How to Help a Few Billion People

Mark Horoszowski
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Investing
  • Updated Biweekly

The world does not need more billionaires. It needs innovators that make life better for billions of people. Join us as we explore "social entrepreneurs" that prioritize purpose above profits, employees above investors, and communities above capital. helpingbillions.org

  1. He Declined an $18 Million Exit to Keep a Promise

    Jun 9

    He Declined an $18 Million Exit to Keep a Promise

    When Ousmane Conde was a kid in Guinea, his mother worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. And every night she came home and did the same thing. “She would take the knife, cut a hole in a random place in the mattress, and pile cash in.” He knew something was wrong. He didn’t have the words for it yet. The mattress was the safest place she had, because that’s where the family slept, and a thief would have to dig through it to find anything. Two decades later he went back and found the obvious thing he’d missed as a boy: nothing had changed. “I realized mattress banking is still the most common way of banking in my home country, Guinea.” Then came the part that reframes the whole problem. He moved to the largest economy the world has ever known, and he found mattress banking here too. The Bronx. Harlem. Different mattress, same hole. That’s the tension Ousmane lives in, and it’s worth naming plainly before we get to the lessons. He could have built WODI the way most fintechs get built: move fast, operate in the regulatory gray, raise from whoever writes the biggest check, and charge what the market will bear. He chose the opposite on every count. He sat on working technology for three years. He turned down an eight-figure exit. He says no to VCs. And he charges a dollar. Here’s what a social entrepreneur can actually take from how he did it. 1. “Unbanked” isn’t a poverty problem. It’s a trust-and-access problem, and it’s everywhere. We use “unbanked” like it means “too poor to have a bank account.” Ousmane’s definition is sharper. An unbanked person is someone who doesn’t have an account, or doesn’t trust the banks that exist, or can’t practically reach one. The nearest branch might be two cities away. The data backs the wider definition. The World Bank’s 2025 Global Findex counts 1.3 billion adults still without an account, and over half of them are women. In the United States, the FDIC’s 2023 survey found 4.2% of households unbanked and another 14.2% underbanked. That’s roughly one in five. Black and Hispanic households are about five times more likely to be unbanked than white ones, and the second most common reason people give for staying out isn’t poverty. It’s that they don’t trust banks. So when Ousmane says “In Africa, every shop is a bank, literally,” he’s not being poetic. He’s describing a parallel financial system that millions of people built because the formal one failed them. The lesson for any founder serving an overlooked market: don’t assume the problem is that your customer has no money. Sometimes the problem is that the institution never showed up, or showed up and lost their trust. 2. Make the store the bank. Meet people where the trust already lives. WODI’s core idea is almost stubbornly simple: “stores become bank branches. The store owner becomes a bank agent.” The cash register becomes the ATM. You walk into the bodega where you already buy your bread, and you open an account, get a Visa card, or send money home. The economics are why banks can’t do this themselves. Opening a branch runs somewhere between two and five million dollars, plus another half-million a year to keep it running. No bank will eat that cost to serve a neighborhood where people deposit five dollars and buy fifteen dollars of phone credit. So in the Bronx, where every corner has a shop but no bank, people get locked out. Branches open at ten and close at four. The people who need them most leave for work before six in the morning. Ousmane’s framing of what he’s really selling is the part worth stealing: “the business we’re in here is a business of moving trust around.” You already trust the corner bakery. The owner watched your kids grow up. WODI’s bet is that handing that owner the software to act as your bank beats any slick app from a company you’ve never met. It’s the same model that turned M-Pesa into the backbone of Kenya’s economy through agent networks rather than branches. Ousmane just noticed the same demand sitting unserved on both sides of the Atlantic. 