 You're ready to go. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Susie Lee and I lead program-related investing at the WK Kellogg Foundation, and I will be the moderator for our session. It's an honor to partner again with SoCAP to host this critical conversation on Rethinking Risk to Unlock Capital and Innovation. False perceptions of risk are often huge barriers for women and people of color and prevents capital from flowing equitably to talented fund managers and entrepreneurs, and our goal for today's session is for each of us to ask ourselves, how do we unlock opportunity by reframing risk? The structural paradigm that reinforce perceptions of risk requires systems change to shift, and we will learn how our panelists are disrupting the risk paradigm and paving new pathways. Structural and systemic racism are the problem that we at the Kellogg Foundation aim to tackle at every level of how we invest and who we invest in. We're focused on taking a systems approach to achieving long-term, sustainable, positive outcomes, and to help us achieve that, we invest in fund managers, entrepreneurs, and social enterprises across the risk spectrum through vehicles, including mission-related investments, program-related investments, and grants, and you'll see that represented across our portfolio that's on our panel today. And today we've convened a dynamic group of leaders from our portfolio who are redefining risk through their work, and they're addressing the root causes of racial inequity from across the ecosystem. So let's dive in. I'd like to introduce our panelists. We have Malin Yen, founder and partner of Operator Collective, David Sharp, CEO of Urban Advisors, and Tim Spurlock, CEO of American Diesel Training Centers. And as a reminder to the audience, you're welcome to drop comments or questions in the chat throughout the event. And I have an opening question for all three of our panelists. Please open by telling us about yourself, your organization, and how are you dismantling barriers to economic opportunity? And Malin, I will turn it over to you to get us kicked off. Great. Thank you, Susie. Thanks so much for inviting me. Such an honor to be here. So I am the founder and partner of a fund that we launched in December of 2019 called Operator Collective. And first of all, I guess one of the barriers of dismantled is that I have the most unlikely background for a fund manager. I actually started out my career as an intellectual property attorney and have had a number of startups ever since, but it's folks like Kellogg, who actually came in as the first institutional investor in Fund 1 that really helps set the stage. But what I wanted to do, so Operator Collective is a venture fund. It's a $50 million venture fund. And what I observed as being part of the broader venture ecosystem is the VC world tends to revolve around VCs and founders, and which are two very important parts of the venture ecosystem. But as you build and grow and scale any company, you need operators, people who have built, scaled and run companies before. But the operators, which is what I mostly identify as having spent much of my life as an enterprise operator, the venture world was not accessible to us. And then, and I realized if, but the VCs and the founders did want to bring operators in, they just didn't overlap with our networks. And then, and so I built a fund that has 137 operator LPs. And the operator LPs, because you tend to know people like you have built and scaled up companies like Cisco and Stripe and Salesforce and beyond, but they're also 90% women, 40% people of color. And so what I wanted to do was create a natural way to bring together these networks of people that needed each other, that wanted each other, but didn't naturally intersect, because we all know that forced diversity doesn't work. But if you can create something that each side needs and find a easy way to make it accessible, then, then, then I knew that we could do things like expand wealth creation and literally change the face of venture from the ground up. Great. Thank you, Mallon. And David, over to you. Great. So David Sharp, CEO of Urban Advisors. And from, from, from our perspective, by way of background, really quickly, I was, you know, functioned as a traditional investment banker for a number of years, then ran community development, the investment side within a bank, and then launched Urban Advisors, where we work with a number of impact investors helping to design and structure funding programs and funding initiatives. And so we're based in the Southeast, but most of our work was, was, was national, and actually very little was actually within the Southeast. And some of our clients really said, you know, there's upward mobility challenges within the Southeast, and we really like to see some more product in that marketplace. And so in 2018, we designed or launched a fund called the Up Community Fund. From, from those of you that remember the upward mobility study, the Southeast was the hardest hit area for folks of color. And actually one of the findings was if you were low income, you lived in the Southeast, you need to move. And so we didn't like that as a finding. And so the creation of the Up Community Fund, one of the things that we focused on here is we're not necessarily honing in on tech