Purpose, Profit & Impact: The Tom Dawkins Story

What does it take to build not just a company, but an entire ecosystem for change?

In this episode of AFF Winds for Change, Afonso Faria sits down with social entrepreneur and ecosystem builder Tom Dawkins. As the co-founder of StartSomeGood and LendForGood, Tom has spent more than two decades helping changemakers launch ventures, raise capital, and scale impact.

Tom shares the personal experiences that shaped his entrepreneurial mindset, the challenges of building mission-driven organizations, and the lessons he’s learned from supporting hundreds of founders around the world. The conversation also explores the rise of impact investing, the importance of community in entrepreneurship, and why purpose-driven business is becoming increasingly important.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, investor, nonprofit leader, or simply someone passionate about creating positive change, this episode offers valuable insights into the future of impact-led innovation.

If you’ve ever wondered how business can become a force for good, this conversation is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

To F winds of change the show that takes to the heart of place that hosts the found of our explorer, evolving wind energy landscape, with decades of experience in management supervision and quality choice delete inside for discussions on the changes. Invite you to listen and join the conversation.

SPEAKER_03 0:24

Hi everyone, welcome back to our podcast, the F at Queen with Windsor Change. It's been a while since we've done podcasts. We've just been busy. The season has kicked off again. It's not on high season yet, but it has kicked off again with all the work and all the projects ongoing. So, anyway, here we are again, and today we are bringing something special. Today we are actually gonna go all the way across to another another side of the world. So today we thought you would someone from Australia. I am delighted to welcome Tom Dawkins in just a little bit. He's one of the most influential voices in social entrepreneurship and impact innovation. Tom has spent more than two decades now helping people turn purpose into action. That's the type of people that we want on the podcast. That's the type of people that inspire us and that we want to inspire you guys to go a little bit further, go beyond your boundaries and go beyond your comfort zone. So he's founded a youth-leg nonprofit VibeWire some time ago. Then he became Ashoka's first digital communications director, co-founded, start some good, and just recently started something else again. It's called Land for Good, where he has consistently been building platforms that empower other people to create changes. In fact, we need people that are out there, that think a little bit further, that are innovative, and that can change the world step by step, one by one. What makes Thomas story particularly fascinating is that he hasn't simply launched the opening. He hasn't just started opening, taking it from there. He has helped shaping ecosystems around social entrepreneurship, growth, crowdfunding, impact investing, community-led innovation. So he's quite active, quite busy. It's going to be a good podcast, an interesting podcast. I'm quite excited to learn more about his history. In this conversation, we're going to actually go into the personal experiences that I showed his worldview, the way he sees things, and the way that Tom acts and thinks upon the task to go into these ventures and to go into multiple ventures as well. And why he believes that entrepreneurship can be one of the most powerful tools for creating a better future. Remember, guys, it's not about just following, it's about creating, being innovative, not being afraid of stepping outside the comfort zone, not being afraid of doing something more, chasing dreams. Sometimes we are chasing the dream. At some point it becomes reality, or when we look back, it becomes reality, and then we realize that we were not that crazy having that dream, even though some people sometimes say that we are. So let's go into Tom Hopkins. Let's welcome Tom, welcome. It's a pleasure to have us with you. Maybe you want to introduce yourself very briefly.

SPEAKER_02 3:08

That was a very generous thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 3:12

Welcome, Tom.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

You want me to talk longer so you can get some coffee where you are today for me. But you know, it's a real pleasure to get to be on this show and share a bit of my story with you.

SPEAKER_03 3:23

Yeah, for me it's it's starting the day. For you, it's ending the day. That's the thing with the time zones. So hence the coffee. I wouldn't be drinking coffee at the end of the day, otherwise, then I wouldn't be sleeping all night.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

Yeah, that's my bad habit.

SPEAKER_03 3:34

Tom, looking back into where you started and what first sparked your design to create all social changes and pursue more into your career, what has set you off? What has been that decisive point where you said go and chase this?

