Hello. Testing. Testing. Testing. Good to go. All right. Please take your seats. Get the last crowd in here. Good morning. How is everyone? Good. A little more energy. Good morning. How is everyone? All right. That's a little better. Some people have had their coffee. All right. Well, hopefully we've got an exciting next hour for you. You should be here for the corporate venture capital and impact investing panel. If you're not, you're in the wrong place. We're going to talk for about 40 minutes. We've got a great group of panelists. We'll leave plenty of time for questions at the end, so please write down your questions as you think of them. Let's go ahead and get started. My name is Leslie Marincola. I'm actually a CEO and founder of a startup, so I'm not on the investment side. I'm on the entrepreneur side. Hopefully we have a mixture of investors and entrepreneurs in the audience. My company designs a technology platform that helps distributors in emerging markets offer life-changing products like solar lighting systems on credit to low-income consumers, so basically off-grid families can pay over time to access solar energy products. We are actually a proud recipient of corporate venture capital. We're a member of the Salesforce Impact Fund, which Claudine will be telling you more about. I want to start by just framing this conversation. What is corporate venture capital? How is that different from traditional venture capital? Basically if I were to sum it up, corporate venture capital is where a business is actually investing directly into a startup. And they're not just looking for financial returns, they're probably looking for a strategic objective of making that investment the first place. So traditionally, corporate venture capitalists will invest into startups that are operating in the industry that that corporation operates in. They work very closely with startups, just like institutional venture capitalists do, to help with marketing, business growth, working with the management team. And there's a really exciting trend happening right now with corporate venture capital in that a lot of corporate venture capital activity is also looking at investments with an impact lens. So not only are they looking for financial returns for a strategic sort of win-win relationship, they're also looking to do good in the world and put their money to use to have a bigger impact. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So got a great group of panelists from Salesforce, GE, Orange, Autodesk. I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves, talk about their origin story, maybe how they got their corporation to think about impact investing in the first place, and then talk about their investment mandate as well. So Joe, do you want to kick us off? Sure, just intro and origin story. Yes, and your investment mandate. Investment mandate, okay. My name is Joe Speicher. I'm the executive director of the Autodesk Foundation. We, how many people show hands know Autodesk in the audience? Right, that's a good amount. For those of you that don't, we are a software company for people who make things.  The foundation's mandate is to take those design and engineering resources and steer them towards positive societal impact. And so we're about four years old. We've been grant making software and leveraging the expertise and kind of intellectual capital of the company to deliver this. In the last couple of years, we've realized that all of the interesting stuff in the climate sphere is happening in the private sector. And so that led us to starting to invest in some companies that can deliver significant carbon emission reduction. So we've done about five deals now. We're mostly in intermediaries. We've done a couple of direct deals, though, and we've been bringing our company and board along with us. So that's my origin story is really boring. I will say one fun fact. I was in the room when the idea for this conference was conceived about 11 years ago. And I helped, I did a little bit of help for the guys who were trying to set this up, Tim Freinlich and Kevin Jones and Gary Bowles. And it's amazing to see what it's grown to. So I'm excited to be here. Great. Thank you. I'm Claudine Imiot. I lead the Salesforce Impact Fund, which we launched officially just about a year ago, actually. And our origin story, it actually goes back to an executive who founded the Salesforce Foundation that became Salesforce.org many, many years ago, actually right around the time that Salesforce itself was still a startup of about 50 people, which is now hard to imagine. It was once that small. She saw in her tenure running the helm of the foundation a gap between what the .org was doing to support nonprofits and then what the corporate venture arm was doing investing in enterprise software companies building the Salesforce platform. She said, I think that there's probably something in the middle there to support for-profit, fast-growing, venture-backed enterprise software companies that also have a social or environmental mission, unless the Impact Fund was born. But it was explicitly placed within the venture's portfolio. So Salesforce has an active corporate venture arm that is the third most active behind Google and Intel, and they have about 250 portfolio companies, over a billion dollars in assets under management, and their mandate is to invest in enterprise software that's strategically integrating with Salesforce. And so their investment mandate filters down to the Impact Fund as well since we're part of their portfolio. So that means is the Impact Fund, I'm still investing in enterprise SaaS. I'm looking for companies that have a strategic integration to Salesforce or have plans to build one. And in terms of deal mechanics, they also look similar. So we don't invest in anything super early. Series A to Series C is our sweet spot. But on top of the business and financial diligence that I do, I'm also looking for demonstrable social impact or demonstrable environmental impact. And we have four focus areas. So the first is education and workforce. The second is sustainability. The third is diversity and inclusion. So that looks like people, ops tech, as well as financial inclusion platforms. And then the last bucket is enabling technology for the social sector. So, software solutions that are serving nonprofits and foundations. Hi, my name is Moses, Troy with Orange Silicon Valley. As a show of hands, who here knows Orange, or has heard of Orange? Awesome. Well, I joined the firm about a year and a half ago. And candidly before that, I hadn't heard much about the company. In large part, we don't have a consumer brand here in North America. But just to kind of set up kind of who we are a little bit. So the audience kind of level sets on that and then drive down into a little bit of our investing activities. Orange is a large global telco, headquartered in Paris. We have about 280 or so million mobile subscribers. Of which about 130 million are on the African continent. So Middle East, North Africa, and West Africa in particular. We generate about 41 billion euro on the top line. And have about 150,000 employees globally. And one thing I just wanted to kind of add into kind of the mix a little bit is, we spend about $7 billion in capital expenditures to fund growth for our business. We also have a budget of around 700 million for innovation activities. And driving down to our office more specifically, we've been in the valley for about 18 years. We started out as a pure R&D unit. So our office of about 40 or 50 people was primarily involved in writing patents. And over the past several years, we've evolved into kind of this more open innovation architecture that a lot of corporates have in the valley. Our office is a mix of technical resources and sort of business development resources. As we were engaging with the proliferation of all of these startups, we launched a fund called Orange Digital Ventures four years ago. It's a 150 million euro commitment. And we're engaged in four areas, Enterprise Cloud, IoT, FinTech, and hardware. And so we have pursued impact investing through the normal course of what we do. It's a very new topic for us. So my engagement here is very much kind of a learning process in terms of how we think about impact in the context of what we do. And looking forward to sharing more. Well, good morning everyone. I'm Robert Wells. I lead the new market development team at BE Business Innovations. We are part of the GE corporate structure, not any of the line businesses. And we include the corporate venture capital teams that do healthcare, energy investing, advanced manufacturing, and software. We also have our corporate licensing, which manages our IP portfolio. You can imagine GE has a lot of IP over the last 100 years. We also have a new co-creation team in our group as well. And then my team, which has really taken the mantle of social impact and social entrepreneurship forward, we came late to this space. We had a foundation that was very active in a number of related areas. But our mandate has been to see how we can move from philanthropy and corporate social responsibility into sustainable business models in the world of social impact. We are interested primarily in the healthcare and energy spaces right now. Quickly overlaps between the two, and many of you in here know that there are a lot of interesting overlaps between the two. We started a program with the Miller Center down at Santa Clara University in Sub-Saharan Africa for maternal and child care. Two years ago, we've taken 10 companies through that accelerator. Excuse me, about 25 companies through that accelerator. And one of our metrics we look at is how those companies do over time. And they've raised about 10 million in investment grants and debt and equity as they move forward. So that really said to us that there is a there there in the space. And so we've now built it out into a more robust platform which incorporates one part of strategic partnerships and shared value partnerships like with Miller Center, one part we'd like to do in investing. One part we'd like to do in new co-creation, leveraging off some of the activities of our foundation over the years. And then the last part is real thought leadership to be a convener, to use GE's brand to hopefully encourage other corporates to be more active in the space as well. Awesome, thank you very much. As I said, a great group of panelists, let's talk a little bit about, this might be a question on the minds of fellow entrepreneurs in the audience or other institutional investors, what are the challenges and the opportunities and advantages of having CBC, Corporate Venture Capitalists, on the board or investing in a company? So talk about the pros and the cons and let's be real about both of these. Leslie, do you want to? Sure, yeah, so Corporate Venture Capital as Leslie kind of kicked off is a way in which