pro forma, for instance, it might be if it's not reducing carbon emissions, it might be something in the workforce development space like measuring jobs created or job retention. They may not be at a place in their model where they're actually able to measure that, but they know that that is what they ultimately want to measure and they're working towards it. That's okay. They don't have to have a number for that metric right now, but they need to be able to articulate it and have a means to measure it. And then from the top down, I also do try to steer portfolio companies to one or two generally accepted industry metrics using the GEN's IRIS framework that seem to make sense for that sector. So for sustainability, it's straightforward, it's reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. For the development I already mentioned, job placement is a core one. For others it does get a little bit harder, but ideally I'd like to be able to have portfolio-wide metrics that I can report broadly to our stakeholders on. But probably the most important is that that single outcome that the company itself wants to try to solve and has a way, a real way to measure it. Yeah, I mean I would totally agree and I think for us we don't formally measure impact measurements in our portfolio yet. It is an area of internal discussion. But with that being said, I mean how do we get beyond not just kind of outputs but outcomes is kind of one of these quandaries that we're still trying to come to terms with and kind of figure out what the best practice is in the industry. I would definitely agree with Claudine that to the extent that a company is mission-driven, having the entrepreneur and having the company really articulate a vision for what is the change that they want to see in the world and what's kind of that theory of change and what is the metric that or two that they would want to measure over time. We have a portfolio company called PayJoy for example that does installment financing for smartphones in emerging markets. And so one very quick way for us to kind of measure impact is seeing what is the actual capital that's been deployed to these consumers in emerging markets. So those are quick and dirty sort of metrics but how do we get beyond that to measuring outcomes? I know that debate's been in this industry for quite some time but we're keen to kind of leverage our corporate resources to figure out ways to advance that discussion. And for us I think it's the way I've tried to portray this is to say that there are really two classes of investment. Whenever I do internal pitches on this I always have the four-part strategy I've talked about and invest I always have in quotes because I think investment can become a term of art if you know how to handle it. I mean there is no question that there are some companies out there we have in our energy portfolio a company called Off-Grid Electric which a lot of you are I know familiar with. And that was a straight financial investment. I mean that just sort of burned on all cylinders. So that's in category one which I call great financial investment oh by the way doing great social good. And then category number two is gonna be the flip of that which is gonna say does a heck of a lot of social good could be a great strategic partner, channel partner for us, could be a great brand partner for us. We'll have a respectable return. I don't advocate us investing in anything we don't think we'll have at least a respectable return over time with it. But the lead would be sort of the impact piece of it. And separating them out makes it easier because then the investors, the investor class as I lovingly call them they can go and say well look these are companies that just work financially for our portfolio and we don't have to get caught up in that debate about impact. That's just add on to the good story and then it clears the way to have some other investments that are a little more strategic for other reasons than just financial. And I think this is interesting because what I often wonder about, this is also the same case with investing with a gender lens or a diversity lens. I wonder if we always have to make that separation between impact investing and just traditional investing or will it be one in the same? Do you guys have perspectives about that as you think about from your CVC perspective? Do you have to make sure impact is part of that mandate or will it ever come naturally and not be sort of separated? I hope it, let's start on this one. I hope it does become natural and not always siloed because I think if we create too many silos we're gonna make it harder for companies because the people who are a naysayer on your investment committee are always gonna find one box you don't tick. I mean that's when you add up enough things that happens. And secondly I think for us as a society we need to be at the point where gender and diversity are just baked into the pie and they are a certain level of assumption is there. We're not, I don't think we're there yet but that would be the ideal for me. My hope is that through our work and the collective work of everyone in this room and the social enterprise impact investing ecosystem is that we can demonstrate that you don't have to necessarily make trade-offs between social impact and financial returns. I think there are certainly reasons to do so and there are