what if we take that philanthropy and rather than Give It Away invest it in entrepreneurs you don't just use your heart but you use your head you don't want to create dependency you want to set these people free that's not charity that's Market building we kept on trying
to solve that problem in a top down fashion and it just didn't work and you came up with a completely different way to not only empower the people but to actually get it to work we don't really get dignity until everyone has dignity
investment ISM means to fully outsized impact to help us solve our most pressing human problems I don't think there's a better return on your dollar well hello everyone it's Jim o Shany with yet another infinite Loops I cannot tell you how excited I am to have
today's guest jackwell and novag Gratz the founder of the Acumen Fund in which I have been uh active and will be active again best-selling author of the blue sweater which is a lovely book by the way and your newer book the manifesto
for a moral Revolution I I I don't think that there's an Accolade that you haven't earned you're among the top 100 thinkers according to foreign policy magazine the 25 smartest people of the decade says The Daily Beast 100 great
living business binds according to Forbes my gosh Jacqueline how how do you even like uh uh how how do you accomplish all of this first off welcome well thank you very much and I don't even know how to answer that I I I surround myself with people who are so
much better at what they do than I could ever do Jim and I'm and I'm a good cheerleader I think it comes with the territory of being the eldest of seven so so I'm the youngest of six but I couldn't agree with you more it's like everyone will say uh sometimes to me wow
I can't how do you manage to do this this and this I'm like oh no no no I'm the show horse part the workhorses on my team are the ones who actually do all the real work so so we're very very lucky uh in sharing that point of view
uh in that regard you know what was what what drew me to Acumen and you originally uh was you have a completely different model for uh uh charitable giving um you really your approach is all around listen poverty isn't just an income thing poverty is a lack of uh
dignity it is a lack of options and choices and you you just so I found your view with the Acumen fund so refreshing so if you don't mind let's start there and and for our listeners who don't know the origins of the Acumen buun could you
sort of take us through that origin story and and then we'll talk a little bit about how you approach giving in a vastly different and I think far more effective manner than many of the other International uh Charities thanks um sure so the Argent
story really goes back to um probably like you as the youngest of six um eldest of seven growing up in a a big Catholic Family with this idea of to whom much is given much is expected so always having this desire to know the world and frankly to contribute to the
world um and yet the economic realities of having to make my way through the world and so my first job was um on Wall Street I found I loved the tools of banking um my first job brought me to 40 countries as well and that was my first
interaction with the then so-called developing world and I remember going to Brazil falling madly in love um and yet seeing how that the bank the bank's loans were never given to the people who I saw actually doing the work in the streets the ones who were in The
favellas Who were so full of work and life and um desired and yet they didn't even have the confidence to walk into the doors of the bank because they knew they wouldn't be served that was a huge experience in in my young professional life that sent me on this journey to try
and understand what it would take to actually use the tools of bus business and Banking and extend them to people who' never had access to credit I'd heard about the gramine bank which was developed in 1976 and gave tiny loans to to women
very effectively and I thought maybe I could do something like that too long story lands me in Rwanda where I ended up um starting the first micro Finance Bank in that country with five randan women and saw how you could change a corner of the world with enough
determination and a few skills given it who I was how young I was um but I also saw to your point Jim that um this was an era of a lot of top- down Aid charity government assistance that was creating dependency which is the opposite of
dignity and the culmination of all of that was this inequality uh and ultimately this is a country that went through the genocide um that the knowing working with and loving people and building an institution for so social justice um who then experienced a
genocide and in some cases helped lead the genocide help made me really think about what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to act actually operationalize not just getting people a little more income or a a job for a job
sake but actually the Dignity of having choice and opportunity that's when aiman was born in 2001 we um we started with this idea that if people had choice and were treated like customers and not passive passive recipients of Charity we might
actually do a better job getting goods and services to them that they otherwise wouldn't have second we saw Capital as ecumenical um the irony is that philanthropy should be the most risk-oriented Capital that we have and yet it's where we too often see people
not taking risk and so we asked ourselves what if we take that Phil thropy and rather than Give It Away invest it in entrepreneurs uh who are trying to build markets where they have not existed and solve problems of poverty in health in
education in energy and agriculture at the time we thought patient Capital was 7even to 10 years I've since learned that disrupting entire Industries or building new ones altogether can take 10 to 20 years and so you have to be really patient with your capital and support
those on R preneurs and those companies um with management assistant your Social Capital your access to networks and if you do that and you're diligent and to your point you don't just use your heart but you use your head and you're willing
to call failure and take down take writeoffs Um this can work and our companies today have brought services and goods to over a half a billion people I see companies you know for a dollar of philanthropy we invest not only do you see $65 in Impact created
for an individual or a family but you see self-sustaining businesses that are then in the long term contributing jobs and real opportunities to the economy and so that's the akumen model and that was precisely What drew me uh to you and
to the fund I I loved the way you reoriented it and and treated it as an investment and an investment specifically in people uh I I was so incredibly aligned with you on the terms of you you know you don't want to create dependency you want to set these people
free you you don't want to uh just like dump a bunch of stuff on them and I the number of times I've told the story of the woman's uh company making the mosquito netting that I'm going to ask you to tell and uh the micro Finance but
also the the ambulance company in India uh and and I would literally having these conversations I would use Venture terms I would say you know I don't know another I don't know a hedge fund I don't know a VC fund that's getting like a 65x return on on their Investments and
that's what you were doing like you are you know the uh you're at Thorp if you're just doing it for money um and so sh share the share the two stories because I I love the the mosquito net story uh because we kept on trying to solve that problem in a top-
down fashion and it just didn't work and you came up with a completely different way to not only empower the people but to actually get it to work yeah um you you you say so many interesting things and I feel like you're you're in my head which is amazing about you but I
