Welcome everyone to our session today. It's great to have you as part of the audience. And first, I wanted to thank you all again just for joining and taking time out of your SoCAP conference to listen in to both this panel and pitch session today. And I also wanna thank our ICM member panelists who you will meet in just a few minutes and the amazing entrepreneurs for participating in the pitches that you'll hear. So ICM are impact capital managers for those of you who are not familiar with the organization is a member network for funds based in North America who are investing for positive impact and to maximize financial return. So one of the investors you're gonna hear from today actually are members of the ICM internal team. We are all a part of teams at member funds who have joined the ICM network to support its mission. And as you'll get a sense from the small sample size of investors you're gonna meet today, ICM's member funds cover a wide range of sectors and impact and investment themes across all of our work as well as stage wise, we're very diverse too. So everything from early stage seed investors all the way up through later stage buyout funds as well. So a really broad set of investors who have backed ICM and joined the network and we're excited to dig in to understand the strategies behind a couple of those today as well as meet some exciting entrepreneurs. So today, just lastly on impact capital managers before we get started, the network has grown to over 70 member funds in its short five year history and represents over 13 billion in impact focused capital. So I encourage all participants in the audience to take a look at the impact capital managers website at some point and you can see a great roster of all of our member funds that have joined to date as well as research and articles and programmatic efforts that ICM has launched and more to come as we continue to work together. So to introduce myself, my name is Emma Sisman and I am with SJF Ventures. SJF actually is a fund that helped co-found ICM when it was first getting started some years ago and at SJF we invest in what we call high growth positive impact companies that span a broad range of sectors that are both environmentally focused as well as socially focused. So everything from clean energy to circular economy and sustainable foods on the environmental side and on the more social or societal side we invest in companies in health and wellness, education, employment technologies, GovTech. So really a broad set of themes that we're looking to tackle and over our 20 plus year history, we've backed 75 portfolio companies to date and most recently raised our fifth fund at the beginning of 2021 that was $175 million in size. So looking to deploy capital actively as well as all the other investors who you're about to meet. So really if anything sounds like it might be a fit for your company or for your work, please feel free to reach out to us after the session. We're looking to engage with any members of the audience where there might be a good fit for a conversation. So before we jump into our pitches and our panel I wanted to give our other panelists an opportunity to introduce themselves. So maybe we will start with Steven if you could give a bit on your background and experience as well as your work at Bronze that would be great. Yeah, happy to do that. I meant, thank you. My name is Steven DeBerry, I'm at Bronze Investments. Bronze was also one of the founders of Impact Capital Manager to really support this organization. We are a social impact focus venture capital fund and we focus on the areas of domestic US where there is structural historical disparity which is basically everywhere. And we're looking to move those disparities to prosperity. And so companies that have a product or service where revenue for the company is driving impact is our sweet spot. We're agnostic about category but we tend to see a lot in health, financial services, education, food, transportation, et cetera. Areas we see marginalization in our society. So glad to be here. Also folks, you know, I think they have products and services that align with us. I'd be happy to talk with folks after this session and I'm really glad to be here. Thank you. Yeah, thank you Steven for joining us. And next Sasha would be great to hear a bit about your background and work at Ecosystem Integrity Fund. Sure, so Ecosystem Integrity Fund or perhaps for those of you who like efficiency of syllables, you can just call us EIF. We are a fund focused exclusively on environmental sustainability. That's the expertise and backgrounds of all of the partners we're all lifers passionate about finding solutions to sustainability and have been investing in venture for the better part of a couple of decades now pursuing environmental businesses. That crosses everything from what you might traditionally think of as clean tech. So enabling technologies for distributed solar and other renewables to things like consumer products that are driven by more sustainable ingredients that are lower impact on people on the planet to things like stormwater control efficiency across HVAC. So diverse set of industries all driven by where we see the opportunity for incremental advancement of more sustainable systems. We're on fund four currently which is a $250 million fund. We're probably about halfway through deployment of that fund and looking for more investments. And one of the really exciting things that we've seen as we've done this work over the past 15 plus years is that what started out as what others looked at as a kind of bizarre, nichey thing has become, I dare say cool all of a sudden that there's a lot of activity in our sector. And it's so exciting because there's so much that we need to be doing and so many different kinds of founders who we want to be supporting across more and more different spaces. And so we're really excited about the breadth of what we plan to do with this fund and future funds and super excited to meet the entrepreneurs and hear the pitches in this session and beyond. So thank you all. Yeah, thanks Sasha. And last but not least, Laura if you could give someone your work at TSF that would be great. Yeah, great. Thanks so much Emma and Socap for having us all here today to talk about kind of this really important subject. I'm Laura Metcalf, I'm a venture partner at the Social Entrepreneurs Fund or TSEF, TSF as we say. And TSF is an early stage venture fund focused on increasing access and economic opportunity for low to moderate income populations. The third fund we're investing out of right now is focused on the United States. And we really believe that it's expensive to be for in the United States. And so by investing in companies using software or SaaS platforms to increase access or to ease some of those costs we can have significant impact on the working poor and the poor's lives here in the US. We invest in three verticals, inclusive FinTech that might be alternative credit scoring mechanisms things that increase access to credit, digital health. Things are looking at apps or platforms that help manage chronic health conditions that tend to significantly or disproportionately impact low income people and then human services tech. So platforms that help the big social service systems workforce development work better. And the one thing I would mention that we're quite proud of is that 60% of our portfolios have a women or minority founder CEO. So we still think we need to do better. And I know we're gonna talk about that in this panel of how we all try to really make sure that we are open to finding founders from diverse and different backgrounds. But that's something that we believe at least we've started that journey and we'll look to do more of. Great, thank you, Laura. So as Laura mentioned that diversity and making sure we're supporting underrepresented founders and having opportunities to receive investment from funds like ours and the broader investment community is a priority for all of us and what we're here to talk about today. And so we wanted to kick off with some questions to the panelists around deal flow and deal flow strategies. And every fund talks about kind of their secret sauce to how they find exciting deals that fit their model uniquely and where they're finding those deals. And through inbound, outbound networks, technology platforms that can support finding deals. So wanted to throw out a question to the group here on exactly that, what is it that makes kind of your deal flow fund strategy unique and how are you finding those diamond in the roughs especially around supporting underrepresented founders, entrepreneurs, company leaders in the work that you're doing on a day-to-day basis. So maybe perhaps Sasha, if you wanna kick off that would be great. Sure. So I think you listed a bunch of sources and the answer for most of us is probably all of the above. And I think that if I am forced to name a secret sauce beyond just anything and everything is I think, and this is probably true for most of the folks who are on this panel and other panels today I thought like, this is our life's work. We've been doing this a really long time and so building a network in a short amount of time doesn't really work. This is something that we have been at for years and years and years. And so the depth of technical exposure and companies that have been built and entrepreneurs and other team members that have moved on to other things. There's a really rich sort of tapestry of individuals that we have the privilege of working with and that is tremendously valuable to building deal flow going forward. Having said that, I think one of the things we recognize is that you're in a way limited by your existing networks. And so when we look at earlier portfolios and we don't see as many underrepresented founders as we would like to, we're incredibly proud that Fund4 looks very different but about half of our founders are underrepresented in Fund4 which is not something we can say about earlier funds. And I think that that comes from pushing ourselves to not just rely on the networks that we have in place today and not just rely on traditional deal flow generation. And that's been a really exciting journey as we kind of go outside of our comfort zone and outside of what comes easily to us and looking under the street lights for the deals that happen to be to be coming through the existing network. So let me pause there and make sure we leave enough time for everyone to jump in. Sure. Steven, how about at Bronze? What's some of the work that you all do to find great deals? Yeah, this has always been an interesting question for me because I honestly wouldn't say we do anything particular to try to attract founders of color. Although our fundamental reason for being is to impact communities that are on the margins. So I think our strategy is what attracts folks at the high level. But I think if you peel back a layer or two, what we really try to do is be authentic in that pursuit. Radically authentic, like we're really real. And we play for love. We think that love is a competitive advantage and that's the thing that I think most investors don't talk about. And we know from experience both as entrepreneurs and as investors that the path to building a company is so hard that if you don't have an irrational preoccupation with doing it, if you're not playing for love on some level, you're probably not gonna win. You'll give up. Giving up is the rational thing to do. You have to be irrationally committed. And so I think we are that and I think like attracts like. So we've never really had a, I mean, knock