 My name is Chris, as introduced here with Lila from Samasaurus, and we're going to talk a little bit about doing business as a source of good. So I have a few questions for Lila, and we'll dive into a discussion from there. OK, cool. So while you're a founder of Samasaurus, 501c3 nonprofit providing project data management with the goal of lifting people out of poverty, which is, I think, incredibly admirable. I think, as a mission. Under Samasaurus, you also founded a for-profit business called LuxMe, which is a skincare brand. So a very unique model. I guess what my question is, what are you trying to achieve with Samasaurus? What are you trying to achieve with LuxMe? And how do you differ from other startups that are trying to build businesses? And from a funding, business model, ownership, et cetera, et cetera? So I guess I should start with the motivation. Over a billion people around the world live on less than $2 a day, and it's the reason why we have close to a billion people without clean drinking water, more than 2 billion people without access to basic sanitation and toilets, and so many of the problems that we try to solve through philanthropy are really rooted in poverty, in the fact that over a billion people make so little. And so I've always been fascinated by this in a world of so much abundance, why do we still struggle to put food on the table for so many people? And I'm really curious about business models that directly employ the poor. We can't wait for trickle-down economics to solve this problem, we have to directly inject capital into poor households, and the best way to do that is to give work. And the digital economy affords many new ways to give work to some of the poorest people in the world who we previously relegated to philanthropy. We previously said, at best we can build a well or a school for these people. Well now we can create direct employment. So what Samosource does is we work with some of the top technology companies in the world, like Autonomous Vehicle companies, for example, Google and Microsoft are clients, and we produce training data. A lot of what we do is image annotation and tagging for computer vision teams using a disadvantaged labor force. So we are now, though we are a nonprofit, it's kind of a weird distinction, we're a 501c3 nonprofit in the US, but our business is actually profitable and we're the largest data services company in East Africa. We employ close to 2,000 people in Kenya and Uganda doing this sort of image annotation work for some of the top technology firms in the world. So it's a really unusual business. I think the coolest part about our business is that in order to become a Samosource worker, you have to have previously been living in poverty, which we define as less than the local living wage, which is about $2 a day. So we will only hire people who come from very poor backgrounds to do this work. And on average, we can quadruple their income. So about three years after they leave Samosource, they're at four times the wage they were before they started. That's awesome. So what I want to give you a little bit of time to talk about is also how under this structure you also create for-profit organizations that can actually take investor capital as well and actually grow like a startup. I mean, that's super interesting. So we're in this really interesting field, which is called social enterprise or social business, which is the idea that you can apply some of the same principles of philanthropy of doing good in a business model. And you're sort of in between a traditional philanthropic organization and a traditional profit maximizing startup. So the goal is really a social or environmental goal, but you're using a business model to solve it. So Samosource became profitable last year. We entered this lucrative market of tagging for computer vision several years ago. And we're now one of the top players in the space and a top vendor for some of these big firms, which means that this business model is working and we can take investor capital and not be reliant on grants and donations. So we just took our first for-profit investment. We set up a subsidiary that's a for-profit that can generate a return for investors. And the investors that we're finding who are interested are impact-oriented. It's a lot of family offices, people who've made their money and they want to do something powerful in the world. They can also make a return. It's probably not going to be like a 10x VC type return. But we can offer pretty solid returns, as well as a very strong social impact. And I think there's a growing market for that among investors. So looking at a company like Indella, who's also leveraging, I suppose, a regional workforce for bigger tech companies all over the world, how do you compare Samosource with them evidently from a structural perspective of you guys are a non-profit and they are a startup. How do you compare that and what are the advantages or disadvantages based on what you are trying to achieve? So it's an ecosystem, right? So Indella is an amazing company that places software engineers with larger tech companies. The challenge, though, for us is that they're hiring from a very different pool. So they would never hire from the pool of