E025 - Joel Solomon from Renewal Funds

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Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. I'm really excited to speak to you and learn more about what it is that you do and help our listeners understand what it is and understand that there are other avenues of investment out there. And if we could touch upon how you run your organization as well, your environmental management, your sustainability, and then talk about how you help others and what it is that you do. And maybe we could talk about some exciting projects that you've got on. I was actually looking at the storm drain one. Is it Opti?

Yeah.

And I was looking through that and that looks fascinating. Maybe because of my hat. Anyway, but yeah.

Yeah, the portfolio companies have lots of interesting ones, particularly in the environmental technologies, 'cause in food, they're fascinating and they're important, but it gets to be how many different kinds of, you know, how many different forms of healthy food can you create?

Yeah.

And how far down the food chain do you go? And what are the issues back at the farm? And so anyhow, there's lots of, but the, Technology side has a different scale of innovation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, here's a question for you. Do you think that we can rely on technology in order to achieve what is now being discussed as, you know, the 1.5-degree targets?

I'm not very hopeful. We could.

Right.

We could, but, uh, I don't know, it feels like we're in, uh, biblical times or something.

Yeah, it's only— I only— I'm only asking because it's— I feel that it's, it's not all about technology. It's all about people and technology.

Of course.

Um, I think that we really need to You know, work together on everything, and we can't just rely on technology.

I absolutely agree. And the focus on technology will solve everything, of course, is dependent on the humans that create it and decide how to use it and how to interpret it. And no, that's not— we have— if you ask me that question, On the interview, I'll say we really are in the process of a spiritual evolution that's required in order for humans to even have the wisdom and the perspective and the capacity to take on the challenge that we're in.

Okay.

And most people are head in the sand.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, should we, should we start? And, uh, yeah. So if you could tell us a bit about your organisation and about what it is that you do to help us give us an idea of, yeah, who you work with and the sort of organisation you are, really. Yeah.

So I've spent my career, so to speak— it's been a colourful one— but I've spent my career working on how money and business can be deployed for the good of the long term and the well-being of humanity and ecology. And I came to this some decades ago just through, I think, common sense, somewhat, somewhat driven by a health diagnosis that made me certain I would die.

Hmm.

I— it said I would die sooner. I had a genetic kidney disease and I was told I could die soon or live longer, but there was nothing I could do about it. And ultimately, that led me to look at what, what am I eating? What does the kidney do? And then I thought about the role of money behind all of it and why the world was the way it was. My friend gave me her kidney 10 and a half, almost 11 years ago now. So it ended happily. Modern technology helped me. But, but in any case, all of this led me to look at the role of the kidney as filter. for what comes through our body. And it made me start thinking about money as a potentially toxic substance that, if not handled well, and with the right kinds of intentions, could do a lot of damage.

Mm-hmm.

And so that kind of simple personal engagement caused me to then decide, given the kinds of privileges that I had, my child of immigrant father made some money and gave me all kinds of access. My mother was an important a quite eclectic— is a quite eclectic viewer of society and questioner of things. And in any case, all of this led to, well, the worst thing about privilege is to squander it and not use it for something that matters. And so that became— I've been exposed to money, wealth, and business, and I want to spend my time understanding how it can be a force for good.

That makes absolute sense, and I'm totally with you. And I think it does— you hear— I mean, I'm probably going to use colloquialisms that you may or may not be attuned to. I mean, for example, the chattering classes colloquialism of— is sustainability just a part of the chattering classes? And I guess you've kind of talked about that slightly, then, because I also come from a privileged background, you know, I went to private school. And is that a bad thing? Well, my dad left school at 12, so no, I don't think it is, because he built a business and he absolutely wanted his children to even go to school, but he'd give them the best education in his eyes as possible. Some people would disagree with a private education and state school, you know, which one's better? And I think our children will go to— well, our children will go to state school. But I'm veering off the point. But what I'm trying to get at is, do you think, do you see through your eyes that it's everyone that's actually trying to become more sustainable? Because you've got— you're talking from the Canadian point of view and North American point of view. So it'd be interesting to hear your take on that.