um I literally wrote this morning that aiman's theory of change starts with people and we've actually grown from the model I just talked to you about to one where we have a an academy that teaches um young entrepreneurial leaders operational Financial skills and what we
call the moral imagination um from that hope that some of those entrepreneurs will go and get invested in um with our patient capital and then we've got about 300 million um that we're managing in the for-profit space and then it's take
the insights take the lessons and share it with the world you're bringing me back to one of the earliest Investments at acumin um in in bednets at the time this is back in the early 2000s um 9 % of all malaria was in Africa and 95% of all bed net production was in Asia
and so Sumitomo had developed a polyethylene based fiber that could be injected with an organic um insecticide parthum that was that had a a very high efficacy rate and um but they didn't know whether they could manufacture it on the African
continent and there was a very little belief that this could be done with efficiency and so this was actually a collaboration where Acumen helped find the right entrepreneur so we didn't do it um and and then we helped build a partnership with UNICEF with um we
needed resin from uh Exxon from the polyethylene production of oil and so ex Exxon actually contributed this resin that would that would hold the parthum and uh and before you knew it there was one line of mar malaria bed bed nets and
every time I would go back there would be more and the company grew till they had about between 10 and 13,000 employees and they were making 30 million bed nets a year and this is now almost 20 years so it's been more than half a billion bed nets manufactured out
of Arusha Tanzania and the whole time that we were part of it and we exited long long ago but the whole time we were part of it I would talk to um Anusha and binesh who were the founders and I would say I such I'm such a believer in
African solutions to African problems this is still an import but this is a third generation family that is creating now one of the largest companies in the country providing good jobs and uh life life changing uh Technologies and just a
couple of years ago or maybe it was last year binesh called me and he said jacine we've just developed the first um new uh anti-resistant uh malaria bed net here in our laboratory in Aria and so that original patience allowed the fundamentals to be to create a
foundation in Tanzania which now is creating an African Sol solution to an African problem and I think this is the story and it's why you started at people it is an investing and Adventure approach but it's also a relationship approach it's a
long-term commitment to the people and to the planet and to seeing investment as a means to solve a problem and not simply as an end in and of itself there's just you're inside my head too because one of the things that that we do at oan ventures is give fellowships and grants
and the idea of African uh solutions for AF or for African people um uh we we have a fellow actually who yet is in Africa and uh the reason he got the fellowship and you were probably whispering in my ear and I didn't even know it uh because he had come up with
an onth ground solution for sanitary napkins for African women I I knew nothing about the problem all of the sanitarian napkins and and other devices were imported they were very very expensive and so what was happening was young women young ladies were going
without and this gentleman formed a mostly female uh company in which they were going to use banana uh fiber to create them on the ground in Africa and he's just killing it and he and and the women women running that uh firm are
making huge differences uh locally and and I love your idea because I was chatting with him at an offsite and he's got big plans he wants it to be in Pana Africa he wants to but the idea is he saw the problem he thought like an entrepreneur he thought no no no I I
don't want any of this from outside I want to create opportunities here I want to solve the problem s here and that is such a great lesson that I think I must have learned from you when when uh listening to AC aiman's uh strategies thank you for saying that because Jim
there's such a hunger also of young entrepreneurial leaders just in West Africa um we got over 700 applications for the 20 spots this year um and these young people are doing incredible things um in a way that 20 years years ago we didn't
see the that pipeline that we have uh today I was just in Nigeria a while ago and um there's a company called coolbox and this is a solar refrigeration and freezer company uh which just got a contract after really disrupting the market just got a contract for um the
First Assembly of the refrigeration in Lagos so for me it's been really really fun over these past 20 years to see a new generation come to teach us what we did not know I I I certainly got the Africa bug um and uh when we were in uh Nairobi we
were talking to lots of people in one of the larger slums there and I honestly was just so impressed by the energy the enthusiasm the incredible amount of ideas that these people had and and I just think Africa is just there it's Blue Sky in my
opinion if they can their population is Young they're techsavvy we uh have uh invested in several feeder funds that are on the ground in Africa because like I I just think there's so much potential there how do you answer like the
naysayers you're probably much better at this than I am I you know it was like yeah but all of the political risk all of the existential risk you yourself mention you know Rwanda and and the horrors that happened there um what what what do you say to the the people who
are always like going on and on about how yeah great opportunity but also huge huge risks well all great opportunity comes with risk first of all number two to your point Jim the this is the youngest population on the planet it's upwardly
mobile very ambitious wants to be connected and um full of opportunity and if you're going to talk about Kenya I actually think Kenya could be the first African tiger because Kenya also is more than 85% electrified most of that
electricity is coming from geothermal Hydro GRE sources so Kenya will soon be a lowcost hub not only for distribution but for manufacturing um very educated uh very entrepreneurial Youth and so one I look at just the the macro situation of what that looks like
compared to aging America aging Europe who's also increasingly full of too much cynicism too much spare too much loneliness and so we are actually talking ourselves down while young people in East and West Africa are talking themselves up they only see the
upside and that is fun to be around it's wonderful to invest in but we also have the numbers and so to your point on Innovation we get to invest in in young entrepreneurs who see these enormous problems that would that are to anybody but they're
not afraid to start where they are with what they have so you take the the issue of you were talking about the slums you're were probably in Kara but near there is a slum called mukuru and uh these three young people saw that one in three human beings on the planet have
no access to a toilet talk about daunting then you go into where you were right where there's there's no room for INF infrastructure no room for sewage there these are areas that are are famous for What's called the flying toilet it's more dignity and it's safer
to defecate inside your house into a polyethlene based bag or um on paper even and then throw the bag onto the rooftops they often land in the streets and um and so when I used to go there you'd often wear gum boots because you'd be up in the rainy season in this
muck uh in the in the during the season they started with this idea that if we built toilets not in the oldfashioned way of a latrine that gets full and then disgusting and then nobody wants to use it because you don't know what to do