plenty of investors who on the spectrum of financial returns are purposely very happy to take a smaller return to maximize impact but I think to prove to the vast majority of investors who are really concerned about maximizing financial returns I think that it is possible to have both and that's why I follow the exact same core diligence process and apply the same level of rigor to my investments as the standard ventures team does who is traditional SaaS investments but then I add an additional lens investigating the social or environmental impact. That's really clear to prove the case internally and externally. And we don't have any exits yet in our portfolio but if I look at my IRR based on how companies have raised follow-on rounds at much higher valuations I'm really pleased. I think we actually have a great portfolio right now and it's a good proof point but it's still really early. In terms of gender and underrepresented minorities and leadership roles of companies it's a huge focus for us and right now we're at over 60% of our portfolios is led by a woman or person of color and that will remain a very intentional focus and underpinning for our artwork and I think that the more that my small team does an impact and then building a more diverse portfolio the more I hope it will actually filter into the core ventures work as well. Just to add on in tying both thoughts as I think at a corporate level we all know that most companies particularly public companies have a very glossy CSR website and these priorities are actually very core to many companies including Orange and so how we think about sustainable development in the context of both Europe and in the markets in Africa that we're in are just core to our business. So ensuring that we have a stable network and provide connectivity to rural populations for example is just part of doing good business for us and also just very strategic to management at the very top. I think that you know as far as corporates tilting venture capital teams towards impact I think that's still a question that is being discussed and I will make a shameless plug. We're working with a couple of academic institutions on a research report a white paper of sorts that will be released sometime next year early next year as sort of a call to action that you know corporates can do this in meaningful ways and generate both financial returns strategic returns and have impact as completely aligned with strategic value. So if there are any folks in this audience that would like to be a part of that from a corporate angle would love to talk afterwards. Do you wanna go to the next question? Yeah. Okay, let's go for it. We're looking at the clock here. Before we open it up for questions I have one last question for you guys. For all the entrepreneurs in the room I'm sure a lot of people are wondering how do they actually approach you? What are the mechanics of the deal? What does that due diligence conversation like? What about post investment? How does an entrepreneur work with a CVC? Can you guys kind of talk about those specifics? I can start. So my best advice in this goes not just for CVC but for institutional investors as well is really do your homework. So start with the website. Sometimes funds don't publish a lot of details and ideal criteria. We're guilty of that, I admit it. Others are much more explicit. So if you can't necessarily get it from a website try to talk to someone who might know how an investor is thinking about a strategy and approach those who you think actually could be a good fit. So that means in terms of sector focus it means in terms of stage. Don't approach a series B investor if you're raising a seed round. Sometimes I'll talk to you just to start to build pipeline but so do your homework ahead of time and if it's a strategic I think it's really important to come in with that strategic story. Like what's the angle here? Because companies are big. Orange does a lot. G does a lot. Salesforce does do a lot. So how do you think about that tie in? That shouldn't be on the investor to kind of come up with that idea. So everything she said I agree with and would add think about how you are gonna be strategic to the investor. GE for example in our healthcare portfolio we care a lot about two things I think that would be great distribution channels and opening up new distribution channels and emerging market countries and product. There are things and a lot of the companies that went through our Miller Center program, not a lot, decent amount, came out of interesting technologies that came out of universities and we could see how they were in an area we didn't have a product in. So really nailing how you think you would be relevant to that investor is I think what separates good pitches from great pitches and obviously impact on all the other things that you would say. Although I do agree with something Claudine said earlier, I'm always amazed how many people don't nail that impact and right up front because it's clearly what we're all after. It helps us so much inside our companies when I get to that second class of that second category of companies of investments that I talked about which are the ones that are maybe not gonna have the biggest financial return but have a big strategic return or some other kind. That's key to it. So I would have that up front in the pitch and really highlight