SPEAKER_02 3:49

There was a point, actually, but there was also a lot of context leading up to that. The two key was the exam of parents and how purpose-driven they were. Neither of them were entrepreneurs, they're both public mom and public groups. But I guess what they've showed me or what they demonstrated to me is that work is a place where you can go to make a difference. I certainly know some of my friends grew up with a very different model of what work is, that works where you go to pay the bills, and then you know, and then you do the things you really care about outside of that and where to live kind of thing. And you know, that's that's fine too. But I just grew up, I just thought work a place where you pursued your passions, where you meant to contribute. Now that was also confusing for me, high school, know what it was to contribute to. I didn't visit a contribution that I wanted to make. And in the absence of that, I also didn't have the traditional model in my head where you get grade, degree, get a good job. I was like, no, no, I'm that you know, that's not the passion, but it's a key thing. But what I think you can do, and what I did consciously in the pursuit of that, was you can change your situation. And I the second key kind of precursor for me was going through change because I went through high school and spending a year in high school in this. That was a very kind of experience for me and very different people, uh, much more conservative. What I had, you know, growing up with around my parents and my communities, I guess, here. And that didn't necessarily change my politics, but it helped me understand my politics better in terms of having to kind of talk through a different perspective. While I was there for a year, the exchange organization I was with partnered with a couple of other organizations to get youth delegates to this massive international conference that was happening in San Francisco called the State of the World Forum. And it brought together Reagan and Margaret Thack, Ted Turner, and there were seven Nobel Peace Prize winners there, or something like that. Like I said, it was a big deal. I think in the piece, someone said, Well, if it's about the future, wouldn't it be nice to have some young people here? But the global search for worthy young leaders who deserve to be part of these conversations, they did just one thing to do when you don't have infinite budget, which is you partner with people. And so they partnered with an exchange organization to select from young people who were already very convenient. And so I found myself quite unexpectedly. I mean, you know, a few of us were invited to AY, I would like to play the forum. I found myself in 32 young people interacting with Nobel Prize winners, the world's leading business people. And it was the most extraordinary experience of my whole life. You know, these important people actually stopped and wanted to listen to us. Coming out of that event, though, I had this real kind of mixed feelings in a way. I felt deeply empowered and inspired. I totally dunked the Kool-Aid in terms of the importance of young people to be active citizens. You know, that it is so important that young person are heard in that. But I quickly asked myself, why was my voice one of the young voice actually experienced? It's the traditional youth because it's tokenistic, it's haphazard, and it's biased. Every single one of us had parents who could afford to send us to America for a year on exchange. And more or less, what I've been trying to do in various different forms, those three then San Francisco. The experience of knowing that their voice and ideas matter, that their life experience is important. And they have a role to play in helping us design and build a better future organizations through I mean co-working spaces and obviously through funding platforms to help people and accelerators and training programs to help more people, I guess, figure out. It's a bit meta, my passion. Other people can pursue their passion, but I want to reduce the business down in the way for people.

SPEAKER_03 7:20

Well, that's some powerful things that you said there. Starting off, I've been making some notes here because your experience in your farm is remarkable as far as I can tell and as far as I can see. Because you've touched there on a couple of things that is actually hard to reality. One of them is two sides of reality, and depending on how you look at your parents, how you're being raised, then you could take that as a good example to do more, or you can take as a bad example to do less. And it doesn't matter if your parents are people that are out there trying to be a little bit more than what they are already doing. So if you had parents, or if you have a family whole that you grow up in, that's how I mean, that's how I grew up as well. So if you grow up in a family that you don't really see the example of going out there and doing more for yourself, then you can grow into, you can think that as an example to do more for yourself. But on the other hand, if you see that example of doing more, then you would want to do more yourself. And of course, there are no coincidences in you flying over to the US and being there for one year, that brings us what I also say to even my own daughter. Go out there, find the world, don't enclose yourself in your little world where you grew up in. Go out there. There is more to see, but of course, there is money that is needed to do that. And then we come into the privilege of some societies or within societies, we have some privileged people, and some people that unfortunately are not that privileged. And I really endorse and I really adore the fact that you are doing that to help out other people and to learn to help others grow, because that's what we need. We need to spread more. We have the wealth, if we have the way and the means of helping others, and we need to. We need to, and that is also, if I bring that back into the industry where we work, that is also how we, for example, go into teaching others and getting people that is not necessarily changed and skilled within the industry, we still invest in them because they still need that opportunity, right? But anyway, going back to you, so you started quite young then because you started, I believe the first one that you signed up was Viwire. How old were you when you started that?

