Billion Dollar Moves™ with Sarah Chen-Spellings | Global Venture Capital

and so when we decided to raise a fund everyone thought we were crazy the institutions were definitely not investing and i you know i knew that because i'd worked at one of these institutions and so yeah it took us to any two months to raise our first fund we did have about five hundred and thirty meetings we ended up getting ninety seven limited partners and that was for a twenty nine million dollar aussie fund and you know that fund ended up being a big investor and sort of earliest investor in canberra and safety culture and culture and pell on a bunch of others we decided to show our gender split through our funnel we think it's the right thing to do we're very happy to do it then the interesting thing is you then get slammed by the media when you don't hit your targets or it doesn't look as good as people would like it to look where the one's being criticized where everyone else who doesn't say anything and just gives their head down doesn't get criticized so we went through a little moment of sort of i guess you know wondering whether this was all worth it but i think in the end we if you haven't heard of rick baker you probably should es c founder of black ventures and the earliest back of can rick has quietly shaped australia and new zealand into fast growing startup pumps from grinding through five hundred thirty meetings to raise a small eighteen million debut fund to now managing billions his journey is a master class in conviction storytelling and non game venture capital in this conversation rick pulls back the curtain on the cardboard boarding trip where you first met melanie perkins and hurt the can dream while blackboard engineered early liquidity and how he did it to protect fund one how he thinks about ai diversity and building a multi generational bc franchise beyond silicon valley if you want the insight track on how billion dollar outcomes are really built this one's for you we were together not long ago in your beautiful home in sydney as speaking about your progress in deploying your pledge in investing more in women led innovation and of course we're coming together to celebrate over a billion dollars deployed now by the port funds at beyond the billion congratulations couldn't have done it without the support of great funds like you and it means a lot to have a multi fund like yourself supporting us all the way from australia showing that this is of course an an important issue globally tell us a little bit about the story of rick baker and how we have come to know him as the biggest banker of can and all these great success stories that you have today here in australia like to sort of humbly say our our stop ecosystem is growing really beautifully and it's been really kind of a decade and a bit of kind of since a a bit of a restart of the ecosystem here my background grew up in sydney in australia i've started two software companies for my sins certainly learned what it's like to to start right at the beginning and be part of those founding teams that literally turn sort of something you know from nothing and then i managed to get into investing i i found myself at one of the super funds in australia where there there at that's our pension system here a wonderful system in australia there is about four trillion dollars aussie so that's kinda three ish trillion dollars us of of capital in our pension system here and it's been a wonderful source of cap all for the venture ecosystem you know over the the years so i found myself a one of that is these pension funds and and running their venture program and spend a lot of time in silicon valley came and lived total in palo alto with my two little kids at that stage and we managed to invest with some just fabulous funds like sequoia and ax axel and benchmark and ad and klein and i kind of learned how they invest my job was to study how they invest and there's such different firms as i'm sure you know everyone will know and then i caught the bug of of investing and venture investing and came back to australia and what i saw here was something really fascinating happening we had a whole bunch of start ups here in australia led by and i'm sure a lot of people would know at atlas and it's been a wonderful success in lighthouse here but there are about a dozen great startups in australia about ten years ago companies like a x and and campaign monitor the list goes on there was not an aussie vc in any of them and what had happened is a a few of the later stage us firms had come over and and picked cream of the crop and i'd say ax axel probably did the best there investing in at atlas atlas and a bunch of others i was fortunate to meet my c cofounder founder in nike around that time and we thought wow there's a real opportunity here with very little capital in the market but great companies starting to to start a new venture firm and to do it sort of the way it's starting in silicon valley here in australia so almost thirteen years ago and here we are today and here we are rick so i wanna take a pause there because i think it's important to also frame for the audience you know in terms of this growing ecosystem in australia in the us we we kinda know you know we're at the hundred bill mark every year in terms of capital deployed and it's increasing you know this is a bit of a tough market what kind of numbers are we looking at in australia here and what are we expecting in terms of growth so there's a a few billion dollars in invest it every year that's grown from a very low base of you know a few hundred thousand dollars probably fifteen years ago but we we now have a really vibrant ecosystem so you know at black bird we we logged about two thousand companies start that we saw last year that were sort of you know good enough to actually go in the system and you know be be logged and sc so the ecosystem is really growing nicely you were a founder twice and this was in a time where it was not you know like today i always think the smartest in college right we'll think about going into a good startup up as a career path but back then it wasn't actually the natural thing to do and yet you decided to actually build software in real estate well i i i plot partly by my cousin who was c founder and and sort of convinced me that this was a wonderful thing to do but you know i was working in a little investment bank over in london and enjoying that but it was two thousand right and the dot com boom was was raging and know had this sort of urge to to try and do something yeah so my cousin and a few others and i you know set up this business with software for real estate agents and it was really back when browsers were quite difficult to actually build applications in everything was quite static and we used some of the very early versions of of javascript and xml to try and build this saas product for real estate agents inside the browser and that was a big thing because you have real estate agents were sort of spread out all over the place with all these little servers we're trying to sync and this green screen applications and we brought something in the browser that was quite easy to deploy so that was the start of that first business and now you're onto your next big business of managing a multi bill in fund if there was one thing that is a leadership lesson that carries through from when you were building your software company what what would that be i think all the way through all of them it's being able to be articulate and tell stories articulate your mission being very clear on what your mission is and we see this too in you know in startups ups and fat great founders that that we see one of the things we're looking for most is you know what is that mission let's get to the bottom of it and let's let's see how that founder kinda of describes that can you bring out that passion and and the insights that this person might have for that and i think storytelling is just you know it it's so important throughout life yeah so let's go back to then building black bird you and nikki meet at start meat through gravel i believe and decide that this was something you wanna double down on and yet you often mentioned it was at a time where the tapes were switched off for australian vc you know bring us back to that moment and those i believe five hundred and thirty meetings that you had yep so nikki and i decided to do a fund we we met each other and you know the ser thing is that we we didn't know each other that well and we when we sort of set out to start black but we kind of knew that we wanted the same thing this was something that was really contra here in australia it had been tried before and unfortunately hadn't quite delivered the returns and so when we decided to raise a funds everyone thought we were crazy the institutions were definitely not investing and i and know i knew that because i'd worked at one of these institutions and so yeah it took us to any two months to raise our first funds we did have about five hundred and thirty meetings we ended up getting ninety seven limited partners and that was for a twenty nine million dollar aussie fund so what's that about a sort of eighteen or nineteen million dollar us funds it was a little fund with lots of investors it it was actually quite cool because we went out and our our target was really two types of of people it was anyone who had done well or made money in tech in australia we basically scour the universe and we just go and have coffees with people and motto was that we were never gonna convince anyone we just had to uncover the people who already believed to already believe that australia could produce great startups ups and they would be the sort of people who would give us money and then the other sort where other half were sort of pe managers and and partners here in australia and who i knew pretty well from my past and they obviously have that kind of come on let's go we'll give you a go you know one of them my one and my first was one of the leaders of private equity here in australia and i went up for a meeting with him and he was you know this is a i likes to ask the the forthright right questions and i was thinking off this is going nowhere he said i'll give you a million dollars we'll see all you can do and so that was a a great start but that first fund has been this most amazing fund and you know as often happens in the the funds that the hardest to raise of those that are invested in those times that are really special and you know that fund ended up being a big investor and sort of earliest investor in canberra and safety culture and culture and propeller own a bunch of others and turned into this awesome little fund twenty two months is a long time in the desert right i i've been told by some of our fun managers it feels like you're in a raft in the middle of the ocean with wind blowing left and right you don't really know that you're going to make it five hundred thirty meetings takes a lot of mental resilience there how how did you and nikki come to a point that this was going to work out did you ever feel like this is rubbish no i i think we're we're both sort of you know die optimus we were very passionate about this and i think it it happened kind of bit by bit it was just these little hits of dopamine i guess when someone would say yes even like a hundred k or fifty k or we had a whole load of a hundred k checks and then the odd million dollar check and not many bigger than that so i think it came in little dopamine sort of hits along the way that that sort of kept us going we had a first closed halfway through that on about twelve million dollars or something and that allowed us to do some of the first investments and in fact can was my first investment it was the fund second investment what an investment let's talk a little bit about that i mean you you are still to date i believe the biggest shareholder something like fourteen percent what was the first meeting with melanie like and you know what gave you the conviction what was your and nikki thesis to begin with black i meant mel and cliff when i was on a kite trip in perth and kite trip set up by bill ty who ran just amazing organization called mite tie and i'd i've got lucky enough to sort of get caught up in that and learned to kite and and bill invited me to this little conference in western australia in in perth not much tech happening in perth at that time it there's actually a really good ecosystem building up there at the moment so we went kite boarding we went to this little conference and one night with someone's birthday and we were having a birthday dinner and somehow bill bill admit mel and cliff and he invited them to come along to the birthday they did and i have a a facebook post that has sort of has the two of them on that photo and it was the first very first time but actually the moment that was i think most telling was the rest of them all went out on the water out on the swan river mel and i decided we didn't wanna go in the water and we just sat on a park bench by the river and started talking and as first time i really sort of met and spoke with with mel and i was still working at the pension fund at that stage mel and cliff we're doing fusion books which was a school year book business was actually doing really well and mel pitched to me the dream of taking that and building cam generalized graphic design platform and frustration with with the the current state of graphic design tools and the way that you did graphic design and a passion for allowing ordinary people to to do great design and i at the same time shared my passion for wanting to start a venture capital fund and as i look back at melanie and i have rem about this quite a lot it's a kind of pretty heartwarming thing to think that we both managed to kind of grow these dreams kind of you know in parallel and sort of having into intertwined journey so it's it's been a you know a wonderful journey and what was the thesis been with black where i mean it was everything from can vibe i believe zoo propeller was in there as well so pretty broad it what were you looking for with i mean a eighteen million front that's not a lot to go around as well so something like twenty companies small checks right we had this pretty strong thesis which still applies today that there would be these great global companies built from australia and we've seen it from as i said that dozen or companies that are done well so it was very much we want the best in the world not just the best in australia so we we weren't doing kind of quick follow our models into our economy and we wanted best in the world and then very much looking at this sort of global right from the beginning and you know back then and in fact that las were pioneers is of this before like this product led growth term had been coined and we called it bottom up growth and what we loved was just this idea that from anywhere in the world and australia in particular you could use digital marketing channels that were just starting to broaden and get well known at that stage to attack global markets right from the beginning and do it with not too much capital and without having to go and set set up sales teams all over the world so those are the sort of key characteristics which naturally led us towards kind of internet saas types of of businesses and you know i think sas was a core theme back in that first fund but we were always curious we were looking for great aussie founders wherever they were and z was our first deep tech investment principal founder an aussie team can clay we've got really fascinated with z and ended up leading that seed round as well so that sort of was our entree into some tech stuff and now we do about eighty percent sort of software internet sas and twenty percent deep tech stuff talking to loud who said by chris savage is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals chris savage ceo of wi and the self proclaimed loudest talk takes you inside the minds of entrepreneurs as they share at the funniest and often tap parts of building human brands in an episode i especially enjoyed chris talks with just simon creator of the distribution first approach about what every business leader knows you are often the brand justin in breaks sound how to amplify your presence repurpose what you already have and avoid content for now listen to talking to loud wherever you get your podcasts so let's go tactical a little bit i mean that's always a debate with with investors right is it really luck and my summer reading always revising the psychology of money and one of the big debates is is this luck or is this of a real picking skill are i really able to look at your patterns of success here and i wanna go back to can of course it was surrender you you know you put yourself in that position but was there something with their formula that you were evaluating to sort of take a bet on mel early on so i don't know i have have various theories on this and i'd probably be wrong you know whatever i say but i think a and do make your own luck and a lot of a lot of life and success is putting yourself in the right position such that you get the opportunity to pick the luck and then i think you know pattern matching and having a a a strong thesis and mission which is hopefully the right mission and it's hopefully a little contra even better you know and building pattern matching skills around that helps you kind of pick those lucky moments and i guess we managed to do that a few times i i think that's kind of what what venture capital is is all about right it's it's it's getting a better than average chance of finding and then selecting some great opportunities so fun one was one of your rock stars i think at a point i wanna see was it twenty nineteen twenty twenty where you were contemplating sort of building some liquidity to the fund you were sitting on something like was it thirteen x or more yeah that's been a really good fund we got sort of six ish years into the fund and hadn't really had much liquidity but the fund was sitting on thirteen times and so yeah we we decided it was you know was the right time to take some money off the table we sort of wanted to make it so there could never be a bad fund and so we ended up selling a slice of the portfolio kind of gp led secondary process and returning about three and a half times the fund and then we thought great this could can never be a bad fund and then we obviously had most of the funds still in the ground to run and so the fund now is sitting on just about forty times tv and we've managed to give back about twelve times dpi so it's a cracking fund it's coming to the end of its life you know a little embarrassing it's called the two thousand twelve fund but we didn't actually get it close to two thousand thirteen so it's a thirteen vintage and you know it being twenty twenty five we're sort of starting to wrap up everything sell down everything we've got a big chunk of camera in it which we will will hold through to the ipo which which sounds like a good idea sounds like a good idea so a decade in this makes me think about some data i saw actually today from car with regard to sort of the time frame the holding period and you know the the expected life cycle for say of of funds right there's always a perception that within ten years this is a ten year fund right you need a return all that in yet company testing private for longer what are your thoughts on where the outlook will be i mean sequoia has not included an evergreen structure is this something black might think about we've definitely thought about it i i don't think we quite yet have the market power of sequoia to kinda of rock the boat and and create a new structure but it's an interesting debate because i think it you know that ten year timeframe frame was set up in decades past when companies did go public or otherwise created liquidity much faster and you know most of the companies in that two thousand thirteen vintage fund still like on their journey in the private markets and if you had a longer timeframe frame would happily hold them for longer but we are having to create liquidity largely through secondary sales which is actually proving to be a really nice way of creating liquidity without disturbing the the life cycle of the of the company yeah we're ideally you would have longer funds now but i think the the lp world is sort of still set on their mindset in in these ten year funds and so we're sort of stuck in this little limbo where we do a ten year fund they all get extended you know the average life of a fund i know is before it gets wound up signed or something like fifteen or seventeen years so you know we we've gotta be a bit realistic about this at some point we have invested in about a hundred and sixty companies and about hundred and thirty of them are still up and running and in the portfolio we're currently investing out of our fifth fund which is a billion dollar aussie fund and raising a new fund at the moment to continue the journey you start at small right and you've really built a behemoth over the last decade here did you built intentionally a multi generational fund and how do you think about the franchise when nick know i first i started i think it was sort of we were thinking cottage industry and we'll raise a small fund and you know if we ever have a hundred million dollar fund that would be amazing i think just in the same way as founders as ambition grows as their business has six success i think we we had that same thing happened to us and we realized a few years in firstly we started being able to raise larger funds and and most importantly started to see the deal flow and the the the great companies come through the ecosystem and i should say you know we started in australia and we added new zealand to our focus regions a few years ago and that's also been a great source of of of deal flow and founders us there your ambition gets pulled by by the success and the growth of the ecosystem and so that that's one thing and then i think at at some point we sort of looked at each other and said this is something that we wanna be more than just us to yeah know our first two partners sam and nick joined us in our two thousand eighteen fund you get a lot of pleasure and fulfillment of seeing other people sort of come on the journey with you and join and and so come up through the ranks and we started seeing that more and more and made this decision to make we we want black to be much more than us and be generational and so when our team is sixty five with twenty nine investors seven partners and really want to be growing sort of the next group of partners that at some point and it's not in the very near future and you know obviously we'll be handing over more and more to those partners and black will to you on we hope and what are the characteristics of a good investor now that you're i guess now the the veteran some would say of course you're still in the game here but you are training the next generation you look to as a mentor to so many including sam building in new zealand there what do you think the next generation needs to know about investing oh it's a great question i don't know if i have a really great answer but i think it is you know it's been said a lot of an apprenticeship model and i really think it is think this sort of pattern matching that you get from just seeing lots and lots of companies both pitching and then actually the journeys of the companies is really important and i think so it takes time we put a lot of effort into our hiring we do use a blind hiring process we use an application called applied which instead of looking at cvs we set up a very carefully worded set of questions we ask people to answer them and then we mark those questions individually without seeing anything about the people and only once we mark them do we start opening up and seeing details you know about who these people are and we think that's a really good way of cutting out bias of course then we go into the detailed interview process and we're very much about you know setting tasks for people to do interestingly you know the emergence of l has made that interesting and and how do you test that you know whether it's an l answering the quest or a human is something we're grappling with at the moment and then it's about really just getting people into the team and growing and and working with them and not everyone will work out but but knowing that you know hopefully we we'll have a few that that rise right up to the top and certainly that's that's happening here at the moment so it sounds like quite a black box on your hiring here but what is one of the most important questions you think needs to be answered in investors we're looking for people who obsessed with startups because i think that's really really important and who also really interested in investing and so to do those two things obviously we're we're asking questions around the startup up ecosystem and what they've done and we're really looking for people who have been embedded in the ecosystem and then we we often ask a quite contra investment questions will give someone an s one and you know of a company that maybe i can remember we did one where you know we work was not going so well and we asked people to give us the positive story on on that we like to sort of pick investment kind of fairly well known investment themes and get people to give their views on it you know vc has become a popular career path and yet you know some folks tell me as i i love to hear whether you have a contra opinion you're either a good investor or you're not you can't really learn these things it's it's a gut feeling it's hard to really quantify do you agree with that partially i think i think there is definitely a a something there but i think you do learn a lot of it and i think pat pattern matching is is something like you know i i sometimes call it gut feel and people don't like it when you say you invest using gut feel but really patent matching is just gut feel right it's like it's like the human version of of an l i'm and training the loa right so i do think learning is very important and i think you can learn a lot of it maybe there's some talent there that needs to be at the beginning but i think a lot of it expert yeah so we talked about canvas as one of course the most meaningful outcomes for you also so sense from a fulfilling journey wise personally what else are the most sort of exciting outcomes from your companies that you've been really really thrilled by yeah i mean that there's been a bunch that we've been fortunate to invest in safety culture one of them does workplace health and safety management culture you know as i come through the mix we have a company called eucalyptus which is in healthcare and delivering health to people using telehealth health which has had obviously a huge boom by all the weight loss drugs recently you know on the detox side we have a rocket company in australia called gilmore space it's australia's version of spacex or rocket lab which we're we are hoping in the next few weeks we'll we will get our first orbital launch attempt which is really exciting and there's a lot happening in ai and in australia in new zealand which is both an excitement and a relief to us because whenever an a big new theme comes through we kind of take a deep breath and really you know have to look and see how our ecosystem is gonna play in that theme and i'd say with ai that's been sort of embraced fully here which is you know great and how are you thinking about that in australia are you is it more the picks and shovel approach of the application layer what what are you seeing on the ground there yeah so definitely by volume that application layer and i think that's really interesting and that we're starting to see some new breeds of founders coming through you know we used to be was very much focused on kind of technical founders or having technical founders and i think now the expertise around industries and workflows and how to apply ai to to those is something that's really really important and as we're seeing you know building the actual code is becoming easier and easier and faster and faster and so we're seeing lots of founders who are much more kind of domain specialist founders coming through and i think one of the sort of good things there is that you know we were worried at first the ai was gonna be sort of dominated by young men i think because of this domain expertise coming through a whole of great women founders stepping into the ecosystem as well and you i think that's really great yeah that's great to hear and and are you seeing the kinds of i mean vcs see here a sort of really scrambling to find the next winners we're seeing companies like lovable i'm sure you've seen them hitting a hundred million arr in a short amount of time are you seeing that kind of excitement and and actual build in australia itself in new zealand absolutely yep we're seeing super fast growth faster than anything we've ever seen before cam is our standout growth with a with a graph and we've now got a bunch companies that are growing faster than c and that's that's definitely you know that ai phenomenon i'm kicking in and how are you advising your other founders in this era here and i'm just thinking about your portfolio you also have alternative proteins right a very different angles really yeah how are you advising some of your top founders to rethink how they're building if at all on the software side it's it it really is you know a a full full focus is anywhere on on ai and building that into the the whole way that everyone works inside an organization on the more detail side it's much earlier in being built into how they're using ai obviously using it on the software side i think that's something that we'll see in the future is sort of ai applied much more to the physical world and we're just starting to see a few founders really sort of think hard about that and tackle that what's the most i guess surprising application that you've seen recently that black is excited by one of the interesting things we're looking at now is is hyper spectral vision we see in red green blue a very limited spectrum and most ai vision so far has just been around that human vision but machines can see a much wider hyper spectral vision you can gather much more information from the things that are giving off the line i can be in so many different things health definitely these spectral cameras can see a lot about what's happening inside the human body but also classification material detection basically anything that really needs to know what something is or or how it is is operating can be enhanced using this yeah super so have you changed your thesis at all i mean from a thirty million aussie fund to now a billion dollars i'm presuming it's now multi stage you're covering the gamut how have you re thought how you're investing so one thing that has not changed is that we go as early as absolutely possible we just love the very first pre seed pre product pre revenue round and you know we'll invest two hundred and fifty k in you know something that's pre product if if that's all the founder wants or needs at that stage that's what we did in cam first round was two hundred and fifty k into pre product cam and so we're still doing that and we we invested in about forty five companies in the current funds so far that we're just finishing off ninety four percent of them we invested sort of seed pre proceed so even as the funds got bigger we've just continued to go early we think that's super important we think that's the moment where you start building a great relationship with the founder we have done a lot to build up our brand over time but we're we're never really you know able to out compete the big brands in silicon valley on brand and name alone but if you've built this relationship with a founder from the very beginning you were the first person to back them and then you back them repeatedly you then have a reason for still being able to invest in those later mid to late rounds when everyone knows this is a great company and there's a lot of competition to get into that company and that's that strategy is served just really well over the years in you know and it's one of the reasons why we were able to build that big stake in canvas was i have you changed your mind on portfolio construction at all do you keep you know something like fifty percent for follow on or how do you think about that again it's been very similar through time we've had this saying we we keep about fifty percent for follow on and we then have a follow on fund as well so our our core fund keeps about fifty percent for follow on we have a follow on or you it's not i i like to call it follow on rather than growth fund because it's still because our call fund so small it's still investing in some kind of late series a early series b through to some later stage so we do we now have the ability to to keep investing with that second fund yeah and just to get a sense here in australia is a seed round something like a million dollars today aussie dollars maybe two or three aussie so okay one or two us yeah and then series a would be this is interesting phenomenon of what often gets done is what we call an aussie series a and that's kind of five mill maybe a bit more aussie then what happens is that we sort of the best companies tend to head over to the us and sort of get the attention of the big firms in the us and what they're trying to raise then is kind of seven to ten million us and which is kind of a us series a and everyone wants to call it a series a so we just do a second series a gotcha that's that that's good intel here alright so you talked a little bit about pattern matching i'm not gonna give you you know only softball questions here like you know me pattern matching we talked about bias i know you're passionate about this kate has been working with this very closely to work through the gender lens strategy within black as well and yet one of your pattern matches was the likes of k key that really broke the internet at some point talk to us a little bit about that and the learning there are in terms of your investing yeah so there's this early stage where you look at the founder the passion the mission and sort of what they've done and with k that all came together and we had a a a really young passionate founder who had found this model of doing a a a new form of of sub letting what could potentially be an airbnb two point o and the desire to take the sort of small successes that that it had in australia and new zealand and take that to the us and that's really what we back them to do i think you know the the hoo was around one of the marketing efforts here was to start what was you know a club for young women in new york who were you know moving to new york and wanted to discover and live in new york and unfortunately that was described and marketed in a way that was perhaps not as emotionally intelligent as it could have been you know it was a really tough moment for us we had to live through that as a back of founders we we back founders and you know it's not out not our job to despite what certain people in the media would like us to do to come out and start criticizing and be negative about founders and so you know really what we did was sitting down and work through this this challenge with the founder and in the end you know got to the point where where he did apologize for the way that he articulated that that strategy and i think it was the right outcome was something that was regrettable but it it's you know it's something that that sometimes happens in in these situations you know we're not experts at how to deal with media we're certainly better at it now the question that often comes about in situations like this is what is the role of investors in in your opinion our investors expected to you know be that activist board member to ensure that every path taken is a certain and way you know where do you stop at the freedom of the founder to really build an experiment and make their own mistakes here to build in the way that you believed in so i think i mean there's always gonna be business mistakes made at the startup stage and we can't shook away from the fact that there will be mistakes made i think our responsibility is to be a positive force you know and a positive influence on the founders as much as we can and you learn could we have acted faster and quicker up you know probably but you know i think we got an outcome that was you know reasonable in the end you know you live and you learn going back to gender lines investing and thinking about your portfolio of course one of the early conversations that made me think was the fact that your transparency also brought about backlash from the media those australian media is pretty brutal i would say yeah that can be pretty brutal tops yeah what are your thoughts here on on that i mean the skill investors carol of course is pushing for before i run to be transparent is this a good thing what should we be encouraging here and what has your gender lens investing journey taught you you know we are not a funds that kind of is you know has a gender strategy or mission where we're a generalist vc fund but i'd i i think we care a lot about having funds that are balanced and we care a lot about making sure that we are attracting all the best founders to come and see us and talk to us and that we are i guess selecting them in know in a way that is as unbiased as we can make it an understanding that you know we're never gonna be perfect and i think we're we're influenced by the fact that by far our best investment at can is is led by you know a a wonderful woman melanie so for us kind of this idea that having balanced funds and making sure we don't leave out a whole part of the founder community it sort of slaps us in the face every day like it's not theoretical for us that there are great women found us out there and we need to make sure we're including them in our process it's there in our face every day that this is our very best investment we're influenced by that and by the fact that it's just the right thing to do we obviously you know joined the organization and made the pledge a few years ago at the same time we were already starting to look at getting our data out we were you know quite believers in being transparent and in you know we think that if you do put data out it makes you accountable and makes you actually do things towards making that better so for example we put our returns out on the website go see them and you know what we decided to show out gender split through our funnel there's a great organization out here that is is helping us sort of try and get standardized across the industry and how we do that and so we made the decision to do that and we think it's the right thing to do we're very happy to do it of course then the interesting thing is you then get slammed by the media when you don't hit your targets or it doesn't look as good as people would like it to look and that's an interesting moment because then you think gee should have i've done this like if by trying to be better out where where the one's being criticized where everyone else who doesn't say anything it just keeps their head down doesn't get criticized so we went through a little moment of sort of i guess you know wondering whether this was all worth it but i think in the end we we kind of gotten through that and we've tough ourselves up a little bit we'll live with the criticism that we don't hit targets and you know we're not hitting the targets let's face it it's hard it's a hard problem to to get a balanced portfolio through its agenda lens and other diversity lenses as well it's really hard but it doesn't mean you shouldn't just keep working on it and we'll just keep working on it flow we salute you for for doing that and i think it you know we believe it continues to be important because you're you're setting the standard for others right and criticism is just part of the game i guess part of the process just like your five hundred and thirty meetings it's all part of the game yep what have you learned here that has worked i know it's still hard are you seeing enough in the top of the funnel are they dropping off like what is the issue in australia specifically here we've set ourselves a target of forty percent of companies that make it to our investment committee pitch have a woman in the founding team that's our kind of our target we've hit it every now and again but we don't hit it consistently i'll say that right now i would say there are a number of things we're doing to try and improve it let's say firstly we're we're working internally on getting our own investment team to be balanced and we're not there yet at the senior levels we're doing pretty well at the overall team level now gps there are seven of us and and two women so we've got a way to go there and we're we're working on that that you know will take us time i do think it's important to have a a balanced investing team it makes sense that the best founders sort of want to see representations of themselves sort of in the in the team that's that that they're about to go take investment from next we're we're thinking a lot about sourcing and that's about both making sure that all our messaging whether sort of website way we speak about things and the events we run and we run a lot of events here in australia we run a huge conference called the sunrise which is this an awesome kind of bringing together of the community and so we're working to make sure that what we're presenting is a balanced for people looking at black bird i think that's important because a lot of our deal flow just sort of is people coming to us through referrals through networks if women don't see you as somewhere that's receptive then they won't come to you we had a little bit of feedback early on that we looked a bit blocking so we've worked hard to try and try and change that and that was a bit of like a stab in my heart at some point because we certainly weren't trying to do that at all so we've done a lot on sourcing we're starting to build communities kate and the maddie and a few others and our team are running these great dinners where we bring groups of women together both founders and out of kind of operators inside tech companies who you know we hope may become founders and that we've had some really good success in in that as well so lots of things there's no one silver bullet i'm curious how has the pledge and you know what why did you say yes to us actually when carol introduced you to us what then encouraged you to to take the pledge and really put a number to it it was very much something we were thinking strongly about and we we were starting to work on at the time it's sort of came together at exactly the right time and it seemed you know something we could do to to a kind of formalized what we wanted to do and and actually make that statement and i think that that is an important thing to do we thought it was a great movement to support i wanted to help support it out here to gather momentum you know it felt like the right thing to do and we enjoyed meeting you know you and carol and the team and you know it's been it's been a really good journey in the us it's been a tough year right with the nt d initiatives have been shut down in many different ways unexpectedly i guess for some within a woman's notice just like usa right how how is the environment in australia i don't think there has been as nearly as much of a a backlash i think it's still something that people feel very favorably about the idea of sort of quotas is being questioned tuned much more and we at black would have never been about quotas we've always wanted to make sure that our investing the way we invest the the companies and founders we pick a are totally mirrored we are fundamentally need to make great returns for our investors that comes first and but what what we wanna do is set up the environment where we're where really we're just where what we wanna do is make sure we don't miss the next camper right yeah biggest case you have for that yeah exactly and so that's that's really how we're going about this and and we use the sort of objectives that we have at that investment committee level as ways to just make sure we've constantly got that in mind and i think that's the right way to go about this sort of thing rather than trying to set hard quotas at least for us absolutely and if you are building v today what would you do differently and what would you do exactly the same a a lot i'd i'd do the same we've built this the this brand that i think is really important i think and vc brand is is super important so i would do all the community and brand building stuff that we've done very similarly what i do differently maybe we could have been more global earlier in that period in the early twenty twenties and put a put a bit more effort overseas i think what we we're catching up now and sort of getting our brand out into particularly the us we've run a whole out of events over there with the australian and new zealand founders that are over in in the us and in the uk and you know i we'll let you in on a little secret that aussie and kiwi are slowly taking over the world or kind of our fingers are everywhere so i think yeah what what we're focusing on now to is to make sure we're we're really well embedded and and in the in the mindset of of those founders i think probably could have done that a bit earlier yeah so maybe a global fund in the works and a next big global fun in the works actually no we're actually not looking at doing a global fund but what we wanna do is make sure because there are so many great aussie and kiwi overseas we wanna make sure they they really know black bird good okay alright so this is dollar questions first thing that comes to mind what truth about your journey would shock most people i didn't really know what my journey was gonna be it was all just ser jump at opportunities and building your luck yes what's one thing you wish you knew earlier about wealth or investing well i i wish i'd had comfort a lot more confidence earlier and i think the ability to sort of press the button and actually make investments is is so important so you know this business all about not missing investments rather than making a few mistakes which book changed your perspective and how they go back to a really old school called the myth which i don't know if it's still in the circa have founder a books where this great little book about starting a bakery and how you start out being really passionate about the craft and then it turns into running a business and how do you kind of how do you manage that and finally what's your most unconventional advice to founders building i mean one of the things in australia is we do which is interesting and probably a little different from the us is we spend quite a lot of time telling founders to be more ambitious push the boat out spend more aussie and kiwi tend to be much more frugal and you know wanna build things incrementally and i think you know how can you hundred times this is a common catch phrase i think you know a lot of investors here in australia are sort of trying to do the opposite they're trying to sort of be frugal and do it step by step and we are we're much more about you know really pushing the ambition yeah and for pushing your ambition black is today you know one of the leading brands right even in the us i'll say your name has reached the shores congratulations rick baker and where can we find you black del and hopefully we'll see you at sunrise come along to the sunrise of his conference in sydney in australia it's awesome what's the date of that in may may okay so may next year sunrise in sydney and hopefully billion dollar moves will be covering the founders there too rick thank you so much thank you for having me and thanks so much for tuning in this week you can subscribe wherever you get your podcast and follow our socials on sarah global to get the latest on the ship it would really help me out too if you enjoyed this to rate and review i'll show on apple podcasts and share your favorite episodes with friend i'm search chen spellings and you've been listening to billion dollar moves