that. We work with intermediaries because we don't have the depth of bench to be able to identify the opportunity and we actually have a pretty sizable team but the expertise required and the market sizing around low carbon technology is so big but I would say that like a couple of deals have come across for like we can't not participate in this and so we actually, Autodesk is a little bit different. We don't have a venturing arm so my team claims to be the venturing arm but we have an M&A group that it's a little bit of the business partner model where if you wanna make an investment or you wanna make an acquisition you kinda make the case to the M&A team. We have an M&A business partner and what's interesting is that our team, they're very impressed by the diligence that our team would do and that was just from a grant making perspective. So I would echo your thoughts. We like to diligence the hell out of organizations and then get fully behind them and so have that game ready. I think just managing process, I mean this might be even a question for Leslie is what are the types of questions you wanna ask a corporate? Be just very direct, ask the questions that are burning questions in terms of how does your process work? How does it go from let's say North America for us through Europe and or potentially Africa? How do deals get funded? There are a lot of mechanics behind the scenes that you'd wanna try to understand and I would say for the most part, we're willing to share a lot of those types of information to help also just level set expectations with the entrepreneur but just be very direct and just ask the kinds of questions that you think would be top of mind for you as an entrepreneur to engage with a corporate. A lot of this sounds really familiar from my sort of single experience with working with the CVC. Really, I mean from the entrepreneur's perspective, you need to think is there a strategic advantage that we would get by working with them in this way that we wouldn't get otherwise and I think don't be afraid to ask of the CVC a lot of questions about what that post-investment experience and collaboration looks like. Cool, thank you guys very much. We'll go ahead and open it up for audience Q and A so hopefully you've been writing those questions down. Yeah, why don't you start? I'd be curious to know. Okay, we're gonna pass the mic around so don't start talking till the mic comes. I'd be curious a little bit more about the relationship with you're all part of public companies and the governance structure around that. Moe just got into it a little bit but it'd be great to hear about that and how a decision process gets made on an impact VC or corporate VC. Do you want me to talk to the start? So Mark Binyov is definitely supportive of the Impact Fund but he's not directly involved. He will actually occasionally send us leads. He's entrepreneurs or hustlers and they can get to Mark. So he'll send me as well to the core ventures team and to the Impact Fund that we'll evaluate but I'll say I probably need to do a better job of evangelizing the Impact Fund within Salesforce. I think more people outside the company know about what we do than people inside the company. So that's on my to-do list but it really fits within Salesforce's overall ethos. I think it's very well known how the company from its very early beginnings set out with its one one one model of donating 1% of equity, 1% of product at 1% of employee time that ultimately inspired a whole movement and I think the Impact Fund is really the next evolution of how a business can do business while also doing good and deploying capital in a whole new way. So there's just one consideration from our perspective and that is from the corporate perspective which is basically influence, undue influence and consolidation. So we just have to make sure that we don't have such a stake in that the SEC might consolidate the entity onto our books. It's a pretty easy bar to pass from a public company perspective. So we just kind of run through the lawyers and say, okay, are we gonna be, are we not going to have undue influence in this company which would then require them to come onto our balance sheet. That's also true for us. We are recaptured. There are ownership stake in a company and we also do the fact that we're a corporate and our counting requirements. We have to have information, right? So we have to see companies quarterly financials. And then for a process for us, I mean, you know, our team here in San Francisco generally leads conversations with entrepreneurs and companies that are based in North America irrespective of where they might generate turnover. So if it's a company here, like Engazo or Binds or Payjoy, we lead those conversations typically we'll partner then with our investment committee which is comprised of executive executives based in Paris and essentially lead the conversation through internal processes that way. You know, we launched last year Orange Digital Ventures Africa, it's a 50 million euro opportunity for Africa specific deals and we are currently in the process of sorting out sort of process of how we best manage those deals more seamlessly. Great, let's take the next question. I think I see a hand way in the back. Ha ha ha. Gonna make him get some exercise here. All right, just a quick baseline, you mentioned 50 euros. How much are you spending every