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Mission Driven at Startup Speed: A New Playbook for Philanthropic Capital
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A
This session was recorded live at the 2026 ASU GSV summit in San Diego.
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B
Our panel today is entitled Mission Driven at Startup Speed A New Playbook for Philanthropic Capital. We have a fantastic panel and I've had a chance to learn more about the background, the current work of our panelists and they have so much expertise to share. Just to introduce myself, I'm Esther Benjamin. I'm CEO of World Education Services and for 52 years we've been focused on helping people learn, work and thrive in new places. We work at the intersection of education, education, workforce development and global mobility. We're actually a global social enterprise and we specifically say social enterprise because we're a nonprofit without any donors. So we operate a global academic credential evaluation service that generates revenues and we have taken the surpluses in support of our mission in all the ways that we can imagine impact. So we have a product that generates the revenues and the resources that our surpluses have turned into the way in which we deploy and support programmatic efforts, policy and advocacy and research work. Also, we have a philanthropic initiative that is focused on grant making and we also have a 100% mission aligned investment portfolio which is led by my colleagues who are in the audience. So it's really reimagining impact using all the levers that we can put to work. And I feel like I'm on a personal mission to create more organizations in the social sector that are financially diversified and independent and can drive impact in the this way. So that's literally the mission for me personally and organizationally as well. We have three wonderful panelists and they bring so much rich experience and the work that they are doing today is so compelling. We have Atin Batra who's the Director of Impact Investments at ECMC Education Impact Fund. We have Vivian Wu who's the Managing Partner of Ventures at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And we have Matt Zeiger, Chief Programs and Partnerships Officer at GitLab Foundation. Welcome to the panel and looking forward to hearing more from all of. We're going to get started with a first question to level, set and understand the perspectives that you bring to this work. All of you bring important experience across venture capital, private equity, impact investing and philanthropy to the work that you do today. Can you share briefly and I'll ask that you keep your remarks brief. We have a number of questions and if you can talk about specific experiences that are informing your work today and what your organization's playbook is when it comes to philanthropic capital. Athin do you want to kick it off.
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Throw me in the deep end.
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B
Sure.
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A
Hi folks. As Esther mentioned, my name is Atin. I'm a director of Impact Investing at ECMC Group's Education Impact Fund. You were just asking about personal experiences, so I'll just share. I spent 15 years working at an education nonprofit back home in India. My wife had founded it. I was just the, the operational man. She is the visionary. But through that experience I learned what giving someone access to educational opportunities and giving someone exposure, how that shapes that person's future. I mean I am everything I am today is because of those experiences. I've learned all of my hard skills, soft skills through those experiences. And so that mission in particular drives me personally is how do we provide more access to educational opportunities to everyone, irrespective of whether you go to a four year college or not, whether you're in the US or in India or anywhere else in the world. The organization that I work for, ECMC Group, it's a national nonprofit that's been around for about 30 years. We're a federal contractor. We work with the Department of Ed. Because of the significant balance sheet that we've built and our mandate, we've now been looking for ways to deploy that in impactful avenues. There are two ways that we do that. There's a nonprofit foundation that does grant making and then there's my team, which is focused, which is called the Education Impact Fund and is focused on investing in venture scalable businesses. We do invest with financial returns in mind, but we have an impact lens. We want to make sure that every investment we make, the company's solutions are providing access to and delivering on outcomes related to post secondary and career success for an underserved learner population in the United States. So we have a number of filters that we go through that make sure that we're sort of always aligned with our impact vision for the broader organization. That's our playbook.
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B
I'm wondering if I could ask a follow up question. You have the ECMC Group and the ECMC Foundation. How do you all integrate the work that you do and learn from one another? I'm curious about that.
- [06:26]
A
Yeah, I'm actually going to borrow a leaf from your book. Honestly, I was at the event yesterday when you were sharing your 10 year vision. You spoke about the spectrum of capital, which is exactly how we think about the ECMC Group as a whole is across that spectrum of capital, the ECMC foundation does grant making. On one end of that spectrum they do PRIs, and on the other end of the spectrum is us, which so we officially fall under the ECMC group, but everybody's under the group. And so we think a lot about in that shades, in that sort of, you know, what shade are you focused on? What do you emphasize more? Whether that's just pure impact or financials, or try and sort of balance the two.