related companies, but we're focusing on kind of, I'm going to say the main street businesses, somewhat of the lifestyle businesses and traditional businesses in general. And the focus is, how can we provide the right kind of capital that's flexible, that integrates with a form of advisory services, where we can really partner with those firms, because there's a huge distrust of institutional, of institutions. So if it's a bank, which represents an institution is a lack of trust. If it's a, you know, government agency, which represents an institution is a lack of trust. And so for us being a firm of color, working with a portfolio of small businesses that look like us and we can relate with them and they can relate with us, what we wanted to do was to break down the trust factor and then begin to help them actually work through the challenges and dynamics that they have as small businesses. And so that's one of the key themes around dismantling barriers. One, they actually look to us to say, wow, there's a firm of color that actually is a capital allocator. We don't really know any of those that actually is owned or authentically owned and can really make those investment decisions. And then then from there is, hey, can I really talk to you about a real challenge that I'm having with my business? We'd rather hear that upfront or along the way as opposed to after the fact when it's too late, when nothing can be done to help. Great. Thank you so much, David. And on to you, Tim, you're a bit of a different, you're a little bit different than the other panelists here. So we'd love to hear, share it with the audience. I don't, do I have to say anything? I just want to sit here and listen. So good morning, afternoon, somewhere in between. My name is Tim Spurlock. I'm the founder, co-founder and CEO of American Diesel Training Centers. I have no background in anything mechanical, and I definitely have no background in anything finance or banking related. But what my background is, and I was talking about a little bit about it, is I spent 25 years in educational publishing, which now everybody calls educational technology. And for nine years, I ran sales for a, I would call it a boutique global business that produced and distributed courseware for automotive and truck programs around the world. So if you were teaching people how to be mechanics, you were either using our product or we were trying to get you to use our product. So I've seen the trades, the skilled trade shortage all over the world. I did a lot of business in South Africa, and I sat in South Africa at the opening of an apprentice academy and saw the CEO of Imperial Motors talk about, there were no mechanics in South Africa. And I would hear the same thing in industry here in the United States. People would call us up. We were an educational publisher. Companies would call us up and they would say, we'd like to use your material. And we'd say, it's really meant for an educational program. And they would say, we don't care. We're hiring people with no experience and trying to figure out how to get them trained. So I thought there's really an opportunity here. And if you really ask me, I say this all the time, but if you really ask me the number one reason we found at American Diesel Training Centers was that I just couldn't take seeing students come out of a typical technical training program in the United States, specifically for-profit programs, $40,000 in student loan debt. And the interesting thing was is that what every program out there, I'm talking a post-secondary community college or a technical for-profit program, they don't train for what industry wants. So we decided to create a disruptor to do exactly that. So we found at American Diesel Training Centers in 2017. It's a five-week intensive hands-on program that we aligned specifically to tasks that industry wants. So think basic stuff like what you take your car in for, brakes, electrical, light diagnostic work, emissions, which is called after-treatment. So five weeks, 25% of the price of the typical for-profit school. And in four years, we become one of the largest producers of diesel technicians in the United States. There's a couple of interesting things that, and then I'll stop. The thing that we are most proud of is that after a five-week program, people make $16,000 a year more than they did when they entered the program. So we are literally lifting people, and we have stories every class, out of the poverty level into not only a great industry where you never have to worry about a job, but career paths that are completely unlimited. And we also are very diverse. This is a great industry, and it's open to anyone who wants to partake in it. So our numbers are about 42% people of color, 58% white. And so we really are super proud of the opportunities, and I can sit here and tell stories forever. The opportunities that we've given to people, since we've been around for four years, we've seen people who started here in 2017 and what they're doing now. And it really is just mind-blowing what we've been able to do, partnering with our students and partnering with great partners like Social Finance. So that's it, Susie. And I'll thank you again for hosting the session. Great. Thank you, Tim. And I'm going to follow up with you just to, if you could share