 But I do want you to stay for this panel because it's going to be amazing. It really speaks to the work that I've been most interested in in the last year or two and that is place-based investing, how to change neighborhoods, how to change communities by what our work is about. And I want to invite that panel to come onto the stage right now and let's get them moving so that we can get on to the next thing soon. But you really don't want to miss this panel. Good morning, everyone. So my name is Miliana Vajosevic and I'm a director with Impact Investments at Prudential. And by way of background, we've had an impact investing group at the firm for over 40 years and in that time we've made over $2 billion in impact investments to date across asset classes and impact, thank you. And we've invested across asset classes and impact strategies, everything ranging from revitalizing our headquarters city of Newark, New Jersey, to finding innovative ways to improve the ways in which we live, learn, and work. And one of the more recent initiatives that we launched is an ongoing $25 million commitment to support more inclusive venture capital models, which we assess based on an array of factors which include the diversity of the investment team, their support of entrepreneurs of color and female entrepreneurs, where they're making their investments and their support of inclusive business models that reflect an increasingly diverse population. And so the evolution of that work has been very organic. There was no wholesale shift in how we did our investments, but more a recognition that we had been doing this and supporting these types of fund managers and entrepreneurs for years. But as many of you know, as bullish as we are on the space, the stats do not necessarily tell a different story. So according to Project Diane, companies founded by Black women raise an average of $36,000 compared to $1.3 million raised by failed startups. And nearly 60% of venture capital activity flows through three tech hubs, Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. And so our hope this morning is to really have a robust discussion about how venture capital can align with our community and place-based investment strategies as well as supporting diversity outcomes. So I am so thrilled to be here with these panelists, all of whom are investors in our portfolio. And so I'll have them introduce themselves one by one, and then we'll kick off the discussion. Thanks, Miliana. My name is Dan Boorock. I'm a managing partner at New York Venture Partners. We're a place-based venture capital fund located in New York, New Jersey. Hi, my name is Stephen DeBerry. I run Bronze Investments. The Bronze Venture Fund invests out of Silicon Valley here. We invest against an east-side investment thesis, very much rooted in the community of East Palo Alto here in Silicon Valley. But the east-side thesis is really about the other side of the tracks. It could be East Palo Alto or East LA, East Philly, East St. Louis, New Orleans East. There's an east-side thing. We can talk about that a little bit more later. I'm the general partner of Impact America Fund. We are a tech-enabled, we invest in tech-enabled companies that are enhancing lives and underserved communities in America. We believe that there is existing infrastructure in America that technology has honestly overlooked. And so we're supporting entrepreneurs that have a nuanced understanding of those communities to scale technology-enabled businesses. Okay. Thanks for your patience. So in my role at Prudential, we wear many hats. And the title of this session is really Why Venture. So we're an impact investor. We're a large financial services firm. We have a philanthropic arm as well through our foundation. And in conversations that we've had with these funds as well as other potential investors, we've observed the fact which is everyone seems to be aligned with the mission, which is supporting the east-side thesis, supporting economic development in Newark and other cities, or supporting more diverse outcomes. But when you get to the point of investing in venture, there seems to be a bit of misalignment. And so I would ask the panel what their experience has been in terms of convincing people that venture is actually an aligned strategy to pursue these opportunities. Yeah. So I guess my mic's on. Great. What I'd say is if you think about the impact investing landscape and the amount of dollars allocated to impact investing, it's still mostly in the public markets. And then you start segmenting out the pie and you say, well, what's not in the public markets? Then it's mostly private equity, i.e. the main capital's world, the larger buyout sustainable place. So the percentage that actually goes to venture capital funds is really quite small. Not sure if that's because we're at a different maturity curve in the growth of impact investment or that people don't fundamentally believe that venture capital investing creates jobs. So I'm going to address that point. Newark Venture Partners, we're a place-based venture capital firm. Our idea is to find great seed and series A-stage companies that are based anywhere in the US and abroad and try and get them to do a physical tie-back to Newark, New Jersey. So why are we doing that? Well, one, we fundamentally believe that venture capital is a job-creating engine. You don't have to go any further than Mountain View and Google. Google created 72,000 jobs over the past 15 years. I was an early employee at Google. When I joined, I was the 400th person at the company. That was 2002. Fast-forward to today. And they've created those jobs not just in Mountain View, but 8,000 new jobs in New York and many other jobs internationally. So it's possible the venture capital done right, i.e. the right company, produces job creation. The second component of what we're doing is place-based investing. So why do that in a place where those jobs can actually have an impact? So whether it's Newark or Baltimore or Detroit or Oakland or East Palo Alto, all these other cities that really can benefit from it attaching the redeveloping urban core to the innovation