companies pursue, in the context of early stage deals, investments in new emerging companies. So ourselves, we typically target Series A and Series B rounds. And I think there are several key advantages. I think, of course, one, there's a market signaling effect to the extent that it makes sense for your company and the markets that you're trying to go into. And so, for instance, if a company wants to work with Orange in West Africa, that's a very positive signaling effect to the extent that that fits a business model. I think two is, we have on the ground brand, infrastructure, people, intellectual capital, marketing resources, etc. That can really help scale these businesses, particularly those that are B2B. And then really, I think, of course, is leveraging the various resources that we have in our office where we do proof of concepts. We have a very strong technical team, so we work in partnership with the companies that we invest in to actually test the efficacy of the actual businesses and what they're trying to achieve. And so I think we have, I think corporates have a very meaningful role to play to scale impact. And I would love to see more of that. Happy to take that one too, Leslie. So most corporate investors are, like Moses described, investing with a very strategic angle. There are a few out there who may not, so GV, for instance, for this portfolio, they're just investing in great both enterprise and consumer tech companies. And there's no mind about whether there's a strategic integration with Google. But with Salesforce, as with Orange, we are very pointed in that strategic angle. And that is, I think, both an opportunity but also limiting factor from our own ability to invest. So it means that my lens of opportunity is narrowed because I'm looking for companies that are potentially going to integrate with the Salesforce ecosystem. And I say potentially because we're investing as early as Series A. A lot of the companies that we're talking to are not yet prioritizing Salesforce as an integration. I mean, there are a lot of product integrations a company has to think about. And it's obviously a question of when it makes sense to integrate with any given platform out there. But usually, it's around the time when they start to hear from customers. I'm on Salesforce. I see how your solution would tie really well into how I'm using the CRM or maybe another cloud. What could you do? And that's actually how our conversation started with Ancasa, with Leslie's company. We started talking. It was a really customer-driven conversation from Leslie's point of view, hearing from her own customers that they were eager to see a Salesforce integration. And that's probably going to be the most successful path towards that. It shouldn't be something that we come up with or that our own product team comes up with. It should really be driven by a company's customers asking for an integration with that platform. In terms of the benefits that I think we offer as a strategic investor, we're generally complimentary and around. We're not, we don't write term sheets. So we're not competing to lead around. We're usually coming in as a nice differentiated additive to other institutional investors. If there are other strategic in the mix, they're probably going to be different from Salesforce. There's probably not going to be a Microsoft or an Oracle. But we usually don't come in with our own competitors. So we're offering kind of our own special knowledge. And with that comes access to the platform. So if you build an integration with Salesforce, that means that you ultimately can sell with Salesforce. And that is a huge opportunity given the ubiquity of our platform increasingly around the world. It also means access to our talent. So we know that our entrepreneurs are often struggling with things like how to scale sales or how to improve their pricing strategy. And we have some of the best people doing that for Salesforce. And we are thrilled to connect our portfolio companies with that kind of internal talent. In terms of challenges, I think in years past, CBCs have gotten a bad rap for moving really slowly. And I hope that's changing. With Salesforce's model, we try to move at the same pace as institutional investors. We do actually about 100 deals a year across the whole venture team. So it's high volume investing. Then we're not kind of the slow-moving model with that I think a lot of people associate with CBCs of the past. I'll add one thing to that. I think nothing to add to the value that the corporate partner can bring because it's leveraging the analysis expertise. But one of the things that I do is I try to, all of our investors, investment partners, I parade them in front of our executives pretty regularly to be like, how can we not be investing in this? We actually had an event last night and one of them asked, can I please be dismissed? So I think that in some ways I, like Robert was saying earlier, dragging the corporate parent into impact investing, I think that that can probably be a drag on some of the, some of the investors. But I think that that's just an opportunity for growing the market. Yeah, a lot of what you guys are saying really resonates with me. Again, from the entrepreneur side of the table, when we started talking to Salesforce, for example, it was a decision, you know, should we engage with a CBC or not? And ultimately we decided it was actually a pretty easy choice from our perspective, not always an easy choice for many companies, but from our perspective, the strategic advantages of working with Salesforce, because we knew we wanted to do Salesforce integration and actually accelerate more of our customers to use Salesforce, it was a total win-win relationship. So we ended up actually expanding our round beyond what we had originally set out to raise and, you know, took their investment, not for the money, actually, but for the strategic advantage of having that relationship, so. Yeah, I want to add a little bit to this too, and we come from a different place. And it's interesting to look at the companies here, and you've got two companies that have been around a long time, one's been around a really long time, which is us, and Orange has been around, I lived in Paris, it's Orange to me, has been around a while as well. Two new companies, very different to deal with companies in their own life cycle in that sense. And our corporate venture capital team, it really was, has been a struggle to bring them into the space. Not that they don't want to do it, but their legacy venture capital. So they came out of GE Capital, yes, we came out here to be strategic like you guys did and open on Sandhill Road, which we did, but we're still part of General Electric, you know, and there is a reality in that when you're trying to break through that historical culture. There's a lot that's good about it, I'll get to that in just a second, but one of the things that, for example, was within our own company, constantly came up with, well how do we do diligence? How do we do governance? How do we take part in a company that's 6,000 miles away from where we as the investor team are? And that's been a hard speed bump to get over, just to be candid about it. And then the second piece of it was, well, you know, in this social impact space, we are given a capital allocation by the company and we are expected to have a return on that at a certain level. You're telling us that we won't get that return, but we can get strategic or we can get brand recognition, but still, we're tasked by the company of having a return on capital at a certain level. We've got some solutions to try and get around that, but that again is part of the legacy and also investors in most companies are compensated by how they return on that capital. So that's been kind of tough hurdles for us to get over to try and retrofit a legacy corporate venture capital team as opposed to if I had my druthers, we would just create a new team from scratch and then we could start with all of the metrics and all of the things that are relevant to those of you in the room. But we're getting there. I mean, we're slowly but surely inching our way and going forward with it. I think the benefits of the companies are, GE's been in Africa for over 100 years, for example. That brings with it a huge amount of experience. So we're able to help our companies that have been through the Miller Center program, understand supply chain, understand legal, understand government relations, understand marketing, understand communications in the context of people that have been doing work in the continent. So there's a lot there to do, but it just takes getting over that historical legacy for some of us to be able to do it. Yeah, and that's a great segue into the next topic that I think we should dig into. Just when you think about the returns that you're looking for from investment, there are financial returns, but the reason we're all at SoCAP here is to think about impact returns as well. I'm sure you've all heard of the term greenwashing, this is when a company sort of portrays themselves as having an environmental impact when really it's more sort of PR and publicity more than the actual actions of a company. The same term that we're using for the impact space, so impact washing. How can we ensure that your company is actually, or sorry, your money is being put towards an actual impact in the investments that you make? And how do you measure that and ensure that you're achieving your impact returns? For us, as I said before, it's we're looking at carbon emission reduction and we're at such an early stage. We look at such early stage deals, seed, series A, that it's all pro forma. But we're working with partners, with intermediaries who have really strong, I would say like infrastructure around this. One of whom is an organization that we've partnered with for a long time called the Prime Coalition and they have a methodology for assessing pro forma carbon emission reduction and they run all of their pipeline against this model. And so it's great for us. We get to see, okay, this is the potential benefit from an impact perspective. I think it gets real fuzzy when you start looking at the social impact side of it. Yeah, I'm envious that you have just one sector and a sector to you that has a very, very clear metric. Yeah. Production agree on that. It's so nice. Well, hold on, we try on our grant side to look at the impacts of the social impacts and the best we can do is like lives benefited. So it's tricky. Yeah. Yeah, so because we're looking at, or maybe even more different sectors, it's not quite that simple impact, impact never is. I believe strongly in both the bottoms up and a top down approach. So what that means is from a bottoms up perspective, I really need for the entrepreneur to be able to articulate what's the primary impact objective and outcome that he or she is trying to solve. It's