with it instead they built toilets where that were dry two holes to separate the liquid and the and the solid and every day the waste is picked up by now about 800 um collectors they bring it to a composting area the F the next business that they
thought as a way to generate enough Revenue to P to make this business work was um to sell fertilizer and what they learned was that there wasn't really a great market for small holders to buy natural organic fertilizer um they still sell it but undaunted then
they started thinking about well what are the other products that can be developed well if you breed black soldier flies on top of the compost you you have the ability then to create some of the most protein rich and energy efficient animal feed in the world and
so now they've got an enormous they essentially have three companies they have a waste collection company they collect about 200 tons every week of waste um a fertilizer business and an animal feed business they run 7,000 toilets across
Nairobi and now another city Kumo and they've just expanded into Zambia that kind of innovation is really exciting to be around it doesn't provide the kind of venture returns that some of the guys you were talking about look are looking for but if you're
looking for investment as a means to fully outsized impact to help us solve our most pressing human problems I don't think there's a better return on your dollar yeah and uh the other term that you pioneered at least for me was the
idea of social return on investment um and uh that that really uh struck me because uh I I like you uh was born into a prominent family uh with very much the where much is given much is required and uh it just as as I was looking at sort of philanthropic things to get involved
in the reason I was so struck by you was because number one you you weren't uh an authoritarian now you're going to do it this way I like there was so much of that and I'm so repelled by that because it it's just not it doesn't work at all
what I loved about your approach is yours is it's almost like you truly understand complex adaptive systems that comes from below where where all of the great ideas and emergence come from and and also though the idea of give a person a fish you fed them for the day
teach them how to fish invest in their fishing pole company and you might get to give them a really really great uh opportunity that just expands you plant the seed and as far as your your comment about uh we here in the west I I I agree
with you sadly um and one of my little things I do is I put up two quotes from various authors every day on social media and one that I just recently put up was and I'm going to mangle it uh but it was along the lines of if you want to
destroy a country poison their stories people with poisoned stories they tell defe stories they tell cynical stories they tell stories of Ah that's never ever going to work and and your focus on people Network and empowerment I I just think that that's planting a
seed that literally it just continues to grow grow and grow and that's where the patience comes in um but you also pioneered a lot of things like microfinance for example talk a little bit about that because I was also struck
by that idea like you know what why was it why weren't we doing that before why did it take Jacqueline and aumen to really figured that out and help it scale that's the important aspect of that but well a couple you've said so many things that I actually didn't grow
up in um in a um a prestigious family I actually grew up in a scrappy immigrant uh military family and I and I think that that was part of my own entrepreneurial bent all seven of us are entrepreneurs um and so Freedom probably was a core value
Jim um none of us are very good with with rules but all of us feel a deep um commitment to each other and to doing what we can to to society and I think it it's very much linked to Immigrant grandparents um who were poor um and I tell you I see my
grandmother's face everywhere and the dignity with which she carried herself the way she thought about work and the way she thought about Community um when I first moved to Randa in 1986 microfinance had already been pioneered but it was it was very very
nent it was it was it was 10 years old but remember that was a time pre- internet pre social media and so you had to really be a junkie about alternative Finance if you were going to be at all associated with it it was in Bangladesh
India a little bit in Latin America um and I owe a lot to those true Pioneers um the idea was that Banks had no interest in lending to very very poor people just as most companies have very little interest in creating products for lowincome people
because well it's it's almost um tological the people have no income there's very little infrastructure there's high levels of corruption there's low levels of trust to make it work you have to have very low margins at least that was the conventional wisdom when it came to
credit however poor people because they couldn't get access to the banks would go to money lenders who charge kind of what payday lenders charge now in the United States right 4 to 600% and so if you could provide legitimate Trust worthy credit at 10 12%
per year which was what we charged at that time in history there was such a sense of of gratitude capability the women for the first time were in a way it was almost a practicum for working within the formal economy not just in the informal economy and so
I learned the power of the multiplier effect within an economy um by providing these small amounts of loans that women indeed did pay us back 99 100% I also learned that not all human beings are entrepreneurs and I think it's a mistake we make we're all
survivors and I think that's why the gig economy has gotten has taken off but the kind of entrepreneur that build something that creates jobs and disrupts markets most of are not wired that way thank thank thankfully um because I am
and my husband is and I can tell you what it looks like when the whole Community is an entrepreneur but if we could provide people that that access to get credit so that they they could solve their own problems whether it be by a
little refrigerator or more Tomatoes as working capital or frankly have a wedding which it's when I first heard of it I thought well that's not productive but in cultures that are very much dependent on the community helping each other it could be very productive and so
it helped me understand the economy um I I would say in a much more nuanced human way than I had previously so today micro Finance is everywhere uh billions and billions of dollars it's formalized there's consumer protection it's an industry uh patient capital of the work
we do is looks more like micro Finance did all those years back um and patient capital is more complex because we invest anywhere from $250,000 to $5 million in a company in the early stages when we believe that it has the the potential to help solve one
of the big social problems of our time you bring up something that has perplexed me for a while uh in trying to kind of think about how one can go about creating higher trust societies um I think that ultimately you know uh credit comes from the Latin
Credo which means I believe and the idea is of course based on trust I I used to tell people and this is something you'll know because you did work on Wall Street and and a lot of people would look at me like I had three heads when I would say it but
Wall Street is ultim based on trust it's based on trust that you will do what as my counterparty you will do what you say you will do our entire system would disintegrate if all of a sudden none of us trusted each uh our counterparties uh
on Wall Street and I just wonder in I mean do you have thoughts on on how you go about creating a and I know let's let's not have grandiose ideas how do you starts small to other than by showing trust acting in trust uh you know I know that we can do that as
