So I'm going to ask you now about the story about the wipeable, because I think it's really interesting. >> That's a great story. [LAUGH] >> One of the hallmarks of social innovation, or social enterprise is being able to get feedback. And I know you really tried to get feedback around the blanket, and people kept telling you something, and telling you something, and telling you something. And yet, it wasn't sinking in. It revolves around the blanket that you use. I'd love to hear you share this story. >> [LAUGH] Yeah, so that one. And first off, as the leader and CEO, there are certain things you cannot delegate. And that includes a thoughtful analysis of your constantly asked questions, the frequently asked questions. So we kept getting, I'm not even kidding, every single meeting Michael, every single one [LAUGH], we were getting this question of how do you reprocess, or reuse the blanket portion? The pack was fine. They were like, how do I sterilize this? And I was like, you use your chlorhexidine, or your alcohol wipes, or you throw it into an autoclave, or you boil it, and they got it. Blanket, not so much. And this wasn't just a one year type of thing. This was several years from when we started Warmilu, not even kidding. From when we started in 2011, people would ask us, and we said, well, you just boil it, put it in your hot laundry cycle. Use those per CDC recommendations. We thought we had all the answers. But then people kept asking us those questions again and again. So we made a video, just like what we'd done with a pack warming, or resetting and reprocessing, didn't work. We kept getting those questions. We put it on our website. We put in our user manual, nothing helped. So finally, one brave doctor [LAUGH] spoke up, and said I will simply not use your washable ones, because everyone had always cited their contamination concerns. >> Mm-hm, sure. >> The fluid would go on to the baby. But I finally I saw it, and she's like, great, here's this picture. And there's this baby covered with all these fluids, this amniotic fluid, and potentially some poop and some placenta, all the fluids. And she's just like, can you imagine me washing this in Uganda? And I don't have a washing machine in the OR. I don't have one in the newborn unit, the neonatal intensive care unit equivalent in Uganda. She was like, I, quite simply, I can't wash this blanket. And I was like because, she was like Grace, literally, I'd have to carry this basket all the way to the outside. It's like, that's where our laundry facility is. And I'm taking care of 6 to 15 infants every hour. And I was like, the light bulb went off. That frequently asked question was an opportunity to improve our product design, not just all of the supportive collateral. So what we did was we changed the blanket to be entirely wipeable. And later, we made a version where it's a washable wipeable, where one, the surface touching the baby is wipeable, but the stuff around it is the fabric. And what happened was that it was miraculous. Finally, this doctor who had only been warming two infants, infants every five to eight hours, because they had two blankets. She was warming 6 to 15 infants every hour. This hospital suddenly, instead of using our blanket just in the OR, they were using it for every transported infants from pre-hospital to inside the hospital. So that was because they were just wiping in between infants. >> That was just something that we would not have been able to realize, if not for a little bit of a push from the doctor. So a lesson to all social innovators out there, if you hear your users, or your buyers asking a question over and over again, listen in. And use that as potentially an opportunity to figure out what are they really asking about here? What is the real design or workflow challenge that we need to address? And that's how we learn. Most hospitals don't have laundry facilities, or at least large ones. >> But you could have taken for granted. >> Exactly, which is what we thought, because we thought, you just throw it in, and it'll be fine. No, for a woman who is carrying a giant basket up and down the stairs that are crowded, by the way, three floors, she can't do that. >> Mm-hm. >> So that's something that, as a social innovator, take note of the workflow. Take note of your frequently asked questions. And even though people say I'm going to use this here, there might be an opportunity that they could use it somewhere else earlier in the value stream, or later, that you might never have considered. So because we made it easier to reprocess more emergency medical service providers, and transport folks were in the ambulances, they use our blankets now. >> As I wrote about in my book, The Innovation Blind Spot, the whole way that venture capital is structured, the way that most people invest in startups has been relatively unchanged since the 19th century whaling industry. So for hundreds of years, we've picked ideas the same way. A few people sit in a room, and they talk about ideas. And usually in the social enterprise world, it's people sitting in comfortable conference rooms in New York or San Francisco talking about