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B
Thanks, Atan. Turning to you, Vivian.
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C
Hi, I'm Vivian Wu from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And I'd say, you know, there's probably two major themes in my background that have influenced my work, one of which is I spent 15 years doing traditional investing at a VC called Excel Partners, private equity at a firm called TA Associates. I did emerging market growth equity at Morgan Stanley. But I also did in my personal life a lot of work getting actively involved with education nonprofits. And I did pro bono consulting for a Better Chance. I worked with the San Francisco Unified School District. I worked with the Clayton Christensen Institute for disruption in Education. And the most probably defining memory for me in my journey was actually when I went to volunteer in China and I worked with sixth grade students in a very, very poor village below the income poverty line. And I was devastated to learn that these kids were going to have to go back to the fields after sixth grade. They were not going to get access to any more education because their parents could not afford it. And that was the, that was the moment that made me realize that what I would like to work on is actually a similar problem that Aten outlined, which is how do you create universal access to these high quality education solutions? How do you enable these students to get access to their potential? And I think my work with both nonprofits and with for profits allowed me to see that nonprofits can be incredibly high efficacy, but oftentimes for smaller populations. How can we actually bring scale to impact? And they're having a business model and that scalability and sustainability that comes from for profits can actually be very, very helpful and complementary in many circumstances. And so the organization I work for, Chan Zuckerberg, we have Learning Commons, we also have biohub, sister organizations. But really kind of the approach that we've taken is how do you use different tools? How do you work with those tools together to actually achieve your impact? How can you be flexible about those tools? And I think that's something that we bring to a lot of the conversation that we have. The second thing is what are we good at? What do we uniquely bring? We call it a CZI shaped problem. And for example, uniquely czi, Learning Commons and biohub all have engineering teams and that's because building technology to scale some of these solutions is also something that is a way for us to make our impact in a unique way. So in seeing all this, a lot of the approach that we have at CZI Ventures is really to support mission focused entrepreneurs that are trying to solve the problems that we are hoping to solve. But they're leveraging entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, and they're bringing these incredible innovations to these problems and they're doing it in a scalable and sustainable way. And I think that experience that I have from an investment perspective also allows me to see that you need to have that investment rigor in, in order to actually be able to scale your impact.
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B
Thanks, Vivian.
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D
So I stand out a little bit up here. Matt Zegar, the Chief Program Officer for GitLab foundation we are a little bit more of a traditional philanthropy. We don't have impact investing yet. We're only about three years old. And when we were starting this, some of the things that we my personal background, I also came out of the impact investing world previously. I also worked in early stage investment and we were thinking a lot about kind of what are the characteristics of these frameworks that even we're talking about today? How do they pour it over into the traditional world of philanthropy? And for many of you, if you're in the world of philanthropy, there's not a common or very clear metric set that's adopted. You don't have a kind of profitability motive, you don't have these clear ways to hold yourself accountability toward accountable towards progress and goals. And so for me, I thought a lot about how do we pull over this concept of the capital spectrum that was mentioned early, but in a little bit of a different framework around. Every philanthropy has a different risk tolerance. Every philanthropy has a different timeline and framework in which it thinks there are not only capital that is from grant making to lending or investment, there's also different stages of timelines and returns and risk tolerances that are really important when you think about the kind of challenges that we're trying to solve for. So if you take this concept of seed to series A, to series B and beyond from the venture world and pour it over into philanthropy be we really look to be an evidence building philanthropy. So we take a lot of risks. We do a grant on average every four days and have for three years straight on average of over $300,000 a grant. We just move very rapidly and we try to help our partners build evidence so that they can attract capital from the next tranche down the line. And we work a lot on that structure. The second thing is I learned a lot about how to invest in teams, and so I'm a big believer. I say the phrase we're moving from an era of planning to an era of navigation. And I think about how when you're investing in early stage frameworks on these really big problems, you're looking for a team and a leader who can take punches and navigate their way through extremely challenging and uncharted territories. That's not often how we think in philanthropy. We are often investing in big institutional frameworks and really clear, long documented theories of change and lots of other things. And I thought about the quote that Mike Tyson's famous for of everyone has a plan until you're punched in the face. Right. I think for most of us in the nonprofit world, we are continuously punched in the face and we can't talk to our funders about it because we just need to have the plan and stick to the plan. We allow you to take those punches and kind of work with you through that. So that's my answer.