individuals and as organizations with each other and with other people but then but then how do you plant that seed in a patient way so so that trust starts to that flywheel starts going because in higher trust societies you can just get so much more
done so Jim first I want to challenge Wall Street um because I think it used to be very much based on trust when you look at the um at the financial crisis in 2008 I will never forget being at a dinner when where a hedge fun guy was explaining to
me that he could lose 90% of his money of of the money people invested and they'd still be whole and I was like help me understand this how does this work and he said well you know we're essentially at the fourth in line on this market for the mortgage and I said
but so who ultimately then pays the Repo Man to take those people's house away from them and he looked at me he was like that's not the question because that's not my problem I actually think that what happened on Wall Street in 2008 is that we got so far away from
each other that we lost our sense of connection and that there's trust to your point with with you with with the people you are dealing with but I often say that distance dulls the moral imagination and I actually think that
that's happened in many of our financial systems where we're so far away from the consequences of the financial decisions that we make including destroying a company because we're not making high enough returns so just get rid of all the jobs without thinking
through the consequences that it's made made us um less than we could be and it's it's actually reduced trust uh because I 100% agree with you I think capitalism is built on trust and I do work in some of the lowest trust pockets of the
world and yet when you show up and when you consistently make good on your word it it's amazing how people will afford you that trust so I often say that trust is the rarest currency that we have it's really easy to lose it's hard to build you were brilliant before when you
said um you were talking about Nations and that the the the myths the stories we tell if those get poisoned we get poisoned I think the world needs more role models and business models to show people who they could be and how they
could be in the world and and that mean that goes for all of us to be more conscious about how we lead and know that people are are looking at us but um within our company some of the best companies in terms of trust building that are purpose-driven when I think
about them they're great storytellers and they're great at setting ex setting examples and making examples of people so you mentioned the ambulance company before which started out with nine ambulances when we exited they had
um was it 13,000 13,000 ambulances and they've taken 50 million people to uh hospital and they fundamentally help shaped the new the the policies for emergency Healthcare in India the way the ambulance system operated pre zit was um you would essentially well the
way that it did in the United States you would call in the 50s you would call the ambulance service it would never come and so 90% of people who were in the official ambulances were dead you would really call them only to take your loved
one to the war to the morg if you wanted to get somebody in a rush to the hospital you call the guy with the car or a taxi and typically you'd pay a bribe um to get them there than when zakita saw this and saw that this multi-billion dollar industry was
so broken even though they only had nine ambulances they decided to take a run at it and um after they had developed their systems and their operations um they knew that they had to count on the driver's uh trustworthiness because people were in the habit of paying BRS
so how do you break that and so there's the according of trust there's the trust but verify so they have a call center and they would call many of the people after they'd been to the hospital to make sure you know did you pay a bribe were you asked
to pay a bribe what was your experience so you have the checks and then there was the storytelling one of my favorite stories was of a ambulance driver um who came to the scene of an accident and the person who'd been hit by a car was lying on the road and his wallet
with about $200 worth of rupees had fallen onto the roadside and so the driver grabbed the wallet and he would not let it go he stayed with the patient through surgery because he wouldn't even give it to the doctors he was so afraid
that somebody would steal this money that belonged to the person who had been injured and when zakita heard that story they made a hero this guy another wise sort of nameless man making a few dollars a day got into the newspapers
celebrated inside the company and um and suddenly you have a new currency for what does it mean to succeed I think we have to do that more we started something in acuum which we should bring back we haven't done it because we're too big now but we used to do these
Frontline Awards where we weren't just celebrating the entrepreneurs but the entrepreneurs got the chance to celebrate their most effective um employees the Frontline workers and to see these people go on stages and to be honored for their values honored for the way they showed
up honored for the Excellence um with which they did their job was everything I think we need more of that not just in companies that are serving the poor but frankly in all of our organizations I think that's a great idea and uh you know incentives I've
always been fascinated by incentives and and sometimes some of the best incentives are not Financial of course Financial incentives matter um but uh what you're just mentioning and speaking to recognition um and and uh things like
that they can also build mimetically right like people see that and they're like wow I want to be more like that I want to behave more like that um on on your observation about Wall Street uh you are correct about um the uh the impact of the financial crisis I I I was
very distressed uh by the socialization of Lawes um because that sort of goes against everything at least I'm in favor of in terms of free markets you know it's one of the reasons why I put my name on my companies because uh when you put your name on when you put your name
on your company you're all in because uh if you if you screw up or you do things that are nefarious and and bad uh it's not you know Global uh evil Corp it's you it's oasi and you know that's why they used to that's why they used that the
banks used to uh be you know Morgan Stanley JP Morgan meril Lyn Fierce pen and Smith you know all of it were the names and they were Partnerships and it was their money so there was no socialization of losses if they made mistakes they were the ones who paid for
it and that's a really good point that you brought up um yeah uh the we need to get back to I I was speaking more in terms of like dealing on a counterparty uh level in where you have to trust your counterparty but that point is an
excellent point and it really did distress me we cannot socialize losses we cannot make others who have nothing to do with it pay for our mistakes and that's what happened and I'm with you totally opposed to that model of capitalism because that that's that's
crony capitalism that isn't free markets um I I deeply believe in free markets but with Level Playing Fields and and rules where you know consequences matter to the individual and and organized players so I I I definitely um uh want
to acknowledge that you're absolutely right and I happen to agree with you on on that particular thing thank you for saying that I I appreciate that very much and well thank you for for reminding me um it's uh and and for clarifying it's so interesting to me
that we sometimes get lost you you can never what's the Great Line about communication is is trying to figure out if it's even taking place and and that's something that you're so good at and your organization is so good at tell me about the motivations for for