with the audience a bit more about that partnership with Social Finance, Upfund, and a bit about the income share agreements, the career impact bond, and really tying it to this theme of de-risking opportunity. And maybe share a bit about the workers and the students who want to access this program, because as you've articulated, it really is a stepping stone to high quality, good paying jobs. And so can you share a bit about how perhaps the barriers that students face and how the financing partnership unlocks the... Yeah. So like most startups, we tried everything. And here's the funny thing. If you read my original business plan in 2017, we were just going to be a cottage business in Columbus, Ohio. And once we started, we started getting calls from companies all over the country. Well, can you be here? Can you come to Michigan? Can you come to California? Can you come to Florida? Well, that's a little tough for a startup. But the business model was that we would charge companies just a flat fee. And in exchange for that fee, they would get a proficiently trained entry level technician. And it kind of worked, right? It kind of worked. But we were actually more successful at recruiting students than we were companies willing to take a risk and stroke a check for somebody who essentially was very improvement. We tried everything. We tried private student loans. We tried having students make payments. But things really came together. I mean, the complete catalyst for this business is when we met Tracy and the folks of social finance, and they created for us a career impact bond, which allows us to get funding for all of our students. So the way the career impact bond works is that we receive our tuition from the career impact bond. There's a significant risk share as part of that. So if I don't do my job and produce a solid entry level technician who stays employed, American Diesel goes away. So there's a huge incentive for us to produce a quality product. The beautiful thing for our students is that they pay no money upon entrance of the program. And then they actually don't start paying on their income share agreement until two months after they leave the program. So they get a really nice runway. But the beautiful thing about what we do is we structured it so the payments are manageable, right? So students come out of here. Our average starting salary is around $40,000 a year. Students come out of here. Their payments are, and this includes a really nice starter tool set that everybody needs, their payments are $317 a month for four years. That's totally capped, right? At four years, it's done. So students come here. They don't have to pay any money to come to American Diesel. In fact, the career impact bond also funds their travel here and it funds their five-week hotel stay here. We put them up in a real nice all-street setup and it funds $400 in meals. So students can come here. They literally don't have to go a dime out of pocket. In fact, if they manage their meal-run money, right, they can lead with cash. And our placement rate is, it's 91%, but it's essentially 100%. Anybody who comes here who wants a job will end up getting hired. The cherry on top of the ice cream, and I know Suzy will probably want to talk about this, is that we've been able to really crack the code in terms of bringing in employer partners who are willing to participate in the, in the basically the de-risking part, right? So many of our students leave. They go to work for a company and that company says, hey, guess what? As long as you work for me, I'm going to make that $317 a month income share agreement payment for you. As long as you work for me, right? We also, 17% of our students, and this thing is growing like a hockey stick, 17% of our students come in already employed by a particular company. We do recruiting, private labor recruiting campaigns for those companies that advertise great opportunity, great career. So what we do is we screen the applicants, we send candidates to the company, and the companies hire them based on attitude and attitude, right? And then they send them to us. So these students are being paid for training, all their expenses are handled, and the ISA payments are handled. And right now that's 17%, but our class, we just pushed out of Columbus here on Friday, it was 100%. Our class we had coming through in December is 75%. So you're going to see that 17% very quickly go to 50, 60, 70%. So we really do have, we have everyone participating in this. I take a risk. The students take a risk or trainees take a risk by coming here. The employers take risk by investing proactively in these, in our students. And the end game is, is our average student leaves here with a $16,000 raise out of the gate and a, we consider ourselves to be a portal into the business. Like there are CEOs of trucking companies all over the place who started out as technicians. So that's the fun thing about what we do. Awesome. Thank you. That is such a great story of really how you're shifting the risk away from the worker and the student and really on to employers, the financing partner and, and you as the training provider, which is I think really where the risk needs to be. And, and that's unlocking those opportunities and breaking down barriers for, for workers. So thank you, Tim. Shifting, shifting