The First Million Is Always The Hardest

Leap, Don’t Wait: Nathalie Molina Niño on Ownership, Capital & Building Power

• The First Million • Season 3 • Episode 7

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Guest: Nathalie Molina Niño — Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of Built, Fund as a Service, and Author of LEAPFROG. 

As part of the ACHIEVE Summit Series and in recognition of Women’s History Month, host Bo Kemp sits down with entrepreneur, investor, and global advocate for women’s economic power, Nathalie Molina Niño, for a candid and deeply strategic fireside chat on ownership, access, and rewriting the rules of entrepreneurship.

Nathalie’s journey spans building and scaling ventures, advising global organizations, and leading initiatives that have unlocked billions in capital for women-led businesses. As author of LEAPFROG, the New Revolution for Women Entrepreneurs, she has become one of the most influential voices on how underestimated founders—especially women—can bypass traditional barriers and accelerate into positions of ownership and control.

In this conversation, Nathalie challenges conventional thinking around entrepreneurship, arguing that the biggest barrier for women isn’t talent—it’s access to capital, networks, and ownership opportunities. Bo and Nathalie explore how women can leverage other people’s assets, platforms, and relationships to accelerate growth, how to think about capital differently, and why ownership is the foundation of both financial independence and generational impact.

Set within the broader mission of the ACHIEVE Summit, this episode is both a celebration and a call to action:

The future of entrepreneurship will be shaped by who owns—and women can’t afford to sit on the sidelines.

SPEAKER_03

Are you ready to grow your business, build wealth, and spark transformation in the southovers of Chicago? Visit Southlanddevelopment.org today and sign up for our newsletter, stay connected, get the resources, and be the first to hear about the atte side, where entrepreneurs, developers, investors, and change makers come together to ignite growth and opportunity. Don't just watch things happen, be a part of it. Join the movement at Southlanddevelopment.org and start building your legacy today. This episode is part of our Achieving Summit series and in honor of Women's History Month. This is a powerful fireside chat about ownership. In this conversation, Natalie Molino Nino shares how women can bypass traditional barriers and white acquisitions may be the most powerful move they can make. This isn't just about business, it's about ownership, access, and changing who gets to build well. And welcoming to the stage, Natalie Molino Nino. Ah, thank you.

SPEAKER_01

So glad to be here.

SPEAKER_03

All right.

SPEAKER_01

Hello.

SPEAKER_03

All right. Everybody is eating, so we're gonna have to make sure we keep everybody awake. Got a few more hours to go. But this is gonna be an exciting conversation.

SPEAKER_01

I hope so. So you've had some amazing ones, including with my friend Nellie Galan.

SPEAKER_03

Yes, Nellie Galan was here yesterday. She was fantastic, wouldn't you guys agree?

SPEAKER_01

I love it when uh Bo was like, so we have the speaker, and her name is Nellie Galan. Have you heard of her? Like, mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. She helped uh write a few of the books that Nellie has done, and I tried to connect you to someone else, and I thought, oh, this is another woman who's really doing her thing. She's like, oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Invested in her.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. On and on and on.

SPEAKER_01

The world of good people doing good work is small.

SPEAKER_03

It is, but getting bigger. But growing, and that's why we're here at this conference. And thank you for taking the time to fly out here and come and do this. How should we begin?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, I have not been here for the talks. It sounds like I missed some really amazing talks yesterday. I was at another conference in New York. Um, so I for me, I would love to A, level set, take a breath. Um, thank you for being kind to me as I'm coming in midway, maybe end of the movie. Um and then also maybe set an intention, but I would love a deep breath. Can we do a collective deep breath? And now I don't know what your intention is. Oh, sorry, team. Uh but my intention is to hopefully add value. Um I was thinking on my way here that inevitably, no matter how wonderful the speakers are, no matter how comprehensive you try to be, um, somebody walked into the room hoping that we would cover something.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Somebody walked into the room hoping that something that's really been just itching, um, you know, that you get some sort of a solution or, you know, some inspiration to progress forward on something that you're stuck with. Or maybe there's just something that you heard one speaker say and then another speaker contradict because we all have different ideas and different ways of moving in the world, um, that's leaving you kind of wondering, how do I resolve this? Or does this even apply to me, right? And so my intention is I hope that we get some interaction, that we get some feedback, and that we in this next hour try to fill some of those gaps.

SPEAKER_03

That's perfect. Uh while while you're on it, I'll just my intention is to leverage this opportunity to speak with you to hopefully inspire many of the folks that are in the room to do pretty much what you said. For many of them, it's overcoming the fears that you may have that are holding you back from taking the steps to the next opportunity that are there. In many cases, it's just inspiration, in others, it may be specific answers that people are looking for. And so we're gonna try to make this somewhat interactive at various points to hopefully engage and get from you what you want to hear from Natalie. But maybe we should start with going back a little bit in time and you giving people a sense of kind of who you are. Um, I've been, as you I've talked to you about doing this podcast, and part of it sounds like it's about money, but for those of you who were able to hear my speech yesterday, it's really about personal fulfillment, and a lot of it is addressing the issues and desires that we have as young people and figuring out how that translates into how we do business. So I'm always intensely curious about people's childhood growing up, what inspired you to become an entrepreneur, the people that played a role, both positive and negative, perhaps in your life that kind of got you to the place where you are today. So maybe I'll leave you with that.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. I mean, um the short version, and then I'll get into the slightly longer version, but I mean the short version is I am a child of immigrants, um, father from Ecuador, mother from Colombia. Um they both immigrated here um as young adults around the late 60s, early 70s, and then met. They happened to have landed in the same neighborhood, in the same um, what is it, extended stay where you could rent these furnished apartments on a monthly basis. It was a place where a lot of immigrants congregated and still do in LA in sort of the Melrose Hollywood area, and they happen to be living in the same building. Um my parents met uh very different backgrounds and yet very similar backgrounds. Um Mother comes from a kind of aristocratic political family in Colombia. Um, and if you know anything about politics in Colombia, unfortunately, even in the last month, um it's it's tragic, it's dangerous. Um and then my my father's mother, so my grandmother on my on my paternal side, she was divorced in the 1950s with five children. My father was super young, I think he was not even two when she divorced, and divorce is not looked upon fondly in Ecuador today. I can't even imagine what it must have been like in the 50s. And not only did she have to deal with the stigma of being divorced in the 50s in Ecuador, but also the family turned their back. Um, as you know, especially then, you know, super, super challenging.

SPEAKER_03

And five kids.