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B
Thank you so much. First questions. Next question is for Athen Athin. Where are you seeing market gaps in the education and workforce development space? And what structures and types of capital do you think are needed? And also, what are the prospects for patient capital in this space?
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A
Yeah. Do we have a day to talk about that now? I think I'll say a couple of key things. One, education has always been structurally underfunded. So let's just like that's the baseline. Everybody needs to know that. We all know that there should be billions more dollars and orders of magnitude more money being poured into what actually drives all of us and our economies further. We don't do that, unfortunately. If you look at the macro environment, I'm sure you've had many conversations at this conference, you will learn the pool of edtech funders is shrinking. That is an unfortunate fact. We have to face it. And with the advent of AI, and especially as it's integrating across and permeating across education, the bar for funding is going up. Is going up. Which means that for a lot of us who are founders, you're going to face a lot of troubles and difficulties raising capital. The way that I look at that is to your question, just what are the different ways to raise capital? I think what you need to do is open up your brain. You open up your minds. Like, don't just think about venture capital as one source of capital. There's grants, there's PRIs, there's market rate, investments, but most importantly, and I feel like all founders forget this, please go and raise money through revenue. Go sell a product. Like that is the best form of revenue. That is the best form of capital. So I feel like we've gotten into this mindset of I'm starting a startup and therefore I have to go raise money. No, you're starting a startup, therefore you have to go sell a product. Keep that first and foremost in your mind. And I feel like that's the mindset shift that I hope, while I don't want this situation to be there in terms of all of the headwinds are facing as a market, but I hope the silver lining is that people will refocus their mindset and say, okay, let's go use AI to build operational leverage, do more with less and actually focus on building a product that we can sell and generate revenue and that becomes more sustainable going forward. That's what's the best for this market, for this sector going forward.
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B
That's perfect. I'm going to follow up on that with with Vivian. Vivian, when we were speaking in preparation for this, you talked about that balance between impact and building strong businesses. And you talked about working with your investee partners to build out strong businesses. And can you talk about how you work with partners on balancing the business side and the impact side?
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C
Yeah, I think there's a few things I'd say here. One is we are looking for entrepreneurs that have the ambition to be both deeply impactful but also successful businesses. One of the theories that I had when I first started at CZI was this idea that we need to prove that we can build scalable ed tech companies. And building successful scalable ed tech companies is both a complement of of the grant making that our organization does, but it also helps prove that more innovation, more entrepreneurs, more investors should come into the space. And I think we can all agree that more innovation, more brilliant minds will help us improve from an education innovation perspective. So that was very much a part of our thesis. The first thing that we look for is really kind of that founder market fit. And I describe that as does this founder have a unique insight or perspective on the problem they're trying to solve? Are they genuinely committed to this or is this just opportunistic? Because I can tell you, as Atman said, education is not for the faint of heart. This is a market that is going to throw all sorts of challenges at you. You need to have resilience, you need to have persistence. But I would also say that once we found that. And we found the magical entrepreneur that has both that commitment and a brilliant idea for innovation. The other piece of it is it's okay to pivot in order to make sure that your company still survives, because if your company doesn't survive, you're not going to make impact. And I think that was a lesson that we learned when we worked with Andela, for example, which started out with this mission. Brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. They started by training developers, brilliant young developers in Africa and pairing them with incredible clients all around the world, giving them real world experience, but also the opportunity to work remotely. We found that enterprises didn't always want the most junior developers. And at that moment in time you could say, is it a shift away from mission to then start focusing on senior developers? And at first it felt that way, but it was still providing this incredible opportunity and pathway for these developers who would not have found these opportunities and career paths otherwise. And the thing that's brilliant about supporting founders and teams that actually are genuinely interested and committed to the impact is as they've now moved into this space where they are supporting enterprises with building AI, using developers to build AI, to deploy AI and to build AI talent pipelines. These enterprises are coming back and saying, I need you to help me train these people because I'm never going to get this pipeline if you don't help me train more of these incredible forward engineers and AI engineers, which goes back to say that the training DNA that Endela comes from is actually what differentiates them. So I think from our perspective, that's something to keep in mind. You got to stay alive and you also, it's okay to pivot, but I think if you stay true to your impact and you have investors around the table like we have been with Endela, they're going to support you in bringing you back to that mission.
