 I want to start this evening by introducing Joan King-Solwin. Joan had two successful careers before coming to Stanford as a distinguished career fellow and most recently founding Elm Innovations. She was a managing director at Accenture and then the head of a college prep girl school. Joan's awareness of her connection to the earth came at an early age. She grew up in Iowa in the long shadow of a multi-generational family farm. And as a girl, Joan spent days walking and weeding fields and harvesting and preserving their bounty. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford in the School of Earth. And she leads a team exploring how to mitigate the environmental effect of livestock farming. Also here with us today is Kat Taylor. Kat received her bachelor's from Harvard and her JD MBA from Stanford. She's a champion of social justice and environmental well-being and advocates in accordance with her personal doctrine, good money, good food, and good energy. Kat launched the innovative Tomcat Ranch and Educational Foundation in Pescadero. She's also the co-founder and co-CEO of Beneficial State Bank, an Oakland-based community development financial institution whose mission is to bring beneficial banking to low-income communities in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner. And she's also the co-founder and managing partner of Radical Impact, a fund that partners with exceptional people to build businesses where financial success creates meaningful social change. To us here at Stanford, she is a Tomcat Center and a Styro Taylor Center founding benefactor. So it is with great enthusiasm that I welcome them and thank them for coming this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming them. Thank you. So I'm going to ask each of you some questions. And I want to jump straight into a topic where you both have aligned interests. We often hear about the extremely negative impact of livestock, particularly in terms of its environmental impact. Could you each speak to how some of the innovations you are championing can address some of these concerns? Kat, maybe we'll start with you. Maybe you could also speak to soil improvement and carbon sequestration from the perspective of the Tomcat Ranch and restorative land management. Thank you. Thank you for having us here. And I really look forward to hearing the next panel for the next generation of entrepreneurs. So my husband Tom Steyer and I took an approach to philanthropy that really isn't philanthropy at all. It has more to do with risk, capital, and experimentation. And we wanted to work at the systems level because a lot of solutions that fail for not taking a holistic approach, looking at the way cycles and dynamics are interdependent. We can't cover the whole landscape, and we tried to have some focus. My husband would prefer linear focus, but I'm an ethereal space case. So we settled on three areas of focus, good food, good money, good energy. And we created operating entities at the heart of each of those so that we would have the insights of real actors in the system make no mistake. We're not livelihood actors. Our family's health and well-being doesn't depend on any of those companies. And so in a sense, I'm not sitting in the same shoes of somebody who's truly seeking risk capital for entrepreneurial activity. But we do take risks and we do try to experiment in ways that de-risk activities for other actors in the system. So at the heart of good money sits the bank, beneficial state bank. It's about a billion dollars in assets with 17 branch offices in the West Coast and 260 employees. And it's really trying to prove that we can run banking as a quasi-public system that redounds social justice and environmental well-being and equal measure to financial sustainability. On the energy side, my husband started Next Gen in a variety of other nonprofits and political organizations trying to reactivate democracy by the people and set up by the dollars. At the heart of the good food work is Tomcat Ranch, which is a 2,000 acre cattle ranch in Fescadero, 50 miles south of San Francisco in a coastal environment. And that's really what we're gonna talk about today, I think, is what are the insights of that ranch in terms of how we treat our food system. Human beings have evolved with grasslands more than any other environment. And those grasslands have always been populated by ungulates. It's the ungulates that are codependent upon the grasslands and they create the ecosystem that benefits both. So ungulates are the most efficient converters of solar energy to muscle mass, which is really protein. And the way they do that is by eating grasses and having the ruminant stomachs in order to convert those very complex carbohydrates to sugars and therefore their own energy and their own growth. So what we were trying to do is not take the industrial and agricultural system that I grew up in as a 59 year old person as something that's just de facto, that's what we, past this prologue, we'll always have that, but really kind of pick it apart and see where we came off the rails. Cause we coexisted with grasslands and ungulates for a very long time, many more ungulates that are likely on the, and historically than are currently on the planet. So it isn't them per se that are bad for environment, but it's some way we sit in relationship to them that's gone askew. And it likely has to do with the scaling of industrial agriculture. I think still about 70% of agricultural activities are livelihood based, meaning small scale, single proprietor kinds of farm operations in the world. And at that scale, we're not running into the real problems which you have to do more likely with mass till with an inappropriate approach to soils and the basically the confined animal factory operation approach to livestock where they're very detached from their natural setting. So soils relate deeply to this, not only because they're super important to us, they are basically our most important natural commons. We feed the world with healthy soils. We have enough food in the world based on the landmass that we have to feed the world, but we have extreme problems of the quality of the food and the distribution or the location of the food. But if you think about historic times, the antecedents to all our deep bread baskets of the world, the most prolific agricultural