3. Restraint is a growth strategy. This is the one most founders won’t want to hear. Ousmane had WODI’s technology ready three years before he switched it on. He stayed deliberately thin and waited for regulatory licenses while competitors, in his words, “report billions of dollars in revenue, but they’re not licensed to do it.” Why wait, when getting fully licensed can take three to five years no matter how much money you have? Because shortcuts poison the whole field. “Imagine two entrepreneurs. I and you are doing the same thing. You are gaming the system and I am not.” The honest one loses, so honesty has to be built into the company as a feature, not a hope. He’d already proven he’d pay that price. In Senegal, PayCruiser was powering rent and retirement payments for millions of users when the central bank changed the rules overnight. Plenty of companies kept operating. He shut his down. “We’re not here to make money. We’re here to change lives.” And from his Boeing days he kept one engineering rule above all others: “you never want a single point of failure.” So WODI’s licensing runs two parallel tracks, bank sponsors and money-transmitter partnerships, so a single regulatory change can never switch him off again. He also walked away from the obvious win. “We had an $18 million acquisition at PayCruiser, which we declined” [lightly edited for clarity]. The number wasn’t the point. Staying alive to finish the job was. 4. If you can build, you don’t need VCs, and you get to choose your cap table. Ousmane is what he calls a founder-builder. He has an AI background, WODI runs on AI agents across legal, finance, and operations, and so a lot of what other founders raise money to hire for, he can just make. That changes the fundraising math entirely. The headline: “right now we’re raising $10 million, we already have completed $8.7 million without drawing money from VCs.” The capital came from corporate partners and strategic backers instead, and the upside is control. “You get to choose who’s on your cap table.” He’s turned down sovereign-wealth-backed funds that offered checks because they didn’t share the mission. His reasoning is the kind of clarity that’s only possible when you’re not desperate: “money is not the blocker here.” The Visa story is the practical playbook inside this lesson. He didn’t network his way in over years. He applied to a program called Visa FinTech Fast Track, basically a cold outreach. They called the next day. “In less than 24 hours, we had a meeting scheduled.” What closed it wasn’t a pitch deck. “Instead of telling them, we showed them this is what it does.” He walked in with a working product and proof of traction, not a promise. The sequence matters: build the thing, prove it works, then go find the partner who needs exactly that. Not the other way around. 5. Hire on the moral contract, not the paper one. WODI grew from one person to twenty-five, and Ousmane learned to protect the culture with a single conversation he runs before any offer goes out. He calls it the scare-you-away call. He tells the candidate it will be the hardest job they’ve had, that “we are not going to pay you as well as your previous job,” that there will be nights and weekends. Then: “if you’re for the money, it’s not worth it.” One of his best employees, a former banker with a kid, heard all of that and said yes anyway. That yes is the real contract. “The moral contract from the get-go” comes first; the paperwork just writes down what you already agreed. For early-stage founders who can’t outbid anyone on salary, this is the move. Filter hard for the people who’d show up before the money is real, because those are the only ones who’ll still be there when it gets hard. 6. Price for the mission. A dollar, not fifteen percent. Sending money across borders is quietly one of the most expensive things poor people do. The World Bank puts the global average cost of sending $200 at around 6.5%. Banks average closer to 13 to 15%. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive region on earth to receive money, near 8.4%. The UN’s target is 3%, and almost nobody hits it. Ousmane’s answer is a flat dollar per transfer, whatever the amount. Bankers don’t believe him when he says it. His logic is almost confrontational in its simplicity: “We can make money by just charging people one dollar. Why should we go and charge them 15 percent? There’s no point.” The principle underneath it is the line that ties this whole conversation together: “Money is a consequence, not a goal.” Late in our conversation I asked Ousmane the question I think every founder in this space eventually has to face. You’re banking people into an economy that has real downsides. Debt. Concentration of wealth. Are you sure you’re helping? He didn’t dodge it. He pointed back to the moral compass and to a saying he keeps close: we’re born naked, we die naked, and what we’re remembered for is what happens in between. A billionaire, he noted, doesn’t take the money with him. The point of building isn’t the exit. It’s whether a woman in the Bronx or in Conakry can stop hiding cash in a mattress. When I asked what skill he wished he had more of, he didn’t say focus or discipline or vision. He said empathy. “There is no such thing as more empathy.” He prays five times a day, and he described it not as an obligation but a gift, five chances to reset and put himself back in someone else’s shoes. He started this whole journey because of a voice he couldn’t quiet at his comfortable Boeing job. “It’s just this voice in you that’s telling you, yes, but there is so much more.” Most of us hear that voice and turn up the radio. He took out a knife and went looking for t