on the four mic or whatever this is. We've never really had an opportunity, a challenge with deal flow. We just like keep it real and grind super hard and we play for people that we love. Yeah. I love the word you use around your authenticity as a firm and making sure that that comes across and in your work and that attracts folks kind of from an inbound perspective to give some input on SJF's strategy. Something that we talk a lot about is our scrappiness. And I think that kind of leads to being our authentic selves as well. So all levels of the firm, cold outreach, trying a bunch of different email addresses to try to reach a founder of a company we're excited about and think might be aligned with what we do. And a lot of that just comes from researching the markets that we're active in and trying to find any and all companies that might be relevant to a question that we're looking to solve or a thesis that we're trying to solve out. And so that that outbound scrappiness, emails 10 different ways, I think hopefully comes across as our authentic for us and telling our story about being involved in the impact space for a long time and trying to be kind of public with our impact work and sharing those results of our prior investments is also a story that we really like to tell to new companies as we get to know them. And Laura, how about you at TSEF? What are some of the ways that you're finding exciting deals? Yeah, no, I love everything that you guys have said and it's probably worth noting similar to Stephen. We are not part of our thesis is not to invest in diverse founders, but I think it's because of the nature of the problems that the founders we engage with are trying to solve. They often have had life experience and that's what's motivated them or given them the passion to solve the problem. And sadly, because we are focused on a load of moderate income, you tend to see an overrepresentation of BIPOC people and women conquering these problems. And so for us, I think we really stood back probably two or two and a half years ago and said, how do we not fall into the trap of just taking deal flow from our networks as expansive as they are because I think that is inherently bias to who we know and who we are. And so how do we make sure we're leaning beyond those networks or really trying to be open to new relationships? And so I would say that for the past couple of years we've just really tried to embrace different sources and that means a lot of kind of volunteer work in terms of like, we're judging mass challenge, we're engaged with universities ranging from MIT to Columbia to a couple in Texas. Somebody on our team is a village capital mentor and judge. And so really it's just like trying to put ourselves in different situations or with groups of people that we wouldn't necessarily spend every day with or we haven't known historically, just to make sure that we are trying to be really open. And we respond to incoming, honestly, like incoming inquiries by a LinkedIn, by our website. We try to be really good about taking a quick look and saying, hey, yeah, this does fit our thesis or it doesn't and going from there.  Sure, that's great. And we just have a couple of minutes before we're gonna get into the meat of our session, which is hearing from our amazing entrepreneurs who have joined us today, but quickly one last question for each of you. When you are speaking with one of the many entrepreneurs that you talk to on a day-to-day basis in pitches and conversations to get to know companies, what is one or two things that stand out to you in a great pitch? We're about to hear from some great entrepreneurs, but for those of the audience members who are entrepreneurs themselves, any tips to what makes a great pitch to a panel or one investor like any of ourselves? Steven, maybe I'll start with you. Yeah, I'll jump on that because I think it's an extension of what I was just talking about. I'm looking for someone who has a unique insight based on their life experience or some other thing. You know, it's kind of like a PhD student at a point, they know more about their topic than their advisor. That's how you get a PhD.  Yeah, I worry about the metric of founders who are smarter than me about something because I think that there's a lot of those, right? Most founders are, but I think that, you know, you can give, obviously your pitch has to be well-informed and then you gotta distill it down into bite sizes that we can understand and we understand your topic way less well than you do generally. But the, I think, you know, where I thought you were gonna go, Steven was in your earlier comment, your discussion about authenticity and love and like the feeling that we get from entrepreneurs about just passion, about their topic coupled with that knowledge is so important because we know that that's such a difficult job and it's exciting and it's wonderful and we get really excited about building something together and I think probably you're not in those shoes to begin with if you don't have that passion but that authentic interest in addition to knowledge in really building something that we all are aligned on wanting to build together is super important when we listen to your story and dig into it with you. I think we're violently agreeing. Laura, any last comments to add? The only thing I would add that TCEF and in addition to what Steven and Sasha have said which I totally agree with, TCEF loves to look for these kind of win-win situations. So where a portfolio company has found a way to offer something inexpensively or even free to their one target client but has found somebody else who finds value in that to pay on the other side. And so an example of that would be Aunt Bertha which is the largest social service database in the United States and they offer that free. Anyone can go to their website right now and put in your zip code and if your grandmother needs a ride to the doctor she doesn't have family around or somebody needs food help, you can find all that. The way they found to pay for that is that hospital systems and healthcare systems post-ACA had significant incentives to help people live healthy and stable lives not just release them from the ER and the homeless diabetic, you can treat the diabetes but if that person's homeless they're gonna be back in your ER next week. And so hospitals in the last few years have become much bigger proponents of helping stabilize people's lives in the community. And so they're willing to pay for that Aunt Bertha data and process. And so we love situations like that where you find a customer who has a business reason to pay for something but at the same time there's all this other social good being spit off. And so those types of business models like it's like catnip for us, we love them. Great, well I'm sure we're gonna hear about some win-wins in these next couple pitches we'll be listening to. So for the audience's benefit just an overview of what you're about to see we are gonna have four entrepreneurs join us from Go Coach, Veruna, Honest Jobs and Mentor Spaces. And each entrepreneur will have a couple minutes to give their pitch and give a description of the business model and value proposition and history of the company. And then we'll move into a couple minutes of short Q&A from us as panelists at our investment funds and then we'll go to the next entrepreneur. So we'll keep it short and sweet and moving forward but we're really excited to have these four companies join us and we will be kicking off with Christy McCann-Flynn from Go Coach. So Christy excited to hear from you. Hi there, hi Emma. Hi, I'm Christy. I'm a CEO and co-founder of Go Coach. I'm thrilled to be here and would love to be able to dive in to let you know how we're bringing equitable continuous education for all. So I'm just gonna share my screen. And go here. So what is Go Coach?  And what we're doing is that we're trying to bring continuous education at scale for everyone. So there's two core reasons why I created Go Coach is that one, I'm a former HR executive and as a former HR executive for 20 years, I watched us throw out people left and right due to lack of skills. We have replaced or recycled everyone where now we have a war on talent, a skill shortage, great resignation and much more. We have caused this trillion dollar problem and we're here to be able to solve for that. Second, as a former HR executive, there wasn't a way for me to be able to see all my different types of employees from all different types of walk of life and really where their gaps are. To actually have an end-to-end solution that really meets people where they're at that understands where those gaps in development areas and is able to measure and manage that progress across the way. So that's what Go Coach does. We're much bigger than a match.com for coaches. We're actually meeting people where there are that be able to understand what those gaps are in a very personalized way and to be able to manage to get to goal progression, actually be able to measure it. So essentially our platform works much differently than what's out in the market right now, which is there's a lot of match.coms with coaches. There's a lot of content candy stores where they have tons of content but nobody knows where to start. And then there's the traditional LMSs that are just a lot of work for both the users and the buyers and order to be able to get that personalization of learning. So we use AI but also self-selection. So we're really meeting people where they're at and understanding those skills and those gaps and really honing development plans that's managed all through our platform for all the different types of users. The coach, the coachee, the manager and the stakeholder and it's actually getting to that overall progression. Right now we have what's actually at 1.3 ARR. We have 100% client retention and user adoption and we have 70 plus clients that are growing. And then just within our current market chain, it's over 74 million. What's really unique about what we're doing and I think Laura had mentioned this earlier is that we have a lot of clients that have a lot of money and that we're tapping into those services to be able to continue to hone all their employees to make sure that everyone has equitable access to go coach. And then on the other side, we're also working with higher ed, online universities, nonprofits to be able to give go coach at a fraction of the cost. And so we're taking from the well paying clients to be able to serve the ones that don't have that money up front that's helping the underserved and underprivileged. And so everybody has access to go coach at the end of the day to continue to be able to hone their skills, to be able to develop and own their career. So our major differentiation, as I said, is that we're in all one solution. We have 100% adoption rate because we actually make money off of people using our platform. Traditional platforms out there in the L and D space make money off of people not using them. That is very different. We want to be able to educate people and actually take that change behavior and be able to measure it. We serve all different types of clients and all different types of customers from all walks of life and really continue to push the blend of learning to be able to connect to rewards and actually change behavior. And these are some of the results that are aggregate from our overall platform of the increase of change behavior, understanding, be able to communicate with others, getting to that overall goal achievement and making progress. It's a land and expand model and these are companies