people we work with. Indella, I think fewer than 7% of their incoming class, comes from poor backgrounds. So they're hiring more middle-class people in these regions, which is important, right? You need a whole value chain. So when my workers leave Samosource, they're primed to get Indella jobs. That's wonderful. But for me personally, I'm really interested in tackling extreme poverty. And I think if we don't directly create jobs among that poorest segment, they're going to get left behind. So our interest is in reaching the people who would normally never be reached by traditional businesses who were hiring the most talented people they could find out of university. Most of my workers are, I mean, almost all of them are living in slums. So they're the sorts of people who you would really only traditionally reach through a charity kind of mechanism. Got it. So I come from an investor background. I think Horizon's Ventures is a little bit different from a traditional venture capital. But we obviously look for return of capital. And so you talked a little bit about impact investors investing in for-profit models underneath Samosource. How do you justify impact as a return? I mean, I think that's ultimately what they're looking for. I can sacrifice a 10x return, but I'd like to see that impact. How do you measure that? Is there other KPIs that you follow or report on? I'm so glad you asked. So I'm kind of a development geek. I used to work at the World Bank, producing development economics reports that nobody read, maybe except people like you. So I'm really hell bent. And when I started Samosource, I was hell bent on creating an enterprise that would measure our social returns the same way that a for-profit startup measures financial returns. So we publish every quarter an impact report that basically tells you how many people we've moved out of poverty and by how much and at what cost to donors each quarter. And we release that on a learnings call. It's kind of like a corporate earnings call. And we publish all of that online. So if you go to samosource.org slash impact, you can see these reports. In order to validate what's happening at the household level, we even see, for example, how our workers are changing their household expenditures. We look at what they spend their money on. We do household surveys. So we randomly select workers and we send people there with clipboards to assess what the impact is. And now this methodology is something that we're selling as an advisory service to other companies who want to measure the poverty reduction of their supply chain. Many companies don't think about this, but if you're operating a factory in a developing country and you're behaving well, you're paying living wages and you're paying benefits, you are a force for tremendous good. And many companies don't really leverage that storytelling, even with their own team. So we're now selling this as a service as well. Interesting. Yeah, I think those are the bulk of my questions. Probably, I think it's important for people to understand what you're doing because it's a very unique model in a business perspective, in a business model way. I think what we do at Horizons, because we have a unique distribution of capital back into philanthropy, and because we have one single source of funding, we're able to take a slightly long review on companies, especially companies, for example, in food biotech in nutraceuticals that have that long lead type of R&D. But one of the, I guess, contention that I felt when I was reading up about you and what you were doing is what I'm looking for is high skilled university, PhD level who are going to build that value in R&D and so on and so forth. And in a way, you're looking at the other spectrum of it. So from your perspective, do you see ultimately, Samasaurus being able to say, okay, I'm going to provide that ability to lift people out of poverty and then transition them through that process? Because it's great to have a good job. How about their children? And then how about social, economic welfare and so on and so forth? This is a really interesting question as our business evolves. We're now nine years old. We have a really solid reputation as a data services provider. I think we're probably one of the top training data providers for fields like autonomous vehicles and gaming. But the question is, where do we go from here? And as an entrepreneur, I'm always looking at the next frontier. And for us, the next frontier is moving slightly up the value chain, even with our own workforce. So once people have done image tagging for two years, they become specialists, they've worked with data science teams, they've worked with data scientists, we wanna provide on-ramps for them into higher skilled work within the company and growth opportunities. So my hope is that we're able to retain that top tier of our workforce and move them up the value chain. And we're also directly hiring consultants and project managers who have that additional skill set. That said, I think the biggest challenge in the world other than climate change is extreme poverty and it's on our watch. We're allowing this to happen. I just got a message from someone who lives in a refugee camp in Kenya this morning, who's