the books they speak beautifully to your mission to the mission that you share with others um but again when when I when I first was reading the one with morality right I I had one of these like oh morality that's high on her horse yeah no no I
didn't think that because I know you but but the I I thought huh like when people see that word I don't think that they mean what you mean so if you'd help uh our our listeners and viewers talk a little little bit about why you chose that particular word and the way you
mean morality when you're speaking about it such a great question and uh I could got talk for a long time even about the titles before I do I want to acknowledge you though because you said sometimes with communication do we
even have that communication and and the counter side of that is is anybody listening you are an extraordinary listener and we'll often say it Acumen that the the way we have to teach ourselves to listen is not to come from a place of trying to convert or convince
but to change and in the interaction we just had the way you listen one really honors the person being listened to but the way you acknowledge the way you learned it just made me feel bigger and so I just want to acknowledge we need more of that so thank you
that's very kind it's true in terms of the the the reason for the books the first book actually started out as a love letter to the women with whom I had gone through the genocide um in Rwanda and I want to be clear I wasn't in Rwanda during the genocide but I had
over the four you know the years that I was there that's all I did this is what I you know had loved I put my whole heart and soul into a this institution with my co-founders and um and I saw communities and and I dare say the country in a
moment of great change and to be part of that was incredible so when the genocide happened and I lost scores and scores of friends um I had to go back to find out what happened to people and particularly the people that ended up uh as bystanders or as
perpetrators how and while I was there um on one of my visits that I went regularly for years I found myself needing to to to discover this bakery that I had started before we talked about most people aren't entrepreneurs and I was like someone's
got to build a business and I couldn't find someone to do it so I thought I'll do it and so they had helped build this Bakery 20 women and um I wanted to go back and see where it was I knew that the baker itself wasn't there anymore but I wanted
to see who was there what did it look like and I was walking on the street in this little area called yamaro and all I could find was this blue paint on the road which was reminiscent of a wonderful day we' had together where we painted the
bakery and and so I knocked on the door in front of I was standing in front of the door I knocked on the door and a woman came and answered it and she didn't speak French which was the language of Rwanda when I lived there and she had never heard of the bakery
she didn't know anybody who' lived on that street she was a refugee who had come from Uganda and taken over the empty house and in that moment I suddenly understood what the Jews speak about when they say that th those who hold the story have a
responsibility to tell them and that I was a very unlikely person to tell the story of these 20 unwed mothers at this little Bakery in yamaro Randa but I was the one who was left and that I therefore had a responsibility to tell their story and to tell the story
of D which was the name of our bank and the the people who had fundamentally changed my life and and so I actually wrote a book that was largely about genocide and the aftermath and what does it mean to be human and how we carry angels and monsters inside of us but as
I was writing it I was also starting Acumen and so these two stories started to converge and it was my husband actually who said Jacqueline you're trying to build a a an Enterprise that is disrupting philanthropy and I dare say the conventionalities of the
conventions of capitalism so you're going to confuse the world coming out with the genocide book at the same time why don't you use it as part of the trajectory that landed you with these ideas of patient capital and how we might do better at solving our problems
of poverty and building a world of dignity and at first I was resistant but I found it was ended ended up being very cathartic because it helped me actually make sense of the different steps that got me to this whole philosophy and so that was the
blue sweater um and then uh a I don't know six seven years Jim and my was actually my boor um who came to me and said we think you should write another book because you've done Acumen has done so much here um you know some of our companies were
reaching 100 million people and uh and what have you learned and so I started scratching my head thinking I was going to talk about the how patient Capital worked and the fundamentals of how you do this kind of investing and what I realized was
that again somewhat reticently but what I realized is that I could write about all those technicalities but if you really wanted to invest in change then you had to find those people who made manifest character and that ultimately
our tagline should be we're acumin and we invest in character and so what was the character and what were the tools that were actually required to build solutions to poverty and here's where the word moral comes in because I had to think about the moral
imperative in this interdependent world where action and our in action every day impacts people around the world is a different moral imperative than the one you and I grew up with where we only knew the people around us and then we could do good for the people
that we we didn't know now people everywhere are connected to each other so what is that framework how could I articulate that framework decidedly not as a top down I hand you the book set of moral rules but rather as a bottomup philosophy grounded
in our interdependence not only on each other as human beings but to all living things that's going to require us to use the tools of capitalism and recognize what else is needed so that we build of Worlds where it does work but it works for all of us that was the moral
imperative um but it's super un um uncomfortable and in this time where we see growing I dare say moral righteousness the the definition that that we have here at aimen for um moral leadership is even more uncomfortable because I see so often on social media
desire to be to be affirmed in what you know is right and that is the righteousness piece rather than to hold a sense of humility in this time of great uncertainty that we've got to find that space between right and wrong right doing and
wrongdoing we've got to acknowledge truths that each other bring to the table even when we disagree or we are not going to solve our problems and it doesn't matter if you are trying to build a business or you are trying to build a community or a school this is a
set of skills and tools that I didn't learn in business school but we should be teaching in all of our schools and that became the blueprint if you will for a book that might have been better title the world is waiting for you or so you want to
change the world because what the book is really about are those practices the hard and gritty and in the gray realities of what it actually takes to build systems businesses organizations that put our humanity and the Earth at the center not just profit
what a lovely summation and and I love the that ultimately uh what you're saying is morality is really about focusing and I'm using your words here on elevating our individual and Collective dignity and I just I I when I was reading that I just that really brang
fruit for me I really loved that definition because I like you the often and and I try to check myself whenever I'm getting like worked up but the whole righteousness that that really turns me off no no matter what side you're being