the problems in New Orleans or Nairobi. And very often, people who don't have insight into the problems are making decisions over how to solve it. And so the idea of Village Capital was born out of the village banking methodology and microfinance, where billions of dollars were invested in very rural areas that didn't have access to capital. Through a core innovation of having people close to the problem, and close to the business make investment decisions. So how we've made over 100 investments in Village Capital's history is we have entrepreneurs decide who gets an investment. And we find that entrepreneurs who are close to the problem in the communities that we're working in very often are a better place to identify solutions, and the results are really encouraging. >> I want to shift gears and talk about you now wearing your entrepreneur hat. You've been an entrepreneur your whole life, or at least since college. And what I'm particularly interested in, you had a really good education, both as an undergrad, as a grad student. But it's my understanding that your real introduction to the world of doing good with money came from your experience in India. I'd love to hear you talk about that, and this idea of immersing yourself into a problem, in order to truly understand it. >> Yeah, so I got an opportunity when I was in graduate school to go work for a startup microfinance bank called the Indian School Finance Company. In India, it's very different than the US educational system. There are 30 million kids in India who attend low cost private schools, private schools that cost just a few dollars a month. And there isn't really a Western equivalent for these types of schools. But it's a huge part of the Indian economy. And my job was to go door to door and talk to these school owners, many of whom open a school in a former restaurant in a slum area, because 3 million people have moved to Hyderabad, India. And the government hasn't kept pace with building schools, and they're solving a market need, and talking with these school principals who are themselves startup entrepreneurs. And understanding if you had a loan, you would build walls in between these classrooms that currently have tarping, and bleed between these classrooms, or whatever it is. It gave me a unique insight into what was actually happening in the Indian educational system. And part of the inspiration for Village Capital was seeing how microfinance banks, like the one I was working with, were largely making learning decisions. Not having loan officers in banks decide which school was lendable or not, but how entrepreneurs themselves decided. And I think being on the ground in the middle of building an enterprise gave me insight into who knew and understood what the problem was what the framing would be. Yeah, I think just I went to great schools, and I was very lucky. And I've seen whether it's the social enterprise, or the impact investing, or the philanthropic world, I've seen people try and solve problems in the slum of India from half the world away in very comfortable environments. But whether you grew up in a disadvantaged background, or if you're like me, grew up in a comfortable background and went to good schools. Either way, having direct experience with the problems you're trying to solve, whether you just have it by nature of your own lived experience, or whether you get out of your comfort zone, and get it is very critical. >> What I think is so interesting about that is not only did this give you first hand knowledge about microfinance, you were able to generalize and see the principles being used. And these long held principles of women's groups generally supporting each other, knowing who's dependable, who they can count on. That could be translated into the US context, and I love that your firm is named Village Capital too. >> I observed in India. And so the Indian School Finance Company was invested in by a group called Gray Ghost Ventures, which was founded by a mentor of mine named Bob Patillo, and was one of the pioneers in the microfinance and impact investment industry. One of the things that Bob and the team did through the foundation that's just called Gray Matters Capital is do a bunch of ecosystem building activities around low cost private schools. So they worked on metrics and ratings. They worked on a fellowship program to get talent into these schools. And the Indian School Finance Company last year was acquired by a larger bank. It was a good investment. It was successes in investment. But there's another great company. There are a series of great companies. One is a great company called. It was founded by two early team members of the Indian School Finance Company. And so the thing that I observed in India was you had a group of people not just investing in a specific company, but investing in an entire ecosystem around low cost private schools. And ten years later, seeing that ecosystem emerged has been been really encouraging. So I'd say whether you're an entrepreneur, or an investee, or an investor, or someone looking for a career, don't just think at the company level. Think at the ecosystem level.