year on impact investing and what's the kind of typical deal size? For Orange specifically, we're doing one to five million dollar checks. In Africa, we'll look at deals up to three million euro one to five million or euro or dollars. And we are generally in A or B rounds. We have not specifically tagged deals as impact or not impact and that's not necessarily a part of our investment process yet. It is something that we're currently exploring. So in our case, we're too far upstream on the pure investment part for me to give you a straight answer because we don't know yet. What I'm hoping to do, you recall, I talked about that whole risk and return issue when we gave our kickoff comments. I'm hopeful what we'll do is on my budget I'll be able to keep the funding but then I'll team with the investors to make the investments. And we will, some will be closer to grants, some will be closer to investments. We'll have a little hybrid combination of the two. But what I'm hoping to do is leverage the expertise of the investor teams but then keep the balance sheet, as it were, under my group so that they do not feel that we're diluting their returns. This year we'll do probably about 10 across roughly 10 investments. So on average our check size is hovering just around. And we're, again, we're just dipping our toe in. We've done a couple of deals at a quarter mil and we just got board approval for a million dollar deal. So slowly building on our size of the pool. All right, thank you. Two-part question related. The first is why aren't there, you guys are all leaders in this space, but why aren't there 50 or 100 CBCs out there? That's the first part. And if you had to deliver the elevator pitch to a CEO of a major corporation as to why this is essential and necessary to advance the cause of impact investing, what would that pitch be? Sorry, the first question was, why aren't there? Why aren't there a lot more CBCs out there? CBCs focusing on impact specifically. I would say that I think it's inevitable that there is a convergence of impact and venture investing because I think number one, we're all belatedly realizing, our corporates are belatedly realizing that they need a thriving middle class for their businesses to thrive. And therefore they need social impact. And you kind of look across the world and say, wait, well, governments and public sector aren't necessarily doing the best job of ensuring that's the case. So we can and should be doing more to ensure this happened. That would be my elevator pitch. And I think increasingly, the more traditional venturing models within companies, folks are getting more and more interested in this. To Robert's point, they tend to be a little conservative. They're either strategically aligned. From our perspective, it's like it's buying code and heads. Or looking at financial return, increasingly the impact side is going to gain traction. I think it already is, hence the reason why we're here. But as more and more corporates realize that they've got to get on the boat for societal benefits, you're going to see how a lot more of this. I would say, if you think about the trends of sustainability, I mean, these are secular trends, demographic, urbanization, climate change, et cetera, et cetera. And as companies think about their resilience over the long term and thinking about their innovation agenda, I personally see sustainability and innovation and how companies adapt to changes of innovation as being completely synonymous. So that's kind of one point. I would say secondly, to the extent that a corporate is specifically engaged in strategic investing, i.e. like early stage investing, I would say that strategic value and impact can be completely synonymous as well. And so there's no reason why that there should be any sort of friction between the two. And so the last thing I would say is corporates have agency, we actually, because we have assets and we have infrastructure on the ground, we can actually affect the change that a startup is potentially trying to achieve. And so if I think of a CEO, I'd kind of point on, hit kind of those three key points as far as what's going through my mind. I would, to pick up on something Joe said about the growing middle class around the world, two things, one is that's true of the external to the company, to the customers of the company. But I would add internal to the company to make your company an attractive place to work, to people who are getting out of college today to the millennials. They care about more than a paycheck, they care about making a difference. And I think this is really part and parcel to how you start to show that companies can engage in making that difference and not just pure financial return. And the second thing I would say is for the companies themselves, GE's as big as big gets, right? And big companies are like big battleships and they don't turn on the dime, but they got held a lot of firepower when you need it. And there's a lot to be said for having a hell of a lot of firepower in terms of how you can help that entrepreneurial infrastructure by using it. But if you think about the world we live in, the world we live in is not a top-down world. The world we live in is from the ground up world. And if you think about disruption in politics, economics, technology, all of it across the board, it's coming from the ground up. And those of