The Future of Venture Capital Is Female with Terri Mead

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart. Today I have Ms. Terry Mead on the show. Thank you so much for being here, Terry. How are you doing today?

I am absolutely fabulous.

And you're coming in from the Bay Area, right?

Yeah, I'm part of the Silicon Valley in Redwood City.

I love it. And we were just talking kind of shop about podcasting before the show, and Terry mentioned that she is really excited to get some more female podcast guests on this show, which I'm really super excited about. And I'm happy to do some as well because I've had some incredible people come through the doors here at Make More Marbles. I want to make sure they get more exposure, especially in that community. I mean, we had Lynn Perkins on and a bunch of just really wonderful talent, tech CEOs and startups, and just amazing people doing amazing things in the world. And most importantly, they're all collaborating now with one another, and this is a home for that connection. And I'm just really grateful to see it continue to evolve. So thanks so much for being a part of that, Terry, and welcome to the show.

Well, no, thank you so much and thanks for being willing to do that. I do know a lot of women and I know that what will come out in the conversation today is there are a number of us are trying to build an alternative funding ecosystem for startups that aren't necessarily aligning with the Brotopia or BRO Network or whatever. And I know of a couple gals, including some down in your direction down in San Diego, that you might be able to get on relatively easily.

I would love that. Yeah. And I think that's really important because that is unraveling as fast as it can unravel. Right. We're seeing more women and men take to social media and talk about their experiences with the powerful and the elite that. That sometimes abuse that power. And it's not everybody. Certainly we're not painting everybody with the same brush, but it seems to be a trend. Right. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. As Lord Acton once said. How are you seeing this show up? I've had multiple conversations with men and women in multiple industries about how that's just kind of how it's always been. And now people are actually taking the power back and saying, no, no more of this. We gotta level this playing field for everybody and make sure it's a safe space where everybody feels respected. You know, I'm sure the pendulum will swing to the other way and become witch hunty a little bit for a while. But where is that middle ground? What do you see the future looking like in tech, in entertainment, in finance, and what are some of the tools and things that people can do to just better understand each other? I think that's really what it comes from. It's like a misunderstanding. It's a mismatch of expectations, it's a mismatch of priorities. And sometimes people in powerful positions abuse those mismatches.

Well, I think the problem is that we're seeing a lot of people who see life as pie and that there's only so much that's available. So it's completely contrary to where you come from with the make more marbles, which is there's plenty to go around and continue to share and collaborate, and you essentially create more marbles. So it's a matter of looking at everything from a place of abundance rather than a place from scarcity. And the thing is that those that are in power, I think I read something recently or heard something on a podcast that somebody says something about the people who are in power do not fully understand that those of us who are trying to get access to just a little bit more to try to level it do not think the way that they do. And maybe it was related to a political thing where, you know, not to get overly political, but the male Republicans absolutely don't want any more Democrats or any women involved because the way that they think is that the way that women would come in and maybe you read this and be in the world, and that they would end up taking away so much and they would be left with nothing. But that's just not the way that we generally look at the world. So the question that you ask is, absolutely, it's a huge and a complex thing. And in terms of the pendulum swinging in witch hunty, I think the problem is that for far too long there's been too little credibility or too little credence given to anybody who's come out and said anything. So. So if there's one or two who are potentially making claims that aren't real, we can't use those as examples as to why we can't share these stories anymore. What we have to do is believe before we disbelieve. And that's one of the first things that has to happen. And then start checking biases and going through a number of different things in terms of how I'm seeing it manifest itself. I want to take a step back because when we started seeing stuff in the VC space about a year and a half ago with Justin Kohlbach and all of that, somebody asked me if I thought that there was going to be a big shift and a big change. And I said, well, I'm cautiously optimistic, to use a green. I think maybe that was a Greenspan term, but cautiously optimistic that we could potentially see some sort of a change in this. But I'm old enough to know that we've seen these kinds of things in the past. And with what Ellen Powell bumped into with the Kleiner Perkins situation, I was like, I'd really like to believe that there's going to be a change, but I'm not sure that I'm optimistic about it. Then we started seeing things with Harvey Weinstein in the entertainment space and it got a lot more visibility. And that visibility, I think, was really important because what I was finding is that in the VC space and in the investing space and startup space, when I was talking to other people outside of the Silicon Valley, no one had heard of anything and it wasn't being heard. But when it happened with Harvey Weinstein, people started. It started having. Was becoming more of the conversation than dialogue. And then when it hit the political mainstream, that's when I think we really saw an opportunity for a big shift. And then we saw the Me Too movement, which a lot of people were. There were a lot of naysayers who were essentially getting tired of it. And now we're even hearing about MeToo fatigue. And the thing is that it's. I think I just saw it come up on social media that the Berlin or the Wall had been up for 10,316 days. And as of today, it's been down 10,316 days. And so the sexual harassment, the imbalance of the playing field has been going on for so long. The imbalance of power has been going on for so long that we really have to keep the pressure on for a long time and stay a little mad or stay really mad in order to really try to push and resist the temptation to have any sort of Me too fatigue or discount or discredit and allow for that swinging to diminish the momentum that we currently have in the space.