Well, we have to divide a little bit. Now, just to keep it at high level, I'll say people that are living on less than a few dollars a day, which is still a lot of the planet, have got to be focused on survival and feeding their families and putting a roof over their heads. That's completely understandable. And it's really not my role to, to try to judge what they're doing, because I understand that very well. My real message is to those of us that do have access and some affluence, or at least the ability to accomplish it. I don't believe that's truly available to everyone. There are people that can pop out of almost anything through hard work and attention and good luck.

Mm-hmm.

But so, no, everyone— many people are just thinking about survival. The upsetting thing is that people that have plenty act like they're living on survival and choose to stick with that rather than to go through the inquiry and consider how the world's working and what our responsibilities are. So there is a growing awakening of people. The information age hopefully is helping that. We know more. We know where products come from. We can find out, at least. And we know that there's global crisis. on all fronts. I won't presume how old you are, but I've lived through the doubling of global population.

Right.

That's an unbelievable fact. So, so we've— not only have I lived through the doubling, but I've lived through the drive where we all want the very best. Again, fully understandable. What we left out was responsibility for how this is going to be balanced well enough that future generations may have this, that other species will survive. Do the other species matter? Well, I think so, because the world's interconnected. So business as the one of the most powerful forces, we could talk about religion, we could talk about a few others. But business should have— excuse me— should have baked into its DNA, into its regulatory environment, into its very Legal rationale that it has a responsibility to the commons and to the larger good. That should just be a given, and it's not right now. So, not everybody is thinking about it. Some people are still thinking very short-term and self-centeredly. We we we have a political system that. Therefore, is influenced to do less to take care of this, a regulatory system. We have all kinds of societal influences that push us to going to sleep about it. I maintain that this is something that humans in every— since the beginning of humans, as soon as there was consciousness, and maybe even instinctually like other species do, is to be sure the species can go forward. And have a better life. We can have a better life and use money in business in a much more conscious, intentional, and balanced way.

Hence why you're a B Corp.

Yes, B Corp is one of the best things we've got right now to do a couple of things. Number one, signal. It's a signal to the to the community, to employees, which have more and more opportunities to move around as they like. We don't have jobs for life anymore. We don't have the pension systems for everybody. So B Corp both gives a signal to the world about what we believe in and what we care about. Maybe more importantly, we have a methodology for checking ourselves and going through our practices. We encourage strongly but don't require. I haven't told you what my business is yet, but it is to— Oh, I see.

It's to—

it's called Renewal Fund. funds, and we organize, at this point, over a couple of hundred investors to pool their money with us, and we invest it in companies in organic food, green consumer products or household products, and environmental technologies. And so our job is to represent them and their money to make an above-market rate of return while doing something that matters that protects, cleans up, makes less waste, makes more efficient different parts of the food system, different parts of how we build out the world, the environmental technologies, green buildings, transportation, all of those kinds of issues. All of it can be done better and cleaner. And there's plenty of money to be made.

Yeah, yeah.

We're just, we're stuck.

And have you, have you seen a visible increase in investors wanting to invest in more sustainable technologies and more ethical?

Absolutely. I came to this innocently, as I hopefully conveyed in the earlier question, which was just through my heart and my passion and the best look I could have of the world. And it led to a career. And the first decades of that career, there was a lot of nice, you know, patting on the head, and, well, that's very nice, but you don't— you're not really living in the real world. Well, when I started thinking about what do I eat, and I went to organic food, and I started investing in organic food with some early resources that I had, I realized that this industry would probably— or I believed it would probably be unstoppable. Who would want to read ingredients that you can't even understand, and if you look them up, you're going to get scared, feed them to your children? Who wants to put that through their bodies if they have the choice? So it looked like a pretty good bet to me. I was innocent and naive, really. I mean, I was not a major finance person, but this is where I put my attention. Maybe for personal reasons. And this industry has grown, outgrown conventional food, what is now called conventional food since the World War II Industrial Revolution, etc. And it has made fortunes for many people, and it remains well under 10% of the North American food diet. And I— it's got to be less than 1% globally.