to Malin and David and both of your funds and organizations provide capital and resources to diverse founders, women and entrepreneurs of color. Share a bit about the barriers that entrepreneurs use support face and really how your model and how your support unlocks opportunity for them. Maybe we'll start David with you. Okay, great. Sure. So, so, so for us, I mean, we went in with a thesis of really helping underserved disadvantaged businesses, specifically businesses of color. But at the same time, we kind of got the one two punch because, you know, COVID hit right at that right at that same time. And so for us, one of the things that we that we recognize is that, I think we've all heard statistics around, they were anticipating a 40 to 50% loss of black owned businesses as a result of COVID. And I have to admit, out of our 16 companies, there was probably some point along the journey where 14 of those 16 were probably teetering on going out of business, especially based upon the combination of COVID. We were probably looking at maybe one or two at this stage that that are facing that potential reality. But the majority of those businesses have have weather that storm and have made it through. We actually helped the majority of our companies secure secure PPP financing. And so what happens is a as a fund manager is that, you know, there's no quote unquote, drawing a line in the sand. It's like whatever your portfolio company needs is what you wind up finding yourself doing. So we were beginning to function as co CEOs, co COOs, CFOs, and we would walk dogs on the weekend for some of the portfolio managers if we needed to. And so, but as a result of that really being in the trenches, really working with these companies, I mean, the things that we saw as themes that were repeatable for the process was, you know, bookkeeping without question was a challenge for every single company. I mean, there's just no way around it. We actually had to bring a bookkeeper on our team. And we'll probably add another one or two to just come in at the very beginning and help the companies migrate through the process as it relates to bookkeeping and financials. Another another area is, you know, bringing in someone who can really help them to review certain contracts. I find that when some of the small businesses get into a jam, it's well, you know, let's, hey, here's an opportunity, let's jump on it because we need it really quick. And no one's really reviewed any of the documents. And so they find out that they get into a really bad deal. For a lot of the companies, we had to clean up their balance sheets. You know, as you're a struggling business, you know, you're, you're reaching for whatever source of financing you could get your hands on. And so, you know, predatory lending, it, you know, to me or on some of the online lending, you know, the metaphor I use with the portfolio companies, it's like crack cocaine. It's like, I mean, I've never used it, but it's just a metaphor that, you know, feels really good for a few minutes. And, and after that, you know, it's, it's a really difficult situation to work yourself out of. And so that became an area that we really began to work with negotiating with some of those predatory lenders to, to get them to settle on some type of amount to help them clean up their balance sheets. Some of them may have had some, some tax challenges that needed to be cleaned up. And so we found that there was a lot of kind of, you know, a lot of, as these entrepreneurs, a lot of them were undercapitalized. They didn't necessarily have the staff. And so, you know, they're just focusing on keeping the lights on. But when you strip it away, a number of them really had good businesses. And Timothy, to the point that you mentioned earlier, we got a couple of companies that are at the trucking space. And, you know, going to some of these, you know, some of these more majority firms to get a truck repaired, the prices are ridiculous. And they'd love to have somebody on their staff that can come in and do some of those repairs at a much lower cost. So I'm, I'm connecting it to some of the folks here on the, on the panel. But that, that for us, I mean, between the bookkeeping, between helping them to make, you know, strategic decisions, beginning to talk about enterprise value. I mean, we really function more like a, like a private equity fund than a credit provider, although the underlying instrument was, was a credit product. Because what the businesses really needed was an advisory capacity or relationship, but it had to be someone that had trust. And so we spent a lot of time on the front end to establish trust with the entrepreneurs. So they could pick up the phone on a Sunday and said, Hey, David, I need to talk to you about, about something that's really going on. And in some cases, it requires a lot of work to fix. And in some cases, it's just a quick fix, but they just really didn't have anybody to collaborate with. So you want to be coming partners to the owners of the business. That's great. Thank you, David. And it just shows how so much more is needed beyond capital and money itself to really help these entrepreneurs thrive. So Malin, the businesses and the entrepreneurs and the founders that you partner with are, are quite different than the, the