lands are the sites of the great animal migrations. And that's really the key to soil development. So if you think of the Serengeti, you had multi-species herds with all sorts of other species, non mammalian like birds in particular that were drawn through an annual cycle by the rains. The rains are what inspired the annual growth of grasses. Most of them were perennials, not annuals. The symphony that happened to create those soils is really a very beautiful one and that's what we're trying to replicate at Tomcat Ranch. So as the rains start, the animals are bunched together. They have learned through natural selection to have their young all in one season of the year. So either spring or fall typically, they drop all their babies, it's confusion to the enemy. Predators can't pick off as many of the young if they happen all at once. Once the animals, the baby animals are ambulatory, which is for a cow, day one, they start the migration following the rains, really following the grasses. Bunched together, they keep more of their young and their units alive, their unit numbers alive because it's hard to pick off the animals on the interior and they move very rapidly to stay ahead of the predators. That creates a disturbance, a disruption of the grasslands. It's very beneficial for the grasses because they're eating just a light grazing, clipping off the tops of all those perennial grasses, not getting to the growing shoot and moving on. So how that translates into our ranch setting is we're trying to give our grasslands maximum days rest, but absolutely need that disturbance. If you don't have the disturbance, you have a single growth and in our setting, if we don't have the disturbance, we'd never open up the perennial seed bank because the annuals grow fast and they crowd out the perennials from the resources, sun and water that they need. Those animals move along at a rapid clip. They're stomping and their manure activate where soils really are created in the microbial community below the soil. Four fifths of all organisms in the world are nematodes. They live below the surface of the earth. The activity there is just replete, just amazing and what is happening is the carbon exchange. So right now we have too much carbon in the atmosphere and too much carbon in the oceans, not enough in the soils. You actually can't have too much carbon in the soils and that's the currency that that microbial community recognizes. So as plants are photosynthesizing, they are reaching down and offering carbon to the occupants of the soil which are traveling along the micro rhizomal highways and those are mostly microbes, searching out minerals that those plants need in order to exchange them for the carbon. They take the carbon, some of it they process in a way that transpires in the annual setting but a lot of it becomes durable carbon in the soil. The animals move along inspiring that activity and providing resource in those manures and also as they go along, the birds provide a symbiosis of picking off the main parasitic pathogens by eating the eggs that are laid in the animals manure. They move so fast they don't get a lot of the pathogens. They move down the cycle and then when the rains turn around, they turn around and they go right back up it and voila, those are the richest soils in the world. So taking that, nature is our model. Nature is always our model. Nature does magnificently. We don't need to do better. We just need to find a way to scale nature so that we can feed American populations where they are in working lands and that's enough for me for right now. Thank you, I was fascinating. Joan, if you could address the very novel approach that you're pursuing to significantly reduce livestock methane emission. And to thank you all for being here and thank you for having both of us here. Really honored to be here and you're right. This is an area where Kat and I have very similar interests and values in the work that I am leading. We too are seeking natural solutions to an issue that is a natural problem to be perfectly honest. So kind of understanding how systems work together, how the carbon cycle works and all that drives my work as well. So in addition to cows being very effective climate warriors who are capable of sequestering more and more carbon into the soil, they also have this unfortunate habit which was created by Mother Nature which is that in that ruminating stomach that Kat talked about, methane is formed and burped out. It is mostly burps by the way, not the other end but at any rate burps come out and methane is a very, very potent greenhouse gas many times more trapping of heat than carbon dioxide. And in fact the cows all over the world if you took all of their methane annually they would be burping about the same global warming as maybe 590 million cars, twice as many cars as we have in the United States. So it's a substantial issue and it really is just about the design of the animal. But in Australia, there was a group of farmers and researchers who do practice kind of regenerative grazing and kind of moving their cows around in order to properly disrupt but also to clip and to sequester carbon in the soil. There were certain months of the year when that really wasn't practical because of climate that the quality of forage was yucky. However, great news Australia is a coastal nation and there's plenty of grass growing in the sea. So they pulled some of the seaweed out of the ocean and lo and behold over a period of some time an accident was discovered which is a natural solution which is that a particular red seaweed has in it specialized cells that have some bioactive compounds that when fed to cows in very small amounts almost completely wipes out the methane from digestion. Almost completely. So this happened in Australia but we here in the Bay Area became curious is this a little fluke that only can happen in Australia? You know, is there something particular about those breeds, their feedstock, whatever? So I formed a nonprofit at that moment to raise some money for a proof of concept to bring this idea to light and to really explore whether in the US context we could achieve some of the same results in terms of the methane mitigation but also really look hard at the system impacts. What else is happening with the animal? What else is happening to the milk products or meat products