Yeah.

So It's a big industry. It's only just started. Big food is in trouble. Big food is getting questions, and it's losing shelf space. And consumers are waking up, and workers are waking up, and environmentalists are about what the side effects go into the streams and rivers and into our water systems. And then the healthcare system's waking up because what does that do to our well-being and cancer rates and things like that?

Mm-hmm.

So this cycle gets pretty obvious if you think about it. And the drive to clean up the food systems, take care of the soil, deal with what will be 10 billion people soon, uh, is a great industry. And so if you go through a lot of sectors of society and think this, this, just think it through, there's a pretty good bet to be made.

Hmm.

B Corp, just to finish that one, helps the companies we get involved with to look at theirs— themselves as well. It helps us in our due diligence. It creates a sense of community around how do we all push each other to do better. The ratings and getting rated best for the world, we're very happy when we get called best for the world as an investment fund. And we get platinum ratings and all that kind of system is designed to work on human psychology like mine and make me feel better for doing better.

Hmm.

And give me an advantage for talking about it. And it helps our companies, we believe. I think I said this, we don't force them, but we strongly encourage and we'll support them with staff time. And they're going to have to answer questions for us anyway, because to get our ratings, we have to get the ratings from all of them.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Have you read Reinventing Organizations?

Remind me the author.

Fred— Frederick—

I haven't.

You haven't? I think you'll find it really interesting. It's— so it talks, it gives you a number of examples across the world on not necessarily B Corps, but businesses and organizations with a purpose, and what the common thread is and where we've come from. And he— have you heard of the word teal organizations?

Yes.

Orange organizations. So he uses that same methodology of communicating how it all is. And it's brilliant. I mean, of all the business books I've ever read, definitely one of the best books in a way of articulating how successful an organization can be by driving exactly what you've just been talking about through its, you know, the way of doing business.

So I innocently ended up early, early in this concept And I found organizations and networks that put together the entrepreneurs and investors and advisors and things like that, that were attempting to do these kinds of companies. Some very well-known ones like Ben& Jerry's and Stonyfield Yogurt and Patagonia and Body Shop and, and many like that. But they were all considered pretty flaky by the mainstream finance world. And now there's been an explosion of networks, conferences, education, university, business schools are taking on courses in sustainability. And this is growing very rapidly now. There's an infrastructure building out. And I would say, in our experience as an investment group, 2, 3 and 2 decades ago, this was still really looked at as outlier and a bit goofy. In the last 10 years, it's exploding forth and proof of concept is happening. And now there are so many other funds that are talking about sustainability in one way or another, or different dimensions. We might be talking about race, gender, all kinds of things that money is beginning to understand. We're in a great reformation.

Hmm.

And there will be strong— there are powerfully entrenched forces that don't like this. The good news, I guess, is many of them will buy their way in. as they find out that this trend is unstoppable. So I was talking about big food buying all the kind of hip, young, cleaner brands because their consumers want it, their employees want it, and soon enough regulatory and other things will make it even more financially crucial.

We see that trend, I guess, through the stock exchanges and the amount of organizations actually joining stock exchanges around the world, it's dropping, isn't it? Isn't it?

I believe—

I don't—

I think the British— I know London Stock Exchange, I think, is— I think it is dropping. There aren't as many organizations wanting to join it.

Well, entrepreneurs that, uh, we get involved with rarely are interested in that. Uh, it has to do with the machinery that you get put into to be on the stock exchange and the people that you start having to listen to and what it does to the values of your company. Because with— it's basically money at all costs or at any cost.

Yeah.