SPEAKER_01

And five kids. And they grew up and they were born in a US-owned sugar plantation um in Ecuador. And so she left the plantation and she went to the big city, Guayaquil, which you know, you were there a couple years ago. Um, and they experienced a level of poverty that I don't know that I really understood. Um and so what's interesting about these two women is that they both come from fairly different classes, fairly different parts of society. But my grandmother in Colombia, while she came from a moderately, you know, well-known sort of economically stable background, she had no access to that money. She came from a family where, you know, the patriarch ran everything. The patriarch was also very well known, a political family. And not only did she not have access to the money, she had no access to even having a say in her own destiny. She was subject to a significant amount of physical abuse. She was nearly killed multiple times by her husband. And while the money was there, it wasn't accessible to her. And so while I say that the they come from radically different backgrounds, and yet that they had this one thing in common. My grandmother in Ecuador divorced her husband because of physical violence. And then my other grandmother escaped Colombia in the middle of the night, you know, radically different access to money, but similar experiences. And so both of these women landed in Los Angeles in the late 60s, early 70s. And I am born a few years later in the late 70s. Um, and my the way that my Ecuadorian grandmother made her way in the world is that she came to the US and then little by little she brought each of her five grandchildren, excuse me, children and then their grandkids her grandkids over the course of 15 years on the wages of a seamstress in the sweatshop of Los Angeles. The same sweatshops of Los Angeles that are currently being rated today. Raided and tormented. And I I don't know, I still don't know. The math doesn't math. I you know, I still look back and I think, how does a woman on a seamstress's wages bring five of her adult children one by one over the course of 15 years? But she managed to do it and she always had a side hustle. Her side hustle was she would make dresses, wedding dresses, quincea dresses, or whatever for the community. And, you know, she she somehow managed to get it done. The other grandmother was also self-employed. She would sell everything you could possibly sell. She figured out how to sell vitamins door to door. She sold jewelry door to door. She found a distribution channel so that she could do private and you know appointments to people and sell jewelry one-on-one to people. They were just, they were very, two very entrepreneurial, two very strong women. Um, and I thought that as my career developed and I ended up becoming an entrepreneur in college, um, I was gonna go as far away from what I had known because I saw them struggle and work so hard, so I went into tech. But little did I know that being an entrepreneur in tech is not that dissimilar to being an entrepreneur in the sweatshops of Los Angeles or going door to door. I mean, these things have a lot, a lot in common.

SPEAKER_03

You know, so one of the things that we talked about yesterday, and and it resonates with what you're saying, is that sometimes, you know, um the hardships that we undergo become superpowers. They actually give us strength to do certain things that otherwise we wouldn't be able to do.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_03

And sometimes the thing that you're running from is exactly what you're gonna end up running to.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

You know, when I hear you describe what your parents and grandparents went through and how that resonates to your parents, it obviously affects a lot of the change choices that you made. Part of the reason you chose tech was an effort to kind of get away. And at the same time, there are elements of tech, particularly now maybe with AI, that actually are gonna kind of bring you full circle. I'm just you know curious how that resonates with you, and and and I'm sure you've given this a lot of thought already.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I've had a number of full circle moments. Um in fact, one of them was just a couple of days ago. So part of the reason I wasn't able to be here is because um the Smith the Smithsonian Museum of Women's History is doing an oral history project on women's financial independence. And I was lucky enough to be asked to be one of the interviews, and so I needed a venue in New York that we could do a four-hour long interview in. My offices are a little noisy, there are a lot of glass rooms, they're not really ideal for an interview like that. So in my mind, I'm thinking, where who of my friends or who of my contacts, or even of my portfolio companies, has a good space for something like this? And I immediately thought of a company that I'm on the board of, which is called Hanky Pinky. Does everybody, does anybody know what Hanky Panky is? It's a it's a 49-year-old uh lingerie company. Um, iconic, yes. There's something called, I'm hearing, I'm hearing like little rumblings, there's something called the Hanky Pinky handshake. Either you've never heard of it or you're gonna show me your thong in about a you know two seconds because you're you're wearing it. It's got a cult following. And they have great offices uh right near the flat iron, and so I asked them if I could use it, and as I was walking in their offices, they situated us in a conference room in the back so that it could be quieter, and we had to go through lines and lines of sewing machines and you know fabric and lace, and just I had to go through a whole cutting and sewing factory to get to then sit down for four hours and talk about what my work is around financial independence, and all I could think of was of all the boards, of all the portfolio companies, it wasn't really a conscientious thing. Um, it's not something I did on purpose, but yeah, here we are, you know, many, many years later. And those sewing machines and those women who work in the factories that got me to where I am today are still not just present in my mind, but it turns out they were physically in the same room as me a few days ago.

SPEAKER_03

You know, it's it's interesting, um, not that we started off intentionally this way, but the plurality of clients that we work with with the SDA um are women of color and in low and moderate neighbor income neighborhoods. And one of the points that I try to make broadly is that we service everyone in the Southland area. Um but if you were looking for those places and those people where there's been the least attention paid and therefore there's the highest, as you would call in you know uh financial terms, alpha. Outside, right?

SPEAKER_01

Alpha, sure.

SPEAKER_03

Uh or or upside, um, that's clearly where it is. And even in the folks that are in the room right now, that's absolutely where the best opportunities are, because they are the groups that have been undertapped where we can make an investment. And you've really dedicated a lot of your time focusing on this in a variety of different ways in terms of how you've created funds, how you've created your businesses, how you describe your books. So I'm just it's an obvious reason of why you do it, in part based on the history that you describe. But I'm also curious about how you've seen that effort change over time. How have people resonated with the idea that this is a market to be focused on differently today than they may have 10 years ago or 15 years ago?

SPEAKER_01

I I mean, I'm until our investment levels into communities match the potential and also just math match the math of it, I'm I'm forever dissatisfied. So that's the one constant from 10 years ago to today. It's never enough. But I don't know that people understand the math of it a lot of the times, right? I I cite these stats because they're so important to me, right? I mean, it is not a new stat that women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men in the United States. That's nothing new. What has happened between the last sort of 10 years until now is that a percentage of those women-owned businesses are started by women of color, and that percentage keeps climbing. Even just in the last three years, it went from eight out of every 10 to 8.9 out of every 10. So 8.9 out of every 10 of those businesses is started by a woman of color. So we've just gotten to the point where the math is simple. If you say entrepreneur, you mean women of color. Right. And if you don't think you mean that, then you're shitty at math.

SPEAKER_03

Right. Right? You're not paying attention.