that are made by that animal? What's happening to the soil? What's happening to the fecal matter of that animal, et cetera, et cetera? So we're in the middle of that process and about to pivot into another stage of our incarnation as out of the nonprofit scenario and into a for-profit enterprise but it's really based on also natural systems that reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of livestock production. Thank you, very interesting. You are both role models for many women and I'm wondering if you could each describe pivotal moments on the journey that brought you to where you are in particular where you have basically become advocates for social innovation and sustainability. I'll take something quick, sure. So as Stacy mentioned, I was with Accenture. I was a managing director for Accenture for 20 years and was kind of an early member of that practice as a woman and one of the very first managing directors as a woman and so I became very interested not only in serving our most important clients but in institutionalizing some mentoring for women in Accenture to kind of continue to keep the pipeline going and I formed a global mentoring program for women for the banking group that I was a part of and traveled a great deal meeting with women and trying to help them brainstorm issues they might have with getting the right assignments or finding the right mentors or any of those kinds of things and I loved meeting these women. They were from great universities like the ones that Kat went to and et cetera and however over dinner with these women or over a cup of coffee many times I discovered that coming in in their 35th year or in their 37th year I was noticing that they had not really learned how to embrace risk in a successful way or they were afraid to ask for help in a constructive way. A number of things that I really wish they had learned when they were in high school or in junior high school and at that time Atlanta which is where I lived was launching a new college prep girl school and the purpose of that school was to be to push young women and girls into areas of discomfort by design and to give them an opportunity to do things that were very hard whether they were in leadership or public speaking or in STEM or other kinds of things and I just thought this was great. It had the potential to be a totally different way of these young women to see failure and to see growth and all these kinds of things and so I became an angel investor in that school and a mentor at that school and finally in my 20th year at Accenture I said this school is innovating. It is changing the social landscape. It is going to change the trajectory of a lot of girls' lives and I wanna be more a part of that so I left Accenture to go and earn the English and education degree that allowed me to get more involved in the lives of those girls and that was a real turning point. Yeah. Sounds like it. Kat, pivotal moment. I'm so glad you did that. I'm so. I am too. Yeah. No, I mean I just because I don't think anyone needs to be sort of a genderist to notice what's actually going on which is that for a time immemorial the female of the species not having the might makes right not being the dominant from a strength standpoint had to develop a lot of skills that are now much in demand much in demand because they are the skills of collaboration and cooperation and coordination political skills, et cetera. When people come to my husband to ask for advice men his age, he always tells them to act more like a woman and he doesn't mean that as a genderist statement either but it is, this is a time when you know we're two degrees away from climate disaster and our economic solutions are not averting social chaos when every market and every sector is failing us essentially we have to think of something new and it really has to do with how we're all gonna get along and not be spit out by the planet like a watermelon seed because it doesn't really need us. So all those skills being at a premium they nonetheless the flip side of that coin is I think the very same group through evolution who has developed cultivated those skills there's an ameliorative or an accommodationist kind of instinct that comes with it to go along and get along which it doesn't serve us in many settings first and foremost seeking venture funding let's put it straight. So I would say I started out with a natural inclination towards social enterprise and mostly what that means to me is I seek multi-stakeholder models. I'm not looking for a transactional approach between two parties because it always fails it's sitting in a larger context it's just fooling itself for a while. You could think of it sort of like we're on a 100 year chess board but right now the spoils go to who wins the next move the next move is not gonna win the game the next move is just gonna win some spoils in the short term. So how do we get the timeframe and the perspective of the whole chess game? It's through a multi-stakeholder model. One of the ways that does that is if we think of the next generation or preferably the next seven generations then we start taking into account everybody who's affected by every decision we make. So the bank has a multi-stakeholder model it's serving not just the equity shareholder it's serving probably first and foremost the depositors because that's the lion's share of our funding it's the most powerful funding because it's very low cost 50 basis points and it leverages our equity capital at least 10 to one so if you're familiar with financial models that have operating leverage that's magic that's just magic. So we should actually be more concerned about what our depositors think than our equity shareholders they hold more of the cards. By the way we also serve our customers, communities the planet, the public at large because banking is a quasi-public system and it should serve those interests. I had a conversation this morning with several of the groups that I work with about mutualism I'm over enlightened self-interest it still has self-interest in it, it isn't working we've tried it for a long time it's crashing the planet. So mutualism to me means that we take actions as if everybody knows that we took that action we're reputationally on the hook for that and we hope that everyone else takes actions with us in mind it's a multi-stakeholder