fossil fuel industry has a very strong interest in not carrying out a green transition and they also have very strong marketing strategies for sway public opinion and political opinion to be against the green transition if you are a family owner and you prefer to care about the next generation and the longevity of your business you absolutely have to look into the green transition because otherwise there won't be any business or any economy to hand over to the next generation you can look at the footprint so the negative impact that you might create which is often the case no matter how sustainable your businesses is and then you can also try to emphasize the positive the solutions that that can kind of maybe bring some of the boundaries back so that's the first thing you have to decide you can't really do a ticking the box exercise with this one i would say earlier this year i was on the road and one of the highlights was c hosting the lp p summit at arctic fifteen in helsinki in that room we tackled the future of climate investing at a time of es fatigue and political backlash where should you as an investor tune in because beyond the headlines this is where the real conversation is happening on how value is being redefined not just in what we invest in but how and why i was joined by two remarkable leaders anna her vice chair of security trading representing the fifth generation of finland most notable industrial family behind the ko legacy and doctor krista h ceo of halt ventures where she's transforming her family enterprise into a force for sustainable innovation together they reveal what cat capital truly looks like in the next economy and how climate investing is far from being dead enjoy to the exciting bit of today where we will be talking about climate in a world of es g fatigue and backlash against climate the question is what next and to join me i love to invite to phenomenal women that are leading their families in sustainable innovation and thinking about investing for the future anna her of course from the family legacy of ko and vice chair of security trading doctor christ health soon from mountain to ventures where she is building the future of her family investing into startups into innovation and all that is in the built environment so to get us started here i think we all know the reality that you know that's been record outflow from es funds that's talk on political backlash against a lot of these es investments let's get started with who you are and why you're so fascinated by this very topic anna so my name is anna her and indeed boy am i here and who am i is it both questions i come from family legacy of for our previous generation so maybe being the fifth generation of industry owning family of gun which is an elevator an escalator company i represent the owners no role in the operative company so i'm kind of in charge of the family office where we do investments then outside corner and then also i'm the operative family member of a family phil that we founded some eleven years ago called the ana the helen foundation where we do strictly climate and almost entirely strictly steel sector d carbon modernization through phil so maybe from that you can already guess that we're kind of have received our fair share of information about climate about the sort of the state of the health and the stability of the planet which is worrying and then this is sort of where i'm coming from with the investments and with the phil yeah i love it and of course you have said that the ecological crisis will be the biggest make market failure of all lifetime and we'll get into that but someone that shares your view is our good friend doctor christ who moved back finland from the uk to drive the family business tell us a little bit more about your view now as ceo of holt ventures i love this doctor christ i'm gonna start calling christ yeah thank you so much sarah i was gonna say you don't need to call me doctor christ so i know i have it on my linkedin but it's just to get some credibility it sounds a bit one curry when you say too often in person i'm christ halt i am a family entrepreneur and impact investor and a sustainability academic so i'm the ceo health ventures which is our family office and investment company our biggest investment is that we own one hundred percent of halt on group which is our family business we make hvac systems so the kind of thing you see there in the ceilings and we do that in we sell them in thirty five countries around the world we have factories in nine countries so very global finnish business so my focus is on the investment side but also a lot on the strategy of the core business because i have my academic background and sustainability i've been able to bring a lot of the sustainability lens in what we do so we do both direct and indirect investments with a focus on the built environment and especially the green transition and the reason that why we're working on this is that if you are a family owner and you prefer to care about the next generation and the longevity of your business you absolutely have to look into the green transition because otherwise there won't be any business or any economy to hand over to the next generation so that's why i'm here today yeah love the and this is very much on your website actually to be in the family business is to safeguard the future and yet es you know impact yes we care about it deeply but the reality is very different it is under threat capital outflow are very very real from es funds and what you care about give us a lay of the land here today is it as dire as the media tells us it is anna i'm gonna suggest you as christopher first and then so i know she knows so if you're talking about the es backlash which i think is more of a thing in the us but it's also absolutely a thing here in europe i think that's a strong political agenda behind that so my phd research was a lot about the fossil fuel industry and that's very well documented how the fossil fuel industry has a very strong interest in not carrying out a green transition and they also have very strong marketing strategies for sway public opinion and political opinion to be against the green transition so i think there are these kinds of underlying forces so it's not that individual people necessarily hate es it's just there's so many strong interest that are worried about the transition and the similar thing is also the d backlash right like there are strong interest that don't see spreading out power and influence to a wider group as a good thing so then there's this backlash that we created in terms of what the situation is i mean we all hear that we are living very uncertain times it's really hard to know what to invest in everything is changing all the time but if there's one mega trend that one hundred percent sure will not change its climate change so if you're going to back one horse in the long term i would say it's mitigating and adapting to climate change and also i think maybe precisely because of the first of all welcome to finland whoever it's not from here although i do see a familiar faces in the audience as well but i think and you can also kind of raise your hand and say if you think otherwise but i think maybe we're a little bit more and it's also been studied a little bit more resistant to the sad sort of opinion influencing here in the nordic so i don't i think maybe that's one of the reasons that it's not like a one hundred percent trend in here i think what's maybe currently more influencing the or kind of battling for attention is the military spending or the innovation in defense and security and many people tend to kind of put these to in contradiction but i'm kind of also happy about seeing emerging discourse about how there can actually be sort of c implemented dual use and just the fact of basically increasing demand for any industry because events often is it's an industrial yeah solution you can if you're kind of smart about it you can really couple the two strategic goals and green the industry while you're ramping up the demand so yeah so and building resilience as well can be for example good for green energy in europe so both of your are essentially saying it is not exactly es g fatigue it is a lot of politically motivated capital being dampened you know if that if there's a better word to that let me know but i guess you know dampening of capital is really what we are seeing but for the capital like yours which are really focused persistent and committed to this agenda where is the capital flowing tell us a little bit about you know the kind of innovations that you're excited about first to just to one more thing about the es fatigue i think it's yeah sure there's a fatigue but it's kind of on the level of discourse so maybe i don't know like we can keep talking about it but i'm maybe you know not too interested in in talking about it the americans are forced to do what forced to do due to their administration and that's a different thing but over here the the fatigue is maybe a thing of the past hopefully where the capital is flowing actually i walk through the lobby and i heard geopolitical geopolitics mentioned like several times just walking so obviously in finland that's a very kind of critical issue and not to be taken lightly so definitely a lot of the technologies also we have been looking at earth observation technologies that are now actually becoming military observation technologies and that's that's definitely the dual use trend is a thing but then if we look at climate i think there's still we're in europe we have now it's been contested a little bit but still we have strong regulation for keeping the planet on course and also making europe the most competitive region in clean solutions then we have a lot of legislation coming up i just spoke with someone from the building sector who was quite excited about the fact that europe's is gonna to have its energy efficiency regulation for buildings in implemented in twenty twenty eight where you need all public buildings to be zero and have some sort of solar panel implementation and then all new buildings by two thousand and thirty so obviously that's gonna mean we need a lot of really good innovations and solutions for super energy efficiency like very energy efficient elevators or or hvac systems but also a lot of lot of new innovation so that's one example yeah yeah for sure and i think in kind of these let's say more difficult times for es you one thing that's a no brainer is different types of efficiency so resource efficiency energy efficiency because it's good anyway it's good for business to sort of optimizing the system i think those kinds of startups ups are doing really well still today on a higher level of course that's not enough actually mitigate climate change we also need to think about the system level changes that are needed in society and how to invest in those to how to build a transport system that's not rely reliant on fully on fossil fuels for example so that's where the long term focus has to be but in terms of where investors find it easy to invest at the moment i think it's all lot these optimizing technologies and even the kind of technology that even our core business is making like you say so improving energy efficiency in the built environment and a lot of our startups are also in this kind of a space yeah so i think what you bring up then we we talked about this earlier about incremental in innovation versus real systems change right if if you're really here to help the climate don't create something that addresses carbon emissions but you know impacts every other the metric how are you thinking about those kinds of investments i e systems level investments given you both represent essentially patient capital that maybe tom henri doesn't have yeah it's not easy so if you think about system level change it's kind of goes against the standard of diversification which is really common for people in finances people here will know but if you want to impact a system such as the built environment system or the energy system then you sort of need to focus on something i need to really understand where the leverage points are so it's not enough to maybe invest in one start up in green energy but maybe you need to invest in the whole ecosystem and the infrastructure and then drive change that way so that's why for example we've chosen to focus quite closely around our core business where we have a lot of expertise so the built environment space and adjacent industries because that that's where we can understand that okay if you change this lever then this and this and this thing will change as well so to build these net zero buildings for example it's not just one technology so energy efficiency is not enough maybe we can add carbon capture renewable energy generation i think the first point is to really understand the system and then how to impact it and then that's how you can start thinking about change that's not just incremental yeah and before we go to and i mean just talk to us a little bit about the example of how you you assess you know startups ups and and funds here for this built environment what are you looking for to enact this kind of systems level change you're looking forward to it's a question of both what the fund or the firm is doing and then also how it fits into what we are doing mh so obviously the fund or the company must demonstrate that they have an understanding of the real impacts of what they're trying to do so anyone can say that they're green because everyone's meeting some sustainable development goal right but then having a deeper understanding of what's actually material so again if you are in the built environment business then probably there has to be something about material efficiency or energy efficiency or something other than just for example gender equality even though that's very important as well but understanding how a company is impacting change that's actually material in where they operate and then in terms of where we stand on this as a family office we focus on things where we can bring some kind of extra value and obviously we can contribute more and we have the connections and the expertise to help them so then that's actually a better leverage point for us so think it kind of varies from investor to investor boy where you can make the most impact so you need to both assess your own strengths and then the ability of the team to operate in that space yeah talking to loud hosted by chris savage is brought to you by the spot podcast broadcast network the audio destination for business professionals chris savage ceo of wi and the self for proclaimed loudest talk takes you inside the minds of entrepreneurs as they share at the funniest and often tap ports of building human brands in an episode i especially enjoyed chris talks with just simon creator of the distribution first approach about what every business leader knows you are often the brand justin in breaks sound how to amplify your presence repurpose what you already have and avoid content for now listen to talking to loud wherever you your and talking about models anna you just commissioned a very extensive model you you talk very openly about how you know you you've been very sad by the breach of the planetary boundaries and you've decided to come up with this extensive framework now to share with the family office group share with us a little bit about you know how you've thought about this and while you decided to create this expensive framework yes with pleasure first just to comment on christ as good explanation i was i was just was just thinking about something that a systems investor just a while ago explained about the way to look at systems that the that systems are never or systems can be but typically the systems that we are talking about are not a clock problem but the cloud problem right so if you look at a like a watch and you can see it's a pretty intricate system but it's still quite simple and then you can kind of take it apart and they put it back together but when if you think about like societal systems are more like you know clouds on the sky where they shift a little bit all the time you can't really say where they start and where they end and i think that's the trick with the trying to be systemic and look at the systems it's also just a little bit to admit that you can never really know one hundred percent what's the system that you're looking at but then it's maybe at least what we do is maybe more try to like really look at the team or the founder and see whether or what's their understanding of the system and kind of the also the almost the humility in the face of the system so so that's also one approach earth systems are also systems and and that's the systems that the pod boundaries framework is is measuring and like you said we are very kind of science led and science based in our approach and we've been building up framework and a tool to really take into account holistically the environmental changes that are happening so if you only look at climate you can really easily scale something that's catastrophic for biodiversity or land use we want to be really cognizant of in like the net impact of what what we are funding through our portfolio so and another thing is the csr regulation or the sustainability regulation in the european union area there's a backlash to that as well and it's created a maybe a disproportionate burden to the companies that are our reporting and there's work being done there don't get me started on that but but what we wanted to do is to take the data that is not being reported and then the kind of really used it basically we found a perfect guy who's a quan analyst but also really kind of science and comes savvy and he's created a tool estimating the pressures in any listed portfolio puts on on the planetary boundaries so so all the critical processes it's it can be climate or it i mean it can be it's nine boundaries so the mh for instance climate fresh water circulation biodiversity and six out of those nine are now already breached which it's not just sad it's really worrying and yeah and so when you look at funds when you look at you know investments that you're making using this framework has it been challenging to tick all the boxes i mean you know i think the criticism if i may off a lot of these es g frameworks is it becomes a ticking off the box exercise yes this is a very different approach because you you end up you have to kind of you can look at the footprint so the negative impact that you might create which is often the case no matter how sustainable your businesses but then you can also try to emphasize the positive the solutions that that can kind of maybe bring some of the boundaries back so that's the first thing you have to decide yeah so there's a lot of choices to be made during that but i am it's not you can't really do it tick ticking the box exercise with this one i would say not if you really know how to use it we are hoping and actually i'm pretty sure that there are other varied science based investors who are working in a similar model for non listed equities at the moment and to be used on a fund so this the first version that we have is listed companies or companies who are for one reason we're not reporting enough of there and this is something you're looking to share with the rest of the family office community to implement for the reminder indeed it's there it's on our website it's it's so therefore everyone and we of course hope that it's i mean the our intention was to build something for ourselves but then when not share it with others yeah and krishna what what model do you use if if at all in framework to assess how do you ensure you're not just ticking a box and also falling into prayer of the green washers out there yeah we're interesting so we're a much smaller family office than the security trading is so we're probably operate a slightly different scale but there's a few things that i would raise just kind of simple principles so the first this is idea that a family investor or any investor can be green by being impact aligned so aligning all your investments so that they fit some kind of an impact criteria or you can be impact generating so not just aligned to green standard but actually think about is my investment actually making a difference somehow to the system that i want to impact so of course you want your whole portfolio to be aligned to some kind of principles of green or sustainable whatever your values are but if you can also then get to this next level impact generation i think that's even better so not just to check okay we're not making any planetary boundaries worse but actually finding investments where you're actually improving things so that's one lens for sure and then of course again i already talked about system change that's very important and then finally again this idea of leverage point so where does my capital and the expertise that my company my family office has where would that make the most difference and of course maybe not all of your capital can be put at risk this way because the most difference is are often made in areas where there is the most risk right but at least as a family of office i think we are more entrepreneurial than maybe your standard investor so we're not just looking at the risk return profiles but we're also looking at okay where is there an opportunity to actually make a difference and if you are in a position where you do actually you are an asset owner on your control capital i think that's a really good way to also think about your impact so could i take on a bit more risk could be a bit more entrepreneurial for something that i care about and then maybe have a real impact in the world in the process and then what do you think in terms of the you know avoiding the washers and ensuring i think what what you're getting to is additional right ensuring that each dollar spent is an additional capital that only you could have brought that value yeah exactly or at least i can see there's a logical path from spending that money to actually doing something useful in the world mh and not just being aligned to some standard but actually having thought about the impact yeah yes i think the additional of our money versus someone else's money is also something that we are trying to kind of look case by case always when we look at new investments recently we have been almost like in our solution and impact portfolio we've been coming more and more to decisions where we only go for environment climate clean tech focused funds or investments and of course there are many funds when you talk asked about green i think there's a lot of really actually good intentions to to be aligned with the planetary boundaries to be climate like there is very little intentional green washing happening but sometimes there's just unintentional green where we're in that kind of point in time where there's a lot of wish to be like really creating real world impact but then it's maybe not there yet so i think in terms of trying you avoid it is you can quite often find if there's the intrinsic understanding of the system when you talk to our managers or or with the company and then also especially if you take a look around the stakeholders and organizations around you can see there there's an alignment or not but as i said mostly it's maybe just like a case of learning together and seeing if it's actually something that can be implemented even though at first it's not there because assess what i love our conversation is you're imagining the future in a in a lens of optimism despite the worry you're because of the worry in that there's a lot more capital that can be patient enough to carry through let's answer the question that is the title of all panel how can capital today be truly cat in this new economy what does that mean to you what is cat capital where should it be spent in your mind my understanding is that there's quite a lot of what we call patient capital in the lp summit and in the room and the simplest answer from my perspective is just that you can kind of that's your additional if you can be patient if you can be flexible in your terms for something that you see really can can make a difference in ten fifteen twenty years that's definitely what we need right now so i have a project in the phil entropy that looks at this cat capital for climate solutions precisely and so there we see that even like both from a return and an impact point of view you actually get both the impact and the return only after we've commercialized right because yep because the the curve is so steep so we have quite a lot of money going to the early stage see really good innovations but then when we don't have enough money to scale all those innovations or even their top i don't know twenty of them we kind of lose the impact of those solutions so i think what families family offices can do maybe we're looking at if also foundations can do this is to really be there for that commercialization the first of a kind bit of a little bit later stage of the climate technologies so that's one like really concrete example to where we can be cat for climate yeah and christ is there i mean verticals that you think you know with the patient capital that we have that we should be investing in to be truly cat to solve some of the biggest issues we were faced with yeah absolutely so i think there's a bit of a vacuum for value based leadership in the world in general and of course it's not the fold of the finance world but i think we can all do our part and trying to hold steady in some values as the world is changing around us so one point is of course that in a lot of types of industries it's not realistic to develop a company from basically zero to completely profitable and making a big difference in like a five year time span so i'm just i think i'm just echoing what you said but especially a lot of these industrial and applications energy infrastructure built environment is very very important that they are different types of investors involved so not just that maybe the typical venture investor who needs a quick exit but also investors that can look a bit beyond and see that okay we can develop good long term business but it might take a bit longer than what we're used to and in i think in all of these systems and in all of these fields they are huge gaps in funding if you think about what is needed to actually have hope for functioning society in the future i mean we keep talking about this but it's just simply the fact that unless we have some kind of a transition a lot of economic value and just people's livelihoods and societies and all of that value is also going to be lost so i think there's an impetus on all of us to look at where we can impact for us it is mostly in the built environment space and then be a bit patient a a bit more strategic on where to invest rather than just always chasing the newest trend yeah so the newest trend being something like ai well i mean ai is a tool right you can use it for good or you can use it for bad and i'm not an expert on this but think one thing about ai is that we need to be mindful on what it's used for so is it something that helps us as a society brings additional value or are we just building huge energy drains resource drains that's using a lot of energy yeah and and then like for for me that's something very important so i there's very good applications for ai very good developments there but it's important to also think about what it's being used for yes i wanna got that a little bit just because i that's what i think about often quite a lot that our ai is gonna provide us with even bigger scale like even more exponential scale so then we should be even more kind of cognizant and really think about what it is that we actually want to scale because it's then it's gonna like sort of happen anyway with the help so you wanna be mindful so you were saying rather than scaling scheduling in our lives than using ai tools for that we should be implementing it in ways that also help our environment how have you seen that actually have you seen real credible applications of ai in the walls that you're investing in or is it just like an application layer and everybody has a dot ai and gets the funding today well i think this is an interesting question how do we define ai so there's a lot of this hype now around the large language models which is one part of ai but there's all kinds of like i what point as a machine learning algorithm become ai and i think the kind of industrial applications of that and optimizing systems and planning things are very different from the kind of chat gp thing that maybe we're more familiar with so i'm not like a technical expert but i'm sure there are lots of good applications of ai type technologies but they might not be the most hyped up ones right now because it's not what we're all seeing in hud day to day lives yeah and ai is it's definitely happening is consuming a lot of energy the claim is that this increased demand in energy is gonna transform the energy basically make the transition final to the clean energy but at the same time we have we are elect occupying our transport we are producing green steel with the clean energy so if i was to come up with a new business today i would totally go for the clean energy or the grid because there's like yeah is coming from multiple directions and it's gonna happen but we really need those solutions yeah and talking about solutions i mean more specifically to inspire to hopefully walk over or some inspiration here despite the ecological crisis what are you inspired by what are you seeing on the ground you know what people fixing in the build environment that we you know because we're investing in gaming and everything else that we don't see i'm just back from sweden where i visited ssa and and a couple of other big companies steel production plant or actually it was a very it's it's an old production plan so i was also walking to into the blast furnace which is technology that was created like a thousand years ago but now they are very kind of energetically and proudly transforming that entire old plant to be working with electric arc furnaces so for cell and then also they have a smaller smaller pilot plant where they're already producing small amounts of totally for sell free greens steel so i was bouncing this bouncy ball that was made of fossil self steel which is super cool because still as an industry is one tenth of global emissions so it's huge so i'm i'm quite happy i was quite happy a happy camper bouncing that ball yeah how about you christ yeah i also say i don't have as tangible an example but in the world where we're so excited about software and there is lots of exciting software i don't wanna blame anyone who's investing in this but i'm very excited by people who are actually developing physical solutions and then scaling those up so new building materials are more sustainable more recyclable or incorporating carbon capture into buildings to actually reduce our carbon footprint or even make it negative or optimizing the energy use of buildings there's so much scope for this around europe and we we also involved in a few very interesting startups ups in this space so more and more like i'm i'd like to invest in teams are to physically doing something and changing the infrastructure because and you can see the impact and it's very tangible and you know that it's there and there are a lot of people working on this so i'm very hopeful about that maybe it's not surprising that an hvac family person and the elevator family person are super excited about hardware yeah we all poor from the old school industries so you it's understandable right but i think there's something there like these are very old industries they're very slow to change but there's a lot of push now for change and it's very exciting there's a lot of opportunity so any startup up for investors can also look at these kind of old industries and how they can be made more efficient because it's very exciting and interesting yeah and can be done yeah so if there's a magic wand i mean just to end on on a positive note here if there was a magic wand in both of your hands to encourage investors to invest in a certain way to put more capital to work in this particular niche being as specific and as tangible as possible where would you want your magic wand actually i'm gonna derail from the hardware and say that i'm really hoping to see a lot more of the sharing economy solutions because i think economy because i think that's also basically no matter how much we create green energy or our or green steel we still need to kind of think a little bit about how much stuff we want here so i will go for that sharing economy me i like that christ yeah maybe related i think very relevant here in finland is just this whole idea of circular circular economy so we talk about it a lot but it's very under underdeveloped in finland compared to a lot of even our neighboring countries so i would like to see a lot more of this thinking and it might also mean that it's not enough that investors do something but investors who want to make change and need also work with other actors civil society even policymakers makers to kind of bring in the system change that we need so i would almost encourage people who really want to make change to be a bit of an activist investor so not just follow trends but also think about where you can lead maybe circular economy maybe it's better materials better energy used there's so many opportunities there yeah yeah and we have time for one question we have a question in the audience before we go to the next session anu i love listening to this panel and listening to the wonderful ideas coming from from you when we think about cat capital it does what it says on the tin it catalyze so you need to be able to bring a significant amount of others along with you and i love what you're saying about systems change i've worked within this for over a decade now so with respect to your impact how are you thinking about where your euros or dollars are best served and where are you seeing their ability to leverage and garner others to come along with you on the you know sort of on the purposes that mean most to you and your family office i actually love this question because this was something i forgot to mention even whether though it was in my notes so exactly so trying to encourage others to come along with you i mean even speaking depends like this so there's there's several angles to this so for example the family office world especially finland is quite small so i find it quite inspiring to meet other people who maybe don't realize that they have a lot of power in their hands in what they invest in and try to bring those kinds of people so i'm saying that not all the catalysis is necessarily financial so there's also other things that we have at our disposal our networks our businesses we're doing a lot also just through our business and the target setting from our core business and their suppliers and partners so that's really important but i think there's no one answer to like where to put the money right there's so many potential options but i'm gonna come back to this idea that is going where where we have expertise where we have understanding where we can contribute more than anyone else and then in the process trying to inspire different types of actors even if we don't agree on everything to at least work together on the things that we do agree on so hopefully the green transition for example can i just add the sort of what she said and then on the point of cooperation i think that's sort of missing piece that i know we are as we speak there are different mechanisms being built for for instance for the most patient capital to be der risking actually like a different sorts of mechanisms for that i know there are like the breakthrough energies building one t climate is building one elemental impact in the states they they are kind of having these mechanisms put in place and we're we're eager to see where that goes yeah yes no i'm thomas due i'm from venture lab in norway which is also a family office i have a question for krista so we know that the construction industry is probably around forty percent of of total co2 right and it's growing with one hundred percent between now and twenty sixty you mentioned hvac systems right so hot and cold which is about thirty percent of that a massive massive bad impact on the environment so going back to the hvac part and in early like maybe even pre construction where do you see ai physics etcetera coming into the total picture is there a did you see any ability to change that prior to construction or impacted prior to construction i guess that's my my question could go to both of you well this is a lot to do with halt group our core business which literally builds hvac systems and our competitive edge for years and years has been energy efficiency so demand based ventilation and cooling so you use as little energy as possible and that can actually cut emissions by thirty percent in a professional kitchen for example so it's very significant as you say and i think a lot of it does come to play at the design stage i don't know if you need ai for that maybe you can do it a bit more optimal but the way that already some of our not me but some of our engineers are doing it is already making a big difference there's also an interesting question about retrofit so we can't keep building all these new buildings so how do we retrofit these kinds of solutions to what we already have and a final question final questions we're there yeah doing i think it was mentioned already briefly in the panel but if a family office in the audience is listening to you and they want to start investing sustainably where do they start what is the easiest kind of actionable of item that they should do use on this framework yeah well yes i mean i think super easy clean energy is if it's we need someone says an abundance which is true but maybe wrong choice of word for my taste but i think at least what happened with us is basically first we just kind of got acquainted with the science behind it but there's loads of help for that but i think clean energy super easy and circular which chris mentioned yeah and maybe find partners to work with so get an expert to talk to your family office about this from like a university background or or partner with a gp that clearly has i mean maybe you can't exactly evaluate which one is the best one yet but at least someone who has a clear mandate and sustainability so you don't have to do everything alone like there's so many people working in this field and so much expertise so find friends example years like what you have yeah and actually i wanna mention in in the us something that's evolving really quickly as families coming together so if you've heard of the firm iconic they manage like zuckerberg wealth and all that not only do they have eighty four billion assets under management there are over also building collab apps which is where the families come together to invest to solve the problem and what i've been inspired with both of you is you know you you start from the beginning right which is what is the problem we're trying to solve and what is the current system how do we change the status quo versus i think what a lot of tech investing does which is forces us to look at incremental innovation more than anything in at the rate where we're changing so much is evolving and yet both of you leap forward telling us that climate investing is not date it is evolving and we have to adapt and i'm grateful for both of you leading and using your voice and using your legacy as a lever for growth and with that round of applause ladies and gentlemen for doctor christ and anna her thank you so much and thanks so much for tuning in this week you can subscribe wherever you get your podcast and follow our socials on sarah global to get the latest on the show it would really help me out too if you enjoyed this to rate and review i'll show on apple and share your favorite episodes with print i'm sarah chen spellings and you've been listening to billion dollar moves

you were very open about being homeless almost you were cleaning you were you know in the pharmacy business left it and you were also in a marriage that did not serve you no you felt like you were at rock bottom well my mom said to me we could be driving home right now and we could get hit by a truck would you be okay with your life in the way you live in the decisions you're making like would you be okay to die right now and nobody had ever put nothing to me like that before exits and valuations before building one of the most recognized rents in women's health beatrice and face setbacks that would have ended most journeys homelessness a marriage that did not serve her playing health challenges but each woman became a turning point and we're back from the summer welcome to bill dollar lube today i'm joined by the cofounder of the honey pot the first plant derived family carolina to his shelves at target w and walgreens what began as a product beatrice dixon formulated for herself grew into a powerhouse brand generating tens of millions in annual revenue reaching valuation north of four hundred million and culminating in a landmark nine figure exit to compass diversified in twenty twenty one b's journey is a testament to resilience and reinvent from rock bottom to building generational wealth from creating out of necessity to rewriting the entire future of women's health and ownership and i could not think of a better way to kick off season three where we spotlight when i call the modern may women are rei imagining both impact and wealth let's look in you felt like you were at rock bottom yes but then at one point you said enough was enough you had a mindset shift yeah bring us back to that moment and where all of the things that you just mentioned were over like maybe six or seven years right like they weren't all like on top of each other but the thing that's interesting about those moments is that there wasn't really a moment in between any of those moments where i stopped and reflected on all of the things that you just mentioned as it relates to the moment that i had where i decided that i wanted to change my life me and the ex had a bad argument that morning this was actually me going back to the doctor and the doctor told me that there was something going on with my thyroid and so i get in the car my mom because my mom came with me to the doctor and i was like mommy she said everything was fine but she said something was wrong with my thyroid and my mom was like we don't have thyroid problems in our family you know like what and so there's an old wives tale if your thyroid is off is probably because you're lying to yourself about something i don't know if you've ever heard this before and so she was like you know what are you hiding what are you hold on to because we don't have those kinds of issues you've never had any thyroid issues and basically what i was holding on to was the fact that i didn't wanna be in this marriage that i didn't like my life that i was depressed it wasn't just the marriage it was just everything that conversation became b's turning point within weeks she walked away from a marriage and into building a new life one defined by purpose let's rewind a little bit to bring us back to the genesis story of honey pot did you see this riding on the wall that you would be this massive entrepreneur with hundreds of millions exit in the way that you've carved it i wasn't thinking about it like that i just wanted to make products that would serve humanity to be honest with you i didn't know anything about a exit back then not to the tune of what it could be it's not that i didn't know about it it wasn't the brass tax of why we were doing what we were doing the reason why we were doing we were doing was to serve right it was to make things that could work it was to fill a white space i know you experienced this to yourself yeah deep issues with b with inspired the honey pot that we know today yes and love i had just moved to atlanta mh i moved to atlanta in two thousand five this was six years later when i started to get b first of all i was outside atlanta in two thousand five was fun it was ridiculous you know one twelve was open vicious was open we were cute so we were you know we were outside i was enjoying myself and i was getting to know who i was and i was also kind of sewing my wild oats and i also kind of got tired of working in pharmacy then i got myself together because i was like i can't keep living like this going out monday through friday getting home at three going to work at seven or eight like it's just not it wasn't it and so i started to change my life and i got a job at whole foods working in whole body which is like whole foods version of a pharmacy right while i was at whole foods that i started to get these recurring bacterial va infections mh it would happen every single month right after my period i lived on cli myosin metro is all fragile but the thing was is i had no idea that you should not live on antibiotics it's killing every ounce of microbiome you have right it's like a bomb that just goes off inside your body and it kills everything i was desperate for relief because the medical doctors whatever they were given me it wasn't working and then one morning my grandmother came and met me in a dream she had told me that she had been walking with me seeing me struggle and she knew what to do and so she handed me a piece of paper it had a list of ingredients and basically she just told me i needed to memorize what was on the paper because she wasn't gonna be able to be there long and then she said wake up and i just jumped up out of my sleep and i woke up i literally woke up saying apple cider vinegar coconut you know lavender rose water i can't i woke up saying the list i wrote it down i went to work that day i had b at the time it just was very uncomfortable very shameful too because you felt the shame to be the person who stun up the car or stun up the bathroom it's embarrassing yeah and i went to work i bought all the stuff i went home had no idea what this was gonna turn into and so i made this formula and it was a wash and i started using it right away and when i tell you that thing was like magic the odor went away couple days later the discharge went away and i looked up and i realized that the infection that i had was gone wow and that was the moment you know that i realized that this is what i would do you call your brother of course i hear that was five hundred dollar credit card involved in initial help yeah that he provided walmart more and it was more it was more than the credit card it was you know it was just like at first i would constantly go to him and asking him questions what should i do about this what i do about that you know and he was like credit okay let me just give you this so you can just do what you need to do at first we didn't make product and sell it mh i would make it and give it away because you have to make sure what you're doing is right my sister asked me to help you with a feminine care company but my background is it's something that's value added to the company i'm a cpa by trade worked at p for a decade and started at my own practice and at some point i had to actually close shop and joy her when we first started off you know it was it was just bootstrap my sister and i and our credit cards and and that's how we got through the first the five years mh and then as we were building in we got a call from target and target said hey i've seen your product we would love to bring you in and my sister calls me and says target just sent me an email my what you talked about they sent an email to her because they had been speaking to one of their buyers were speaking to one of our customers and so they suggested us then they said hey we're gonna give you guys a shot and we're gonna put you in a thousand stores we have to fund it exactly so our first round was a friends and family around b made this product by hand for the first five years so by the time we were looking to raise a little bit of money to to able to support the doors the stores for target we already had kind of a warm leads because they had physically seen her and working with the same office design with a twenty one thousand loan from her brother simon gray being moved from kitchen experiments to full time household even working another job to sustain her dream within a year her product sold out at a hair show in atlanta then and landed in whole foods and soon enough in target inc reports that the company grew from forty thousand dollars in initial sales to two hundred fifty thousand the very next year and that pressure pushed the first big to target somebody that i was giving product to her at some point later on was selling product to was like hey you should go to the b brothers hair show i had never heard of the b brothers hair show she gave me reference number and was like give him a call he'll hook you up with a booth right i call i do all the stuff find out how much it's gonna be talk to sai and it's it's expensive especially when you have nothing and si made it happened he went and found a couple of his friends he pulled the some money into himself two and that's where we launched honey pot we went to the show we took six hundred bottles we sold out in a few days it was wild and then we went on to just run the business i think the first year we did like thirty thousand dollars in sales or something like that was just