SPEAKER_01

And you're not paying attention. And the fact that venture capital, for example, went from investing less than 5% into women-owned businesses to now even lower, because it's decreased just in the last couple of years, means it's going in the wrong direction. But there's absolutely no question that that is where the upside is and that is where the biggest opportunities lie. It's also where the majority of the entrepreneurial activity is.

SPEAKER_03

It's also where the majority of all of the consumer demand is.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. Women control the majority of all buying decisions. I'm sure Nellie talked about this in her work that we did with Coca-Cola. We've got access to data that is infinitely better than any of the data that, for example, the National Census would give us. Coca-Cola knows their audience and they know who buys and they know who influences. And it's amazing, especially among Latinas, among many, you know, communities of color. You influence one woman's buying decision, and she tells her auntie and her daughters and her sons and the cousins and everybody else, and the level of impact and also the level of savings, right, on something like marketing is insane.

SPEAKER_03

It's funny you mentioned my my auntie. I'm I I pray that any of you have a family member like this. My auntie, she lives in Detroit, and she's already texted me three times today. It's gonna be really hot, so she wanted to make sure, you know, that I wear something appropriate. She wanted to wish me good luck today. She wanted to make sure I got enough sleep last night, you know. Um, and you tell her something, and immediately she's gonna be spreading it like CNN to everyone. So yeah. Um aunties are the one any aunties out here? You guys rock.

SPEAKER_01

Right here. Yeah, and I aspire to be that level.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Um she's at a special level.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I got I got an angry call from a cousin the other day because his daughter, uh, who worked on Capitol Hill, was fired by the congressman that she worked for. It was her first job out of college. She was sobbing, she was so upset, she was afraid that her parents were gonna be upset with her, and so of course I was the first call. And then I got a call from my uh cousin saying, Why are you letting her call you and not let tell give give me the news, right? And I was like, She's she'll tell you when she's ready. At some point, it's auntie's job.

SPEAKER_03

Well, you know, it's it's interesting in talking about aunties. You know, my my aunt was um an early kind of lower-level executive at Ford Motor Company, and I got the experience of watching what it was like for her and my mother, um, you know, trying to be in this corporate world as a woman in the 70s and 80s and 90s, which is very different than it is now. But there's also this other not that different. Exactly, and yet not that's different. But but there is one thing that is substantially different that I actually worry about and I'm curious. Um it used to be that people went into corporate America for a little while to at least learn. Because what corporate America is good at is spending money to train you. We have people now that are so frustrated with corporate America and so uh inspired by being an entrepreneur that they graduate from schools or they immediately finish whatever they're doing and launch their business, but they're missing a whole layer of training that could be paid for by someone else. And I'm starting to see there's some gaps in the marketplace in terms of people's experiences as a result of that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

You have been both an entrepreneur where you're hiring those people, you've been a funder where you're funding those folks.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

And I'm curious about that kind of dichotomy that you see.

SPEAKER_01

But I'm one of those people. I'm one of the people who, in your example, right, I I skipped that. Um I didn't go to Goldman, I didn't go uh to Google and sort of spend the first few years of my career um getting some of those basics, right? Um I do notice that different institutions do better at teaching students executive skills. Um I actually I and this is an unfortunate thing because it falls into the usual, right? Where when I taught at Columbia University, I noticed that these kids were getting executive skills. And I see kids that are equally smart coming from a state school or a school that you know isn't at the level of Columbia in terms of cost and all these other things that make it feel like I don't even know if it's worth it. But when it comes to the executive skills, those feels like those feel like easy gaps that we could fill with anyone, whether they're at a trade school, a state school, an Ivy, it doesn't matter, right? Because executive level schools aren't that expensive to teach.

SPEAKER_03

And when you say executive level skills, what kind of skills are you?

SPEAKER_01

Scheduling, interviewing, negotiating, even personal finance, right? Those sorts of things. And I would argue entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_03

I agree.

SPEAKER_01

Because we had an argument at the university a lot of the times where they felt like entrepreneurship was something that you could major in, it was something that it was sort of a very specific track. And I feel, I felt then and I feel still today, that entrepreneurship is not one of those things. Entrepreneurship is just a life skill. And it doesn't matter if you study medicine, it doesn't matter if you study law, chances are if you're pretty good at what you're doing, you may end up starting your own private practice, you may end up starting your own law firm. If you're good at what you're doing, there may be a moment, there's highly likely, increasingly lately, a chan an opportunity either because of an accident, because you get fired, or because you choose. You may find yourself being an entrepreneur. And the ones that thrive tend to be the ones that understand it as a life skill, that understand that just because I'm a specialist, because I'm a scientist, because I'm an attorney, because whatever, I still have to have this life skill, which is the entrepreneurial life skill.

SPEAKER_03

My my experience in terms of training entrepreneurs, and it, you know, my advice for those in the crowd who want to be entrepreneurs, the most important skill is around this level set of are you a good coach, are you a good teacher? Because the skill set that I found in entrepreneurship that matters is recognizing that to be fair or equitable doesn't mean to treat everybody the same. And it means that you have to pay a lot of attention to what the needs are of this specific person as you are doing your work, which is different. How do I motivate person A maybe very different than how I motivate person B. Right, but I have to learn the skills of paying attention to those differences. I have to learn the skills of how do I provide that to those two people differently, and to do it in an environment where they both see that I'm providing them something different, and whether they feel it, it doesn't impact their work that it feels unfair. Because what I may do to one person is not the same thing that I do to a second person, because I need everybody to move in this direction. And business school does not teach that. Um, my experience is that when you become a coach, you have to learn that, right? To teach people different skills for whatever kind of coaching it is. Teachers theoretically should have differentiated learning. That's part of what teaching should be. But there aren't that many places that you learn that kind of a skill. And my experience as an entrepreneur is that's not the only, but it's one of the really important skills that most entrepreneurs don't start with.

SPEAKER_01

One of the most common things, there was a study recently done of the sort of emerging skill sets that get asked for in job descriptions, whether corporate or not, it's entrepreneurial skills. So even if you're in corporate, they're wanting You need to be entrepreneurial and be an entrepreneur while you're there. And I will say, for the people that are skipping the corporate route, the way that I accidentally did because I started a company when I was in grad school, I ended up having to learn those skills and to know what it's like to be immersed in a corporate environment like that, because Microsoft became my biggest customer. We ended up having a $300 million account with Microsoft that was we made us the sixth largest vendor in any category, and I was embedded in that world. And so even though I wasn't part of their 401k and I, you know, wasn't an actual employee of Microsoft, I lived, breathed, was surrounded by that corporate culture, and I did end up fairly early on getting an opportunity to learn those skills that you discussed. You had to learn to write a corporate memo.

