 And the next pair of speakers both run successful incubators with components of co-working and accelerator programs in different parts of the country. They both include a theme of social impact and they both have some connections to city government. Andrea Chen is Executive Director of Propeller and Rick Terosi is Co-Founder and General Manager of PI. And I believe Andrea, you're going first. Hello everyone. It is really exciting to be here at Columbia and having talked to some of the folks here at Columbia it really feels like the architecture school is at an inflection point where this whole series of conversations is about challenging the status quo and creating space for new ideas. And so I just feel very honored to be part of this conversation and where the school is at. So a little bit about myself and Propeller in the room. Okay. Yeah. And so I'm actually not going to be talking about empathic communications although I had my first experience with an energy healer intuitive empath by phone and so she claims to do exactly what you just described so you may want to get to know her. But in any case, I'm the Co-Founder of an organization called Propeller. We're a social innovation incubator and we're located in New Orleans and really how we got started was really in response to Hurricane Katrina. You all know about that. That happened in 2005. And throughout our entire history and I think David you talked a lot about kind of measuring success and reflecting on what success means. We've gone through that our own journey and it has been very difficult at times of like how have we... What is it that we're doing? What does it mean to actually do meaningful work? Because what seems good at first ends up upon reflection maybe not so good. So going back to our Katrina story. So this is right after the storm 80% of the city flooded. A million of residents left the city. A month later only 600,000 people still hadn't come back. And even though it is what 13 years later we are still experiencing the effects of that. And there was so much destruction. And one thing that happened though and this is more about kind of like human survival and just kind of like getting things together when you have no other options. So right after the storm, people started the people who were able to come back. We didn't have the infrastructure. We didn't have street signs for at least two or three years after the storm. And you had artists coming in and they were the first ones. And all for a while in New Orleans, every street sign was made by an artist. And so teachers were coming together to gut homes. People were getting together to try to fix the levee system. And so there was all this incredible energy and civic engagement right after Hurricane Katrina. And we wanted to make sure that that energy didn't fizzle out because right after the storm we had a ton of media attention. We had volunteers coming in funders. And we wanted to make sure that people saw that no matter who you were, it didn't matter if you were a stay-at-home mom, if you're a real estate agent, you've never run a company before that you could. You could do something that you could make a difference. And a lot of the companies and organizations that started after the storm were started by people who didn't have those backgrounds. And so that was kind of how we got started. And as we were going, actually let me say this too. So where we are, that was back in 2005. We started in around kind of like 2006, 2007. Where we are now is I'm just going to give you some kind of like by the numbers. So at this point we're about, since 2011, 200 entrepreneurs supported through our accelerators. They have generated, or 85% of them are still in business, 71% of them are owned by entrepreneurs of color and women, 105 million in external financing revenue with the alumni, 460 plus full part-time jobs. And we've had, I'll go there next, we've had companies who have gone out to raise millions out in Silicon Valley. They've been featured in all kinds of different national publications. But when we were first getting going, it was kind of like people were just throwing all kinds of ideas out there. And it was kind of innovative, but it's like someone might have an idea for something related to criminal justice, here's something for kind of maybe like rain gardens over here. And there really wasn't that collective effort. There were single point solutions. And about five years down the line, and this was kind of upon the reflection of what does success mean. It was great that we had all these social entrepreneurs, people who were making change, making things happen. That was good, maybe. But we were also seeing at the time that there were these massive challenges that our city was facing. We had huge educational disparities prior to the storm, after the storm those kept on going, although there had been a lot of education reform that happened after the storm. Same thing in food, health, the environment, anything, right? And we wanted to see, okay, was there a way that we could actually move the needle on an issue? Say childhood obesity, right? Could we actually move the needle? And we knew that it was not possible for one company, one entrepreneur to actually take on childhood obesity and solve that problem. That was not possible. And so we started shifting, kind of like how do we actually see our work as being meaningful, right? And so we started kind of coalescing around this idea of more collective impact, the networked approach where, okay, so take our food system in New Orleans, right? We have, well actually food systems anywhere in the country. You've got distributors, you've got aggregators, you've got the producers, you've got retail, you've got people and they're kind of like buying decisions around food. So take kind of like childhood obesity, right? That problem, it's about what kids are eating and how much they're moving, right? And so if we're actually going to tackle the childhood obesity problem, there are so many layers to it, right? And so what we started doing was curating our entrepreneurs and recruiting entrepreneurs to tackle the same issue from all different levels, all different angles. So I'll give you one example in food. So now we have five, kind of like five target areas. There are food, health, education, water, and