 First of all, I want to welcome everybody who is listening in and to our fellow panelists. I want to thank you all for joining this panel on what we call the new tech touch balance. My name is Matt Schar. I am a senior director at Axiom Venture Lab. We are an early stage venture fund whose aim is to support the world's most innovative FinTech startups and founders in their efforts to create a more financially inclusive world. Today I'm really excited to be joined by three founders in the Venture Lab portfolio. Louis Bortart from Henry, Michael Moorland from Field Intelligence and Eli Poek from Apollo Agriculture. And in a moment I'll have a question to each of you to kick off the conversation and give you a chance to introduce yourselves. But first of all, welcome to all of our panelists and it's great to see you all again here on video. Now for our audience, I also want to just encourage you to use the chat to ask questions. We do have some folks from the Axiom side who will be able to moderate and share some of those questions. We'll spend about 25 minutes with some questions for our panelists and then we'll open it up for the rest of the audience to ask anything that is on your mind. And also I encourage the three of you here up on stage to ask questions of one another as well. While I've peppered it with questions, I'm sure you also have some insightful ones to share with each other, so I fully encourage that. Let's go and get into the topic though. As mentioned, we're talking about the tech-touch balance today. And release is an important one in the field of financial inclusion, particularly in a world with continued expansion of what we call a digitally native set of connection points with customers. A few areas of critical exploration need to come to mind. First it's where does the in-person relationship in that tech come into play? And does being digitally native actually run the risk of being exclusionary? And how do we adopt the right balance to support the historically underserved in their journey toward financial inclusion? I also think it's really necessary for us to talk about this in the shadow of the ongoing pandemic because that really has also affected the shift in a variety of ways. We're seeing more a digitally adoptive country's rebound from the pandemic at a faster pace than their counterparts. So with that in mind, I wanted to start on a question to you, Luz, I'd love to hear more about what you're building at Henry, and also as a follow-up as you've grown as a company, how has the usage of technology with your customers evolved vis-a-vis in-person communication and engagement? Okay, thank you for being here. Like, thank you. Hi, everybody. It's an honor for me to be here at this panel. So my name is Luz Borshard. I'm co-founder of Henry. Henry is a computer science school with trained software engineers with zero upfront cost in exchange for a portion of their future income, also known as the ISA, Income Sharing Agreement. We founded Henry to challenge the status quo of education in LATAM by giving access to anyone who's willing to participate in its intense curriculum. With this, we're looking to untap talent, no matter economic or social background, and thereby investing in underrepresented human potential. And our zero model cost provides opportunity for people to land in high jobs that are, which pay, on average, four X more. And this represents a life-changing opportunity for a region which has the highest, like, world's income inequality rates now as Latin America. And here we're trying to solve, like, two big challenges. Henry's roles in providing affordable financing for high-quality technical education can help address multi-faceted challenges in Latin America, such as, like, income inequality, as I was saying, high unemployment, and this skills gap or the skill worker shortage, like, facing both students and employers in Latin America, right? So to give you a context, just in 2020, this skills gap, we had, like, more than one million tech job openings in Latin America, but less than 100K professionals with the skills and the training necessary to fill these roles. No doubt that COVID has accelerated all these numbers, and we are expecting for 2025 to have 149 million jobs open in technology in the world and 25 million in Latin America. So there's a huge skills gap, but we always say that Henry models does not only speak to the skill gap of, like, providing high-quality education, but also closing the inequality gap, right, giving this access to everybody who is willing to participate and who wants to land in jobs which are rewriting the future in technology. Latin America is one of the regions which has eight of the 10 most unequal countries in the world, only 14% of the population has access to higher education and employment rate has raised through COVID to 12%. So we always say that education is the best way to solve the world inequality, but only if it's accessible for everyone and high quality. So, yeah, that's a little bit about Henry. Great. Thanks, Luzna. I'm curious as a follow-up, given the fact that many of your students are coming from different sorts of backgrounds in which their engagement with technology has varied, they want to move into a technology professional role, how have you seen the way of balancing out their awareness of technology and sort of how they ramp up to that versus others of your students who might be a little more savvy in technology when they get started in the curriculum? Yeah, well, that is a challenge we are also working right now which is kind of educating the people about moving into technology in Latin America. You have countries which are like really conservative and traditional and which relate on super traditional education methods such as in-person education, like this myth of delivering an online education is not the same or like the lots of barriers that we have to break also regarding this aspect. For example, there are lots of companies who ask you for a certification or for kind of a degree, a university degree, and we are trying to kind of work upon those barriers and super difficult for this population to understand like