So we're beginning to understand and think about questions like, how much is enough? How big do I need to get? What's my real life purpose? Is becoming a billionaire crucial? A hundred-billionaire? once you've got money, is it important to double it and why? And what is it you're going to do with it later? A lot of people say, I'll give it away. Very few end up doing that. So I started asking a question to myself. I liked the billionaire thing. Like, I'm susceptible to competition or getting ranked or, you know, getting validation. That's probably the best thing to say. Who doesn't like validation? So when I thought about this in my 20s, which is now 40 years ago, I thought, well, billionaire is a nice word. I don't— that means you're, you know, you're successful and you're important. And I thought, well, what else could I be a billionaire at? Like, what about billionaire of good deeds? What about billionaire of love? You know, what about billionaire of doing something meaningful? So that I was able to channel the kind of human instinct to compete and accomplish and achieve, I think, more towards at least a more balanced approach.

Yeah, I think that, I think that's very healthy as well, both mentally and physically, to be able to think physically.

Yeah, I mean, when you get a health diagnosis and you really think about it, and you start doing research, and you find out, you start to question, well, how much is this about my emotional being? How much is it about my inner dialogue? How much is it about what activities I do? It goes on from there. And, and just, I just suggest to anyone listening, be sure and do that along the way. Uh, if you do it before you find out you have some kind of a major challenge, that's better.

Yeah. Yeah. So what, what would you say your business superpower was?

That we are on a trend which is gigantic, which is meaningful, and which matters. And it's actually real for us. It's real. We care. And we want to be good citizens.

Okay, brilliant. Can you tell us a bit about how you engage your staff, suppliers, customers? I mean, you've talked a bit about how you have— you try and get the people that you invest in to become B Corps and to go down that route. Can you tell us a bit about how you engage staff, suppliers, customers with your mission and purpose?

Okay, so it's a big complex question. I'll start with, we think our biggest impact in this regard are those couple of hundred investors, their families, their friends, their advisors, their wealth managers. That looked like a very interesting way to try to affect change because money has got such lockdown around it with the sole goal be to maximize more money. And to affect that, you've got to get into the— kind of into the DNA of where that comes from and who are pulling the levers and things like that. So to prove that there are ways to make money, enough money, doing it cleaner, better, more aligned with bigger issues, to be part of— and do my best as a citizen to be part of political systems, to elect people who care about these things. As an elder with kids and grandkids and a chance to influence students sometimes and things like that. So how do you in every way attempt to affect it? Well, our investors many times are getting their first exposure to somebody with this premise.

Hmm.

The good news is now there are more and more people proposing. So first of all, we're affecting those ecosystems. Then by our very, uh, standards of how companies— we're going to look at companies effectively. If you're an entrepreneur, typically you're going to try to— I mean, there's one just kind of base level of this. You want to try to please the people where you're going to get the money from. But more importantly, you're going to start to realize that these things matter and that the trends matter. So I like to think about our impact much more at that bigger scale, the very story that we exist, the way that we do things and the people we touch along the way is a big deal. Then we have to bring it down to the very practical. Our biggest— like, the thing that is the most painful to me is travel, especially airplanes, and all the shipping that's involved.

Yeah.

So as a climate-sensitive person, This is a serious conundrum, and I believe that a day not that long in the future, we'll have more options of how to deal with that. So I have to live with the contradictions and many other contradictions. With our employees, no one comes to work here, no one makes it through the hiring screen, you know, we're going to ask people, why do you want to work with us? There are plenty of bigger firms, things like that. So the fact that we wear our values visibly inherently causes certain questions and causes people to think about these things we believe. And so then we get down to the level of, well, what are our practices every day? And we're as imperfect as everyone else. I walk around the office, I see lights left on. You know what you do? You can, you can lecture and lecture and lecture. You know, I watch the waste flow coming up. So we do, we do the things we can do the best that we can. You end up creating an ecosystem where the more that those values are the DNA of what you're about, you start to get pickier and pickier on yourself and probably the toughest on yourself. But it causes, it causes a lot of things to get done better.

Hmm.

So we carbon offset, we double carbon offset, you know, to deal with that. But that doesn't really cure my wounded spirit about the responsibility of those trade-offs.