right now that offer equitable go coach to every single one of their employees. And so where they started off small, they've expanded significantly because we made it affordable and accessible for everybody to have that opportunity to continue to hone their career. This is where we are right now. We're looking at doing two forum bookings by the end of the year of bringing in one five revenue and we're gonna continue to build within this model. As we continue to tap into higher ed because that has been a huge vertical that we've been working on with online universities, community colleges and state schools, we're gonna continue to push equitable go coach while major corporations are paying more of the higher price tags to make sure that there's access for everybody. This is my team that's remote everywhere. We're experts within HR tech and education tech and we're actually oversubscribed as of today. So we raised over what we're supposed to at the two and a half at three and a half and we're still looking to take a few checks from investors that believe in education and believe in equity of access for all. So that's me and I'm not shell and go coach. Thank you. Thanks Christy. Be proud. Investor judges to come back in and thank you for staying so prompt. You stayed right on schedule. So appreciate that. But for our investors on the line, any initial questions, comments for Christy as we take a couple of minutes for feedback? I'll jump in. Congratulations on being oversubscribed Christy. That's something not a lot of entrepreneurs get to say. If you had access to more capital, would you take it? And so what would you do with it? Yeah, we would definitely take it right now for a couple of different reasons. I mean, we were bootstrapped. So I actually created go coach with my own money that I actually got from companies that did not do the right thing when it came to sexual harassment, discrimination, bullying and a lot more. And I'm a former HR exec so you could probably figure out how I got that money. I said no, but I want to invest that money into something and that was the sectorable education for everyone. And so we've been kind of acting like an incognito series there. So we're gonna continue to take on that capital right now. This market is huge, but everybody's looking at it as far as giving access to people that already have access to a lot of opportunity. We're looking at it given the access to people that traditionally wouldn't have that opportunity. And so while the iron's hot, we're gonna take that and continue to bring in a CFO, a head of marketing and probably more sales and tech and development. I'd love to jump in and just on two things. One, and if you could just talk a little bit more, are you a marketplace where you're actually bringing together corporates and then on the other side, higher education and other types of learning institutions? And then the second thing, if there's time, I'd love to understand a little bit about how you're thinking about your impact measurement. And I saw those numbers quickly kind of come across the screen. I'd love to understand a little bit about that as well. Right. So right now we're treating higher ed and the corporations as two different verticals. They have the same challenges with overall engagement, retention and skill shortages. And what we're seeing particularly on the higher ed side, especially with, we're only working with online universities, state schools and community colleges. We wanna get the underserved and underrepresented ASAP to give them a leg up and actually bring applicability to their degree and make them more employable because that's the issue. It's not that the issue that there isn't skills, it's how you get out there and how you really start to hone your career. And so we're treating them as two separate verticals right now, but the idea is to converge them together to essentially not only be a coach marketplace, but be a talent marketplace for these individuals to be able to tap into a lot of the corporations that we're working with. So separate now going to converge on the roadmap later. And there was a second part of your question, Laura, I'm sorry. Well, Sasha, I'm happy to let you go if you have another one and then- No, go ahead, go ahead. I just love to understand a little bit about how you're measuring your impact. Are you doing kind of pre-post surveys or versus published studies or say a little bit more? Yeah, as far as the impact as far as the change behavior, it's ongoing data. So we're getting a current state assessment as to where they're up right now and then how they're progressing. You know, I mean, with all the feedback from the coach, the coachee, the manager and stakeholder to get to that change progression. So it's all oriented in data. As far as the actual impact, it's really looking at the number of learners from each sector, like naming like we have like some corporate Fortune 500, but we also have a bunch of nonprofits so that we're able to give go coach a discount. As we tap in the higher ed, we're gonna see those learners go up significantly with some of the deals that we're working on currently within Q4. And so that's really gonna help us, like if we can triple our learners with one online university that's helping over 8,000 students, you know what I mean, that that's gonna be a significant jump from where we are right now with our corporations.  What is your vision for what this company can become?  Yeah, that everybody has access to go coach. As an HR executive for over 20 years, the lies we told ourselves, nobody's good enough.  Like, you know, I mean, you can't find the right people. Now, we just wanted to shove people in a box and if they didn't perform, then we got rid of them instead of actually honing, you know, I mean those skills. And so I don't want people to be disposable anymore. I want people to be accessible and to be able to continue, you know, their education from whether they get to the college degree or not, that they have that ability and agility to do so because, you know, a lot of what's missing within the workforce and has been missing for the last 20 years are these human schools. How to critically think, you know, I mean, what it means to actually communicate and collaborate, understanding the difference of the people and opinion. These are the most important skills right now that are constantly lacking and that are causing the biggest problems within our world. Yeah, Christiane, I guess a follow-on question to that. You just touched on some of the different skillsets that users are building upon. So curious, one, where have you seen the most traction? Is it in communication, you know, tools? Is it in leadership development? Just curious from a content perspective how you've seen folks respond, users respond. And then a second part of the question too around coaching, just curious on the scalability there, you know, how much is actually a human helping with coaching versus online content that they can work through in modules where it's more technology-based. So getting a sense of the divide there between human versus tech. Yeah, absolutely. So as far as the skills, irregardless of industry or vertical or anything like that and irregardless of the level of the employee entry bubble to executive bubble, it's five predominant skills that have been consistent pre and post COVID. Number one, being change management, how to deal with all of the ambiguity and what's in it for me factor for any type of change within an organization which can be growing, restructuring, resizing, what have you. Number two is communication. Three is collaboration. Four is situational leadership across, up and down. How to be able to manage those relationships with your peers, your managers, and those that may report to you. And the fifth one is diversity, equity, inclusion. What is it? What do I need to learn? How do I become more equitable? How do I understand and communicate with people's differences? So they all go hand in hand and they're all tagging at this, you know, remote world we're in right now. And then as far as, you know, what we're looking to do, you know, I mean, with the platform is that it's blended. So we have a coach marketplace, the learning experience platform and the learning experience platform is proprietary content built off all those data themes.  The more coaches we have, the more skills we have. And that's where it becomes very sticky because, you know, people are coming back year over year going through those top five skills but we're gonna continue to evolve as technology evolves. And so everything is done on the platform, you know, I mean, regardless if it's a person or you know, I mean, a module popping up some and it's very targeted based on where they're at right now. It's not generic like a lot of other L and D platforms or it's just like, oh, Emma, here's a coach for communication. Good luck. It's very prescriptive to what the data is telling us and where the data is going to actually be able to get them there. Got it. And beyond one more question, I guess, following on there beyond where they are today. So, you know, I might be working at a clean energy company and I might be at point A as an associate. And, you know, you have a CEO and an education company also participating and they might be way far down the line but is the core curriculum that you've built the same for every kind of user? So would I as an associate be going through the same curriculum as a CEO at a company in an entirely different space? Yeah, potentially. I mean, it's where they're at. I mean, what we're finding is that the skills are very consistent irregardless of a level. The lack of skills are very consistent regardless of the level.  And so we've got to this boiling point. And so what we're finding is that we're not forcing it. It's actually a natural learning curve irregardless of where they are right now. And so, you know, in the way that it's targeted they could see where those gaps are and it's only going to recommend things that fill those gaps rather than something once again that isn't targeted or generic. So it's about change behaviors. That's what we're looking to do. That's the outcome and that's what we're measuring against. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Christy. I think we're up at time but really appreciate both the pitch and the deck and overview and answering some of our questions. So thank you very much. Awesome. Thank you. Have a good one, guys. Great job, Christy. So next we will be hearing from Sheyi Fabode at Veruna. So Sheyi, welcome and we're excited to learn more. Thanks so much, Emma and hi, everyone. I'll just pull up my slides here. Give me a couple of seconds. First of all, thanks for having me at the session. My name is Sheyi Fabode, CEO and co-founder at Veruna. And at Veruna we provide what we like to call visibility, insights and awareness to water systems so they can deliver clean water consistently. We all know of the flints of the world, situations with high level of water contamination that catches the attention of the country and the world. What we don't know is that there are hundreds of violations that happen across water systems daily in the US. And while they might not catch the attention like flints, they are still consequential, negatively consequential to the people who experienced these ball water warnings. Because what they really mean is the water system that is ordering you to boil the water coming out of your tap has admitted to not knowing what's in the water and is handing off responsibility to you. And the reason why they do this, unfortunately, is because they lack visibility into the real time state of water quality beyond the water treatment plant. They ship the water out of the plant and essentially send a technician on a truck to go take a sample if they think there's a problem or if a customer calls to say, oh, water smells or tastes funny. And these locations where they're sending the technician to what we like to call blind spots. And unfortunately, there's this stark overlap, one-to-one relationship between the prevalence of these ball water warnings and parts of the country where you have higher minority populations. Probably doesn't surprise you. This is as much an operational issue as it is a social justice issue. And the blind spot tend to open up in places where you might have crumbling infrastructure or distant locations from the water treatment plant itself. So what we do at Verona is we deploy these beacons, as we call them, these nodes into those blind spots. They're affordable, parameter-driven sensors that are self-powered. We pull the data into simple dashboards to alert the technician if there's a problem, provide them the optimal workflows to address the problem. And as we capture more data, we start to predict possible contamination issues in the water system. And what this allows us to do is serve those markets that I've mentioned to you. Those places where minorities tend to be the predominant dwellers in either parts of a city or in the city itself or a town. And we prevent their violations, increase the efficiency of the technician and improve decision-making for resource allocation. We call it 100 times the visibility eyes where they didn't have it before and 40% increasing their ability to address their operational needs. We sell it as software as a service. The hardware is baked into the cost and we start with pilot engagements that then roll into us building out a digital representation of the water system for the utility or the commercial entity. A big market, as much as it's a problem, I think someone mentioned earlier, as much as it's a problem, it's an opportunity. It's a huge market as we continue to see increasing need for updated technology and infrastructure to manage our water systems. And what we've chosen to do is create a new category. It's blind spots, current solutions are expensive and binary. They either tell you there's something or not. There's no, oh, your water is trending towards chlorine residuals dropping too low and there might be contamination. No, most tools currently just tell you one thing and if that thing is in there, unfortunately you end up with the contamination problems we prevent at Veruna. And our implementation is converging with just the great awareness of the need for action in this area. And that is showing up in new contracts, increasingly in cities, even large cities that are looking to deploy an affordable advanced technology solution to their minority residents and consequently to the whole city as well. Myself, I've been in the utility industry for about 20 years and this started when my wife and my son started to have adverse effects to the water we're drinking when we moved to Texas. My co-founder Jamil Carter, he's done sales into government for the bulk of his career. I've worked in power utilities as an operations engineer and we've wrapped ourselves with just experts in the fields we need them in. IoT and AI, dev and investors that believe in the mission of Veruna, which is over the next couple of years to serve at least 45 million people with 10,000 units of Veruna, ensuring clean, consistent water for really everyone is who we plan to, but we have a clear goal, knowing the communities in the US where the problem currently exists and we're doing the work to serve those communities. Thank you. Shall we go? Sure. See, I've got a couple of questions. I think this is a really interesting business. Thank you. Yeah, man, we need this kind of thing for sure. I've got two questions. One is, what are the buyers like? Because I've seen various solutions not dissimilar to this that we do need. We need to have them deployed in the communities, but especially at the municipal level, if that's the customer, even though it's rational, they don't buy. So I would love to understand what the buyer behavior is and how that may have been impacted by the infrastructure bill. And then my second question is, once you hit your 10,000 units, you reach your 45 million people in what? Global domination, I'll answer the second one first, but in all seriousness though, we targeted 45 million because, and it actually ties to the first question. Thanks for both. The way we've essentially gone to market is, found that map I showed you is the overlap between where violations currently happen and where communities of color are increasing in number. So what we then do with that list, because there's a list behind the map, is we essentially customize, quote unquote, the pitch to that city. We know you're in violation. We know there's a consent decree that unfortunately is not being implemented here. But at the end of the day, you do want to provide clean water to your customers, otherwise you don't continue to receive either the rate increase requests you make or continue to receive the support you require. So we partner with them. We don't come as a salesperson. We partner with them because we know there's a problem. It's why we start with the pilot. It doesn't require the convoluted approval level. The pilot can be approved by the manager of the technical team, the technicians, doesn't have to go to the board. And what we found every time, except one, where we didn't fully satisfy the use case because of where they put the note. They put it in a vault instead of in a blind spot. Every single time we've gone in with, you have violations, we have a solution to allow you come out of the consent decree at a price you can afford. And we will work with you here every single time, but one, we've managed to convert it into a full engagement with the water system. So that's, it's both a go to market, but also a precise targets in approach, taking the reluctance to take action away because we know they're already in trouble, sadly. And one, sorry, one really quick follow-up. What costs more, the beacon or a violation? A violation actually costs more. That's the, that's the wild thing. But I will admit, unfortunately, the violations aren't being penalized as they should. Some cities have violations that they're supposed to pay fines for and they haven't. So we know that.  What it does do though, is that it takes the administration of the water system away from the team and under the city in some of these municipalities and that they absolutely don't want. Could I ask a really basic question? So is this a kin, these sensors and these beacons?   But are you also providing the solutions to the problems or is that a partnership with another organization? Yes, so it's another great question and I'll answer. Steven, did I answer your questions please? Awesome, thank you. Fantastic question. So yes, I had never thought about us as a smoke alarm, but I'll dive a little bit into the solution itself. There are about five parameters that the water system knows coming from the water treatment plant. We monitor those five parameters at every point that we drop our nodes and take the historic information and essentially say the last time the five parameters read X, you had a cluster of customers calling to say they had E.coli in their water. I'm using that as an example. And then we say the inference here is you might have E.coli, these are the five steps you take and those actions go into the hands of the technician who gets the alert. And the reason why we've chosen this approach is because it's exactly the approach when I ran a power plant, we served about half a million residents in London. It was essentially the same thing. It allowed us to put more IoT devices in the grid and use the data converted into information instead of the approach that is currently being used where you wait for a customer to call or if you've bought a super expensive sensor, if it's a lead monitor, for example, if it doesn't have lead, it doesn't tell you anything else that's in it. You just now say you don't have lead and that won't serve in the future state. We need sensors everywhere converting signals into workflows. Thank you. So there are so many problems with our water system and what you're doing makes a ton of sense and to Steven's point, you're dealing with a customer that sometimes doesn't behave rationally. And we've seen that over and over again. It's so frustrating, but it's the reality of that world and everyone's dealing with their own constraints of risk tolerance and various maybe misaligned incentives. So I'm curious as you have learned from initial engagements and looked into building your pipeline and converting it to revenue, if you have begun to pick up on what makes a more likely target customer, right? So which municipalities are more incented to abide by the appropriate regulations? Which ones are more comfortable that they're not actually going to be fined and punished in the way that, technically they're supposed to be? How do you know who is a more likely customer and where you're going to see uptake? Yeah, no, it's not a great question ties to Steven's there. So there's the aspiration, which is that all municipalities that have violations dive in and buy our solution. But there's also the reality, which is that investor owned utility private entities that are assigned the task of running city water systems are actually a big part of this market as well. So for example, in Texas, there are just over 2000 privately run water systems, but you pay your bills to the city. And so we're not targeting the city, we're targeting those privately owned, investor owned utilities who thankfully have, apart from the regulatory incentives to take action, they also have a business incentive to take action. So it's why I mentioned the operational efficiencies for those investor owned utilities, there are two metrics they care about. The main one is clean water at a service level that is great. The second one is a metric called required visits tied to violations and outages. I won't bore you with that, but it's a financial metric on their books that we directly reference in our pitch to them because we know what that is from matching their violations, the cities where they operate and their books to say we can do X for you, reduce your violations, but also reduce your required visits and consequently allow you to do more with less money spent. And that is a compelling message that we're taking to market. The last two big contracts we got were essentially that, but again, we want to serve everyone, our initial go to market knowing we will get deals with those investor owned utilities. And then we, similar to the lady right before me, we then turn around and go get some grants to deploy our solutions to some of these municipalities because that's worked for us as well. Great. Well, thank you for the questions and answers and show you we appreciate you taking some time to join us. Great job. Thank you. Thank you. Good to meet you all. Great to meet you. And next we will move to Harley Blakeman with Honest Jobs. Hey everyone, let me screen share. All right, my name is, let me get started here. My name is Harley Blakeman and I am the founder and CEO of Honest Jobs. Honest Jobs is mobilizing the formerly incarcerated workforce to recapture 77 billion in annual lost earnings. So you may not know it from my baby face but I've been to jail a few times and I've been to prison once. I unfortunately had my father passed away at a very young age. I was 15 and at that time my mother was divorced from my father and she was fairly addicted to drugs and alcohol. So at that very young age of 15, I was essentially homeless living with friends on different couches and things. And I just slipped into depression and started using drugs, severely around 16, I dropped out of high school and really just fell into an unstable life where I was using and selling drugs. And right after my 18th birthday, I was arrested and convicted of grand theft and drug trafficking in the state of Georgia. And I was sentenced to 14 months in prison and actually prison was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It's not your typical narrative view here but prison was a great experience for me in the sense that I got sober for the first time in three and a half years. I had time to reflect on what I wanted in life. I earned my GED. I read about 60 business books and came home with the full intent of working hard, building a career and living an honest life. Unfortunately, when I came home, I ran into many barriers. I actually put myself through community college while working at a restaurant. Then I transferred to Ohio State University where I went to business school and actually graduated top of my class with honors. I published a book that sold over 6,000 copies. But my senior year, I had 75 companies that took me through multiple rounds of interviews and I graduated unemployed. Every single company passed on me. Most I believe are due to the background check. In the thing, about four months after graduation, I was able to find a job as a production supervisor. It was a good job. I got paid well. I was very thankful.  