why should I study technology, right? Like why is technology a good opportunity for me? So we are doing a lot of education and run those topics in order to not only attract the super tech savvy base but also the people who are not too aware about education and in that having said this, our students' profile is super diverse. We have people from all over Latin America from different social classes. We want the class to be super diverse and which represent a lot of culture and different backgrounds and by that we are trying to kind of deliver an experience which blends the human interaction with giving lots of live and online lectures but also in a super fast way and in four months in order to get employed. So the way we are doing to attract these people which are maybe not too tech savvy is to kind of show examples or stories of other Henry's which already went from the program and are working for companies in the US and all over Latin America and their own example of moving into technology of making a career shift was the way to kind of illuminating these people in order to come and to be onboarding Henry. Great. That's a really helpful context. Thanks, Luz. Michael, I'll turn the same question to you if you'd share a little more about Field and also maybe sharing a bit more about the context of your customer base which is quite a different one compared to, I think, Luz and Eli's. So great to hear your thoughts on it. Yeah, sure. Thank you again, Matt and Socap. Again, Michael Morland, CEO and co-founder of Field and we work in healthcare supply chain in Africa. Globally there are every year about 10 million people around the world that die from diseases that are otherwise treatable by safe and affordable medicines. They just don't have access. This is particularly true in Africa. The countries where we work right now in Nigeria and Kenya there are about seven times too few pharmacies per capita than what would be required otherwise. And it's really a difficult business environment for the pharmacies to really thrive. They are all small businesses and they struggle with things that other small businesses struggle with like use of data, the high-fragmentation access to finance, but then also the complications of managing pharmaceutical supply chain. And the consequences are really dire. We see that stock outs of essential medicines can be as high as 50%, even at corner pharmacies. Expory can be 10, 15% a year. It's enormous inefficiencies and the consequence is that most pharmacies shrink the number of products they offer and they raise their prices and the patient really loses out. And as does the market. Manufacturers and suppliers trying to get to market and really build the Africa business case struggle because of how difficult it is just simply to reach the patient. So what we've been trying to do from the very beginning is number one, fix availability. Make products available, make high-quality products available affordably everywhere. And in doing so really transform this business model and the knock-on effect being that there are simply more pharmacies, more places for people to access quality drugs when they need them. So our business model though in order to accomplish this software is necessary but not sufficient. We have to do so much more than just provide another piece of technology. So we have always been from the very beginning a full-stack company, a full-stack startup if any of you know that expression. We are both a full-stack software company, but we are also a registered licensed pharmaceutical distributor. We decided to jump right into the value chain and get rate involved in using that technology to help make sure that the proceeds and the benefits of that are shared directly with the retailers themselves. So we run a program called Shelf Life. Pharmacies can join as a membership. And as members they outsource their supply chain to us and we take over all of the planning fulfillment and finance. So there is a lot of technology involved, but there's also a robust agent network. We call them fulfillment partners. And they are out there doing the deliveries but also doing the stock counts and the stock management. They're doing the account management and they are helping augment the very small staff, very small footprint of our clients to make sure that they really benefit from very best-in-class technology but also are connected back to this broader network of people who are there physically with them ensuring that those goods are physically available for the client. So, yeah, we exist both as a tech company and as a distributor that way. Very tech in touch. Great. Thanks, Michael. And then Eli, same question to you. Fantastic. Matt, thanks for having me here. It's a joy to be here. And Michael Luz, it's fun to be on the panel with both of you. I'm Eli. I run Apollo Agriculture. Our business is helping farmers make more money. What we do that is we provide financing and products for Africa's small-scale farmer market. You know, I think I'll save more detail for later in the conversation, but I think just stepping back, agriculture is the backbone of most economies across Sub-Saharan Africa. 60% of the population, Africa overall has 21% of global farmland, yet I think farmers struggle to access the basic financing and tools that they need to invest in their farm and make more money. So, we obviously didn't discover this problem. This is an age-old problem, much like the challenges that Michael and Luz are working on, but we've tried to take a somewhat different approach to addressing it where we said, how do we rebuild with technology the approach to reaching small-scale farmers such that we can meet that half-acre farmer, that one-acre farmer, and see not only an opportunity for us to support them to make more money, but an opportunity to make money ourselves and in doing so, build something fundamentally more scalable and financially sustainable than what would otherwise be possible. Our customer base is heterogeneous. There's no one small-scale farmer, but our average customer is about 50 years old, about half-men, half-women. Using a feature phone, we've certainly seen smart phone