a lot of money yeah for something that just came out of thin air and you were just selling this making this in small batches yes we were making it in small batches at my house then at his office then back in my house sold it online we shipped it ourselves we just did everything ourselves imagine thirty thousand dollars worth of bottles there's three thousand bottles for that year and then the following year we did like two hundred and forty thousand dollars a couple years in we got an email from target and we got our opportunity target was monumental for you how did it change the business target is monumental for many reasons target gave us the the ability to mass produce our products get it out of the house it gave us the opportunity to raise money so that we could grow our business it gave us the opportunity to go into more mass market target also was beautiful for us because it put us on the national stage or part of their like black beyond measure campaigns that they were doing especially around the time when george floyd passed away and so they really started to invest in black businesses we were the brand in a target commercial that launched during super bowl yeah i mean it's wild so bring us back to that negotiation right we're here to learn mh from you in terms the smart decisions that you made and maybe some mistakes you made along the way mh when you were negotiating with target knowing that they had such huge leverage i mean it's a dream for many founders to have their products in the house of target mh how would you have done things differently if at all wouldn't have done anything different you can't have expectations when going into a mass market retailer you really especially if you've never been in one you have to just go with the flow you're not really negotiating you're accepting the terms you're accepting the terms because normally the terms are in place because they're not just terms for you yeah their terms for pretty much anybody that's on this shelf i think that one thing that's really important everybody wants to be a mass market retail but going into mass market retail you need to be responsible with yourself your business your customers you wanna be in a position where you're ready and i wanna double click on that because i've heard you speak about how you bolt your business yeah and you're very clear from day one that this business is to make money right absolutely every of business to make money yeah but a lot of people misunderstand that and also i guess for a women of color right often that's a perception of it's for impact there must be impact there there's a mis perception of what it should represent for the people for the business talk to us a little bit about that angle so i do agree that there should be social impact we've been doing social impact before we even had money we used to work with after pads back in the day even if we were able to send them a thousand dollars a year we at least were investing in humans who did not have access to the products that we made you can't do anything for anybody else if you cannot do for yourself i'm sorry with my family and my friends and my colleagues we did not create this business for there to not be wealth generation if we're doing that we are hustling backwards there is no reason on on the planet earth that anybody should just be in business in my opinion if you are not a non nonprofit organization your goal should be for your business to print money and if your business is printing money and if your business has had to bring in venture capitalists if your business has had to bring in private equity right which my business has done that you have to make a point to be responsible with that when somebody gives you a dollar honestly they want back ten yeah with demand came decisions fundraising expansion of the product line and supply chain pressure be raised her first round in twenty seventeen and walked away from financial dependency to run the company full time by twenty twenty three honey pot achieved over one hundred twenty one million in bra sales across more than thirty three thousand us stores including walmart cbs and walgreens take us back to that first round of funding of taking external capital walk us through that decision making process of selling a part of your business we got in into target we got into eleven hundred doors a target each store sets three to six pieces and then they order every week after and when you do that math that's a lot of product that you have to have so you have to have access to capital in order for us to mass produce our product that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and then we needed to create a brand branding like a story packaging logos tag lines those are the ways that you create relationship with the human that you wanna serve also the way that we shop is visual it needs to be beautiful so there was no way that we were gonna do that the money that we were making was to sustain business it wasn't to be able to do to go into target and scale that money that we were making was to go back to the manufacturer and make us some more wash make us some more white then it's time for you to go into more retail it's time for you to innovate it's time for you to be able to double down and and support your products on shelf you need money so then you have to go out and raise it again we didn't raise enough because you you think well let me just raise what i need well anytime you think you need a certain amount of money you should probably multiply that by like three or two because that's probably really the amount of money you need and then kind of the third or the fourth time is the charm where you've been out in the world you've raised money before you've learned you've seen your mistakes you've seen how you've run out of money when we got that target commercial yeah and that's when we brought in private equity v which stands for velocity mae good they're one of the best private equity funds for consumer package goods that was where we did a very meaningful yeah raise with a pretty good valuation when you get with private equity guess what comes next there's rules they're not getting involved unless you're saying hey in the next four years four to five years you gotta sell this business they have lps they've got people to answer to they raise a fund and so in order for them to do business with you you have to say that this is what you're doing because they have to return on their investments yep in that amount of time that doesn't mean that all of them win but they need a few of them to win in order to continue to do it over and over again then came the moment most founder stream of and many compromises on in twenty twenty four compass diversified acquired a majority stake in the honey pot for three hundred eighty million dollars in cash but here's the kicker b actually turned down a four hundred fifty million off of before when asked why she didn't flinch i would have been selling my soul some founders prioritize price be prioritize alignment with her vision her team and her legacy so you have now sold eighty five percent yes of your company to compass yes and as we're going deep into the whole thinking of building a successful sustainable business mh that creates generational wealth absolutely what made you decide to work with compass i know you had higher offers yeah we did much higher much higher but you decided to go to compass and importantly sell the majority state but still be operated in the business with a lower share the reason why it was compass was because they believed in this leadership team they believed in the team that was existing they believed that we were the best to run our business they believed in the future that we see there was partnership in a really beautiful way and it didn't feel like we were gonna sell our soul and so it was the right thing for us and and they were the right partner and they continue to be today b remains at the helm as ceo and chief in asian officer continuing to drive growth while holding a significant minority she's more than a founder she's a modern me truck proving resilience and wealth can coexist with integrity community impact and ancestral wisdom so you mention target a few times and a target commercial but of course it did come with backlash of course what do you think about just founders being hit left right center today where you said it's increasingly tough to be successful under such scrutiny as well so first of all it's gonna happen you have to be resolute in who you are first and foremost what your goals are or what is your north star what are you pointing towards and you have to be grounded in truth typically if you're a company that's hit scale is growing that's successful you're going to have a viral moment a allah is gonna get started and it's gonna go like wildfire and people believe unfortunately they hear some do not all in this particular instance there was one part of the commercial where i was sitting down with somebody and he asked me like a thousand questions and the one that they chose was asking me why was it so important for honey pot to be successful and normally i don't bring sexuality or race to the conversation but there's a reason to bring it in which my answer still is today because i have a responsibility to humans of color to humans with vagina i have a responsibility for this business to be successful when people that look like me can be successful it states the case that we aren't a risk to invest in and so it's extremely important for there to be wildly successful outcomes it's important because the more of us that do it it's not just just the black thing it's a bi thing it's a being a woman thing even if you don't consider yourself that the world that we're in right now is an interesting one there's gonna be even harder for us to be successful so because of that we have to be able to pass the torch to the next one the revolution is financial it is and you our role model for exactly that but of course the other criticism was the change of the formulation that was around it and and what have you learned from these viral moments and how to handle it best especially as a ceo today under so much scrutiny where everything you do i've learned that you have to get out in front of it the old school p rules was that you don't say anything you just let it boil over well those rules don't apply today because social media is alive and well it's kind of like the way that artificial intelligence will be in the future well where we will just lose control of it that's where we are with social media the control is lost it's gone billions of people are on these platforms so it doesn't take anything for the wrong message or or a lie or anything to get out into the world and if you're a brand that's that which i'm very grateful to say is is culturally relevant as honey pot is which i'm again i'm i don't say that with eagle i really appreciate that people are just waiting to bring it down and so the thing that i learned even though we may have been advised differently is that i have to speak the truth from our point of view because we're the ones that are dealing with it we're the ones a new app happened all of the largest brands in the world change formulations at all the time in fact there's so many reasons why formulations change and if you look at where we were at the time coming out of covid where ingredients may be available or not available things change all the time sometimes you just don't have access to something and guess what you gotta do you have to change your formulation and so one thing that i learned was like i said you have to get out in front of it and speak your truth and me as the leader i've done that in past and i would do that in future you have to manage your energy you have to take care of yourself yeah that's the other thing you have to do thirdly you have to care for your team because they're taking the brunt of it too the question that i have now in this chapter you've added chief innovation officer chief visionary officer on top of being ceo what does this next chapter of b as a leader look like and what can we expect for honey honestly it doesn't look much different than it looked before i have an incredible president ali va because we're kinda like c ceos it allows me to focus in on the areas that i really excel in which is innovation it's strategic thinking being the face being out in the world it's kind of being the mat of this business i love that because it has a soul a real one mh and it's not just my intuition that that's locked into that it's the team's intuition that's locked into that from living in hotels to leading a nine figure brand dixon story is one of conviction prove to me that purpose and profit can coexist if done correctly founders investors and leaders alike hear my key takeaways from her journey number one always invest in yourself first when you can be put her own money into early products signaling readiness to retailers and investors alike serious founders invest early even before external validation number two authenticity as a strategy she built trust in a taboo category by naming things as they are and serving her community with honesty turning brand purpose into a emo number three capital clarity she raised only when ready and knowing exactly what the money was for discipline and fundraising preserves equity and power number four exit on your own terms b walked away from a four hundred fifty million offer that didn't align with her values instead choosing a three hundred eighty million deal that allowed her to keep ownership leadership and her team intact and finally scale who has sold beyond products she invested in community education and wellness culture building advocacy and long term beatrice story from homelessness to multi hundred million dollar exit is proof that purpose foresight and refusal to compromise can defy expectations and with that thanks for tuning in to billion dollar moves if you found value in today's conversation share it with a fell builder a fund and hit subscribe to support our work here until next time keep moving with capital and conviction my name is sarah chen spelling signing off i'll

candidly i had been sort of scarred by the wealth management industry i been wildly under impressed by it even though iconic is just thirteen years old the work that went into build an iconic preceded our first day as iconic by almost ten years we had done a few one off consumer direct investments alibaba jd dot com our client became public company ceos they were no longer allowed to opt in into a direct investment that they wanted to do so we raised a fund it allowed us to find companies like ibm service titan pro core the list goes on and on and on you really were ahead of the curve compared to i mean lights speed is now a r general capitalist stopped calling themselves a venture firm and even bought at hospital you almost did what they are now doing where you've built the family office relationships managed the money built the grow firm impact how is iconic impact going to approach things differently instead of thinking about what can you as an individual family or couple do for climate change what could twenty tech found families do for climate change six months later we were able to build the first of its kind fifty million dollar ocean climate collaborative the of what feels like america's culture and how it needs to revert we're in this game of pin we are in a culture of extremism both sides i'm talking good bad ugly because you've given me a lot of good p enough we're being honest you won't find them humble bragging or causing us throw on x but behind some of the biggest tech fortunes in the world there's icon quite by design iconic capital manages the wealth of valley elite with over eighty billion dollars under management they built a modern financial empire platt family office part venture powerhouse park fill and philanthropic force i spent the day with iconic a cofounder founder mike anders someone rarely in the spotlight yet deeply trusted by the world's most powerful builders to stuart not just their money but their legacies let's get into it alright my anders mike anders the man behind the iconic firm that we've heard representing amazing tech founders and you are now helping them steward their money store their impact scale their impact and do so much more what do we need to know about your upbringing to understand the leader we have here today i'm the son of two professors my parents taught in the medical school at stanford and the medical school of brown well i was born in new york i quickly without much of a say moved to palo alto california my parents taught at stanford until i was twelve or thirteen years old and then with even less of a say they moved to providence rhode island at to brown university my mom was first year of medical student i made the front page of the papers because i was born her first year of medical school and she didn't miss a class and my dad had marched with martin luther king in the you know sixties as well so i grew up with the values of fairness equality decency and a deep belief in education even though i wasn't a great student if we're being honest it wasn't until a very random moment which i can remember as if it was yesterday i was bored and dis interested and channel surfing and i saw on the screen of seas span this unbelievable charismatic candidate for president united states named bill clinton and he was announcing his candidacy i was so inspired by this guy's vision and his ability to articulate the vision i was like i wonder if i should do something in public service and one of the things that i got was an opportunity to work for a summer in between my junior senior your year for then us congressman now a us senator named jack reid from rhode island he gave me the advice i was twenty years old that have i've if i really wanted to go into politics and be a public servants which he believed that would be good at that i should start outside of politics you'll actually have some worldly experience that would be relevant make you a better lawmaker and the day of graduation i was on an amtrak trained in new york city that advice would take him to wall street but it wouldn't be long before mike realized he needed something more what began as a pragmatic d detroit soon turned into a personal reckoning inside the glass towers of new york finance mike found success but also dis so my first job at fidelity investments even though i had nothing to do with it fidelity had just rolled out the first commercial donor advice fund and i was really amazed by it it seemed like such a clever impactful idea fast forward a few years i started a company that was building these donor advised funds for all the large financial service firms that frankly should be offering phil to their clients but weren't and when i dug into it a little bit more i realized it's really cumbersome to set up it's not the core competence of any big bank and so we created this company that would provide a white labeled outsourced turnkey charitable product that jpmorgan good brand and use jpmorgan asset management but market to their own client base long story very short and sad the company did sign up all these major banks as clients but never really got off the ground in terms of the private client advisors marketing the product to their pine net worth clients it just didn't pay the brokers enough it wasn't in their core understanding their competence and so the products all sort of sat on the shelf while fidelity continued to raise billions and billions and billions of dollars largely from jpmorgan and goldman sachs clients and then we ended up selling that company for peanuts a quick note donor advice funds or da are like charitable savings accounts you get a text right of now and direct runs to charities over time without the hassle of a private foundation twenty an twenty three da held over two hundred fifty billion dollars fidelity had the first mover advantage raising billions mike's accompanied tried to white label da for big banks but it never took off why brokers didn't push what didn't pay them da have lower fees and assets it's the brokers e reducing how they get paid at i went to fidelity to their charitable services group and led up kind of the fundraising efforts for fidelity charitable platform which also included a pooled income fun and an outsourced foundation product in that role i started meeting some very affluent individuals all of whom were very eager to talk about their phil and occasionally one of these individuals or folks around the ecosystem would bring up this guy mock and candidly i had been sort of scarred by the wealth management industry i been wildly under impressed by it and so the idea of joining a wealth management platform was really uni interesting for me at the time but so many interesting people and smart people and people i admired so much kept telling me that i had to meet this guy bash and so in two thousand and five dives i went for our first cup of coffee and it was really love first sight and soon mike would begin to shape what would eventually become iconic but first they had to challenge the very idea of what ralph stewardship could be starting with one simple idea what we figured out for us is we wanted to be the best cad in the world to the best golfers in the world and we knew very early on that being the best cad was an honor in itself how do we surround ourselves with clients that are much smarter than we are much more relevant than we are how do we create a community of exceptional founders and ceos who by listening to more than we talk at would give us a view of the world from their perch and the collective wisdom of this group would be pretty informed pretty unfiltered and collectively would help us shape a view of where the world was today and where it was going over time we started realizing these clients are not just exceptionally smart but they're highly relevant they're gonna see a lot of really interesting deal flow and in isolation the tech guys would probably see a lot more tech deal flow the consumer guys would see a lot more consumer deal flow but collectively and in sharing this deal flow they would build diversification across really interesting and very unique and hard to seek out and deal flow and ultimately having joined dev first at goldman and then us moving to morgan stanley together we realized one to truly be independent and objective you can't be at a big bank and second of all our client base through a lot of luck and coincidence and timing had become so significant that they all wanted to be an on an independent platform as well they did not wanna be at a big bank and so in two thousand and eleven we set out to create iconic but truth be told and i have known each other for over twenty years and had started building this business even in the con fines of a big bank platform you really were ahead of the curve compared to i mean lights speed is now a r general capitalist stop calling themselves a venture firm and even bought a hospital you almost did what they are now doing where you've built the family office relationships managed money built the growth firm impacts i mean now you have the data centers all of that talk to us a little bit about the strategy the through line here did you see it than two thousand eleven you know the writing on the wall that this is the direction that wealth is going to dictate in some way i don't think we could have started iconic in any other geography in the world and i'm not we could have started it at any other time in the world i think there was something in kind of the mid two thousand where collaboration social partnership were emerging themes that actually meant something silos were a bad thing and community was a good thing and obviously facebook was kind of a pillar of promoting community and so there was something about the timing and the location that allowed iconic to become iconic and i think there was something humble in the earliest of days about iconic that understood collectively a group is gonna be smarter than anyone individual and if we can get a collective group of exceptional founders and ceos and not just silicon valley but consumer energy transportation yeah us non us old young that diversity of thought was gonna help us become smarter as long as we were better listeners than we were talker and so that dna i think is what ultimately drove iconic and then of course who would have thought the facebook would become facebook who would have thought that you know we would have just been at the epicenter of these businesses starting from one day and then the next there tens of billions of dollars of value hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap so the relevancy of the iconic ecosystem just became more and more of a juggernaut in driving interesting deal flow and also helping us build internally the team to source and vet that deal flow in a really intelligent way and then i think too as you start listening more and more and that becomes core to who you are you start picking up patterns you start picking up themes so one of the early themes that we picked up on was we had done a few one off consumer direct investments alibaba jd d dot com there was a number of these and one we realized that as our client became public company ceos they were no longer allowed to opt into a direct investment that they wanted to do whether iconic sourced it or someone else in the ecosystem sourced it and so we raised the fund and we brought in my partner will griffith to drive that the building of that fund and that now is we're in our seventh vintage there's a hundred people at iconic dedicated just to our you know venture growth equity tech investing but we saw early on from the consumer that it was a very interesting opportunity to migrate to sort of enterprise software and so that was a really interesting shift in two thousand and thirteen where the vast majority of our investing over the last ten years has not been in consumer where we had done a few deals but now is an enterprise software yeah and that just was again really great timing it allowed us to find companies like adi service titan pro core snowflake data dog the list goes on and on and on and so again it was sort of listening to the ecosystem listening to the client base seeing these patterns and in this case making a pretty bold and deliberate move into investing in enterprise software and as we began investing more capital into enterprise software we began seeing the migration of the cloud and we were living this every day yeah and so as we began spending time again with more of our clients for example a couple of the ceos of the hyper scale players we saw the migration of the cloud and we were hearing from them that there was no way they could keep up with the demand on storage and so as innovative thoughtful sort of business creators and all our first impulse was who we allocate capital to that's investing heavily in the data center space and there wasn't anyone at the time there was large you know infrastructure funds where a percentage of the fund was dedicated to data centers and the rest was toll roads but there wasn't anyone dedicated to investing just in data centers and we saw this again from this client base and from the investing we had done in enterprise software that the cloud was going to be a huge place to invest and that data centers would be those railroads and so we began building data centers and we raised our first font dedicated just to the building of data centers and we really decided early on that we were gonna focus almost entirely on the hyper hold bad thought hot hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to reduce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation want to move faster like tumblr visit hot hubspot dot com you've seen the mobile wave you've seen also the different crashes twenty sixteen high of saas enterprise and more now we're on the next wave of ai what are your thoughts first of all it's no secret but ai has become top of mind for i think most everybody at this point and for good reason if it was even a year ago where people were skeptical of how real it was and what would the implications be i think there's very little debate about how real ai is how disruptive it is going to be just taking that seriously i think is is important there's lots of ways to look at aa there's the foundational models ll you know small language models our focus has really been a no surprise for iconic has really been on sort of the application layer where is ai creating product that has a use case in business either creating efficiency allowing for employee productivity you know margin expansion these are the areas where we've looked at and so we've spent a significant amount of our time over the last two years diving deep into ai but not so much from the foundational standpoint and more from the application layer i guess you're you're speaking to sort of the picks and shovel approach really of taking you know what's going to be ai as a horizontal application in many ways you've invested into category leaders like better up call right can how you see ai being core to these category leaders around the time we started iconic there was a lot of folks that believed investing in technology was a vertical some point between then and now feels like most people agree it's no longer a vertical it's a horizontal it really doesn't matter what business you started you founded a widget company it's now a technology company that sells widget and so there's this horizontal layer that makes every single company like it or not a tech company and we see ai as being another layer in that horizontal tech stack and so we think every company will be an ai company and what's been fascinating for us is of the hundred and fifty or so companies we've invested in over the course of the last ten years most of them were not ai companies but now every single one of them is transitioning to become an ai company and as we sit and meet with these companies on a regular basis we have an ai scorecard how quickly are you embracing ai show us how you're adopting ai tools into your traditional business if you look at a company like fig which was not an ai business but now dylan will talk openly about the fact that ai is raising the ceiling and lowering the floor for developers to come in and effectively use fig in ways that they weren't able to do just a couple of years ago and then we look at companies like writer or eleven labs these are pure ai native businesses but again businesses that are solving a real problem creating real productivity in the workplace efficient workflows allowing for margin expansion and soon we see this as even like new product development ideas are gonna come from ai this is the future in our opinion how would you differentiate between hype and substance here when you're looking at investing in a company an ai business you wanna really dive deep avoid the hype and get into the substance of what's the adoption of their product how are they growing and of the many many many ai businesses that they may be competing with how are they stacking up in terms of usability and use case and adoption relative to their peers and i think it's very easy to put money into ai right now it'll be just as easy to lose money in ai and i think what you really have to do is navigate through that hype because there is an enormous amount of hype that is not gonna translate into success and yet there's going to be enormous wealth creation and business productivity created through ai in a space cloud by noise a mike and his team are focused on substance not slash they aren't chasing trends they're backing boulders so i asked him what separates the companies that actually make it what is like the common threat among you know some of the big techniques that you've invested in from fig to aiden what we're really looking for is customer adoption and then a lot of diligence calls around users of this software this this business how are they using it how are they finding it what's you know helping their business so there's an enormous amount of work that goes into validating the product the efficacy of the product the likelihood of continued growth of the product and then also two you know we have a network beyond just the immediate iconic client base of some of the largest single family offices around the planet and sovereign wealth funds around the planet and so when we invest in a company you also get the iconic network behind you and so when we look at investing in a business one question we always ask is can we really add value here we don't wanna just be a capital provider we wanna be a partner to their business we wanna help them think about growing their board we wanna help them think about key executive hires and we certainly wanna be very active in making customer introductions and help and generate arr and inject more energy behind the growth that they were already seeing micah and his team have built a front seat to the evolving tech economy and today that vantage point has never been more critical from macro uncertainty and market cycles to the ai gold rush to the crushing values in corporate culture mike has seen it all so what does he make of this very moment i had twenty years less gray hair than i do today and so winning that trust early on was certainly one of the hardest things we had to do starting iconic since then has had less friction because we had the trusted of plants we had a track record of delivering for them and we had really this network that we had begun to use for this information edge this access edge and so day one of iconic wallet was not without bumps certainly didn't have the early stage hardship that comes with any you know startup up business if you will but of course along the way even with an iconic there were bad hires we made there was a couple businesses we started and didn't work out and as long as you take a step back and have an honest assessment of what went wrong why did things not work out like they did for our growth business a shot then you get better than you get smarter what was their hardest movement in the iconic journey that you can speak to i think one of the hardest moments of the iconic journey was dealing with you know the financial crisis in two thousand and eight was just a very very tough time because it was so much uncertainty not too dissimilar to what's going on right now with you know the tariffs and the confusion over what's going on i think whenever clients are panic and stressed and are worried about their own business not just their portfolio there's a level of stress that you unnecessarily have to absorb or unnecessarily have to absorb we've had a few curve balls that were thrown out us over the course of of the last ten years that certainly caused enormous stress and also to a lot of these things turned out to create enormous opportunity for us i think being an entrepreneur is you know accepting things that are not right not just dealing with the curve malls that are inevitably part of starting a company but then figuring out how to turn that into something constructive so when you think about the state of the market we touched on this briefly have but with the new administration in full force the uncertainty that is very much alive i mentioned i'm heading off to europe book for this and the nt is very very well in the minds of investors including family offices mh but on state of the market and how we should behave as investors yeah i mean i'll answer the first question i think right now there's a general sense of confusion and i think that there is no sort of clarity about what's happening because so much of the news feed is changing day to day if not more rapid what's been interesting is i've been in and around the investing world for thirty years and was in paris working for soc general morale when the europe wants the euro i was working soc d general when the russian currency crisis in nineteen ninety eight happened and the latin american debt crisis and when long term capital management failed and the dot com bust and financial crisis in two thousand eight and covid and in any of those financial crisis the government a government multiple governments where there is a rational this is the first crisis that in part is being caused by irrational governments and the uncertainty that they're creating so to have clarity to have answers right now is dishonest so i think what you do is you proceed with caution and you don't change the course dramatically from where you are so from state of the market let's talk about state of corporate culture there is a lot going around with the evacuation of what feels like america's culture and how it needs to revert i know you care a lot about race relations and diversity equity inclusion thoughts on that and especially iconic impacts role in this yeah i think you know we're in this game of pin ball where the ball is is being knocked around from both sides we are in a culture of extremism on both sides and i think what we need to find is rational ground where you know we can continue to promote long term goals of racial gel just gender of equality diversity these are all things that iconic stands by they're actually part of our values and at the same time we need to make sure that you know business isn't being driven by operatives being set by people that don't understand business at all and i think that's part of the challenge of what's going on in the country right now is you know we have been let down by government over decades and i think what we need to do is figure out a way where we can reinvest in america reinvest in education and hold our lawmakers accountable to some basic standard because at this point like you know we're we've got a whole issue we talked about earlier about ai but government proved their inability to regulate so much of what happened with social media mh so how is government in its current state gonna be able to regulate something like ai if it needs to be regulated and so i think right now these are the issues and i think it's less about v anti it's more about fundamental rational thinking that applies good business environments for people to thrive and succeed and at the same time up upholding values like diversity equity inclusion gender equality and racial justice amid the noise of headlines and the chaos of uncertainty icon approach means clear listen closely move deliberately need with conviction but for mike there was one question still unanswered what could capital do if it was mobilized not just for returns but for good that's where iconic impact comes in a platform built not just a give but to reimagine how giving is done and at the center of that vision is not a force in global development and the core architect behind icon next frontier i really started my career in poverty advocacy where grassroots poverty advocacy thinking about how we can encourage the public to leverage their voice to actually shift policy around extreme poverty i spent time in the field in fa working on education policy in kenya and uganda working on campaigning for great access to section reproductive health and rights access to basic contraception for women and girls and once i started that work i realized just the sheer need for folks to dedicate their lives to the space which i never thought i would be but really figuring out how can a global investment firm that works to support some of the world's smartest tech founders how can we leverage that for greater impact at scale and really built a platform for large scale collaborative photography instead of thinking about what can you as an individual family your couple do for climate change what could twenty tech founder of families do for climate change and suddenly you've got twelve families raising their hand and saying hey we do wanna to work on the ocean climate nexus together and what could that look like and that's a real example six months later we were able to build the first of its kind fifty million dollar ocean climate collaborative leveraging some of the smartest people in the space people who dedicate their lives to shipping d discrimination or changing the all community of the ocean to make it absorb carbon and so by both encouraging c funding and partnering with the folks closest to the issues it just accelerates not only your giving but it accelerates your landing and so by the end of it you've got a crash course in ocean climate change ocean ocean climate giving and you've met peers that you trust and you'll ultimately know how to be more strategic and you're giving moving forward because you've leveraged a really smart team and a strategy that works because if you do it alone it continues to be scary but if you see your friend that you trust and who you're maybe on a board together and maybe you've worked together doing something really begin and impactful and i'll give you really specific example one of our first efforts was a ten million dollar refugee award finding like the best refugee reset organizations around the world and it started with one family and we did this beautiful call with the family and the wife had spent time in a refugee camp in her childhood and we invited twenty families to listen in and by the end of the call we actually had five other families so inspired that they joined and it was really easy for them to join and it was easy for them to join at scale because they heard from a trusted tools they understood the process was fair in terms of finding these exceptional organizations and it just made it feel a little bit less scary because they were doing it alongside a friend and so that was really the genesis of the collab lab model which is our collaborative funds which is at the most basic level very simple since its founding in twenty nineteen iconic impact has deployed over half a billion dollars and the results have been nothing short of transformative we actually had an incredible organization right to us that we funded and doing education in tanzania and they said thank you so much for your unrestricted ground for the first time in twenty years we're now we were able to buy tables and chairs to hold our meetings wow on tables and chairs instead of on the floor right and you hear that and you think oh yes that makes sense you need to fund operations for a bit for an organization and it was just one of those examples of you know you do need to really embrace an approach to say if i'm gonna fund an organization i wanna trust the leadership i wanna trust their vision and i wanna trust them to it what's right how is iconic impact going to improve things differently it was an idea that we had because we thought silos are bad silos create ego silos create inefficiency and so the first premise is how can a group of really smart people who share an interest this is not to say everyone has to care about ocean health or gender equality but those that do shouldn't be trying to tackle these issues from scratch been on their own and then as i mentioned earlier i think iconic really has an opportunity and a moral responsibility to bring our client base around a table and talk about existing solutions that work and how we're gonna have a coordinate effort to drive real lasting change the answers are there the capital is there it's unlocking the capital to the existing solutions and answers in a really timely manner iconic impact isn't just another philanthropic arm it's a of capital role in healing the world but behind every villain dollar move is a cost for mike building icon wasn't just a professional journey it was a deeply personal one what do they need to know about your journey like i'm talking good ugly because you've given me a lot of good p stuff it is really difficult to grind it out for twenty years right i mean i love my ex wife but i lost my marriage along the way right like i put everything into this business and it cost me a lot and i'm so blessed to have a relationship with her still and i have an amazing with my kids mh but this was my life and i did it with people i love within the company and i did it with clients i love and so i have no regrets but it is not for the faint of heart and you know our first office space was above ko and san francisco and while i love greek food like smelling like creek food every day like you know that was that was not easy either but it has been the journey of a lifetime and i think what i'm probably most proud of is that every single day we're asking ourselves how can we be better we just came from our off site a couple days ago and the level of energy and the level of curiosity and the competitive desire to be better hasn't changed at all since day one and so you gotta have fire you gotta have drive you gotta have conviction and you know when you're small and starting on some cases it's easier now people know iconic we've lost a lot of friends you know to competitive firms and that just means that you gotta work even harder from being scarred by wall street to transforming it from being inside from the first coffee with dev to managing billions of dollars in capital for text most iconic means from wealth to impact michael anders is showing us that it's not about just how much capital you waste it's about how deeply you care about what you do with it thanks for tuning in to dollar meats if you found value in today's conversation share with a fellow builder and thunder and don't forget to check out all show notes for more on iconic impacts collab collab model until next time keep moving with capital and conviction and making your own version of billion dollar moves my name sarah spelling signing off