    1h 35m

  2. May 21

    40 VCs said no. Then she led her impact startup to a successful exit.

    Forty venture capitalists looked at Little Thinking Minds and said no. Not because the company was broken. It was profitable. It reached roughly half a million children learning to read Arabic across more than ten countries. Paying private schools, government contracts, third-party-verified results. The VCs liked all of it. Rama Kayyali, who co-founded the company and ran it for two decades, remembers what they told her: “We love you. We’ve been following your story. It’s amazing what you’re doing. We relate. Our kids have the same problem you guys are tackling. But, it’s not interesting for us because it’s not fast growing.” They believed in the problem. Some of them had kids with that exact problem. They just didn’t want to fund a company that grew the way hers did: steadily, profitably, without a hockey stick. Then in April 2025, Seesaw, a US learning platform used by more than 25 million educators, students, and families, acquired Little Thinking Minds. Seesaw kept the Arabic brand. Kept all 70 staff. Hired 20 more people into the region and started building an Arabic platform on top of what Rama’s team had made. So sit with this for a second. The trait that made Little Thinking Minds uninvestable to 40 VCs is the same trait that made it worth buying. Rama didn’t reach a good exit despite refusing to chase hockey-stick growth. She reached it because she refused. Below are six things her story can teach any founder building for impact. 1. A VC “no” is a verdict on fit, not on your company This matters because founders read rejection as a referendum on the business. It usually isn’t. Little Thinking Minds was solving a real, large, measured problem. The World Bank estimates that around six in ten children in the Middle East and North Africa can’t read and understand a simple, age-appropriate story by age 10. Arabic literacy is a genuine crisis, and Rama had a product with evidence behind it. None of that was the issue. The issue was that venture capital is a financing model built for a specific shape of company, and hers was a different shape. It didn’t help that she was raising in a region with almost no capital designed for what she was building. Only about 2% of global impact-investing assets are deployed in MENA. Rama puts it more bluntly: “There are no impact investors in the Arab world. None. Zero.” When a VC passes, they’re answering one question: will this return our fund in the time our fund needs it back? That’s it. A no means you don’t fit that instrument. It does not mean the company is bad, the problem is small, or the founder is failing. Rama collected 40 nos, and the company kept reaching more kids the entire time. Separate the verdict on your financing from the verdict on your work. They are not the same audit. 2. Use grant money to buy proof, not to run the company Before Little Thinking Minds ever raised a Series A, Rama needed to know schools would actually pay. She found out using money she’d never have to pay back, and never let herself depend on. The company won a spot in USAID’s All Children Reading challenge, one of 13 companies selected globally, and used the grant to run a controlled pilot in Jordanian public schools. An independent firm ran the evaluation: treatment group against control. The result, in her words: “the results were significant. They were statistically significant.” Published research later put the literacy improvement at 25%. That pilot did two jobs. It proved the product worked, and it proved schools were the right customer. Only then did Rama raise the Series A. What she didn’t do is build the business on grants. She came close. When fundraising got hard, the donor route looked tempting. But she’s direct about why she’s glad she resisted: “You cannot build a business on... donor funding... thank God that wasn’t our business model.” Anyone who watched the 2025 USAID cuts gut organizations overnight knows why that instinct was right. Grants are excellent for buying evidence. They’re a dangerous thing to mistake for revenue. 3. Let the paying customer fund the mission Here’s the model that made the whole thing durable, and it’s worth stealing. Little Thinking Minds sold its platform to elite private schools in places like Dubai at full price. It also sold to governments at high volume and a much lower per-student price, which is how the product reached public-school kids, refugees, and children in low-resource communities. The premium customer subsidized the mission customer. It’s the same logic that lets India’s Aravind Eye Care fund free surgeries with the patients who pay. Investors, Rama found, were happy with one half of that and uneasy about the other: “Investors love us reaching the government school sector because that’s where the volume is, but they don’t like the idea of... refugee communities” Which is why, for years, she didn’t call her company what it was. The phrase “social business,” she says, “scares them.” So she didn’t use the words. “We never actually called ourselves social entrepreneurs... We were ashamed to say that.” She pitched a “for profit edtech company, cutting edge, innovative.” Same company, different vocabulary depending on the room. “you feel like you have to have two personalities,” she says. The lesson isn’t to hide your mission forever. It’s that a cross-subsidy model lets the mission survive contact with investors who’d otherwise kill it. The paying customer makes the impact customer possible, and you don’t need anyone’s permission for that. 4. Companies don’t get bought. They get sold. When Rama’s board started raising the idea of an exit, she had no idea how it worked. So they gave her a line she now repeats: “Companies don’t get bought, they get sold.” What that meant in practice: she had to stop spending all her time running the company and start spending real time positioning it. “I had to shift my focus from growing the business... to positioning it.” Speaking at conferences. Being visible in the sector. Becoming a known quantity. That’s how she ended up in a room with an edtech M&A specialist, and how that specialist connected her to Seesaw. An exit isn’t a thing that happens to you. It’s a process you run, with its own work, separate from the work of operating the business. If you wait to be discovered, you’ll wait. 5. Judge an exit by its terms, not its headline By the standard that should actually matter, it was a great one because it accelerated the growth and impact of her work. Seesaw kept the Little Thinking Minds name in the region, because 20 years of brand equity is worth something. It kept the whole team, 70 people, 70% of them women, instead of trimming it the way acquirers usually do. Then it added 20 hires and committed to building in the region rather than treating the office as overflow. Rama has seen the other version: “Sometimes when I’ve seen some of the acquisitions that happened, the office here just becomes a back office” And what got the company there wasn’t a growth rate. It was everything the VCs couldn’t price: “It’s not about just the numbers. It’s not about the bottom line. It’s about the impact, the reach, the content we’ve built, the teachers we’ve empowered, the students who started to have more confidence in the classroom.” If you’re a founder choosing an acquirer, or an investor pushing for one, the deal size is the least durable thing about it. Who keeps their job, whose name stays on the door, what gets built next: that’s the exit. 6. Don’t let the company become your identity The hardest part of this story isn’t financial. Rama spent 20 years as Little Thinking Minds. So completely that people stopped using her name: “people here, they don’t even call me Rama. They just say, oh, this is little thinking minds.” When the acquisition closed, the question waiting for her was: “who am I when I’m not little thinking minds?” She had help with that question, and this is the part founders skip. Across the whole life of the company, Rama worked with coaches, mentors, and a therapist. Not as a luxury. As infrastructure for a job she describes as lonely in ways you can’t take home to family or friends. The founder who built a company that survived 40 nos, COVID, and a six-month due diligence is the same founder who did two decades of deliberate work on her own head. Build the company. Don’t vanish into it. There will be a day it isn’t yours, and you’ll want a person still standing when that day comes. Forty investors told Rama Kayyali her company wasn’t interesting because it wasn’t fast. She built it her way anyway: slower, profitable, locked to the mission. Two decades in, the company that bought it wanted precisely that. The growth curve was never the asset. The company was. Want to Learn from Purpose-Driven Founders? Subscribe to the Helping Billions Podcast. Have a founder we should interview? Have them apply here, or nominate them here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit helpingbillions.org