actually amazing how many pitch meetings I come to where that's not very crisply articulated. So to entrepreneurs in the audience, just a little tip, make sure you know how to say that and that you are, and you say it with passion and conviction. Sometimes they get a blank stare and so, but it's important because A, it shows that there's a North Star for impact at the top of the company and guiding the whole business model. But also I think it's important that the company is thinking about an impact outcome that makes sense to them to measure. They may not be able to measure it right now. So it might be pro forma, for instance, it might be if it's not reducing carbon emissions, it might be something in the workforce development space like measuring jobs created or job retention. They may not be at a place in their model where they're actually able to measure that, but they know that that is what they ultimately want to measure and they're working towards it. That's okay. They don't have to have a number for that metric right now, but they need to be able to articulate it and have a means to measure it. And then from the top down, I also do try to steer portfolio companies to one or two generally accepted industry metrics using the GEN's IRIS framework that seem to make sense for that sector. So for sustainability, it's straightforward, it's reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. For the development I already mentioned, job placement is a core one. For others it does get a little bit harder, but ideally I'd like to be able to have portfolio-wide metrics that I can report broadly to our stakeholders on. But probably the most important is that that single outcome that the company itself wants to try to solve and has a way, a real way to measure it. Yeah, I mean I would totally agree and I think for us we don't formally measure impact measurements in our portfolio yet. It is an area of internal discussion. But with that being said, I mean how do we get beyond not just kind of outputs but outcomes is kind of one of these quandaries that we're still trying to come to terms with and kind of figure out what the best practice is in the industry. I would definitely agree with Claudine that to the extent that a company is mission-driven, having the entrepreneur and having the company really articulate a vision for what is the change that they want to see in the world and what's kind of that theory of change and what is the metric that or two that they would want to measure over time. We have a portfolio company called PayJoy for example that does installment financing for smartphones in emerging markets. And so one very quick way for us to kind of measure impact is seeing what is the actual capital that's been deployed to these consumers in emerging markets. So those are quick and dirty sort of metrics but how do we get beyond that to measuring outcomes? I know that debate's been in this industry for quite some time but we're keen to kind of leverage our corporate resources to figure out ways to advance that discussion. And for us I think it's the way I've tried to portray this is to say that there are really two classes of investment. Whenever I do internal pitches on this I always have the four-part strategy I've talked about and invest I always have in quotes because I think investment can become a term of art if you know how to handle it. I mean there is no question that there are some companies out there we have in our energy portfolio a company called Off-Grid Electric which a lot of you are I know familiar with. And that was a straight financial investment. I mean that just sort of burned on all cylinders. So that's in category one which I call great financial investment oh by the way doing great social good. And then category number two is gonna be the flip of that which is gonna say does a heck of a lot of social good could be a great strategic partner, channel partner for us, could be a great brand partner for us. We'll have a respectable return. I don't advocate us investing in anything we don't think we'll have at least a respectable return over time with it. But the lead would be sort of the impact piece of it. And separating them out makes it easier because then the investors, the investor class as I lovingly call them they can go and say well look these are companies that just work financially for our portfolio and we don't have to get caught up in that debate about impact. That's just add on to the good story and then it clears the way to have some other investments that are a little more strategic for other reasons than just financial. And I think this is interesting because what I often wonder about, this is also the same case with investing with a gender lens or a diversity lens. I wonder if we always have to make that separation between impact investing and just traditional investing or will it be one in the same? Do you guys have perspectives about that as you think about from your CVC perspective? Do you have to make sure impact is part of that mandate or will it ever come naturally and not be sort of separated? I hope it, let's start on this one. I hope it does become natural and not always siloed because I think if we create too many silos we're gonna make it harder for companies because the people who are a naysayer on your investment committee are always gonna find one box you don't tick. I mean that's when you add up enough things that happens. And secondly I think for us as a society we need to be at the point where gender and diversity are just baked into the pie and they are a certain level of assumption is there. We're not, I don't think we're there yet but that would be the ideal for me. My hope is that through our work and the collective work of everyone in this room and the social enterprise impact investing ecosystem is that we can demonstrate that you don't have to necessarily make trade-offs between social impact and financial returns. I think there are certainly reasons to do so and there are plenty of investors who on the spectrum of financial returns are purposely very happy to take a smaller return to maximize impact but I think to prove to the vast majority of investors who are really concerned about maximizing financial returns I think that it is possible to have both and that's why I follow the exact same core diligence process and apply the same level of rigor to my investments as the standard ventures team does who is traditional SaaS investments but then I add an additional lens investigating the social or environmental impact. That's really clear to prove the case internally and externally. And we don't have any exits yet in our portfolio but if I look at my IRR based on how companies have raised follow-on rounds at much higher valuations I'm really pleased. I think we actually have a great portfolio right now and it's a good proof point but it's still really early. In terms of gender and underrepresented minorities and leadership roles of companies it's a huge focus for us and right now we're at over 60% of our portfolios is led by a woman or person of color and that will remain a very intentional focus and underpinning for our artwork and I think that the more that my small team does an impact and then building a more diverse portfolio the more I hope it will actually filter into the core ventures work as well. Just to add on in tying both thoughts as I think at a corporate level we all know that most companies particularly public companies have a very glossy CSR website and these priorities are actually very core to many companies including Orange and so how we think about sustainable development in the context of both Europe and in the markets in Africa that we're in are just core to our business. So ensuring that we have a stable network and provide connectivity to rural populations for example is just part of doing good business for us and also just very strategic to management at the very top. I think that you know as far as corporates tilting venture capital teams towards impact I think that's still a question that is being discussed and I will make a shameless plug. We're working with a couple of academic institutions on a research report a white paper of sorts that will be released sometime next year early next year as sort of a call to action that you know corporates can do this in meaningful ways and generate both financial returns strategic returns and have impact as completely aligned with strategic value. So if there are any folks in this audience that would like to be a part of that from a corporate angle would love to talk afterwards. Do you wanna go to the next question? Yeah. Okay, let's go for it. We're looking at the clock here. Before we open it up for questions I have one last question for you guys. For all the entrepreneurs in the room I'm sure a lot of people are wondering how do they actually approach you? What are the mechanics of the deal? What does that due diligence conversation like? What about post investment? How does an entrepreneur work with a CVC? Can you guys kind of talk about those specifics? I can start. So my best advice in this goes not just for CVC but for institutional investors as well is really do your homework. So start with the website. Sometimes funds don't publish a lot of details and ideal criteria. We're guilty of that, I admit it. Others are much more explicit. So if you can't necessarily get it from a website try to talk to someone who might know how an investor is thinking about a strategy and approach those who you think actually could be a good fit. So that means in terms of sector focus it means in terms of stage. Don't approach a series B investor if you're raising a seed round. Sometimes I'll talk to you just to start to build pipeline but so do your homework ahead of time and if it's a strategic I think it's really important to come in with that strategic story. Like what's the angle here? Because companies are big. Orange does a lot. G does a lot. Salesforce does do a lot. So how do you think about that tie in? That shouldn't be on the investor to kind of come up with that idea. So everything she said I agree with and would add think about how you are gonna be strategic to the investor. GE for example in our healthcare portfolio we care a lot about two things I think that would be great distribution channels and opening up new distribution channels and emerging market countries and product. There are things and a lot of the companies that went through our Miller Center program, not a lot, decent amount, came out of interesting technologies that came out of universities and we could see how they were in an area we didn't have a product in. So really nailing how you think you would be relevant to that investor is I think what separates good pitches from great pitches and obviously impact on all the other things that you would say. Although I do agree with something Claudine said earlier, I'm always amazed how many people don't nail that impact and right up front because it's clearly what we're all after. It helps us so much inside our companies when I get to that second class of that second category of companies of investments that I talked about which are the ones that are maybe not gonna have the biggest financial return but have a big strategic return or some other kind. That's key to it. So I would have that up front in the pitch and really highlight that. We work with intermediaries because we don't have the depth of bench to be able to identify the opportunity and we actually have a pretty sizable team but the expertise required and the market sizing around low carbon technology is so big but I would say that like a couple of deals have come across for like we can't not participate in this and so we actually, Autodesk is a little bit different. We don't have a venturing arm so my team claims to be the venturing arm but we have an M&A group that it's a little bit of the business partner model where if you wanna make an investment or you wanna make an acquisition you kinda make the case to the M&A team. We have an M&A business partner and what's interesting is that our team, they're very impressed by the diligence that our team would do and that was just from a grant making perspective. So I would echo your thoughts.  