Live Episode @ Venture Cafe | Founders Dave Becker, CampusESP and Catherine Griffin, ImpactableX

First, my name is Zach Brand. I'm the host of the founding Philly podcast. We dive into the stories behind Philly's exciting startups. We are fortunate to have Dave and Catherine, and we'll be getting into the early stages of the startup journey. So to kick things off, Katherine, would you mind giving a quick introduction to the audience and then we can jump in?

Sure. My name is Katherine Griffin. It's such a pleasure to be here tonight and see some familiar faces and a lot of new ones. I'm the founder and CEO of Impactable. We're based here in Philly and we do social impact analytics for startups, funds, and brands. And I'm looking forward to sharing my story with you guys.

Yeah.

Hi, my name is Dave Becker. I'm the CEO and co founder of Campus esp and we support parent and family engagement at colleges and universities. We work with over 300 schools who are communicating with over 7 million parents. We have a team of 50, one of whom is here. Mira. So say hi. And before that, I also was startup founder for a company called Beacon and Lively, which was a wearable tech startup that failed. So I'm happy to tell any stories about that. And then also I was the COO of Scolly, which just just sold a couple weeks ago, which was exciting for me and excited to tell my story.

Thank you both. So to. To start off, I think everyone has ideas as entrepreneurs, want to be entrepreneurs. Right. Not every idea is essentially a business. So, Dave, you could kick this one off. How did you ultimately come up with Campus esp?

It was at a bar. That's always how it seems like these things come up. So my background was in education technology. It's what I knew. And when I was testing out, the idea for Campus ESP was really around student engagement and engaging students to support retention and graduation. And so I did what you're supposed to do, which is talk with customers, talk with your audience. And one of the first schools that I went to was Abilene Christian University, which is in middle of nowhere, Texas. And I was at a bar. I have a picture of the moment where the CIO is like, there's a lot of apps that really engage with students, but there's the students aren't even in the systems anymore. It's the parents who are in there. And I'm Gen X. I did not talk to my parents at school. And I was blown away. And I was like, let's take a picture of this moment in case this is a real idea. And that was the birthplace of campus, esp. After that it was really about testing the idea, building the platform, researching it and, and, and going from there. But it really did start with leveraging my network and thinking about just talking with customers that had a perspective for a problem worth solving.

And I really get into the helicopter story. But I have a question for that, so we'll pause for that, but I want to make sure that you share that one.

Yeah. So Impactable was not something I dreamt up one day. In fact, I walked into it reluctantly. Truth be told. I led a fund in accelerator for about eight years prior to launching Impactable with hundreds of early stage social entrepreneurs. So companies using technology to address social and environmental challenges. And I led two global innovation initiatives. One with Bloomberg Philanthropies focused on urban innovation in partnership with the city of Philadelphia and Wharton. And then the second with the Obama administration focused on climate adaptation innovation alongside over 80 different cross sector partners. And it was over the course of these two programs that those partners started asking questions about impact potential. How much impact are we actually making by investing in these companies? Right. Just like a fundamental question. And so we sat down with the entrepreneurs, we asked them very simple questions about their impact, which is by the whole reason why they founded these companies. Right. They couldn't answer them. We looked around for solutions we could offer them we could draw from. And those.