one of our trainees, telling me that his father was killed really tragically in a senseless raid, basically due to poverty. And that just shouldn't happen in 2017. So for me personally, this is my life's work and I'm really excited about building models that reach the people that otherwise wouldn't be reached, that are getting left behind. And we do that, by the way, in the US as well. We have a really cool program called Sama School. We're the first nonprofit that's created a training program for the gig economy to provide on-ramps for low-income people to get jobs on platforms like Care.com or Field Nation or Upwork. And to me, there's so much opportunity in the digital economy that's not being tapped to reach low-income people. So I think we'll always maintain at least half of our focus on reaching the people that can't be reached. And of course we have to do that within reason we wanna still be able to have a profitable business, again, within the confines of doing something that's good for the world. So tell us a little bit about LuxMe. So Skincare Brand, expanding internationally, sounds like a very appealing business to begin with. How did you build that under Samosor's, especially the ownership part, which I think is really interesting in terms of how do you motivate and have that distribution of capital go back to the people that built the company, I suppose. Yeah, so it's kind of random when I describe what I do. I have this data services company, Samosor's, and then I have this skincare business called LuxMe, which is seemingly, they're very disparate, but actually they're really the same goal. Both companies exist to give work to low-income people. LuxMe is the first fair trade and organic brand at Sephora nationwide, which is one of our biggest beauty retailers in the US. And the mission is really to do what Samosor's did to employ very low-income people, especially women in the supply chain. Cosmetics and skincare is a very lucrative industry, you see insanely high gross margins, and most of the luxury firms that produce these skin creams are doing nothing to make the world better. Maybe arguably they make you look better. I think that's mostly marketing, but they really do nothing to reinvest any of that amazing margin back into making the world better. And women are the primary buyers of this stuff, and yet most of these companies really do nothing to help women in the supply chain or even, you know, they're not even owned by women. So I thought it would be really cool to create a different kind of a model where we use the luxury industry to give work to low-income people. And our mission is, we call it beauty for humanity. So we source rare, wild ingredients that are fair trade certified, which means that they pay living wages to women's cooperatives and that are organic. And we produce them in luxury packaging. We produce really beautiful products for skincare. Right now we have four SKUs, and we launched last year at Sephora. I sell it on TV, which is a little bit surreal, on QVC, and we're about to launch in Europe. What's fascinating to me is that millennial consumers actually care a lot about social and environmental impact. So it's not just products that are good for you and that are organic and healthy, but they want products that give back. So I think as millennials are aging and earning more disposable income and able to afford luxury products, they want something different from what their mothers bought. And that's what I hope we provide. Yeah, I think, you know, when we, we invest in a lot of food biotechnology, nutraceutical, health and wellness type products, and our experience is the same. Millennials and just modern day buyers, right? Care a lot more about the sustainability element. They care a lot more about the impact of that product and what it has, the carbon footprint that is associated with, just like they were looking at a new nutrition label. And so I think that's a really cool concept. Are you planning to expand that beyond beauty or is that you're gonna stay there and try to build that business? Because distribution is hard, right? To get into shelves and so on and so forth. Absolutely, well, we're starting with beauty and the other thing that I'm really passionate about within beauty is that we can source ingredients that not only have a social benefit but an environmental benefit. So one of the biggest, you know, contributors to climate change is deforestation. And one of the biggest causes of deforestation is that local people don't know how to monetize the land unless they're clearing it, right? Or selling it to a local mining company and they don't see the value of this raw virgin rainforest. In many parts of the world, like the Amazon where we're now working, you have rare wild ingredients that have incredible benefits that haven't really been tapped. And if you can show people that they can sustainably harvest a wild ingredient, this has been done, for example, with ASAE in the Amazon, which is now a huge superfood trend in the US. If you can show them that they can make more money off of a wild asset, then they'll preserve it. And it won't be sold to the nearest cattle farmer to be cut down to make room for pasture. So that's part of the model of Luxemey and