Yeah, and I agree with that as much as I, you know, can't ever understand what it's like to be subjugated, to be oppressed, to be felt, made, to feel inferior, to be made like, I'm an American white male with a long history of wealth and rich and prosperity and all that good stuff in my family. And that's wonderful, and I wish everybody could experience that. But unfortunately, up until now, capitalism, you know, democracy as we call it, all these systems have been the best way to get and assert and dominate power. And now we see this world that's shifting where, like, we're moving from scarcity as a strategy that works to abundance as a strategy that works, and people are finally opening up to the fact that we have all the resources we need, we have all the access and all the power we need. And now it's like, it's this. This elite that's holding on versus this newcomer mentality that's like, hey, wait a second. This is wide open for everybody, you know, and doing it that way is stupid and inefficient and linear and local. We're going to think globally exponentially. We're going to solve these problems in a different. And this is just one more example of that. It used to be somebody came out and said, okay, this happened to me. This is a problem. I want to address this. And they would quickly be drowned out in a sea of noise. And now they create the grassroots movement and it becomes like wildfire. And there's no way for anybody to put it aside or to dismiss it except by fighting fire with fire, which is some of the things you've been talking about with the me too fatigue and all that. But even that will eventually be overcome because ultimately the truth will come to light. Whatever the truth is. It just will. It has to. And it's only a matter of time, whether it be 10 years, 50 years, 100 years. You know, I like to talk about that in the blockchain space. Everybody's like, oh, well, I don't have to pay taxes because nobody's ever going to find out. I'm like, there forever, guy. It's like it's in the blockchain. That's the whole point, is that everything that's ever happened is there from the beginning of time. 50 million computers around the world have a record of it. Where do you think you're going?

You know, it's muted. Well, one of the things that I like about what you said about the groundswell is I don't know if you've ever seen the movie the Bug's Life.

The Bug's Life? No. Is that Jerry Seinfeld in that, or what is it?

That's a B1. Never mind. Go ahead. But one of the things about the bug's life is the ants are oppressed by the grasshoppers. And the grasshoppers are bigger, but they're fewer. And then there's one particular one who stands up and basically goes, wait, this is ridiculous. There's so many more of us than there are of them. And ultimately gets all of them who say, oh, no, it's always been this way. We can't change it. They're going to hurt us. They're going to kill us. Eventually, one of them, and I don't remember what his name was, but he gets everybody to go, oh, yeah, there are more of us than them. And once that realization happens, then they were essentially able to take control and take back their lives. And I feel that we are, with the time's up with the. Me too. We're seeing enough of this happening, at least here in the States. And I keep asking about what's happening in Europe and Australia and other parts of the world to see is this something that can permeate throughout the world more quickly? And can we lead by example by really standing up and saying, yeah, this isn't working for us any longer. We are no longer going to be the ants to you grasshoppers.

Yeah, I like that. I really do. And I think that's just a microcosm of a megatrend.

Right.