- [18:58]
A
Can I say one thing? Sorry, my colleague Steve, who unfortunately is not here and I'm a poor replacement from him, definitely a less handsome one, I promise you. But Steve coined this phrase for our team called the business case for impact, which is exactly what Vivian just said, which is if you build a financially sustainable business, to build a financially sustainable business, you first have to have impact. Impact that will become the growth engine for your business. Because if you have impact, your customers love you, they want to come back to you, they will tell other potential customers that really is what will build the flywheel. So that's the business case for impact. That's why you have to think about impact, especially in education. May not be true elsewhere.
- [19:40]
B
Great addition. Thank you, Matt. Turning to you, some of the most innovative and impactful solutions often come through co design with stakeholders. And I know this has been your overall approach to your work over many years. Wondering if you could talk about some of the best practices that you have seen in terms of co design and how do you think funders support these practices.
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D
So whenever I think about co design, I think one of the again, unspoken challenges of working in this space, whether you're working as a founder with an investor or a nonprofit with a funder or funder to funder, is that often there's not a lot of transparency in what individual parties within that relationship actually want to achieve. It's often not very well documented. There may be lots of different measurements of success that have kind of soft definitions around the edges. And I think for almost all relationships, right, it comes down to a structure of trust between the two parties. And so we think it is extremely important. It sounds very elementary, but a very clear articulation of what you were trying to achieve, how you were measuring success in extremely clear terms. So what that means for us is that we have a lifetime earnings framework. So we post all of our modeling on how we measure our grants and what we're trying to achieve in a particular sector and we allow people to see into exactly what we care about. So partnerships allow, we are kind of disclosing, putting our cards on the table with a partner and it allows someone to come to us and find the component of their organization or the component of their growth into a new market that fits within that framework. Now we're not for everyone, right? It allows us to also make quick no's, or it allows us to move to decisions that really honor the time of the partner we're trying to build with. And so I think very much comes down to clearly defined outcomes, transparency and evaluation. So again, being kind of radically open with what you say yes to and what you don't, what the history of those yeses and nos are from an investor or from a kind of builder perspective. And last, you know, iterative, low friction applications. So funders often have, and investors too will often have very kind of long processes that take a lot of time on the other side of the table. And what that does is it forces you to structure a plan that is not taking into account the kind of co design approach. Right. And so we've totally rethought our approach and have always built this kind of rapid iterative concept note process. We think that's a really important relational way to build trust, to know that we're working in the same direction and to really have clarity together what we're trying to achieve. Last thing I say all the time is to be specific, even if wrong. So, you know, there's a lot of sense in these rooms that if you just are a little vague in what you're talking about, what you're trying to accomplish, you can kind of capture the person across the table to fit into your worldview. That tends to be very. It doesn't move people forward towards action as much as putting your flag in the sand of what you're trying to accomplish. And then people can kind of navigate around what that flag is. So being specific, even if wrong, transparency and accountability and clarity of outcomes will do a lot to build co design partnerships thoughtfully.
- [22:59]
B
Thank you. I want to talk a bit more about scalability. What do you think investors and impact leaders can learn from one another about scalability? And anyone on the panel could comment on this.
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C
I think, you know, I think for us probably start with what I said in the beginning, which is, you know, different tools have different particular strengths. And I do think impact investing in particular is very helpful in creating these models and supporting these models that can have huge success.
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A
Scale.