SPEAKER_03

You had that, like it sounds simple, but most young people today have never written a corporate memo.

SPEAKER_01

I had to learn to speak, especially in something like Microsoft, speak in PowerPoint.

SPEAKER_03

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

Everything is in PowerPoint, right? I mean, it was absolutely a learning, but I I will say you don't have to be in it to learn it.

SPEAKER_03

You didn't come this far only to come this far. You've got experience, network skills, but you're still trading your time for someone else's dream. Imagine using what you already know to build a life that pays you in time, money, and impact. In the Life Design Masterclass, I'll show you how high performers turn career story into the next level of business. Go to lifedesign.com right now. That's L-I-F-E, D-E-S-Y-N.com. Don't just upgrade your job, redesign your life.

SPEAKER_00

Your listening to the first million is always the hardest. We are now returning to the show.

SPEAKER_03

I want you to take us back to that moment in grad school where you were like, you know what? I'm not gonna go look for a job, I'm gonna go start a job. You know, tell us about the company you started, talk through us a little bit about that process. A lot of the folks in this room want to be entrepreneurs, want to follow a similar path. They may not be technologists, right? But they want to follow a similar path. Just help us understand what you were thinking about, how you got to where you were. And you sold that business by three years, right?

SPEAKER_01

I was 23, yes. I was I was young and dumb and lucky.

SPEAKER_03

Um lucky is better than good all day.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, absolutely. Um and but I will say I don't know how you follow the path of most entrepreneurs because I because a lot of these stories are accidental, right? I was in grad school, my only form of transportation was a motorcycle. Uh I couldn't tell my South American parents that my only form of transportation was a motorcycle, so that was a big secret. Um, and then I remember my boyfriend and I went to Columbia uh to spend the holidays with family. And then again, I keep saying young, dumb, and lucky, uh, I went on a ride on a dirt bike. Now I rode a road bike, yeah, right? A cruiser. But I was like, a motorcycle is a motorcycle. How different can it be?

SPEAKER_03

It's a lot lighter that dirt bike. You could flip on that.

SPEAKER_01

I got on a dirt bike that was way too big for me. I remember that my uncle had to hold the handlebars while someone else kickstarted the thing, and then I jumped on wearing a bikini and sandals. Dumb, young, and lucky. Yeah. Um, I went on, and this was in cloud forest, right? So I went into the woods, I rode around very carefully because I didn't know the terrain, but then I turned around, and then I got cocky, and I was like, now I know the way. I'm just gonna retrace my steps back so now I can hit the gas. I did. I ended up in a ditch with the motorcycle on top of me. I ended up with a bum knee and a bum wrist, and I go back to college in January, and my only form of transportation is a motorcycle. So I say all of this because what what are you gonna follow in my footsteps? I mean, these a lot of entrepreneur stories are these sort of accidents.

SPEAKER_03

Some of us already take the bus.

SPEAKER_01

Some of us already I decided I do want to live to be an old lady. I no longer ride motorcycles. Um, but in this case, I remember that out of necessity, I went to the dingiest, saddest looking little used car dealership on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, where I was in grad school. And I noticed this was in 1996, the majority of the um large car dealerships are were already starting to have the rudimentary basic website, right? You couldn't necessarily transact on those websites, but you could find information, you could make an appointment, basic, basic things. But the little dingy used car dealership that was a few blocks away from the main drag did not have a website. And so I noticed that he had a Jeep Cherokee that I wanted to buy. I could afford approximately 50% of what he was asking.

SPEAKER_03

Those are the ones that say, Don't worry about your credit, we got you. Correct. That one, yes.

SPEAKER_01

And I had sold my well, I knew I could sell my motorcycle for a certain amount. What I could afford was half of what he was asking, and I basically offered him a trade. And I said, I will give you half of what you're asking for that car, and in exchange, I'll make you a website. All of your competitors have websites, you do not. I had self-taught myself along with my friends. I was an engineering student. We were learning, we were, that's what we did, that's what nerds did, right? We were teaching ourselves how to make websites, not the kind that you were seeing in 1996, but the kind that were a little more sophisticated, that had databases behind them that you could actually transact with. Long story short, the guy said yes. And so I got to buy a car and I got to make a website for this guy. He told a friend who owned another car dealership down the street. Fast forward, we had a company with a bunch of employees, and we were making pretty sophisticated websites for people like the Colorado Lottery, Janice Funds, uh, the Weather Channel. Um yeah, before you knew What was the name of that company? It was called Web Meridians. Because I was in grad school studying cartography and I was a big map nerd. I am still a big map nerd.

SPEAKER_03

And so you sold that business, and then you immediately said, all right, I'm done with this web thing, I'm gonna go on to the next.

SPEAKER_01

Uh yeah, well, that part is where it just starts to get a little predictable. So I think like anything that is both painful and hard and fun all at the same time, it creates an addiction. So I created three more companies after that. But what I focused on was I was a specialist in all things internet, and there was this group of OGs who were specialists in globalizing software, but software, software that sits on your desktop, not the internet. And so there were a number of different companies that were specializing in that, and I had always I'm multilingual. Um, English was not allowed in the household in Los Angeles. My parents were adamant that I was not gonna lose my language or my culture. Uh my dad was very anti, still is can kind of anti-assimilation. He was like, this this country has many, many good things to offer, but the culture is not one of them. You have your own culture. Um, and so multilingualism, multiculturalism, it was always sort of inherent in everything that I knew. And here there were these people that were building software that way. So they were advising people like Disney and Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, and they were teaching them how to build their printers and how to build their games in the case of Disney, but make it culturally appropriate for Japan, for Hebrew, for you know, for the different languages. Imagine a video game that now you have to read everything from right to left instead of left to right because it's Hebrew and Arabic, right? So all the complexities of taking software international, there were companies that did that. What they didn't know how to do is how to translate that and put it online. And so I came in and my subsequent startups have all been in that area. So I specialized in natural language before that was kind of a ubiquitous thing. Um, machine learning, basically all of the nerdy parts that led me to the final company, which is a company that ultimately went public called Lionbridge. Um, ever since I left, they brought it back and it's private now. I'm no longer involved in any way, but it's the largest translation company in the world. And it is a company that, in my case, in terms of the built business that I built, is we helped build basically Google in every language except for US English.

SPEAKER_03

Wow. So now this is something that I've had to deal with that I think you may have as well, which is as much as you love being an entrepreneur and building things, and it feels at one level very capitalistic, there's a whole other side of you, which is very much like, hey, the system is broken. And how do you reconcile, I'm assuming, those two parts of yourself. Maybe that's not anything you need to reconcile. I often find myself. Oh, it absolutely is.