SPEAKER_02 9:28

That wasn't even the actual was university store, kind of me about some other universities. I was universal. There were a couple of things before that, even. I mean, I construct there has been a culture of clubs. If you've ever been any high club, I know that from high school sitcoms. That when I was a few school-organized kind of age club and chess club and the Bay Club, and there was support. But if you weren't doing representative sport, you were meant to be studying. It was an academic school, and then organization really pumped up, feeling like I need to do something. I had this, you know, this larger organization that had a playbook that would enable me to set up a chapter in the school. It was called Junior Statesman of America, very fancy name. But yeah, you did lots of monuments and learned how to do that. And when I came Australia, I wanted to set up something very similar. So I started Future Leaders of Australia again, but kind of I was kind of modelling the same thing. And we grew up members in 50 packed around Sydney. It was a bit of an upclimbe because there was actually banned at my school. My school was we weren't allowed to prompt things or organize things on school because I guess distraction from sport plus academics, you know, learning how to be a change maker difference in the world. I don't even think that differently today. So that's some very interesting thing. And one of the things I really learned, I can't get just leading to pitch people to share your ideas is half a battle bit right.

SPEAKER_03 10:51

One of the greatest challenges that adults, young or middle-aged adults go through is still to this day, is finding their own voice and not being afraid to challenge, not being afraid to speak out and not being afraid to actually speak their mind, right? Say what they want. And sometimes we are adults, but we're still a little bit afraid, we still have that challenge at us, we're afraid to speak up with other people, not that confident. So that's one of the biggest challenges. Tell me just really quickly, because we in Europe we grew up sitting watching American sitcoms and watching a little bit more of the American society, but we've never really well there was in Europe there was one big high school sitcom, Austrian sitcom that Solov was grew up with, and that's the only thing we knew about of Syria. Was that a big cultural change?

SPEAKER_02 11:38

By the way, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:40

I grew up watching as many European kids. Was that a big cultural change when you moved over to the going descended? There was some change, but there was a big difference there between between social classes, between school itself and behavior itself.

SPEAKER_02 11:55

Yes, but it was it wasn't I was impressed by kids my age who were like going on exchange to places with a very different culture, Brazil or even Italy, and been you know dropped into a new language and stuff. And I just went to another English-speaking country and I missed that opportunity to work on language skills, but certainly it exposed me to lots of subtle differences. And in some ways, it's that idea of that on Kanye Valley where everything's very simple. And I guess a lot of it was about just the culture of the spending time with meeting people from different black. It was actually a very conservative America I ended up with. I spoke kind Washington. We think of Washington state as like Seattle and progressive, but the whole state, you know, they had two Republican senators back then, and the eastern part of the state where I was is I met a lot of people with very conservative views and had some really interesting conversations with them. You know, I remember the first day in class meeting someone who thought something very about the bottom line who thought that the world was literally created in six days or the world was flat or some something, you know, I knew had existed in the past, but I didn't know the thing that's still believed. You know, it turns out I was the weirdo in that situation. Me, you know, I think kind of think-through things. I was challenged a lot by people. Sometimes that is shifting, sometimes not so much. You have to in some ways deep, but being more thoughtful because I actually had to be like, yeah, why do I having to collect it? And of course, there's a big gap between just the like day-to-day lived experience of most Americans and what we see on TV programs, particularly when it comes to class. I mean, as a general rule, I forget if I read some average, the actual life of people are presenting in American programs. Like even think about a show like Friends, one of them's a struggling actor, the other is a I forget what. Like, none of them are meant to be wealthy, but they're all like departments, like huge type of. None of them steam all that spends money. Sure, functional income they'd need to have the life tell about. So, you know, it's easy, I think, for a lot of us to grow up in a way thinking that America, land of all me, it is a rich country, evenly treated. And I saw that even more recently in America before years where I founded Starts and Good living in very places like San Francisco, but where you also see poverty and disadvantaged.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

You know. We'll talk about Starts and Good in a little bit. I just have another question before we jump in there. Because you just mentioned about being challenged and so and being the different guy in the class, but was there ever, you know, during the part of doing your all things that you accomplish and you have you've done sometimes there is some doubt, and sometimes there is days that we just question ourselves, right? That we just say, why do we do this and what are we doing? I'm sure you've encountered that yourself. How do you deal with that and how do you carry on?