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C
I think fundamentally it goes back to having a sustainable model, generating revenue, building a product that actually generates value for someone. You've got to be able to demonstrate that value, which is how you demonstrate outcomes. And with that data, whether you're a nonprofit or a for profit, that's what's going to enable you to raise the capital that actually allows you to scale. But I think the other thing is being creative in order to think about scale is actually also something that can apply to nonprofits or for profits alike. When I look at one of our companies. Handshake, handshake. There were companies. It's a college recruiting marketplace. And one of the things that it did was when it first started, it went to career services offices across universities and said, we're going to just replace your awful career services software. And what that allowed them to do was it onboarded all of the students, students. And where there were students, the employers came. So that network effect was extremely helpful. And then came some creative access to funding, which was, well, the students aren't going to pay for this platform. Universities pay a little bit, but employers will pay for it. And so where can you find those sources of funding where someone actually is getting value, can afford to pay, and can therefore fund the opportunity for these students to have access to these Incredible jobs across all of these different employers that they would otherwise not be able to access because they would be limited to only employers that visit their campus. And so I think that's one example. Another example is, you know, one of our companies emeritus started out by having these incredible partnerships with very, very internationally recognized universities, whether it's Berkeley or Northwestern or Wharton or whatnot, and doing executive education, education online and hybrid classes. That's wonderful. But in order to scale that business, one of the things they did was they started from that point of quality and brand preservation and then they actually expanded to emerging markets and partnered with universities that were locally recognized. What this allowed them to do is it allowed them to scale their business to more and more people across emerging markets, but also to make it much more affordable. And that's another thing that as you think about scalability, I think a lot of it comes down to how do you use technology in a way to increase access and reduce cost? How do you think about creative forms of distribution, creative forms of funding? And that's actually something you can do whether you're a for profit or a non profit.
- [26:05]
D
I'll just say one phrase that we use all the time with this and we've made some mistakes here. And I'll say that first time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution. You know, for everybody in the ed tech space, you know this very well, right? There is a, there's really practical, practical work you can do around pulling that user close to you. To your point, Vivian, around really knowing what problem you're trying to solve for creating value in that way that really pulls you into the marketplace in a way where you're not constantly having to burn capital to force yourself into a market. Really understanding distribution and product user connectivity of whatever you're building early, early on is extremely important. Even in the nonprofit space, we see that all the time.
- [26:46]
B
Athena, I'm going to ask you to maybe comment on do investors learn from impact leaders about scalability? To ask the question more specifically, is learning both ways happening?
- [27:03]
A
Absolutely. The example that I would give is even within organizations, I'm sure it's the same with you and Smitha and team, but we talk to our foundation every single day. What are you seeing in the market? What are you, what grants are you making? What are you learning? At the end of the day, you have, we have to admit, like we have to be self aware enough to know that we are not connected to the grassroots. I do not know what a teacher is thinking because there's like three levels of disintermediation between them and me as an investor. And so we have to rely on our research partners, our foundation partners. We have to rely on our. On our founders, actually, who are sort of themselves going and speaking to the teachers. And we have to have that constant dialogue of what are you seeing? What are the problems they're facing? One of our partners is this guy called Rob Snyder, and he has this framework called Pull Framework. The idea is like, how do you build a product that everybody wants to pull from you? And the first thing on that list is, what is the urgent project? What is the task on people's list? And that's not something that you and I can find by reading a blog post. That's by speaking to the teacher. When you're in the class at 9am in the morning, what's the first thing you're thinking? Tell me that, because that then drives the solutions we go out and look for. That then drives how we measure their efficacy, how we measure their outcomes. So absolutely, 100%. I think if you don't have that dialogue, I think you're failing your founders and you're failing your capital providers, frankly.
- [28:29]
B
Okay, I get to work every day with a group of 400 colleagues who are incredibly dedicated to the mission that we have at wes. I wanted to ask all of you about the desired outcomes that motivate the work that you do, and how are you measuring that impact of the work? And what do you see as the metrics that matter? I think I'll start with Matt on this. Matt, you talk a lot about a specific metric around lifetime earnings gains. Can you talk about that metric and other metrics that are meaningful and motivating for you and your team?