righteous about that that that isn't the way to elevate individual and Collective dignity um because that's a I'm right you're wrong that's a binary deterministic way of looking at the world and that isn't the way the world works and no well I think I've gotten
more nuanced in that I think that that having activists who have that moral IND indignation and righteousness actually are useful for us but those aren't the people who build Solutions right and what I am is a person who wants to build
and what auman does is find those people who are willing to hold these opposing values hold these opposing truths I'm glad that the there are people out there saying like this we're not doing it anymore you know without them climate change we'd still all be
debating and debating I mean we still are technically but less and less right You' had those people at the beginning AIDS we needed them but the people who come to the table with Solutions that's the people that I know how to hang with and
build with and uh and I think we need more of them and I particularly think we need more of them today I think that's a wonderful distinction I've never thought about it that way you really probably do need those agitators those people who
are just on fire but it's because I like you and I I'm built help solve problems I'm built to like fix things and or come up with and put people together who who can build and create and do all of that but I always miss that part so thank you that's like a really good
me nonsense nonsense that would be impossible that would be absolutely impossible but that is such a great distinction in my mind because you really do need both right even if you're thinking just like a business person what do you need to
think about you need to think about pain points you need to think about where is there some sort of glaring problem and do you have a way that can fix that problem right but I you know now now my mind is spinning because I'm just kind of thinking of all the times like good
ideas that we decided to do something in business about it was because somebody was squawking they like this is wrong this is like and in fact you know when we started the new company of shaas C Ventures we will only we have a lot of
different verticals but we will only invest in win-win outcomes and like we you mentioned earlier in our conversation payday loans I I I think they are immoral I think that they are predatory I think that they are taking advantage of the most vulnerable people
and so yeah did we see a bunch of deal flow where you could earn huge sums of money yeah but I won't touch it because like that is that's not a that's not a zero suum game that's a negative suum game certainly not dignity exactly wi how do you define it I Define
win-win as a an Enterprise or an activity or a new idea or a new company where um uh the the transactions occur in such a manner that I am I I am selling whatever I'm selling my widget at a price whereby the person who's buying my widget is going
to be happy and willing to pay that price because they perceive that the value value that they will derive from it is far exceeding the price at which I'm selling it to them uh I can win because if I have enough people buying my widgets I have a profitable company I
can employ people my employees can win because they have good jobs that they like but our customers can also win because it's at it's priced at a point where they find much more value than than uh they have to expend yeah but I
would also say that win-win mentality is we we for so long of our human history like things really uh you know Hobs Hobs hit it on the on the head life is nasty brutish and short and and it doesn't have to be like that anymore and and we
now live in a world a almost a magical world of Wonders where we have this incredible technology where we are building the human Colossus where we really can be aware and interconnected with people everywhere you know it's often really hard to change your
physical zip code but it's really easy to change your digital zip code and you know like when we started the fellowships I one of the things that was animating me was historically a genius could be born lived and died and she or he didn't even know that they had
anything to contribute and and nobody knew of their ideas or or their efforts but we don't live in that world anymore we live in a world where we can find and fund those Geniuses and I feel and here we're gonna go now I'm G to start using
moral people are gonna go Jim what the hell are you talking about but we have sort of the moral obligation to do that right because we are you know it may be a chaotic time but it's also an amazing time because we now have the potential at least to build this human Colossus
and and I think that that's the way we evolved we evolved to work together we did not evolve to like you know I'm GNA win you're G to lose and that's the way a lot of society had to be or not had to be but was was uh run but we don't have
to run it that way anymore and and that's one of the things that I just love about acum and all the work that you do well thank you and and no it really helps me I I I like how you are talking about it because and you're a problem solver and so you can see why
the work of using the tools of business to solve problems of poverty is so um it's not for what in yours of my generation was called the category of the doters right the people who fancy themselves you know so smart so determined
so agile that they are going to take the best of their of themselves to actually build companies in places where they shouldn't work and that can be a lifelong passion because it's like you get a a PhD almost every six months you know and and it's
following people who are going into impossible situations and partnering with them to make them not just Poss but Thrive and in one of your podcasts you talked about um you didn't use the language of the adjacent possible but you talked about how you
love connecting dots because you know you love poetry I love poetry and um and how it will te it'll take you to another thing and I was thinking the adjacent possible because we get to see the adjacent possible unfolds the story that I love the most
is um in off-grade electricity and again in this world of so much cynicism we to your point words like moral words like virtue words like dignity almost make us embarrassed and yet I think we need a little bit more of all of them not in a righteous way but
in a way that fundamentally sees the beauty in all of us the potential in all of us and so um and the joy of doing this work and so 2007 there are billion and a half people on the planet with no electricity two guys who were literally co-eds um from business school came to
us with a prototype for a $30 solar light um frankly they sort of were basing it on a wish and a prayer and a good technology and we were basing it on a wish and a prayer and some patient Capital but they were the right guys neip tozen and uh
Sam Goldman and I would say it took them seven years uh through that what we call the wandering through the desert period where they had to understand how much would a low-income person pay for solar if they are how long would it take them to use
your word to trust you that they're not going to buy this technology and a month later it's debt they couldn't afford it and um how do you finance it how do you break the kerosene mafias that have no interest in seeing a new technology come
into two areas that have been dominated by this 19th century source of of energy kerosene and um and it was fascinating the learn our learning curve was through the roof our partners who had given us philanthropy would were sometimes impatient well you keep telling me about
these failur Jaclyn but tell me about the impact they were getting impact all along the way way but in 2011 you have an adjacency in that cell phone banking is now letting you pay for your your electricity every day you don't need any other kind of