SPEAKER_02 14:28

But yeah, but then yeah, I encountered that a lot in the sense of you know, all of my entrepreneurial endeavors. I mean, they've all achieved my goal out with grandiose goals, as we often do, to change the world in very end up, you know, at best changing the world in more modest and subtle ways, or in at one particular location or for or for the rest. And it's all hard when, you know, I often find it hard to differentiate between limited them, and ideally they have they're set up to be hard or you know, they're they're structurally difficult. So yeah, I had that a lot. I mean, part of I think what helps me keep going is I'm not sure what else I'd be doing, to be honest. I mean, I I don't really kind of came in my mind like I was a successful actress and then quit that to become a chainmaker. It's kind of all I've done, you know. Like for you know, I as I said, not my first, but I guess serious unpuffet while at university, and that I did my twenties, and then I then after that I started and did that for 14, 15 years, and now I'm focused on learn for goods. So, like, uh, how do I keep going? I mean, what I don't know, kind of look for the alternative to keep going. Exactly. Yeah, I'd have to go find how to do a whole bunch of things. Learn to code or something, but I missed the boat on that one.

SPEAKER_03 15:38

Well, that isn't worth a way. Sometimes there's other people that they're spending on how we keep going, so that's it. That it's not worth the way.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

And then to just like parenting in a way, I think. You know, like I mean, you have some like tough days as a people like how do you go? I mean, you don't just stood admin. You don't sit there going, so I keep going or not. You're gonna wake up tomorrow, you're still gonna be going. I don't even know how many conferences I've been to now. As you said, I started early and have been to a lot, so hundreds probably. And you know, seen so many speeches, and there's not that many that you remember, to be honest, out of all the stuff that washes over you. But I also think about this guy I saw some years ago at this social change conference with like everyone was camp. And this guy was a major forest campaigner. He was an older guy and did better forest Australia, you know, the kind of people who like go up trees for a month and chain themselves to bulldoze. And and through that whole time, we've been losing native forests in Australia. Like it's kind of been relentless, you know, trying to slow down the destruction, never really turning the corner. The kind of change the capitalist system reduces the, you know, and and someone asked him a similar question in a way, like, how do you, like looking back on your life, how do you feel about it? And he said some beautiful reflection that I can't remember most of it, but he said, at the end of the day, it's been a life well lived. And I think about that a lot, you know, that he got to spend time with other people who also cared the lose more often than they win. Yes, they did. It's not kind of like about the winning, but it is about the process. Living the life and the process living the life, exactly. I mean, it's a bit gloomy sometimes about my business, sometimes about the whole world. But I am fortunate that I regularly get to social entrepreneurs. And social entrepreneurship definitions that they're getting on with things, it's that they're optimistic, you know. You know, social entrepreneurship is kind of almost the act of doing the best we can with what we've got. You know, there are other important ways of making change, like activism, but social entrepreneurship specifically is kind of not relying on someone else to do the right thing and say, all right, what can I get on with? We have a creative life where I get that constant, I get to wrap up against really optimistic, practical, getting on with it, making a difference, people really regularly. And I love that.

SPEAKER_03 17:45

Certainly is about the pan and what the goal. I mean, the goal needs to be that you say your goal's high and you go for it, otherwise then you have nothing to work for. But it's it's every day today, not going into it. That's yeah. At least that's what keeps me going. That's what I see is most important, is the way that we get on to it and not when we get on.

SPEAKER_02 18:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

Tell me a little bit about Starts and Good because you've launched that as well. And with the social entrepreneurs also, that you are helping grow their own ideas. How does it work? What's the biggest lesson that people can learn and what you've learned from it? And how are you spreading that across so that it grows into more countries, more sectors, more groups for the Dr.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