SPEAKER_01

It absolutely is. I mean, I I actually I wrote it down because it's one of my favorite quotes, and um, it was something that Alice Walker said that I absolutely love, and it speaks to exactly that. Alice Walker wrote, the real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff, with raising a reading level from second grade to third, with simplifying history and writing it down or reciting it for the old folks, with helping illiterates fill out a food stamps form for they must eat, revolution or not. So that's the balance, right? Is do I feel like there is something fundamentally broken in the world of entrepreneurship, but even more so in the world of finance, which either makes or break makes or breaks entrepreneurs? Absolutely. Uh it's why I never imagined that I would ever end up in finance, which of course, again, remember masochists. Yeah, I started multiple companies, as painful as it is, and now my least favorite topic, my least favorite people were always the finance team. Um now I'm in finance. And it's because at the end of the day, while I think these systems are broken, if we're not rolling up our sleeves and getting dirty, I mean, Michelle Obama can keep it on the high, but I'm gonna stay low. If there is a mess to clean up, if there is some hands that have to get dirty, in this case, every single time that I was passionate about something, I would go break it down like an engineer and figure out where the root cause is, inevitably it was finance.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And so I could sit and complain about how broken finance is and how it limits what I want to do and what I want the world to do, or I could actually get into the game and fix it.

SPEAKER_03

That's one of the things I think is very difficult for a lot of people to figure out, which is how much I should be in the system to fix it versus how much I need to be on outside of that system. I made a similar decision when I finished, I was an entrepreneur as a child. When I got uh through college, um, first thing I did is went to Wall Street, started Morgan Stanley, mergers and acquisitions, about nothing more capitalistic than that at all. Um and partly it was to, I needed to know the system if I was ever gonna change the system. I needed to really understand what that vocabulary and language was, if I was gonna leverage it to do what I thought was important. Um, went from that to private equity, which is even you know another 10x times um that level. Um, but I have found that with that language, the work that we do, for example, here at the SDA, we are able to leverage that language to do some things. And in fact, if you don't know that language, many times you actually can't make the changes to take someone from second to third grade reading or translate. There are elements that are important that you need to be able to draw from that world in order to make even the simple kind of changes that you were describing that are not, I shouldn't say simple. They are, they may not sound profound, but they are the most profound of the changes that you read from you know Alice Walker.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, I think the thing to remember though is that if you're translating, sure, you you've got to speak that other language, right? You've got to have gone to Wall Street and understood that world. But translation is a two-way street. You still have to remember the original language, right? And I think that's where I come in, where I I I, for example, take offense to the term financial literacy. Every poor person that I know and my family when we were coming up in this country, we were okay, didn't know terms about MA and private equity, but we were not financially illiterate. We were the scrappiest people that figured out where to get the deals and which day you had to go to the store. And these days, you know, what are the days that you go on Amazon where you don't have to pay for the shipping? And you know, what are the different angles to be able to survive in a world where you have scarcity, right? These are some of the most financially literate people that I know. And so who are you calling illiterate?

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_01

Right?

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_01

Um, I think that that happens a lot. And so I I I think where I learn the most is at the builder level. People who are wanting to be entrepreneurs, people who own family businesses, they're the ones that are ultimately speaking a language and have a vocabulary that I find the most useful. Because if we're building solutions that don't speak to that, then we're not building the right solutions. And I I have to tell you, I think I was a little bit older when I even realized to what extent the trauma around money, which is truly the vocabulary that most interests me, exists whether you are rich or poor, famous or not, the trauma around money is there. You've got very wealthy people that are ashamed of their wealth, you've got very wealthy people that don't know what to do with their wealth, you've got the typical gender roles where among wealthy families, you know, the sons are in charge of the family office that does all the investing, and the daughters are in charge of the family foundation, which PS only represents five percent of the family wealth. Right. Right? By definition. By definition, the IRS says so, right? And so, you know, that's trauma, right? And then and then we have trauma. I remember there was a story that I heard all growing up about how there's a lot of colorism in Latin America, just like everywhere else. My father um has four siblings, we are half indigenous, and genetics plays these games, right? Where it's like three of the kids came out um show uh looking white, and two of the kids came out looking very indigenous. My dad came out looking redhead, green eyes, and freckles. And it was such a weird thing in Ecuador that he tells me a story about how there was an auntie who was who was doing well and who um had started a business and was suddenly, you know, economically able to do things like be a part of the fancy tennis club. And she would come and she would take him for the day, and he describes being taken to the tennis club and being shown around like he was a new bag.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_01

And I remember hearing that story enough times that I got old enough to formulate an opinion about it, and I asked my grandmother one day, Ahuelita, why would you let your sister do that to my dad? Take him to a tennis club and show him around like he's a fancy bag. It just seems fundamentally sort of demeaning. And I remember that she took a deep breath and she sat me down and she said, because that day I knew that your father would eat well. That is fundamentally why someone like me who doesn't come from finance ends up in finance. Because there have to be systems to make sure that people like my grandmother, and obviously people like my dad never go through something like that. And they're there. The the abundance is there, we're just not distributing it properly. The wrong people seem to be getting the control of the majority of the fountains of wealth and the majority of the mechanisms for creating wealth.

SPEAKER_03

So, one of the things in your book, Leapfrog, that um you and I have talked a little bit about, and and actually separate from the book we've also talked about, was the idea that um you don't have to go to get venture capital money in order to start your business, right? And um I think I did.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and I highly do not recommend it.

SPEAKER_03

It's you talk about trauma, right? So I've I've been finance, I've been financed by venture capitalists, I've been financed by private equity firms. You know, um it's like everything in life, right? The the more important you think you are, the more important is your boss, right? Um, and when you take money, you've got a new boss all of a sudden, and that person has a lot of control over your life and can make it okay or can make it really painful. But I'm interested in you talking a little bit about that concept because I think for a lot of folks in the room, one of the concerns, we showed them a bunch of deals earlier this morning. Land that they could buy, houses they could buy, um, uh not just houses, properties they could buy, some were industrial, some were commercial. We talked about individual businesses that were available. Um, and my mind immediately goes and says, Oh, okay, well, they're gonna do seller financing and I got to raise $200,000. I'm breaking this whole thing down. But for a lot of people in the room, they think, well, I don't have $200,000 in cash to buy this, you know, a million and a half dollar business. How am I gonna get there? You know, one of the stories that you talked about is forget your friends and family. You know, you talked a little bit about not using venture capital in order to kind of get yourself to a place where you've acquired these businesses. I would love to hear more about your thoughts and to share with everyone.