ones that David described. But can you share with us some of the, some of the challenges that, that the founders you support face and really how your model is so unique in helping them grow and thrive? Yeah. So I do enterprise software. So, so a little bit different from what you guys focus on. But I think a lot of the themes are the same, right? The risks in running any business is that when you're trying to recreate the wheel, each individual person is trying to recreate the wheel and figure it out on their own. They may have a great idea, but they, any roadblock from, from lending, right, to just a good lawyer, just people who have been there, done that, you can accelerate the success of them. And so what we wanted to do with, with both actually, when you look at how we've sort of de-risked, it's actually the founders that we invest in, but it's also the, the operators who have been left out of venture who wanted to access venture. But for us de-risking, so let's actually talk about that first, because on the operator side, the ones who have invested in our fund, right? And then the fund invests in the founders is that these really highly talented, you know, highly skilled, highly experienced individuals who had just not had the opportunity to invest. And investing is not just about, oh, you know, you hear about, it's like, oh, you should just Angel invest, right? But Angel investing and losing your money, right? When wealth creation is already concentrated amongst a single dominant homogenous group, it's not, a lot of us who are not part of that dominant homogenous group can't just Angel invest and not have, you know, and not have that, you know, and just do it in ultra risky investments. So what I wanted to do was make it easy and safe, right? And a way of not every single one of these operators trying to recreate the wheel to learn how to Angel invest, how to source companies to the efficiencies. And then second, when you invest, you want to have a portfolio. So me as an individual operator, maybe I can't do 20 or 30 investments. I maybe can do one or two, which is not diversification, but through our fund, they can actually, they invest in obviously all the companies that we've invested in because they've invested in our fund. Second, on the operator side, even though there's all these ultra talented, mostly women and people of color, 70% of them have never invested in venture before. Our fund was the very first time. And when we asked them, they said, well, no one asked, I didn't know how to engage. And, you know, didn't have time, etc. And then so the, so our fund actually invests in founders from all backgrounds. We don't just invest in women and people of color. But we also knew is because you have these naturally more diverse networks from the deal flow that we get from our operators and others that are, you know, our, our founders do tend to be especially an enterprise software, which tends to be very homogenous. Our founders actually tend to be more from more diverse backgrounds. So 70% of our founders have a founder of color, almost 40% of our CEOs are founders of color. And then also with respect to, to women, 48% of our companies have a female founder, almost 40% actually have a female CEO. And this was not intentional, but, but it actually over, you know, almost 25% of our companies have actually about all female founding team. So, so when you can, when you can, when you can, you know, de risk, make it accessible for this group of ultra talented operators to come in, then you necessarily have a broader lens in which to invest in these founders who you might not have access to. And then so for these founders, it's a lot of what David and Timothy are doing, which is how do you, how do you reduce the risk by we have a, you know, 137 individual operators who have all built and scaled up companies, some of them are founders as well, and all of their networks that we can tap as they grow and scale their company because you need different things at different stages of the companies. And so that's what we do with our, with our founders as well, which is we make sure that we only invest in values aligned founders who we believe the world is are going to make the world a better place by treating people well, having great cultures and also obviously being ultra successful because this is about expanding wealth creation beyond the same, you know, group of which, you know, wealth has tended to, to, to circulate. And, and it's fun. And I'll just share a couple of stats, which is I, this is the first time fun for me. I'm a first time fund manager and a lot of people, a lot of people believed in this idea, even though I didn't have the traditional background of, of a venture, including Kellogg, like I said, who came in as the first institutional investor and really made a huge difference. But since we've started the fund, we've been investing for about, about two and a half years. We have, you know, the deal IRR is almost is over 80% of the 11 core companies we invested in prior to 2021, 10 have raised follow on rounds, 11 of them were, or 10 companies have raised follow on rounds. 