adoption grow, but not that much. So, about three out of four Apollo customers don't have a smart phone. And so, we're very much building for what for somebody in San Francisco might feel like the world 10 years ago. But at the same time, we have to be able to figure out how do we apply technology in the right place in an operational process to bring the cost of acquiring, serving, and delivering value to a small-scale farmer to a level where it works for our business. And so, I think we're constantly puzzling over these sort of tech-touch questions, thinking about how do we balance our need for scalability, write something in software, deploy it across our entire customer base with our customers very real desire to be met where they are in terms of their tech literacy. So, I think these are questions we love talking about. And I think where we've often found the most value is at that intersection point between technology and operations, a process that can't be solved with peer ops or peer tech, but rather that when our teams come together between technology and operations, we come up with a solution that is fundamentally better than what either would have come up on their own in a vacuum. So, excited to be here. I'm excited to talk more about these topics and look forward to sharing more about Apollo. Great. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for those responses. And I'm really intrigued because I think each of you has customers that are as loose. I think you put it really well that kind of come from different areas of tech savviness and really being able to accommodate that. I think sometimes the challenge that we notice is acquiring a customer that may be less digitally native can be more expensive. It takes more time. And particularly in the venture-backed startup space, a lot of times we find that those customers get left behind. So as you think about this and you really see the balance between all these different customers, how have you seen your approach maintain that balance and ensuring that you continue to accommodate that less digitally savvy customer recognizing it might take more time and energy? But have you thought about that internally to make sure that you are still continuing to reach them in a way that's going to be sustainable for you? Who is that for, Matt? All of you, but if Michael, if you have a thought on it, go right ahead. Yeah, yeah, sure. This is a huge topic for us. If you look at... So we sell on consignment. It's a form of vendor-managed inventory, which is not something we invented. It's something that most really advanced retail operations use across the world. And it solves a lot of problems and allows retailers to work really efficiently. What it requires is it requires the retailer to be fully online, to be recording every sale in a software system, scan-based trading. Again, we have barcodes and we've got great trade of information across. None of these things exist in our market. Only about half the barcodes... Sorry, about half the products we get in country, even half barcodes on them. POS systems are very, very resource dependent. The skill levels it presumes of retail attendances is totally inappropriate for the setting. We're just a non-starter and if we limited our business only to those who had fully adopted and developed all of those capabilities would have put an enormous filter on our market anyway. So from the very beginning, we had to think differently about how we approached that problem. And where we ended up was with these fulfillment partners and said it's much easier for us to train and equip a really specialized group of agents that we can get to go and serve abroad market, sort of bartering that from the agent-banking model that we see in FinTech companies other ways. And that has really carried through the road map since we started Shell Life in 2017. Everything that we do is sort of starting from that lowest common denominator in terms of tech ability and building back up. And some of that is about segmenting the service. So in trying to, as Eli put it, reduce the cost to serve for our clients. If clients who have those skills can benefit from certain integrations or certain ways that we can operate more efficiently, then we certainly lean into that and give them the chance. And that is acting as a way to raise the tide for all the rest of the clients that we serve in a way that maybe is less tech dependent. And so I think for us, we've been able to fan out across the market and develop options on different ways to work together that make it just incredibly accessible. No matter where you are, we can meet you. But it doesn't mean we have to stay at the lowest common denominator. We can still rise to meet those who are more tech savvy if we build out very intentionally a system that is truly for all of the market. Yeah. And complimenting with what Michael said on our side in Henry, we know that the traditional way of learning online probably won't replace in-person learning. That's why we were forced to kind of build a more complex education method that's leveraging on our customer-based tech-sevenness and different diverse backgrounds. So what we did was deliver an online education which is completely remote. It's a cohort which is completely remote, accessing everybody and every corner of Latin America no matter if you live in a big city or if you're in a small town. So we build cohort-based education where you start with a group of people who are going through the same experience. And second, when there is people going through the same experience, we understood they could help each other. So we are working on collaborative methods and by this we're building a strong community. So how to keep on these people engaged and mixing different customers with different tech-sevenness approach. So building this strong community through different methodologies such as, for example, per-programming or project-based, working on projects based from real-world companies, collaborative learning methods as a whole, and all of these are enabled through tech tools and technology which are implemented in our program. We try to replicate a real-work