our first ingredient in Northern Uganda actually comes from a rare wild plant that used to be cut down for firewood and sold to make like $1 a day. So we've convinced the local population there that these trees are worth more alive than dead. And I think that within beauty, there's so much more room to expand. We could go into, we're looking at, we have a body product that's launching in February. We could go into baby skincare. This is a huge market in the US for organic baby care products. And men's skincare will just change the packaging and make it appeal to you guys. Well, it was the first time I'm wearing makeup for the first time in my life, so it's fabulous. We have a couple of minutes left. I want you to tell people about your book. Tell them a little bit about what you're gonna do in the future. And yeah, what else is saving is coming down your pipeline? Sure. Well, I would just say it's so easy to be cynical nowadays. And I meet a lot of people, especially with what's happening politically in the US and all these terrorist attacks. And it just seems like every day there's more bad news. It's easy to become cynical. And I think it's up to us to stop that. There are so many really concrete things that entrepreneurs and leaders of business can do to make the world better. And most of that is within your supply chain. So I wanna encourage you, if you're watching this, to think about how your business spends money because that's the most powerful vehicle for good that we have. It's much more powerful than philanthropy. In the book, I talk about the fact that the biggest 2,000 companies in the world, the Global 2000, spend $12 trillion annually on goods and services, trillion. By comparison, the GDP of all of Sub-Saharan Africa is 1.8 trillion. So what if we could take just 1% of that $12 trillion in spend and allocate it to vendors that are like SamaSource, that are social enterprises, actively fighting a social or environmental problem on the ground. And there are more and more. There are nonprofit factories, for example, Levi's sources from one in the US that makes denim with a marginalized workforce. I think they hire people coming out of prison and military veterans. There are factories that operate on a fair trade basis. There's a phone called the Fairphone in coming out of the Netherlands where the entire supply chain for the phone down to the mine that the minerals and the batteries are coming from is fair trade. So they will show you the mine workers on their website and you can actually verify that those people are being paid living wages. So I think our supply chains represent untold benefit for low income people and that's something we can control, right? We make the decisions as entrepreneurs how we spend our money. So how much effort do you guys put into traceability? So because so much of it is coming from fair trade sources or sources that you obviously respect and think will be good for either local community or the ultimate consumer. I mean, how much effort do you put into traceability, finding out and on a step-by-step process? Yeah, so in the Luxemey context, I actually go and visit our producer communities and if you go on our website, you can see videos of the women who harvest the nuts in every package. We actually put a number, a code on every product sold and if you type that code into the website, you can meet the woman who harvested the nuts, the raw ingredient that are in your jar of skincare, which I think is really cool. So there's all kinds of cool things you can do with technology now that weren't even possible a decade ago and I think consumers love that. They wanna know the stories behind what they buy. It's a much more powerful and deep connection they have with the brand, especially if you're trying to build a direct to consumer kind of model and I would say that more broadly, it's not that hard to find vendors that do good. Even if you're thinking about catering your like office Christmas party, we actually have a guide that we put together at givework.org that's a guide for companies to find vendors that are doing good in their areas. So that's one place to start. But I just think it takes thinking a little bit differently about the money that your company is spending every day. Yeah, great. Thank you so much. Last 30 seconds. Any challenges to the audience? You know, I have great admiration and respect for what you're doing and I think that is incredibly inspiring and I'm sure the people here are really inspired. So any last words of wisdom, any last words of encouragement? Just, I would encourage everyone here, if you wanna do good, think beyond charity. Think about giving work. The most powerful thing that we can do to solve poverty and all of its negative downstream effects is to give work as opposed to aid. When we give aid or a handout, we're essentially writing off that person's talent. We're saying we're relegating you to a relationship where you're just receiving a handout as opposed to a mutually beneficial relationship that happens when you trade with someone. So wherever possible, and it's not possible in every context, but wherever possible, I would urge you if you're thinking about trying to give back, to give work. Great, thank you so much. Thank you.