then inclusive entrepreneurship more generally. So just a quick example around food. So, you know, we had, this was right after the storm and the food, the school food in the schools was terrible, terrible. There was like frozen, like hamburger meat being served to kids. It was not good. And we saw this as an opportunity to change the healthfulness of the food in the schools. So at this point in time, about 40% of public schools in New Orleans, I think over 20,000 children are under this new program with healthy school food, but that wasn't the only piece of it. So we also had worked with distributors and aggregators to provide local food and that was part of the food service contract. There was another company that was doing education curriculum. We found that kids were not eating as much of the healthy food. I mean, they were eating more than before, but they weren't eating kind of like at the full USDA kind of like capacity and calories. And we found that the kids were going to corner stores to get, you know, like, you know, junk food, chips, sodas. And so we started a healthy corner store program and incubated a company that was doing local food distribution, sorry, produce distribution like fruits and veggies to the corner stores and kind of get working with the corner stores to get cooler. So we kind of see how it's actually like as we better understand the problem and peel away the layers like they're kind of like how we need to make sure that our entrepreneurs are kind of like tackling it from different angles and those entrepreneurs come together and, you know, this is, you know, it includes our alumni, it includes our current ventures to really work on the same issue. So, you know what, I'm skipping all around with my slides. So, okay, so what is it that we do? Okay, so we're an incubator and so there are lots of different parts of the assistance that we provide to the entrepreneurs. So at the very kind of like core, like early stage level, we do a lot of pitch competitions that happens in this building in that front space and you guys are design architect folks. So one of the ones that, you know, designers and architects really like is we did a pitch competition called Lots of Progress and this was at a time when the city owned all the, the majority of vacant lots in the city were owned by the city. And so they, you know, we had a competition, they gave us, I think, 50 plots of land throughout the city for this competition and people in the community, if they had, you know, great ideas, they could pitch to win land for their project and start their company or business. So I actually need to speed up here. So let me, okay, so I'm gonna roll right along. So this is where our incubator is, well, this was our old co- sorry, this is where we're currently located. This is part of the construction of the building that became this. This is our 10,000 square foot co-working space. We also run a million dollar social venture fund where we, you know, invest in our alumni and so those are all parts of our program. So these are some of our entrepreneurs. Oh wait, those are, okay. So right before the 10th anniversary for Katrina, we started getting a bunch of kind of like national attention and this was part of the dominant narrative. So like pretty much drum beat, regular drum beat every month. We get articles saying things like, New Orleans is the number one brain gain city in the US. I don't know if anyone here has seen that. And we were like kind of the social, sorry, we had experience as entrepreneurial renaissance and things were so great after Katrina. And so we started going back to the measurements of success. From the external perspective, it looked like we were doing great, right? Everyone, the national media was bullish on New Orleans and we were starting to believe our own hype as well. But then we started peeling back and looking at the data a little bit more and we were like, huh, are we actually doing better? And we're like, well, maybe we're not doing that much better, but we couldn't be doing worse. Okay, so let's take a look at some of the data. All right, so this came and I have to, I'm low on time, so I'm going to go quick through these. Okay, so this is just for New Orleans, but what I would like to say here is that these, this data actually mirrors the national trends. So we think about kind of like, post the civil rights era, racial gaps, that we have closed racial gaps, like things are better, right? We can't really discriminate legally as much anymore, right? But here's, this is just on income gaps. So this is like right after the civil rights era in 1979 to 2016. This is the New Orleans data and you can see the blue line. This one is for African Americans, this is for whites. And you can see that line trending upwards for whites in New Orleans and that line trending downwards. This is where Hurricane Katrina was right here. That going significantly lower since Hurricane Katrina. Okay, so that's an important data point. An employment gap, same thing, are widening. And you can see here, again, this blue line, right? This is for black males in New Orleans and you can see post Katrina. It has gone way down, slightly up for African females and then this is the white females, this is white males. So you can see that, right? Entrepreneurial boom, so it is true. Entrepreneurs, we did experience an entrepreneurial renaissance in comparison to other kind of similar metro areas. However, we've left entrepreneurs of color behind and so you can see here, like even though, this is for kind of like black entrepreneurs has grown significantly since Katrina, the total percentage of receipts has stayed the same at 2%. So in New Orleans, New Orleans is 30%, white about 60%, black around 2% to 3% Asian. And even though, so you can kind of see that disparity, right? It's 60% to 2%. Who's making the money in the city? That makes sense, yeah? Okay, so this, so we realized, so kind of like thinking about, okay, basically looking at the data, every single system that we were working in, whether it was food, water, entrepreneurship, everything, the challenges there, all the disparities in that sector broke down along racial lines. So we have to start thinking, why is that? Is there a pattern? And I challenge anybody in this room to look at one system