Glip is one of the first social impact crowdfunding platforms. They founded it while San Francisco did uh Ashoka. And so Ashoka has spent decades looking for and supporting some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, literally coined the phrase social entrepreneurship, something like 50 years ago. But their mission to change, right around the time I got there, they embraced this everyone to change vision. How do we build a world where everyone can be involved and make this sorry? Did you go get more water? Sorry, I got a really persistent bug in my throat. Sydney. So I so sure can embrace this everyone to change my vision. Not everyone's gonna be one of the world's leading social entrepreneurs or founders of something that scales globally. But we all have a role to play, you know, in terms of creating a better future as orders, as conscious consumers, as philanthropists and donors, as great parents and community members, just digital communication there, thinking about how digital communications and digital the web to help support more change making and again to reduce those problems, my personal kind of mission as well. And so a lot of that was about inspiring people and educating people and sharing stories. And then I moved to San Francisco to work for a couple of other impact organizations, and it was thinking about early support for years, experience for the web or what a pro-innovation ecosystem is infrastructure and support for things not yet proven to work. And I realized that kind of what I'd experienced through my 20s in Australia, growing vibe wire, doing a lot of brand new things using technology, opening the first co-working space in Australia, working with young people, that a lot of why that was hard was essentially that philanthropy was all VC style funding and no angel style funding. And that we needed to find a way to catalyze more angel fighting ideas. And at the same time, crowdfunding was just beginning to blow up. Not my idea. Kickstarter was becoming prominent in D GoGo, particularly around more creative communities. I'd been to Burning Man Ocean Times, I knew a lot of burner. Big Burning Man came to fund the kind of artwork camps and so on happening out there. And so it didn't take long really for a light bulb to go under social entrepreneurs need this infrastructure as well as creative entrepreneurs. In some way, Kickstarter will solve you a very different problem, which is that the creative industry used to make the record label, the gatekeeper to sign you up, and then they will you want to radio another gatekeeper. And it was only once you were through those gates that hey, I like and buy it. And so while those, you know, while those institutions still have a role to play, they're the game in town now. If you're a musician, you can build audiences directly, you know, through YouTube, through Spotify, and so on. Raise money to go into the studio and reclaim through present. And so it's been that same kind of risk-tolerant fund and new things, not yet put relying on people who are investing money predicting what they want, and more professional obligation to try and do will work or what will work. And so quickly realized that it is just to get into that puff variance in your codence. We realized like a lot of people need a tool, they obviously need support to know how to use tools to actually get old with getting the youth of power. Was doing one of the things we did once was in Project On you don't run a project by just being cameras off the center. You spend with them helping them think what they want to say, how they can use cameras. We right from the start put far too much effort in to be honest. Like I didn't know what I was doing in web cables. It was my first for profit social enterprise, or so my first social enterprise rather than kind of something more related. I realized now it wasn't even my first social enterprise, but the first thing I was consciously building is such. And we were putting too much effort. On a basis than what a crowdfunding model could support. So over time, over the last 15 years, while Startsumer still runs a crowdfunding platform, the bread and butter of the organization now is more around accelerator programs, leadership programs that are sponsored by foundations, corporates, local governments, and so on to help us engage us to support new innovations, new ideas. Obviously, at a big location, the type of foundation we've run youth funders, women, indigenous, as well as for very for flicking vertical economy, tech. So that's kind of the basic these days. It was acquired two years ago and is now part of a big group with a number of kind of accelerator brands in Australia, including Boomerang Labs, Energy Labs, Clean Tech, and Rapid Cedar, and crowdfunding specialists and amongst that. Both entrepreneurs and residents focus now teaching and coaching other founders. She understood all entrepreneurially into LinkedIn. And then we want to help them.

SPEAKER_03 22:56

Let's go into land for wood because that's the most recent that you've started. And what was the gap that you just mentioned? But then that brought you on to land for wood. So where does land for wood get end and how is making the change, as making that thing?