economy. So those are the two things that we fundamentally believe exist. Venture capital does create jobs, and those jobs can be laser focused in communities that really need to benefit from technology job creation. Yeah, I agree with all of that. My logic around why venture is pretty simple, which is rooted in my experience with bronze, which started as a multi-asset class manager. So we were looking at all assets. And what I realized is, unless you are completely satisfied with the investment landscape as it exists today, then you have to do venture. Because otherwise, you're picking from the products that already exist. So if you want to see things that are new and you want to see things that are innovative, the asset class that drives that innovation is venture capital. Yeah, and I'll add just a little bit to that in that given the conversation of this conference around social and economic change to throw a stat out there when you look at the racial wealth gap stat here in the U.S., it's quite alarming. Black and Latinos have six and seven cents on the dollar to white wealth. And if you think about the demographic shift here in America to the year 2020 when half of the nation's children will be of ethnic or minority group by 2040, over 50% of this country will be people of color. So you have a majority population that has very little wealth, power, influence, and control of their economic destinies. So if you think about solutions, my role and while I chose venture capital, I'm an activist at heart and believe in social change with a finance background. But my reason for choosing venture capital is because we need to accelerate change. So how do we invest in technology enabled companies in our case that doesn't help the one or two businesses when you think about the case of a maven and helping independent hairstylists, but it's supporting 20 to 30 to 50,000 businesses at one time. So there's a way to do this by leveraging technology and the venture capital approach. I believe to accelerate the change that we need to really pay attention to and act on immediately. So I want to drill down a little deeper in this in terms of what your investor experience has been like and of the investors that you have to date. Why they've chosen to invest in you. I can see it's a range of options whether it's they believe the investment strategy. They see strategic value, their mission aligned. And so I'm curious to hear from some of you why folks have invested with you. Obviously, we are one of them. And then what you hope more investors will see in terms of the value proposition that you all provide. So maybe Steven, can we kick off with you? I think it'd be better for you to answer that. But I think in our case I think most good investment strategies have something to do with driving activity where most folks aren't looking. That's how you get different returns and hopefully better returns. And so our Eastside thesis, which is really looking at communities that have been designed to be on the social and economic margin, absolutely looks at places where I think it's non-obvious to most folks to search for value and capture. But given my lived experience and familiarity with these communities, I can see the value that's there. So I think that has something to do with it if I were to put words in your mouth. I think one thing I'd add to that is it also depends on where the pockets of capital are coming from. So I'll just, at New York Venture Partners, about 50% of our capital has come from five large corporations. And the rest has come from a couple foundations and then family offices. But what I've noticed going out to institutional investors is they don't know where to put the impact investing bucket of capital. Does it sit in a foundation? Does it sit in their traditional investment strategy? And if it does, are they convinced they're going to get similar returns to their other investments? And so finding the right pocket of capital, and I think we'd look to you folks to think about how you can be more open minded in terms of allocating capital to impact funds, especially the private funds that we run. I think it's important too to truly believe in the messaging of what we're delivering around impact being a competitive advantage, right? If you're treating your employees better, if you're treating your customers better, if you're providing some value add back to the community, then that, Matt, if you're investing in a company that does those things, then that company should have a competitive advantage and should be the winner long term. So I think as LPs or investors think about investing in impact investment funds, venture capital is a risky asset class. In some actuality, does having an impact mission-aligned focus within the company de-risk some of that earlier stage risk that would ordinarily be there because of the benefits that you get from the mission alignment? One of the things that I think is really, I think makes us all aligned is our place-based focus. So Prudential having been headquartered in Newark for the past over 140 years, you being in Newark, all of your work in East Palo Alto and all the work that you did before launching what's now Impact America. I think we have something which I call the cloud versus community conundrum, which is we talk a lot about minority-owned businesses and we seem to be conflating two concepts. You have the mom and pop deli on the corner in a city like Newark and then you have that soon to be tech behemoth. And they have very different implications in communities in terms of what their impact is. And so I would love to hear from you all if venture investing can have a community impact or community investments can attract venture capital dollars or if they are separate. Maybe Dan, we'll start with you. Yeah, well, it's a great question. Our thesis is underpinned on the work of Professor Moretti who's worked as a teacher professor at Stanford in Berkeley around the multiplier impact. So if you attract great companies that are growing quickly and creating jobs in the city, they're going to have a positive impact on the local economy. One software