my mentors have always been men so men would help me out the latter and i never had the female mentorship so i'd reach out to females in leadership positions and either they would seniors me as a competitive threat or old school and say no i fought my way to get up to the top there are a limited number of seats at the table for women you need to do the hard arts yourself and i'd look around and i'd see hold on the guys were helping each other and and the guys were helping me why as women weren't we coming together and and helping each other yes we're saying that you know we want to have a positive impact on the world but we can have a positive impact to make money at the same time and make better returns but also operating both across the us and australia so there isn't any venture fund even today that looks like us from last week's episode on cross culture this week we go cross continents asking how do you build a cross border of vc fund that backs female founders before the world sees their value today on bill dollar moves we spotlight like marissa warren cofounder of adi ventures a california based fund investing in early stage female founders across the us and australia a former microsoft and s sap p exec turn an entrepreneur marissa teams up with heat bill ex google youtube and n z and the woman who launched spotify to number one in australia backed by carl sc forest family office and the dan home family they're proving batting on diverse teams is in charity it's smart capital we dive into voting cross border of vc fund what us vc still get wrong about aussie startups and why diverse founders delivered thirty five percent higher roi this is part of our special merit emotion series and let's get into it welcome to bill dollar moves where we dive deep into the journeys of unicorn founders and fund who have turned their dreams into billion dollar realities all across the globe and yet many of them were underestimated long before they became iconic many of them unexpected leaders just like you and i i'm sarah spellings you know let's get started marissa marissa twenty six years in tech workday sap microsoft you name it you've and run the gamut in your work life and now you are funding the future with women at the helm how do we get here how do we get here by not following the rules the first thing was when i defied my my parents sort of expectations for me and decided not to go to university so i come from a very entrepreneurial family on both sides of my family and at the age of thirteen i was i had my first part time job going through high school working my grandma's aunt gallery serving drinks yeah even though i underage age i was still serving drinks but i got that appetite for making money and the entrepreneurial sort of spirit so when it came to graduating you i could not see myself going and being in another institution i just wanted to get out and make money so i think that that was the sort of the first deaf in my journey of just not following the rules i fell into tech really a ninety seven and then since that i i just fell in love with it because we've seen a lot of change over that period within the tech industry two thousand and one i started selling enterprise software i was able to work for some great companies like sap microsoft workday both across the us and australia and and the two types of roles that i had we're selling enterprise software from tens of thousands to multi million dollar multi country deployments through to then building channel businesses so i went to the sap acquired business one they went okay this product is for the and smb space we can't take our top end of town reps to go and sell ten thousand dollars worth of software because quite frankly they wouldn't get out of bed for you know less than a million so in they needed to build a channel business to take this product to market so i was head hunted specifically because i knew how to sell erp in the australian market and and globally as well and then i built that channel business for the southern region in australia from scratch to three hundred and fifty customers within three and a half years went on to to microsoft did something a little bit different at that time we had this thing called the cloud so it was the cloud came in and it there are some similarities between that now and and ai as well i was brought on to help accelerate microsoft partners profitability because they've done some modeling name okay on average it takes eighteen months from microsoft partner to become profitable the longer it takes somebody to become profitable they're less interested they aren't like selling your stuff and so microsoft wanted to shrink that gap down to at least six months to see them essentially just selling more microsoft product i was brought on to to build out those programs and then within a couple of months we actually were revenue producing so from idea stage to to building that out across australia and in southeast asia and at that time where we had as i said the transition to the cloud there were entirely new business models that we were looking at as well you couldn't just take the on prem business model and apply that to how you were selling cloud software and what did that teach you about what you're doing now i mean are there any residual lessons from onboarding customer is going to market that you're now also bringing to your portfolio i think what i really took away from my time and corporate besides sort of just i i mean the the corporate upbringing was really good even though i was in corporate i was always in the the road divisions so when i started sap myself and my boss we didn't even have desks like we weren't we were not that important within the sap organization but that also enabled us to we didn't have to be on the same crm we we could do things our way and then when we started getting bigger and selling more deals then they were interested in start folding us into the the rest of the business the same thing with microsoft you know able to do have a bit more freedom but at the same time that experience also taught me that both at sap and microsoft if i help my partners become successful they're gonna sell more stuff and that's ultimately gonna reflect on my numbers and me being able to achieve my quota and so that's what i take when i'm working with our founders if i can help our founders be successful in their businesses get them organically generating more revenue we can help them with the fundraising and to accelerate that and into making their their businesses more invest that's ultimately gonna have a positive impact on the fund and deliver the returns that we're we're looking for yeah so tell us about this fund and how you got to this point i mean after all those years of building within the corporate you are building your own fund as an entrepreneur yourself yes and so if i say sort of break all the rules it's so then going back from corporate i was actually living in new york at the time so this was back in twenty thirteen and i i i've just gotten to the point in my life where i went i've had some really great career successes but unfortunately my men mentors have always been men so men would help me out the latter and i never had the female mentorship so i'd reach out to females in leadership positions and either they would seniors me as a competitive threat or old school and say no i thought my way to get up to the top there are a limited number of seats at the table for women you need to do the hard yourself and i'd look around and i'd see hold on the guys were helping each other and and the guys were helping me why as women weren't we coming together and and helping each other i just got to that point in my career where i went you know what i want to do something about it and funny when you really fired up about something i and i've just just living me in your you know you meet so many amazing people on a daily basis i was in an elevator just opposite a grand central station and who do i meet but the australian voice of siri you know siri in your iphone yeah yes yeah and we somehow i think we just read sheryl sand book lane in and you know i raised the top so you what about the piece about women sa other the women and she goes because karen was a besides the voice of serious so she's a voice over she's a single and song been in media or in entertainment space for for most of her life and she had experienced the same thing within that industry so we went on and did a little youtube video together that got a lot of attention in new york because this was two thousand fourteen so we weren't really talking about it then but like cheryl had started shining the spotlight but it wasn't we were invited then to do an event at the harvard club and from there people were coming up to us and going marisa karen you're you're on this concept of women helping other women it's funny how it evolved i sort of stumbled across my passion and my purpose in life i was always going to get there i just had to get some of those great corporate learnings beforehand and then i started el which was a five zero one c not for profit and that was really designed to help women tech founders get investment ready and funded i didn't want another sort of like fluffy woman's network i wanted something that was gonna have real tangible results to move the needle and so over the seventy period that ran it we had a hundred and seventy five women through the program that raised more than a hundred and twenty million now and five exits and it was a pre accelerated a pre excel tell us what that means zack in the context of what you were doing here how it started was just because i'd go into pitch events here in new york city back at that time and you know quite often they'd be at six o'clock at night summertime time did come in that the air conditioning was off it would smell a bo it would be mostly men like ninety nine percent men beer and pizza and it was just not the type of environment that i would wanna go to or or other women would go to and so that's where it started having these pitch events that were in an air conditioning building you know better firm mine but the mix of audience was pretty much all fifty fifty men and women and then having women get up and pitch but have it really structured helping them prepare and then having a judging panel as well so just taking it up a level and so at what started is just helping them sort of get pitch ready for those events turned into then an eight week program but centered it around that finance piece so how do you picture investor but also what is an investor looking for and what does that process look like from initial reach out all the way to to closing yeah so i wanna ask you this directly because you've done this now for a while from your time from you know building out in five one c three a lot of times i mean i i speak for myself you know a lot of my genesis story has to do with lean as well i started lean in malaysia that's how i got tune into this becoming an accidental activate feminist is what i call myself and a lot of lean criticism has been that it blames the woman right and that you need a pitch correctly you're not speaking the language in a certain way you need a lean in and grab you know every opportunity but the same time i think this was something we spoke about in australia with carol sc one of your lps as well and carol has been in this even longer than both of us but there are certain things in the system that needs to be redesigned to fully allow women to shine and be as good as they already are versus changing them versus doing a lot of these training programs that almost tells them to be more masculine any thoughts there on what you've learned along the way have you changed your mind on anything in this regard i'd always say to our women look i'm not trying to turn you into men we went teach them how to pitch like men but we were at the same time highlighting some of the areas that can let them down in a pitch and that's the apologizing in in some some instances sort of thinking bigger sometimes being you know a bit too a bit too conservative and not backing themselves and but it's really what i distilled in our women's through the program is think of yourself as you are the price if you get this right investors are gonna make a lot of money off you so just change the narrative in your head around you you're there sort of with a big bowl out you know you know wanting money it's and it's not being arrogant about it either but it's just you have the power here to be able to create something really great and remember that and bring that confidence through the pitching as well and it needs to be a you're not gonna accept all the terms that investor puts in front of you there's gotta be some pushback it it's could be balanced as well so there's a a win win on both sides yeah hold that thought hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to reduce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot platform to email real time trending content to millions of users into seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation want to move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com and now you're funding them funding the great ideas of course you and kate kate comes from a very strong background with spotify tell us more about the genesis of how that five zero one c three essentially was one of the key trigger points for you to then build elle which is latin for another way wonderful so we're doing things differently so take a step back to when covid heat that was i mean you know for all of us is scary time we didn't know what was happening but at the same time from a funding perspective it just dried up overnight for female founders both across the us and australia at that time i was running alabama across both countries and i'd moved back to the us in california at that point i went to i went to kate i said i've got an idea i said i think now is the time to start a venture fund i've got this brilliant pipeline of female founders that are struggling to get funding we know that the the results have shine know how to pick the winners and i think it's a ripe opportunity so that was in june of twenty twenty that we decided that we wanted to do it never waste a crisis yeah and then in twenty one is when we were out market and launch the fund and there's a lot of work obviously that goes into sort building a venture fund and for us neither of us had built adventure fund before i remember kate's first question was i haven't done this what do we do and i said i've googled it and i think that we need to speak to some lawyers to get the right entity structure set up for us it was then making sure that we were surrounded by great advisors as well who had been there and done that before but also we'd take their advice in and we'd we'd craft our own path as well from there i'm a big believer in that getting the advice and then figuring out sort of what works for you i mean yeah we launched in twenty one yeah and of course you're gloss over the journey here but let's get into it it wasn't all you know peaches and roses as you had to build your fund there were questions on the lack of a track record is the perennial question of you know i liken it to an internship right where someone wants to get job experience by an internship but doesn't get the internship because they need more job experience it's almost the same thing that a lot of gps especially women and people of color face tell us about how you were creative using even like a loan structure to be able to raise very quickly build momentum and really prove it out that you were the people to do this yes and that's a that's a good question and this was in zoom mirror as well that was a great time to start a venture fund because it meant we could keep our costs really low we didn't have to travel and we could just have zoom after zoom and we did that for the first three months of pitching and literally i don't know was about like eight zooms a day and we had no for three months and then after we we went okay what are we doing wrong like we we couldn't see it until we talked to our advisors and one of them said look you know what what i did when i started my first and now he's got a few billion assets under management he did this creative loan structure the constant question or the constant comments that we were getting with you've got great deals in the deck come back to us when you've transact those deals in market and we're like great but we need the capital to be able to transact those deals and then they'd go yeah come back to us when you've done that in market that's then when he talked about that loan structure we went that is a way to be able to fund those deck in our pipeline and we did that and very equipped within a few months we're able to get to first close i hit raised five and a half million for our first close and so that for us was a real turning point and it was just a basic loan structure twelve months loan or first close you know whichever happens sooner and six percent interest and we've actually done this the same thing for fund two as well to to be able to fund our deals and warehouse them before i first close on fund too so instead of getting a repayment they also had an option to then convert to equity into the fund as an lp exactly yeah that's a very good point so at first close they had the option to either to take the money just the principal and interest or just the interest or roll that into the to the fund at first closing and become a fund lp we had a hundred percent convert into becoming an nlp an interesting you mentioned carol schwartz so she was our anchor for fund one but she was one of the nose initially really yes sure tell us the others how did you convert good old carol well we went back with this revised strategy and then also said like we'd like you to be out anchor because literally when we got the email that came back and was a very thoughtful email from her team and going these to the reasons why both kate and i we we cried i know because we really wanted carol as an investor a few months later that we went back with this revised strategy so the loan structure was a try before you buy right type approach and then they were able to work with us really closely for a few months and then she put in a much larger check at the first close so i wanna ask about this loan structure which i think is important to unpack because so many emerging managers those fund one fend fund three are still today struggling with it even more so we do a lot work with lps today and a lot of the commentary that's come back as distributions have been tied even from the earlier vintage because we're we're waiting for twenty one to and two how did you intend to repay that if there was not that hundred percent what was your plan there there was no plan no plan there's only a plan we just had to make it happen k kate and i really spent you know a good six months thinking about our thesis and then going back the really interesting piece is investing across the us and australia and i think the fun fact that a lot of people don't know every billion dollars invested australia is now producing more unicorns than the us china or israel really wow yes alright and of course they've done a lot of their innovations like google maps that we don't know of yeah google maps wifi or you have can atlas so i think the nature of the ecosystem in australia is that it's really only exploded over the last ten fifteen years before that there really wasn't a adventure ecosystem and it's it's very quickly grown and now you have a number of funds with you know billion dollar plus assets under management we have a lot of the name brands that are coming in and investing in australian companies as well sequoia benchmark excel a sixteen z etcetera so they're they're cotton onto to that for for a number of years now and what's driving that in the last ten to fifteen years what's changed i mean you've been in this for a while the first major event was atlas atlas so right and in that that money went you know part of that went into building black so you've had these sort of bigger events where then you're getting more capital reinvest in into australia australia has always been this they have this underdog mentality right we were a comb that were you know right there were things that would you know deported from the uk it's we've there's always astra has this natural you know punching above its weight for a population of less than twenty six million we do very well at the olympics in all areas as well there's also because it's been such a capital constrained market for so many years in built into the founder of dna is thinking about generating revenue right at the beginning it's not this growth at all cost model it's okay i'm building this product how do i get customers buy it from day one so there there's thinking like that there have to be more capital efficient because it's that's just a nature of it's been harder to get capital and then when it comes to time to expanding to the us they're also significantly under undervalued compared to us companies and so you get a nice really nice valuation uplift yeah when they expand yeah so talk to us a little bit about you know investing at the pre preceding in seeds stages you're investing in fund when it was two fifty to seven fifty k that types of checks right what was your strategy with regard to ownership and follow on capital making sure that you have that level of ability to you know bring in the distributions that you were thinking of as now you're raising fund too so definitely a a concentrated portfolio of approach so for fund one just under nine million us and eleven investments and the two fifty to december fifty we typically do because we aren't doing pre seed and a couple of those pre preceding investments have been idea stage so back of the napkin it is taking a real bet so we'll do a smaller check there around the two fifty mark as they start achieving the milestones then we'll follow along with the capital and quite often we've been able to pre the rounds as well and keep sort of good valuation as well for our dollars but the strategy been getting that five to fifteen percent ownership as i said before as well the the board seats so we are much closer to the companies but it's also i think a key thing has been getting in there early and really helping the founders think about the fund strategy and what that needs to be how to value the business what type investors that they wanna have on board are they just looking at strain investors is it individuals because quite often we've been the first check ins so even before friends and family so what type of capital and at what point will they expand to the us for the australian ones mh to raise from us investors yeah so eleven that's a very concentrated bet in your portfolio and it sounds like you're really hand holding in some places because they're super early on beyond the investment criteria what are you must have qualities that you see in a founder especially at the early stage where pivot are gonna happen mark it's gonna gonna change every single day i mean now with the you know the geopolitics of the day it's it's almost like how do you even plan what are you looking for and your founders as they're building here in the early stages it is the classic we're we're we're betting on the founders you can't bet on the product a few of our companies that have in the pre before they've even launched the product in market the products pivoted a couple of times because of things like chat gp coming right and so for us it's looking at what is that resiliency of the founders do we think that they've got what it takes to be able to ride out the tough times and also do they have it ability because we really like the b to b revenue model streams do they have what it takes to be able to sell to corporates can they go and sell to a ceo of an organization cx o and we look for some of those early proof points so sometimes they might have pilots where they've done that and so it's a mix of consulting and tech where they they still haven't come out with the mvp but they've been able to to sell into big brand names and give them you know my sales background i'm looking can they can they sell their product even at that very early eventually states to this stage and tell us some success stories i know a lot of your value add is because of this exact mine of you being able to get into those customers including one that you've helped recently with hubspot that of course our podcast is part of the up podcast network it's part of the network and sales strategy to get into those that listen to podcast podcasts like this talk us a little bit about your value at as a fund i think there's the two main areas that we focus on first during when we come me and it's they're quite often mid fund raise so it's helping them with that fund strategy and complete that fund raise and we've been really deliberate in terms of the lps that we've wrong board the allie v up and most of our lps actually c invest alongside us so some have done a c invested in like six of our companies is that something that you actually pre negotiate with the lps that if you come into the fine you get c investment deals as well yes so we don't spin up sp b's because you know it's just like mini funds i mean i just don't want that head but it's also been part of the value add so for our lps we do all of the the dd we share that with them we negotiate to be able to get extra positions in the companies we share that with our lps to be able to decide with a c invest in just about every company that we have has at least one of lps that have c invested so that's part of it so helping with the strategy helping with investors bringing investors on board and then we very quickly shift you to the revenue pace because investor cap lasts for so long need to help them to be self sufficient as possible from a from a sales and marketing perspective and it's getting quite tactical as well it's looking at their people their systems their processes their their proposals because we know if they do those pieces as well and i can get the the customers that's just gonna make the business more invest yeah so what are two to three sort of traps that you've seen founders fall into as they're thinking about growth at this stage one of the main things is rushing out to hire a salesperson person too early founder led sales is is incredibly powerful no one quite has the passion for the business that the founders do but they also need to learn going through what resonates with the customers why are the customers buying what does that journey look like they need to do that you know a dozen times more than just to to build up that muscle and understanding before they start hiring people because you'd you don't know when you're starting off you you have a thesis around who you think is going to buy product that you don't know and until actually launch that market how about from a cross border perspective i think that's one of the things that your portfolio companies look to you too and that you have the expertise in us expansion right i i presume and in both ways a lot of australian founders are looking to grow their market into the us and when do you think is the right time when do you tell them yes tick tick tiktok you meet this criterion you're ready i wish it was that easy i really do every business is very different mh some of ours have expanded within a couple of months of us investing and some have taken much longer i think one of the biggest mistakes that i see that founders make from expanding into the us is just thinking that they can do the fly and play out you know have some investor meetings sell some deals and i'll be able to it doesn't work like that this is the most competitive market in the world in every state as we know as operates very differently but even within california i mean i live in laguna beach and laguna beach operates differently to to la to san francisco and we're still on under california i say to my founders is and and it's part of our dd processes are they willing to move to the us for a period of time to be able to establish a business because they need to come over what works in a strength might not necessarily work in the us because it's even though we speak the same language there are a lot of different things culturally just back to that competitive comment before where you have coming out of investor meetings you have founders that are emailing you know straight away or within you know twenty four hours here in the us whereas in australia it might be a week later you can't do that it's it it's getting onto it it's on the ball it's then the follow up as well in a constant follow versus i think it's sometimes it can be a little bit more relaxed in australia you've almost started as a generalist right and then narrow we're down into the verticals are three verticals what are you seeing i mean it is twenty twenty five we can't leave a conversation without touching ai disrupting everything how are you thinking about the future of work and the verticals that you're now doubling down on then so fe i i see it eventually everything's gonna be ai we have a couple of native ai companies in our portfolio and then we have some your traditional saas businesses that are building then the ai capability and when we're making new investments we'll do it across both as well but it's how are they going to ten x that that customer experience with ai ai and that helps it to been formed that product development road map for some of those traditional businesses so one of our companies go figure which is a marketplace helping employees find you know projects and match them with projects within their current workplace but it's also helping to upscale them as well and coach them we've been talking about where it's that that industry is actually heading and it's people need to learn to be able to how do they work with ai agents so you'll have ai agents as colleagues or managers and how does that then work with a human and even doing performance reviews on your ai agents so it's really sort of rei imagining what that future workplace is going to look like in health tech there's so much for focus on the preventative side now so one of our companies eugene out of australia is the at home dna testing combined with genetic counseling and that's they started off with carrier screening for pregnant women and couples and then going on to cancer and heart health as well so what's your predisposition towards getting cancer a heart disease based on your dna and there's proven studies that if you have a predisposition towards getting breast cancer for example if you then have a you know a healthy clean lifestyle with the the right types of exercise and foods and so the lowest stress you can actually avoid getting breast cancer so there's a lot that you can do on the preventative side so i think we're just at the beginning there of really analyzing our dna to to unlock our future health we've just invested last year in a company called gin which is helping kids and teens have a better of relationship for technology devices so again technology is here to stay and our kids are suffering even more we didn't have that when we were growing up but there's you know much higher levels of depression and suicide and anxiety and a lot of it is wrapped up with that relationship that they have with their devices and it's how instead of the no screen time or cutting them off it's actually teaching them to have a better relationship with their tech and also so being able to give some insights and fore warning the parents if there were gonna be any potential issues down the track around depression or anxiety so these are very important areas of of our future as a generation that you're investing in what gives you hope in what you're seeing out there in what founders are thinking about the problems that they are solving what gives me hope is that i think would just at the beginning of unlocking the power of ai like it is just gonna be so transformative and these founders just their visions to have a positive impact on the world yes they wanna build a venture scale business yes they want to see that success but they also want to have that positive impact on the world that aligns very much with the the ali via thesis as well and when you think about your journey you know in the last couple of years twenty fourteen was it when you start out va and now with your fund how have you seen the maturity of just a startup up ecosystem in both the us and in australia founders are just much more sophisticated now because there's so much knowledge out there around how to start a start so much education i think the piece there's still the black box is the vc industry like starting a of on a lot of things i just learnt by starting a venture fund and there are a lot of unwritten rules that you don't know until you start new stumble across me like why isn't it working this way because i'm not playing the game in the right way and that brings me to the last portion we talked a little bit about planning your distribution strategy and how that works for a pre fun that's super early on that you know frankly there needs to be a lot more patient capital and yet we are in a capital constrained environment it is no longer z period of zero interest rates there is pressure from lps to see dpi beyond right the markup that's no longer enough how are you adapting to this how are you thinking about your distribution strategy are you swing out there in negotiating second as we've seen a lot of our fund managers do or i think we will continue to see the the vc model evolve over time but particularly i mean we're we are a pre proceed and and seed funding and so you in our modeling you know we're not modeling out until you know having returns until sort of year seven although we have already had our first exit which was loop in into december of last year to a sting right yeah to sting right you to a publicly traded company so that that was a that was a great experience that was ahead of schedule but we're not pushing our companies to exit to generate liquidity for our lps we're str that we're trying to be sort of like more of the patient capital like the the family offices but at the same time we really realize as we go on that there'll be an opportunity to take some money off the table and that's what we you know have built into our strategy because i can't see us holding on until the ipo especially with the ipo bar that's risen you know significantly higher from what a company needs to look like from a revenue metrics and profitability perspective so we need to be able to take some money off the table but not you know losing our position in that company to return some for lps but also not forcing an exit that's too premature on our companies and so this points to lp alignment you have some really strong lps from carol shorts it's the chihuahua group robin dan as well from tesla and many other families that are thinking about investing in the future what have you learned about just lp alignment keeping the momentum going so that you can bolt like you said a franchise of funds not just stop at fun one fun too so i think the refreshing thing for our lps is that because we weren't spin out we didn't come from the venture capital industry we did things a bit differently what i always corporate was stakeholder management you had to keep them updated on what you were doing in the progress and but you know there was an element of managing up and everything else and so i've taken that same philosophy to keeping out lps updated so a a tactical example is our quarterly updates i've constantly gotten the feedback from our lps that we're so much more transparent than other gps that they have in their portfolio we we go into the detail around what's working well but also what's not you know cashing bank at the companies we give a lot more detail yeah and so there aren't any surprises when a company goes to zero because that that's the model we will have companies that go to zero but they're not getting that surprise and that's something i learned in corporate around that stakeholder management you don't surprise your stakeholders as you keep them they're coming along the journey with you and they know what's happening with the companies especially with a number of our lps coin investing alongside us as well so where really that working with them as a that trusted adviser to say look you know i give it to them straight this is what i like about the company is what i think that they need to work on and some of the gaps no one's perfect this is early stage investing thing nobody has it completely buttoned up and i think our lps really appreciate just that transparency yeah and now as you look to towards the future as you're planning ahead here what does the next fund look like is it the same thesis and extension or are you doubling down on certain bets that you've learned over the last couple of years it's a fun too is larger twenty five million dollar fund but at the same time that's that's about the right size we wouldn't for for funds three we wouldn't wanna do more than fifty to to keep doing the pre seed and seed investing we know that that is a real strength of ours to be doing the preceding and seed so we'll we'll continue to have those smaller funds however i wanna make sure that we can continue to invest in every round and so once we get to fund three we may have have sort of like our growth stage fund or something that's specifically for follow into some of our more growth stage companies and get some growth stage gps involved in the fund as well so it's it's really being able to fund throughout the life cycle of a company's journey yeah and you mentioned earlier some of the heart lessons that you've learned what was one unexpected lesson part of me sometimes are like how do we get these really brilliant lps to back us like you said like carol light robin and denim like nick and andrew forest they have the largest family office in australia the list goes on of you know like really successful people in in their own right so i think that's been one of the things that has been surprising everyone talks about it's a hard fundraising environment for us fundraising for fund two is actually easier than fundraising for fund one as hopefully it should be right because you now have a track record but even this market but at the same time i mean i learned how to sell enterprise software in two thousand and one which was much harder than now you know because we had my eleven we had the dot com crash we had everyone buying software before y two k to be y k compliant so it's we had to be so much scrap here and they're you know but for me as always there is always money out there and you just need to knock on more doors to to get there but it's also making sure that getting the right capital in that's aligned with our thesis as well yeah so i wanna double click on what you said there with all the top families really backing you mh what do you think was the driving factor of them saying take my money i think first of all because we're a very mission aligned mh so yes we're saying that you know we want to have a positive impact on the world but we can have a positive impact to make money at the same time and make better returns by doing that for always finding another way while we always end with a quick card game and these are fire questions what core values do you want to leave behind i have two girls a six year old and three year old and for them it's really really important that they believe that they can achieve anything they set their mind too just because the female gender does not mean that they can't achieve anything or do anything that they want that's been something that would be very important to me and even making sure that i had the right partner in my husband that has that saying sort of mentality as well i just want that next generation of women to be able to just have that mindset yeah love it who is always on your speed dial and why my sister so besides my husband we we both work from home so you know he's he's there yeah he's there you know i i hear him you when he's on zoom and stuff in the next room yeah but my my sister because we just we just get each other there's no apologizing there's no explaining there's no you know we can have our win we can celebrate things we just don't we don't judge each other yeah love that well marissa thank you so much for your time and for your work in finding another way and showing us that many ways are possible and that women continue to outperform and they're the largest under capitalized asset that we have today thank you thank great is and thanks much for tuning in this week for more inspiring conversations just like this to help you lead build and invest better follow us wherever you get your podcast and on socials on bill dollar moves podcast and sarah chen global and yes if you want to keep hearing from us pledge your support for the show by leaving a review on apple podcasts a five star rating on spotify and telling a friend i'd really appreciate it i'm sergeant spellings and you've been listening to villain dollar moves

probably a month and a half after i took over as interim ceo or has been announced but i was gonna take the interim ceo role a board member called me one night and was like i know this says interim but the best thing you could do for the businesses is to act like the ceo and i think that's the best piece of advice i was given rachel roam built a four point four billion company that made college possible for walmart cashier and disney gen without debt in twenty fifteen she c found a guilt education out of a tiny denver office with her stanford class britney n itch the transform tuition assistance into real career mobility make it seamless debt flea make it work for the workers left behind gil quickly became the hottest at tech startup in america backed by top vcs partnering with giants like walmart disney chipotle hilton by thirty four rachel had built a new category education as a work benefit and then she had a stroke three brain surgeries total paralysis on the right side she couldn't speak but she had planned for every eventual for her business her message was clear called bi shop bi then chief experience officer was a maternity leave recovering from a traumatic birth but when the call came she stepped into the lead today's episode isn't just about rachel division it's about the woman she trusted most to carry it forward from slum development in india to building workforce mobility for millions bi shah is now chief executive officer guiding guilt through its most critical chapter yet scaling for the ai era delivering out outcomes and proving that servant leadership is a strategy not a sentiment this is a story of legacy resilience and rising exactly when it matters news i was honored to tell the story because for all the headlines and high the will work of building is often less human and unseen and those are the real billion dollar moves welcome to billion dollar moves where we dive deep into the journeys of unicorn founders and fund who have turned their dreams into billion dollar realities all across the globe and yet many of them were underestimated it long before they became iconic many of them unexpected leaders just like you and i i'm sarah tenth spellings now let's get started but when i was twenty five years old i worked at visa amazing company i loved working there very complicated business and with a lot of people not understanding kind of the foundations of what that business does but while i was working there my cousin who actually lived with us when i was in high school he suddenly passed away and i think my way of coping with that situation and everyone deals with that type of tragedy pretty differently but my way of coping was you know i need to be doing something different i don't know when my own life is going to end it could end any day and i wanna make sure i do something really impactful in the world and so i actually ended up moving to india pursuing a fellowship with the american india foundation it was a joint fellowship with a clinton foundation i actually went to work on some development issues and one of the primary things i worked on was something called market aligned skills training so helping individuals in india who come from underserved communities actually get the skills they need to be able to pursue jobs that pay good economic wages but inside of india and so one thing you realize is this problem isn't just persistent to the united states so that's actually persistent around the world and that everyone is trying to figure out how do you get working adult learners or learners who are entering the workforce skilled in a way that they can participate pretty productively in the environment i actually ended up going back to visa after working in slum development and market aligned skill training and then here we are some twenty years later actually i'm working in kind of the same sector but inside the united states and if you had told me that's what was going to happen i would have said no i'm not sure that's what i'll be doing but here we are yeah so from pun india working in slum development to now in the united states what was the first meeting playing with rachel understand you joined a little bit leader when he was rachel and brits tell us a little bit about you know that meat cute the genesis of really the making off bi visual the ceo yeah so i actually knew rachel socially i knew that she is working on a company called guild i didn't know much about it i at the time was working at another high growth startup in denver called ib bought and very focused on the ad tech and payment space i had met her a few times but i actually got a call from one of her board members randomly a board member in named michael dear who i also knew pretty well he had been a mentor for me on another startup i've been working on earlier in my career and he called me and said i have the perfect job opportunity for you there is a company that's focused on creating a social enterprise so business that is both trying to do good while building a sustainable and profitable business they are focused on the education and workforce sector and i think that your technology background and your background in payments actually will be quite valuable to the business so i said that sounds intriguing i was super happy where i was working and really was loving building again my hands were really dirty and deep in inside this other business helping to scale it and so i wasn't really looking for a new opportunity but i met rachel i heard about what she was trying to do and the problem she was trying to solve and i really felt as though my background in ad tech plus payments as well as my experience in india working on market aligned skills training would be a great compliment to kind of her experience in her background i didn't really care about the role or the title i more wanted to work on hard problems and help build things and that's my come one of my favorite things to do and kind of see around the corners and see the possibilities and so ended up joining her this bears a little bit of attention here when you're making a decision like that to join a founding team if someone is experienced as as you are which a lot of our audience and listeners are they have a lot of options actually with regard to you know where do i take my path yeah i've built some critical core skill sets you know i know i can built one to ten how did you make a bet on rachel what was it about her cell that me you think this felt right for me i think there are a few things one is meeting both rachel and brit i think they both understood the problem really well and i think that is core when you're talking to a founder do they understand the problem space that they are playing in really well and what it is that a customer end user might need they were deeply kind of customer and human centric they thought about things in this case from the eyes of frontline workers or workers who came from disadvantaged populations they had both spent time working with this population themselves independently as coaches they had a bold vision for how they thought this problem could be solved which is also something that i think is really important so understanding the problem and then having the ability to know or have a vision for that problem and then the third for me is just looking around at the team that they had assembled brit and reach a assembled a really smart group of folks and so i think when you look at the problem to solve conviction around the future of what this business could look like and then some amazing sec talent around the table it's a lot of really great ingredients to work with and you are coming in with experience that you think could be relevant and helpful to the business and so i think those were the three things i would say anyone should be looking for and are really important especially when you're gonna join an early stage startup up or a founding team that is trying to figure out how they're gonna get from where they are to where they're trying to go i think this is what sort of seven years ago when when you were first joining in has a vision change has the execution changed along the way in line with the also market change just talk us a little bit about guilt as a business itself so one thing i will say before i talk about what's changed in the business is the mission has not changed if you look at the early pitch decks that regional and brit put together on what problem they were trying to solve that problem has not changed the notion of unlocking opportunity for america's workforce that mission has not changed the hal has changed over time and i think it would be na for any leader or any founder who's starting a business to believe that your how might not change over time and so to give you a really tangible example when i got to guild they were producing content they were creating leadership classes and financial literacy classes from scratch to try and meet the needs of employers like chipotle and walmart we do have one part of our business today that creates content on academy business that is very focused on kinda leadership and softer and more durable skills but that is not the core of what guilt does the core of what guilt does is we run a marketplace and we bring to bear the best learning providers in the country and help ensure that we are holding them accountable to outcomes and that we are putting in front of employer partners and ultimately their employees really great learning options that will actually drive mobility outcomes for them and so we went from a business that was trying to create content itself into a business that realized in order to serve multiple types of employers and multiple verticals we actually need a marketplace and so that is where you know my background at visa so valuable at the foundation we have a data platform and a payments platform and that is powering our ability to have a marketplace and we are passing data and information as well as processing payments and then creating a user experience that allows for an employee to find the best learning option for them given where they're trying to go or where the business believes they have critical talent needs and so i think the mission has not changed but the how of how the business works and fundamentally what we do has evolved quite greatly i think relative to the original vision so in essence a version of a cor era on steroids for the workforce through a marketplace right and in some way just because we've had jeff mag called from cor sarah but this model of content creator right providing the content itself to become a marketplace is a very different play can you walk us through a little bit about that decision was it a push by the customer or was it push on you know trying to hit those arr numbers what was it that really steered you in this direction i will just say we were never focused on what the arr number we felt as though ensuring we were being customer centric and actually delivering what the customer needed and in this case we are marketplace business so both what the employer needs but also what their employee needs is super critical to what we do and so making sure we're