It's just. We're just getting started asserting power in a different way, and it's gonna take a while for all that to kind of level out and equalize. But I think this is really positive in a way that few other things I've seen in my life has been. And just being vulnerable for me, I was very threatened by it initially because I was like, well, I see all these, you know, men being, you know, having all their dirty laundry aired out without trial or due process. And, like, you know, I don't believe in any of the things that they're doing, obviously, and I don't recommend that. But it's. The place you go is fear. It's like, well, what if somebody said that about me? How would I even defend myself? Would I just be lumped in with that, too? And obviously, I'm not some entertainment mogul. I'm not some politician, but it runs through your mind. So I can just imagine what the conversation is having at my level of consciousness versus the rest of the world. And then having worked through it, I was like, okay, well, Obviously this is the right way things are going, this is progress, this is in the right direction. How can I be a part of that conversation, actually help it get to the place it needs to go? Which is, I believe, a bigger conversation around understanding a bigger conversation around, here's the world through my eyes. Here's the world through your eyes. We're not that different. Believe it or not, we have more in common than we don't. And how do we find those commonalities versus what has always been, which is what keeps people afraid and not connecting. And the people who in power want that. They want dissociated individuals afraid of each other, afraid of themselves, afraid of the government, afraid of life, when life is a big happy puppy that wants to play with it. And I want more people to play with that big happy puppy personally. So, you know, it's just for me, all of this stems back to scarcity. All this comes back to scarcity thinking in economics and finance and in relationships, sexually, health wise, just like that, this idea that there's not enough and I gotta grab for what's mine is causing all of this at the very core base of it. And scarcity sometimes is true for a fact. There isn't enough to go around, but the vast majority of the time it's not true. So I'm wondering, like Terry, in your experience and really taking this on and putting this torch as your forefront of your life, what have been some of the things that you're noticing are shifting in the ways that people are communicating and understanding. What can we do to put more gasoline on that fire?

What am I seeing? Well, one of the things that I'm seeing is, let's say, so one of the things that I do is I'm an angel investor. And one of the things that I realized in the last two and a half years as an angel investor is that I joined a group that, you know, there are not a lot of us female angel investors, so there were a lot of men in the group. But what I very quickly realized is what I wanted to invest in wasn't necessarily what most of them wanted to invest in. And I realized there was like a misalignment of values. And so what I do, because I'm just a natural networker and connector and trying to figure out who, you know, what to connect with, who. And what I started to do is connect with other like minded individuals who are looking to make it so that we got more money in the hands of female founders, that we could get money into the hands of founders of color, LGBTQ, those that aren't traditionally getting funding from the 90% plus male VCs or early stage investors. And so one of the things that I'm doing to add fuel to the fire, to change, because money is power. And so we need more money into the hands of women, people of color and LGBTQ in order to level the playing field. And so what I've been talking about, and I know other investors have been talking about, is how do we either shift the current VCs into seeing that there's a huge financial opportunity in investing in these startups that are serving underserved markets, or do we create a whole new ecosystem of investors and funding opportunities that may be a little bit different from the traditional vc, but allow these startups and these founders to really grow and scale and build the companies that are serving more than just an roi. So I believe in doing well and doing good at the same time. I don't believe in ROI at all costs. And what I'm finding and an Uber is an example of an ROI at all costs. And I think there are a lot of people out there and we are slowly connecting and coming together to build whatever this new ecosystem is going to be. We're eventually going to have to have some sort of a hybrid model where it's a combination of pulling some of the 90% male VC money, because there's just so much of it and we are going to need to have access to that. So as you said, we can add fuel to the fire to be able to really grow and scale these companies and really be able to have more and more examples of success so we can pull more and more of those VCs over. So one of the things that I'm doing in order to try to do this is working on this ecosystem and it's really more of a grassroots effort. There's no real formal type of thing. But I'm also speaking at various different events, like I was at Slush in Helsinki in November December and I moderated a panel with Monique Woodard, formerly of 500 Startups, and Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures and talked about the shifting demographics and the need to shift investing along with it so that we could start to demonstrate the wins, whether it's the stitch fixes or Blavity or some of these other non white male centric companies, because trying to see that there's a huge financial opportunity to create a little bit of FOMO around it so we could start getting the money to fuel this. My biggest concern is that these companies are going to get to a point where they're doing well, but they're going to need capital and then they're not going to be able to scale or they're going to fail. And as a result, these primarily male, white, male VCs will say, see, I told you so. And so that's we're creating this whole separate funding ecosystem. So it's not just early stage money, but we need later stage money. And it may not be in your traditional VC format in order to fund the startups that are meeting the needs of women. Because we're not in each market, we are 50% of the population or creating products that are suitable for different types of customers. In terms of a black customer or Latinx customer, we all have different behaviors, buying behaviors, consumer behaviors, different things that we're going to need and different things that suit us or work well for us. You know, one of the examples I always come up with in the digital health space, because I invest in digital health, is that I think there's like a synthetic heart that was designed by a man for a man and it only fits into maybe 10 or 15% of female bodies.