experience working with sprints, agile methodologies and tech rituals typical from tech companies such as daily stand-ups, code reviews, retros. So preparing students to kind of be productive from day one and leveling the playfields, right? Even if you come from a super-tech background or not. So our whole program has those things which are from one side like the technical skills and the soft skills to get to that complete profile to land on a job and be productive and ship and code from day one. Great. That's all really helpful. I'm curious, maybe to your customer-based Eli given that you probably have some farmers that are just still relying on USSD and that type of communication on a future phone versus those who might be more tech savvy. How have you thought through this and ultimately the full breadth of resources or services you provide depending on a customer's tech savvyness? Yeah, absolutely. I think that we've built from scratch for that feature phone customer and we also expect to be the first mobile app for farming that our customers use but I think that we've definitely prioritized saying let's broaden the base of customers and make sure that we're meeting needs of maybe not every customer but if we want to talk broadly about opening up the market at scale and then we say if you have a smart phone that's inconsistent with what we're trying to do. It's inconsistent with the size of the market opportunity. I think ultimately it's about matching what needs to happen to the most scalable piece of technology or not technology that can solve a problem and so maybe this is too kind of intellectualized but on some level we think about a framework of sort of most scalable, least effective piece of technology all the way up to kind of least scalable highest touch. So maybe on one side you have an SMS and an SMS is very scalable. The height of scalability, write it, send it with software but what we've found is that competing with our customers is close to worthless except for sort of a nudge or reminder. On the flip side we could send somebody out to visit our customer, a highly trained person every time we wanted to have a communication with them and that actually might be delightful for a lot of our customers but we would never have a chance of building something scalable or profitable and so when I think about our different interactions throughout the customer lifecycle I think we try and match the right communication modality to the task at hand, whether that's for example every customer needs to meet someone from Apollo because someone needs to come and walk the actual GPS boundaries of their field so we can be sure we're looking at the right field from satellite data to actually verify their identity to gather some information that requires a smartphone. So for that we've built out an enormous network of agents who partner with Apollo like Lyft or TaskRabbit. It shows up in their app and says, hey Eli you know if you go visit MathsFarm today you can earn 300 chillings and then I'm paid upon completion and quality verification requires a smartphone but we make sure a smartphone goes there. On the flip side for something like providing advice to customers over the course of the season we focused really heavily on automated voice which we found strikes a really nice balance between the richness of audio based communication. We can work with radio producers to produce dynamic engaging content in local language and push it out in a way that a customer just has to answer the phone and they can hear it while still having that sort of cost and scalability profile of an SMS in terms of creating content once and shipping it out to everybody with limited marginal cost. And so I think our approach has generally been to say maybe not lowest common denominator but to really try and broaden the base of customers that we're building for and not cut people out on the basis of technology. But I think we've been able to find ways to do that and deliver really rich high quality experiences for our customers in a way that also meets our fundamental goals around cost and scalability. Great. Yeah, so it sounds like all of you have kind of kept this lowest digitally native customer in mind as you've built out things. I'm curious and I know there's a couple of questions that are coming through in the chat. Maybe one last one for everybody. We've alluded to this a little bit already but the pandemic has certainly had its effect on the ability to particularly have more in person conversation with customers. And I'd be curious here from all of you as over the past year how you've adapted things to make sure you're still accommodating the needs of all of your customers across the digital native scale and where you perhaps see things that you've learned from that experience that you're going to kind of keep with you long term. I know this pandemic is going to be with us for at least another year, hopefully less but probably about that if we're being honest. What are the things you're carrying with you for the long term based on the things you've learned? Any sort of anecdotes you can bring up that really bolster this would be really great to hear. Luis, happy to start with you. Great. So we still don't know how the after COVID world would look like but what we always think and reflect with the Henry team is that we planted a seed for the future in education in Latin America. From my point of view, like working with tools and with technology and like no code also tools which actually help us scale and help us kind of be 24 seven for our customers of our students there was super important also the over communication, right? Like how the program is delivered and like where you can get access to information and like kind of over communicate because of being in a remote world was also something which was super useful for us. From my point of view during these times we were able to deliver high quality education in many places which was impossible to think just a few years ago, right? So in Henry we have students like from all cities from Latin America receiving the same quality as a student sitting in Buenos Aires or in Mexico City