where that is not the case. And so we were kind of, you know, and I think we're running out of time, but like in terms of like doing the analysis of this, it was like really for us, our analysis is that it is structural racism that is feeding every single one of these systems. And if we tackle these, each sector on its own, again, kind of like the cross sector approach, we won't get anywhere because it's basically, it's in the ground water. And if we are not tackling the underlying structural racism that is feeding everything, it's just gonna recreate itself. And so we kind of from that, we were able to, to kind of do a lot to change the way that our organization now functions and the way that we work. And so this is our, so this is our mission, is to support and grow entrepreneurs to tackle social environmental disparities. This is our vision. And the way that we see this is our theory of change, of, you know, working with institutions that are, you know, kind of like equitable from the get-go or startups where we can influence them to have equity baked into their business practices, from their HR policies, what representation looks like, how they do recruitment, culture, all of that, bake that in from the very get-go. We want those companies to grow, scale and make a ton of money. On the other side, institutions that are not as equitable, we're working to kind of organize within to help them shift. So I think I will pause there because I am out of time and then we can talk more about this later. Thank you. It's an honor to be here from Portland, Oregon. Well, they get my slides up. How many people here have had an idea or thought about starting a business at some point? How many of you have provided feedback to somebody that they have a really bad idea about starting a business? All right, so that's basically the premise of Pi. A bunch of people who want to start businesses and a bunch of people with knowledge who want to provide feedback or opinion to the people building those businesses. So at its very most basic, Pi has always been an ongoing experiment. We've figured out in the Portland community that we have a wealth of untapped knowledge that has no infrastructure to give back to the community and we have a community of entrepreneurs who have no mentorship to help them bring their companies forward. So that at its very most basic is what we're always trying to do. Find well-established entities with a ton of knowledge and engage them with people who are trying to improve their business, create their business, or start something new. So how did we get started? Our humble beginnings with Isaiah Mustafa. So I usually start with this slide because our original partner in this project is a company called Widen and Kennedy. They have an office here in town, but they're headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Most people, if you're not in Portland or in the design industry, have never heard of Widen and Kennedy, but they generally know their work. They're the old spice guy. They are the Just Do It campaign. They are the new Colonel Sanders. They do very big brand, generally television advertising. And they do really well with brands that have significant capital built up in the brand, but have somehow can blast their voice. So they do a good job of kind of reinventing that. So your question is probably like my question when Widen and Kennedy approached me. What does a global advertising firm want to do with the Portland startup community and why? And their response was two-fold. One, they felt like they had been a startup not so long ago and they wanted a way to give back to the community. They wanted some of that infrastructure to help the community get better at being a startup. And second, as a creative agency, they were very interested in staying on the cutting edge of what was happening with technology so that they could figure out ways to apply that technology in new and interesting ways for their big brand clients. So we started that experiment. Originally it was just a co-working space. It was the mortgage crisis. They had a bunch of retail space open in their building. So they shoved us in this little corner of 3,000 square feet and we started filling it with startups. And then brands showed up. So this was at a point in time, again, just pure dumb luck. It was working for the Portland startup community, but it was also at a point in time where major corporations were super interested in innovation. And you'd say, well, what do you mean by innovation? And we don't know, but startups seem innovative. So put us near startups. So a bunch of people found their way to us, worked with us as mentors or participants in the program with Daimler in particular, which has a large trucking headquarters in Portland. We helped them build an incubator within Daimler that was designed to take employees through the process that we take startups through so that they would learn a new way of thinking about problems and then take that back to their groups for learning. They're not all obvious. So Target, obviously Google, Coca-Cola, Autodesk is our latest partner, and then the city and the state have also been involved. So again, we're not a typical accelerator. We track the typical numbers. I think like Andrea, like that's an expectation of the industry. They want you to report on certain numbers. But what we're really actually good at is convincing people not to do the business they thought they wanted to do. That's our real skill. We get a lot of first-time founders who believe the mythology but don't understand what it really takes to build a business. They want a product to exist, but they're not always trying to build the business around that product. So we work to educate them really quickly about what it takes to build a business and help them decide if they want to be on that path or not. If they don't, that's great. That's a win in our book. That's a lot of time saved and a lot of money saved. If they do want to build a business, then we help propel them further faster than they would be able to go on their own. So Pi stands for Portland Incubator Experiment. We take that very seriously. So we're always kind of reinventing, re-experimenting. It keeps me pretty close to the startup vibe when we're always changing what we're doing and trying to