financing if you can't pay that day you could even turn your unit off but otherwise you pay and as long as you keep paying they keep your unit on um other companies start building today we have 40 companies in which we're investing they have brought almost
a quar billion people light and electricity not as Charity because they value it they can afford it now but so there's still 800 million people with no access to electricity about 220 million of those people will not be reached by the
markets that have been built they're just too poor and we haven't figured out yet how to make this affordable and unlike other markets where you can increase the price you're already at a price that are putting people under they're not getting enough to eat and
yet this could fundamentally change their trajectory into the beautiful world you're talking about because I share your belief that this is for all of us and um and so that's when the fund begins we we're we're now have a $250 million facility where we're
Unapologetic about the grants that we need to help create markets that didn't exist concessionary debt different kinds of incentives the side by-side assistance that's not charity that's Market building it requires different kinds of capital it
only functions when you find the right character in terms of the entrepreneurs in whom you're investing but also your own character are you trustworthy do you bring what you can do you give more than you take whether you're the investor or
the entrepreneur for the government partner we start moving from that place which I also dare say has a moral basis to it in the way that our moms and dads may have thought about it we can do this there's no reason we still have 800 million people on the
planet without access to electricity in fact that is not only moral immoral but it's it's dangerous and it's um incredibly unproductive and so that's what excites me that you can start with it's a journey 17 years but you can start with the $30 light in 2007 and in
2024 have a sight line through some of the toughest economies on the African continent but where people are just as hungry and ambitious and and driven as anywhere else and as talented they just haven't had the education or the access
or the money to help them get there it doesn't take that much by our our calculation you know call it a dollar per household that requires subsidy to get electricity by using the private sector in ways that allow them to allow for people to flourish it's such a wonderful
synchronicity because when I was in bhah we were visiting a lot of villages that had no electricity and my wife and I were wandering down a very if you've ever been there you know that the roads are so we were walking down very carefully because it was getting dark uh
a road to a small Village near the hotel that we were staying and there were all sorts of those lamps in that Village and so I'm very curious ious and so one of the things that was great is what the the children see you coming they're so
welcoming and they come with these beaming faces and they grab your hand and they want to show you everything and it's just so delightful but I got into a lovely uh discussion with their father and mother about the the lighting and I I'm sure it wasn't the same company that
you're talking about but it was exactly could it could in fact be because they were so proud of the fact that they had because they had more than one they uh the entire area where they lived was uh lit up with these lamps and uh they they
told the story with such great pride that they had solved this problem and then you know it the it was kind of the the child was speaking English the the parents didn't speak English and so there's there was a translation lag
but I I could just tell when the mother was gesturing to the parts of the village that were dark and then the child was translating mommy and daddy want to make sure that next time you come everything will be lit up and and see that's that's magical to me because
that is as you say it's a market we we we don't markets don't have to be all about hard noses and you know green eye uh that was a market solution that worked that that couple that I had the privilege of talking with they were hell bet that the entire place next time I
stopped in the in the village was going to be lit up so Jim I have a story for you but also just to to to to bring that point home Bhutan is an energy exporter right it produces more energy than it needs as a country and yet if you're
poor you don't have access or if you do have access the the electricity that comes to you because of these these Hills the mud slides the rural areas you might get it a couple hours a day and so it is not at all unusual for us to be in
villages where the grid is overhead but the reliability is in the systems that these families make the decision to pay to buy the the story I want to tell because and when when people see it it's magic and that and I the other part of the adjacent possible is you get people
access to electricity and the next thing that comes is solar television those solar televisions are now we have a education company every day it's reaching 13 million kids and and their scores are jumping through it's called
the KY networks because they have solar television then you can have a distribution system for for cook stoves which is the largest um contributor to deforestation on the African continent suddenly that adjacent possible allows you to build on other Innovation for
people but the story is um Delight is the name of the company and I was actually in rajastan in India and in a place where the grid was overhead but all the homes had solar uh home systems and I was sitting with a group of women and I was asking them why they still
chose to use the solar and what gave them the enage to put away their kerosene lantern because it's a big deal to take a risk like that when you have no money and um they gave me lots of reasons that people give uh like you can carry it to the
bathroom at night and so you're safer it helps you see snakes so you can not be so afraid uh you don't have a woman said um I don't feel stress because when I had the care harassing Lantern I was always worried it would fall over and
hurt my children or do something worse and now I don't feel stress and I said that's really interesting man because the young man who founded this com company was actually living in a West African village when his neighbors kosene Lantern fell over and it burned
down the house and it almost killed his eldest son and it was in that moment that he decided he was going to commit his life to eradicating kerosene and now I'm sitting in front of you and you're using one of his lights and she leaned forward tears in her eyes and she
said please vam would you thank that young man for me and Jim this is what we've got to communicate I think to young people who want to be of use that we are too wedded to this concept of success based on money power and fame If instead we thought about the the
amount of human energy that we could release in the world as our as our number one metric and one day someone on the other side of the world might say just thank you and I think that we need to tell more of those stories and we certainly
need more of those entrepreneurs what a lovely story and it just uh we've seen that happen so often as well and you know we're also invest pretty big investors in AI artificial intelligence and um one of the questions uh I actually put it up on Twitter what
if we maximize the objective function for creativity as opposed to revenue what if we yeah what if we maximize the uh objective function for all of the things that we're talking about here today and I love this adjacent possible because that is that's just I'm going to
steal that from you jack but Steve Johnson who first said it Stephen Johnson who's such a writer yeah I I I'm that's funny I I've read a lot of of him and I'm I don't equate that term with him I must have uh I must have been slow that particular