are delivering on the things that they need are really critical to our business model and have always have been customer centric is at the core of what we do and so these decisions aren't made based on how are we gonna make a little bit more money or how can we change the way we make money but we're very much focused on we have customers coming to us they are asking for can you help our employees get the foundational skills completing their high school diplomas getting the ability to learn english those are foundational skills that need to happen regardless of where you are and where you work and so they're coming to us with specific requests for what they need out of their employee population and in order to service those needs in a really agile flexible and quick way there's no way guilt can go build all of that content itself and there are great providers out there who do amazing and innovative things and so we realize very quickly that in order to meet the needs of our employers as quickly as possible it wasn't about guild building that content it was about guilt going and finding the best providers and actually bringing them on to our platform and so it was driven by a customer need and a user need at the end of the day versus the business trying to hit some financial metric or financial goal and i think that's really important because that drives the durability of the decisions you're making if you're just looking for that next way you're gonna make a a few extra bucks or how you're gonna help fill a gap in revenue you end up making short term decisions that i think lead to maybe closing the gap you have in one quarter but they're not durable decisions that actually drive the longevity of your business i love the angle and i think it's important to also so frame where we are in america because we do have a global audience talk a little bit about the problem that you're solving here and has it improved in the last you know seven years that you've been in the business or has it widened with the digital device with now ai over powering all of the conversations yeah i will say the problem we're solving is not unique to the united states we just happen to start in the us and we do have a global solution now that we provide in the world because this problem is a global problem and the problem really is that as things like ai advanced the workforce but also the needs you know the half life of skills has gone from five years to roughly two point five years and we think it's going to end up being something where the skills you need to do the job you need to do are gonna change every year and so in order to help support the economy we need people who are employ and have the skills to be able to meet the needs of the workforce and that is true regardless of whatever country you're working in in the united states in particular these problems are pervasive across multiple different industries manufacturing health care retail financial services and so our goal is to help make sure that we are bringing the foundational skills to employees across our employer partners and then getting them the specific skills they need so you know we have a learner her name's juan she was doing health care administration at a health system she actually all one of become nurse for a very long time but neither had the means the money or the time to invest from going from being an administrator to actually becoming a nurse and so we've helped her move from this job that was more of an administrative job into a job where she's taking care of patients by helping her go get first her associate's degree in nursing and now helping her pursue getting her bachelor's degree in nursing and so we're really helping move people from roles that they are into day to roles that are super critical inside of our employer partners and are critical to fueling our economy and having a thriving middle class which is core to having a democracy regardless of of what country you're in yeah so a couple of points i wanna dive into there one is of course the state of america today i mean it sounds like that's a mismatch a big mismatch of skill sets that you're looking to solve there is growing une is while it feels like we're there's been massively layoffs off especially in the tech ecosystem what are you seeing you know it's twenty twenty five that's also threats with the tariffs right every day something changes which pushes actually opportunities for americans to step up to the game to manufacture but we actually don't have these skill sets what are you seeing on the ground here what's concerning what's alarming there are three kind of different things all coming at play at the same time the first is we have an aging population inside this country which means the workforce actually shrinking the number of working adults inside the united states as the boomer population exits the workforce is continuing to shrink that's the first thing going on the second thing is ai is disrupting work you see it particular in the technology sector we're starting to see it in financial services and so you are seeing these disruptions happening to people's work because the skills that are required for companies are changing relatively quickly and what they need out of their workforce is changing that's the second thing and then the third thing is you have this push inside of the united states in particular to bring things like advanced manufacturing back to the us and as you said there is a shortage of people who know how to work inside of advanced manufacturing facilities who know how to actually work with the technology inside of those facilities who know how to lead teams who are working on the production floor and so you see c in particular and their hr you know the leadership inside of those organizations as well as operators inside of those businesses looking out at not just the next six months but the next three years and the next five years being like how are we gonna fill this talent gap and this void we have inside this country especially knowing that in the us the education system isn't totally aligned to what the workforce needs are and their challenges with the operating model for our education system and so you have a lot of people who really believe that there's is a problem to solve and i think sometimes people stop and are look for the perfect solution when there are a lot of things that are out there today where you can get the ball rolling you know we've been around for ten years we've helped seventy thousand employees drive mobility in their roles and to move from roles therein in to more critical roles that employers needs and do we get everything right and perfect we don't and we do mess up but we've moved seventy thousand people i'm not sure anyone else can say that they do that at that scale including other providers in our space the beauty of our marketplace model and the fact that we hook into academic institutions as well as hook into employers is that we can track what is happening with these employees both inside their existing employer but also over time and so we're super proud of those results and we got a lot of work to do there so so many thousand that's a huge amount in a short amount of time walk us through a little bit about the business model here i i think marketplace you know it sounds like it's a subscription plug on but of course very different employees from walmart to chipotle require very different things what does this look like from a business perspective very early on in our process we sit down with employers and ask them what business outcomes they're trying to drive are they trying to fill hard to fill roles are they trying to drive retention inside their organizations are they trying to attract talent that they have not been able to attract in the past are they trying to ensure that they can upscale folks inside the business who have been there for a while to keep up with the pace of change or to move into leadership roles and so we have to get really clear on the problem that the employer trying to solve first and that happens during the sales process what problem are you trying to solve and what is your biggest hr and talent issue because that then helps us decide what is most important and what do we bring to bear inside of our platform and so every employer has a very different catalog and a very different policy around what they're trying to do with their employee population it's bespoke to the employer so once we understand the problem the employer trying to solve we try and understand the employee population better what's unique about this employee population how many people have finished high school how many people have bachelor's degrees how many people speak english as a second language inside of their employer or don't know english at all in understanding the employee population just like in health you wanna understand the patient population is super important so we can put the right solution together to help bring to bear what is needed and so we work with a large grocery chain in the southeast one of the most innovative i believe in the country and they have a lot of employees who don't speak english and they have a lot of employees who haven't finished their high school diploma that's great because that gives us a starting based to say what is most important to get these individuals the foundational skills they need before we start layering on bachelor's degrees or advanced certificates or all of those other things that i think people really want or that cor area might provide there's like a foundation that has to happen before people can take advantage of those types of opportunities and so we really are trying to understand the employee population once we understand that we can then spend time saying great what should go inside of your platform and your catalog that you're offering to your users what types of degree programs because you have hard to fill roles what types of trades programs what types of foundational skills should go into the catalog what types of certificate programs should go into the catalog and we really are intentional about what we put inside the catalog and this is learning that's happened over time in our early days we would just stick everything in because we would say we don't know enough about the the employee population or we don't know enough about what the employers needs are and so let's turn on a bunch of things but as we've worked with many more employers and learned more and more about their employee population we've been able to actually optimize what that experience looks like and what goes into their experience early days hard to imagine that a big company like walmart would agree to a tech startup up and obviously you've built your credibility now but has the sales cycle shrunk for you what did that look like in early days we got really lucky with walmart there were a set of leaders inside of walmart at that time who were willing to take a bet on a company like gill with them and chipotle and players like disney like we owe them a lot of credit for willing to take that chance and that bet and come on this journey with us we didn't have everything figured out or sorted it out and there was risk and then wanting to help enable and support an organization like ours so our sales cycle is less taking a bet and a risk on a startup these days just because we're a proven quantity now we have outcomes data to prove what we're doing but the sales cycle still takes six to nine months and a lot of that is because we are trying to make sure we're deliver the right solution for the employer partner and so rushing that process it's not good for us in the long run we don't care about winning the deal we care about creating a durable sustainable partnership with our employers and making sure their employees get what they need and so we need to spend that cycle actually understanding their problems and c the right solution and then for us in particular we do focus on making sure that we work through the process of getting the employer stood up on our platform our goal is to drive outcomes we wanna make sure people actually complete their programs and that they finish their programs that they actually see career mobility or growth or even in some cases you ask people why they sign up for these programs they are trying to build confidence in themselves or show their kids that they can do something and so there are a lot of different reasons why employees sign up for what they're embarking on and so just making sure we're helping deliver a successful outcome to that employee because that means the employer will then be successful is super important so is it sort of like a package deal where walmart signs up for x amount of employees and these are the list of items that are provided and it's a transaction based sort of percentage for the courses that sold by the merchant in some way where some based business so we don't make money unless the employee actually persists in their program and that they continue in their program and so we have more of like a snowflake model than traditional saas model and more and more i think tech companies aren't seeing the value of consumption driven businesses because especially in you know enterprise sales and in enterprise businesses they are asking questions around who's using this what are they doing with it what outcome is being driven and so no there's no fixed fee or cost to the employer in terms of fixed number of seats we get employees to engage on our platform and then when they engage and they continue to persist in their programs we are successful as a business so you're incentivized for sure by the right metrics here which is to ensure that the employees want to do it and one of the things that actually struck a quarter with me was when you picked out from your data that certain decisions like what walmart did with a dollar a day was counterintuitive tell us a little bit about you know some of the interesting i guess consumer behaviors that you picked up since you're deep in product when you started and again it it depends a little bit on what the employer's trying to drive but one of the things that some of our employers had before even they joined on guild was you know have the employee have skin in the game or i'm gonna offer this but i'm gonna do it in a way where they have to pay first and i'll reimburse the employee later and what you realize especially when you think about more underserved or the frontline population inside of employers is you know outside of the covid era when people couldn't really be spend money the average american has roughly you know three hundred to four hundred dollars in their bank account taking the money out of their savings to spend on education is really challenging a lot of folks are burdened with student loans inside this country they started something it was the wrong time in their life or the wrong program and so they had to abandon it and instead trade off education with work thing and so they are saddle with student loan debt and you see the news kinda cover this on an almost daily basis on what's happening with student loans inside this country and so you have these individuals who really want to invest in themselves but they do not have the money and they do not have the time to be able to invest in educating themselves and so one of the things that over time we've learned is that if you can remove that financial barrier people aren't gonna like take the money and pocket it they're gonna be excited that your their employer's investing in them more they're gonna be more loyal to their employer we see a two point six times increase in retention relative to those who don't go through a guild program because their employer just invested in them and not in like a short form or micro learning but invested in their education and so they're super excited about it and they feel like their employer cares about them which they do their employers do care about them and so there are those types of decisions where you look at the barrier to entry and coming from a product background thinking about what is driving barrier to adoption or barrier to persist and continue it's really fun to think about that in the context of education versus to use a consumer app or something else because these these are life changing things that can happen to these employees if you can get them enrolled in the right program in the early days we had no program recommendation engine and so the catalog was filled with hundreds of options and as you know there is the thing called choice paralysis and so if you do not actually get more information about the user and understand where they're starting from and then personalize the experience or the recommendations to them both as an individual but also inside the context of their employer they end up either choosing nothing because there's too many options or they end up choosing the wrong thing because they are not set up for success to start with and so there are a lot of really cool principles and thinking about personalization and driving adoption and retention from a product experience that i think have been really exciting to unlock for the purpose of driving economic mobility yeah so you started from a product perspective you a chief experience officer but of course thirty four year old rachel was hit with a tragedy that really catapult at you into the seat that you are now in as chief executive officer and we wanna talk about that chapter but before that bring us back to that moment i mean you had just delivered your baby i recall using saying ami mint was just telling you you know one foot in front of the other honey but you were also you know struggling with some p symptoms which we've spoken about actually on the show because few women speak about it but it's more prevalent than we think walk us through that moment of decision making how did you proceed in that time of tragedy yeah i think you're hitting on a lot of things that you know i think aren't talked about very much so i had my second child and i was out on parental to leave i was going to physical therapy three times a week because of my delivery was extremely challenging and i had a lot of symptoms just physical symptoms as well as hormonal symptoms that then lead to mental barriers around just having had delivered a baby not sure how i'm going to manage you know i having trouble sitting upright walking was pretty challenging because my delivery was so challenged my abdomen had kind of separated a little bit and so just a lot of struggle i was having trouble breastfeeding actually my baby couldn't latch and there's like a lot of things around making sure your baby gets breast milk it's better than formula so just a lot going on and and feeling frankly already overwhelmed with the three times pt trying to get my baby to both eat and sleep having another child in the household who is in some ways feeling like what is happening it was just me before and now there's someone else and so overwhelmed is probably the best way i describe how it's was feeling and then i get this phone call and as you mentioned my husband meet i feel so lucky that someone knows me so well and is asking me you know in that moment like don't think about all the things that are gonna happen next just think about the next day and the decisions that you have to make and you know asking me very much like just put one foot in front of the other and whatever decision you make i'll support you and so went from a friday being on parental leave to a saturday and sunday wrapping my head around needing to step back into the business and then showing up on monday morning the phone call like who was calling you what was the statement there that stopped doing your tracks someone from rachel's family called me and then i missed the phone call so they called my husband actually and so i called the rachel's family member back and they said rachel rachel's gone to the hospital i don't have more tells for you right now but i will call you later and give you an update and then i got a update later in the afternoon that she was probably gonna be in the hospital for a while and so i needed to put a plan or needed to move the plan in place for a business continuity plan so she was thirty four years old and i understand she was laying on the floor for a while before she was found what happened there and how did that affect rachel my understanding is that she had had the stroke the night before on her patio actually and so her aunt lives down the street from her does a walk every morning around her neighborhood and actually had found her lying on her patio she has a medical background her aunt and realized that rachel had had a stroke and so i called nine one one and they had taken her to the hospital at this time i didn't know she had had a stroke i just knew that she was in the hospital and something had happened and so the instruction the marching order to you was bi y'all get your act together you have to be in the office on monday no actually that's not what happened because rachel was obviously in the hospital and the family member just said this has happened but gil has a business continuity plan and in that continuity plan there's who takes over if there's something happens or or if someone goes on sa medical etcetera and so i just knew that the next steps in the process we're calling the board and that i needed to make a decision whether or not i was gonna show up on monday morning and how did you come to this decision like i said a lot of i don't think i can do this i'm in the middle of my own struggle i really believe in gil business and what we're trying to do in the world and so i also knew that it's important for the business to have some continuity that this was the right thing to do i just didn't know if i had the ability to do it given everything else that was happening and i said i was already overwhelmed and my husband was pretty instrumental in helping me be like put one foot in front of the other i actually had a lot of family in town that weekend because i had planned a forty of surprise for birthday party for my husband my family as well as a ami meets family and they were like we had this you got this i executive assistant called me and was like i can step in i'm here to help you the executive team was like we got your back the chief financial officer in particular at guild chris ga looks like you can do this i'll do this with you we got this just a lot of people rallying behind me a community of support is what got me through making a decision say i can do this and then the board was wildly supportive so how did this chapter the event pan time has passed since that happened but we have seen rachel take stage a little bit coming back into our own how has this changed the way you run the business you know what are your thoughts here in your chapter ceo does this feel like still an interim position for you actually probably a month and a half after i took over as interim ceo or has been announced that i was gonna take the interim ceo role a board member called me one night and was like i know this says interim but the best thing you could do for the business is to act like the ceo and i think that's the best piece of advice i was given because until then i was pretty hesitant to move things around or make different decisions and kind of the decisions that had been playing out because you don't wanna rock the boat i wanted to make sure wasn't overs stepping some line or boundary and really that phone call is like there are no boundaries like you are the ceo now do what you think is most important for the business people wouldn't put you in the interim role if they didn't think you could make the right decisions and don't wait on decision making we don't have time as an organization and everyday matters and it does in a ten year old company where guild is today we're still figuring things out and growing and scaling like everyday does matter and the decisions we make better and our customers need to know that their stability in this business and their platform isn't gonna shut off or their employees aren't gonna get access to the things they need or that payments are still gonna be made etcetera and so as best piece of advice i got i feel like i i got my legs underneath me relatively quickly actually more than not knowing what to do is more is it okay to make decisions and make change and so once i it was clear that that was acceptable and i didn't need to ask for permission and how did you arrive at that was it you know that conversation with a board member or was it you know also time with reach i know you went to see her in the but you are not allowed to speak about business actually yes i we were not allowed to speak about business and i did go see her in the hospital i mean this is someone that i had you know talked to slash argued with slash ben in the trenches with for five years you know approaching six years and to then suddenly not be able to have a conversation with that person is just pretty jarring to go one day from being able to do something and the next day not being able to do something i went to see her we were not allowed to talk about business but she said she did say one thing that i think was also really great which is like you know what to do that was super helpful in making sure she also didn't feel like i was taking this moment in time and trying to like take something away from her or common dear the business and at that point it was still not clear to me whether she was gonna come back or not i knew she had a long road and a long recovery but it still wasn't clear to me what decision she was gonna make or where she was going to be and so to hear her say that in addition to the board member was super valuable i know she's recovered if fair i've been really happy to hear that but it sounds like you're still you know common during the ship as she continues to heal completely where are we and what does this chapter of bi s boss bitch looks like in the ceo role so rachel is very focused on a recovery she plays a a role on the board and continues to provide perspective we are very much as a business we have a lot of cool things going on we released three new products last year we have a bunch of new stuff coming this year and we are really focused on doubling down on how do we deliver the best possible outcomes to our employers and their employees and so it's a fun and exciting and i would say truly innovative time at we have some new innovative partnerships that will be launching as well as new models for things that we're trying and doing to really help enable workforce development inside this country the future bright for guild if there's sort of like three key things that you want your legacy to be doing your chat in the c seed what would they be framed around yeah i would say two things one i spent last year and a half alongside the rest of the leadership team at guild really making sure that we we're sustainable and had a great foundation as a business and the market dynamics have changed greatly you know it used to be i would say i think twenty twenty and twenty twenty one growth at all costs now there is an expectation from investors that you are growing but that you're also profitable and sustainable as a business and so i spend a lot of time getting that foundation all in terms of how we're spending and what the business profile looks like and making sure that if we spend a dollar we're getting a dollar back that we're being efficient with our capital and with our spend that is one thing i think was like a major thing that the business change and operating motion that the business need to go through and a restructuring that i think was important to making sure the business was on solid foundation the second is we have this huge problem ahead of us as a society and and a country in particular around how do we fill the skills gap in this country and how do we get people the skills that they need in order to be productive members of society and so when we think about the challenges guild is solving is it's not just challenges that are important to employers these are challenges that are important to creating a thriving democracy inside of our country and so how do we do our part to play a role in driving workforce development and workforce training and workforce transformation that is required and so i hope that in this next era of guild you are seeing a slower as a workforce development partner trying to take your internal talent and ensure that they are best equipped to drive the workforce needs you have of the future well we've covered a lot of ground so we usually do this in person but i was tough to find you out in denver this time around so i'm playing it for you we're gonna choose some carts here and i'm gonna ask you the question that it presents so this is a quick fire around what kind of leaders do you hire servant leaders servant leaders what does that mean leaders who are helping to enable and propel their teams as well as leaders i hire gun leaders people who can play at a strategic altitude as well as dig into the details when needed so that we can say stay nimble and agile and what we do what is this wood gum i feel like i've heard it before gum is this character this clay animation character who's who has the ability to stretch in like very cool and different directions and in every interview i asked especially leadership interviews questions around can you explain to me how you're a gum leader have you stretched yourself a lot of it find where when to do it and when not to do it oh well how are you stretching yourself bi y'all these face i'm spending a lot of time utilizing ai technology and trying to stay at the four of what's happening and what the bounds and limitations are of different technologies a counter lesson you've learned as an investor or an entrepreneur someone said this to me yesterday and i think it's just sticking out in my brain an important thing which is authenticity and transparency are not the same thing and i think i con complete those two things a lot i tend to be a really transparent person in but those are not the same thing what you wish someone told you before you meet your first major financial decision look into the tax implications of the decisions that you're making love it that's that's important what word do you hate hearing no no maybe i don't like hearing and because we've heard so much about you know your challenging birth and all of that so this baby's gotta be worth it what is your message i mean for your children three key things you want them you know values you want them to spouse as they grow older this is so easy because we actually say these values every day be kind be curious and be persistent and then we try and reinforce those or provide examples of where they're doing those things because i think hopefully they'll turn out as decent human beings if they focus on ensuring they have uphold those three things i love it love it well bi visual for being kind curious and persistent america and the world is benefiting from your talent and thank you for spending the time with us here today thank you for having me it was a pleasure talking with you awesome and finally where can we find more information about you about guilt yeah gil dot com and we can learn all you need to know about what we're doing and our we're trying to help society and thanks so much for tuning in this week for more inspiring conversations just like this to help you lead build and invest better follow us wherever you get your podcast and on so shows on bill dollar moves podcast and sarah global and yes if you want to keep hearing from us pledge your support for the show by leaving a review on apple a five star rating on spotify and telling a friend i'd really appreciate it i'm searching by and you've been listening to dollar moves

amazon they have the technology they have the dress across your phone they know where you shop when you shop before you do because of the huge data assess right and that's typically what separates people in the future and brands of business in the past we are re as a whole because we're still are trying to hold on to the old and a lot of that has to do what america wants was versus what america is becoming and that is that's jeffrey bowman ceo and founder of reframe ai technologies and reframe consulting a former senior partner at og jeffrey pioneer the firm's first cultural practice helping modernize how the industry thinks about inclusion and growth today he's a two time award winning author and a recognized voice in inclusive experience design in this episode we dive into how most companies are still using outdated data models that ignore today's reality we're living in a minority majority world and the friends that will win by voting for the full addressable market not just a legacy base from lessons on how companies are leaving villains on the table by excluding women and people color to how startups can future proof their product by being more intentional about who they serve this is a master class in ref framing growth useful for all of us investors and builders let's get into it welcome to bill dollar moves where we dive deep into the journeys of unicorn founders and fund who have turned their dreams into billion dollar realities all across the globe and yet met many of them were underestimated it long before they became iconic many of them unexpected leaders just like you and i i'm sarah chen spellings now let's get started the future is already here and so when we talk about re framing it's more or less pointed in lens to be wider for instance when you talk about the total addressable opportunity not only have to talk about it from an investment standpoint in terms of tam but you have to spend it in terms of the audience and so what we found at most brands and businesses especially their later stage they understand the tam but they don't understand in terms of the go to market how you have to be more inclusive of women and minorities in terms of their their their workspace and so what that means is developing a product that truly is inclusive that has the insights you've taken the right approaches of understanding the user inclusive of how they may fill how they may respond how they may engage with their product and so that's usually the biggest deficit that we see investors as well as folks that are in the startup space truly do think about the future but how do you go to market in a more inclusive way is the problem to be solved and i wanted to bring in the historical context as well where we are in america where we are now where we were and where we're headed right i think that's like topic of the moment and is on the minds actually have a lot of top executives today how do i build in a way that is true to my values true to what we've built and yet you know yesterday was tariff day so times are tough times are tough for sure when corporate america actually came to formation and not only just the us perspective but also global a lot of the thinking that went into for the marketplace was really centered around america audience wise was less than ten percent diverse so when you think about any company that financial services any company in terms of packaged goods get some durable the nineteen forties and fifties when they were building their brand it was truly centered without women and people of color at the center as shoppers as as buyers of their product made sense at that time just given the numbers but then the nineteen seventy census was the first time that was predicted where blacks in hispanic were gonna explode from a population standpoint and so when you think about go to markets we really haven't changed even with the invention of the internet it still did not change and so what you had as i was doing the research from my book reframe to marketplace was this idea of general which meant white and mass and multicultural both separate and so when you think about today america specifically is you know on the pre of becoming a minority majority and so what that means is that brands now really truly have to think about how do you serve your audience across all of the different nuances in itself doesn't mean that it has to be specifically for blacks for agents for hispanics but just like you incorporate data to the data you now have to be inclusive in terms of those audiences within your data set and for companies that have not done this or don't intend to do it you're missing a significant growth opportunity because when you talk about gen z gen alpha they all are minority majority already and so you are leaving dollars on the table when you don't include those audiences in terms of your marketplace and to your second point yes there is tension and will continue to be tension because for the first time in the human race what was once minorities are becoming major not just here in the us but also global are there are more brown people in the world than there is non brown and so when you think about youth globally when you think about agent population in certain markets you talk about biggest wealth transformation that's about to take place when boomers sell their businesses on the m and a side i don't think brands of business are truly prepared for the massive shift that's about to happen not only here in the us but also globally anecdotally and there's more data that's being put together as a whole on this but you know i work with a lot of private banks that serve the ultra high net worth and seventy percent of widows upon losing the husband's in twelve months change financial advisers why is that because for the longest time they've not been speaking to us they've been speaking down or speaking you know not at us you know and and that is real monetary loss we always talk about oh it's good for business but i think we're at the stage where guys if you don't invest in diversity you are losing out here this is a business risk and a cost you know i got my big break within the space of change management and that's truly what we consider our services in terms of reframe consulting services because we're not talking about integrating the or integrating the marketplace we're not talking about diversity equity inclusion and be frank with you what we are talking about a growth acceleration so there's a taxonomy that we literally had to come out with because what we didn't wanna do is people think about the old way meaning diversity equity and inclusion whereas this is a data driven world right and so what we say diverse audience segments why do we say segments because to get to a quantifiable outcome you need to do what we call segmentation or you measure attitudes and behaviors you cost those attitudes and behaviors irrespective of race ethnicity identity now for some people that don't like to hear those words it's like shoo it's not race i think but it really is like you're actually talking about people and so for the us census in the us that's what we use now we don't stop there we get to attitudes and behaviors in terms of those how do people think the actions that they take and what they feel now two year example of around women and financial services the biggest client that we had to validate what you just mentioned around women was actually met life and so when you think about the insurance industry for so many years it was predominantly focused around agents and financial advisers and so in the case of this and we do have this case study in the book as well dying is an equal opportunity business everybody's is gonna eventually happen however within the financial services business specifically in around life insurance more likely than not the agent really focuses on the man and so in our case what we were asked to do think about our retail businesses and i think they had about four different products across their retail businesses the first step that we typically do because most organizations do not include women and people color in into their financial modeling believe it or not and so what we do is we go in we do what we call organizational alignment around growth impact ambition process and around that what we do is we ask for all the data in terms of sizing in most cases in sample size for women and people color are not statistically conclusive why because they haven't done primary research around women and people of color they've used their base business data to grow their entire business it's often oftentimes perceived the risk so in the case of these guys we knew that there was a gap when it came to women now we didn't really understand in terms of the household piece and so most agents focus on a hundred thousand dollars or more and so in the case of this we ask him to expand their basket opportunity and look at the hundred thousand and less and so when we did it it was a hundred billion dollar opportunity that they were leaving on the table because they were not including households of a hundred thousand dollars for less that's part one part two is when we talk to the agents and you're right women only were talk to when they were coming into cash in their policy after their husbands had died and so when you break that down even further with an african american households you have more women who are head a house than other racial ethnic grew and so this unlock enormous amount of wealth we had to do the retraining in terms of how do you talk to women what do you say how do you become more inclusive before the mail dies and after we did the segmentation which you talked about before we did the user journey or the the customer journey we ended up growing their business pretty significantly within retail by refocus in terms of the growth opportunities of a hundred thousand dollars or less focuses on women as we went to different conferences and trade fairs and it was a two x in some of their products that were digitally based two x as it relates to growth yeah that's huge and you know i wanna pick on what you said that with the lack of data it was interesting to me i didn't even think about it this way back in the day because you were i don't wanna date you but you've been a veteran in the space right you're a veteran in the space very experienced right so we're learning from you here but you went through the different transitions right from even getting looking at america getting completely onto the tech scene i know you were itself by southwest when you know the likes of z were just pitching the idea so that a transformation into social all of this and one of things that caught me when you talked about sort of looking at history and where we are today was the fact that a lot of the data points thinking about credit cards for example as a product right in a market that we're so come with today in fact were completely mostly cash less in america in most urban cities and the very fact of back in the day if you just turn the clocks back women people of color were a bit suspicious mostly of even using credit cards doing online transactions which means that we're looking at data that already was not inclusive i had the great pleasure of working at sears i think oftentimes specifically if you're startup up an investor you're using the word a tam address right total addressable market from a digital perspective what you mean is the address of that audience how do you get that address oftentimes either in email when you talk about the size of the opportunity as basket and so when you think about the early early early beginnings of of of address the reason that that's so important because when you think about the conversion of when databases started being filled with data in the seventies and the eighties overwhelmingly ninety percent if not ninety five percent or not women of people of color why is that critically importance because when you start to build those models in terms of predictability outcomes and what we call attribution they were not complete because they didn't have the total available population included in that dataset set and so when you think about the early beginnings you didn't necessarily have significant households that had a credit card for some of the early companies it was about financial credit card and then it became the debit card and so a lot of the inputs in terms of that data were not complete women minorities were some of the leader adopters when it came to transactions that were electronic and number two credit scores approvals for those financial instruments that we call credit cards and so forth and so those were like the at the very early beginnings in the seventies and eighties and then when you talk about the idea of building those models and taking you know artificial intelligence to large language models the small language models and how far back the the data go one can oftentimes even till today if i'm going in manually to these companies large enterprise organizations and they are not including primary data one begins to question how conclusive is your model in terms of the output and then second when you think about how do we move forward with these different data models and datasets sets one then begins in terms of how reliable was that data gonna be when you talk about bringing the rest of the population with you a lot of times i will say data is imperfect right and what we tell entrepreneurs actually is you know do the best that you can and move forward right you you need to put your mvp out there and because technology and start we move at such a high pace and that's driven by also you know i'll need for venture returns we need to have that exit in a short period of time how would you advise us now to think about doing all of this which feels for a lot of my counterparts i would say like oh this is yet another thing i'm so impressed right now to deliver and you want me to think about all of this like how do i even tactically do this let's talk about three things that's happened over the past twenty years right and i'd say you know twenty five years my name was free right low interest no interest two popular themes that became very evident within tech world move fast and break things right and then third one's blitz scaling okay now all good in a neighborhood until the industry matures i think we're going through this maturity and correction and so for an investor obviously there's a innovation cycle with artificial intelligence and machine learning but there are so many businesses i've seen that leave out these great opportunities to grow even more fast and more su sync if they took the effort to be more inclusive in terms of and you talk about users you talk about how is it that you want your product to be accessible oftentimes what i would just ask investors is that as you're looking at the tam just asked a question how inclusive is that tam in terms of women and people of color and this not a political question anything that's a growth question number one and number two where's your evidence of to show that and then number three oftentimes what we've seen when investors are when brands and businesses begin to take a look at that is when they have a disruptive competitor and so if you wanna future proof your business but we've seen that works is truly know your audience and customers from an inclusive way and so the way that we typically do that is by as you think about your product market fit as you think about your go to market plan look at all the possibilities when it comes to growth irrespective erase gender identity and it's really that simple i wish it with more and number two in terms of how do you that we've seen is truly understand the user journey and so when you think about the user journey oftentimes it's usually based on a set of users that's not inclusive of that tam that you talk about and so when you think about the user journey in itself just making sure that it's a representative sample of the people that you wanna go to market with and then the last thing i'll say oftentimes when you are testing and learning your way into a market from a data perspective it's optimizing that approach in a way to where you are really thinking about ab testing in terms of your base in terms of generations in terms of gen z and gene alpha that we know a company if that's within your product mix and then it's really truly about holding your founders accountable in terms of that growth in an inclusive and dynamic way i'm of course on your side i wanna play devil's advocate here hold that thought hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to reduce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation one to move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com in the recent years we say this is not political but in many ways it is let's think about the you know some super bowl moments right but lie you know the mistakes there or and where it's headed now and you came from i believe you work with foster at some point you came from the beverage industry it feels like if i'm in brand this is really a tricky time you know in terms of how do i