Dr. Jarrett. Yeah, I've heard, you know what I'm talking about, the artificial heart.

So there are certain things where we as women weren't kept in mind when things were designed. Which is why having diversity is so important. Because if you think about if you build something or you build a couple of something that can meet a broader, more diverse market target market, you can actually make a lot more money. So it just makes good business sense. So that's one of the things that.

I'm doing and you mentioned a couple things there that I want to dive into is I think more so than that, even though the whole venture capital model is a little bit turvy, right? The fact that we're still 90% failure rate and it's just obscene at this point how many of these startups actually fail. And I think they fail because of a lack of support and education. Right. There's no really good place to go say, okay, I'm going to be entrepreneur, where do I go learn that? You learn it through the school of hard knocks. And you hope that you make, you know, less. You don't make enough deadly mistakes to kill you really over the time. And you end up doing that anyway. You end up failing a lot anyway. And having started, I don't know, a dozen ventures at this point, only having had, you know, two or three of them work out the ones that work out is what people focus on and that's what gravitate towards you.

Right.

So I'm not super worried about the failure rate because it is what it is. And if you can find a way to address both problems at the same time, that'll create more of an incentive for people to invest. For sure. Men, women, doesn't matter. And then highlighting the real wins. Right. The Spanxes of the world and the Oprah networks of the world. Harpo, I think she calls her media company that have just completely outpaced the growth of many other things, male or female. What are some of the ones that are lesser known maybe that you've either invested in or seen that kind of follow a different, you know, model of either fundraising or success in entrepreneurship that are more female focused and female founders?

Well, I think Stitch Fix is a really good example of a success that had to was working within the model because they only raised $42 million and they were profitable after eight years and then raised 150, 100. Around $150 million in their IPO recently. And I don't know where they're at, but they were between one and two billion dollars the last time I checked. So the. It's more about not having access to the same amount of capital. If you're a female founder, founder of Color, you have to do a lot more with a lot less. And so you have to be scrappier. And to your point, the thing with having so much venture capital, especially here in the Bay Area, is there are ideas that are getting funded that shouldn't get funded, and they continue to get funded when they should fail. So when there's less money going after these, then you will have more failures, but the failures will happen earlier. That's kind of one of the drawbacks of having so much money in this particular space. And. And then I'm trying to think. I don't think I have any other examples. I mean, I'm following a couple of companies. Of the seven angel investments that I've made over the last two and a half years, it turns out six of them either have female co founders, female CEOs, they have female leadership. And that was not by design. I realized afterwards it was like, oh, that's right. Because it isn't a criteria of mine when I invest. And they're still relatively early. One of them that I'm most excited about is Zoom. It's ride Zoom and it's on demand and scheduled rides and care for kids 5 to 15. Last year they raised their Series A 5 million Series A LED by Sequoia Capital. And they're doing really well. And are they doing anything that's different? I think they're having a harder time appealing to your traditional investors because it's something that's going after something that we women or we moms are looking for but not necessarily dads can relate to.

How do you see equity crowdfunding, ICOs and the like kind of dovetailing into what you're already doing as a better system, serve more people? Like, I'm really fascinated. Not with these, you know, write a white paper and go market it and you make a billion dollars crap. Let's just leave that aside for a minute. But this new fundraising mechanism might have legs. Obviously people are using it. What are some of the ways we can marry that with the very real demands of Silicon Valley and the SEC and accredited investorship and all that in your mind. And maybe that's a way to even speed up the process a little bit.