I think just managing process, I mean this might be even a question for Leslie is what are the types of questions you wanna ask a corporate? Be just very direct, ask the questions that are burning questions in terms of how does your process work? How does it go from let's say North America for us through Europe and or potentially Africa? How do deals get funded? There are a lot of mechanics behind the scenes that you'd wanna try to understand and I would say for the most part, we're willing to share a lot of those types of information to help also just level set expectations with the entrepreneur but just be very direct and just ask the kinds of questions that you think would be top of mind for you as an entrepreneur to engage with a corporate. A lot of this sounds really familiar from my sort of single experience with working with the CVC. Really, I mean from the entrepreneur's perspective, you need to think is there a strategic advantage that we would get by working with them in this way that we wouldn't get otherwise and I think don't be afraid to ask of the CVC a lot of questions about what that post-investment experience and collaboration looks like. Cool, thank you guys very much. We'll go ahead and open it up for audience Q and A so hopefully you've been writing those questions down. Yeah, why don't you start? I'd be curious to know. Okay, we're gonna pass the mic around so don't start talking till the mic comes. I'd be curious a little bit more about the relationship with you're all part of public companies and the governance structure around that. Moe just got into it a little bit but it'd be great to hear about that and how a decision process gets made on an impact VC or corporate VC. Do you want me to talk to the start? So Mark Binyov is definitely supportive of the Impact Fund but he's not directly involved. He will actually occasionally send us leads. He's entrepreneurs or hustlers and they can get to Mark. So he'll send me as well to the core ventures team and to the Impact Fund that we'll evaluate but I'll say I probably need to do a better job of evangelizing the Impact Fund within Salesforce. I think more people outside the company know about what we do than people inside the company. So that's on my to-do list but it really fits within Salesforce's overall ethos. I think it's very well known how the company from its very early beginnings set out with its one one one model of donating 1% of equity, 1% of product at 1% of employee time that ultimately inspired a whole movement and I think the Impact Fund is really the next evolution of how a business can do business while also doing good and deploying capital in a whole new way. So there's just one consideration from our perspective and that is from the corporate perspective which is basically influence, undue influence and consolidation. So we just have to make sure that we don't have such a stake in that the SEC might consolidate the entity onto our books. It's a pretty easy bar to pass from a public company perspective. So we just kind of run through the lawyers and say, okay, are we gonna be, are we not going to have undue influence in this company which would then require them to come onto our balance sheet. That's also true for us. We are recaptured. There are ownership stake in a company and we also do the fact that we're a corporate and our counting requirements. We have to have information, right? So we have to see companies quarterly financials. And then for a process for us, I mean, you know, our team here in San Francisco generally leads conversations with entrepreneurs and companies that are based in North America irrespective of where they might generate turnover. So if it's a company here, like Engazo or Binds or Payjoy, we lead those conversations typically we'll partner then with our investment committee which is comprised of executive executives based in Paris and essentially lead the conversation through internal processes that way. You know, we launched last year Orange Digital Ventures Africa, it's a 50 million euro opportunity for Africa specific deals and we are currently in the process of sorting out sort of process of how we best manage those deals more seamlessly. Great, let's take the next question. I think I see a hand way in the back.  Gonna make him get some exercise here. All right, just a quick baseline, you mentioned 50 euros. How much are you spending every year on impact investing and what's the kind of typical deal size? For Orange specifically, we're doing one to five million dollar checks. In Africa, we'll look at deals up to three million euro one to five million or euro or dollars. And we are generally in A or B rounds. We have not specifically tagged deals as impact or not impact and that's not necessarily a part of our investment process yet. It is something that we're currently exploring. So in our case, we're too far upstream on the pure investment part for me to give you a straight answer because we don't know yet. What I'm hoping to do, you recall, I talked about that whole risk and return issue when we gave our kickoff comments. I'm hopeful what we'll do is on my budget I'll be able to keep the funding but then I'll team with the investors to make the investments. And we will, some will be closer to grants, some will be closer to investments. We'll have a little hybrid combination of the two. But what I'm hoping to do is leverage the expertise of the investor teams but then keep the balance sheet, as it were, under my group so that they do not feel that we're diluting their returns. This year we'll do probably about 10 across roughly 10 investments. So on average our check size is hovering just around. And we're, again, we're just dipping our toe in. We've done a couple of deals at a quarter mil and we just got board approval for a million dollar deal. So slowly building on our size of the pool. All right, thank you. Two-part question related. The first is why aren't there, you guys are all leaders in this space, but why aren't there 50 or 100 CBCs out there? That's the first part. And if you had to deliver the elevator pitch to a CEO of a major corporation as to why this is essential and necessary to advance the cause of impact investing, what would that pitch be? Sorry, the first question was, why aren't there? Why aren't there a lot more CBCs out there? CBCs focusing on impact specifically. I would say that I think it's inevitable that there is a convergence of impact and venture investing because I think number one, we're all belatedly realizing, our corporates are belatedly realizing that they need a thriving middle class for their businesses to thrive. And therefore they need social impact. And you kind of look across the world and say, wait, well, governments and public sector aren't necessarily doing the best job of ensuring that's the case. So we can and should be doing more to ensure this happened. That would be my elevator pitch. And I think increasingly, the more traditional venturing models within companies, folks are getting more and more interested in this. To Robert's point, they tend to be a little conservative. They're either strategically aligned. From our perspective, it's like it's buying code and heads. Or looking at financial return, increasingly the impact side is going to gain traction. I think it already is, hence the reason why we're here. But as more and more corporates realize that they've got to get on the boat for societal benefits, you're going to see how a lot more of this. I would say, if you think about the trends of sustainability, I mean, these are secular trends, demographic, urbanization, climate change, et cetera, et cetera. And as companies think about their resilience over the long term and thinking about their innovation agenda, I personally see sustainability and innovation and how companies adapt to changes of innovation as being completely synonymous. So that's kind of one point. I would say secondly, to the extent that a corporate is specifically engaged in strategic investing, i.e. like early stage investing, I would say that strategic value and impact can be completely synonymous as well. And so there's no reason why that there should be any sort of friction between the two. And so the last thing I would say is corporates have agency, we actually, because we have assets and we have infrastructure on the ground, we can actually affect the change that a startup is potentially trying to achieve. And so if I think of a CEO, I'd kind of point on, hit kind of those three key points as far as what's going through my mind. I would, to pick up on something Joe said about the growing middle class around the world, two things, one is that's true of the external to the company, to the customers of the company. But I would add internal to the company to make your company an attractive place to work, to people who are getting out of college today to the millennials. They care about more than a paycheck, they care about making a difference. And I think this is really part and parcel to how you start to show that companies can engage in making that difference and not just pure financial return. And the second thing I would say is for the companies themselves, GE's as big as big gets, right? And big companies are like big battleships and they don't turn on the dime, but they got held a lot of firepower when you need it. And there's a lot to be said for having a hell of a lot of firepower in terms of how you can help that entrepreneurial infrastructure by using it. But if you think about the world we live in, the world we live in is not a top-down world. The world we live in is from the ground up world. And if you think about disruption in politics, economics, technology, all of it across the board, it's coming from the ground up. And those of you who are working as entrepreneurs on the ground are really the leading edge in that. And for companies to understand that, I think it's critical that they stop thinking about everything, you know, GE, if we want to sell aircraft engines to Air Kenya, we go in and we see president Kenyatta and we're great at that kind of thing, big top-down kind of way of looking at the world. But if we really want to grow our healthcare business in Kenya, we need to be working with companies like Cedars Diagnostics that thought of a whole new economic model of Brown bringing MRIs to people in the slums of Nairobi. So I think for companies to see new markets, to understand the world and to attract the next generation of talent, this is where they need to be. Here, here. What over there? Hi, thank you so much. This is really valuable. I was curious, the earlier session was all about lessons learned and I was just hoping maybe if any of you had some tidbits on this whole journey that you've had that you can share with all of us. The good and the bad.  