If it helps, I read that EasyJet have invested quite heavily into an electric plane company, and I think by 2025 they want the majority of their fleet to be electric. So free for them in some ways to fly around Europe, which potentially is the same as actually North America for internal flights around North America.

I am confident that unless foolhardy politicians get in the way of it, technology will continue to improve a lot of things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when it comes to running a sustainable and ethical business, what would you say your biggest struggle so far has been, and could you let us know how you've overcome it?

Well, our job is to produce returns for our investors, uh, and then of course there's an understated competition out there because they're looking at other funds and things like that. So we have to be Certainly respectable, if not ahead of the pack on rates of return. And we have to demonstrate more than that. And we do it through ways I've already gotten to, to share with you here. But the— so the— ask me the question again.

When it comes to running an ethical and sustainable business, what would you say your biggest struggles were so far and how, how you've overcome them? Yeah, you've veered towards it with the travel, actually, and etc.

Yeah, well, but the bigger struggle is what is clean enough and what is good enough. It's a very relative world. And we don't claim perfection nor sainthood. We believe that we're in the trenches in an era of change. And we're advancing many, many small and some larger things, and we're doing proof of concept, and we're normalizing and, and making— growing consumer demand. So we're in a complex, difficult, and challenging system, pulling many levers on ourselves and through what we do. And so hopefully we're part of a much larger ecosystem of change that's underway, and I believe that's the fact.

Mm-hmm.

So it's very difficult to live with the contradictions. We went back, or you and I talked about early privilege. And so we're feeling somewhat noble because we did better things with our lives. And that's true and good. But we're not perfect. And we're not saints. And there's a long way to go. And we still cause a lot of damage. But the biggest damage, and the easiest to fix, or an easy one, our name is on the money that comes through us.

Yeah.

that we, that we get, we hold, we invest, we deploy, we purchase. We are asleep as a species for the most part on that responsibility.

I—

the harsh statement I can say about it is there is often blood on the money.

Hmm.

That's in my pocket. That's it. Because I don't even know where it came from. I'm counting on blockchain and all, all of those smart people to someday help me know every step of the money that came to me and keeps me responsible for it on down the road, at least to know where it's going.

Yeah.

So that's why I've chosen to focus on money. It's like the great underspoken, if not unspoken. It's a deep loss of some kind of spiritual understanding of what life is and why life is. The global world religions don't help us very much on it. It is the global world religion now. How do I get more of it? And that's going to make my life better. So that conundrum is so big. If I'm honest about it with myself, the contradictions are layered and layered. But if we don't start asking and pushing ourselves and doing the best we can and making conscious choices, it's not a pretty picture coming down the road.

Here's a question for you. Someone comes to you and says, I'd like for you to invest in us. How do you end up deciding? What's the process that you have to decide, yes, this is an organization or company or business or technology that we want to go down because it's the right thing? Is there a blurry line? Is there— I'm curious just to know How, how it works.

Absolutely. Just like everything else I've said, we have to use our experience, our judgment, our instincts, our commitments, our model, and we do the best we can. So the risk in the business I'm in is that you— your due diligence, when you start to look into a company and decide whether you're going to invest, gets more intense and more intense and more questions and deeper ones. You kind of— and so that's a really good process for learning and to really test what you're made of. But we use our best judgment. So we have a team, we've got the intake, and there's a group that look at, is this— do we want to take this to the investment committee? We go to our investment committee, which is a good number of us, and we say, will we go forward further? And how deep do we go? And what are the key questions people have? And so it's, in some ways, a really exciting and wonderful process and privilege to get to go through, to have that deep of a look. And there's a power dynamic here that you want to be at least aware of. Because the power of money can make you into a tyrant.

Yeah.

So how do you do that respectfully and reasonably and that kind of thing? So all I can say is, I mean, I could call it a secret sauce. But it's— it would be the personality of each business, each investor, each investment entity, how it makes a choice. So we put ourselves to the test of, does this matter? Does this product or service or technology matter? Do these entrepreneurs actually care? Or are they just on a quick buck thing? Because our belief is that will— if they don't carry some consciousness and ongoing learning process about this, eventually their values will get superseded by the race for bigger money. So we want to be in business with partners who at least can have these conversations.