And I saw it as an insurmountable challenge for the majority of the people affected by our justice system. And that's why I started honest jobs. So the problem is pretty clear. It takes over eight months on average for someone to find employment after incarceration and the average annual income is only 6,700 a year in income. It takes half as long for a job seeker with no record to find a job and their average income is 35,000 per year. The most common solution is to work for a temp service where employees are undervalued, underpaid and have very little upward mobility. So our results, our early data showing some really great results. Kind of the status quo again is over 240 days to find a job with less than seven grand a year in income with honest jobs. From the time they create an account with us to starting their first day on the job is 31 days. The average pay rate right now is just below 38,000 which in most states is a decent livable wage. And why right now is such a great time to build this company, why it's a great time to invest in honest jobs is across the spectrum, this is the time to make this happen. Political climate is great right now, house reps, legislators, even presidents all have agreed that criminal justice reform is needed right now. Racial justice obviously companies everywhere are doing DE and I, there's been all the protests that we've seen happen. They are inherently tied together, the inequities in our criminal justice system and how that impacts people of color's ability in particular to progress in the workforce. Human Resources, the largest HR organization in the world, Society for Human Resource Management. Two years ago, their key initiative was called Getting Talent Back to Work and it was training HR employees on how to hire formally incarcerated people. This year they launched the Getting Talent Back to Work certification that's actually a formal certificate that the Society for Human Resource Management offers and then obviously we're all very aware of the labor shortage and labor issues that we're having at this time. So here's our product, it's a mobile friendly web app with over 10,000 users. It's almost like any other job board but in a couple of slides I'll be able to talk to you a little bit more about our proprietary technology and what makes this really unique. So if you see here, you can see the green dots, it shows our conflicts AI score, lets you know how likely your criminal history is to directly conflict with this job and what that translates to is how likely are you to get through the background check if you apply for this job. Our proprietary technology helps job seekers identify, my apologies, I'm repeating myself, the algorithm will consider the industry, applicable laws, EEOC guidelines and human resource best practices. So as you can see the kind of Venn diagram there shows what that conflicts AI score is considering and ultimately it's bringing the jobs to the top of the search results that you have the best chance of making it through the background check and that's how we're getting people hired much faster with less rejection. So our market size is pretty enormous but I'm gonna break it down in a couple of different ways here. We think about it as by population so there are almost 67 million Americans with a criminal record but there's about 20 million that have a felony criminal record and if we narrow that down even more I'm not super satisfied with the research that helped us come up with a 7.9 but if you take the number of people with felony convictions that are also considered computer literate it's around 8 million. I think it's slightly higher than that but that's the best answer I could find at this time. Market size by lost earnings, again I referenced this in the beginning, annual lost earnings due to a criminal record so this is misdemeanor and felony 370 billion a year in annual lost earnings due to criminal convictions. If we focus on just people with felonies there's 77 billion lost in annual lost earnings and then if we focus on people with felonies who are also computer literate that's our immediate kind of opportunity is that 30.8 billion. Now the way we think about our immediate market size is people with felony convictions that are computer literate times our average placement fee so our average placement fee is about 15% of the annual pay and that gives us about 4.6 billion. Now our business model is pretty simple. It's a, I don't like to use the word because it's bi-intimidating but it's a bit of a three-sided marketplace. Job seekers it's 100% free. Employers we have a freemium model, we have free, premium and direct placement and then our white labels are really for distribution but it's just a kicker that we also make revenue off of our white labels. Just someone said earlier, Ampertha makes money off of white labels too. We're actually one of their customers and the white labels are very important because it's our distribution. So I think I talked more about that but we provide white labels to a lot of people who then send us job seekers who are looking for jobs. Our immediate market and what we're hoping to target here in the next six months or so is the Second Chance Business Coalition started by Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. This is 35 Fortune 500 companies who are committed to Second Chance hiring and we believe we can make over 20 million per year off of these companies alone. Our traction is pretty phenomenal over the last couple of months. We went through Techstars which finished in February and since then we are on track to break one million ARR hopefully this month if not this month next month. This is our team. We actually have hired three more people who are all three formerly incarcerated. Currently nine of our 13 employees are formerly incarcerated. We've got a very diverse and committed team that are all mission aligned with us here. And then lastly is my contact info and that's my time eight minutes. So thank you all so much. Excited to answer your questions. Thank you Harley. Maybe as the other investors are funneling in a quick question to kick off. So you mentioned the white label and I have the benefit of knowing through prior conversations with you a little bit more detail there but I think it would be helpful for everyone if you could touch a bit on who you're white labeling for and maybe the kind of gov tech target down the line that might make sense for the organization given goals of governments around the country. Yeah, given the short time period for the presentation I didn't dive into it because it would probably cause a lot more questions but absolutely it is an exciting part of our business model is our white labels. So we kind of have a full package solution for governments. So we are negotiating multiple statewide government contracts right now where the state essentially hires us to hire to help everyone coming home from incarceration find employment. So here in Colorado we have about 65 companies across the state that use our service to hire and we are working with the department of corrections in the AG's office to do basically give our product to every probation parole and correctional facility employee. So everyone coming home is immediately plugged into a network of dozens of employers looking to hire formerly incarcerated people. We provide the tech support, we provide the customer service and they basically outsource that function because we have very quickly been able to prove that we can do a better job than most of your government funded programs in this space. And we're also talking, I know I think Sasha might be in Massachusetts. We are also negotiating a contract, oh sorry, Laura, we're negotiating a contract right now with Massachusetts the executive director of public safety. And those contracts are pretty substantial. I mean, 350 grand a year and then also they're sending us tens of thousands of users every year that our cat could be negative as far as job seekers, which is really exciting. And we actually have white labels with some other people as well, like really large nonprofits that serve a lot of formerly incarcerated people. So it doesn't have to be a government, it just needs to be someone who's strategic and they're really a high touch point for this population. Thank you, Emma. Thank you for your presentation. Super inspiring story and I'm really interesting you're doing. I'm curious if you are collecting data or anticipate you'll be able to collect data in the future that might inform other accretive ways, so to speak of helping formerly incarcerated people, find jobs and find better jobs, target individual for companies to either target individuals who are better fits for their organization or vice versa, add skills, help job seekers target places that are particularly rich for them and that they'll be happy in the longterm. I could see a variety of different ways that the data that you're collecting as your user base grows might inform ways to enhance the experience further beyond just access. Yes, absolutely. So there's a couple of things we're thinking of here. As one is to explain the government, why labels is we can then give the government data as to hey companies are coming to us wanting to hire for these roles but people coming home from incarceration don't have the skills to fill those jobs. So every state has programs where they're trying to educate people behind the wall so they can come home employment ready but there's no data driving that. It's literally just like they can get a warehouse job, let's train them on warehouse jobs. So we can use that data for policy making for university research, for a variety of things on that front. But then on the job seekers side, the white labels with states and really just being the best product for this problem will help us build a mode around a very large demographic of the workforce, almost 10% of the workforce. And