I think it's easy to kind of get drawn to a shiny object that makes you think, oh, this is not quite of the right fit on the strategic integration side or it's a little bit early. And then those things tend not to be the best performing or best fits later on. And so, you know, what we know is enterprise software, we know the Salesforce ecosystem, we increasingly know the sectors that we're working in and we're really comfortable at series A and above and not earlier. And so for us, it's really honing our investment criteria and keeping ourselves honest to stick with it because it can be hard. You talk to really, you're really telling convincing entrepreneurs you wanna invest, but you know, sometimes it's better to just wait. I alluded to a story earlier.  And it, we were looking at, wanted to get more in production, I'm sorry, product design and manufacturing. And so this came to us in the M&A group and they led with like the number of road deaths in India. And so that's why it came to my team. And so we said, we raised our hands and said, hey, we'll do the diligence and we'll look at the deal and see what we think. And then we came together with the M&A team, my team and the CEO and said, we would never touch this thing. And here's the diligence we did and here's why and whatnot. And the M&A team was shocked, number one at the amount of diligence that we did to look at the deal. And it never passed the sniff test. We were trying to show off a little bit what we could do. But number two, we wanted to show that like this is that impact can be just as rigorous as a financial or a strategic deal. And so we use that as an opportunity to kind of influence them to a greater degree and are now kind of regularly checking in with those guys and making sure we're back and forth. To the point where our M&A team recently said that they're getting lots more deal flow around impact because we've kind of signaled the market to that. And actually it was, I think they were a little bit annoyed about it. But we think it's great. We're like, wonderful. So I think, I mean, the lesson there would be like, don't, every opportunity that you can leverage it to infuse more impact into the conversation. All right, we've got time for probably one final question. Hand in the back. Thank you for the great session. One question. In your experience, corporate venture capital has been impact venture capital. Has it been top down, bottom up or the intersection? Has it been driven by leadership? And then people, are the people lead it? Or is it an idea that has come from the team and then you convince the leadership? Thank you. In the Salesforce example, I alluded to the origin story. It was definitely driven by leadership with broad support among other executives at the top. So that's our slice of that answer. And we're still early in the process. I would say, ask me next year. And I can tell you how that sort of turns out. But I would say at this point, there's a lot of kind of internal discussion on what a strategy might look like for us. And I think we're an example of, I said a minute ago, all these things about GE being very top down. But I think this actually came, this was intrapreneur work. I mean, this was internal. We started the program with the Miller Center as an accelerator and based on that, we said, no, there's a lot more here than we have all recognized. And so we said, let's do more, let's go into investing, let's go into new co-creation. So very much in our case from the bottom up. And I would say from our case, we lead with an impact first lens. And when we identified that all the opportunities were in the private sector, we brought our board along to say, we need to be investing. And they, to their credit, said, yeah, great, let's go for it. And we've used that foot in the door to influence the wider conversation around corporate venture capital within the company. So bottom up, I guess. Awesome, well, we are out of time. I would really encourage you guys to come up and talk to all the panelists. If you have more questions, they're all very friendly. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks a lot.


Is this man ever, ever in his life experienced what it is actually like to get an autism diagnosis in Australia? The amount of time it takes, the amount of money it costs, the stigma that you face, what a ridiculous offensive thing to say, and how awfully that perpetrates the idea that neurodivergent people, particularly autistic people, are in some way faking their condition? Now this comes on the back of years now in which both sides of politics have perpetrated a lie that there are more people in the community diagnosed autistic than there actually are autistic people in the community. There is no evidence of an overdiagnosis of autistic people because there is no data speaking to the baseline existence of autistic people in our society pre the NDIS. The NDIS has come in and people have finally been able to get access to the services and supports they need and somebody is tracking the data, therefore we now see autistic people in the community.


Hi, and how are you all today? My name is Priyanka and the question says find the points on the curve y is equal to x q at which the slope of the tangent is equal to the y coordinate of the points. Here we are given the equation the curve as y is equal to x q on differentiating y with respect to x we get dy by dx equal to 3x square, right? Now let the point on the curve be x1 y1 right, so at this point dy by dx at x1 y1 is equal to 3x1 square which is also the slope of the tangent. So at x which is x1 y is equal to x1 q, right? Now we are given question that of tangents are equal to the y coordinate that is 3x1 square is equal to x1 cube, right? That implies 3x1 square minus x1 cube is equal to 0 taking x1 square common. We are left with 3x1 minus sorry, taking x1 square common. We are left with 3 minus x1 equal to 0. So that means either x1 square is equal to 0 or 3 minus x1 is equal to 0. That implies that x1 is equal to 0 or x1 is equal to 3. Now when x1 is equal to 0 the value of y1 is equal to 0 and when x1 is equal to 3 value of y1 is equal to 3 cube that is equal to 27, hence the points are 0 comma 0 and 3 comma 27. Wait, this is the answer to this part. Hope you understood it. Sorry, this is the answer to this question. Hope you understood it well and enjoyed it too. Have a nice day.


The Lotto Jackpot is an estimated 2.8 million euro. Play responsibly in store in app or at Lottery.ie. The National Lottery. It could be you. Broadcasting throughout the Northwest and across the world online. This is Highland Radio. And you're very welcome back and as promised joining me on Zoom now I've got young Finnish-owned actress Leanne Devlin who is about to stage her self-written play in London next month. And Leanne, you're very welcome. Thank you so much. So great indeed. Actress and playwright and your play now are going to be on the London stage which is fabulous. So where did your theatre career begin, Leanne? I suppose if you go back far enough. I did speech and drama with Emma Portler when I was really young, maybe like eight in Bunkrana. And then I did some musicals with Donald Henderson through Grace Pint Productions in the St Mary's Hall in Bunkrana. So I guess that was the start of it really. And then after school I went to drama school so I studied at the Gayley School of Acting and the Guilford School of Acting. And it just kind of after Covid took off from there. Fantastic. And I suppose everybody, well not everybody, there's a lot of people who are involved in amateur dramatics locally. And their dream is to hit the big time. And I'm sure you met a lot of challenges along your way. Oh yeah, definitely.  And that goes the full way up to like A-listers. They'll be getting rejected from blockbuster movies, right, left and centre as well. So that's a massive part of the job. But it's just something that you have to be okay with. And most of the time when you get rejected from a job it's not because you're not good. It's because you weren't the right fit. And you just have to be okay with that. And it's vital for an actress like yourself to have a good agent that gets you auditions and gets you on the ladder if you like to success. Yes, 100%. I was very lucky last year to sign with an agency called Nova Artists, which are based in Northern Ireland. So they get me a lot of really cool auditions for RT and BBC and the likes of that. And obviously it's worked now because you've written this play. It's a one-woman show and it's going to be staged in London next month. And Slippery While Wet. Am I right? Slippery While Wet, yes. So I'm intrigued by the title of that. So tell us a little bit about the play. It's a one-woman show that follows the journey of an actor who was living in a big city and ran out of work and money. So she's had to move back to her hometown to her parents. And then for money she's got a job in a local supermarket as a cleaner. So when she's working in the supermarket she falls in love with a colleague. And then that forces her to face her complicated relationship with her hometown because when she moved home she initially wanted to get straight back out as soon as she can. It was like a means to an end. But now she's kind of debating whether to stay or whether to go. And I believe that you actually did work as a student in the supermarket. So is there personal experience in there or is it fictional or is it a mixture of both? I think this is the most common question that I get. The play is totally fictional. None of the events are based on real life. But it is definitely inspired by my time working as a cleaner in a super value current on it. So that was not actually when I was a student when I graduated in COVID hit. And there was no theater work happening is when I was working in super value. And it was just so much crack.  