Pitch for Progress Online Demo Day short version by Jonathan

Hey everybody, welcome to the Pitch for Progress online demo day. We are super excited to have you here today. We had, I believe it was almost 1,000 people register, and it was most countries that I could recognize. So if you are out there in the crowd, let us know. Let me bring up my chat screen here as well. I always, I always love to, uh, love to see where people are, are joining in from. Let us know where you're joining in from in the chat. And let's see, I give a virtual— so we have already South Africa, Dallas, Texas, Texas, India, Vancouver, Portugal, Dubai, Virginia, Romania, Raleigh, Paris, Sweden, Jerusalem, Maine, Czech Republic. Awesome, awesome. We love to have an international audience on this event, and we try to make these events as interactive as possible. As well. Okay, so in the chat, try to meet some other people, try to comment on some of the companies. We're all here to learn about interesting companies. We're all here hopefully to help propel some of these interesting companies that are doing amazing things in the world and try to propel them to just keep doing amazing things in the world and to keep getting the support that they need to do that now and into the future. So my name is Jonathan Grecian. I am the co-founder of the Founder Institute. And let me quickly just give you a little bit of background on what the agenda is going to be today. So first, I'm going to go through a quick presentation on how an entrepreneur can have an impact and sort of the why behind why we're doing this Pitch for Progress competition and why all the entrepreneurs that you're going to learn about today should be lauded and should be supported for the good that they're trying to do in the world. Secondly, we are going to introduce our judging panel, and we have an amazing judging panel today from both the public, private sector, journalists, a great, amazing judging panel, and then all of the 3 finalists in the Pitch for Progress competition will pitch, and they will then get asked questions by the judges. And then finally at the end, the judges will vote on a winner. Now we were just discussing this before the event. We have 4 judges, 3 companies, so there's a couple combinations there where there may be a tie. And if there is a tie, then it's going to be up to you, the audience, to choose the winner, and we'll be doing a quick Zoom poll. So be sure to stick around for that. And then finally, there will be some after-session networking. So there's a Bitly link here, and we'll throw that into the chat as well. There's a platform that we use called Airmeet, which you'll be able to go into this kind of big networking room. It sort of looks like an online poker room, if anybody out there has played online poker, but different tables with different topics. You can also do a chat roulette style and hopefully make some connections with this amazing international audience of people that are interested in impact that we do have here today. All right, so with that being said, I will get started a little bit and give you a little bit of the why as to why we ran this competition here at the Founder Institute. And, you know, very briefly, in 2020, so this was pre-COVID, and COVID only made this all the more important, but in 2020, we established a new mission for the Founder Institute. It was basically our 10-year mark as a company, give or take. So what is the next 10 years of our company going to look like, which is essentially the 2020s. And we wanted it to be about impact. Okay. We were super inspired by the UN SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals that they set up. We're not— we're on a terrible track right now as a society to hit those goals. And the Founder Institute is an organization that works with a lot of entrepreneurs at the idea stage, is in a unique position to try to influence those kinds of decisions on the kind of businesses that get created and the kind of businesses get that get funded going into the future. So as we went into that, like any good entrepreneurial organization, we started with customer development. We started talking to the entrepreneurs that come through our programs, the entrepreneurs that have graduated our programs, the mentors advising our programs, the leaders running our programs. And unfortunately, we kept kind of getting back to the same feedback from these entrepreneurs, right? First, an entrepreneur would say something like, but, you know, how are we supposed to have impact? Like, we're a for-profit company. Impact's not our domain, right? That's not what we're doing. I'm trying to hire people. I'm trying to do all this stuff. Impact's not in our domain. And it was sort of this frustrating paradigm where people were thinking, you know, you either go for profit or impact, right? And the thing that always frustrated me the most about it was it's kind of similar to the political discourse we have in the world right now, where it's either A or B. You know, you're either on this side of the extreme or this side of the extreme. You're either some you know, just a greedy, money-hungry capitalist, or you're some, you know, nonprofit kind of company, right? And there's nothing in between. And, you know, that is a false way of thinking, but that is one of the things that we saw that we'd have to kind of break through if we wanted to make an impact. And then the second piece of feedback we typically get from people was this kind of idea of like, look, I'm not, I'm not trying to change the world, right? I'm just one person with this little fledgling company. Like, honestly, what kind of difference can I make, right? It basically boiled down to like, I love Elon. He's great, but I'm not Elon. I'm not trying to be Elon. What can me, this one entrepreneur, do against the face of one of these UN SDGs, number 1 being no poverty, right? Like, how am I supposed to actually solve poverty? Like, that is the domain of these well-funded, mostly not all nonprofit, but a lot of nonprofit organizations, multinational organizations, right? It's their job to do this. I'm just an entrepreneur trying to get something off the ground. How the hell am I supposed to have any kind of impact on these massive, massive problems in the world? So when we started to boil down to think where we could kind of break through some of these chasms, so to speak, and, you know, I think the biggest thing that entrepreneurs, especially at the idea stage, need to understand is that in the United States alone, 627,000 companies are started every year. Okay, so even