SPEAKER_02 23:10

Well, something sorry funny, it has happened with kind of impact investing or social enterprise investing over the last 10 years, I think. I mean, when I started stuff from good, I felt like the gap was right at the very beginning. But no one was helping me here, really, so that I'd experience San Francisco, whether, you know, whether it's access to tools and education, the things at the very beginning. Sadly, that's you know, that that was a product of philanthropy, you know, that it was mostly relied on philanthropy, and philanthropy is trying to do, you know, most, you know, philanthropists are trying to do the best they can, but it often they and the less that they can confident is gonna happen. Yeah. And so I think a lot of the quest, you know, if you think of kind of you, if you distilled it down into like a question of a lot of it was, but will I might fund it? Will it work? You need to be it could work. But if you want to work is enough, but will work, go. Let's find out. Let's actually none of us actually know what not. The only way to find out is to try. That's just part of my frustration these days is fangled thing, aligning us most with the impact. In ways it has a similar dynamic to philanthropy, which is a lot of money but at the latter stage. And very little money at that early stage. A lot of money at the it's already working, let's scale it up stage, very little money at the earlier stage. And so the gap has moved a little bit. You know, the the main at the very beginning, there's actually there's so much more support now at the very beginning than there was 15 years ago. I mean, it's competitive parts. Well, I was happy to let to for Start Some Good to be acquired and to shift my focus, was it's actually like a really competitive space to earn these contracts to run these programs to support early stage entrepreneurs. Every university has it has some sort of support program, it feels like Australia. Most state governments have provided some funding. Foundations have got better at supporting idea stage, not all of them, but some of them, innovation challenges, easy to raise the first $50. There's also pre-sale and crowdfund goods. The same never been easier to raise funds. There's a lot of money in latter stage funds who are desperate for if you meet parameters. There's an oversupply of capital versus deal flow. But then there's this big gap in between 50,000 to 5 million, where there's very little that happens. And particularly 50,000 to 1 million. And that's partly because of just the cost of deal making. You know, these funds are expensive to run, and the due diligence makes uneconomic for them, irrespective of the actual economics of privacy city. That was a piece that I didn't fully understand. That you think a lot about, you think that investment is all about the economics of the organization raising investment, but it's a lot about the economics of the organization being the thing. And that kind of creates this demic gap that gets called the missing middle in impact investing. And we're trying to close that through this partnership model. It's very different from Start Some Good in the sense that an enterprise who wants money can't just rock up and create a campaign. They have to be listed by and endorsed by one of our foreign counting support organizations around the world. So they're early stage, so they're people like Start Some Good is one of them. They're people like accelerated, capacity builders, investors, doing to share some of that due diligence on the platform. So they're having to start from kind of kind of endless due diligence in the sector. I think due diligence is a lot, and we need it. We're not we're not disparaging enough of it. We've got plenty of it. But most of what we have is poorly distributed and often wasted. And so we're trying to build a platform that makes essentially deal making cheaper, the platform also takes care of all that busy work of knowing your customer checks, anti-money laundering, moving the money around, contracting. So we're trying to radically reduce the cost of deal making to help more enterprises grow through that kind of missing middle capital gap so that they can they can then access more of the capital that is sitting around in latter-stage funds waiting for the bad deal to rock up, money out of those funds in the world where it can make a difference.

SPEAKER_03 26:48

Listening to you, it brings me so many thoughts up of things that an out there that sometimes as entrepreneurs we get pulled into things for fundraising or for supporting others and so on, and investing in others and so on. And sometimes we are just not renting that. And that's because we are missing all steps. We are missing to see the overall picture, which is exactly what you described that throughout your journey with all of the starts and woods, all of your journey has led you to uh recognize those gaps and try to close those gaps and try to make it bigger, try to make it a little bit better distributed and better shared between everyone. Most importantly what you said, at least that's what caught my attention and what stopped most is what you said about will it work and could it work? Because sometimes it's just an idea, and if that's a slight chance and it can work, we need to go for it. That's it. We are just about running out of time, so we'll slowly close up. One last question. Where do you see yourself in 10 years, saying 10 years from now? And what advice would you give someone that wants to make a change and doesn't know what to start?

SPEAKER_02 27:56

Oh, dispense on the first time pretty quickly, because I never really think that far ahead, to be honest. For all that like the work I'm doing is always about the future and change. I'm just very much about kind of like what I do now, what's at my disposal. You know, I really have a vision. I mean, I hope I'm healthy still doing my my kids will be at 20 by then. That's kind of blowing, and I hope good enough to do fun adventures with them and see the world. Give them a cross-cultural experience that was so important to me an early age as well, between now and then. In terms of where to get started, I think we've touched on it. I think that if you haven't already found that thing that's lighting you up, go to new places, have new experiences. If you do see a challenge in the world, but it's not one you yourself have a lived experience of, be some pre yourself to the problem. Don't blow in thinking you've already just found out about it, but you already have the perfect solution. It's really important to learn from the people who've been doing it already and see what's out there. So there's definitely sorts of change makers, community groups, and so on. I would really encourage you to try and find a group looks well where you can go and maybe you know there's a couple of good ones in Sydney and uh hope that hopefully there are where you well, where you can meet people who are also thinking a difference or who are changing. Surround yourself with people who are of a similar mind is great. It's very inspiring. Often you can, you know, it's a great place where you learn about new ideas or things you want to get involved with.