you who are working as entrepreneurs on the ground are really the leading edge in that. And for companies to understand that, I think it's critical that they stop thinking about everything, you know, GE, if we want to sell aircraft engines to Air Kenya, we go in and we see president Kenyatta and we're great at that kind of thing, big top-down kind of way of looking at the world. But if we really want to grow our healthcare business in Kenya, we need to be working with companies like Cedars Diagnostics that thought of a whole new economic model of Brown bringing MRIs to people in the slums of Nairobi. So I think for companies to see new markets, to understand the world and to attract the next generation of talent, this is where they need to be. Here, here. What over there? Hi, thank you so much. This is really valuable. I was curious, the earlier session was all about lessons learned and I was just hoping maybe if any of you had some tidbits on this whole journey that you've had that you can share with all of us. The good and the bad. I think it's, you know, for us, it really is trusting that you know your sweet spot and sticking to your guns there. I think it's easy to kind of get drawn to a shiny object that makes you think, oh, this is not quite of the right fit on the strategic integration side or it's a little bit early. And then those things tend not to be the best performing or best fits later on. And so, you know, what we know is enterprise software, we know the Salesforce ecosystem, we increasingly know the sectors that we're working in and we're really comfortable at series A and above and not earlier. And so for us, it's really honing our investment criteria and keeping ourselves honest to stick with it because it can be hard. You talk to really, you're really telling convincing entrepreneurs you wanna invest, but you know, sometimes it's better to just wait. I alluded to a story earlier. We had a CEO had an opportunity come across his desk that was to invest in a car company in India. And it, we were looking at, wanted to get more in production, I'm sorry, product design and manufacturing. And so this came to us in the M&A group and they led with like the number of road deaths in India. And so that's why it came to my team. And so we said, we raised our hands and said, hey, we'll do the diligence and we'll look at the deal and see what we think. And then we came together with the M&A team, my team and the CEO and said, we would never touch this thing. And here's the diligence we did and here's why and whatnot. And the M&A team was shocked, number one at the amount of diligence that we did to look at the deal. And it never passed the sniff test. We were trying to show off a little bit what we could do. But number two, we wanted to show that like this is that impact can be just as rigorous as a financial or a strategic deal. And so we use that as an opportunity to kind of influence them to a greater degree and are now kind of regularly checking in with those guys and making sure we're back and forth. To the point where our M&A team recently said that they're getting lots more deal flow around impact because we've kind of signaled the market to that. And actually it was, I think they were a little bit annoyed about it. But we think it's great. We're like, wonderful. So I think, I mean, the lesson there would be like, don't, every opportunity that you can leverage it to infuse more impact into the conversation. All right, we've got time for probably one final question. Hand in the back. Thank you for the great session. One question. In your experience, corporate venture capital has been impact venture capital. Has it been top down, bottom up or the intersection? Has it been driven by leadership? And then people, are the people lead it? Or is it an idea that has come from the team and then you convince the leadership? Thank you. In the Salesforce example, I alluded to the origin story. It was definitely driven by leadership with broad support among other executives at the top. So that's our slice of that answer. And we're still early in the process. I would say, ask me next year. And I can tell you how that sort of turns out. But I would say at this point, there's a lot of kind of internal discussion on what a strategy might look like for us. And I think we're an example of, I said a minute ago, all these things about GE being very top down. But I think this actually came, this was intrapreneur work. I mean, this was internal. We started the program with the Miller Center as an accelerator and based on that, we said, no, there's a lot more here than we have all recognized. And so we said, let's do more, let's go into investing, let's go into new co-creation. So very much in our case from the bottom up. And I would say from our case, we lead with an impact first lens. And when we identified that all the opportunities were in the private sector, we brought our board along to say, we need to be investing. And they, to their credit, said, yeah, great, let's go for it. And we've used that foot in the door to influence the wider conversation around corporate venture capital within the company. So bottom up, I guess. Awesome, well, we are out of time. I would really encourage you guys to come up and talk to all the panelists. If you have more questions, they're all very friendly. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks a lot.