then what we can do is our technology actually determines based on your crime how likely you are to be able to get a job and it's getting better over time. So what we can do is we can reverse engineer that. We're actually on our roadmap is a product called Pathways which is, hey, you tell us what you're interested in, we can show you about 200 different career paths and we can let you know how likely you are to get hired in that job if you get these skills. And we plan to partner with things like marketing and tech boot camps that are online and scalable but also looking into a network of community colleges that can teach skill trades and things like that. So we haven't started building our education or upscaling feature yet. We really wanna get our footing strong in this and really make sure we're doing this as best as we can before we start to do other things. But upon a series A, we do plan on investing in kind of helping people navigate to the next step in their career. There's a saying that we say in jails and prisons all the time is to set expectations, there's the ABCs, find a job, then find a better job, then find a career. People can't come home from prison thinking they're gonna find their career day one. It really is healthy for everyone if they get a job and then they start to plan for their better job and then their career. Data is the big play here. Like obviously in the end goal, if we have all the data, it's gonna be very powerful and it's gonna help the community if it's used correctly. Thank you. Thank you. Harley, there are various actors working on some variants of this. It's a big problem across the country. Why are you the ones that are gonna win and how do you protect that advantage over time? Yeah. I think that there have been some other people, there have been some other people who weren't necessarily product founder fit. There have been some people that kind of had gimmicky brands where they really were trying to play on a gimmick that would help them reach the audience quickly. Our brand is very trusted, honest jobs and players really like the tone of the way we work with them. We don't promise them the world. We try to coach them into it. So we've gotten almost 10 Fortune 500 companies doing contracts with us. We expect to do a lot more, but really we've talked to investors who have invested in other kind of competitor related companies. And our unique angle is both the government relationships where we're creating that really smart funnel where we can kind of build a motor on ourself. But also we are the only company that I'm aware of that is actively collecting data and improving our ability to match you with the job that we believe you have the best chance of getting. So our algorithm is really the thing that like right now we're acting a little bit as like a recruiting firm. Like we're actually helping kind of handhold people along but all along the way our algorithms improving and it's getting smarter and better. So really our game plan is strong tech enabled from day one we've been a tech company and we have half our staff as software developers. So I think having a brand that isn't gimmicky that's trusted and ultimately we are working for HR. I know like I'm formerly incarcerated most of our employees are formerly incarcerated but we believe that we have to serve HR and we have to serve the people who are gonna hire these people. So we're not social justice warriors. We're not advocating for major law reform. What we're doing is we're operating in the system that we were given right now. We're trying to optimize to make it easy for HR to do what they kind of already wanna do. They want to brag about diversity and inclusion. They want to brag about how they helped people but if it's gonna cost them an extra hour in the day to do it they're gonna pass and they're gonna hire the next best person. So what we're trying to do is just make it where HR loves honest jobs because it makes their job extremely easy. Thank you, Steven.  I think we're running out of time but I just wanted to say I'm super impressed with your story and honest jobs and have done a bunch of work on reentry and recidivism in one of my past lives. And the other key point that I know you know but wanna make sure everyone knows that if you can get formally incarcerated individuals into the workforce they are hugely less likely and I can't remember the stat but far less likely to recidivate or to end up back in prison. And so you're helping the community, you're driving economic development and you're changing those people's lives. So congrats. Yeah, thank you, Laura. Yeah, we are out of time but thank you so much, Harley for joining us. And lastly, we are going to turn to Chris Motley with Mentor Spaces for our final pitch today. Hello, can you all hear me and see me okay? Cool, thank you so much. So Harley, great job. It was always hard to follow you but my name is Chris Motley, founder and CEO of Mentor Spaces. We built a community driven mentorship platform to really support diverse talent and attraction. Since we're in the mode of sharing baby pictures I guess I have to share some of mine. I grew up in the South side of Chicago to a teenage mom but through a series of relationships and really conversations with people who really helped me understand the world around me. I was able to go out to college, have a nice career at Goldman Sachs and become an entrepreneur presenting for you today and it really just came down to having the right mentors and that is the inspiration behind creating Mentor Spaces. In fact, LinkedIn presented research that shows where we go to school, where we grow up, who we surround ourselves around the workplace, give us a 12 times advantage in navigating our careers. So when you're a person of color and you simply don't know people in career paths that you may aspire to have or even career paths you don't even know exist it's almost like saying you're in a 12 times disadvantage when navigating your career and this network gap is really one that we hope to solve with Mentor Spaces. And despite companies spending eight billion annually on DE and I initiatives, we still hear from some of our customers that existing solutions simply don't work and fail to consistently attract and retain underrepresented talent. And when you think about my narrative even when you think about the narrative that Harley shared part of that means that the solutions don't really speak exactly to the problem. And being an underrepresented person myself especially early in my career you ultimately lack the confidence as well as the network necessary to navigate. And so when we think about strategies that companies pursue to solve these problems as it relates to talent attraction and retention they're just overly transactionals they're overly focused on candidate assessment as opposed to relationship building and they really don't meet people where they are which I think we all can agree in the COVID environment is very, very important and that's just very simply the mobile device. And this impacts our customers who are Fortune 500 organizations when it comes to brand value, cost per hire all the way down to employee engagement and retention. The current landscape, I know I'm preaching to the choir a little bit on this but it goes to show sort of what we have to think about in building the product that we built to solve this problem. Many students, whether they are attending a bootcamp or traditional college university they just don't know what they don't know. And we have this huge part of the workforce that's already activated who actually want to help but they just don't know how and they have limitations on their bandwidth. And then while the events of the summer of 2020 have certainly increased the budgets and the focus on DE and I the goals and expectations far outweigh the resourcing. So having a scalable solution is super, super important. And that's really where mentor spaces comes in. What we've built is an approach to facilitate conversations between existing employees and prospective candidates that are trying to find their way in the world of work. And when you really think about mentorship that's effectively what it is. It's just a conversation with someone who can help you accomplish your goals. So the way that it works we create sort of real estate representing our customers within the mentor spaces ecosystem. Our customers either invite candidates or previous applicants to the community where they can easily clarify their goals. We didn't match those individuals with mentors who lead groups or spaces that are focused on soft scale development, functional roles, industry topics that really serve as a base cap so to speak for conversations. And then finally we facilitate conversations both in one-on-one in group formats which is ideal for scale to really help demystify career paths and build that confidence and social capital necessary for underrepresented populations to attain relevant careers. For employees at our customers who oftentimes are the mentors we make it very easy for them to specify what they're comfortable supporting others with. And most importantly we capture time commitments and we integrate directly with the calendars across all calendaring technologies to help capture inventory of their time so to speak which we then make available for mentees to book one-on-one and group sessions. Ultimately our position is companies will always have goals as it relates to talent attraction and retention and mentorship is the strategy to cost effectively accomplish those goals on a continuous basis year round as opposed to episodic time bound experiences that define the traditional approach to solving this problem. As talent are nurtured through group sessions about various topics and voice, video and chat it provides a great engaging environment for companies to target their opportunities, internships, et cetera for individuals or cohorts of individuals who can be a good fit. Ultimately mentorship programs that are leveraging our technology continuously cultivate talent as I mentioned they experience our proven process for turning their employees into ambassadors for their organizations in a way that doesn't require a lot of time commitment, virtually no admin and we're available both in iOS, in Android and in the browser. Ultimately what makes us different is what we call community driven mentorship and what that basically means is that well everybody's a mentor if they have a lived experience of some value and everyone can benefit from mentorship as they grow in their careers and by allowing people to shift between playing a mentor and a mentee continuous values being created and delivered in the user experience itself. Ultimately the value we deliver to our clients is targeted employer branding, pipeline cultivation on a roll by roll basis and analytics as it relates to employee engagement sentiment which is tied to retention. The value drivers we support are everything from hiring effectiveness and conversion to reduced turnover and reduced time to fill positions which we estimate to deliver about one and a half million dollars of value annually at a fraction of the cost. When we think about purely from a cost for higher perspective, the TAMP to be seven billion much higher when you think about employee engagement and branding and part of how we sort of fuel our go to market motion is by offering our technology at almost no cost to legacy nonprofits, community organizations and MSIs where we facilitate mentorship between their populations such as students and alumni lowering our user cost of acquisition but also