SPEAKER_03 29:13

I fully agree with that. I fully agree that we need to get out there, be more open-minded, learn from the ones that have already done it. And especially nowadays, in OMS that grew up when you started, there was no it was already limited when it comes to it nowadays. There is so many tools out there that is so much available and accessible, that we need to use those tools. We need to be able to grab hold of that and use it in a way that is actually productive and effective and helps us and not just waste time. That's something that unfortunately I see sometimes people wasting their own time. And we only have a set amount of time on this wall, so we need to make sure that everything counts, right? That's right. Ten years from now, who knows what's gonna happen, but if we make today a good day and tomorrow a better day, then for sure ten years from now it will be even better.

SPEAKER_02 30:05

That's right. I think a lot about it after myself, what's the next right step? Breaking it down, I think it's the next right step. You know, make the next right step of today file from interesting places.

SPEAKER_03 30:18

Exactly. And it's just a little bit so right, Tom. Thank you very much. The time is interesting to meet you and to talk with you. I will certainly dive more into Len for Wood and to start some wood as well. I will look you up, I'll dive into it more and see what it is that we have here in Europe and Portugal. We have European based based in Portugal, and I'm looking forward to speaking to you again. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 30:44

All right, guys, so there you have it. Another wonderful podcast. It's always good to talk with entrepreneurs from all kinds of industries, even though it's not our own industry, but we can subtly take the lessons and we can certainly take the experiences that we learn from other people, from other entrepreneurs, from other people that go out there, step outside their boundaries, their comfort zone, go and learn about other cultures, try to share more. And once again, it's about sharing. We are all individuals, we all build ourselves individually, we all grow ourselves individually, but we grow based on the experiences that we see around us, that we live with, and to do that, we need to be able to look at people, see what they do, learn from them, learn from the mistakes that we believe others are doing because it's always expected. But learn from the mistakes that we believe that people are doing, try to do different, learn from our own mistakes. That's the most important. Be uh critical about the way that we see ourselves and that we judge ourselves so that we can actually learn. If we are always thinking that we're doing things in the correct way, then we can never actually make that next step to actually correct ourselves because it's not always good. We do make mistakes. What to take from this, from today's podcast, and I believe one of the biggest lessons that we can take from this podcast, it's very powerful if you think about it, is whatever you have in your mind to do, whatever you have in your dreams to achieve. Sometimes people might say that if you share, by the way, it's sometimes it's not good to share, but if you share it with other people, sometimes people say that you are crazy, you will never achieve that. But whatever it is that you set on to do, think to yourself, can it actually work? Is there a slight chance that it can work? Then take that chance. You don't want to be sitting here for 10 years from now thinking about things that you could have maybe tried, but you have never tried because you refrained step outside the comfort zone. Guys, that's it. The next podcast is going to be interesting as well. We're going to be talking with some persons that are actually very active within the renewable industry itself. We're going to step back a little bit into the industry. There's going to be one podcast, so I don't know when that's going to happen, but very soon that is going to be very regional, very local in Portugal. In the area where I live, because Portugal is a very country, guys. Let's face it. The area where I live, it's not really valued that much, although we do have one of the biggest we are uh contributing the most to the industry and to the economy of Portugal and the region where I live, even though we don't really talk that much about it, we don't really see it that much. So we're going to try and go out to entrepreneurs and companies out there within the industry that make the change in Afro in this region. So that's going to be one of the next ones. I don't know exactly if it's the next one or the other one, but it's coming out soon. And I'm looking forward to speak to you guys. Once again, reach out if you have a specific topic that you want to talk about. If you want to come out here and expose yourself and talk to people and say what's on your mind, you're more than welcome to do so. As I said in the beginning, half seasons kicking off, high seasons kicking off. This year there's a lot of winter lines going up. Next year there's going to be more. So, guys, stay safe. Make sure that you have everything checked. Make sure that everything is up to date, your certificates, your trainings, your experience. Make sure that you are well enough, that you are good to go. And let's go and change the world. Thank you, guys. See you next time.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Joining us on AFF Winds of Change. We appreciate your time and hope you enjoy this deep dive into the wind energy world. Stay tuned for our next episode where our fonts of Faria returns with more insights. Until then, keep riding. The winds of change.