The equity crowdfunding. If we're looking at it like the syndicates, like the Angellist syndicates, one of the things I'm actually looking to do is leverage syndicates to leverage the network of people that I know who are interested in investing in startups that I'm interested in investing in, but not having it be really a formalized group. Like I really struggled with Sandhill Angels, but I have a network, I have a global network of people who are like minded investors. So I kind of see it as a poor woman's VC or a poor man's VC to be able to kind of crowdfund the investing using the AngelList syndicate, pulling together, you know, let's say it's 10 investors for $10,000 each and it's $100,000 in, and then it's a single line item on the cap table for the founder and they don't have to manage 10 different investors at $10,000 each. So concept and I like the platform and I'm working on doing my first one or two. One of the things that I've seen as a problem with that is there aren't a lot of female syndicate leads and it's been a primarily male focused platform. Jenny Rook, she does some healthcare related deals, but for the most part there aren't a lot of women out there or syndicating deals. But what I've done is I've talked to them and I've introduced the angellist concept and the people to a number of other similar people to me who have a Great network and may want to syndicate deals through that. So you talked about something else with the equity crowdfunding. The accredited investor thing is absolutely ridiculous, frankly. And I know that Ryan, people out of the door. Yeah, the oppression here, let's let you go gamble, let's let you do a lottery ticket, let's let you play Powerball, but we're not going to let you actually get access to an opportunity that will actually create actual wealth. It's just another form of oppression and it's very, very arbitrary. And I think the head of Seed Invest, at what event was I. It wasn't Saster, it was maybe launch festival last year. He and I were talking and I think he was up on stage and he talked about how he was an accredited investor because he made money and then he went to his MBA and all of a sudden wasn't making the income and was no longer an accredited investor and then got a six figure job and was backing an accredited investor. And he said his knowledge did not change from the point where he was accredited to when he went back to get his master's degree. So it seems very arbitrary and it.

Seems accredited does not mean sophisticated. You know better than everybody that guess what, earning money and investing money, two different mindsets, two different hats. I went from a million plus dollar hedge fund where we made a million a month to the next year shutting it down. My income took a dip. And accredited, not accredited, you know, and it's just arbitrary, it's silly, it's ridiculous. So now you have to still get certified, let alone, you know, deal with all the different SEC nonsense. It just needs an update, it needs an overhaul, it's not protecting anybody and people are still investing. So it's like, come on guys, get with the program, let's find a better way.

Well, yeah, and then you get stupid investors investing in things that shouldn't be invested in or. Yeah, and then. But Seed Invest I think is leveraging, what was it, the JOBS act that allows for non accredited investors to invest up to $100,000 a year. So there is an opportunity in there. And one of the reasons why I like the syndication opportunity is there are a lot of women who are not necessarily comfortable taking big risks. And so I see syndicating deals as an opportunity for them to participate, potentially develop additional wealth over time, but not doing it by writing 25 and $50,000 checks. Maybe it's 2,000 at a time, 5,000 at a time as they develop their skill level, their confidence level, their risk tolerance changes and they just get more experience, but then they could at least get exposed to it because you need to get your foot in the door and start making your first investments. I was a little bit unusual in that when I became an angel investor, I saw it as a two year PhD program for me. And I figured Sandhill angel had a minimum investment amount of $25,000 a year. And I figured, okay, I'll invest $50,000 over two years. And with the $5,000 for administrative fee, I thought $55,000 and I'll just assume that it's gone. But it would be the cost of me seeing what's out there, because I've spent the last 20 years working in and with life sciences companies. And as we know life sciences from a technology perspective. And I wanted to see what was out there and see if there's a way to bring some of the technology into life sciences so we could somehow get out of the dark ages, get to help get to market faster, optimize business processes. And month one, I invested. Month two, I invested. Month four, I invested. Month six, I invested. I invested really quickly. And they typically say, look through a hundred deals before you invest. Well, at the very first meeting, I saw my health teams and I'm like, I want it. I just knew it was the right thing. And month two, I saw Sandstone Diagnostics. I'm like, huge opportunity, I'm in. And so I didn't wait. So I'm a little bit unusual for most angel investors, and I'm definitely unusual from a female investor perspective. But because I'd mentally already written off that money, it was easy for me to make. It wasn't like a risky thing for me to do, which I know a lot of women don't like taking those risks. You talked about. The other thing you talked about was the, were the ICOs, gosh, with where everything is this week, you know, it's quite a wild little ride. And we're very, very early on and we're just starting to see some of the ICO scams come about. Yeah. So is it going to influence the way that companies raise money? Absolutely. Is it already doing it? Yes. Are we going to need some more regulation around it? Yes, we absolutely do.