as an entrepreneur of a small company, maybe you won't have a singular impact of any of these organizations, but if those 627,000 companies, even a small percentage of those 620,000 companies, and again, that's just the United States, okay? If a small percentage of the new companies getting off the ground have some impact towards making the world a better place, the cumulative impact you know, it's sort of this long tail of impact, right? The cumulative impact of all those companies will not only rival but probably surpass governments, large multinationals, large nonprofit types of organizations. In short, not every entrepreneur needs to change the world. Not every entrepreneur has to change the world. Not every entrepreneur even wants to change the world, okay? But every entrepreneur just can do their small little part to make progress on the SDGs. And if we all adopted that collective mentality, the impacts to humanity would be incredible. And again, it would rival, if not surpass, the impacts of governments and some of those other organizations I showed you prior. And just two quick examples I want to give here, and these are FI portfolio companies, and I think they've done an interesting job of sort of being creative on impact, right? So you don't need to be building some AI-assisted machine learning thing that cleans up oceans or whatever. That's cool if you're doing that, but you don't have to do something like that to make an impact. This company, Asusu, which came out of the New York Founder Institute, this is a company at its core, it's a SaaS product for landlords of large residential buildings. And it helps those landlords manage their tenants, collect fees and stuff like that. Right now they took the extra step of integrating with credit agencies, right? So not only are they helping landlords be more successful, now they're, by integrating with credit agencies, they're giving tenants in large real estate or large residential buildings, you know, they're giving them credit for paying their rent on time, right? Normally, if you're a renter and I've been around, I'm sure a lot of people are renters here, you only get, dinged if you don't put your rent on time, right? You don't get any credit if you actually do put your rent on time. So Azusu, in doing that and taking that extra step, is actually very much focused on one of the SDG goals, which is to help allow people access to financial services, right? You build up your credit, they could eventually build up their access to different types of loans and different financial products where they can own their own home, right? So I think this is an interesting way that they've done it. And Sworkit, this is a mobile app that helps people do workouts without any equipment. It was on Shark Tank. It's just, you know, just one of these just amazing consumer apps. But now they set up a program where they're giving away their apps and their training and their services to schools, elementary schools all over the country. And now they've had over like 10 million kids, I think it was less than 13 years old or something, using their app and using it to exercise. And again, while it may seem, no, are they going to solve Are they going to solve, you know, the health crisis in the world? No, but they're doing their small part. And it's something that's very much core to their business, but it's a creative approach to creating impact. So to help people try to figure out some of these creative ways, you know, it is our stance that any entrepreneur can make an impact if you just do two simple things. Okay. Number one, you identify achievable and actionable impact metrics. We call these IKPIs, right? It's very typical in business if you're trying to sort through all the madness and try to figure out, try to be focused on something that, that will drive revenue or drive profit or whatever, right? You focus on KPIs. Well, these are IKPIs, and the important thing is that they're achievable and actionable. And then number 2, track and publish those KPIs and your progress to them over time. All right, it doesn't have to be a hockey stick thing up to the right. Obviously, if it is, that's awesome, but as long as you are trying to you know, really looking inward and trying to figure out how to make an impact on those KPIs over time, then I think you're doing your part. And to help people find these opportunities, we released this tool at fi.co/progress. It's called the Progress Planner tool, and you can look at it right now. And to use an example, so let's say that your company was interested in maybe making some small dent on poverty. Again, you don't have to solve poverty on your own, that's going to be an impossible task, but you can go through this tool, you can select which, uh, which of the 17 UN SDGs you want to attack. You can kind of pick here. So, and this is sort of using an example of what ASUSU might have done, right? Where it's the number of poor and vulnerable given access to fair loans and opportunity for home or property ownership, right? That's a goal that's actually actionable and somewhat realistic that you can boil down to from the meta goal of no poverty. You can then download, print this out, include it as a PowerPoint presentation or something that you give to your company. It also downloads as a PDF worksheet that you can use with your company to try to figure out how you can, how you can start to attack this on a year-to-year basis. And then we definitely encourage people to publish their results publicly as well. This is the ones that you could see that the Founder Institute's trying to do at fi.co/ikpi. This is a live website. And look, you could see the bar is going to go up and down. All right, and that's fine. The bar going down, yeah, we would all love the bar to go up from a quarter to quarter, a month to month basis, but that bar going down just allows us to hone in and it's an opportunity for us to improve. So in short, there are no excuses, companies of any size. All right, now I agree, it does take a little bit of creativity, but check out the fi.co/progress tool. We're hoping that that can help you boil down to some actionable metrics that your company can try to pursue, but any company of any size can make progress on the SDGs. The, the, you know, the important thing to push forward here is that we just all each have to do our part. Okay. We don't all have to be like Elon. We don't all have to, you know, try to change the world necessarily. It's great if you want to do that, but even if you don't, just try to do your part, the cumulative impact will be immeasurable.