expand my market without losing my core customers as well you're gonna have a pro's antagonists and antagonists and so when you think about for brands who want to walk on the political spectrum versus walking on the growth spectrum then their businesses are not gonna be what we call future proof right i'll give you an example in the beauty space today that's a brand called elf elf is growing at ten times the category the reason i say is because brands who are re trench and taking a position of quiet or scrubbing historical artifacts that were inclusive of people that are a part of their audience they stand to lose to most and so for the brands that are what we like to say ten down on the future there may be a little pain points but because the numbers are so massively convincing you have to stay the course and be brave to your audience of now today of the future and so the reason i bring up the elf piece that elf went in and disrupted an entire category not by using the traditional midwest forty five plus white woman as their core they started in direct to consumer from the jump now why is that critical importance because we all know retail physical retail stores when it comes to beauty it's it's a pretty important part rather than go to the store and get a sample and get your your face done they turn to social media and so they doubled down on influencers right they didn't hire an agency to do the creative they did it with influencers why is that dynamic because because when you think about the beauty category in itself you went into the store you had someone wanna apply makeup you sample the lipstick was they went directly to the user with influences to show them how and they evolve this category of how to's and so through social media and tiktok they created this ph around how to videos and then they just in stock there they backward engineered products because speed to market was an issue in terms of beauty it took about two years within the life cycle to create a product and have it tested it ready go to market they basically came up with this idea of speed to market called doping and so they dupe things that were in the market that had traction based on the data because they were digital they had address and then they dupe and then the last thing that is they actually went into the retail with leverage the reason as importance is because if they started direct to consumer first saw the evidence in terms of what was working what was not partnered with influencers who had micro audiences was mass audiences they then had the power to bring foot traffic into the store completely opposite of you know traditionally in terms of how a product is placed in the store the last thing i'd say in terms of the political front and bravery is that they come up with a campaign and they were not doing like mass advertising communication called dixon the boardroom too many dixon the boardroom room right now catches off guard you're walking you see this big billboard but they were talking about men versus women and minorities in the boardroom all this was done within the last two years and so for the brands that are re trench to political pressure not their audience time will tell in terms of whether or not you made the the right investment that's an old playbook when you had a base for consumers that were what we call mono now we're moving into this idea of cross cultural and poly cultural and is not turning back and so for the brands that are not paying attention and only using old playbook will likely not be in the consideration set for the audience as we move forward i laugh because i was putting a a framework together for one of my investors and the dixon the the boardroom was definitely top of my list there so definitely a favorite can you give us a little bit of insight i mean off was great in the sense of they started differently right that's all almost a norm i would say today in which brand social has exploded everybody's is trying to be influencer first and then you're a celebrity and then you plug on a product so it feels like we get that what other models in your experience has i guess surprised you that inspired you to write this book it was over you know twenty years of my career the brand side and corporate strategy side and then getting with dale on the coin side i just kept seeing so many brands really ignore growth because oftentimes you're making bets financially when your shelf life as a leader may only be two to three years so you you know you've gotta to really be precise in terms of where you placing your bets and so you know what was happening for me was seeing how corporate strategy corporate finance work in terms of how investments were made and you're talking about you know over a hundred million dollars for most companies annually in terms of your growth and go to market and then startups ups even more it's at at stake great because maybe you're in series you know b or c valley got a little bit of marketing money in terms of go to market so it's even more a precise in terms of how do you really get the most of what we call marketing return on investment and so that's a piece there that inspired me to write the book i give you another example in the telecommunication space and a lot of our best customers are old are new meaning companies that have either been around for you know less than five years or companies that's it's been around for more than fifty years right because of you know fifty year old company you know they've been successful off of boomers for a number of years right maybe they branch off and to so this was a you know fifty year telecommunications company they didn't have a lot of data when it came to millennials now the reason for that is because they used to climb telephone pulls and you used to get a bill every year or every month rather and in that bill you had only one phone in the house right it was on the wall and so with the mv of mobile phones for the first time they had to really pay attention to not gen ads they're pretty much written them off millennials you kinda had insights but not really in terms of you know these new consumers to them were were the millennials and so i'll always go back to sizing of the prize and of the opportunity so if you can quantify the opportunity the question them becomes do you have the insights as it relates to those people that's in that town so if you're an investor great tam show me the insights behind right to be conclusive because if you can do that then you've got the golden nugget and so they didn't have millennial data in their entire footprint because they had telephone bills and so as a result of that we helped them develop a segmentation personas if you are startup up a segmentation persona if you going in and and you know doing your interviews as you're are thinking about you go to market you have to listen and think about are you bringing in diverse mix of groups doing your interviews as you're doing your mvp to think about your product in terms of your go to market and the user piece same thing with this fifty plus zero company we did the same thing a little bit more sophisticated and it costs a little bit more money but it's the same exercise that's why it means for startups ups it's easier but oftentimes they don't do and they pick up the same habits as the older companies do because they're really looking for the product market fit a sliver of the market but you have to be a you're more inclusive in terms of who you're trying to be that much more potential in terms of your tam and so i'm i'm toggling between the two to show that it's not rocket science by asking questions and talking to people with a wider aperture right whether you're a fifty billion company of fifty thousand dollar copy the second thing that we did for them after we did the research came up with the insights and we typically lean on what we call cross cultural insights so you go from mono mo to cross in poly we're in the world of cross and poly not mono and mo even though most brands and businesses have what we call base consumers they're mono cultural insights and then from there we designed the experience based on the insights so you will hear this word lot company culture right the sea word i call it most people really don't understand what the sea word it is they just say it right values anytime i hear founders say well company values are are mission i often say well who was in the room other than the founders right because if you think about your value system in your mission it should be inclusive of the audience that you serve and so if you're all from stanford harvard you know the the classic do you have a diverse mix of people that's in in thought and thinking and so when it comes to culture i really wanted to understand what that word meant i went down a rabbit hole in the book reframe the marketplace to truly understand what does culture me and they are you know attitudes values beliefs but the part that people often don't include is that cultures on a spectrum according to social scientists mono cultural is shared values attitudes and beliefs of one specific group you you hear about the tech pros all the time right that's oftentimes expressed as a mono cultural behavior or community when you think about china and japan not the most diverse most like it can be tribal if you go to africa assembly in certain countries but it's usually off mono multicultural so it doesn't have to mean white or or men but oftentimes it's express that way it's mono if you have a base set of consumers that you grew your business on most likely mono multi inclusive of other race ethnic identities but they're separate they're not integrated or inclusive of mono multicultural mo so the example i use black spanish asians but they all live in separate neighborhoods and they never talked to each other right that role doesn't exist anymore whenever you hear black culture hispanic culture that's multi multicultural now cross cultural is the world that we're in today you have similarities values and beliefs but you also have those nuances right oftentimes people like to eat mexican food that's example that's often used that came out of a certain culture and when it across other groups right cross culture is what we tend to lead with because to get to what we call poly cultural irrespective of race ethnicity identity you are able to cluster those attitudes and behaviors because you got what addressable data amazon poly cultural they have the technology they have the address across your phone they know where you shop when you shop before you do because of the huge data assess right and that's typically what separates people in the future and brands of business in the past when you have address wide enough and frequent enough then you can move into what we call poly cultural space as a whole i think that this is gonna be super important especially for those that are building with consumers in mind a lot of us investors even till today we'll say oh focus on us first focus us first but they forget that we've because of social so we've had the first level of mobile and then social and then now it's ai we're increasingly global and so the reach is not like previous patterns of success yeah and and i'll i'll i'll say this for context oftentimes i don't like the toggle between marketplace and place right here's a little secret for your audience most businesses have been built with a core or a base consumer mono control if you think about early sixteen hundreds in terms of america took from like the sixteen hundreds to like the nineteen eighty census right to predict that you truly were gonna have a multi multicultural america and so when you look at that time span till today the reason that people are like moving shockingly is because things are happening so fast not only just from a technology perspective but from a human perspective and so for the companies that when will lead with culture not race ethic think identity and the reason i say that because when you have full addressable data that's reflective of the new majority you then have insight cultural insight if you skip that beat meaning not include then you will be regulated to race ethic in an identity based outcomes if you include you got more data to mind and then you can really get to the cultural insight irrespective because now you have that efficiency play because i got the inside i understand those similarities irrespective poly cultural amazon chat ep pt one argue it's culturally based why because i got the dress a representative sample size of the total addressable market tam and now i truly get them mind the data to find the best outcome that gives me the best sticky so if you're skipping those steps they're gonna have future proofing of your business in for disruption at some point yeah so two last big questions before we go into rapid fire here ram remiss for me not to ask about you know you talk a lot about you use the word future proofing the phrase future proofing lot ai is front and center and one the things that i i mentioned to you i'm looking into because my work is all fueling women led innovation the women in ai workforce today is only thirty one percent we're going through you know just like mobile now we're actually asking startups actually to almost think ai first just like back in the day we're saying mobile first right because arguably every business moving forward needs to have an ai component what are your thoughts here on how we can future proof to be inclusive for total addressable markets in ai i think that was a word that was per you know over the last couple of years called responsible the evolution of of data maturity in terms of you know you're housing a bunch your data the convergence of that data to allow that model to be better than other people's models it should be inclusive of multiple people in terms of inclusive of black spanish to agents and women the reliability of the model that people are building construction constructing has to be front and center because i've heard people and i've been to a couple talks around responsible ai they using sent synthetic data to supplement the gaps within her data sets it's not inclusive of women minorities right totally against it right so the responsible yeah piece i think is is definitely one to keep front and center as the space matures now when it comes to building a diverse ecosystem inclusive of you know women minorities as time told us and shared it like know women engineers that conversation took place blacks and hispanics in terms of the curve with being included in it as it relates to the digital gap that close the only difference is that you had people that made stuff meaning invented stuff and then you have people that made content they were producers of content so they didn't engineer this stuff and so when you think about women in ai i do think because if we look at the data specifically let's talk about african american women right they're more women in college african american women that african american men and two weeks ago this data gap that is exists within folks in higher education and so i just think there will be something to happen because i don't think you have to go through quote unquote the formal education piece because of the numbers sheer numbers that women will make their way to bring stuff to market in a much more dynamic way than the men are doing because women inherently are inclusive most cases more nurturing one to get the data i saw that they actually build better organizations from an agile perspective we'll put in a a ton of that twenty three to sixty three percent higher returns when women are leading company yes and so if you're an investor out there and you're not leading with women in my opinion then you're missing out on the opportunity and i think there have been significant efforts for the lp and the gp level to invest specifically or develop funds specifically for women i think that's gonna be the key there that women will likely take alternative routes what we have to resist is this belief that masculine energy is the only energy that produce great companies and so you think about some of the stuff that second bugger saying loves scott gallo love them to death but this whole male campaign woe was me on them i don't buy that tough get over it because the way i compare this conversation now this may be political right we're here for it we're here for it in the eighties when and i'm a eighties baby right seventies point seventies but eighties you know grew up when crack was a thing nobody had sinner or houses to help drug infested and drug addicted black people predominantly black men flash four thirty forty years later i will say white men young men are having a little hard time then we wanna write books about it and again i would like to look at a challenge of data young millennial gen z men are in their mother's basement playing video games tough get over and get up right because it's not to be less and empathetic but at the same time these are the things that other people have had to go through and because women people of color in some cases are getting ahead there's this campaign that i feel like is bubbling that we need to feel sorry for them and help them give them a leg up and i don't buy that the world is changing and a much more accelerated pace women minorities will become the majority from a demographic standpoint and the more we try and squeeze and hold on to the old the more accelerated the new will happen for instance these tariffs you're trying to reset a whole world trading order and what that's gonna do is bring europe closer and accelerate china's is gonna accelerate in africa the brick they're gonna accelerate we are re as a whole because we still are trying to hold on to the old america always been about the new new but instead we're hold on to the old and a lot of that has to do what america wants was versus what america is becoming and that is diverse a multi multicultural nation with cross and poly cultural insights yeah i feel like that's a mic woman there so we'll put that as a mike drop movement but i will ask this question because i do think it's crucial right i mean race aside what you just said that women are graduating as a whole at higher rates than ever before right and then we're advancing and all these things and this lost voice phenomenon and has been something that social psychologists have looked at for years and i wonder what is the way that we can address this even as we've become a new majority here how do we ensure that we ourselves i mean we've been inclusive and i think it is about continuing to be inclusive but i say the boys are failing i look at the boys of the younger generation and just telling them to get up and get on with it has not really worked i don't know if it hasn't worked yet right bring it closer home within the marketing communications industry half a trillion knowledge is spent less than three percent of those half a trillion dollars goes to women and minority owned businesses right hasn't changed as media has shifted from the black box to digital with facebook google etcetera hasn't changed now there's a belief that all boats rise with the sea right rising tides rising tides it has never happened in in media right so what i think the hard reality is and that ass all of my good folks on the other side liberals right in order to make the shift you're gonna have to give up something not everybody's gonna win it's a capitalism right and so yes there are the social consequences there are the consequences with regards to mental health and wellness are we still gonna remain a capitalist society our socialist society that everybody gets saved with chap it's a pyramid structure right and so if we really wanna be honest with ourselves the market has to determine where people will fall now it sounds like it's a different persuasion right now not everybody's gonna make it unfortunately and that's always been the way with america and itself in a capital society and so when do we start bringing things in place so that people don't necessarily lose anything then where is a competitive incentive to innovate and that's what america was built on from the job america was built on capitalism in commercial right cotton sugarcane you name it it may have sounded a little harsh with the whole thing and you know the guys are in in the basement but not everybody's gonna win i'm sorry and that's just the way that america has taught us hence why you have this thing around holding onto the old because in order this is the last thing i'll say in order for america to be the america that we all knew and grow to love you have to be accepting of the new america if we continue to hold on to this old america we're not gonna be come the new america that we're capable of becoming and we will have another superpower and it won't be us wise words wise words and can't agree more we will end with a rapid fire gap failure is not leaving anything behind success is creating something that didn't exist money or power money fame or fortune fortune first job you got paid for washing dishes oh where do you feel most at home or at peace martha's vineyard love that most significant thing you've changed your mind about over the past five to ten years masculinity masculinity and finally what gives you hope today jeffrey bowman my kids and with that jeffrey such a pleasure i love the rabbit holes we went down such a great conversation now it's an important conversation at this point in time and i'm grateful to you you know here we welcome multiple prospect perspectives because we we believe that that's what's needed right you need to be able to have hard conversations you can still be friends without agreeing with each other and and still build a future that we both want to shape together so thank you for your time and for the billion dollar moves you're making and re framing the future we're so excited where can we find your book and more about you more about me at jeffrey l bowman dot com and more about the business that get reframe dot ai thank you and thanks so much for tuning in this week for more inspiring conversations just like this to help you lead build and invest better follow us wherever you get your podcast and on shows on bill dollar moves podcast and sarah chen global and yes if you want to keep hearing from us pledge your support for the show by leaving a review on apple podcasts a five star rating on spotify and telling a friend i'd really appreciate it i'm surgeons filings and you've been listening to dollar moves

it's easy to stick with the status quo right no one gets fired for continuing to invest in a fund that's maybe been around for ten twenty thirty years to to stick with strategies or or people from a certain pe or background that that feel safe and trusted and just relying on those old patterns you're gonna miss out on innovation i feel very privileged to sit in the seat that i sit in at pivotal ventures where our mission is to drive social progress create more equality and opportunity for people here in the united states gender is essential to that named one of four most powerful women melinda french gates seats snow introduction over the last twenty years through a work at the bill melinda gates foundation one thing has become clear to her if you want to lift the society up you must invest in women incomes our ex guest erin har moore senior director of investment for pivotal ventures a melinda french gates company created to do exactly that to accelerate social progress in america by investing in women's power and influence as a member of the executive leadership team aaron leads the organization to fund and direct investment decisions overseeing a diverse portfolio of investments that drive breakthrough innovations an impact for people in america with nearly twenty years of investment experience building customized portfolios for endowed institutions and family offices serving most recently as managing director at cambridge associates we talk about everything from challenging the status quote to our investment strategy you don't wanna miss this welcome to billion dollar moves i'm searching spellings and on the show i travel across the globe in search of the unexpected leader every week it is my job to the bill dollar moves of unicorn founders and fund many of them underestimated it long before they became iconic many of them unexpected leaders just like you this show is about unfiltered conversations on success failure fear encouraged in the pursuit of the next big thing in tech adventure now before we hop in here i have a quick favor to ask you about eighty percent of the listeners of this podcast have yet to hit the follow button and it would really help me out if you would smash up followed about it wherever you're tuning in from the bigger the show gets the bigger the guests and the more stories we can amplify across the global venture ecosystem so that we can all keep making billion dollar moves together now let's get started as the always do in build dollar moves fashion the first question is always contact frame who you are what do we need to know about you in your background that brought you to this work i am a native t turn east coast transplant i've spent my entire adult life between new york city boston and now washington dc i'm also a mom to two kids who i have heard them describe as very opinionated and charged up boy and a girl so they keep me that my husband on our collective toes and i'm an investor my career background i think sort of followed a a very traditional path i started my career on wall street at at goldman sachs and i was always trying to figure out how to get more harmon with my professional training and interest and my personal values and when i was very early in my career as senior partner at goldman said to me well you know and like thirty or forty years you can have impact you can step back and you know do phil give money to stuff invest with that lens and that just didn't resonate with me i i i was constantly questioning like why why should i have to wait and i feel very fortunate that over the last decade in my career i've achieved that more of that harmon with my values and the work that i do as an investor when i was a cambridge associates for almost a decade and now at pivotal ventures where i lead our investment team you actually said this in one of your interviews in the past that you never thought about investing as career as a young girl going up case you know i'm unpack that a little bit how did you then have this vision of that hopping on the traditional top yes you don't visualize what you can't see or dream what you can't see i grew up surrounded you know by many professions in my family my dad's a doctor my family members that are lawyers that are teachers that are nurses so those were the paths that i thought one would pursue for for a career business finance investing was just something that had not entered my radar and i hadn't seen people and particularly women and black women in those roles when i got to college i had some friends that had these internships on wall street and they came back to school talking about the energy and the fast pace the combination of the quantitative and the qualitative that the people that they were being exposed to and that the technical work that they were doing and i said wow that seems like the kind of place that i would wanna be but i had no idea that it existed until i got to college and saw that as an as an option through some peers and some friends and and we'll get to this with your career but do you think that's changing i mean over is you've now basically right what you believe to be your passion profit and purpose all in one do you think this pathway is being paid by people like you and times are changing for young women now i'm black women specifically yes and i'm encouraged when i go back to my alma mater wash and saint louis or or i went to business school at harvard there are so many women women of color who or approached me or that reach out cold and send me emails and say i i am doing this like i'm not waiting i wanna a career and impact investing i wanna a career doing this work and that's the ultimate encouraging you know factor for me is that you know it it's it's not a miss anymore it's not something that people feel like they they have to wait and i think the models are there we're we're seeing i'm i'm just one example of of that you know path that that someone has been on and and i love sharing my story and and being able to encourage and support other young women and women of color who are hoping to follow a similar career trajectory absolutely and of course you spent in your last chapter that spoke about cambridge associates that was full a decade off your life and of course before that different stepping stones including being a golden what was unexpected in that chapter and you know maybe a snippet of the chop before she role cambridge associates this fantastic firm it's one of the leading global investment firms i'm such a proud lump i learned they're eric goldman sachs how to do manager diligence how to build portfolios to meet the objectives of a family of an endowed institution so that training again was foundational and allowed me to sit in the seat that i i sit in today at pivotal ventures but there are challenges and again as we were saying about these kind of traditional models and in ways of of thinking you know put a premium on track record and pe and backgrounds sometimes of of you know where a person came from or or or how they came to this work and it was interesting to see that evolve over time at at cambridge and i also learned that you can't move much faster than your client or than your principal one example i was working with an organization there were several members of the board and the staff that wanted to bring more of an impact and values align mission lens to the investment strategy and i just took that signal and ran with it it's like i can bring all of these managers and you know climate gender lens different strategies to the table and then found out that there were a few hold outs around the board seat that did not want to apply that perspective and lens to the portfolio and that led to some really challenging discussions and conversations and ultimately we didn't end up committing to some of those funds despite know the work that i had put in to to do the research and make those recommendations that was a tough pill to swallow but i learned that you can again move faster than the the people around you sometimes and you have to build that consensus get that buy in have the conditions of good governance and decision making to allow you to move forward with that more impact at least in that instance lens so this is interesting and of course that will be remiss for not to talk about the time work we are under attack diversity initiatives are under attack yes women have colored black women specifically as well at a time when we desperately leave invest in and we're hearing all this push right you know a lot of these initiatives are pulling bad mh thinking back to their timeline you have experience that in your previous chapter is this the same feeling of what's happening in the moment you know what was the biggest and how did you address it back in day back in the day again it's all about building that consensus and listening i think sometimes we lose track of how important it is to meet people where they are and understand their perspectives even if there's a difference in opinion and work to to build that trust and dialogue together to move forward to something that's more productive sarah you asked specifically i mean the news today is disheartening it's it's challenging black women women of color or or under attack and in you know various lawsuits etcetera that are that are being filed every day is a black woman in myself i i feel that acutely i i i'd say you know the lawsuit against one is a lawsuit against all of us but we're not stopping our work i'm not stopping my work we're not stopping our work at pivotal ventures to achieve gender parity in our society we need to have women of color be a part of that full stop and we're gonna keep doing that work and pushing but listening at the same time and bringing hopefully others along with us thinking about your time in cambridge will see it's when you had that push pushback from clients what can you learn from that what can we learn from that in actually maneuvering this top movement that we're in to be able to invest in the change we want to see at the end the day the performance we'll speak for itself i i do believe that and diversity makes us all better we have to listen though and and really understand where someone is coming from why why they're putting up that resistance or asking those questions and it may require a little bit of going slow to to go fast as well reflecting back on some of the experiences i had earlier in my career you know you're you're hard charging or like i i wanna get this done i wanna make this investment i wanna make this commitment and sometimes you have to slow down and and hear what other people are saying and and listen and know that this journey this fight that we're in it's it's a long one and they're gonna be setbacks they're gonna be moments that feel tough and challenging and difficult but if you're communicating well if you're building that trust and listening to your partners and and respecting their perspectives and the voices around the table i think that's when the magic happens when you start to see that change really settle in and the performance and the the outcomes will will show us again investing in diversity full stop is is a strategy that i think will deliver great returns to investors and aaron you know i'm on your side this is the way so we live been breathe every us but there is still resistance when do you think this resistance in all the years you know you've been at this longer than i where do you think there's resistance sounds it comes from a place of i think just it's easy to stick with the status quo right no one gets fired for continuing to invest in a fund that's maybe been around for ten twenty thirty years to to stick with strategies or or people from a certain pe or background that that feels safe and trusted we have to examine the incentives as well that are in place i feel very privileged to sit in the seat that i sit in at pivotal ventures where our mission is to drive social progress create more equality and opportunity for people here in the united states gender is essential to that that's the the world i wanna see that's the values that our organization puts forward as well and so we're we're pushing in that direction and see the value there others may not but as i said i think it's our job to to use our voice tell our stories tell the stories of our partners and see the success that they're having to create new patterns so that people will see those new patterns and know that that's a way to to drive again great great outcomes for your portfolios looking at consultants this you were there for a significant period of time right arguably in the recent years we started seeing a lot with them you woke move that and he is she and all these things and consultants are frankly under fire on what to do because they have high needs their other stakeholders and have they've got their firm to run as well how how do you think investment in consulting specifically should be thinking about this time in advising their plans and steward this capital it's a excellent question sarah you consultants are often described as the gatekeepers they work with some of the best and largest institutions and endowments foundations families pension funds all of our jobs as fiduciary is is again to promote the interests of our clients and the portfolios and drive great results and to ignore whole swabs of people women people of color and investing to me is not being a good fiduciary so i think it's incumbent upon the the consultants to have those conversations they're tough right some clients may push back may not like it it takes time but if you listen if you go back to the data i think that's what's gonna move the needle forward more meaningfully absolutely and of course you are now steward the capital of one key principle at social ventures first tell us a little bit about this ship i mean you had that question by senior you know in your mind and talk to the senior partner of goldman sachs that okay you can make your impact later make money first essentially right so buying me for yourself first how did you then come to find this opportunity with melinda melinda eats every day i wake up and i'm almost wondering is this a dream because i feel like i have the best job in the world and pivotal has allowed me to do that to live my values every day i was very fortunate to be approached about this opportunity to lead the investment team at pivotal a little over three gap gosh now almost four years ago and as i said when i got that call i i thought someone was playing a prank on me so this can't be a real job and i learned quickly that it was melinda commitment her you know willingness and ability to use her voice her platform as a philanthropist as an investor to drive change is incredibly impactful and to sit in the seat that i sit in driving our investment portfolio allows me to do that every day to interact with some amazing women fund managers and founders that are building the businesses and innovation gonna drive our economy forward gender is foundational to moving our country our our society forward and we use a couple of different levers at pivotal to to do that phil high impact strategic partnerships policy and advocacy work and investing all four of those are essential to moving the needle and across a variety of themes like building a more equitable care giving system in our country getting more women into tech and stem so that they can build the businesses that are gonna drive innovation for our country activating more women into public office you were sitting here in in the washington area i live in dc and and the dysfunction frankly that's occurring all around town and at the capital of i'd argue if we have more women in power we might be seeing some different results so we're trying to create the conditions for women to control more resources in our country and investment capital is in an an essential part of that as well yeah so i wanna go back to you know when you first had the first meeting in with melinda mh and you were sort of thinking about the impact that someone like her with her resources her connections capital connections capability right to be able to create a change that we all wanna to see in the world because we we work with a law next generations right who have some of that access as well how should someone with that level of ability right connections what i call the flu connections capability capital think about where is my biggest point of impact and how did she land on alright it's gonna be women and girls melissa blonde been a champion for women and girls so for her my sense is that's been of her core value and and a motivating factor for her and her life is a business woman a philanthropist and and an investor so that was clear is is our mission objective and the outcomes that we wanna see and drive towards from an investment lens again if we're not putting more capital in the hands of women we're gonna be locking them out of the innovation that's gonna drive our country forward tomorrow so we think again about the tools the resources that that melinda that our principal has that we have to deploy and it's all of those to drive change and impact one alone is insufficient they all have to be working together but the investment capital is so important and the time is now i mean despite the work that we're doing at pivotal some of the data is not great sarah you know still sixteen percent of decision makers check writers at venture capital firms and the united states are women only two percent venture funding goes to female founders female led teens it's possible i mean two percent that's terrible that we could be doing so much more so much better and that's the core of what's driving our investment strategy and again us seeing the resources that we have to be able to to to deploy more capital against that that problem getting more capital in the hands of of women investors and decision makers so that we can build the type of businesses that we wanna see in our society and you said in the past talking about building topic and investment capital because i think this is an important distinction for us to think of all a little bit here you have said that southern philanthropic capital is key to solving where market fe exists and invested capital to expand opportunities and really unleash the potential what already exists yeah gene tells us a little bit more about you know i'm thinking about because one of the challenges i have is people think still think your leader that investing in women is charity charity yeah no let's our listeners here let's just put that myth to bed it is not charity investing in women you can make money doing it we are proving that and and living and showing that thesis with our strategy at pivotal ventures but not to diminish the importance of phil again it is an essential tool to driving social progress expanding equality and opportunity for more people in our country specifically for women but investment capital is needed as well to give an example we over the past five years or so really been focused on the gaps facing caregivers in our country we're all caregivers at some point in our lives but women often bear that burden most acutely it's a six hundred forty eight billion dollar market opportunity the care economy is and we see policy failures as well around that market failures that we're using and philanthropic capital to address pivotal ventures but when i heard six hundred forty eight billion dollars my mind went to wow how can i get more capital in the hands of people that are creating and leveraging technology for solutions that are gonna make caregivers lives easier and so that's that's the opportunity right that's where we can drive impact and also make a lot of money we're gonna laugh all the way to the bank doing it and i hope others join us as well and we're seeing that we're seeing more energy more momentum more capital flowing into these spaces as investors and entrepreneurs with entrepreneurs specifically with their lived experience build businesses to tackle some of these huge problems facing them as caregivers yeah yeah so and and just to really make sure we have this right here the philanthropic capital that deploy is mostly through so pivotal is pivotal ventures is a separate entity from the gates foundation we deploy philanthropic capital melinda has committed a billion dollars through pivotal ventures into advancing women's power and influence and and equity and opportunity that includes all of those levers that i mentioned the investing the phil the policy work and the strategic partnerships got it and but your bucket that you're solely responsible for from investments perspective is investment in capital is investment capital yes yes returns seeking investment capital so market returns above market returns definitely yes and we would sort of mapping this out a little bit in in your office you know months ago when we work together about the strategy here right with the investment capital in a different levers that that you're deploying whether that's through fund managers so changing the face of who rights the check yes some direct deals to drive the innovation that we wanna see can you talk to us a little bit about how do you thought about the strategy here love that question sarah our investment strategy has those two pillars investments into funds that are women owned and led to start to move the needle against those stats the sixteen percent of female check riders in us venture firms we wanna get more capital in the hands of women that are making the decisions and backing the entrepreneurs of tomorrow we also wanna deploy capital directly as an investor in companies that are tackling and some of the big problems and innovations that will create better solutions for caregivers that care economy that we've been discussing so both of those together we're going to allow us to tackle the problems of of facing female founders and and fund we see them as sort of very closely tied together in essential parts of our investment strategy so a bill all was melinda commitment where are we today what's the update yes we are continuing to deploy capital scaling the portfolio of both fund and direct company investments it's exciting i we've had so many it it's almost i think if some of our our relationships with our partners is is a family too and i love both my children equally some days i might like one more than the other and so you know what you're talking and asking about our progress it's it's hard i i would love to share with the listeners and you can go to our website and and and you know as follow up and see some of our partners you know there but we they're all building and doing amazing things but a couple of examples i think that illustrate the the progress that we've made and the path that we're on we inc in an anchored to fund at pivotal called mag ventures that's tackling that care crisis investing in technology that supports modern families they raised fifty two million dollars have been deploying that over the past few years now into some really interesting companies one called milo which is a personal assistant leveraging ai for the home so all of the tasks that you struggle to keep up with me as a mom i'm like is today picture day is today no uniform day do i have to send this book i have no idea my husband bless him he probably also has no idea and milo is trying to tackle that problem and ease that coordination burden that parents face so we look to a fun investment like mag that's was helping to catalyze this market as as a success and some of those companies are now growing and scaling one other example we invested in impact america fund led by k cash they raised a hundred and twelve million dollars this year one of the largest raises by a black woman venture and they are investing in lower moderate income communities black and brown communities the products and services that will you know uplift of folks in in our society as is that team and they raise that fund much more quickly than their last fund i think that's a testament to the partnership of limited partners like us and others who are willing to invest early perhaps bring a more creative lens to our diligence to to to get to a yes and and allow that success to to come to bear i love that last point that are getting to it a yes in this fundraising environment which feels for many like a fundraising winter can you talk to us a little bit about why that sixteen percent number is still the reality today of women writing the checks when you know we see a lot more women in finance actually at least in the the entry levels you the key pipeline happens and all that just us a little bit about that the structural problem that exists and how are you thinking about that as an investor we're in the business of pattern recognition and unfortunately still a lot of the patterns we we are creating more of them every day with our investments at pivotal and that many others are are making still are not enough women to to point to and and as we have built our process this is one of the things that that makes us differentiated and and i'd even say unique it at pivotal one we try to invest early to tackle that question you asked about the fundraising winter it's it is hard out there but if we have conviction we wanna move as as quickly as possible through our diligence to to get to that yes and then be a signal to others to join us around the table sharing our diligence and being as collaborative as possible with other limited partners so that they can get to yes as quickly as possible and we can you know start to speed up and knock down some of those barriers that are holding women back also on the process front just trying to check some of the biases that are in place and and this gets back to your question too sarah of it's it's it's all about the patterns i would love to see someone that has ten years of experience at a brand name you know sand hill road firm with their audited track record and i can look at each company and and and vet that that may not exist though and there are some folks that have raised funds that have that pe profile but there are many others out there that do not and i'm constantly asking the question what risk are we trying to assess or get get comfortable with or or try and minimize as much as is in gaining an understanding around as much as we can in the in in our investment diligence process seeing the value of someone who has maybe been an operator for a decade how that fits to the strategy they wanna execute and using