 Well, I'm very excited to talk about a subject that's important and also a subject of some passion for me personally and professionally, and that's the topic of founder succession. And I'm really excited to have two great colleagues on stage with me, Jim and Betsy. I'm going to let them each quickly introduce themselves to you by saying just a quick word about themselves, something that's important for the audience to know about you. I'm going to have Jim briefly introduce us to Ben and Tech. So, Jim, give me a quick, who's Jim? Entrepreneur, turned social entrepreneur, and I'm really passionate about technology. I am a deep geek. Deep geek. That's true. Betsy. Wow, engineer, social entrepreneur, it's true. We have some things in common, but definitely lots of years in high tech and a more recent social entrepreneur. Great. Thanks. Describe Ben and Tech to us. So, Ben and Tech is Silicon Valley's deliberately non-profit tech company, and that means we're successful by definition, by the way. And what we do is we write software products for where the market's going to fail. So the technology exists, there's this great social application, and a regular venture capitalist would say, what's the worldwide market for helping disabled kids or human rights groups? We build those products that, off the shelf tools, wouldn't be well suited for basically solving. Can you give us an example, give us a product or two? So our biggest product, and the one we'll be talking about today, is Bookshare. And basically the thumbnail sketch is Amazon meets Napster meets Talking Books, The Blind and Dyslexic, but legal. So our goal was to reinvent the traditional library for the blind and dyslexic using two innovations. One, the e-book, so digital text instead of human narration. The cost to create a book like that is a hundredth of what it would otherwise be. And for example, that's what Somersores would do for us. And the second innovation was crowdsourcing. So we actually turned over creating a library to the community of people with disabilities, parents and teachers, to build that library so that any kid who needs a book to succeed in school and can't read a regular print book gets it in a digital form that talks to them, might be in large print or in Braille, but far more books, far cheaper. So that's the goal. And how global is your reach right now? Well, you know, we have users in hundred countries, that sort of typical thing. But Bookshare has been really focused in the United States because of intellectual property stuff. Our other projects, our majority outside the U.S., in human rights and environment, are two other big areas. Great. So do you want to add anything about the social enterprises of Benetech before we move to the founder topic? Yeah. I think, and this will probably come up more in our conversation. Bookshare has become a foundation for other things we can do. So we're in over 20,000 schools and districts in the United States, and that means we can provide more services. So it becomes a really interesting foundation for the other things that we can do to drive impact. That's great. Thank you. So here's the interesting story. This is a story about succession planning, but not necessarily in my mind a typical story, at least not as I understand it from spending some time now talking to Jim, whom I've known for some time, and to Betsy. First and foremost, there's a kind of an interesting SOCAP landmark part of this story because it turns out that Jim and Betsy met at SOCAP in the first one, the first SOCAP in 2008. And I'm sure when they met, each of them had something on their minds that drew them together. I'm just guessing, Jim, that maybe what was on your mind had something to do with building this massive social enterprise and being a founder and CEO. What was going through your mind as you came to that first SOCAP? Up until that moment, we had about three, roughly million dollar social enterprises, and we had just won a 32 million dollar contract from the federal government. So six and a half million dollars a year. So Bookshare went from a million dollar year social enterprise to a seven million dollar year social enterprise. And as the founder, and by this time I've been doing this for 15 plus years in different forms, I was kind of restraining at the seams. And so I was thinking about how to solve this. So I had, so we maybe six or nine months in, we were, we needed a lot of help. You know, we outsourced a lot of our stuff to social enterprises like Samosaurus and digital divide data. But I was worried about succession and I had talked a lot to senior social entrepreneurs about succession and heard a lot of horror stories, you know, how the second CEO after the founder had completely flamed out in year one, how the COO didn't work out. And I had already tried to hire a COO and had failed a few years earlier. And so I was thinking, well, what else might that be? And so came to, came to SOCAP, met Betsy, and basically identified a different kind of succession plan where instead of hiring a COO, someone who kept the trains running on time, hire someone who was more like me, an entrepreneur, an engineer too, important to me as a geek. But someone who could actually run an organization, be responsible for the strategy, build a product line in that sector, and also offer my organization a succession plan rather than someone who maybe didn't have the outward facing responsibilities. And so, and I think that's what we got. So Betsy, why were you sort of able to be lured into this, into this conversation? What were you thinking about when you were meeting up with Jim? Yeah, I came to SOCAP. I had heard about it through just looking on the web. My company had been sold some months before I went to Africa, did some volunteer work and was really looking to get back into social enterprise. I had started a social enterprise before and had sort of gone back to the dark side for a while. So I wanted to come back to this and I thought, what a great place to do that. This sounds like my people. And I felt like I met my people here at SOCAP. And one of those was Jim. Somebody said, oh, you do tech and he does tech, you should meet. I came here thinking, I know I can do consulting because I was doing a fair bit of that with some women entrepreneurs and such. And then Jim tells me, well, look at our website. And so for me, the fact that it was a general manager position and had a lot of external focus was critical because I had actually turned down COO kinds of jobs. I am much more comfortable being kind of in this bigger picture and with with a lot of external focus as well as running the trains. So that was a big part of it for me. I if he had come and I'd met him and he had a COO role, I would have thought it was interesting because Benetech, I found extremely interesting, but it will probably wouldn't have gotten me. I think you just highlighted a couple of really interesting points. Benetech is a really alluring company. It's, you know, it's a great success story. And I know if I had been in your shoes, you know, it would have been hard to stay clearheaded actually about, you know, well, gosh, if Jim wants me to come work for him, I'd almost do it no matter what he tells me he wants me to do. You know, I mean, it can be that kind of conversation. We've all been there in this in this world of kind of, you know, we're passion and mission are so closely aligned with business interests. So I can't imagine it was as easy as you two have just described it. You meet at Socap, you know, you carve out your roles over a beer and you're on your