Hmm.

We have done things like when a company sold, looked at the situation and felt, well, the entrepreneurs actually got diluted down too severely through their process of raising money. And we want to see them get a little better reward. And we've negotiated with all the other investors to give a clawback, it might be called, but to be sure that they leave this after their 20 years of hard work with a decent amount of money. And so that's, that's kind of heresy in investment.

Absolutely.

To leave some back on the table. But here's why it's not— here's why it makes sense. We're in a big competition to find the best entrepreneurs and best companies. Who do they want to have? Whose money do they want? They don't— I mean, some of them just take what they have to, but the ones that are the hottest do get to decide.

Yeah.

So do they decide on how big a ride we can take them on? Do they decide on a decent life? Do they want to have investors they are at war with, or do they want to have investors they actually trust? So we think that actually creates an advantage for us to be, be more thoughtful this way.

That makes sense. Brilliant. Is there one piece of advice that you could give to help these people with their purpose, and what would that be?

Well, I got lucky. Some through birth. I mentioned my mother, who was a huge influence of questioning everything. I grew up in the '60s. It was time to question all kinds of stuff, and that was helpful. But really, the health diagnosis accelerated me.

Mm-hmm.

And what I learned, what I believe I learned, what I claim, is that it is the inner skills, the emotional skills. How do you handle conflict? How do you deal in long-term relationships? What do you do under pressure? The psychological skills, which can tie into that. It's just a little different dimension. The mind and the tricks it can play on us, or we get influenced by outside forces. And then I say the spiritual. What's the spiritual? A sense that there's something bigger that precedes and postcedes us, you know, whatever that means to you. What is the divine? What matters? What's the meaning of life? And so I believe that those inner practices and learnings are crucial. That a good human being is a gift to yourself that carries you to your deathbed. And it makes all your relationships better. So when I get asked this question at business schools, they're expecting, you know, what was the secret of your financial success and how do you, you know, something like that. And I just, but I— always go to this because people around money are some of the more disabled in this part of life. Their relationships don't work that well. Their relationships with their kids aren't that good. On and on.

Hmm.

So look inside and make that a part of your lifelong practice because it will pay rich dividends, at least in satisfaction.

Fantastic advice. What— coming to reducing your environmental impacts and carbon footprints, what would you say your biggest single frustration was and is, and the biggest challenge?

Well, I just— the global food system has a deep deep environmental footprint now.

Hmm.

And we're attempting to find companies that are working on the reform of that or taking responsibility for it. So there's lots to say about that. I talked about shipping, and we're in all these product companies, and there's trucks, you know, going down the highway, and sometimes airplanes carrying food. So the carbon and the climate costs that no one thought about until recent times, and how deeply that's embedded in our economy and all of our economic activities. It's hard to be an individual or an individual business or even a big one and solve all that. It takes 10 million, 100 million, a billion flowers to bloom on this one, an awakening to happen that it matters and we have to take responsibility. So the biggest frustration is the same thing that drives the biggest joy and why we do this and what good about it is we're stepping into mental contradiction, emotional complexity, and a certain kind of long-term responsibility. And that— it's easier to stick your head in the sand.

Hmm.

Just not think about it. So just the complexity of what we're dealing with now, the power that we kind of sit on with being able to talk to each other a continent apart right now.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and, you know, all the things. It's just, it's a very complex time. And I could point to global political events. I could point to all kinds of things in, in the news almost daily now that raise these contradictions. So I would say it's the moral and ethical responsibilities and how to do that How to be a billionaire of good deeds.

Is there any advice that you could give and share with our listeners on—

Well, since I've done the inner skills one, I'll move to— it's going to matter more than meets the eye to have the DNA of your company and to have your own well-being and advancement as a human and to make it possible that a workplace provides that for people. Because mobility is increasing for the staff you must want and the consumer is also getting— we invested in a food traceability technology recently that eventually, of course, will be a swipe on every barcode that not only tells you where it came from, it helps, let's say, the fast food industry when they have an issue with a health issue, they know which farm right away.