day but I love it and I'm gonna steal it I steal it I steal well I because I think once you see it you start to see the building blocks and there's nothing like offgrade energy to create an economy but you have to build you have
to take the first step exactly and but but what I love about the term is it itself opens up the adjacent possible Right in because of the way you tell the story beautifully hey you get the electric then you get a Solar TV then you get a solar iPad then you get and
you know fill in the blank it just continues to grow um stability AI which is the company I've invested in uh got got the remit to uh educate some of the school children in Malawi and uh we're using solar powered tablets um and the just I mean every
time I see an update on it it just makes me feel so good because you know these kids you'll see videos and like the faces are just filled with pure joy and andity that exactly exactly and and the more that we can do to uh nurture curiosity to help along those
lines and I and I love it that H that young man thank you I just oh what a wonderful wonderful story well we are we are closing uh in on our time I could talk to you or hours and hours and hours uh what what what are you most excited about right now um
with uh with your endeavors and and all the great things that you're you're working on in a way it goes to what you were saying um what when you were asking me before how do you convince people that this is it's great to invest in in places like
the African continent or Pakistan that I used to I used to talk to people from a place of the promises of what could be now I get to say look at what has been done and we we have a new generation and it's time to build on it so what excites me most right now would
would number one be this work with the with bringing electricity to the people who are considered the hardest to reach on the planet um in countries like Somalia Bina Faso the the Kong Malawi Zambia Etc um to give people who are fundamentally
left out of opportunity that first rung uh it's going to be really really difficult um and I'm in that camp of people who do things because they're difficult and so I'm very very excited by that the second thing that really excites me is acum Academy where we are
um really focused on hope building one of the world's real schools for social change um trying to offer these tools of business but they're grounded in the moral imagination how do you build in ways that put our Humanity in the Earth at
the center and how do we then take these ideas and send them off into the world and the third is just Acumen as a constellation if you will in in the next three years in the for-profit side of the house will'll have raised and and will be deploying almost a billion
dollars across Latin America um East West Africa India Pakistan and the United States we have actually been U America now doing really amazing things um the lessons from all of this particularly at this Nexus of poverty and climate I believe we have a
lot to offer the world and so thinking about how do you how do you influence how do you talk how do you bring others in because we have the skills and the knowledge and the Technologies and goodness knows with AI we're going to have that in
abundance how do we a light our moral imagination how do we reinforce our will to continue to do the hard things not for ourselves but for other people because as you said before we don't really get dignity until everyone has dignity I love that you know oh sh
Adventures has a film Division and as you were speaking about what your what's exciting you I just immediately saw a documentary um I'm not gonna put you on the spot but uh I might come later and say would you be willing to let us make
a documentary about this because I think that would be such a great film to make Jim I think it's a really important film because we have these hidden Heroes across the worlds and I think you just I think you just named the documentary hidden oh my God I love that and we've
got hundreds of them and they blow my mind and and and and it's I mean just a few like headlines like the guy who saw these the flowers in the rivers in India and realizes that they're covered in Arsenic and lead and cadmium so he
realizes that these have been given to the temples as blessings and the temple priest throw them in the river and then they pollute the rivers and people that are bathing so he builds a business where he collects the flowers hires women from the lowest cast They convert
them into um incense sticks and now vegan leather and he just got a contract with Tommy hillfiger like these are the kinds of of Innovations started by people who follow the thread of their curiosity and bring hardcore business
skills to bear in ways that help people solve their problems create jobs create opportunity do so in a way that can help us solve our problems and so hidden Heroes I'm in oh I love it okay I'm in too then so that uh you we'll have to have uh uh a meeting
yes perfect perfect let's do that well Jacqueline how can uh people listening or watching uh if they want to get involved uh where can they go to find out more about uh you the Acumen fund Etc they could go to our website at Acumen acen.org um is probably the very best
way to start to learn about us and then that will lead you to you know I want to learn about acum India Pakistan acum in America Acumen Academy we've got um a growing number of resources and courses on on acument academy.org which allows
people who are interested in building their Solutions not only to build but hopefully as we build as we ourselves build find each other I think that's great and I'm so impressed by both you and the organization and everything you've done uh you are a a shining
example and uh I I the world is a vastly better place because you're in it um and uh if you've listened you you you know that our final question uh is going to create you the Empress of the world you can't put anyone to death you can't
re-educate anyone in a camp but what you can do is we're going to give you a magical microphone and you can speak into it two things and everyone on the planet whenever their morning is is going to wake up and look at the themselves or their their loved one and
say I have just had the two greatest ideas and what's different this time is I'm G to act on both of them what two ideas are you going to incept in the world's population so the first one it would have been the opposite of poverty is not
well that's dignity but you already took it so first one is just I stole I stole it from you well the first one is just start that um too many people sit at the starting blocks wondering what their purpose is waiting to do something and
I've learned that purpose doesn't come to people waiting on the sidelines we find our Purpose By following the thread of our curiosity we take a step toward it whether we fall down or learn we're going to know a lot more after we've taken that step it leads us to the next
step and before you know it you've lit the world so just start and the second one which goes to um these times and you and I talked about it but that building anything is hard building things in an interdependent World particularly for
people who have been overlooked and underestimated can sometimes feel impossible it requires not righteousness and not a full level of certainty but a willingness to hold opposing values in tension one of my great my favorite quotes is by a Sufi by roomi who says
Beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing is a field I'll meet you there so just start and move into this world with all the audacity that it takes to believe that you can change the world and the humility that is willing to look around and recognize what we're facing in the world
and you hold those two things in tension and you're willing to do the work you can make magic happen I love both of those Jacqueline and I will meet you there I will meet you there J thank you so much thank you so much for being on the uh podcast