10 of them were actually also pre-emptions, meaning that they weren't even raising and increase in market valuation from the time that we first invested to the last round valuation increases over $7 billion. So, so this works because it, this works because there are people like Kellogg and others who believe that this is an idea that could work. And then the trickle down effect of what folks like you guys do, you know, through the wealth creation that we're doing for the operators, and now it's the founders that, that perhaps we can, you know, help see around the corners a little bit faster, right? As these guys know, we can't do it for them, but what we can do is make it a whole lot easier and remove those barriers and then hence reduce the risk because ideas are great, but execution is a challenge, right? It's hard. And that's where most of these companies actually end up falling apart. It's not in the initial ideation phase. It is, okay, now we're on to something. How do we hire? How do we do this? And so I'm incredibly grateful for, for the support of folks like you and then totally see, and so in all of what David and Timothy are doing, you know, in their industries. That's great. Thank you so much, Malin. And maybe David, I'll go back to you to see, and Malin shared some of these really great examples of how all of the wraparound support really drives growth drives impact drives returns. Are there anecdotes or examples that you'd like to share around how your unique model has really helped drive impact and, and returns for the entrepreneurs that you support? Yeah, great, great. Yeah. So, so we've deployed, you know, $10 million into, into 16 companies and, you know, give you one company that actually is in the e-commerce space. And when this young lady and 40% of our portfolio are women, 60% are males, and 100% actually are African-American. And so with that being said, one example of a company in the e-commerce space, this particular woman was probably making $100 a day when we first connected with her. She is currently in the process of wanting to sell her business to, to realize enterprise value. And it's probably looking at a valuation of close to a million dollars. So this is an individual that went from really, you know, just, just day to day survival to now enterprise, right? And so that becomes like part of our discussion through, through our process with some of our portfolio companies. We had one company that had, had taken a hit when they, when we were introduced to them, they were in the medical space, and they had their revenues had went as low as, as almost, you know, call it $2,000 a week. And, and she was on, on the brink of going out of business. And we funded or provided a lot of the support. And she's probably, you know, north of $100,000 a week right now. And so, and she's, and she's wondering, is our next steps, does she take, you know, a traditional round of capital of really, you know, ramp up her operations? Or does she think about exit? Or is it just a straight, a straight kind of distribution model for her? And how can she grow and expand? It's all the market. So those, those to me represent areas where I feel like it's really powerful. We have one company in a portfolio that's actually in the asphalt business. And, and this particular individual actually cashed his checks at a cash checking place. And that was, and that was basically was his bank. And, and he went from really kind of running the business just from, you know, checks going in and money coming out to now he's talking about ratios. He's talking about, you know, I want to build a business for my family. He's got three new family members that he's brought into the business over 18 months. You know, he's, he's, he's picking up more. His backlog is probably two, three million dollars. But when we first met him, his backlog was maybe $20,000. Right. And so you see the transformation in the mindset of those individuals. And, you know, and, and, and I think what's powerful about it is you can just hear the inspiration, you know, in their voices as they're starting to get some of these wins along the way. And like, I think the comment was made, it's all about execution. And, and I totally, I totally agree with that, because you can't do it for them. But sometimes just knowing that they've got a resource there, we have something called the Up Community, the Up Community Fund Village. And what we do with that, we would have quarterly to semi-annual conference calls, and we would encourage our portfolio companies to work together, go after a contract together, or if somebody found a good insurance resource to share that. So someone doesn't have to, you know, experience hard knocks unnecessarily. If someone's looking for, you know, a contact in the state of North Carolina, so they can go after a job, well, there's somebody else in the portfolio who has a relationship. And so we, we really can encourage that notion of we're a collective family, and nobody wants to live in a, in a gated community with one house. So if we can raise up another, enough small businesses, they now can talk about wealth creation strategies, and really lift each other up, but which helps to lift their companies, their employees, and the ecosystem. That's great. Thank you so much, David, and Mal and both of you, really describing how access to networks and expertise and that mentorship and peer support and building community for the entrepreneurs you support really contribute to their growth and