establishing more credibility among prospective customers. We've partnered with some of the largest nonprofits in the country focusing on our demographic and some of our customers are well-known brands and we have a pretty healthy funnel as well. Right now our current reach is about 50,000 community members, 500 prospective customers and we have a half a million dollars in committed ARR. As I mentioned, our funnel is pretty robust. We really have a flexible approach of starting off with companies at around a 25 to $50,000 contract value and then scale within the organizations as we expand the scope and size of our mentorship program. One of the things that I like the most is that it works. So we're seeing more than 50% retention on the month by month basis and average to 35 minutes in our app each month. Every session is 30 minutes. So we sort of engineer our own success there and we're getting consistently over 90% participant satisfaction among both mentors and mentees. Finally, we integrate with some of the leading HRIS systems that allow for easy onboarding. Success factors is the first one that we've done and we'll continue on to integrate with Workday and Oracle guided by our prospective customers. Again, this allows for us to be up and running with our customers in as little as four weeks. It makes it very easy for mentees or mentors from the organization to be on the app and productive. From a competition standpoint, one way to look at this is that most mentorship technologies exist within the sort of four walls of a company which basically presents a barrier for the people who need mentorship the most. And the mentorship programs that exist outside of the organizations tend to be in nonprofit organizations who don't leverage technology that we bring to bear. So we use mentorship to focus on the talent acquisition motion allowing for the people who need it most to have access to it to develop both confidence and social capital necessary to get higher paying jobs. When we think about sort of our theory of change, it really just comes down to that conversation. I think we've all had a conversation with the person that could have been life changing. And so as long as we continue to facilitate conversations between experience and less experienced individuals, you can equate that to salary increases that you get from having more access and social capital and the network to attain higher paying jobs. And when we think about our current reach, that's 600 million in value that we can deliver in the next few years. I think it also is a competitive advantage when you think about the great resignation because we're able to attract some really talented individuals to our team who are just passionate about this problem and get to build cutting edge technology to facilitate mentorship at scale. So thank you so much for the time. Feel free to get in touch to learn more. And I guess we will open it up for questions. Thank you. Great, any initial questions from our panelists? I'll jump. Great. Great pitch, Chris. I'm also from South Side of Chicago, so. We're very proud of you. Which is actually East Side if you look on the map, but we'll talk about that later. What's the best success story that you have, you know, with your product impacting real folks? Well, really quickly, I now see the notes. Sorry, I ran over a little bit there. I thought we were a little bit longer, but thanks for the question. And so really we had a guy, Vaden, who was in the application, who connected with the Mentor 101. They had maybe three or four conversations and Vaden got an internship like four months later. And we all know that internships are leading indicators to full-time jobs. And not only is that the success story for the organization and this individual, it was very easy as a leader of this company to say, hey guys, let's do this a million more times. This is what success looks like. And that just was a gratifying thing to lead a team of people who can see what success looks like as we continue to build scale in our solution. You may have mentioned this in one of your metrics focused slides, but just curious on kind of the pairings to date. How many students and professionals have you served with providing kind of a connection to a mentor? Yeah, it's because you have group mentorship or group conversations, and one-on-one is really not about the pairings. It's about the time people are spending in the application and the feedback that they're providing as a result of those conversations. I had a conversation earlier with a prospective customer, huge brand. I know we're gonna close them. And they said, well, when does this end? And I'm like, well, it never ends. So you always need mentorship. And so one of the things that I think are the most important metrics is the fact that people come back and use it, which is a much more predictor and leading indicator of some of those lagging indicators that we will attract from an impact perspective, but also from conversion rate into jobs, as I mentioned earlier, and even promotion rate when someone gets that job by virtue of conversations on our application. I'm so glad you went there because that's kind of what I was thinking. I love that whole concept of everyone's a mentor, everyone's a mentee. I find that in my own life. In fact, people I mentor, I now ask for advice on things all the time. And so the tables have turned. And so that was gonna be part of my question. And maybe you answered it, but you could say a little bit more. How do you land and expand with some of these big corporate clients? And is there an ability to move this into career development rather than the kind of front end of the pipeline? Yeah, so it's a great question. So to handle the second question first, the front end of the pipeline is important because we close deals more quickly. What we're finding some of our customers, especially those who start off on the front end, they say, can we also use this for interns or can we use this for our frontline hourly employees to get them to more salary positions or can we use this for entry-level folks and get them to more managerial positions? And they answer, yes, yes, yes. And so the way we would start is we would go to a company and say, hey, let's just partner with your black or Latinx employee resource group. They almost always have goals related to leadership development as well as pipeline development, which they both can do with mentor spaces. And then it sort of creates, oh, let's do it to the Latinx ERG, let's do it to the working moms or whatever the thing is of the day. And that's how we sort of expand out. And that's all from recruiting motion. Ultimately it gets into, hey, let's do this internally for these five lines of business where we have an existing mentorship program, but it's a huge administrative load. It's super manual. Most mentorship programs are off of Microsoft Excel. And so it's not even about even from a competition standpoint of how many people are doing this. It's the fact that 90%, 95% are Microsoft Excel. And I think our community driven approach allows for that one program that could be 50 grand a year expanding within an organization to run all of their programs where you have this real time measurable feedback and direct tie to the return on investment. Great, thank you so much, Chris. Wonderful presentation. Well, we have one minute left for the session. So in closing, I just wanted to thank all of our audience members for sticking with us for a long presentation and session here. But hopefully you enjoyed hearing both some perspectives from our investor panelists as well as our entrepreneurs and learning more about their companies. So if there are any synergies with our firms, TSEF, EIF, Bronze, SJF or any of the companies you heard from Go Coach, Veruna, Honest Jobs or Mentor Spaces, please feel free to reach out and we will be happy to make some connections. But again, a big thank you to the audience and to our panelists and entrepreneurs for joining us. Sasha, Steve and Laura, thank you so much and look forward to working with you in the future. Thanks, Emma. Thanks so, Kat. Thanks, Emma.


Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending our session about what's behind the 8K video streaming at cloud age. Well, I hope you can enjoy our session as well as the splendid scenery in Berlin. And I'm Jinghua, and my English name is Coco. I will give this presentation with Changzhi and Shaohe. While I and Changzhi are both the staff researcher from the novel research, Shaohe is a cloud engineer from the Intel. Today, we are going to talk about 8K video at age. Firstly, we will introduce a background of 8K video. Then we will elaborate our age-optimized architecture, which is based on the Stalin's project. Next, we will focus on the work we have done to meet the 8K video requirements, followed with their demo and their summary part. You know, Berlin is a magical city. And two months ago, in Berlin, I feel consumer technology show, it was 8K TV that capture the headlines. Big TV manufacturers like LG, Samsung, and the Chinese manufacturers, TCL, all launched their 8K TVs. And the conception of 8K contrast back to 2012, or much earlier, in these years. And the news about 8K can be seen everywhere, like in August 2006, NHK kicked off their first 8K satellite broadcast. And in March this year, Alibaba released their 8K video cloud solution. Oh, and I think the most well-known one must be that Tokyo Olympics will be held and will be shoot and broadcast in 8K. So we heard a lot of news about 8Ks. What make me think that? What is 8K and what kind of features that 8K have? The answer to this question may be much simple if we compare 8K with other resolution. And the table on the right compares those at five dimensions. And the first dimension is the resolution. 8K refers to any screen or display in that width is around 8,000 pixels. So it's four times over 4K and 16 times over 4 HD, all we call 1080p. And you can tell from the left picture that the 8K resolution displays higher picture quality. As for the audio channel, 8K Ultra HD supports 22.2 degree of audio channel rather than the 5.1 channel over 4K. And the 100 degree of viewing angle empowers the user to catch every frame and enjoying their video with a master sense. As for the coding format, 8K used H265, or we call it HEVC, or VP9. Not for the network bandwidth, to transmit 8K or 112 FPS, network bandwidth needs to reach 120 Mbps. And while for the HD and the 4K, the number is much smaller. Great features as 8K have, no doubt in the inference, even stronger sense or presents and realness to viewers. Hence, it's the usage of 8K may be well-rounded. One common usage is in consumer, is in commercial TVs. Others like the immense video applications such as panoramic video and virtual reality. Also, in real life applications, such as the health care and the high precision monitoring, in the remote health care with 8K resolution, doctors can see the internal structures of the blood vessels and the boundaries between the cancer issues and the normal issues. Also the tiny satyrs, which are very difficult to see even with the naked eyes. And the high precision monitoring is needed in the crowned areas like the street and the airport. To use 8K features, we must first cope with the challenges that 8K video may bring. And the challenges may come from every process procedure from the camera side to the end user. And the first challenge is the difficulty to manage the cameras in their common smart city areas because most of the cameras will be placed separate and far away from data center. A statistic from the media shows that