iterate more and more. I think there are a variety of things there. The ones that I want to call out, the diversity and inclusion project, the reason there's a gap in that one, and for context, if folks don't know, Portland is literally the widest city in the United States. Like, that is a fact. And so what we've been trying to do is change the conversation about who can start companies, why they should start companies, and how they start companies. And so we originally started with youth. We started a youth program. It was an internship kind of training thing. And what we discovered is training youth up on entrepreneurial efforts or getting them jobs at startups doesn't really work if they're the only person of color in that company or if the culture has been so defined by white male tech bros that they don't feel at place. So we stopped that program and then repackaged it so that we were actually working with entrepreneurs of color, women founders, who are building diverse companies from the ground up rather than trying to help people try and reverse engineer diversity into their company. Oregon Storyboard was an experiment around VR, AR, video games. So people who are creating more communicative digital assets, could we use the techniques we had learned in software to help them improve their businesses? And what we discovered was the application of the programmatic elements was working but the market wasn't there in Portland. It just wasn't the right time for us to be pursuing that so that's on hold. And then the Pie Cookbook came out of we started our accelerator based on kind of prevailing accelerator models three months, $20,000, a bunch of mentorship, stress for the sake of stress, not really because it's helping one way or the other but just because that's the way people do it and kept changing it. We're like, this isn't working. Are we doing this because we should be doing this or because it's working? So we kept changing, changing, changing as folks were watching us do that they would come to us and say, hey, can you help us reformat our accelerator program or can you help us start a program from scratch? We weren't really staffed to do that. So what we did was write the Pie Cookbook which is an open source document for anyone who wants to start a startup accelerator. We continue to revise it with new techniques that we learned or new ways that we manage our program and there's a small community around that that's feeding in details about how they run their programs or saying that may work in Portland or Oregon but that doesn't work in New Orleans so you need to do it this way. And then our newest project is with Autodesk who folks are probably familiar with. It's called Pie Shop and Pie Shop because we always have to have bad pie puns for everything that we do. Pie Shop is working to see if we can take the techniques we've learned and apply them to manufactured objects preferably with a digital component. So what I'm learning now is like how much space do physical object companies take up or what type of different mentorship do they need or where are the gaps in their knowledge base. Again, we all have to report these numbers so here they are. I'm actually more... The top line is kind of the traditional everybody pays attention to these numbers. I'm more happy with the bottom line which is the number of entrepreneurs who've been attracted to the program we have. I'm most proud that we have 300 mentors who volunteer their time to help other startups on a yearly basis and the six continents and just to have that kind of impact and potential for the program has been really rewarding and if anybody from Antarctica wants to apply we will accept that. So I think the big secret in just a slide I want to finish on here is we thought we wanted to be a startup accelerator. What we realized was we were actually a community development tool or a way of better connecting people who already lived in the community in a way that was compelling for all of them. So all we are is a means of extracting knowledge that exists as an asset and providing it to folks who desperately need that knowledge in the most efficient way we possibly can. Thank you. Sure, I'll start. I think this idea... So going on the diversity and inclusion front I think that's definitely been a big theme in a lot of incubators, accelerators and ventures and investors kind of around the country and I think people have really struggled to figure out how to do it and I think there have been a lot of fits and starts and sometimes people do or it may seem like people are doing harm rather than good with a lot of diversity and inclusion efforts like what have you seen with yours? I think the most interesting and it's across all accelerators but I think it's a problem we can solve for particularly with the diversity and inclusion stuff is I rarely see upward... Oh, there I am. I rarely see upward mobility in the accelerator environment so generally in the world of accelerators there's a role of a program manager which is kind of day to day dealing with the startups and there's the role of this managing director which is funding or the mentors or those kind of things and nine times out of ten, never the twain shall meet. Rarely do program managers become managing directors and so one of the things we've been trying to do specifically with our effort is try and create that path for folks and find folks it's not a white cis male's job to tell people how to do diversity or where those accelerators should be located we're working to kind of train the program managers up so that they can become managing directors of their own programs and take that program and make it work for the community I think that's one of the challenges is people often try and do the cookie cutter thing and it just doesn't... I think that's a recipe for failure. Yeah, what have you seen with your companies? With the companies? Yeah, with the companies in terms of equity and inclusion. So, thank you because I'm all shaky too. So we originally, we admittedly were pretty much a white tech bro space and we got... we would get women in the space but not like by intention we would just get lucky with some applicants and a few applicants of color who would be in the space I think what we're seeing now is back to my point about the internship