SPEAKER_01

I think I think what's happened, right, and this is um, it's a good thing today was not the Damon John's Day. Um I actually I I think things like Shark Tank have created a little bit of a problem in the industry because it has made something that is super niche and that is super, in my experience, irrelevant to most business people, it's made it seem ubiquitous. So that I've got my 12-year-old nephew telling me, what do what do you want to be when you grow up? And his answer is I want to be a venture capitalist. And it's like, okay, there are other things, and in fact, I think because venture capital is structured the way that it is, because 90%, 80 to 90, they'll argue the number, but 80 to 90 percent of the investments that a venture capital list will make is are designed to fail. That's modern portfolio theory. This is not a fluke. Modern portfolio theory says spray and pray. You spray money across a hundred companies, you pray that 10 of them survive, and then hopefully, if you're good at what you do, one or two of them become a unicorn, right? And even a unicorn is not a company that is making a hundred million dollars in revenue. Right. It's not a company that's in some cases making any revenue. A unicorn is defined as a company that a few venture capitalists get together in a room and collectively decide is worth a billion dollars. And in many cases, it turns out it's not.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Anybody remember a startup called Clubhouse that was popular during the pandemic?

SPEAKER_03

For a hot moment, and you couldn't even, you had to be invited on and the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01

Somebody decided that that company was worth a billion dollars and it was called the Unicorn for about five seconds until everyone realized that there wasn't a lot of there there, right? And so we've made up these terms, made up terms like unicorn that are largely meaningless. We have made it seem like everybody needs to go out and get venture capital, but what we don't tell people is that of all business financing, venture capital represents 0.05% of it. And what I also don't agree with is that we have created a sort of hierarchy that says if you're really good at what you do and if you have an amazing startup, then maybe you can get to the top of the pyramid and get some venture capital. But it's not a pyramid, it's actually more of a spectrum.

SPEAKER_03

And the spectrum is sorts, maybe is on the sorry? Is that a rhombus? It's a rhombus.

SPEAKER_01

It's basically, I would say, it's a line, and the line goes from least expensive capital to most expensive capital. And venture capital is the most expensive capital. And it's not just expensive because they're taking a piece of your company, because they're taking control of your company, but it's also expensive because by design, the goal is to eventually take control, and in 90 plus percent of the cases, it's to fire the founder. Not because they don't like you, but because that's the model. And the model, the other thing that I find really expensive about it is the model is to force an exit.

SPEAKER_03

Yes, it is. And this is In as short a period of time as possible.

SPEAKER_01

In as short a period of time as possible. If you have a fund that is five years long, you're gonna spend two and a half years deploying capital, and the other two and a half years either clearing off the dead weight, which is to say the companies that didn't become unicorns, right, or forcing an exit and forcing a return on the handful that did survive and do seem to be going on the trajectory that you want them to go. Here's what I know about most entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs, and I don't just mean the owner of the restaurant, you know, the owner of a manufacturing company. I'm talking about entrepreneurs that we know. Most entrepreneurs, I think of in the entertainment world. Think of Issa Ray, who's a client of ours. Think of um, you know, I'm thinking of someone like Nina Vaca, a really dear friend of mine from Dallas, who started a company doing IT tech services and today has over a billion dollars in annual revenue. It's a family-owned business, it remains a family-owned business, and she has absolutely no desire to exit. Most entrepreneurs who are like me are building things because they want them to last. Most entrepreneurs are building things because longevity is something that we admire, right? We want our employees to maybe be able to have a career with us, to be able to be with us in 10, 15, 20 years. Like we aspire to that. Steven Spielberg did not start his movie studio so that he could hurry up and exit, sell it, and start a second one and a third one and a fourth one. Steven Spielberg is going to die owning one studio. Steven Spielberg has no exit strategy. Neither does Issa Rae, neither does Shonda Rhimes. So it's not just the mom and pop entrepreneurs, it's iconic entrepreneurs that we all know who do not aspire. To sell their company. Venture capital by design is a sort of capital that forces you to sell your company as quickly as possible. So I also think it's culturally inappropriate for most of us. It's not something we should aspire to have.

SPEAKER_03

So how do we fund these businesses without venture capital?

SPEAKER_01

So I would argue obviously the bootstrap strategy is the best strategy. Get to revenue as quickly as possible so that you can invest in yourself.

SPEAKER_03

My Timberlands are very worn though.

unknown

Correct.

SPEAKER_01

Very, very worn. Correct, correct. I hate the word bootstrap. But and and not all companies can get to revenue as quickly as you'd like. Or they can get to revenue quickly, but they need investment up front in order to do that. I would argue that this is where, and this is where the case study of women entrepreneurs is really interesting. Women entrepreneurs tend to be disproportionate. First of all, we are not better at getting, and it's not about us, we are not getting the venture capital, we are not getting the private economy, we are not getting the other sorts of funding. But one thing that women are disproportionately better at, it turns out, the data shows it, it's at crowdfunding. And I don't think that it has anything to do with crowdfunding. I think it has to do with building community. And I would say that a lot of people that are locked out of the traditional financial systems might not know how to go and land capital for their startup, but they know how to build community. A group of friends of mine in New York decided that they were tired of going to the nightclubs. They love dancing, they love music, they were very savvy.

SPEAKER_03

This is the daytime.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, they were very savvy about knowing the best DJs in the world, and they loved the music and the dancing of it. What they didn't like was the late night, the drinking, the gross vibe that means that you're constantly wondering if someone's gonna roofie you. And they were like, we have to be able to have this experience and not necessarily have to deal with the culture that's associated with it. And so they decided to do morning raves. I was there for the first one. It was a fifth, it was fifty of us. It was literally a few friends that threw a party, and it was at seven in the morning, painful if you're a night owl like me. But it was an experiment. What if we hire the best DJs in the world and we throw a party at seven o'clock in the morning, sweat it out, and then go to work? And it worked. And then they did a second one and a third one, and now it's a thriving business. They have there, it's called Daybreaker. They have daybreaker raves, no alcohol, no booze, great music early in the morning. They have them in like 30 different countries now. It is a thriving community and more importantly, a thriving business. And that is the sort of thing that entrepreneurs that are typically locked out of the financial system tend to be really good at. And if you're good at building community, guess what? You're good at doing crowdfunding. And now, of course, there's all sorts of new legislation that make it easier and easier not just to do crowdfunding in exchange for product, let's say, but also in exchange for uh getting paid back like debt. They're crowdfunding debt platforms. So you could give up zero equity and just get a loan on pretty good terms. Um, or you could do it in exchange for a share of the company. So this is a non-sequitur but that's an example of in terms of an answer to your question. It's like if you're not going to go to the venture capital or private private equity route, what are the other options?