Yeah.

Instead of closing down the whole Western Division or something like that. But I believe that, that because everything's going to become more transparent, now we have, in addition to just our own impetus that might for high-minded purposes get us to be a better person, there's going to be a track record out there and it's going to be visible. And I said that about blockchain. I mean, I really look for the day where I am held to account for where I put my money and what it did to other people and places that I don't have to think about today. Yeah, yeah, that's wrong.

Yeah, yeah. Do you invest in organizations outside North America?

US and Canada.

Just US.

We are, yeah, we are a group of 12 people right now. Though we manage $98 million and that will soon increase with the next fund, it's small in the world of capital. There's— I like to point out that in North America alone, $100— I'm sorry, $50 trillion is going to pass hands in the next 3 decades simply through death.

Wow.

Will be inherited by younger generations. I call it $100 trillion globally. I have no idea of the number. I did write a book called The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism, which tells some of these stories, talks about the growth of this industry, and talks about the morals and ethics around the issues. And so I just— again, I forgot the original question, but—

I was just asking if you invested in— because I know a lot of our listeners are going to be in the That's right. Around the world. So I think it's useful to know. And so therefore you're not bombarded by people going, will you invest in me? Thank you.

Thank you. Well, what I'd say about that is it is all of our jobs. So if we're consumers or we put money in a bank or we have a pension plan, all those things, but also for entrepreneurs to ask these questions of their investors. Don't just take investors' money because you need the money if you can help it.

Yeah.

Because you want to be sure who you're in bed with and who your partners are and what they're going to be like to deal with over time. And if they're not showing any sign right now of having even answers to these questions, or whether they're— obviously, it's more about thoughtfulness than it is having the solution. But I would be— I would encourage you to be very careful about taking money. And you should do your own due diligence on who you're taking money from.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, we're going through the looking for investors at the moment. It's not the reason why I was asking, but it's really interesting for me to have actually had this conversation, having had a number of conversations, because I went into this— we've got a new carbon footprinting software that is potentially going to change the way that organizations are able to understand their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. And my worry when I first started thinking about investment, I actually stopped. I didn't want it because I did not want our ethos and our ethicalness, as it were, to be diluted. So, but I've spoken to more people now and I'm realising that there are more people like you out there to be able to have conversations with and to be— Because actually, if we really truly want to make the biggest impact, we need investment in order to do that. And it was this kind of, what do we do? You know, do we dilute or do we absolutely dilute if you're working with someone you trust?

Well, that was my other statement about we only invest in US and Canada. But this trend, this movement, this way of thinking is showing up all over the place. And if you just start— use your search skills, one, to everyone, use your search skills. And there are, of course, search words that can bring you to where there's investors at least talking about these topics.

Yeah, exactly.

And you can use B Corporation. And, you know, there are standards starting to grow, and you will increasingly find them. And then if you— You know, this is where human instincts are part of what I said about your inner skills. You got to have, you know, how do you hire? How do you marry?

How do you date?

How do you judge who to do business with? You take it really seriously.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Joel, for coming along today, and it's been fascinating talking to you. We'll put the links for your website and any other information that you want to share with our listeners onto the website and in the podcast show notes?

I'd say renewalfunds.com to see what our business is, and then joelsolomon.org if you're interested in the book and further thoughts from me.

That's brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been, it's been fascinating and really interesting, and really, I love the fact— I love how enthusiastic you are, and I love the fact that As a person looking for investment, I know that actually there are people out there, and it's brilliant to know that you exist. And yeah, it gives— it just gives us hope, doesn't it, that you exist?

I just have to thank you for that comment.

All right.

Gives me hope. Gives me hope that I exist. I'm enjoying it.

I bet you are. All right, brilliant.

Cheers, bye.

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