developer job creates between four and six service sector jobs in the community. So we're coming from a top-down approach where we think that attracting small companies to build up in urban cores is going to have a positive impact on the local community. We quite honestly haven't really given thought to investing within the community businesses. We kind of think the companies that are growing there from a technology perspective will hire locally. So I think it's an interesting sort of approach. We're coming from the top-down and the job creating component. I think it's important to do both, right? So the best answers tend to have multiple inputs. I think absolutely the leverage that you get with venture capital is important and that tends to lend itself to big companies. And the financial model of the venture capital business really relies on home runs to win. But I also think, Kishi, you talked about the venture capital process. I think there are ways of knowing, ways of seeing that come from doing venture capital that can be applied to companies that aren't necessarily slated to become billion-dollar companies. I mean, I'll give a quick example. Just as a side project, about four months ago a guy from down in the bayou in Louisiana reached out to me and asked me to help him with a shrimp business. And initially, I see several thousand deals in a year. So initially that was a clear no. I can't help you with shrimp. I'm in Silicon Valley. I'll try to be short on time. But the punchline is, I talked to this guy for several weeks. It turns out they're pulling 120 million pounds of shrimp out of this little community down in the bayou. And I helped him understand how to position the company. It turns out there's all these chemicals and shrimp, and he's not doing that. And so I helped set up this company called Naked Seafood, which is now in negotiation to be an exclusive supplier to Blue Apron, the big meal kit company that recently went public. So do I think Naked Seafood will be a billion-dollar company? Probably not. But the things that I've learned as a venture capitalist have absolutely been able to employ those and helping this entrepreneur build something that I think will be a well-generator like nothing that's ever been seen in his community down in the bayou in New Orleans. And building on that, what we're really excited about at Impact America Fund, we are seeing people who come from communities, when I say the communities, communities of color, lower income communities, and they figured out, including myself, how to navigate through these institutional and academic structures that are quite familiar to most of us in this room, but for them was tough culturally, right? But they figured that system out, and they're saying, hey, I see some flaws in this system. There aren't enough people that look like me in the system from the same economic background, the same racial background. And I have family members that are not a part of the system that are in the bayou trying to build the shrimp business. And hey, by the way, I understand a bit more. I have a bit more sophistication around business and finance and technology. How do I come back, and not only just help the one person in the bayou, but with technology in the case and what we're seeing, how do we scale a platform or business model using technology, not to get rid of the guy in the bayou that are farming the shrimp, but how do we do that nationally and potentially globally? And we know how to do that, and I know how to communicate with the shrimp farmer in the bayou, because he is my family member. He's the person I grew up with. So we're seeing this interesting situation happen where people from the community have gone through the system that are coming back out and saying, I know how to fix this problem, invest in me, and give me the opportunity to actually scale a solution. Great, so we're close to running up on time, so I'd like to ask the panelists one closing question for them to respond to. And for us to close some of these equity gaps in building more inclusive venture capital models, strategy is very much like yours. I'm curious to hear from each of you what you think would help grow the field, and the caveat is you can't say more investment, since that's a no-brainer. So I'll start with Keisha, and then we can move over. Grow the field. I am going to leverage what, if you all were here earlier, what Giselle said from the GEN, we know what the problems are. There are solutions to these problems, and we have to get to work. So I think us sort of getting over ourselves, and we're all very good at sort of talking about these issues and the rigor and thinking about it academically, it's like it's time to get to work. And if we all roll up our sleeves and do this work, I do think we'll see some immediate change happen very quickly. You know, my view is what would help both my business, venture capital in general, and also our general situation in this country in this moment is just friendship, y'all. We are talking about these communities that I bet I'm not going to do the show your hand thing, but if I listed a bunch of these East Side communities, I bet 95% of y'all have not been in them. And if you go, you may go through them, but you don't go to them. And so what I would say is stop and get out of your car and go buy a cup of coffee or get to know somebody, give somebody a hug. I mean, you know, that kind of proximity will release financial value and also social cohesion. I'm going to go a little more retail. And what I'm going to suggest is that, you know, there's a halo effect, I think, that comes with impact investing at the venture capital stage of investing. And, you know, if we had more other venture capitals, more traditional venture capitals and more companies looking at where we're doing and bringing us deal flow and co-investing with us to sort of support our impact, that would go a long way. So the Sequoias and the Mayfields of the world, benchmarks of the world bring us your deal flow. Great. Well, please join me in thanking the panelists for a really robust discussion. It was really fascinating. Thank you all.