    1h 9m

  3. Apr 30

    All Flourishing Is Mutual: The Founder Sustainability Stack

    If you’re building a social enterprise to last, you’re signing up for a decade or more of HARD work. And the longer you’re at it, the more life shows up uninvited. A parent dies. You get married. Friendships fade. The market collapses the week before your Series B. Most founder advice doesn’t account for any of this. It’s tuned for a sprint: eighteen months to product-market fit, forty-eight to a Series A, and an exit story that fits on a Forbes cover. Mission-locked founders don’t run that race. We’re building things that take a decade or two to actually matter, and the only way to make it that long is to build the conditions for your own survival into the work itself, and to do the same for the people building it with you. Steph Speirs spent ten years building Solstice, a community solar company that made clean energy accessible to roughly four out of five Americans who can’t put panels on their own roof. She sold it to Mitsui in October 2022, the last good year for clean-energy M&A before the market turned. She’d just buried her father. She’d just gotten married. The thing she’s most proud of isn’t the exit. It’s that she made it through as a real person, even more in tune with the people and world around her. And now, she's at it again with her latest venture, Future in Bloom. In this amazing interview with Steph, we uncover what I’m calling the Founder Sustainability Stack: five concrete things she built, on purpose, that let her keep building when most founders would have given up. 1. Find a peer cohort. Don’t let it dissolve. Steph applied to twenty grants in Solstice’s early days. Twenty rejected her. Echoing Green was the first to say yes. But the money wasn’t the highlight of this Fellowship, the cohort of peers was. Eleven years later, Steph’s group still gathers monthly. “There’s a group of us that have been meeting for now eleven years on a monthly basis and sharing our ups and downs.” This isn’t networking. It’s something more specific. A founder spends her day managing everyone else’s motivations: the team, the board, the customers, the investors. Almost no one in her life is allowed to see her scared, confused, or stuck. A peer cohort is the room where she’s allowed. The data on founder mental health is grim. Research by Michael Freeman at UCSF found that roughly half of entrepreneurs report a mental health condition, and they’re significantly more likely than the general population to experience depression and anxiety. The thing that protects against it isn’t grit. It’s other founders. If your fellowship doesn’t fund the cohort, fund it yourself. Find five founders at your stage in adjacent industries (not competitors). Lock in a monthly call before you need it. The version of this you build at year two will save you at year seven. 2. Build a real support network outside the company. Founders are professional motivation managers. The job is to be the steadiest person in every room. Somewhere in your life, you need people who get to see the other version. The version that’s terrified, exhausted, or genuinely lost. For Steph, that was her partner. She was able to share things with him she couldn’t share with even her co-founder, because she was always, in her words, “managing everyone else’s motivations.” Her co-founder needed her to be steady. Her husband didn’t. This looks different for everyone. For some founders it’s a partner. For others it’s a parent, a sibling, a friend group from college, a therapist they’ve kept for a decade, a chosen family. The form doesn’t matter. The non-negotiables are that it exists, that it’s not transactional, and that it gets protected like real infrastructure. Research on entrepreneurial wellbeing keeps landing in the same place: perceived social support is a stronger predictor of founder mental health than money raised, market traction, or hours worked. The founders who last aren’t grinding alone. They built a network of people who knew them before the company and will know them after. 3. Innovation comes from your own scars plus exposure to worlds that aren’t yours. Solstice’s most original product wasn’t a solar farm. It was the Energy Score, a proprietary credit-scoring system based on utility repayment history rather than mortgages and credit cards. Steph built it because most solar financiers require a FICO score of 680 or above, and roughly half of America doesn’t have one. The product that was supposed to save people money on their electricity bill was excluding the people who needed those savings most. Why did Steph see this when other solar founders didn’t? Two reasons. One personal, one structural. The personal reason was her mom: a single immigrant parent raising three kids in Hawaii on