- [29:20]
D
Yeah, we made a little bit of kind of waves in the philanthropy world because we chose to build this philanthropy around one measurement, which I think is the only time I've seen that anyway. And this came from our founder, who was an engineer, and he's founder of GitLab. He's a man who thinks about mathematical optimization all the time. Right. He's very much focused on optimization. And he said you can't optimize for more than one thing. And I think we all see organizations that are trying to optimize for many different things, and therefore they can kind of hide behind what success looks like. And they can. It's very unclear for partners to know where to engage with them. So we measure lifetime earnings growth, but in a very specific way. So we really try to understand the counterfactual. If this intervention or project did not exist. What is that specific person? What is their life trajectory? And how do we measure the difference between the POST program and that counterfactual in an extremely rigorous but thoughtful and kind of sector specific and market specific way. We also measure it in an efficiency score basically. So for every dollar we put in, how many dollars are ending up in the end user's pockets? And that's how we measure everything. Is that one measurement. All of our grants and all of our activities are totally public. So you can see into every single modeling process that we do, things we've said no to, things that we've said yes to and also how all of those grants have performed over time. So you can look at 250 of them right now. You can see all the real data that we have in real public Google sheets, spreadsheets on our website, tableau dashboards, all of it public. I'd say just a few measurements are incredibly important. Clear measurements are incredibly important and specific measurements are incredibly important. And I mean those three for a couple quick reasons. Again, One, a lot of organizations try to hide behind a little bit whether or not they know they are achieving what they are trying to achieve. Right. There's not a lot of accountability when you have 15 different measurements and nobody knows how to measure them. So we think it's a forcing function for that specific also is very helpful because the end user should be able to understand your measurement of success. And I like to say if I went on to we work in East Africa and in Latin America and the U.S. and if I go into any street in any of those nations in which we operate and I ask anybody what will make your life better? The preponderance of answers will be something adjacent to I'd like to make a little bit more money so that I can send my kids to better school, so that I can be in a better house or a more safe environment, whatever it might be. So it's a proxy metric that is very human centered and also allows people to focus on what we're trying to achieve and holds us accountable towards that.
- [31:53]
C
Yeah, I think for us, as I said earlier, I think to some extent scale is actually and reach is a very important part of what we're trying to accomplish with the impact investing side of our house. And I think what we have been able to see across our portfolio is they now serve over 150 million students. They cover all 50 states and they cover 150 countries. And that to us is actually an important complement to the grant making work that we do. Another thing that we also focus on is essentially the priority is that our program colleagues who are researchers and educators that what they have prioritized. So for example, what you mentioned about, are these companies starting their work with evidence based research, Are they actually starting to measure their outcomes right from the beginning? Are they making the investment in curriculum science? Because if they say they're going to build something that's great for kids, then they should be starting right from the beginning and continuing to measure it and continuing to iterate their product design based on what works. And so I think that's very important to us as well and that drives towards improving outcomes in learning as well as employability. The other thing that we really focus quite a bit on is increasing access. And I think this is part of, you know, part of the original goal that I described. But it is important to us that we are these companies are able to use technology not for technology's sake, but to use technology in order to increase access to improve affordability. How are they making this a better product available to more students? So these are very important outcomes from our perspective. I will disagree a little bit with what Matt has said. We don't believe in a singular metric. We also don't believe in vanity metrics. You might argue scale and reach are a little bit vanity. But ultimately we don't believe in having one, partly because we don't have a similar objective and different organizations will have different North Stars. But for us, we invest in companies that are providing eight hours of education to a student whose family earns less than $2 per capita per day. We are investing in companies that are offering after school support and those are just not. We do not put a weighting on one being more valuable than the other. We invest in things that are core curriculum. We invest in things that are supplemental. We invest in things that are during school day, outside of school. We invest in models that sell to governments, to schools, to employers or to consumers. It's very difficult to say that across all of those. There's one North Star across how you're going to think about that. So we choose to invest in these companies that are measuring and that continue to iterate their product based on learning science based on what works. But ultimately we are open to people actually coming to us with very creative things that they're measuring that might not be the same across the portfolio.
- [34:53]
A
Yeah, I'll just add a quick couple of things, but I sort of generally agree with both
- [35:01]
B
of the folks.
- [35:01]
A
Yeah, we also do not say sort of Just the one metric across our entire portfolio, we actually look at outcomes as sort of points across the learner journey. So if you're a K12 school, a K12 company that we're investing in, what is an outcome that you should care about? It's the graduation rates, it's the mental health, it's GPAs. I mean that is important if you're investing in a higher ed company. That is persistence rates, is career readiness, it's that if it's workforce learning, it's wage gain, it's access to opportunities. So we've, and this is why I said that I agree with both of them because Matt said something earlier which is co design. That approach for us is we sit down with a company and say let's talk about what metric will actually deliver outcomes for your customers. And that has to be unique for you and you and you. And so let's do that. That's a co designed approach. Once we've done that, then we find how we measure it, then we sort of talk about it and design measurement of that. And again, this is what I'm saying that I agree with them because again, Matt said something which is not just the co design. We have a risk tolerance that is generally higher than other folks around the ecosystem. And what that means for us is in many cases we'll invest in a company that does not have research that proves its outcomes. And that's fine with us because once we've laid down the markers of what metric we're going to measure you by, then let's go and find ways for you to measure that, help you figure that out. Because at the end of the day, let's be very clear about this. Founders are not researchers. Founders are founders. They know how to build businesses. They do not know how to run an rct. So we help them. That's our value add, that's what we can help them do is how do you measure the metric and then how do you amplify it? How do you tell, how do you sell that to your customers? That's the value that we provide as an investor, as an impact investor that sort of cares about impact metrics. So that's a lot of the work that we do. Our investment team, we've got 10 people on our team, two of them are only focused on impact. And that's what they do. They sit down, talk to the companies, define the metrics, go measure it, go amplify it. So we've dedicated resources to do that.