SPEAKER_03

No, that's that's exactly what we wanted to hear. So you were in grad school, I was in New York, and in the early 90s, it was in the late 80s and early 90s, there were lots of day clubs, but it was because you stayed out all night and then save the robots in the Lower East Village opened at five in the morning. So you go there at five and you dance until 12. It was a different strategy, but that's how we got down back then. Some of those people still make it into daybreaker where you're like, Well, I think this idea that there are ways of cobbling together and keeping control of the equity is important for people to understand and hear. And that's part of what I wanted to have you talk a little bit about what you did today because you know one of the fundamental things I ask people when I have my podcast is did you want to build an empire or did you build something to generate cash and revenue? And I have to say, I'm a little torn, right?

SPEAKER_01

I don't know that you have to choose. I don't know that you always makes a billion dollars in annual revenues at her company Pinnacle. But I would say that she built an empire and she didn't go the private equity venture capital route. So here's she's not gonna exit.

SPEAKER_03

So I don't think you're wrong. Um, but here's the thing that I've seen is there tends to be, not always, tends to be a connection between if I'm building an empire, I have to use my own money. And because I have to use my own money, I also have to build from scratch. Whereas the other side of that equation is if I'm building something to sell, I can use other people's money, but because I'm using other people's money, I have to actually uh build this thing to get out of it, you know, fairly quickly, right? That's th those those things tend to be together. They're not always the same, right? There are exceptions, but I find those to be more exceptions than they are the rule. Now, I'm interested in what you're talking about because I hear you saying there's a third way, right, that kind of combines a little bit of that together.

SPEAKER_01

Right, because there seems to be this preconception that like if you want to go big, then you're gonna have to give up equity. You're gonna have to go the venture capital and the private equity route. But Nina's not the only example. There's a entrepreneur called Patty Arviello who owns an organization called New America Funding. They're the 13th largest mortgage company in the country. They never took a penny of outside capital. They own 100% of their company. And what's beautiful about her company and the fact that they own it 100% still, they have $60 billion in mortgages that they service and that they originated. And that's an example of a company where the way she describes what she can do by virtue of being a whole owner of her company is that she can basically sit in a crisis and say, all right, for the next two years we probably won't make money, but we're gonna survive. If you had investors in the room and a board, you would not be allowed to do that. There's another amazing example of a woman named Rosa Santana. Hers is a story of she was providing administrative services for Toyota, I want to say in San Antonio, Texas, and she was doing it exceptionally. She was just really, really good at running her business and at making her client happy. And so when Toyota decided that there was a part of the factory floor that they were gonna outsource, they put out a bid, and no women or people of color-owned businesses applied. And they were working on diversifying their supply chain, and they they were like, What do we do? How do we fix this? And they went to Rosa Santana, who had never done any manufacturing, and they said, We know that you don't know anything about this, but you do know how to keep us happy, you know about customer service, you have ethics and you have values, and we love how you run your business. What if we loaned you two of our execs? What if we rented you a piece of the factory floor? What if we handed over all of the vendor contacts and trained you on how to become a manufacturing company and you bid for this? She did, and the rest is history. Rosa Santana is in the manufacturing business, and a tiny fraction of what she continues to do is administrative services.

SPEAKER_03

That's interesting. Yeah. That's the sort of thing, honestly, hopefully the SDA can help somebody in this room too. Um I would love to do that.

SPEAKER_02

Sweet clapping.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Um, well, we are a little bit over, but we didn't get a chance to ask the crowd for any questions that are. So let's take an effort to do that now. And just see if there's anyone, and you can scream out in this instance. This is the only time you're allowed to scream out. But if anybody has a question, because I have others still. I see one in the back. It's hard to see, but just see it.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. I'll repeat it.

unknown

I'm making a screen pronouncing.

SPEAKER_02

I heard you say it's now a financial literacy compliance.

unknown

Finance words.

SPEAKER_03

That's a good one. What's the new word? She she said, if you don't like financial literacy, I don't mind financial fluency.

SPEAKER_01

And by the way, you don't have to listen to me. I just, you know, I'm I'm careful about my words because, for example, I you will never hear me say, even though a lot of people say certainly my book was for women entrepreneurs, I started a center for women entrepreneurs at Columbia University. Like I work in the women's space a lot. Um and people say she's in the women empowerment space, and I do not use that word. I don't I don't like the word empowered because to me it suggests that I have all the power, and whoever this is the subject of that word, which let's talk about. Let's talk about who gets empowered in our world, right? It tends to be people of color, it tends to be women, it tends to be uh people in the global south, right? To me, it suggests that the subject has no power. And I don't know how you go and be of service to people when the first thing out of your mouth is you don't have power. And so those are just words, you know, same thing, financial fluency. I don't think the people who tend to be the subject or who are in receiving a lot of these financial um literacy courses, I don't think that they're illiterate. I actually think these are some of the savviest people on the planet, and what they need are tools. And so I I like financial fluency. I think there are a lot of other terms like that, but I you know, I think, you know, step number one if you're trying to do do something and move the dial is is respect. And I think sometimes we we're handed these terms. In my industry, for example, we have a wealth management firm, among other things. Where we didn't talk about this, but my company is called Known. We're a financial services firm, and we're very much solving the problem of I think the wrong people are in control of the majority of the money. Women and people of color represent more than 80% of the planet, and yet we are in control of less than 2% of the world's money. And so that's what my company is trying to solve. And one of the words that we inherited, one of the terms we inherited, it's an industry standard, is families, many of whom we manage their money, of high net worth.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

And I thought it implies that the other folks, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

But uh but everybody uses this term. Look it up, Google it right now. High net worth. It is a isn't an industry accepted term, but it's one that I think is a little disrespectful. What you own and what assets you have are not necessarily what determine your worth. And so we've now in my company started to use high net wealth. High net wealth, ultra high net wealth, those are the new words. And you know, it it I you forgive people for not thinking about it. I used it for years and I didn't think about it until some friend pointed it out to me. And it was somebody from a high net wealth family that says, I don't really like being associated having my worth associated with with my inheritance. And I had never thought about it that way. And so I hope that answers your question. I think there's probably a lot of room.