way. And Betsy, you told me a little bit about, you know, how you really needed to be super clear with Jim about the job you wanted. And I think there was a little bit of a dialogue about that. Can you can you bring a little more of that forward for us? There was. And I would also have to give tons of credit to the rest of the senior team at Benetech, who were very singularly focused on Jim really needs to hand this off. And I heard every day for my first few months, you know, Jim really needs to hand this off. Let's make sure this is happening. And for me, I never felt that he wasn't. In fact, there was one point after about a year where I said, can you stop now? I kind of have enough. You know, can we slow this down a little bit? So but one of the things that Jim asked me, one of the best interview questions that I ask all the times for the end of the interview process, which is what can I do to make you successful in this role? Great question. And I said, we have to mind meld. And I have to not only work with you internally, but I have to see what you do externally in all of these different venues. And he was very great about that. So so again, you've raised a couple of really to me what are really important points. You know, you were in a real dialogue and it was it was definitely a dialogue of peers. And the senior team clearly deserved a lot of credit for for also being very focused on this for you and with you. So I think those are excellent points. Jim, from your standpoint, during that first year with Betsy. Was were there times when you realized that you were still too founderish or to, you know, not letting it sort of happen the way you actually wanted it to, but couldn't quite let it? Was there any of that kind of stuff going on? No, because I I had like had that failure mode like a few years earlier, I didn't let go. And that's why the prior COO had left. OK, so that I didn't hand over any control. And and I'm sort of ADHD and I really kind of and I'm kind of the serial founder who's not as good at operations, more good at creating and the way Benetech structured, I can go off and do new things. I don't have to like get rid of Bookshare. I can go off and do other things. So my roles shifted. So I got to do things like learn about how Washington worked because winning a the largest ever special ed award is a novice bidder right turned out to create gigantic political problems. And I got phone calls from Washington saying, I hear you have horns in a tail and bribe the program officer. Where are you? And I'm like, I didn't know I was supposed to lobby Washington. And I got to work on a treaty for the last five years. And we got an international treaty to make Bookshare able to expand globally. And so I got to be like an international diplomat to like play at it. And that's great because it kind of kind of plays to my hyperactivity, doing new things. And what Betsy's job was is to say, this is a moment for Jim to play a cameo role. Or this is a relationship that Jim has owned for 10 years and he can't abandon this. We're going to do this jointly until this person gets comfortable with Betsy being the primary point person. Does that sound like the same landscape you remember in that first year? It does. Though we remember our meeting at Socap quite differently, which we're happy to tell you later, that is very true. And I think some of those long term external relationships have taken the longest to really transition over. Because Jim's been in this particular field for now, 25 years. And so these people have known him a long time from and told me great stories. But so that has definitely taken some work. And we still have to work at that sometimes. Well, it sounds like you two have a lot of fun together, which I think is also a really important part of the equation. I think you and the entire team actually find moments for fun. If you'd seen the three of us getting ready backstage, actually you shouldn't have seen the three of us getting ready backstage. Because there was such a lightness and buoyancy and spirit to us wanting to come out and talk to you. And I think that's critically important for building these complex enterprises. Because this is hard work. These are very complex. We're all business people. We started as business people who became entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs. And therefore, I think we know really well how hard this is. Because these are very complex value propositions. So can you share with us very quickly, when you need to get back to that spirit of levity that we were able to find backstage, what do you do for one another? We wrote a song together. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Do you want to do that now in our remaining one? No, no, but I think it's really important. When I went to Comdex, which was the big conference I was at for seven or eight years, and I went to a party with Comdex, right? 1,500 of my closest friends, not, right? And when I got to the social sector, everybody was lovely. And everyone cared about social change. And they were nice. And I went, wow, I want to do this. So my advice to people is go to the parties because we have to put social into social entrepreneurship. Well said. OK. Betsy, you said something when we were talking on the phone that I think would be a great place for us to close, which was, again, the business and social entrepreneurship perspective. And it was about how the combination of the two of you and this kind of unique, this isn't succession planning in the textbook sense. I mean, you didn't go to your board and start a process and end a process and all that. But you described it as a growth strategy, actually. Can you describe that for us? I can. It really, it's been a growth strategy on two levels. One, we talked about the growth strategy within my program area. So taking Bookshare. And I've been able to come up with new products, new visions, new ways to take that. And it's grown 4x or something in that time. At the same time, though, because Jim was able to focus on other things, it meant that our human rights program had more wind in its sails. It meant that Jim could help start some new things at a Benetech level, like our Benetech Labs initiative. So it really has field growth, I think, across Benetech, not just in one area. And I think the other thing that's worth mentioning is I used to be where everyone looked for the vision and the leadership. And that was kind of the last thing that kind of changed. I'd say that took three or four years. But now, Betsy has actually set the vision for where all of our literacy and education projects are going. And when people come to me and say, can you basically give us a pro-wisdom, I say, well, either you should talk to Betsy or I will channel Betsy briefly and then you should talk to Betsy. And I think that's a really important transition because a real CEO type leader is the person responsible, not only for the operations, but also for where are we going, how are we going to raise fresh money, who are our new customers going to be? And now I get to be more of a cheerleader for that as opposed to the originator of that. This is a huge point and a great point to close on because not only the respect that you're showing one another, but the clarity about how to continue along a vision as well as a strategy path is critical. And thank you so much for telling us about this. We managed to do that right on time, I want you to know. We're at 0-0-0-0 on our wind-down clock. Thank you both so much for being with me. I really appreciate it. All right, sorry. Thank you.