 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Morgan Berman. She is the founder and CEO of MilkCrate, a platform that measures and grows in social and environmental impact. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I want to start off by telling us a little bit about MilkCrate. Sure. After we're a tech company, we got our start about four years ago. We've grown and changed a lot in that time, but what we really focus on doing is helping big organizations, either for or non-profit, engage people in social and environmental impact in a game app. And we build custom versions of this app based on the goals of each client. So whether it's a big company that wants to engage employees in volunteering and riding a bike to work or a non-profit that has kids that they're trying to get go to art museums and encourage them to go more often, we can gamify both of those behaviors in unique apps and then those clients have their own kind of engagement experience for hitting those goals. Well, it's a really neat idea. Tell me how you came up with it. Well, it's, like I said, it's changed and grown over time. Originally, it was my own personal desire to grow my impact in the world. I grew up in this kind of crunchy, you know, kind of wonderful bubble, I guess, where I, my mom would only buy food from the farmer's market. She was actually a farm to table chef, one of the first female chefs in Philly. She wrote books, Rating and Reviewing Thrift Shopping. So I grew up with like fresh local food, thrift shopping. There was a community garden behind us. She was a hipster before her time. Exactly. My mom's like the original hipster and my dad was also an entrepreneur. So when I moved to West Philadelphia, which is like the crunchiest part of the city by far, I was trying to figure out how to ride a bike in the city for the first time and how do you compost with worms when you live in an apartment and you don't have a backyard? Where's my nearest food co-op so I can start feeding myself this way? And my interest grew and grew as I started learning about things like climate change. And I went to a Bill McKibben talk about fossil fuel divestment. And there are these children in Haiti holding a sign that said, connect the dots, your actions affect me. And it really hit home how my privilege as this like Western world person with this degree and all these things that most people don't have that every choice I made about my life was having a direct impact on someone the other side of the world or often not even that far from me. And so I wanted to figure out how to live my life in a way that my values weren't conflicting with my actions. So I applied for graduate school in sustainable design to originally the idea was to help design sustainable buildings but I quickly learned that even though I had this degree architects weren't gonna take me seriously. And so I pivoted and took all my extracurriculars in industrial design and interactive media. And I had the head of the department for interactive media actually helping me with the first mock-ups of Milk Crate which was all about designing an app to help people live their values particularly around sustainability. And then after a few years of learning and growing we actually Forbes picked us to be one of the five companies on the Forbes under 30 stage and that catapulted us onto this path of suddenly going from a school project to a startup company that needed to raise money and have a business model. And I was like, what's a business model? So after about two years of learning and growing we realized there was this opportunity with big corporations to engage employees in sustainability and that there was a pain point on this enterprise level that we could solve. And what was the pain point? I mean I think that's the thing is that we can all say that it's great for companies to get their employees to ride more bikes and to start a recycling program. But why do they care? Yeah. And that's what investors would always ask me and I'd be like, and I had to learn the answer and the answer is 75% of the S&P 500 issues a CSR sustainability report every year and that has grown exponentially over the last few years and the reason they do that is because employees want to work for a company that's making a difference. 45% of millennials will take a 15% cut or more in their salary to work for a company that makes a difference in the world. The reason that B-Corps are growing exponentially around the world, all of these things, this business is a force for good in the world, it's the norm now. Whether you realize it or not that's what's driving people to work for a company, to stay for a company, for customers to buy a product from a company. That's how people are starting to make their important life choices. And so now companies invest in having a corporate social responsibility, not only director, but a whole department. And what we learned when we were kind of researching how to figure out this whole business model was that CSR directors, their top three pain points are engaging employees, tracking and analytics, and having a scalable cost effective program across the whole company. So we realized our product could do all three of those things. And I was like, Oh, I think that's a business model when you solve the major pain points for an important like corporate role in the world. So that's how we kind of started moving in that direction and we started getting validation. And then we realized we also could work with nonprofits when they started reaching out. And so now we've kind of filling both of those needs that are a little bit different. So you're gamifying, making it into a game, making it fun for employees or clients or customers or whoever the target audience is. So what kind of rewards are they getting for this? How do you light up their bulbs? I mean, there's, I'm actually giving a lecture on this at Wharton on Monday. So it's top of mind. You've got intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, right? There are the things that you do because they make you feel like you're being your authentic self where you're expressing your values and that lights up your brain in a way that nothing else ever will. Then you have external extrinsic motivations, things like