model we now have devices that will help us do that in how we photograph, shop, invest and vote and I'm not even talking electoral politics I'm talking about voting proxies if we all used our phone to communicate through photos that's a picture is a thousand words things going on around us and we banded together and had community sort of packed about how we shop, don't shop for things that are actually working against you don't invest in things that are working against you don't vote your proxies whether that's in a company setting or the electoral politics in ways that are against you we have an opportunity to create a network effect the internet is nothing without us if we all used our power to boycott, to withhold we could shut down the internet but we aren't yet coordinated to do that so the very 99% who feels like it has no power actually has the utmost power if we all get together and coordinate and depict we can, so in electoral politics which has had a negative network effect for the last 40 years what has happened is when the bell curve of opinion shows up we get a good result when the bell curve doubts that the middle is gonna show up, only the tails show up and then we have an internecine war between two extremes and wonder why we have to live with either but none of the middle of the bell curve is convinced that the best of the bell curve is gonna show up if we reverse that that's a network effect like the phone system like the internet and now because we have smartphones in almost everyone's hands and massive computing power and the ultimate in transparency we can create a network commitment to show up as the middle of the bell curve and actually get the ends that would be good for everybody at once in a multi-stakeholder model so sorry to sound so sort of theoretical but I actually think it's really important I'll give you an antithesis of it, privatization sometimes helps us experiment charter schools really good way to experiment but it's not good in the main it's a single transaction between two parties and it leaves everyone else out so if you privatize prisons, bridges, schools, elections you don't get good outcomes for everybody so I'm all in for multi-stakeholder mutualism I'd like to ask a question this I think will have to be our last question just because we want to get to the panel as well but I want to turn back to entrepreneurship and I'm wondering if based on your experience how can an entrepreneur decide when the time is right to launch her own venture and with whom, who to launch with? I imagine some people have that question in the audience well a general thought that I have on that is that the best way to launch is in a way where you launch and launch again and launch launch and you're continually learning through each step the lean launch pad methodology often used here at Stanford is a great example of that where you identify kind of through a business model canvas where the greatest risks or unknowns are and without a formal launch you head right in there and either develop a tiny prototype or you visit directly with the stakeholders you pencil out the key risks in that area and you go from that one to the next one and the next one and the next one and you are kind of waltzing ever so slowly into being the entrepreneur that you see yourself as and without kind of putting everything out there in just a big bang kind of launch and so I know that with the work I've been doing I've been leveraging a great deal of non-dilutive capital that is philanthropic capital to explore around the edges of this innovation before I really head out with the go to market answer so my thought would be if you can launch over time in kind of an elegant little wave motion I'd try to do that. So I asked my colleagues because they're way more experienced at Radical we are dominantly female younger entrepreneurs former entrepreneurs now investors and they had some really good answers which I recognize because we do practice them but they said the numbers in venture are just the most dismal for gender parity they're really quite pathetic and there are practices that we can see are causative of that and one of them is that most female pitches get interrupted by a question I think it's something like within 90 seconds of launch so if you can't beat them join them so what they are counseling a lot of women until we change that ethic they are saying anticipate that question and let the question launch your pitch so think about what are they gonna and the question is likely gonna be something to try to shut you down like to just make the pitch end quickly so they're gonna go for your Achilles heel figure out what it is and have a really good answer that allows you to tell the rest of the narrative I'm sorry to say such a sort of negative thing but we're in migration to a better system so we might as well be wise about how to approach it the other thing is to have lots of proof points before you go to market I think this is true for any entrepreneur venture still is just not right it's not the kind of risk capital that is ready not to see where the payback is like the revenues, the contracts the whatever it is that show that they can write down on paper and say here's the break even here's where we start to make money even in the impact space maybe even especially in the impact space and so you have to do two things that once you have to get yourself ready to raise money and you have to work on sales you just have to have some sales don't go in there without ink on the line and then the last thing is I encourage people and they do too to go towards alternative sources of capital when you open the aperture and make the problem bigger the solution set gets bigger too and you will find more resources and more constituencies of support that way and you can articulate the impact beyond financial you still have to show the financial but if you can show transformative impact social or environmental you're gonna garner an audience with some of the new impact capital that's pretty exciting and is quite willing and ready to be non-traditional Thank you both for great advice we're gonna now turn to the next portion of the event I wanna mention that we're gonna have time at the end of the afternoon for the audience to ask all the speakers questions but please now let's just take a moment to thank Cat and Joan