it believes that there are 1 billion cameras worldwide by 2020. And the second challenge came from the more parallel computing of the main coding format of 8K video like HEVCO VP9. And the third one is when using deep learning or machine learning models to analyze 8K video, it poses a heavy load on data processing because of the high resolution. And the fourth challenge came from the transmission of 8K video, which needs 120 or 50 Mbps. To cope with these challenges, first, we need our age computing technologies which provide hand bandwidth, high bandwidth, and low latency. And based on that, we need the different accelerators to empower the deep learning or machine learning models and video codec algorithms. Also, we need to manage the device and topology of different separated age clusters. So that's why we came up with our age optimized architecture. And in the video scenario, it's suggested that we process the video that at the age, then send the result to the data center. So we use OpenStack in the data center. And in the age site, we utilize Darling X Project because it was a very scalable and development ready age solution. And it provides fault management, host management, service management, and so on. And that's what we need. But how we cope with the remaining challenges, such as the accelerator management or how can we manage the topology of different kinds of device? I will introduce Zhi and Shao He to elaborate that. Hello, everyone. My name is Chiang Zhi. I am a staff researcher at the normal research. In this slide, let me talk about our age computing solution architecture. It contains two parts. One part is cloud computing in data center. And the other one is age computing. In our OpenStack platform, we manage physical networking infrastructures by our internal project. In this project, we can see the network topology and operate switches and servers. I will explain you how it works in the next part. At age, we use Darling X as age infrastructure software platform. Beyond Darling X, we do something more on it. First thing is physical topology management. The second thing is age devices management. We need to manage the lifecycle of different Windows devices and monitor them. I will give you a detailed introduction in the next part. The third thing is that we use several to manage our accelerators, such as GPU and FPGA. Shao He will talk about it later. Both in cloud computing and age computing, they bring together technologies like CIF, DBDK, SIOV, and some accelerators. Both in data center platform, both in OpenStack platform and the Darling X, we are using CIF as our storage backhand. We have done a lot of optimization about the CIF performance, such as address code, online upgrade, and date-consistent enhancement. This part, I will give you a detailed description about physical topology management, age devices management, and accelerators. First, let me show you our physical topology management project. Both in data center and the age side, we can manage our physical topology. At the beginning of the physical topology management in age, it will be registered to the data center as an age cluster. Data center will store age clusters information, such as clusters, switches, servers, and links. One data center can own several age clusters, and every age cluster will report its status to data center. This project consists of API server and topology process. API server is the entry of APIs. It receives HTTP requests and the command line requests. API server returns topology data from DB. Topology process gets topology information by using SNP protocol. We need to set the IP address range of switches before start the topology process. At the beginning of topology process, it will scan all IP addresses which we set before. After scanning, we can get these active IP addresses next. We can connect them and get LLDP information by SNP protocol. Additionally, if the network topology is changed, this project can detect the change within few minutes. How does this project work? Briefly, we enable LLDP feature in switches and install LLDPD precise in servers. So we can get the whole network topology by running LLDP protocol between switch to switch or switch to server. At last, we use SNP protocol to get the LLDP information. So we can get detailed information about the switches such as software version, system name, interfaces, status. As for our age devices management, just like Newton-Iobas, Newton-FWAIS, age devices management is a plugable project. We will design some abstract interfaces and a different vendor who wants to use this project need to implement their own driver. Next, we will design camera common plug-in and sensor common plug-in to fit cameras and sensors. Additionally, new age devices will be registered into this service, and we can monitor these devices. Good morning. This is Shao He from Intel Cloud Team. Now let me introduce some hardware and its management in VCO Cloud. Now Intel is unleashing innovation in VCO Cloud. It has a total solution in different scenarios, such as media processing and delivery, media analytics, immersive media, cloud graphics, and cloud gaming. Include, encode, decode, inference, and render. This is a media analytics pipeline. It should go through, decode, inference, and encode process. So VCO Cloud is a full stack. Include hardware and software. The hardware cover different domains in computing storage and networking, such as the young processor, VC card, IPG card, operating persistent memory, graphic card, and Movedas. The software include different tools in encode, decode, inference, and render, such as media, software 3DO, webRTC, open window, media display SDK, and other render tools. Beside these tools, leverage AVX5012. WebRTC can also leverage VC card, and open window can also leverage IPG. Now let's see how these hardware power can work with VCO Cloud. This is the Intel Xenon Scabal processor. All Xenon processors support AVX5012. With mesh architecture, it delivers low latency and high band length among calls, memory, and L controllers. Just the performance of VDO stage, including transcoding, will be greatly improved. This is the open family, including DC participant memory and SSD. They are high performance in bad ones, LPS, and latency. You can see a small, faster endurance and denser than conventional storage medium. This is Intel FPG, the new product is Stratix 10. It supports high floating-point performance, high speed transceiver, high bandwidth for parallel memory interface, useful in inference and HPC. This is QET. It provides hardware solutions for computer intensive workloads, such as data storage and transmission. It supports 100 GBS cryptography and 100 GBS data compression. This one is a smart card, a smart leak. It's used for network acceleration. Currently, it supports 225 Ethernet. It supports full open-v switch acceleration. It is programmable and easy to deployment. Here is the sliders of some accelerators in upstream. Now we have supported the IPG in Thaburger. With Thaburger, we can discover FPG and the program data. And I think we have seen the Thaburger IPG demo in the keynote. The QET carpet and the comparison already supporting itself. Partisan memory spec is under review in NOAA. And we are supporting Partisan memory for read and write caching itself. Libre supports the new ASA for inference. Kubernetes has already supported QET, GPU and FPG. All FPG, GPU, QT plug-in can be run as a demo set. All these accelerators can be shared by multi-pause. For FPG, it supports two modes, AF and region mode. But it does not support image management. For QET, it needs to pre-load and configure DPDQ driver, pre-install and configure quicker assistant technology software. So let's see Thaburger. Thaburger will support more management for these accelerators, such as dependent software management and FPG image management. The community are trying to make integration with Kubernetes. There will be a Thaburger master plug-in running Kubernetes master and a Thaburger node plug-in running Kubernetes nodes. All these are containerized. And the leverage customer resource definition to a container to support all these accelerators function. OK, that's all for me. It's time for demo. OK, before the video demo, let's take a look at the environment. We have a data center site and one age cluster. The data center is managed using the CineCloud OpenStack. Why does each node have one GPU and cameras and other devices connected? OK, let's start our demo one. It's a short movie. First, log our CineCloud OpenStack product. After that, let's go our physical technology page. A few seconds later, we can not only see the data center physical technology, but also get the age clusters technology. At the data center, we can see the switches and servers and their information, such as system and running status. At the age, we can also see the switch and the server Additionally, we can see five devices from different windows with different color which are attached to the server. So this is what we have done in physical technology management. And we still have a lot of work to do. Let's show our demo two. OK, this video is going to have two groups of comparison. And the first, we compare the video process. We compare the process to a accelerate 8K video. So not only the encoder decode the process, but also the detection process. So this video is going to demonstrate that. So we first check the resolution of our video using the FM pack. And then we change to the Dark Knight. And the Dark Knight is a neural network framework. And we also use UNO. UNO is used for object detection. So we check the UNO config and see different parameters. This video where you can see the people from left to the right after we use GPU to decode as well as detection is much faster than the rest. And the video in the middle, we decode using CPU and use GPU to detection. And this way is utilized by the Dark Knight code right now. And in the right, it's the process of using all CPU. So we find that FPS of all GPU is at 25.4. And in all CPU scenario, the people are almost stable, static. And the FPS of the middle video is 10.4. And for the all CPU, it was very small. And this is another comparison because we use 8K video as input as well as 1080p video as input. And we get the output after running the Dark Knight and compare these two videos. First check also check the resolution. And using the Dark Knight, we get the output video also the output video for 1080p. And the video at the top is using the object detection for the 8K video. And the video in the left is the output of using 1080p video to do the object detection. And you can see there are more details and more objects have been tagged from the top of the video. So let's go back to the slide. And this is some information about the object detection. We use Dark Knight and the ULV3. And we also do comparison, two-group comparison. So in this session, we are talking about our age-optimized architecture based on Stylianx. And our solution can manage device and network topology as an age and also manage different accelerators via Cyborg. And the video demo shows that the 8K video can provide much more details in analysis. And for the real-time analysis, that 8K video should be accelerated in every processing procedure, not only the detection, but also the decode process. So there's something about the future work. We want to containerize the Cyborg and use the user space network stack to accelerate our age networking. So it's a Q&A part. Do you have any questions? If all of you have any questions, you can connect us by calling the connection. Thank you. Thank you so much.