SPEAKER_03

Well, it's one I will say they represent us. So known financial is actually working with the Southland Development Authority in the development of our Marnark fund. In fact, she's architected this thing as much as I have with, and I'm grateful for your uh support in that effort. And and that really is about us being able to put our money where our mouth is, right? Instead of begging people to make investments in the Southland, we think that the world is missing the opportunity. So we're gonna make investment first.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_03

So I'm gonna I'm gonna introduce you to the opportunity to invest in the Southland. That's what I'm doing. And I just put my money up here first because that's how confident we are that this is the place to make an investment.

SPEAKER_01

Which is the premise of my company. So, what we realized, we have some extraordinary people who I'm lucky enough to have as my business partners who have had incredible careers. And all of us agree on one thing in particular, and that is that we don't have to be the one on the face and on the front of the magazine. We've had careers, we've had the exits, we've had a lot of things that have happened in our lives. We're ready to be the pit crew now. We've all gotten to the place in the career where we realize that in finance, especially, there's a pit crew. There are all sorts of things, how the sausage gets made in the finance industry that most people don't even realize and understand how it works. And if the usual suspects are in charge of the inner workings of finance, nothing will change. So we're the pit crew, and our job is to take race cars, make sure that they have everything that they need to get across a finish line, and hopefully to get across the finish line first.

SPEAKER_03

We'll take one more question if there is one. There it is.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, the city of New York just hired McKinsey for millions of dollars to tell us that we need plastic trash cans. Uh yeah, I think your money is better spent in other places. But there are some really interesting, especially new young consultants. Um, there was one group that I recently learned about called decolonizing wealth that is bringing a whole different perspective. And again, informing and teaching people like me to think about things like high net worth, right? Um, to think about how we build teams differently. I think there is something to be said about the next gen organizational consultants that are bringing some new ideas. There is a team led by uh Sloan Leo, who is who we brought in to be the external sort of chief people officer at my company, and they are extraordinary. These are people that came in and taught us to think about what our values are, how that's going to translate into everything that we do. Sure, we have a company manual, but our company manual is very different from most people's company manual. And this is a team that I first met because there was a nonprofit that I was a part of that had a very dysfunctional board, and so they had hired Sloan, Leo, and their team to come in and reevaluate how the board worked, and it really worked well. Um, and so when we were standing up our company, I thought, you know what, Sloan is the person that I want to come bring in. Um their name is Flock Studio, F-L-O-X, but plenty of others. I I would just argue that whatever smells, feels, looks like it's the next gen. Not saying throw away all the old traditional ideas, but you know, I was at Microsoft when they put everybody into a color. You're either blue, you're yellow, you're red, I mean, Myers Briggs, all of these things. Like, I do feel like all of those traditional organizational systems are very accessible now. You can find them online, you can find plenty of consultant consultants to bring in. The ones that are harder to find, but I think are adding more value are these groups that are saying, maybe the old way doesn't work.

SPEAKER_03

Now, what about taking that same question and bringing it down to, hey, I'm a team of five people and I need to figure out what are the next two people that I need to bring on? What are the resources that might help me really evaluate, hey, you know, I only have space for two more folks. Who are those two people? Who should they be, and how should I think about them as part of my burgeoning but small organization?

SPEAKER_01

That's where community comes in. That's where I'll give you an example. This is a different problem, but but in terms of the same solution. I have a number of people that come to me and say, My company's too small, I can't afford real PR and marketing. What do I do? There's a little group and it's a community. It's a community of women entrepreneurs, it's called Dreamers and Doers, right? And what they do is I use them sometimes for this, and now we have our own PR firm, but like I really like what they do is they kind of crowdsource PR opportunities. What they do is they have like thousands of members and they go out and they talk to Bloomberg or they talk to you know Fast Company or they talk to all these different sort of magazines and and media channels, and they say, We have a group of women entrepreneurs, thousands of them, and they're really unique. Whenever you are doing a feature next time on the top ten ways to save money or top ten ways to be more efficient, or you know, um stories about how to hire and fire people, we have a bunch of entrepreneurs that you can tap. So, what they do is they bring an email together where they say, Here are five PR opportunities. Anybody who wants to be a part of this article, submit your story in this little like Word doc. And so you end up being a part of a larger community of women entrepreneurs, but in the same token, you're saving money and not hiring a PR firm, and next thing you know, you've got a feature in Bloomberg, you've got a feature in Pass Company, and your company is mentioned.

SPEAKER_02

That's a great idea.

SPEAKER_01

I would argue that there are lots of little communities like that where you don't have to hire the consultant, you don't have to hire the external professional, you can just be a part of a community that basically crowdsources a lot of these resources. A lot of these communities exist, and especially increasingly for women of color-owned businesses.

SPEAKER_03

Well, I will say this this is a plug, a straight commercial, but the Southland Development Authority, and many people in this room can attest to that, have essentially done something similar. We've got a pool of consultants and uh uh subject matter experts that we pool together. Often we go and get resources on behalf of clients. Yeah, and those clients help us identify where we can help fit them in. But the idea of combining three or four different parties for uh you know something like PR, we hadn't gotten that one yet. So, Manny will make sure we follow up on that.

SPEAKER_01

I'll send you the example.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, that's a great example. Well, listen, thank you so much for your time.

SPEAKER_01

I'm trying to think of what we didn't cover that I wanted to cover, and I do think that I want to just say, you know, we get we keep getting told that in order to make money you're probably gonna have to sacrifice on your values. Yes. And I just don't think that's true. And I think entrepreneurs on the ground are proving it proving us right every single time, right? And it doesn't have to mean that you're fixing climate change or you know, somehow finding a solution to the political situation. I mean, that they don't have to be huge solutions. You're giving people jobs, that's a big deal. You're running your business in an ethical way, you're doing the right thing, I consider that to be an impactful business. And when we come out of the ashes of whatever is happening right now, we're going to need builders. And I think that that you talk a little bit about the tension between, like, okay, there's a war, there's huge things happening, my family might be losing their Medicaid. There are huge problems around us, and sometimes it feels it's a little overwhelming. It feels overwhelming and it makes you feel guilty whether the problems with your payroll are as important as the ones that you're hearing about in the news. But the most important thing that's going to happen in this country and around the world is that when everything finally settles, the most important people are the builders, and entrepreneurs are the builders. Absolutely. And so it doesn't matter how big or little the problems seem, you solving the problems of your businesses, or if you're in corporate, you helping entrepreneurs get that contract and thrive and live to see another day. That's how we build societies. And I don't think there is such a thing as too small of a problem when it comes to that.

SPEAKER_03

Well, on that, thank you very much. Appreciate you very much.