that is a mosaic of building a track record that again may not fit the traditional markers but honors is the experience that say this woman operator is bringing to the table that will allow her to build a fund that will be successful and and ultimately deliver value back to us as limited partners and also to the founders that that that that they're supporting yeah so i hear all on that and this is exactly the that i have as well but i'm gonna play devil's advocate sure i think it's let's let's let's let's mix it up back that i got a lot from out is look we're doing the access play my access planning meaning we have a small venture allocation ten percent i'm gonna spend that on running names like and and i wanna prove even if i'm a family office and that's a whole different topic i got together right i need to prove to the paycheck that i can get into the sequoia of the world why should i take all this risk for frankly returns venture has not been as it seems right with interest rates are things gonna change you know what would you say to that push fire excellent pushback i've heard it i've heard it before i go back to the data what does the data show us my former employer cambridge associates re of of data on this and is shown that emerging managers typically funds one to four when you look vintage year over vintage year outperform funds that are five six seven eight nine ten to me that makes the case for you should sure if you can get access to sequoia have sequoia but you should also be looking to the talent of tomorrow that's perhaps more diverse bringing different perspectives to the table and carving out a portion of your ten percent allocation or whatever the number may be to those funds as well because the performance is is has spoken for itself and i think you know again just relying on those old patterns you're gonna miss out on innovation too those diverse perspectives and and backgrounds are gonna bring are gonna see the challenges and problems and maybe come at them solve them in a different and a different way and and i'm inspired by your principal obviously of and the fact that she is a very professional founding office through the work you do yeah pivotal sorry but she is still a single principle that can draw these positions and for many of our listeners actually they're in the world of family offices yep their next generations they're inheriting their earning their potential they're having assets exits what would you make von families you know and in thinking about their capital to do today moving forward start deploying and do collaborate as well the family office community specifically i've always found to be very open once you're in that network people are are wanna c invest together they wanna do deals together with other like minded families and and thought partners and so if if you're a next gen join some of the communities that are geared towards the next gen investors and start sharing ideas and deal flow in testing out your thesis then get the buy in that's essential too and and that involves some of the more complicated conversations as we've spoken about governance that's hard work but you have to set the conditions of governance to have a successful investment program full stop so i'd encourage people to to start deploying lean on your networks and your peers and and make sure that the decision making architecture around it has the space to do these type of investments that you're excited about exploring yeah and and we you know on build as the names it goes it's it's all about how do we think in it in a large way right and how do we impact with scale yes and in melinda book moment of lived she talked about cracking the patterns of history right and of course we we touched on this slightly earlier with black women being under attack right now but what are the structural solutions that we need are be thinking about two craft these patterns of history today wow that's melinda book is great if you haven't read it i'd encourage you to check out check out moment of lyft and we have to be bold advancing women's power and influence lifts up all we to lift up all women women of color are essential to that as well and i think it's bringing their voices bring all voices to the table to understand the unique challenges that are facing these communities and having all of us work together towards the solution so we can't sit off in our you know ivory tower so to speak and think that we have all of the the answers we have to sometimes be a little bit more humble and open ourselves up learning and and being open to those different communities and and perspectives to drive change but it's hard these these barriers exist for a reason to perhaps protect some of the entrenched interests around the table so we have to to keep keep pushing not stop our work we're not stopping i'm not stopping my work we're not stopping our work at pivotal to get us to gender parity here in our society and and the work of so many others that we work with right fund managers gps pee lps still continues yes what would you advise be to them i i mean you've been through the different cycles right you've seen firms start with a lot of gust yes and then shut right and i am starting to see a lot of that as well what makes the difference between our where and a yes you you right i am i have now seen several cycles and crises for better or for worse but that perspective is important and it's all about you can be a great investor but they're you have to have the the leadership the people around you it all comes back to the people to build an enduring franchise that's the difference maker is setting that vision where do you wanna go as an organization and can you bring the talent around the table incentivize them compensate them reward them encourage them to again is with an investment context to go out and find the best founders to back and help them scale their businesses but it's not just about one or the other it's it's knit all those things together and i think that recognition of of all those pieces that's what separates the you know the organization that might have one or two good funds from the franchises that endure for a long time yeah so if you look at ventures as an example what give you that conviction that yeah they're building a franchise here that we wanna continue to be early on and say yes to clear thesis you know what is their right to win that's a question i often always ask and thinking about what is your edge what is your right to win as an investor they had defined that had a very clear thesis and and strategy that they were deploying and then two of the team and the the partnership and collaboration particularly in venture these are marriages i've i've been married now for a good a good while but some of these venture funds we've committed to will be around as long and longer than some marriages are right so do you have that conviction in how these partners communicate how they make decisions how they collaborate and connect with each other that to me the strategy the team how they work together are essential to why we had confidence in what magnified is continuing to build so looking ahead here as you think about your impacts mh and the work that you all do at pivotal ventures five years down road having the same conversation meeting in the same studio yes you talking about i hope we will see movement in the stats we'll be talking about more success stories more examples of women that are leading billion dollar franchises and firms founders that have exited successfully created wealth for themselves and for their families and for their employees that that to me is what i hope we're talking about that they're just more and more of those stories it's not just one or two and that young women and girls that are interested to your opening questions sarah of of of wanting a career as an investor don't just have the one book to read or the one person to look at they can see dozens of examples of that success at the midas list the forbes midas list has way more women audit it than it does today those are some of the things i'd love to see when we're sitting here five years from now yeah intentionally and what the success look like for pivotal ventures you can't track what you don't don't measure i firmly believe that so success for us is seeing movement in these big macro indicators that we're tracking as it relates to women's participation in the political spear controlling investment capital in the tech industry closing wealth gaps etcetera so that success for us is is seeing meaningful movement and more parity on some of those areas over over the next five ten years yeah no well we've covered a lot of ground here and a lot more that i wish we could what is one angle that you think we have covered here that was important for us to bring to the before it's been a great conversation if one thing i would point to you were asking around you know how folks can activate more capital and i i would just come back to that i i think we need more we're not gonna solve this at pivotal by ourselves that's why we believe in partnership and collaboration with other like minded fund and investors alongside us so i just wanna leave the listeners with you know hopefully you've seen and and your interest has been peaked about some of the the things that we're doing and come join us it's if you're not investing if you're not trying to solve some of these problems it's it's a huge opportunity and and we'd love to see more people working with us alongside us but before we end here yes my favorite section out the show the rapid fire or billion dollar question so the first thing that comes to mind okay you see the right on you i i think so alright here we go this pretty person melissa of black successes impact figure is oh not not trying not not pushing so much of your work aaron is about women's full potential have you reached that full potential when do you think that would be if not not yet i am on my way though but it's a lifelong it's a lifelong journey so i'm excited for what's to come your most use app on phone now oh it's a toss up between the new york times and instagram very different party long it's long mille money power power what keeps you up at night still i've have a very regiment sleep regime so i sleep pretty pretty well but i would say thinking about my kids just you know the world that they they might inherit it from a climate perspective a a social justice you know kind of equity perspective that's that the we're moving you know slowly and and not setting them up for success but that younger folks are fighting and and are not satisfied as well so so that's keeps me up at night but the same time gives me hope too worse advice you've been given oh worst advice to to just wait to that like don't pursue your things there your dreams your passions like you gotta wait to get to it just go after it best advice have fun in what you're doing and your work and in your life what's in an conventional opinion that you bolt sadly still that people should be investing word women to our conversation earlier throughout the podcast sarah that that you we need more people getting capital in into the hands of of women yeah what's the most significant thing you've changed your mind about over the past decade that that there is such a thing as work life balance i i don't think that there is i think you're we're all constantly every day just trying to do our best and some days you're great at home some days you're not some days you're maybe stronger at work some days or not and that's that's okay so that kinda having it all having that work work life balance i think there's just always that tension in the trade offs and i've i've learned and appreciate that differently today than i did ten years ago and finally i guess years leader what won't your know legacy be my legacy will be more again impact women's us achieving more power and influence for women so that my daughter and my son too but my daughter see a world that looks very different from the one that that i grew up in that that my parents grew up in that's that's my legacy wow and with that voice choice power women's power and influence thank you aaron for the work that you're doing and your leadership thank you sarah so much for your questions your time your passion as well this has been such a fun fun opportunity to be with you this morning thank you and finally where can ever find you in the work that you're doing actually so you can find me on twitter on linkedin personally you can follow pivotal ventures on mini social channels twitter linkedin instagram check out our website as well to learn more about those levers that we're pulling and some of our partners and and how to join us and our work and thanks so much for tuning in this week you can subscribe wherever you get your podcast and follow our socials on sarah global to get the latest on the show it would really help me out too if you enjoyed this to rate and review show on apple podcast podcasts and share your favorite episodes with friend i'm search spellings and you've been listening to villain dollar moves

we don't have a mandate to invest in these companies we have a mandate and a produce fiduciary duty to deliver returns with that sort of objective we've still invested in over forty percent of our portfolio that could be defined as an impact company and i think that tells you a lot if you don't have a financially viable company then how an earth are you're gonna maximize the impact side so it has to go hand in hand but all job as investors is to today on villain dollar moves were joined by ro ba head of es g and impact at ant one of the world's most active and selective early stage french venture capital firms with twenty seven offices across continents from a childhood shaped by global moves and a para to navigating hedge funds during the global financial crisis raw brings rare systems thinking lens to venture ant is one of all pledged partner funds at beyond the berlin our global initiative where gps and lps commit self defined capital targets to its investing in women founded companies this week we're proud to celebrate a major milestone over one billion dollars has now been to point by out funds into women founders at angela ras is helping to redefine what it means to invest early with intentional inclusion and commercial grid with nearly three thousand women supported through their global counter residences and over forty percent of their portfolio qualifying as impact companies all without a formal mandate but the pledge this conversation is a master clause in purpose boat scale let's dive in welcome to bill dollar moves where we dive deep into the journeys of unicorn founders and fund who have turned their dreams into billion dollar realities all across the globe and yet many of them were underestimated it long before they became iconic many of them unexpected leaders just like you and i i'm sarah chen spellings now let's get started i grew up kinda all over the world so zimbabwe south africa ireland cyprus england my mom was a a teacher my dad was a para so i think what really sort of shaped me and my entire sort of life in career is that adaptability and and curiosity were pretty much kinda of baked into me from childhood i studied chemistry thought i was gonna be a scientist but after my masters i fell into recruiting and to be honest it was just to pay my rent and moved to london and then i ended up recruiting myself into a hedge fund and i spent three years there and also experienced the global financial crisis at that time and to be honest i had no idea about capital markets and it was quite a shock but an incredible experience for me and then after that i spent eleven years in asset management and during that time i moved from london to singapore with sc and then four years ago i joined ant and sort of stepped into this world of venture capital i didn't never really had a kind of grand plan around my career but i know that i've been really lucky with my experiences i'd say sort of the the common thread across my career is probably how much i'm drawn to systems thinking so whether that's around people or human behavior or markets or you know my chemistry day molecules i really like the kind of complicated stuff where answers aren't always obvious and now i get to do kind of apply that way of thinking to help founders actually navigate complexity and uncertainty and build companies that solve real problems and it's been an incredibly rewarding time yeah so before you gloss over did you say your father was a para troop yes that's right what does that involve and how did that i guess role model career life for you as a kid well i think my father was desperate for me to join the military so a para trooper is a sort of a a special group within the army where they literally threw themselves out of our airplanes parachute in and work on specific kind of programs all over the world and hence that's why i've moved many different countries i think at last count my brother and i were saying that we hit forty one homes in forty years i'd say that probably has shaped a lot of the way that i am as an individual today yeah and so jumping in flying off a plane that sounds a little bit like you although you did it slightly differently tell us a little bit about how you decided to join i mean from sc to ant that was founded by as we know magnus who up frankly on a farm and then decided to become this massive entrepreneur how did you decide like this was going to be the firm for me for you know the next couple of years it's a good question it's funny because i often think about that time when i was first introduced to ant and it was at a time where i spent a really long time in financial services and i had a wonderful career i was working with incredible people and i really enjoyed it but i was looking for something different and i blame covid because i think during covid was a time where everybody had these sort of existential crises and i wanted to explore something different and when i learned more about ant and it's completely unique model to me it just made a lot of sense coming at a point very early stage exactly at a point where founders need support they need community and they need capital and the more i learned about ant the more people i met and saw how ambitious and sort of crazy they were in what they wanted to build i had to be part of it and that's the honest dancer love it and tell us a little bit about the structure for those of us that are not familiar with how has built the app infrastructure and platform and of course it is global we are on the heels actually beyond the bill we're headed to one of our summit in finland a lp summit in finland so know that you you all have just raised a hundred million in the nordic as well so very global it tells a little bit about you know the story with anc and how it's built out to become so i i like to to think of it that we were really sort of solving a problem and it was sort of a big problem because startups were failing and they were failing for the wrong reasons really it was you know bad product market fit team issues or lack of a team and then an inability to raise capital and there's many different reasons for that but what magnus decided was that there's all this incredible talent out there and we can provide a platform where they can come and address those risks so we get about a hundred and sixty thousand applications from founders as a year we invite a very small percentage of those to come and join a residency program and that'll be in all of our locations around the world and they've spend anywhere between six and twelve weeks with us we help them find cofounder we validate their product ideas and then we offer the chance to receive capital at the end of it we've been cited very often as now the world's most active venture capital firm globally but i also like to add that we're the most selective as well because when you take that funnel and actually looking at who we're funding it is incredibly selective and we started here in singapore made our first investment in twenty eight eighteen we're now in twenty seven offices around the world so that's across six continents we've invested in over fifteen hundred portfolio companies from pre seed up to series c and we have a community of over twelve thousand founders now so it's a it's been quite a journey in a short period of time but i think it points the fact that this type of model was very much needed for most of us we have the y comb comparison how different is the model of ant versus yc i think the first thing is just how early we come in so when we choose to invest in companies we typically value them and this is you know it varies slightly from location to location but typically at one million and then we take ten percent but then the real important work stuff after the residency so that's where we help founders you know find their customers we help them think about taking this product to market we help them fund raise and it's all about that sort of early growth and helping them scale and what i love is that you know when we first started that it was still very early stage in terms of kind of pre seed investments but then you know we naturally matured and added more products to our suite to actually support founders over a longer term and hence taking us to to series c so i think that relationship over a really long period of time is helpful for founders and i'd say that our global footprint is also incredibly helpful as companies look to enter new markets or as we've seen a lot recently where they want to hire teams in different markets and they tap into our founder community to actually find those first hires and they've kinda had the rubber stamp of approval from out haven't gone through the residences i've heard magnus and a few of your team members speak about how you invest in the founders right it it's not really the idea you're backing the people so you must have some really interesting metrics or you know psych analysis on what characters work together with how teams are best built and things like that can you share a little bit about you know some of the insights course it's it's not always a hundred percent fit it's almost like match making that you're really doing except for building a startup well i think the first thing is it's so crucial in the early stages to find somebody that has complementary skills and to work together with a mutual ambition of what you want to create but obviously in the early stages there's a lot happens priorities are shifting all the time different pressures happen but what we can do with our program or residency is to help teams through that process now in terms of your question about sort of personalities now this is something where obviously the enormous amount of data that we have internally is helping us to give signals or indicators that we can start to recognize and see some patents emerging about what makes found as successful what makes team successful but ultimately when you're coming in as early as we do it's that sort of that spike that we're looking for do they have the determination are they able to build incredible teams are they gonna be able to win customers and are they gonna stick through this through challenging times and that's ultimately what it kinda of comes down to and certainly from speaking to partners all around the world they've started to kind of recognize actually who's going to be capable of being a a truly successful founder and what i should say is also that you know this isn't just about first time founders we have a large number of seasoned entrepreneurs that that come and join our program because they recognize that what we offer is something that they're just not able to find elsewhere and it's wonderful to hear those stories where they say i never would have met this that my c founder or i never would have been able to get to you know series b if i hadn't have had that support from ant and that's what we're all about ultimately and what have you learned i guess if a founder is building right now right from one to ten because it sounds like you've done all the way from zero to one to one to ten as well and in supporting the founder in building teams i guess from zero to in one to ten what is a critical mindset to have in making sure that your team is set up for success for me and and probably they're coming at it from a sustainability angle it's that that purpose and intent that's behind a company when you're building a startup you know it's something so incredibly hard and you'll need to be able to build sort of the right resilience in yourself and have the ability to also adapt in whatever's happening either with your business or things that are affecting your business you know like we're seeing at the moment with macro trends there's a constant awareness and a need to iterate along the way but then also recognize that feedback is so important be that from your customers or from your team or from your investors you don't necessarily have to take every feedback but you do have to listen and i i think that's such a a crucial part of being a a successful founder and of course you're coming on the show share a little bit about your success stories and investing more in women founded companies we still know the data shows that women outperform and yet are under cap and things currently are not as popular as it seems as back in the day right we're in the rise of v nt d we've seen some really interesting revelations in the last couple of months where we are from a gender perspective and diversity in and all that and as well you know from just what you're building a a macro trans perspective are we looking out wounds right now give us some reflections of where we are today as a whole let me start off just by touching on sort of the the fact that supporting moon founders you know isn't anything new for us so ann mission if we really boil it down to one line it's simply to find and back the best founders solving big problems so in vc we're in the business of spotting outliers and we know that outliers are are gonna often come from underestimated backgrounds and with our global footprint we see just how diverse entrepreneurial talent really is and it is far beyond what the vc industry is traditionally reflected now to your question around so that the macro environment and the pushback that we're seeing around d the criticism is often that diversity is just simply being pursued for diversity sake so regardless of outcomes or trade offs and it's just yet simply ticking a representation box we also have to acknowledge that linking diversity directly to financial returns is actually very difficult to quantify but i think the most important thing and that's often lost in this conversation is that d was never just about representation it's about perspective and culture it's about building teams that better understand their markets their customers and their company risks and those are the things that really drive resilience and growth especially in startups when they're just beginning and i think the same logic really applies to how we find and support founders if you wanna back the best in the world you have to look beyond the usual vc networks and we have to recognize that different founders may need different types of support to actually reach their full potential and that that's gonna be something that's shaped by their own experiences their barriers and never motivations ultimately it kinda comes down to what makes business sense right whether you're a es or a d sort skeptic or whether you're sort of more inclined that way we're all asking the same question you're where's the value and i think if your approach is intentional it's clear and its outcomes is driven then that's incredibly hard to argue with you mentioned early in the conversation that it's about mixing a a you know different pools of telling that would never have mix before and your numbers interestingly have always been a little bit higher than the average that we see in venture tell us how this is structured for you to be top of the funnel getting these higher numbers because i think that's helpful the pushback is oh they're there's not enough women for this work we don't discriminate sarah but there's just not enough women building so tell us what you're seeing and how i guess you've also built a little bit more intentionally to be able to construct the outcomes that you want so you're right you know around twenty seven percent of our active portfolio companies have at least one woman c founder and they've attracted close to a third of our invested capital now their average age is around twenty six months and all of this data you i'm gonna caveat at it little footnote here the nature of early stage vc means these numbers are gonna change probably quite dramatically sort of week on week month on month but you know for now across these companies they've gone on to raise more than four times the capital that ant invested at inception and that kind of capital leverage is exactly what we aim for in early stage vc i think it shows that there's real market appetite once the right teams get backed and that's why our model at ant coming in as early as we do is so important now looking across the they're gonna broader portfolio and if we look at funding rates the rates for companies with women c cofounder is are comparable to all male teams what we do see is that the average valuations and total external capital raise are still lower but i do think this could be you know down to a mix of early stage and and structural kind of market factors but yes it's telling us that there's still a gap and who gets funded but it's not in who actually performs so if we look at our top ten performers in terms of moe three are led by women seven of our top thirty performers include women founders and then if we look to our top hundred twenty one have at least one women cofounder and then if we strip out to outliers that heavily sort of skew the averages valuations among women led companies in the top one hundred are actually slightly higher than they're all male teams so the upside is there and it's growing so let's unpack that a little bit let's start with the valuations so the valuations are higher a little bit higher with gender diverse teams i'll be devil's advocate here are there particular verticals where it's in general like ai right now command huge valuations so gender is not really something that is the key dominant driver what can you say with regard to where they're outperforming are there certain underlying factors here that i will also support that and this is something we need to kinda unpack more we have the data but we do need to go deeper in the analysis we could look across regions and across sectors but there's always sort of nuances to it so for instance when you look at our southeast asia portfolio the reason why there's so many women cofounder with that portfolio is because it's one of our oldest locations and so then when you compare it to some of our newer locations like brazil or canada it's a small sample set and these are things where we will learn from other locations and think about if there are gaps then what are we missing and what can we improve on and that's the beauty of having this very cohesive global platform that we've created because it's always about learning and sharing and thinking about where we can improve so singapore was law in twenty eighteen whereas brazil was you know a few years ago so it's the maturity of our our portfolio our branding and awareness in that location and of course it takes time when you enter a new ecosystem you have to kind of build your branding from scratch and now there's a lot you can leverage from the rest of the platform but you still need to be credible in your own ecosystem and so i think naturally our application rates increase in terms of absolute numbers over time and then we start to get a more representative look at what our actual location will have in terms of who's applying who's getting funded etcetera so of course the absolute numbers grow but the proportion i guess you're in singapore where have you seen pockets of success with your women founders are they particularly building in certain industries with there certain strategies that you apply to be able to get to this level maturity the beauty of being sector agnostic means that we have found is building across all sectors and if i look across so since twenty eighteen we've backed around four hundred and twenty companies with at least one woman cofounder and that's globally now obviously as i mentioned that'll look slightly different across different locations but actually they're all very strong in terms of who they're funding who they're backing these founders are building you know across ai infrastructure fintech climate health consumer tech prop tech when i look at the data in terms of specific sectors nothing really stands out year on year it seems to shift quite dramatically and that just may simply be a reflection of what's happening across the industries macro aspects and really sort of where the hot topics might be sitting i wanna call out ne who's founder of india p she previously scaled india's largest clean cooking company and then she turned her attention to micro finance so she's helping rural women entrepreneurs access growth capital and allowing retail investors to actually back that credit and her team have already processed fifty thousand loan applications in just two years and i think for me being on the sustainability side it's such a perfect example of where innovation meets inclusion and is very commercial at the same time and then you've got emily far a genuine taste in our canada portfolio so her team are producing cultivated animal fat from stem cells so there's no harm to animals there's no deforestation and it's improving the taste and nutrition of alternative protein their process also cut emissions by up to ninety percent and so it squarely sort of puts them as intersection of climate and food and then i have to mention maria because i spoke to her this morning she's over at the us she's a part of our new york residency at the moment she's a three x founder she's a y comb a lu and now she's building c with ant this is a multi layered ai platform for mental health diagnostics now in the us over fifty percent of mental health diagnoses are wrong so that's leading to mistreatment unnecessary costs for clinics and insurers and often you know terrible consequences for patients and their families and maria knows this firsthand because her mother was mis diagnosed she's got support from stanford you know major mental health associations she's develop this platform that's already been used in clinics that really looks to bring more precision and accountability into the system i think you've there is such an incredible example really of how personal experience from a founder can drive innovation and that's why we need to keep you know backing founders like maria rose nash at bio detecting p fast so the forever chemicals polluting our water systems han from bio in vietnam reducing plastic use through bio plastics christine ocean oasis doing scaling desalination with wave power and then the da at am in germany she's launching small satellites into space to deliver industry leading analytics so i you can see just how spoiled i am working with these incredible women founders tackling real problems that need solving and doing it in incredibly innovative ways back to that that point that we were talking about you know what sets found is apart you know it's that that grit that purpose and their ability to lead teams and that's the kind of thing that we look for ant and that's regardless of of gender and when you think a little bit about you know the work that's being built here you mentioned something that i think really resonates where when women built they built inclusive and they bolt with real purpose right solving something of the most urgent problems that we're faced with today it's not incremental that's so common in i don't know enterprise saas where you see a plug on or an ai wrapper or for something that doesn't necessarily move its all forward in the way that we should be moving forward one of the challenges however on the flip side is that women are often seen building with impacts in an impact investing lens which sometimes impact investing as well is defined by the behold that right but it sometimes seemed to be concession can you tell us a little bit about the commercial returns that you're seeing here so i think it's plain and simple to be honest ant is not an impact vc we don't have a mandate to invest in impact companies i have to say even though i'm head of es impact i don't like the terms es or impact i think unfortunately they've been misunderstood they've been sort of collapsed into different definitions that make no sense for sort of vc but it doesn't mean they're sort of not important it just means we have to actually think about what actually matters to founders on the es side of things and then on the impact side of thing as i say we we don't have a mandate to invest in these companies we have a mandate and a produce fiduciary duty to deliver returns with that sort of objective we've still invested in over forty percent of our portfolio that could be defined as an impact company and i think that tells you a lot we are still looking for that commercial traction if you look at the gen definition of impact it's not about concession returns it's about delivering an outcome that benefits the environment or society that is intentional but it's also about delivering returns if you don't have a financially viable company then how on earth are you're gonna maximize the impact side so it has to go hand in hand but our job as investors is to think about is this a problem worth solving how are they gonna scale this company and how are they gonna scale the impact that they're hoping to actually achieve and is this something that could be long lasting or is this sort of a short term sort of response and so i think when we assess impact companies sure there are additional aspects that we look at but in terms of the financial viability aspect it's exactly the same as we look at any other sort of category that we're exploring sustainability is something that should be aligned with structural growth trends if you think about over here in in singapore and southeast asia urbanization is without doubt a big theme you know this is something which is incredibly important for this region and how are you gonna do that how we're gonna build cities or buildings in a way that means they're gonna last or they're gonna be sort of more efficient or we're gonna cut energy costs because they are enormous if we are living in this ai world we need energy in order to power it and we will not have enough energy if we just rely on what's been used in the past so these alternative energy sources like renewables is a great way to do that i wanna come back to the brass tacks here with the data how about exit rates you know how about the liquidity that you're seeing from a portfolio perspective where are we today to be able to deliver returns or the lps that you know your fisheries too as you mentioned so because we're so early stage we haven't seen sort of significant exits yet what we look at is that funding rate our goal is to get as many companies as we possibly can to a series a when they've come through our residency program so that's our kind of main objective if we're thinking longer term of course when we're assessing a company we have to think about an exit strategy what might that look like what is the founder goal what does the market look like are there examples of similar companies that have achieved that but this is something that we'll look more into as our companies mature over the years and certainly sort of when we look at some of the investments made from our follow on investment vehicle that'll come fairly soon so i was gonna point to that actually in terms of portfolio strategy and construction first of all you're super global but there are different gps that are leading locally right so we have local partnerships to drive the work there which is super important how then are you thinking also with each fund in terms of like the holding period to then exit and create the liquidity side it's honestly case by case at the moment so southeast asia fund is on its third one that we're just launching at the moment and that's probably sort of the more frequent that we've seen but a lot of other regions are going on to fund two like we're seeing in the us or or central europe and then elevate our follow on investment vehicle is also now fundraising for a second fund as well but in terms of our holding period you know it's very typical to any other vc we built that follow on investment vehicle because we wanted to continue to invest in some of our really strong performing companies we don't leave the round but we've got to know these companies of you know two plus years and so it's really important that we can continue that relationship i think when a liquidity event happens then we will assess what to do whether we need to do distribution whether we reinvest into the fund i think that recycling sort of aspect is really important if you do have an event early on but to really think about what makes sense for the portfolio and when to sell down we like to hold as long as possible until we really need to provide sort of distribution or realize our returns but none of our funds have kind of reached that term as yet yeah so still early days but of course for a fund that's building in its early days you were quick to say yes to taking the pledge beyond the villain to invest more in women and to double down in a strategy that clearly you know from all the stories you shared has been working for you yet it is a tighter capital environment and other funds you know across the world feeling the pinch well i think that's a real bifurcation with the mega funds right that are becoming more than vc funds i think you saw general catalyst bought hospital and now are operating it so you know adapting as we go how are you adapting in today's approach what's your advice to a fund that may not have frankly ahead of es and impact when markets a leader you know i think that for any investor clarity matters more than ever you need real conviction in the team and how they think how they communicate and how they're gonna execute but i think you know i wanna touch on sort of more of the diversity aspect because when pressure sort of amplifies so does bias you know when stakes are high people tend to default to what's familiar and i think that's why we had outlet doubled down on intentional and long term thinking we have to remind ourselves that vc is about backing outliers and in moments like this if you lose focus on that then you risk overlooking the very people that are wired build differently and that's gonna be sort of linked to returns i guess more practically are there templates that you use that you train your team on how do you think about this i think this is absolutely real right and with the vc just bringing people into the decision making room that are different even as an example matters how are you being more intentional in making sure that even as you adapt you're not compromising on certain values that then affects the returns when we joined the the pledge which is back in october twenty twenty three there was an expectation that this would sort of need to change sort of who we're investing in know how we invest but i don't think it actually done that but it's changed how we reflect and act and i'd say this is a kind of constant thing the pledge and other initiatives that we've worked on has added sort of layers of the accountability we report on progress annually which means that we have to inter our data more we have to refine our sourcing strategies and really build more intentional support systems around our founders i think it's really important for vcs to keep widening the funnel so we don't miss out on really exceptional people we don't have hard quotas i don't think it's anything that sort of really delivered the outcomes that we want for our founders or for the ecosystem so we have to focus more on insight and where we see sort of gaps or declining trends then we have to dig into why and then respond and this is something we've always done with new initiatives deeper analysis or developing partnerships like we have with beyond the billion to to close those gaps i think one thing that really helps us is the amount of time that we actually spend with founders before we invest so when i talked about that residency program this could be up to twelve weeks and this really helps us understand the people behind the pitch and then so naturally reduces this bias that we often see when decisions are made too quickly and in times of sort of pressure we get about twenty three percent of our global applications from women and that percentage kind of stayed the same but the absolute number now takes us to having supported nearly three thousand women across what i founder residences and scale like that really matters i would say on the flip side though so i've kinda talk about all the positive stuff that's going on know we've spent years building broader networks launching initiatives but application rates acceptance rates and funding issues haven't moved significantly so now what we're doing is asking the harder questions so is it the issue in the funnel in our funnel or is it how the ecosystem itself is designed and we have to think about what more is needed both upstream and downstream and that'll mean you know rethinking our own assumptions around sourcing it also means looking at how we support women through the fundraising journey and that could be anything from peer learning to boundary setting or to confidence in high stakes conversations and i think these are the kind of things that we need to dig deeper within the vc industry and share our learnings and i have to call out brooke andrew she's not a a portfolio and a founder at ant but the work she's doing with safe raise is about helping women founders raise capital on their terms and i think this is the kind of thing that we wanna see from founders and it's certainly something that the ecosystem needs more of and hopefully we can share more down the line of the the work we're hoping to do with brooke for someone who is new to this you're the head of es impact how do you implement that each step of the way so you start with the pipeline there's no hard quotas but is there an intentional look folks we wanna get the best in the best best in class in the world for this to ensure that you reach to fifty fifty like how do you actually think about this and how do you think we should be thinking about this moving forward so hard quotas are different from aiming for targets so what we recognize is when i talked about sort of that data analysis is how important getting that data at different points in a founder journey with out are so in twenty twenty three we actually extended the demographic questions that we asked our founders and this wasn't because we're nosy it was genuinely linked to a business strategy this was going to help us understand who is joining ant of the type of support they might need and to learn from this incredible community of thousands of founders so yes there are scouting initiatives where we can broaden and access new networks there's you know promotional activity and awareness and for building our founder community through our own founders that already are part of our community i have to say that word bath is probably the most successful sourcing strategy that has purely just allowing founders to talk about their experiences and encouraging people to come join and then obviously sort of as we go through the application process and bring them into the residency within that again we're collecting data so we can start to sort of see where the gaps might occur or the reasons why women founders might drop off and things like that and so it's a constant exploration and it's something that you know i have oversight on and so far i should say that we've been very successful in maintaining our ratios and obviously the absolute numbers speak for themselves but there's always more that we can do but we have to link it back to that overall objective of what ant is all about and that's finding the best founders and we won't compromise on that what's interesting to me about endless model is that you have multiple locations right and therefore you work with different local partners a lot of your gps actually that we've met are very diverse and very happy to see that whether you've seen any trends like we've seen in the data where women are twice more likely to invest in other women any insights there with who the a is in terms of who we bring in it takes quite a long time with the process and there's a a very different model and it's