or in a town in the middle of Colombia, right? So regarding how I think that the education system will continue like after COVID. I think that like the learning method online is here to stay that learning method for reskilling based on like cohort based live lectures online careers with practical work since day one will be the best approach, right? Like understand what the companies are demanding and like teach careers and technologies which fill these needs. I think that this is something which is going to stay in a learning in an online, you know, online and live with interaction like maybe in your couch, in your own house but completely working together with our community like you are not navigating this alone. This community and this networking is super fundamental and it's something which is super like going to stay also after COVID like which was before COVID also with a whole, you know, presence life which is like networking but our challenge here is how to take this to the online level. So, you know, lots of also technology and no code like software is helping us. And also what has, you know, come to stay is the remote work, right? Like we still don't know how it's going to work like perfectly and to end but what we do know is that 87% of Henry Gratz work remote. And also in a remote world, LATAM is in a great position to capture not only, you know, local demands so this 25 million job openings I was saying at the beginning but also demand from US and Europe and all over the world because like specifically in US and Europe we have like the same time zone English proficiency and, you know, it's cost effective rates for companies in those markets. So I think that that, yeah, like we don't we don't know how it's going to work but we do know some, you know, key things which is remote work, cohort based live online careers and like this community and like the support in learning by collaboration and with peers those are things which COVID has accelerated definitely in Latin America and are here, you know, to stay. Great, thanks for that. Michael, Eli, any additional thoughts? You know, I mean, just super briefly, you know, we didn't build a business that we just wanted to be sort of pandemic resilient, right? We set out to build a business that could reach the needs of small scale farmers full stop, right? And we wanted to do that in a way that could be scalable and cost efficient driven by technology but I think it turned out that a lot of the stuff that we did along the way in order to do that put us in a really solid position when, you know, when lockdown came into effect in Kenya, when travel restrictions came into place and so on. And so, you know, obviously this has been, you know, a challenging last 18 months but I think, you know, farmers are farming people are eating, you know, the opportunity is bigger than ever. And I think if anything, we feel like, you know, we've been able to operate with quite a lot of continuity. And so I feel really, really grateful that that's been the case. And I, you know, I, yeah, I don't think that, you know, I don't know what it looks like to go back to quote normal and quote, but I, you know, I don't expect our business to sort of start suddenly doing a lot of stuff in person again beyond what we need to deliver value to our customers. Yeah. Michael, before you, before you offer some thoughts on the question, Mackenzie in the chat had a interesting thought that I think is relevant is hearing if there was any specific feedback that you had gotten. So it sounds like fundamentally I'm hearing that that you've, you've already, you're already in position where you're able to accommodate customer needs, but were there any particular elements of feedback that you saw some things from a strategic perspective, but, but during this past year so we're, we're notable saying, oh, like we probably should be emphasizing X a bit more based on some customer feedback loops. Michael, if you want to incorporate that into into your response to the question, but also Luz Nila, if you want to offer a follow-up to what you'd shared before, I think that'd be really helpful. Michael, you're starting. Okay, I start. Yeah. Completely like definitely we feedback is, you know, in the hearts of every Henry decision we're taking constantly feedback from, from our customers and for example, one thing that we are actually, you know, working on right now, an example and anecdote here is that we have a full-time career right now, right, like full stack full-time career and this, you know, region also with highest inequality rates obviously make that, you know, people who are actually working, it's impossible for these people to kind of access to this education, right. So we, we launched last year and since like last year we have lots of prospects or customers talking about like why don't we have an offer, like why don't we offer it to the market a part-time a part-time program, right and we started recovering feedback on how this part-time, you know, program should be and we started kind of, you know, building together the program. So we co-created together with our customers, together with a target which couldn't, you know, apply to Henry but was willing to change their lives, you know, working maybe in a call center to that person wanted maybe to start working in technology or policemen working in cyber security so, so we co-created the program with them we took, you know, feedback and we make kind of a pivot, a small pivot, you know, it's the same but part-time but maybe it wasn't in a roadmap but, you know, in the middle of pandemic people, you know, understood with this whole of, you know, education in technology is the brings a lot of opportunity, a lot of, you know, high-paying jobs and so on so people who were actually working and couldn't, you know, leave their jobs came to us, you know, knocking the door saying, hey, like we would love to start a program and they're, like we said, okay, like sit in the table and you know design it with us and we design a program we're actually about to launch and for us that is an example of feedback and how we, you know, pivoted and understood their