Yes, please, come on. Yeah, we need to come down on the accredited investor and come up on the bullshit meter on the ICOs personally. Those are my two.

Yeah. So you have to decouple the ICO from the blockchain to some extent, but they are connected. And so I love the idea of doing the token sales to help build the ecosystem. But we're seeing a lot of them that are really trying to raise money as a security and it's not necessarily going to build the ecosystem and people who get in early with those tokens aren't necessarily going to really drive any benefit, which is one of the benefits associated with doing the ICOs with the tokens. So we're still super early days and you're going to have a lot of bad players who are trying to, you know, the Ponzi, get rich quick schemes. So it's going to have an impact. My crystal ball is pretty murky on it. I do own some Bitcoin and some Ethereum. I have not bought into any particular token sales quite yet because I haven't seen one that there's one that I'm following called Simply Vital and it's in the healthcare space and I love the CEO co founder so I'm following her. But I've not yet placed any bets and I really do believe it's placing bets right now.

Yeah. And that's what it is. We're all speculating. And you picked on something I don't think a lot of people who don't invest for a living really understand is that you're not buying stock. You don't have a convertible note, you don't have debt in the company, you don't have anything in the company. You have a token in an ecosystem which may never amount to anything. Even if the company does well. What if they pivot away from that token? You're left with nothing. You don't have any equity. So, you know, at least if you invest in Facebook, you own a piece of Facebook for better or for worse. Right. And you're tied to the ship that you are investing in with these ICOs. I don't think most people understand they're just buying a something somebody made up. It's 10 lines of code, you know.

Well, what I don't also fully understand. Yeah. And I don't understand later on when these companies scale and they need more money and if there's no actual market for the token, you know, how are they, how are they going to raise the next round of funding? I don't fully understand how that works and how that's going to work out.

Because their valuations are insane. Off the gut.

Yeah. So I don't understand how that's going to work. It's a little insane and irrational to me.

Yeah.

Call me old fashioned.

No. And I think you'll be proven right. But for the meantime, they're just seeing all these dollar signs. I mean, $232 million raised as a donation that went to Switzerland and may never come back or be built into anything with Tezos, for example. And I don't know, I don't know if these are good actors, bad actors. I just know when there's that much money, you don't need that much money to build a company. First and foremost, it throws the valuation way out of whack. It doesn't necessarily, it's not tied to anything. There's no like way to get your money back. It's game over already. Like, and now you just, you got nine figures worth of wealth that just went away. Tron is another example where the whole thing was plagiarized for the most part. You know, that entire white paper, line by line, with the exception of the first seven or eight pages was plagiarized from other white papers. It became an $11 billion behemoth on the market, top 10 coins, and then quickly went to 0bitconnect, which was more blatant. But yeah, it's crazy.

Why would, why would anybody invest money into something that is just in a white paper?

Because they don't have the sophistication and I'm not talking about accreditation because it's a very different legal term, but they don't have the sophistication that you have right to ask those questions and say I think this is a bad idea. They just see dollar signs and they act irrationally. And now they don't have any barriers to entry or protection with which to do so. Anybody can, you know, it's as easy as sending an email to send money now to somebody. And there's no intermediary, there's no third party checking the boxes. There's nobody really checking to see if this is legit or not.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And just to point out. So my angel investing is kind of a part time gig. I actually do consulting and expert witness work to fund my investing habit, as I jokingly say, because now it's become a habit because I absolutely loved it. I've doubled and tripled down on some, some of my investments. And I'm constantly looking out to see, you know, are there other startups that I really want to invest in and are really aligned with what I want to see changed in the world.