I just thought some of this needs to be on a stage because it was comedic gold.  You accept yourself and nowhere to hide. So I presume that you have got some techniques to keep you going. It's a 60 minute long show. So that's a long time to be on stage by yourself, Leanne. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's an hour long. But one of my favorite parts of live theater is the audience interaction and making it an enjoyable experience for the audience. So I'm really excited to use them. It's all direct address. So the whole story is told directly to the audience. It's the fourth walls broken. There's no barrier there. So I'm really excited to see their reactions and feed off their energy because they don't have the cast members to feed off instead. And you're the only actress on stage, but you have a partner in crime with the director Emma Porter. Is that right? That's right, isn't it? Emma Copeland is her name yet. She's a London based director. She's brilliant. So originally the show got accepted to Dublin Fringe Festival, and that was meant to be the premiere. And I asked Emma if she'd be interested in directing it and she read the script and she was on board straight away. And she's just been like a workhorse since she's doing amazing. And then she asked me if I'd be interested in doing London and I kind of, you know, didn't really think much of it. I was like, of course I'd be interested in doing it in London. And then I think it was like the next day she was like, OK, I've got a two week run in Barnes Court Theatre in London for us. And I was like, what? You know, I didn't actually think that was going to happen and for it to be premiering in London because that's happening before Dublin Fringe. It's kind of still sinking in. I never thought I'd be doing this so early in my career. So do you have to pinch yourself sometimes to say, is this really happening? Yeah, 100% at the minute, because we're in the middle of the producing work and we haven't started rehearsals yet. I don't think it's sunk in, but once I get on the flight to London and get into rehearsals, it'll be like, whoa. And I've just read some reviews of it. It's cheeky and a reference, gorgeously, rye sense of humour throughout and Leanne Devlin is a national treasure. Do you envisage the London audience having any problems with the Donegal accent or maybe the Donegal sense of humour? I hope not. This is a soft spot for me because through my training, my accent hasn't always been encouraged, but I think telling Donegal stories in a Donegal accent is really important. We've got so much humour in Donegal that is so niche that other parts of the world don't have. So no, I hope it's not an issue. I did do a show in London in April. It was a three-hander, a Belfast show called Two Fingers Up, and it went down a treat. The audience loved it, so I'm hoping that Slybrio and Watt can have the same reception over there. And to put a show on the road, I'm sure you must need funding. You're a young 24-year-old just starting out and you don't belong to any big theatre company, so was it difficult to get the funding to stage this? Yeah, definitely. That's something that we're still working on. So being an individual that's not from a company, it's really hard to get funding from the Arts Council for individuals. So we have applied, but at present we're a totally unfunded show. We've got little bits from, we did a fundraiser online and we got a lot of support on that. But in terms of the scale of budget that you actually need, we're miles off, so it's definitely going to be a challenge, but we're working on it. Fantastic. So the dates for the London production now are at the end of the month. Isn't that right? I've got them somewhere here. Yeah, to the 22nd of August. To the 2nd of September. And prospects of bringing it over to Ireland? Or are you going to bring it elsewhere? Yeah, so we're going to be in Dublin French Festival in September from the 9th to the 14th. And then I'm off for a bit doing another show. And then in November we're bringing Slippery On Wet to the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. So we're going to be in the Lyric from the 7th to 10th of November. And after Slippery On Wet wins, are you working on another play then or future plans down the road? Yeah, so in between the Dublin dates and Belfast dates, the show I mentioned before Two Fingers Up that I'm part of, we're actually touring to Australia. We're going to be doing the show in Sydney and Melbourne over the end of September, start of October. Wow, so as I think Heldon said in Coronation Street, the world is your lobster. At 24. Well, congratulations on your play. And it's been stated in London and your career and every success in the future. Leanne has been lovely talking to you this morning. Thank you so much. Thanks a million. Take care.


Okay, very good morning to you. Hope you're doing well Thursday 22nd of April and Gonna start off then with the close on Wall Street where we finished up across the major three indices around zero point nine percent So snapping that two-day losing streak and this morning then going into the European open Just gone through 7 a.m. Now as I'm recording this the DAX future. It's just printing session highs up 87 NASDAQ as well just having a test on the overnight Kind of late US close Asia Pacific high region in the NASDAQ to keep an eye on here in the futures As markets continue to settle after that nervous start to the week So kind of like what we were suggesting in the briefing this time yesterday that just a little bit of calmness Coming into what was I thought a little bit of overplayed in terms of negativity for the set off Given the context of just how high that we were in the equity markets and this idea I guess of you know having had this pretty strong run-up in the last couple of weeks for US equities pricing in almost Perfection if you like and then what's happened here is the global COVID situation Generally has got worse in terms of number of cases on a global level. It's just that a lot of that is very focused on the emerging Developing country kind of area and so India particularly in the spotlight Japan We have seen though in developed world country also getting worse But generally areas of course of greater magnitude for financial markets like the US And say the UK to a certain extent have been more relatively controlled But the COVID thing certainly just has been a focal point But again, I don't think it comes as a great surprise Those trends have been emerging for some time. So yesterday really just putting in a bit of a recovery Overall actually the the small cap Russell 2000 outperformed about two to one against the three usual Kind of major US indices like the S&P that down and that's that 100 Overnight in the Asia pack session then Similar kind of story taking the positive hand over from from the Americans Japan outperformed Hong Kong Australia just eking out modest gains India a laggard 314 thousand 835 new cases in India for COVID-19 in one 24-hour period is a record and Subsequently, they're their equity market continues to be weighed by that ongoing worsening situation for the time being a lot to be said as well actually on that point about this kind of two-speed recovery between the lights of the US and then These emerging market countries and and and the rule kind of necessity globally if you want to see the full strength of recovery in the second half of this year because of the demand that comes from these large Populous areas that are emerging markets and Well, no for the moment the market seen to be managing the fallout of the COVID situation because of the Nature of where the issue is arising at the moment One thing is it does impede a little bit the recovery narrative to the most extreme extent Given the nature of the fact that the demand is going to be Kind of suppressed on that that two-speed recovery as I mentioned the one thing I actually think for equities and I was talking to to Sam one of the traders here yesterday was that You know, perhaps this is what equities really need Which is there was a lot of apprehension of course over recent months about the kind of the more Solid outlook that we were really factoring in for markets going forward and ultimately that does tend to then lead to the Discussion about tapering and so on we've had that now emerged from the bank of Canada yesterday Being the first major bank to take that step But perhaps the the kind of risk then on the global level of COVID is enough to keep central banks Kind of true to their word of just holding the line for the moment And I know Canada have taken that that kind of first step I do find it hard to see the lights of the Fed and the ECB following to be quite honest And does that provide those more optimal conditions then where it kind of You've got you've got a more constructive narrative growth story going forward, but still supportive Monetary policy environment coupled with as I'm going to talk about Still a lot of stimulus coming from the fiscal side as I'll discuss in Italy and marry a dragon's latest plans as well to inject over 200 billion in a recovery package For a radical restructuring it's the Italian economy so So to just think about on a balance going forward because you know overall I still think that we go higher here in equities generally going forward Yields as well continue to remain generally lower Excuse me, so we're up around five and a half ticks Going into the moot this morning and that coming in step with generally Modest gains seen in in the equity market at the moment and gold Found finding a bit of a test here and an interesting technical level So actually worth keeping an eye on because we've just had a slight slip below it That was holding during the late Asia pack hours and early during the kind of early Or late European afternoon going to early part of the back end of the US session And that pivot on the daily Technicles as well as the high on the 19th was holding up. It's just seen it being pressured here more recently, so We're keeping an eye then for the next level of of interest down at 1788 It's about seven in the in the futures market and this coming of course after quite a nice Uptrend over the last two days. We've had in gold Having added, you know good dirty bucks to price Probably having found a target near that 1800 but a profit-taking coming in given the degree of run-up that that price has had FX markets pretty quiet as you can see here You're a dollar left and cable pretty locked in in fairly sideways price action at the moment And of course, we've got the ECB coming up later, which we which is going to be the main topic to discuss right now So what are we to expect from the ECB today? Well in summary, I'd say overall It might well be a relatively Tame