their success and de-risking them as enterprises. Would like to shift back, Tim, to you. And, you know, according to recent reports, you know, there are currently 10 million unfilled jobs in the US and more than 8.4 million unemployed people in the US. And what you're doing is really bridging that gap. So can you share a bit more about the big vision around, you know, what, what would you say to other investors and company leaders, you know, about the importance of the career impact bonds and this concept of income share agreements to really, again, unlock that pathway to employment. You know, you've got a lot of big vision around how to scale your, your company. And would love to share that with the audience in terms of what's possible and, and how to break down some of the barriers and, and unlock that financing. Yes. I mean, that's, it's a great question. And, you know, I mean, we, I think that one of the key things that we identified, and it's, it's so right in front of you is that there are millions of people, millions and millions of people in this country, we see them every day. I've got a group of them 200 feet from me out in the shop. They're working really hard, but they're working, we say they're in high effort, low skill, low wage jobs. And there are two options right now, don't work for them. The two biggest barriers that we've broken through are in general, people in our average age is 26 years old, 38% of our, of our, of our students, trainees have children, right? The two biggest barriers are time and money. In today's world, the typical American doesn't have time for a two-year community college program, and they sure don't have $40,000 plus to go to a technical school. So that's really what we, what we were able to do was to partner with industry. We knew we had the educational model nail. One of our first meetings, literally, I don't know, we barely had a building was with the top three people at FedEx, right? So, and we identified, and it's just isn't diesel technicians. Right now in this country, there are at least 100,000 openings for diesel technicians, but there are industries all over the place that are very similar. Tracy talks about it all the time, I think, excuse me, I think there's 7 million middle-skill jobs, which they're a little bit after high school, but not a post-secondary degree. That's really the niche that we figured out is that we just figured out how to move people on a much quicker pathway. Our pathway is five weeks from $22,000 a year to between 38 and 40,000. And we, we have a kid who graduated four years ago. He's making just under six figures right now and he's running an entire service operation for the largest truck dealer group in the United States, publicly traded. Well, like I said, I can tell stories like this all the time. So, it's the, it's the pathway. Now, the problem in, in, which is why we, we chose not to go the Title IV funding route. And so, Title IV funding are basically grants, student loans, et cetera. We believe because there's a $2 trillion student loan debt, the Title IV funding is one of the biggest challenges and causes really a buffer, you know, kind of where we are right now. Like so many people are so buried in debt that they, working in jobs that they didn't go to school for, right? So, we were successful in basically building the model for, and then going to find, even though it was really hard and David and I were totally right. Like we had some really rough weeks. We built the model for, and then we figured out how to fund it later. I don't know that I would give anybody that advice, but we've really kind of, now that we've broken through and done what we do, I guarantee you there will be other startups very similar to us in other businesses where companies looking for mechanical resources. They want people who can show up, work hard, be willing to get additional training, and fundamentally solve mechanically. I think those traits, they translate to industries way outside of what we do, but the income share group and the risk share and the fact that you can come here, and literally their parents don't start at worst case scenario until they've landed a job. Best case scenario, they're going to come through here, get a job starting out at 40,000 plus, and never making a payment on their own, because the company's going to make the payment on their own, because we've proven a rock solid ROI that that company, it's the greatest deal on the planet for students, based on the expensive rates that companies charge. Great. Thanks so much, Tim. I'm going to shift it back to David and Malin to begin closing us out here with any advice. What advice would you give to other innovators and how to raise unique funds like yours and really meet the needs of these entrepreneurs that you're serving? Yeah. So for all of my life, I felt like an outsider for lots of reasons. Even my first job, my first executive position was as chief IP council, books on patents. Do we lose fellow? Oops. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay. I can hear you as well. And so anyway, I've always felt like an outsider from having immigrant parents who didn't speak English, from being the only one who didn't have a technical degree, who was in the chief patent council, the major corporation, to not having really any budget investing experience when I started a fund, would say lean into those differences, because if I had tried to put together a fund that looked like your typical venture fund, no one would have funded it. I wouldn't have funded it. Kellogg wouldn't have funded it. But instead, I focused on what do I know and how can I develop what I need to? And then the second thing is listen to the naysayers too. When I started to hear what they're saying, doesn't mean you have to listen. David, can you hear me? Yes, I can. We can hear you, Timothy. Yeah. And so listen, hear what the naysayers have to say, because most of the time they mean well, but I heard a lot of you're never going to raise a fund if you do this. You're never going to raise a fund if you do this. And instead of ignoring it, understand that other people are going to have those comments too and find a way to address them, but maybe not in the traditional way that other people have. And I think those were some of the two key things that allowed me to put together a fund that really didn't look like anything else with a background that didn't look like anyone else's either. I'm so glad you did. David, what advice would you want to share? Yeah. And so it's interesting. I'm going to say it's a pre-social unrest versus post-social unrest. I mean, we kind of raise our capital during the pre-social unrest. And I have to admit, it's a different dynamic now. I think the opportunity set is better now for fund managers. But I think at the end of the day, it's got to be a segment that you really have some personal passion about, because every day is not a sunny day, right? And it's got to be something that at the end of the day gives you enough purpose to go through the challenges that you are going to go through. There's no way around it. You're going to go through challenges if you're trying to get into the fund management business and then start as that emerging fund manager. We're like a startup. And the thing I always say to our portfolio companies is, we're just like you guys. We're having the same challenges as a small business. But the thing I would say to you, though, is that if it's something that you really care about, you're really passionate about, there may be a need in the market. But as long as you feel like you're going to have the staying power to really stay with whatever that mission is, you just need a couple of folks around you who can really buy into what your mission is and then you can start to build out from there. That to me, I find is really powerful. If there's something that, well, I'm kind of lukewarm about it. And if it doesn't work, I'll go get a job and you keep kind of walking that fence. It's going to be really hard to make those commitments that you have to. And that's one thing. And then I think another thing, too, that is important. And the Kellogg folks have been tremendously helpful for this. I was on a panel once and talking about all the great things we were doing for these black owned businesses. And someone said, well, who's doing that for you guys? And it's like it was like silence. It was like, you know, like, yeah, that's a good question, right? And so I think at the same time, I think for us, you know, if there was a lesson learned, you know, we needed to continue to find sponsors and supporters for us and the work that we're doing to help us the same way in which we are helping our portfolio companies. And so I think if you begin to approach it from that perspective, I think that there's a good runway right now to really put vehicles in place to address social issues. Thank you, David. And we are almost at time here. So I might invite Tim to offer a closing statement. And then I will close us out here. Is there any final parting wisdom, Tim, that you'd like to share with the audience before we wrap up? No, I mean, again, I would just say that we believe and we've proven right that we believe the key to increasing inclusivity and spreading the wealth and raising people up is actually reducing barriers to our current educational system. And that also includes funding, right? And so solid fundamental training, solid funding mechanism, shorter pathway that works is really what we believe is the key to improving people's lives. Great. Thank you. Well, I'm going to bring us to a close here. This has been a really quick and super energizing 45 minutes here and flew by. I just wanted to wrap us up here by really reiterating that this is a critical moment with more capital flowing towards advancing racial equity and shifting power. As investors and change agents, we must all continue to rethink and redefine risk to dismantle the false narratives that perpetuate perceived risks of investing in black, indigenous and people of color and women. And we hope that the stories and successes of our panelists that our panelists shared will really inspire more investors to support fund managers who are reaching entrepreneurs and people of color in unique ways and to invest in entrepreneurs directly who are disrupting the system. So again, thank you, Malin, David and Tim for sharing your wisdom with us today. We really enjoyed this conversation and a huge thank you to Socap and all of you in the audience for joining us today. And we hope you all enjoy the rest of the virtual convening. So thank you all.