prizes, but also social acknowledgement. Seeing that you are functioning the way your peers are, that sense of I'm not alone or I'm normal, that's a really important validation as a human. So seeing that you're in the top 10 or that you're above average, that feels good. So we have things like your rank and how you're doing on your team and how your team's doing in comparison to other teams in your Millcrate community. And then there's the actual rewards. So university clients of ours have given tickets to sporting events or credit to the bookstore. Corporate clients give certificates to local, sustainable restaurants and coffee shops near the headquarters. We're actually now partnering with an amazing B Corp company united by Blue that has ethically made and environmentally thoughtful products like mugs and candles and things like that. So it depends on the client, what their goals are, what their budget is, what's gonna motivate those people. But really the beginning part, when you first download the app, the first couple of challenges are things like answer this question about how important is it to you to live your values? So you get them thinking in that mindset about why they're using this app. Priming them to think of them. Priming them, exactly, like getting them in that head space. That's the most important thing we can do in the beginning is just to help them understand why they're using this. And then the rewards are almost, they're a distant second. Okay, okay. So you are a B Corp and are there many other B Corps here at Grace Hopper? I mean, what's your experience? As you said, it is now the norm that the business is functioning this way. But B Corps are still a minority, relatively speaking. There's a lot of room for growth there, yeah. I think having the CSR report is the norm, but doing everything you possibly can, there's still a lot of room in that department. One thing I saw that I loved was that instead of giving out swag, Facebook was actually donating money to non-profits that help women code. I was like, that's great. So I haven't seen any B Corps here. That I've, yeah, I don't think I've seen any other than Roar for Good. Which we had on the show earlier, yeah. So Yasmin and I are definitely two Philly B Corps. I would love to see more tech companies go in that direction. But yeah, there's a lot more growth in these happen. They're about, I think, I actually just got to meet one of the other founders of B Lab that does B Corp certification. He gave a great presentation answering in more detail, why do companies do this? It was amazing how many stats he had. I was like, yes. But 2300 B Corps, and I think something like 16,000 benefit corporations. So they're slightly different things, but yeah, it's a growing movement for sure. So talk a little bit about your experience at this Grace Hopper Conference. It's day one, we're nearing the end of day one. How would you describe the energy, the atmosphere, what's your feeling about being here in Orlando? So I've heard over and over again people saying it's just so good to be in a room full of women who are all doing awesome things. And it keeps reminding me of when I went and saw Wonder Woman with my parents. And I remember sitting in the theater and kind of going like this and being like, oh, my cheeks are wet. Oh, I think they're crying. Oh, I think I'm having feelings. I think it's because I've literally never seen on a screen several dozen or hundreds of women just being powerful physical beings with like aggression and skill and it having nothing to do with sexuality or being attractive. And it was just the first time I'd seen that in my 32 years of existence. And to just, there's something so powerful about having that icon, that image, reflected back at you to see, oh, if you can do that, I can do that. And I actually for the last 13 months have been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and competing. And so to see women being physical strong warriors and only women and it not being sexualized, it was like, oh, that's the feeling I get when I compete. And when I'm with my teammates, my female teammates, like, anyways, I think that's kind of what's happening here is that sense of like, these are my people and we are doing amazing things. And to just see each other when, you know, historically you never got to see a room like this. I think it's an unfortunately necessary experience to be reminded that we are out there, we are doing this and it's growing. And there is a sisterhood in the belonging that you talked about earlier too. And that you see men who don't seem particularly uncomfortable here. They can kind of, they're like, okay with this. And they get to kind of know what it's like to be in the minority. And I kind of want to ask them, like, how are you feeling? What's this like for you? But like to see everyone like flipping the ratio and we're all good, so that means like if we could get somewhere more like parody, I think that could be pretty magical. So as a female founder, a female technologist, what is your advice for the younger versions of you who maybe are just graduating from college or maybe even younger than that and sort of wondering, can I even do that? Can I aspire to be that? You absolutely can. And I gave some advice at the end of my session earlier and my two bits of advice were detach yourself from any negative association with the word failure. Try and come up with a new word for yourself if you need to because learning and growing is what you're gonna do your whole life. And so taking risks, that's what you need to be doing every single day. And so pushing against those things that scare you. The second was to find a mentor because no one piece of advice I can give is ever gonna fill the role that having a mentor can give you over the course of a career or even just for a few years. The amount that I've grown in just the last four years of building my company with some of my mentors, it's incredible. So find someone who reminds you of who you wanna be and then latch on to them and get them to help kind of carry you along. Great, well Morgan it's been so fun talking to you. Thank you, this has been great. Thanks for joining us. I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando just after this.