not right for everybody when we're expanding into new markets you know we have to think about first whether it's a an ecosystem we want to enter whether we're needed and then we have to think about who's gonna run it and it's really incredible because i think this is this plays to sort of the culture of adler you have to be a team player but then you're also running your own business in your own ecosystem where you have all the knowledge and the network so it's really about finding the the right balance making sure that there's an understanding of how we work together the benefits of being part of a a global platform but in terms of backgrounds or ethnicity we don't have a mandate to invest in these companies we have a mandate and a produce fiduciary duty to deliver returns with that sort of objective we've still invested in over forty percent of our portfolio that could be defined as an impact company and i think that tells you a lot if you don't have a financially viable company then how on earth are you're gonna maximize the impact side so it has to go hand in hand but our job as investors is to i grew up kinda all over the world so zimbabwe south africa ireland cyprus england my mom was a a teacher my dad was a para so i think what really sort of shaped me and my entire sort of life in career is that adaptability and and curiosity were pretty much kind of baked into me from childhood i studied chemistry scientist but after my masters i fell into recruiting and to be honest it was just to pay my rent and moved to london and then i ended up recruiting myself into a hedge fund and i spent three years there and also experienced the global financial crisis at that time and to be honest i had no idea about capital markets and it was quite a shock but an incredible experience for me and then after that i spent eleven years in asset management and during that time i moved from london to singapore with sc and then four years ago i joined ant and sort of stepped into this world of venture capital i didn't never had a kind of grand plan around my career but i know that i've been really lucky with my experiences i'd say sort of the the common thread across my career is probably how much i'm drawn to systems thinking so whether that's around people or human behavior or markets or you know my chemistry day molecules i really like the kind of complicated stuff where answers aren't always obvious and now i get to do kind of apply that way of thinking to help founders actually navigate complexity and uncertainty and bill companies that solve real problems and it's been an incredibly rewarding time yeah so before you gloss over did you say your father was a para trooper yes that's right what does that involve and how did that i guess role model career life for you as a kid well i think my father was desperate for me to join the military so a para trooper is a sort of a a special group within the army where they literally threw themselves out of our airplanes parachute in and work on specific kind of programs all over the world and hence that's why i've moved many different countries i think at last count my brother and i were saying that we hit forty one homes and forty years i'd say that probably has shaped a lot of the way that i am as an individual today yeah and so jumping in flying off a plane that sounds a little bit like you although you did it slightly differently tell us a little bit about how you decided to join i mean from sc to ant that was founded by as we know magnus who up frankly on a farm and then decided to become this massive entrepreneur how did you decide like this was going to be the firm for me for you know the next couple of years it's a good question it's funny because i often think about that time when i was first introduced to ant and it was at a time where i spent a really long time in financial services and i had a wonderful career i was working with incredible people and i really enjoyed it but i was looking for something different and i blame covid because i think during covid was a time where everybody had these sort of existential crises and i wanted to explore something different and when i learned more about ant and it's completely unique model to me it just made a lot of sense coming at a point very early stage exactly at a point where founders need support they need community and they need capital and the more i learned about ant the more people i met and saw how ambitious and sort of crazy they were in what they wanted to build i had to be part of it and that's the honest answer love it and tell us a little bit about the structure for those of us that are not familiar with how ant has built the app infrastructure and platform and of course it is global we are on the heels actually beyond the bill and we're headed to one of our summit in finland a lp summit in finland so know that you you all have just raised a hundred million in the nordic as well so very global it tells us a little bit about you know the story with ant and how it's built out to become so i i like to to think of it that we were really sort of solving a problem and it was sort of a big problem because startups were failing and they were failing for the wrong reasons really it was you know bad product market fit team issues or lack of a team and then an inability to raise capital and there's many different reasons for that but what magnus decided was that there's all this incredible talent out there and we can provide a platform where they can come and address those risks so we get about a hundred and sixty thousand applications from founders as a year we invite a very small percentage of those to come and join a residency program and that'll be in all of our locations around the world and they've spend anywhere between six and twelve weeks with us we help them find cofounder we validate their product ideas and then we offer the chance to receive capital at the end of it we've been cited very often as an capital firm globally but i also like to add that we're the most selective as well because when you take that funnel and actually looking at who we're funding it is incredibly selective now we've grown we started here in singapore made our first investment in twenty eighteen we're now in twenty seven offices around the world so that's across six continents we've invested in over fifteen hundred portfolio companies from pre seed up to series c and we have a community of over twelve thousand founders now so it's a it's been quite a journey in a short period of time but i think it points to the fact that this type of model was very much needed for most of us we have the y comb comparison how different is the model of ant versus yc i think the first thing is just how early we come in so when we choose to invest in companies we typically value them and this is you know it varies slightly from location to location but typically at one million and then we take ten percent but then the real important work starts after the residency see so that's where we help founders you know find their customers we help them think about taking this product to market we help them fund raise and it's all about that sort of early growth and helping them scale and what i love is that you know when we first started that it was still very early stage in terms of kind of pre seed investments but then you know we naturally matured and added more products to our suite to actually support founders over a longer term and hence taking us to to seriously c so i think that relationship over a really long period of time is helpful for founders and i'd say that our global footprint is also incredibly helpful as companies look to enter new markets or as we've seen a lot recently where they want to hire in different markets and they tap into our founder community to actually find those first hires and they've kinda had the rubber stamp of approval from outlet having gone through the residences i've heard magnus and a few of your team members speak about how you invest in the founders right it it's not really the idea you're backing the people so you must have some really interesting metrics or you know psycho analysis on what characters work together with how teams are best built and things like that can you share a little bit about you know some of the insights of course it's it's not always a hundred percent fit it's almost like match making that you're really doing except for building a startup share with us some interesting insights something that you've learned from this whole i guess massive experiment of building teams and then some of the your success stories there well i think the first thing is it's so crucial in the early stages to find somebody that has complimentary skills and to work together with a mutual ambition of what you want to create but obviously in the early stages there's a lot happens priorities are shifting all the time different pressures happen but what we can do with our program or residency is to help teams through that process now in terms of your question about sort of personalities now this is something where obviously the enormous amount of data that we have internally is helping us to give signals or indicators that we can start to recognize and see some patterns emerging about what makes found as successful what makes team successful but ultimately when you're coming in as early as we do it's that sort of that spike that we're looking for do they have the determination are they able to build incredible teams are they gonna be able to win customers and are they gonna stick through this through challenging times and that's ultimately what it kinda of comes down to and certainly from speaking to partners at all around the world they've started to kind of recognize actually who's going to be capable of being a a truly successful founder and what i should say is also that you know this isn't just about first time founders we have a large number of seasoned entrepreneurs that that come and join our program because they recognize that what we offer is something that they're just not able to find elsewhere and it's wonderful to hear those stories where they say i never would have met this that my c founder or i never would have been able to get to you know series b if i hadn't have had that support from ant and that's what we're all about ultimately and what have you learned i guess if a founder is building right now right from one to ten because it sounds like you've done all the way from zero and thanks so much for tuning in this week for more inspiring conversations just like this to help you lead build and invest better followers us wherever you get your podcast podcasts and on socials on bill dollar moves podcast and sarah chen global and yes if you want to keep hearing from us pledge your support for the show by leaving a review on apple podcasts a five star rating on spotify and telling a friend i'd really appreciate it i'm searching filings and you've been listening to bill dollar moves telling

breakthroughs are happening very quickly with ai breakthroughs will happen even faster but we can't speed up technology in the brain the same way we can speed up a tesla and a factory it just doesn't work that way when you're asking chat gb a question taking all the data that it has and it's sort of like finding the mean average right here in the middle we don't want middle results we want exceptional results and so how do we get exceptional results by she went viral before viral vitality was a business strategy an early youtube pioneer emmy nominated filmmaker and now investor tu has spent her career at the bleeding edge of tech and storytelling she made history with the first fully ai generated music album today she's working on the frontier of brain computer interfaces at black rock neuro attack exploring how technology can restore mobility memory and identity on this app episode billion dollar moves we go beyond the buzz and into the build of tu southern you'll learn how to use her grip framework to prom all your favorite ai tool l pro what neuro tech reveals about the future of healthcare care recognition and deep tech investing this my friend isn't just about ai or investing it is about rei imagining what it means to be human let's get into it welcome to billion dollar moves where we dive deep into the journeys of unicorn founders and fund who have turned their dreams into billion dollar realities all across the globe and yet many of them were underestimated long before they became iconic many of them unexpected leaders just like you and i i'm sarah tense spellings now let's get started for the past seven or eight years i've been experimenting with ai as a creative process as a creative pursuit and also working in neuro technology and the past four years of that time been working in implant brain computer interface technology with a company called black rock neuro tech it's been really interesting seeing how those two sort of intersect in really unique ways particularly in the last year while i was also sort of going through my own personal health challenges very frequently i work with patients who have lost some form of fun whether they have als or they are paralyzed or they have some sort of neuro disease that impacts their motor control it's devastating for these people to lose their autonomy lose their freedom and so many times these clinical trials with these bc are all they have and i actually can sort of identify a little bit with that experience of having an incredible amount of uncertainty a health diagnosis and a treatment plan that that keeps you pretty limited in terms of like how you feel and what you're able to accomplish and all of it changes your outlook on life and what it is that you wanna do and spend your time doing yeah absolutely but of course the the question that comes forward you know many of us remember you from you've had what seven hundred million views on even more now perhaps in your collective videos you were one of the first few who put yourself forward as frankly a female voice that's smart that you inserted it satire i think you did what was it the the play on obama girl you're gonna hillary all of that how did we get here to brain chip interview so i mean this is a very unexpected turn of events really yeah the few years before i got into entertainment in youtube i actually went to school university of miami i was studying anthropology and broadcast journalism and my goal was to be a documentary filmmaker a margaret mead anthropologists type who would go in and study unique cultures i was kind of obsessed with human culture belief systems i did my senior thesis on ayahuasca that was in two thousand four i would just always been fascinated by the technologies both ancient and modern that sort of impact our world and so i thought i was going to be a broadcast journalist or a documentary and i got out of college and i went to los angeles and tried to get on shows on discovery channel and national geographic and they're like you look like you're twelve like that's not going to happen so i ended up taking my first job as a red carpet host thinking you know this is a a great job to pay the bills like it's fine on my path to being margaret made i will i will do red carpet interviews and it just sort of took off from there and i started working quite frequently as a host in a lot of the early digital projects so i was one of the first hosts for myspace one of the first hosts for facebook and did a lot of their sort of exclusive live content and it just got me really excited about this new burg wild west space and so in my free time i started making videos one of the first videos was a satire called hot for hillary which was kind of a spoof on another popular viral video called obama girl for the two thousand seven presidential primaries and that video went viral i ended up getting a couple of job offers to become a political correspondent for msnbc fox news out of that video and that's when the light bulb went off it was like oh my gosh traditionally we've had gatekeepers whether it's agents managers casting directors all these people that have to sign off and say yes she's talented enough but now we have this other path where we just can go straight to an audience and let the audience say what they like what they don't like and let that sort of govern this process and it was so exciting to me and i'll never forget one of my agents at the time who was my hosting saying don't put videos on youtube it's gonna make you look bad it looks desperate at that time that's what it was sort of perceived to be i thought it seemed so much more exciting and that first job offer that was very serious was kind of the proof of the pudding there so i did that for many years until maybe seven years of youtube and while i was doing youtube i also started working in traditional tv and film i was an actress for a while did some sick sitcom just like we got my hands into a lot of different pots i love storytelling i always knew that this was not a career i thought this is really fun to be doing all of this in my twenties but by the time i hit thirty i better not be driving around to audition anymore like it's just not happening and i stayed true to that commitment to myself so i don't know it was in my late twenties i was feeling tired from the youtube hamster wheel of making content and i was looking around saying i still like doing this i want it to be more intellectually stimulating i wanna do something that's more challenging and i wanna do something that's putting more good out in the world like my funny videos on dating humor i don't know that they're really contributing that much and so i ended up in a google artist and residents program in twenty sixteen that was intended to allow influencers and content creators a chance to experiment with early google technology so was their ai technologies their spatial computing in vr technologies and so i spent a year doing that just playing integrating i went to usc and and got to participate in seeing a a trial on patients who are using virtual reality for pain management yeah so understanding how content affects our physiology and this kind of opened up the door for me to say okay i'm done just being a youtuber and making content i'm ready to start diving into these technologies that will have a profound impact on our lives and on our health and our well being and that's where it all started yeah and twenty sixteen was way ahead of the curve with you know experimentation you were one of the first few well actually you were the first artist that created a whole album with ai tell us a little bit about that process and i guess you know bringing it to where we are today where are we with the creative process i mean we just came from a bunch of general meetings with a fund where they were talking frankly the head of a huge studio was sort of debating with the chief strategy officer of open ai about ai and the creative process and who should be in the driver's seat and what this means so as the pioneer creating your own album with ai what does this mean for us as creative moving forward actually the ai album was another seed that was planted in that artist and residence program that i participated in i was working with google inc than a couple of the other early ai programs that they were working on internally and pretty blown away to be honest back in twenty sixteen there wasn't much on the image and video generation front everything just sort of like a psychedelic mess if you were plugging into the ai models then large language models didn't even exist yet but the music the rule based music ai software was pretty good and so i reached out to probably eight nine ten different early stage ai music companies got access to their demo software and was blown away i was like oh my gosh because i also i love music i've always had a passion for music but i'm not a traditional i don't know how to play an instrument i had a a piano teacher who was na le god bless her soul and so she would fall asleep in the middle of teaching and i i was like i didn't wanna wake her up so i would just sit there while she would sleep and that was my two years of bizarre piano lesson so i i i don't know how to play an instrument but i quickly learned that my skill sets around sort of understanding how music can be translated into a different language in this case code or simply language based language based ai so categorization tagging all of that i could learn music in a different way i was so excited so i i decided to put together an entire album each one sort of working with different tools and released that in twenty seventeen and it hit the chart it hit the charts one of the songs hit the top one hundred which was a really exciting moment i mean look i'm sure people were just like what is this song written by robots let's play it on the radio and then immediately go back to our human songs i think back then it was just like what what's happening this is so weird but i got to speak a lot about that process and in doing so kind of dis down why i felt it was a huge ad to creativity not a subtraction and i think every single person is different we can't look creativity as a one size fits all venture we all come to the table with different skill sets and different limitations sometimes those limitations are resource oriented sometimes they're based upon you know like who we actually know and can collaborate with and sometimes they are sort of expertise limitations like in the case of me making music and not knowing how to play the piano and whenever we bring in this kind of like outside collaborator that has infinite knowledge and expertise we get to plug in the holes where we see fit so i never recommend people use ai for the thing that they love most doing or that they are really good at or have their expertise in but to use it to fill in all of the other areas to scale their ideas to broaden the possibility of what they can actually ship to the world and as a youtuber knowing for many years that the most important thing is getting that video out every single week even if it's not perfect and learning a little bit of this skill and a little bit of that skill and you learn a little bit about lighting and a little bit about camera work and you kind of become this multi disciplinary artist i think working with ai is very much similar but we are really advancing at you know light speed right in terms of the quality that's being produced i mean today with just the amount of data that's being ingested and how much it's being proved that will be job loss for sure yes and creators are at the heart of it you've used the word taste making in the past with regard to where i'll roll therefore becomes but frankly we're in the world of investment in finance but very much so this is why the this podcast exists and we feel that the brand needs to be out there you know we need to speak to the thesis and frame the direction of where the money goes frankly right because you know content affects us in so many ways what would you say is your advice i mean learning from your early days for those that are touching creative in some way how would we upscale how do we think about ourselves moving forward future proof ourselves you absolutely right that it's coming so fast i think everyone is overwhelmed and feels even a bit timid or scared just about the sheer volume of tools being thrown their way knowing how to actually integrate those tools into a workflow that works for you also is not a one size fits all endeavor and i think the best thing you can do is take advantage of the incredible free education that exists on youtube i teach an ai boot camp that is very specific to marketing communications and creative professionals so i've kind of tailored that there's a million of other people just like me who are out there teaching these classes four to six weeks an hour a week of experimenting with these tools because what you'll find is that the way that you might be taught to use this tool by whatever teacher you are going to start viewing that tool through the lens of your work and your challenges and it won't take long i mean i find this all the time in my boot camp where people sign up they think they're gonna learn x y z and they end up walking away with three other different insights because the way that they're applying these tools to their work challenges is unique to them it's just a matter of that exposure and the trial and once you do that you're already ahead of ninety percent of the curve what do you see is the key gap here i mean when people come to your boot camp is it a whole different style of working and thinking that we need a reset i feel you've been through the mobile wave right myspace you went out to interview your myspace friends for the first time yeah so we've been through the mobile wave ai today is arguably the biggest wave that we're experiencing sometimes we overestimate it as well let's talk a little bit about that but what is the shift that needs to happen from a talent and frankly investment standpoint what is the in the words of zach actually he was one of the key builders in open eye he talks a lot about the blank space you know we've always talk about like oh the dangers of ai but there's also a lot of blank space what's the blank space here what's the skill gap that people are missing i find most people are just scared to get started they feel overwhelmed with like i said the sheer volume of tools they've maybe used chat g a handful of times a lot of times you will sort of use it like they use google to ask certain questions i think learning how to optimally use it and all of us sudden seeing the huge leap that your results take when you use it correctly i mean i always tell them look at ai as a huge team of people that you have access to and if you prompt it correctly you can ensure that each of those team members is a category expert but you have to prompt it correctly because right now you're just getting the mean average of results when you're asking chat gb a question saying all the data that it has and it's sort of like finding the mean average right here in the middle we don't want middle results we want exceptional results and so how do we get exceptional results by prompting with certain keywords that tell the system i'm only gonna be pulling data from this set of people individual's expertise with these kinds of examples and so i have a whole prompt framework i call it the grip framework so you'll never grip about your prompts again and there's five key components to the grip framework so if you are working on project there's no room for error here you really need the best results you can use this framework and you will find that what you get back from the system is nine million times better than what you would have had if you just treated gb like google yeah so changing i'll free give us a very quick and dirty here sure i do use your grip framework because i listen to it it so practical yes so the great framework first goal what is your goal that you were having chat g do for you is it to write an email pitch great then r for role what is the role you want chat gp to play so in this case an expert email marketer perhaps we've even give an example of someone that you think is like the top in their field i stands for identity of the audience so who is this actually for is the audience for thirty seven year old busy professionals who don't have enough time and are constantly chugging protein drinks sorry not specific at all pee is for parameters and parameters can be any sort of constraint that you have such as one hundred words needs to be five hundred words it needs to be in the style of the new yorker or in the style of alex for or you know whatever the case may be it's usually the constraints the little details doesn't it need to be in bullet points format tone and then finally e for examples so do you have actual examples of work that you like and if you don't have examples another great way to get optimal results is to use frameworks as examples for instance if you're writing a book you know under e for examples you might say make sure to follow this particular three act structure from you know so and so expert book hero's journey would be what follow the hero's journey structure so frameworks are great also as examples and that's your that's your fed part framework hope bad thought cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use raised hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were pretty incredible click the rates jump twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot come to see how breeze can help your business grow yeah and it can be overwhelming but breaking it down like that makes it so practical for so many of us whether there were investors or or creators and thinking about really maximizing ai now the question turns to you know i come from the lens of investment we know that the majority of capital today is flooding ai so much so that it's drowning everything else that's a lack of resource where frankly it still matters right in areas of impact that you and i care about how do we think about investing smartly ai you and i actually talk had a conversation about this right where yeah we started actually our first conversation was about an episode in black bearer yes and how a bc was input into an actual person who would otherwise be branded and ended up talking through ads which is really scary because that is amazon prime all the time in a person is that even possible are we like over where a can go and taking over the world are we over investing i mean i know that's a loaded question but tell us give us some answers turn so i believe i soothe some of your anxiety in this conversation by saying no it's not possible right now to just read someone's thoughts the way that these currently the way that these brain computer interfaces work is they are decoding and encoding movement information in the brain it's very specific sometimes they are also decoding and encoding sensory information in the brain so let me give you an example you have a patient with als they are fully locked into their body they cannot move nor can they since touch right so you have an implant in the motor system and in the sensory system let's say they're riding an email with their brain with their thoughts what's actually happening behind the hood of the car is they are contemplating handwriting a letter or typing if they were you know whatever they were more comfortable doing before the disease to a cold their brain has a memory a sense memory of what it was like to use their hand to type or to write we are decoding the signals of that movement intention from the brain sending that to an algorithm that then translates that into code that computer can understand so when you see someone speaking with just their bc typing with just their bc we are not reading their thoughts we are translating this movement intention so it would be very hard as you can see for us to just go in and understand and that would be a completely different part of the brain and we we don't even understand much about how sort of complex thoughts are formed but we do have this understanding about the movement part of the brain and we're gaining more of an understanding about the vision part and on the sensory part we can essentially stimulate the brain in certain patterns in the sensory area so that patients get some kind of tactile feedback from their movement so if they're let's say using a robotic arm to feed themselves they're actually feeling something similar to having a spoon in their hand because it's very hard to grip right it's very hard to grip and understand movement dynamics without having any kind of sensory i mean look what we're able to do now is unbelievable it's mind blowing i still feel like it's absolute magic but it's not the black mirror episodes that we're all used to okay and i don't think we're going to be close to some of that for quite some time what does quite some time look like well it's hard to say because a lot of this is just limited purely by biotech regulation right there's only so many brains we can get implants in there's only so many people who are willing to sign up for these very experimental studies when we're talking about like reading thoughts or something more complex we're looking at whole brain coverage which quite frankly we don't even have the technology for yet breakthroughs are happening very quickly with ai breakthroughs will happen even faster but we can't speed up technology in the brain the same way we can speed up a tesla and a factory it just doesn't work that way there's this limiting factor will it happen in our lifetimes yeah maybe maybe maybe when we're old and enjoying a glass of tea on the veranda with our thought we will be watching this episode that will feel like film you know rolling it back so talk to us a little bit about your work now in black rock you are front and center in storytelling for black rock where are we in the tech how is it it is a competitor to neuro link that many know how is it being differentiated in the approach yeah so black rocks been a lot around for a very long time and i have to say it is not the same company as the the very famous pe firm black rock tickets it has been implant patients since the early two thousands we're coming close to fifty patients implanted our technology is safe it's effective it works it's just been a very long road in getting sort of the necessary fda approval outside of the clinical trials to commercial this technology and get it in the homes of people who need it most in part because it's a very expensive technology although those costs are coming down and also just because of the the lack of awareness for so many years so i have to say i really love the fact that elon musk has gotten into the game and sort of created a mega or used his mega phone rather to amplify this technology you know as a result we were able to do a several fundraising rounds that i don't know would have been possible without that and we kind of needed that sort of boost in order to make the next big leaps forward he's really going to space endeavor they're very very hard they're very very expensive there's not currently a path for making money you do it because you know that this is critical a technology and that it'll also result in so many amazing insights about the human brain which we can take with us into other areas of human study you were talking about the use cases for als you know those that have limited ability what is the commercialization time frame for a company like this bringing back to that question and pulling that thread a little bit on capital is there two pools of capital that needs to be spent here i e phil because like you said if we're being completely honest here the commercialization timeframe frame is gonna be super super long and you're doing this for the good of humankind and then on the flip side there are certain product cases or use cases which could be commercialized how should we be thinking about this are we overs spending i don't think we're overs spending we have to spend the money that we're spending in order to get the results that we need i think we're actually very close really really close actually to a commercialization point is that going to happen in six months this year next year i don't know but it's right around the corner the data is there the science is there the safety i believe is there it just becomes a question of win not if and on the commercialization front it's interesting well there are obviously patient populations of people who have paralysis and als who can get these technologies is limited right like this is not a technology for everyone this is a technology for a very small group of people who desperately need it and want it and so one of the things that we've been looking at is how could these technologies that are being used for this patient population also be used to benefit other people how could we sort of expand what's possible here so that we can get more investors in the door and so we're currently looking at that right now and have been and i think that there are some really exciting opportunities and other neurological diseases and disorders that could fall into the category of being helped with these devices in really novel interesting ways as of now as a population we've all just sort of accepted pharma approaches as commonplace especially as we age and we look at things like alzheimer's and dementia and parkinson's which are really neurological diseases and we often use medicine to treat these diseases and and not even not very well right when you're talking about an interface that can encode information electrical information the possibilities start to open up in really interesting ways on how to potentially remediate those diseases so i think that there is a lot a lot of opportunity here from like an investment perspective it really just depends on what your time scales are but in many ways like this could be the exact right time to get in if you wanna get in on the early ground floor of something that will absolutely be massive and game changing in the world these companies have now gotten to the point where we've proven them we've proven this works we've proven the safety and so it's not as risky as some other early stage biotech investments in that way it's just knowing it's gonna take while for the commercialization paths to work themselves out say you know there's a new startup that's coming to us as investors that is looking at neuroscience and you know building in tech through that to solve those problems what kind of capital injection are we looking at today of course black rock neuro tech has been around for twenty five years so there was a lot of initial capital where it was expensive but now with the tools that we have to build is it possible to see a ten year exit horizon in the venture kind of framework or is this purely going to be a private equity play possibly possibly especially with musk getting in with ne link it just changes the acceleration points for everything i mean we raised a two hundred million dollar around last summer prior to that i think it had been maybe a total of thirty million which is not much for an implant bc company most of the company's history it was a profitable but non venture backed company what was the business model who were they selling to we were primarily receiving grants from the government da when obama came in he put a huge amount of money into the brain initiative and so there were a number of years where we were getting this money to essentially provide the technology for these clinical trials and so we were the gold standard of neuro tech for all the institutions that were running clinical trials around the country around the globe we were the ones providing that tech and so what was cool about that was in many ways not only are we getting to see how different institutions are using the tech are using different kinds of methods of extracting green signals and which ones are best but we weren't actually putting up the money for the trials themselves the universities were getting the grants we were just there as sort of the grant partner we would sort of be the beneficiary of those grant approvals and so that could continue and it's a great model because you can remain profitable you don't need venture capital to keep running it but then you can't scale as a technology company if you wanna actually commercial technology that's where you need venture to come in and say alright let's make this more than just a research and so taking a zoom out on the opportunity of ai beyond the work that you're doing in the space what are you to southern still excited by i was really caught by what you said with how we're really just at the median average of what ai can deliver where should we be investing in and how should women be part of the discussion by the way i really want women to be part of discussion it makes me so sad that i still am seeing ninety percent ninety five percent men dominating the discussions and the investor space in a lot of these technologies and i just gosh i just want this time to be different you know because you know that this is gonna be the next big wealth creation moment and i don't want women to miss out and the tricky thing about this particular moment and we talked about this it's really hard to actually know how to place bets in a space that is moving so fast i mean the bets that i would have placed a year ago for the most part i would not place today because of the advancements that sort of come out of nowhere and you're like whoa deep seek okay whoa chat gp look at your image model didn't expect that it changes everything and so it does make it very hard generally man or woman it makes it hard to invest but i think there's a couple of areas that i find particularly interest thing because they're huge problems that just need to be solved so one of those areas is ai efficiency efficiency i mean speed but also energy efficiency like we know that we have an energy problem it's one of the things that a lot of investors don't wanna talk about because it doesn't feel good but ai using up water it's using electricity the math doesn't work out when we look at sort of usage over time and there are some interesting ways to tackle this and there's some technologies that are tackling it both on the chip but also in the data centers i found that like an interesting place to look it's not so sexy i think it's critically important so i would say that and then some just in the chip structure themself figuring out are we going to be on transformer only chips that are sort of running l m's much more efficiently do we need to look at a different type of chip because nvidia has obviously just crushed it they've crushed it in the market and it's very exciting but that means there's a lot more space for manufacturers to come in and potentially do something kind of novel and interesting and also save companies a lot of money and so those are two areas that i've particularly been spending a lot of time looking at in terms of the actual application space i mean that's the space i love to play in right i'm always playing like with the new tools and what's possible agent ai and creative ai and it's just there's so many players it's really really hard to figure out how you place a bet on what's gonna work a year to five years from now especially in the consumer space so that's the space i've i stayed out of outside of my own experimentation what are the questions i mean you know we like to enrich our audience with frameworks right so how should i be thinking about what are the key questions see i get pitch i mean we get pitches all the time and frankly i can't tell a from b nowadays because the story is so good talking about storytelling the storyline is getting better and better they're using imagination i have no limit now i'm like yes this is possible yes i believe in you what other the questions i should ask myself and the entrepreneur in diligence to sort of check it out it's so hard to steal down just a couple questions i i always like take a second to look at the whole space i mean one of the best things you can do is literally go to chat gb you know inject a pitch deck or a summary and say what are the biggest issues that you see with this investment where are the challenges that you see coming up what are the competitors that they have to be concerned about you know and then going back to the founder and and poking holes with those assessments so that's obviously an easy one to do but i think beyond that i think getting a feel for the founder and how ready they are for the magnitude of constant change whether that's regulatory change assessments corporate governance change technological change like do they have plans in place for when all of a sudden you know a transformer chip becomes the only chip that is used because it the cheapest chip available and their technology is running on a multipurpose chip and so it's like how many contingencies do they have in place and unfortunately because the space is moving so fast i think founders i think ceos have to have many more contingency plans then they would have five years ago yeah and so you touch on deep that is a big risk with regard to just what's happening outside of america are we being too ambitious without capital i e were not capital efficient enough and just aiming for high valuations and more capital and more money to make things worse i feel nervous about that i mean ventures always been tough right it's always been tough but i think that there was a kind of a this big moment i'd say five seven years ago we're being a venture capitalist was like very sexy and so a lot more people got in more capital came into the space we saw a lot of like fluff occur sort of deaths in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two started happening of these companies that really hadn't didn't even have a moat and now technology is doing this i think it's almost like going back to first principles with venture to make these bets and trying not to get distracted by the super shiny objects which are everywhere it's really challenging though it's really challenging as i was telling you i personally am not going to be making individual venture bets for a while i'm focused you know on funds and just other things because i find it too hard for me personally to place those bets alright well we'll wrap up with this quick game bill dollar plan pick a card and quick one sentence and answer what's your most recent google search slash question chat g should we look last google search round trip ticket to bali because i'm going there for august so that's not that interesting and last gp question how many rounds of a supplement i need to to take to get rid of a bacterial in my gut this is disgusting you guys i didn't think you were gonna get this something but i wanted to be honest so how many rounds are i laurie plaques do i need to take to get rid of it alright good to know which book changed your perspective and how i'm really enjoying right now in this moment the second mountain by david brooks and it's about this phase in life where the first mountain is like all of the things that you do to satisfy the ego it's usually the accumulation of status and wealth and whatever the you know the achievement right and those are the things that kind of fuel us as were young usually you get the shit kicked out of you a few times some early in life some later mine all happened in like a very condensed period in my thirties yes and when you come out of that you often find at least i found it is very very hard to get back on the same horse that you were on before your ambitions have changed your values have changed the way that you do life has changed and so the second mountain is about that moment of reconciliation the hardship with the previous ambition and what what you're doing in that second mountain of life to create purpose and meaning and i love what's one thing you wish you knew earlier about wealth or invested oh good choice this is so good i mean when i was in my twenties i really wish i knew what i could ask for myself i wish that i had taken equity advisor positions with some of the companies that i was consulting with i would have done very well with a few of them i just wish i knew how to have the hard conversations i mean it almost feels strange these days with chat gp and with youtube there's so much education out there for young women who are investors we didn't have that yeah we didn't it was you were really having to kind of learn by trial and error or hopefully you had a guy friend who was willing to pull you aside and say this is how this works there wasn't a big community of women doing it i wish that i knew where to go to have to learn where to go to learn how to have these conversations how to negotiate contracts and to get ownership that's what you're really pointing to because we discount that you know as advisers i think that's very important because you wanna stake in the game as as they succeed that's right and it takes time for those advisor equity shares to pay off and so the earlier you can get to know that process the better for you in your life yeah and which is exactly why i started bill dollar move and sadly today we are still one of the only female voices venture talking about investments not just work life balance by the way we are serious as investors and i'm so grateful that you are making your version of billion dollar moves turns so tu on there you thank you for this time and thanks so much for tuning in this week for more inspiring conversations just like this to help you lead build and invest better follow us wherever you get your podcast and on socials on bill dollar moves podcast and sarah chen global and yes if you want to keep hearing from us pledge your support for the show by leaving a review on apple a five star rating on spotify and telling a friend i'd really appreciate it i'm search filings and you've been listening to villain dollar moves