event from a market reaction point of view Here is the kind of general Context of this meeting The ECB is trapped in a situation which stubbornly high coronavirus infections are forcing tougher restrictions across the 19 nation region Dampening output and leaving the economy training well behind the US that the same time progress on vaccinations and joint fiscal aid Is fueling optimism that a vigorous rebound is close I guess again people may be a bit apprehensive given what Canada did yesterday because they're they themselves are facing quite a Tricky COVID situation, which is leading to subsequent restrictions over large parts of the country and irrespective of that They chose to take that step to commence tapering. I don't think that the ECB will follow So I think that any apprehension is unwarranted and not needed at this point as far as the ECB is concerned Few other things to be aware of then what is the kind of timeline that we can be expecting from the ECB? Well, here's what the Bloomberg survey economists that was conducted earlier this month would suggest in terms of timings So July the ECB will reduce the pace of pandemic purchases So still a long way to go here Until we get that and also as well I think June generally for the likes of the ECB in the federal reserve is a really big Meeting at least at this point In time that we can see because by the time we get to several more weeks down the line We're obviously going to have progressed in really two major places the speed of vaccinations And also then what is the global COVID situation and domestic COVID situation and subsequent restrictions then As a result of that going forward Then we can have a little bit of a more clearer update to when both those central banks will be issuing their latest projections And at that point then we can see just are we in a better place? Generally, if we've seen increased vaccinations decreasing restrictions Do they need to then start talking about this reduction then of the amount of stimulus in the system? and obviously the target being these emergency measures they've that the ECB have employed like the pandemic emergency purchase program, so July then it would be interesting. I don't think you need to wait for the June meeting to know that Obviously tracking those aforementioned areas will be key to ascertaining the timing of these things as will obviously subsequent ECB speeches that will be coming over the coming weeks because There are already some of the more hawkish contingent of the ECB Talking about this this very thing already Um, I don't think that that's the consensus of the governing council at this point Beyond that then the fourth quarter the ECB will give three months notice on the pandemic program First quarter the ECB will end net purchases under the pandemic program So again to be clear they already have an asset purchase program underlying their kind of normal QE Proceedings the PEP is on top of that And so again start reducing these purchases in July Three months notice then issued in Q4 about then the subsequent ending of it as we go into the beginning of next year Now this is what what economists are predicting There's obviously a lot of uncertainties when we start looking this further forward Like the potential spread then that this situation does get worse in a lot of these emerging economies from a covid perspective and that that then Has some tangible kind of change to the virus it mutates and therefore we start to see Vaccines then when we're going into a point of requiring booster shots Which are then perhaps rendered ineffective to a certain degree against a new variant and so weather patterns would be very changing the weather conditions we know generally covid tends to Spread and be more transmissible in colder conditions. And so therefore You know, this is the timeline. We're tentatively looking at it might not actually play out in this way But this is what we need to go off and how markets are generally priced at this point So, yeah, hopefully that gives a bit more perspective again the the kind of crib sheet, of course the ing put out I did share this with the Amphi live community yesterday. I'll reshare it again later on today but this is looking at the scenario analysis and Again, just to explain this graphic So from left to right you have the the the two major economic ways of which the governing council look at the economy to Judge their decision-making process So the outlook for inflation and growth and then you've got the tools and instruments that they use Which is the interest rate the qe program and the pep and then any commentary on the exchange rate Which I don't think we're going to get anywhere near comments on the exchange rate at this point So here then the the kind of base case and I must say I agree with ing here that The language which is always if you're new to training is the language and how they describe These areas and these tools that is indicative then of any potential Movement that could be seen in the likes of the euro European equities European eons and so on And so it's the nuances that then they're hinting towards that go from up more dovish Inclination from what they're saying to below more hawkish the base case though the most likely outcome and I think Probably will happen today By by a fairly high conviction rate will be for growth Somewhat higher inflate or for inflation somewhat higher inflation this year on the back of one-off factors So the kind of year and base effects from how We were going through this dramatic drop in demand this time last year The energy price rises and so on and so forth. So inflation is going to go up But they see as a temporary pop before then kind of normalizing For the growth outlook recent data confirmed the base case of a gradual recovery So an upgrade of this if they were going to be more hawkish Would be a tilt more towards the second half of them commenting would be stronger than they're currently anticipating I don't think that they could be in a position to really use that type of language at a point when vaccinations are picking up which is positive in europe um, and coven generally has been um Decelerating for had been a worse situation just a few weeks ago, but restrictions are still in place Things are still fairly uncertain. I don't think they've got the the confidence yet to make that that leap of faith About talking that that convincingly about the future On the actual tools no change the pep size to increase if necessary. So re Reiterating that same language that they've said before the alternatives here would be on a dovish side So if dovish then would weaken the euro probably boost european equities Uh and see bond prices rise would be if they said no change but intention to increase the pep um size communicated Going more dovish these would be increasing the pep envelope to keep higher pace of purchase in the second half of 2021 Again for the balanced reasoning of what's just happening from what i've described I don't think that they will go down a very dovish option I think that's very low probability on the flip side being hawkish The governing council assessment of declining future need to ease policy further And again, I think that's just too That's just we're not at that point yet for them to have that kind of confidence to be that sure So overall, I think it's pretty bedded in this base case be aware of the alternatives And strategically plan then for the likely market reaction That might come of that But I would say be mindful of the fact that you're probably going to get this And given the fact that I don't think I'm unique in having this view or ing having this view I think it's pretty much shared across how the market is positioned at price for today And hence the reason why Unless we get a real shock and surprise It might be that the jude that this meeting Is a bit of a bridge And the ecb and legard will be looking to Try and get through this meeting without making any communication blunders Now, I know legard gets criticized quite a lot for her communication techniques But I think she'll try and keep it relatively on point relatively concise and short and sharp At least that's the advice I'd try and give her Answer the questions in as quick and short a time as possible and get off the stage Because you don't want to make a mistake and this meeting should be just a bridge them to more important meetings When we get to june and the eurozone should have to seen a much larger degree of reopening and at that point The ecb can make a better judgment on the best subsequent course of action for monetary policy all right Very brief update then I did mention Mario Draghi the former ecb president and I talked about fiscal So next week according to the ft last night was reporting that he's going to unveil 221 billion euro recovery package to restructure the italian economy. It's called the the draghi recovery plan Which should be approved by the italian cabinet by the end of this week It involves 30 billion euros of italian budgetary resources and 191.5 billion of loans and grants from Something called the next generation eu scheme according to people from the matter The next generation eu project requires member states to submit their plans By a target date of the end of april hence the reason why this is materialized right now Where this money is coming from this kind of pencil 191.5 billion This next generation eu scheme is where much of this money that draghi is trying to get is coming from Is from that recovery fund at the 750 billion that we've had agreed obviously over the course of the last year or so from europe so he's really Putting in the request at this point But it's these sorts of things this fiscal commitment and perhaps then the covet global situation which keeps then central bankers a little bit apprehensive x i'm going to say for now canada Then i think that's a supportive environment for keeping any of that runaway yield on a on the tightening of financial conditions debate on an ice And means that the the the market can kind of simmer away in a genuinely calm upward fashion That it has done when it comes to the equity market over the medium term The other thing was just on vaccines So just a quick mention jjj published their single shot covet 19 vaccine phase 3 data came out Fairly late last night. They stated it remains confident in the positive Benefit risk profile of the vaccine with 85 effective against severe critical disease as well as meeting its primary endpoints Separately, we also have this which was the serum institute of india They'll be able to raise its monthly output of astro zenica's covet 19 vaccine to 100 million doses by July from 60 to 70 million at the moment However, that is later than the previous timeline that they had said before of the end of may according to their chief executive Okay, quick look at the calendar of what's coming out today And so the european morning is very