And that's all you can really do at the end of the day, is vote with your dollars. And I truly believe, and I've said this before, I'll say It again, that the fastest way to wealth is to add more value to more people and therefore increase your income. There's a little bit more to it than that, you know, sales, marketing, et cetera. But that's the basic premise, right? Create something of value, sell it, increase your income above your costs, ideally, and use that additional money after you pay taxes. Thank you. Taxes to invest in things that you care about, whether it be other companies, whether it be charitable projects and ventures. I think there's a lot of cool stuff happening in the four benefits space. I'm really excited to see a blockchain for nature, because right now nature doesn't have a balance sheet, but it's in the red. So I'm really excited to see how we manage and measure that in the future.

Yeah, no, it'll be. It'll be interesting. Yeah. We need to do a better job with education. We need to do a better job just in general.

Absolutely. So. All right, Terry, if you had a microphone that magically carried the voice that you have into the ears of anybody in the world, what would you wish everybody knew?

It goes back to your point that we don't have to live in a place of scarcity, that there is enough to go around. Unless you're in South Africa and it's water that we're talking about. But generally speaking, there is enough to go around and you don't have to hoard it. And the more you share, the more you give away, more comes out back to you. So shift your mindset into coming from a place of abundance and know that you are enough. And I work on this on a regular basis. Know that you are enough, and the combination of the two of those, everything will fall into place.

That's beautiful, Terri. And I'd love to ask, because you've been so generous in creating space for us and sharing your wisdom with us, how can we help you move your mission forward faster? What are the connections, the resources, the opportunities, the people, systems or crops as you will, that will help you do that.

So I had to write this down to make sure that I'd remember what to say. You know, the first thing is, with my podcast, piloting youg Life, I really am trying to give voice to people who otherwise aren't, would not be heard, and at the same time also provide opportunities for us to have role models in people that we wouldn't otherwise see. And I don't know. I know the listeners don't know. I'm a commercially rated helicopter pilot. A girl has to have a hobby. So yeah, just a hobby. And so all of my branding and everything is around aviation because it's all about taking flight and getting above it all and mapping your own journey and finding your destination. And so listening to my podcast would be great. So if you go out to itunes or Stitcher, it's called Piloting youg Life. And I would love it, love it if people would listen and then also make recommendations for people who really are owning their own journeys, their own destinations and pilots in their own lives that in sending them my direction, I'd be more than happy to interview them. At the same time, if there are like minded investors who are looking to do well and do good out there in your audience and they would like to connect so that we can find a way to move this ecosystem, this alternative ecosystem of funding forward, Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I think I'm Terri Hanson Mead out on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter. I'm TerriHanson Mead out on Twitter. Or Piloting Life. That one too. And then finally, well, two more things. One, if you guys see some digital health deals, early stage startups in the Femtech or Pedia tech space, so women's health or children's health, send in my direction, I'd love to take a look at them and see about ways to really get better health care for women and for children. The health care system was not designed for or by women and we do not have a seat at the policy table. And finally, I love to talk about the shifting demographics and the need to shift investing and the opportunities that we have in shifting the money so that we can shift power so we can get closer to leveling the playing field. So I love to either be on panels, but I will not be on any diversity and inclusion panel. I will speak on tech, I will speak on life sciences, IT strategy and IT compliance. I will speak on angel investing, but I will not be on any diversity and inclusion panels.

May I ask why? I'm just curious.

Because we women get relegated to diversity and inclusion panels and it's seen as, oh yeah, we have this many women, but we're all in diversity and inclusion panels. We're not brought in to speak on diversity Hire. Yeah, that we're not. That we're technically competent to speak on.

Got it, Got it. I really appreciate it, Terry. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing your window into the world. Check out Terry's podcast and please, please, please leave a review as well. Piloting your life.

I love it.

Helicopter pilot. I didn't even this is what I get for not reading the liner notes Before I jump on here. I sometimes do these back to back. I don't always get a chance to look. But you're an amazing lady and I really appreciate that you're here and that you're sharing time with us. And on behalf of everybody on Make More Marvels, I really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here.

Thank you. My pleasure.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast. For more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing abundant life in your health, wealth, relationships, whatever that means to you, head on over to makemoremarbles.com check out our cool explainer video about what we're about and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher or Google Play wherever you listen to your podcasts. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.