situation in a COVID context where actually they couldn't, you know, move forward because they needed to work so yeah, that is one example in Henry. Michael? Yeah, to touch on a few of those things, the pandemic and then the feedback question so COVID really strengthened the business case I think for shelf life, I think independent pharmacies saw the need to there's power in numbers that we should join a large group who can buy together and I can access all the help that I can get in a single place and I can get financing that can really remove the inventory risk and I can get more help running my business and so we saw a really big surge in demand while we were also responding to updating our own operating model and certainly on the sales front, this is a big change in how the business is run there's a lot of market education that we still need to do and we had already planned to invest in more online sort of inbound sales, sort of enabling more asynchronous, remote learning about the system learning about how it would work with you and then signing up this way and then of course we already had the shelf life app but we made it far more engaging where we could actually on a routine basis be engaging and receiving feedback from clients through the period so those were all really quite good but I think there's two important parts for our business in particular here one is that it's not always for us just about putting more tech in the hands of the retailer or expecting them to use more or the patients to use more for us the pandemic has brought on a really challenging time in terms of the global health supply chain there is unbelievable shortages particularly in Africa we all know about the supply chain challenges around the world but a lot of the pain is being exacted on the continent shipping lanes being rerouted to help serve others in Europe and elsewhere availability is a real crisis point in a lot of places and we have needed to put a lot of our tech to invest in smarter and smarter more and more optimal allocations and what we're able to go out and procure and put on our client shelves and in that way we hope that the engine that is supposed to be serving these frontline health workers is hopefully getting smarter and smarter and that is a technology job as much as it is anything else and that is to say that it is also about what we're not investing in we have been really explicit about not trying to for lack of a better word chase trends there's a lot of talk about things that are really great in some context like telemedicine or direct to patient sort of online e-pharmacy really interesting models that serve different parts of the market in different countries but are as committed as ever to the fundamentals that good quality products should be available and affordable everywhere in every community and just because some of us around the world are working from home doesn't mean that any of that changes that you suddenly don't need your corner pharmacist anymore that you don't need to be able to pick up something affordably just out of the corner when you need it so I think one of the challenges for us as a tech team is trying to stay focused on those essentials and not jumping to whatever oh the world is changing let's jump to some you know let's presume that the health system for these countries is radically changing but it's absolutely not and it's been a really big part of the journey of saying no to things which I think is important for every found in every technology team but especially true in this period of real uncertainty Matt I'm happy to answer but also happy to have you continue guiding us Now go ahead I think you have to be great to hear your thoughts on I mean I was going to say something more just kind of a macro level but I think it really speaks to this tech touch question which is when we set out we said we're going to acquire customers through channels like radio road shows the type of thing where we could really connect with a customer remotely and they're going to send an SMS or key in a usd code and then we're going to give them a call and it's going to be this kind of like I don't want to say idyllic but like very remote fully automated approach and I think we just have again and again felt this pull from customers towards I want to learn about your product in person and initially that was something we thought really hard because I think we felt like well are we going to be able to build the level of scalability are we going to be able to get the unit economics right if we have that in person and I think increasingly it's something that we're leaning into and saying wow like actually we've built out this unbelievably powerful technology that drives our agent network and so we can have somebody come visit a farmer for a price that works great with the area of economics we can build a farmer to farmer referral program which is our second largest acquisition channel where you know you get that same sort of in person engagement but not from somebody who's a direct affiliate of Apollo and so you know I think we felt pre-COVID for sure and still throughout COVID a lot of customer pull towards in person you know saying sure I heard about you on the radio but you know I didn't know if it was real until I talked to someone right I want to not talk to someone who I go to church with or who you know who I speak the same language as or who lives in my community and so you know I think we've adjusted and I think it's been actually fine but I think you know we actually had to pull back in some ways from and add more touch in response to what our customers were not just saying but also demonstrating in terms of things like conversion rates across the funnel for channels with less touch versus channels with more touch. Yeah I think that's interesting we see we see it in a couple other other portfolio companies in which they've been using TV ads quite extensively and the whole idea of finding places that a broader variety of customers are at is a really exceptional way to try to broaden the customer base because it's much less relevant to what are being served I can add on Google and more of the