quiet nothing major coming out So really you have to wait for the the first part of the ecb, which is a statement Which is going to be at 1245 Probably if anything, that's the the more more dull part of what otherwise this is going to be an overall very quiet meeting Uh, that's expected And then the press conference will follow at 130 as usual and that's where there could be a little bit more interest Where she's got a little bit more Flexibility to to talk and obviously counteracting the general questions in the q&a format You've got the weekly jobless numbers coming out of the u.s. It could be interesting. Um, we had a 576,000 print last week that was substantially below market expectations of 700,000 in fact It was the lowest level since the negative effects of the coronavirus have really been felt since march 2020 so the question mark is, you know, can that be A consistent pattern or not the consensus estimate is for about back up to around 17,000 however that in itself is still actually relatively low Comparative to the recent weeks over the last couple of months for jobless claims You've also got existing home sales. I'm not expecting a great deal of change there from previous That's coming out at three eurozone consumer confidence flash funding for a port three as well Those are these data points as a cluster. I don't really see too much in the way of any associated risks or Potential catalyst to shift sentiment on the intraday perspective from any of these to be quite honest It really does depend on where we're at technically on some of these charts If we're at quite a key Technical point, perhaps about lies enough to bump us either way But I don't think there are any game changes on any of these three measures Supply wise if you're looking at fixed income, there's a there's a hefty amount coming on the market from Spain and France this morning and then from a u.s. Earnings perspective Yeah, kind of a three to look out for AT&T intel as the u.s. Airliners american airlines as well coming out Later on today that is it. I'm going to leave you to it and let you get on with the session You can reach me into the the amplifier live community If you have any questions at all I'll be in there throughout the day and I'll be covering the ECB live Of course with the team Otherwise, if you're watching some youtube don't forget to like and subscribe any questions. Just drop a comment. Happy to help All right. Have a good day guys. Good luck for the ECB


We live in a late-stage capitalist society, so we already know that, you know, it's unsurprising when we see stories about the rich getting richer during a pandemic. It's unsurprising to see that large multinational corporations are making record profits during a pandemic as they lay off thousands of workers. But a new report by The Washington Post really gives us a sense of the scale of this issue and how disgusting the greed of corporate America is. And it's truly, it's shocking like it's worse than I thought. Now, I'm going to link you to the article from The Washington Post down below, but I'm actually going to read you a summary from Common Dreams, because we don't have enough time to get through the full article of The Washington Post, even though I would highly recommend that you read that. But let's get to the summary. So this is from Kenny Stansel of Common Dreams who reports, while the COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic crisis have made 2020 a devastating year for the vast majority of people throughout the United States, most of the country's biggest companies have prospered only to hand a larger chunk of profits to shareholders while firing thousands of workers. An in-depth investigation published Wednesday by The Washington Post illuminates how big businesses are having a very different year from most of the country, which is suffering as a result of the federal government's negligent response to the ongoing public health catastrophe and inadequate provision of financial assistance to working-class households. This is a global crisis, but the big companies are not treating it as one. They haven't skipped a beat, said William Lasonic, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The Post shared examples of the surprisingly upbeat outlook shared by executives at some of America's largest corporations. I don't think we've ever been more excited or energized about our prospects, PayPal finance chief John Rainey said on a November conference call. These are times when the strong could get stronger Nike chief John Donahoe told analysts in September. According to the newspaper's analysis, 45 of the 50 most highly valued U.S. companies have turned a profit in 2020, despite their financial success, 27 of those firms cut staff this year, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the midst of an intertwined health and economic emergency. Instead of using the wealth produced by workers to keep employees on payroll, corporations put Americans out of work and used their profits to increase the wealth of shareholders the Post found. So I don't think that the average American, assuming they know that corporate greed is a thing, even knows that it's this bad. Like I don't think that they realize that laying off employees as a means of raising shareholder value is what they do. And it's a common phenomenon, like it's not necessarily exclusive to this year. This is what they always do. But it's just particularly disgusting when we see people lining up for miles, waiting for hours to get a box of food on Thanksgiving, when we see 14 million households and 19 million individuals face eviction come January. Now, I do want to share a graphic that the Washington Post created, because I think this is really, really interesting. So as you can see, there's two main categories here, companies that were not profitable, such as Disney and Boeing, and companies that were profitable like Comcast, Walmart, and Microsoft. And as you can see, even if they were still profitable, they laid off hundreds, if not thousands of employees in spite of said profitability. They don't care about their employees. They have one goal, and that is to boost profits. They have a fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value, and they will do that, regardless of the cost. If that means throwing their own under the bus, throwing the very people whose labor they exploit, who make them rich, under the bus, they're going to do it. Because corporations are amoral. Their actions are absolutely unethical and immoral, but these are amoral actors.  It's not surprising. None of this should surprise you if you've been paying attention, but that doesn't mean that because we're desensitized to these sorts of stories, we should lose our sense of outrage because this is something that is a common phenomenon in dystopian, late-stage capitalist societies. And this isn't just going to change because one day these large corporations have an epiphany and think maybe we should treat our workers better. You have to force them. It's sad, but again, not surprising in the slightest.


The soundscape project collected data on sound levels in the northern Adriatic Sea during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data includes sound pressure level measurements from nine monitoring stations, which are characterized by different natural conditions and anthropogenic pressures. These data can be used as a benchmark for scientists and policymakers who want to assess the risk of noise impacts on marine fauna in the Mediterranean Sea and worldwide. This article was authored by Antonio Peprizzo, Andrea Barbanti, Giulia Bafucci, and others.


絕に people can ask questions over lunch. Let's just go for one or two, just very quickly. It is one down here. I'm literally going to limit it to two questions. There is one there. It is a question for Kwahan. I was quite surprised that you didn't mention Safe Harbor anywhere, because I mean it is certainly our belief that we can transfer data outside of the European economic area providing it is to a country that complies with Safe Harbor directive. So I just wondered what your views were on that. Chwain, dyna'n gofyn i'r tuwch. Y Llywodraeth SAFE HARBER is just for the US. There's a whitelist of certain countries. So if it's a whitelist of countries, it's fine. If it's a SAFE HARBER, it should be okay, but in the UK. But European regulators have raised a lot of doubts about SAFE HARBER. And in future, they might try and kill it. Or at least put a deadline on it. So it can be tricky if you're outside the UK. I think UK is probably okay as long as the data is kept in the US. Is there one more at the back? Is there a question at the back there? And then we'll take the very last one over there and that'll be it. I'm Tony Scott, web developer. The law does seem to line with reality. An immediate thought that springs to mind with me is to solve very fine and good saying to keep personal data within the EEA. But it doesn't take it into account where the internet is working. There's a package, package that doesn't recognise national borders. from neighbours, I've got a client on them. The pockets would go anywhere around the world. If each pocket in theory could go a totally different route, any in every country in the world. I didn't have time to mention it, there is an exemption for mere transit. End of the question about follow the sun practices, is that mere transit? Thanks. A very last question, very briefly if you can please. Do we need to worry about the Patriot Act in the US? In terms of commercial or legal sense of data? Again, that is kind of... because US cloud providers are dominant, there's a lot of emphasis on the Patriot Act, but actually all countries have laws which enable them to get your data. It's just that US cloud providers are dominant. In many ways, because I said earlier on, a lot of cloud providers actually put in their terms that they have the right for their own protection, they have the right to disclose data if they're requested by authorities. In many ways, this is a personal data issue about can you transfer the data outside the EEA? The information commissioner has said, if you are a cloud user, you've signed up for a US cloud provider. If they do transfer data under the Patriot Act, you're not necessarily in trouble because it's not you doing it, it's the cloud provider that's doing it, and if they do it because they were required to by law as opposed to being simply asked, then they're protected by law because they're required to. But in many ways, it's not just that. If you have got a cloud provider who's US based, you might have data transferred out to them, but if you have another cloud provider, you might get data that's sucked out of there by their local country. So it's not just the US that you have to worry about, it's all countries really. OK, thank you. Can we just say very quickly, thank you to our three speakers in this session.