- [37:06]
B
Thank you. Then you spoke earlier about going out and building the product and that as an important focus for entrepreneurs. So I'll ask this question of Matt and Vivian. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs looking to become more investable in the education workforce development space? How can they become more investable?
- [37:39]
C
I think it starts with having a clear vision for what it is that you are trying to accomplish. I think it goes back to what I spoke to earlier, which is, I think it's very important in education, which again is a very challenging space. You have to have a founder and a team that really is committed because you will need to be persistent, you will need to be resilient. And so having those unique insights, having that founder market fit is very important. And having a sustainable business model, ultimately a source of funding is what you're going to have to be able to articulate. How are you going to achieve this in a way that's going to generate a business? So I think for those, those are all important pieces to us and I think it's very helpful to have entrepreneurs that are self aware and know where they need support, both from a team perspective in how they compromise, how they compose the funding syndicate and how they approach challenges and how they, how they evolve and pivot.
- [38:42]
D
So yeah, it's, it's such a good point. I think I often think about, there's a little bit of a joke in the venture world around founders will often put up a deck and say if I only get 1% of market share we'll be able to do that. And so we actually there's a negative correlation between specificity and the knowledge of a really complicated thorny problem and success. So if someone comes in and they just say I'm going to solve this grand problem, it's a bad, it's a red flag, right? If someone comes in and says, and I'll give a specific example, we've had a lot of different benefits access screening tools coming our way and we have a lot of people who say we're going to improve access to SNAP benefits across millions of users. I had a team come in and say to me, we have X hundred thousand people using this system. We need to improve the specific document verification screening tool. And that means that there's this database that we need to rebuild and we need to partner with these organizations to do better OCR capabilities and this is what we're going to try to do and that's going to increase a 16% uplift in our ability to do throughput. And I said that's who I want to invest in, right Somebody who's done the hard work, who knows the problem they're solving and is narrowed to the beachhead of where they're going to actually make a difference in that sector. So just be extremely specific in what you're trying to accomplish and humble about the complexity of it. And that often is a big green flag for investors.
- [40:00]
C
I know we're running out of time, but one thing I just want to repeat that Authority said earlier, don't just think venture capital is your only source of capital. That when we talk about investable, there are forms of capital that do not require you to grow as quickly. Because we all know that putting tons of marketing dollars does not actually accelerate teacher adoption. And so think about other forms of capital, whether that is more patient capital, whether that's capital that says slower growth is okay, whether that means you shouldn't be a for profit and you should be a nonprofit. These are all very important.
- [40:34]
A
You guys should know these guys have nerves of steel. That count has gone all the way down to zero and it's now climbing back up in red.
- [40:39]
B
I'm going to ask one final question, though. What is one call to action that you all have for this audience of innovators and operators, investors and philanthropic leaders? Just one call to action that you would close with today. Vivian, do you want to kick it off?
- [41:00]
C
Every learner deserves to have a high quality education and to have the ability to achieve their potential. And so I just want to thank everyone here who is in this space and is actually working towards this. It is very easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom. You guys are doing the hard work and thank you for everything that you're doing.
- [41:23]
D
Measure fewer things and measure them better.
- [41:28]
A
I'll follow in Matt's footsteps. Know your why. Know your who. Know why you're doing this because it is a difficult place to be in. And know your who, as in who are you doing this for? Who are your funders? Who are your stakeholders? That matters more than anything else.
- [41:41]
B
On that note, thank you so much. I've learned so much. I hope you have, too.
- [41:46]
C
Thank you.
- [41:47]
A
Thank.
- [41:53]
C
You.