channels that they already exist on so I think that's quite a number. Yes and for marketing we get great customers from radio we get great customers directly from agents but I think we had to say okay it's not going to just be the kind of what in Kenya folks call above the line channels. Yeah yeah certainly I'm realizing we are so we're almost done with time which is which is interesting I realize we could probably talk about this for hours we really wanted to there's one other question I wanted to ask you I think in particular given you have this you've got a lot of staff around the field so you lose for example you have your educators Eli you've got and Michael you've got agents on the ground working with farmers and pharmacies how do you still discuss this I think this culture of the tech touch relationship within your HQ staff so your software developers who may never have a touch point with a customer how have you really brought that into the culture so that it matches what's happening out on the ground I'll go first this is actually why we're named field from the very beginning just because we've always thought from the outset that this is actually where the magic happens this is the most important part of the business and even though we're going to be a tech company we're going to focus on being in the field it's where the customer is it's where the business happens and it's where we have to be and for the 10-12 years I've worked in Africa in African healthcare settings I've not found yet a better substitute to being there it is the least scalable option perhaps there's no substitute for being there right now I'm in Nairobi and we have two of our product managers and our CTO doing site visits going out in the field every single day we have a now that we can travel again all of our teams in Nigeria, Kenya and our small office in Berlin are all rotating and this is only to build the empathy and the connection to the user and the context that is very clearly for us required for building something that's appropriate and it's actually going to return on that investment and so it's not a very good answer but you got to go I think that's the only option for us yeah and in Henry Henry as Michael's and Eli's companies is a super mission-driven company so putting the way in the beginning of every meeting we do are like why we're here starting with why we're here to close the inequality gap in Latin America so putting this why in front of in every meeting every ritual we do from all hands to retros or meetups and also communicating we have a Slack channel for example which is called hashtag boom ever since Henry gets a job there's a bot which says boom Eli got a job in the United States working remote so this is the most important moment for us in the life cycle of the students right so this channel everybody celebrates around like wow yes we can do it so 100 booms to go to reach the 1000 booms for example so we so there's a lot of celebration culture that we promote we also have like kind of a fail fest so you know come and you know tell us which are your failures you know we want to understand we want to learn from that and also you know putting the stories of the customers of the students in the hearts of you know every decision we make in Henry like and also we are like in constant touch with Henry's because you know everything's online so we have you know the community online we have the classes online so we like everybody no matter you know what role you play in the Henry organization has to attend to graduations to kind of kickoffs you know in order to be in different you know moments of the cycle of the Henry life cycle of the student life so in order to you know get in touch with the reality and also feel the purpose of you know why you're here in the first place right so when we hire in Henry we look a lot to this you know are you compromised with the mission do you do you get that we are trying to move the needle in that time of education and also you know feel free to you know say whatever you think and speak up over everything if we should kind of make a pivot or you know in order to get to our mission in a better in a faster in a greater way of democratizing education so the constant touch with the with the people with the students from our staff it's you know crucial for us like we couldn't make it if we don't have you know our customers and our students feedback the whole time and iterating the way we do things in order to improve fantastic I mean Matt I know loose already ended with the boom so not sure I have too much to add other than that it's just so fun to be here talking about this topic with you know two other folks running such different companies but where there's so much shared overlap in terms of this constant healthy tension between you know where where technology has power and where you just got to be there and sit with the customer and understand so it's a joy to be here and thanks so much for hosting anybody has questions I'm sure there's some way to find me in this system so feel free to reach out yeah and with that with that closing note again so grateful to all three of you it's great getting a chance to hear more about about your approach to this this challenge it's good to see you good to see your faces again hopefully get a chance to meet in person again sooner rather than later but yeah so to Eli's point Katie who's one of our colleagues from Axion posted the respective websites of each company if you want to learn more about Henry Field and Apollo and I think also you can go to the the people tab on on socap and learn more about about each of us if you want to reach out on LinkedIn or just have any follow questions I know from experience that all three Michael Lewis and Eli are always responsive and happy to share more thoughts around what they're building so again very grateful for this conversation thank you all for attending and looking forward to learning more and sharing more in the future and this conversation will be recorded so I think it will be available on socap website in short order so you can share with others thanks again and have a wonderful rest of the day