a salary below the poverty line. A bad credit score. A boss at a call center who once told her to go back to her old country. Steph remembers her mom telling her, and it’s worth slowing down to read this: “In America, your credit score is your destiny. It determines whether you can get a car or an apartment or sometimes even a job. Even though we have a bad credit score, it does not mean we’re bad people.” The structural reason: before Solstice, Steph was in a fellowship at Acumen, serving in low-income villages in India and Pakistan. She watched microfinance institutions there pioneer alternative measures of creditworthiness, using social connectivity, behavioral data, and mobile-money repayment history. All of this was years before any US bank looked twice at the idea. M-Pesa was leapfrogging Apple Pay in East Africa. “I love the idea of taking solutions from the global South and bringing them to The United States, because there’s this hegemony of thinking that the West exports all the innovation out to the global South, and that’s just not the case.” Vijay Govindarajan at Tuck has been writing about this dynamic for years. He calls it reverse innovation. Most US founders never look in that direction. They benchmark against US competitors, attend US conferences, hire US talent, and miss models that are five years ahead in markets they’ve written off as poor. The CFPB estimates roughly 26 million American adults are credit invisible (no FICO file at all), and another 19 million have files too thin to score. Those people pay rent on time. They pay their phone bills on time. The system just doesn’t see them. Steph saw them because her mom was one of them, and because she’d already watched another country build an answer. If you want a product nobody else can copy, the formula is straightforward. Find the problem your own life made you angry about. Then go spend serious time in the place that’s solving it differently than your industry knows how to. 4. Grow yourself at least as fast as the company. By year seven at Solstice, Steph had collapsed her identity into the work. “I had given up everything in my life. I put off a lot of things for work. It was my entire identity. It’s what I did from when I woke up to when I went to sleep.” This isn’t a moral failing. It’s what the founder role rewards in the short term. Push harder. Sleep less. Take the meeting. Skip the social gathering. Cancel the trip. Every individual decision looks rational. The aggregate decision is a structural risk: you become a person whose entire being depends on a single company performing. That hurts both the human and the company that human is supposed to be leading. Steph’s recovery was learning to keep becoming a person. She took up free diving in Hawaii during the pandemic. (Sixty feet down on a single breath of air after one weekend of training. She’d been afraid of swimming deeper than three feet before that, which she joked was a little embarrassing for someone from Hawaii.) She took up spear fishing. She reconnected with the Hawaiian view of nature as ancestor, not environment. When she was preparing for what came next, she made three lists. Everything she’s worse at than the average person. Everything she’s better at than the average person. What she wanted her life outside of work to look like. The third list, she told me, didn’t exist when she started Solstice. At the end of a decade, it was the one that mattered most. The hidden lesson under the lesson came from free diving. The panic feeling underwater, when your body is screaming for air? That’s not actually your need to breathe. It’s CO2 buildup. The fix is to slow down. “When your instinct is to freak out, the answer is to probably go more slowly.” 5. How you treat your people is the strategy. Not in addition to it. Here’s the question Steph never got asked. She raised significant capital across multiple rounds. She went through extensive diligence with multiple investors. Fund analysts, partners, MBAs with spreadsheets, the works. “Never once did I get asked by an investor: how do you retain your talent? How do you treat your people? And that is one of the most important reasons why a business succeeds or fails.” Solstice didn’t hire its first HR person until year eight. Steph and her co-founder split the role between them. She calls it a huge mistake. People problems don’t wait for the founder to have time. They explode. Without a specialist, every blowup landed in the founders’ laps and pulled them away from the work that only they could do. The proof of how much her team mattered came when her father died. For the first time in eight years, Steph couldn’t go to work. She told her chief of staff and her co-founder she needed two weeks. The company kept running. Note who carried the company when she couldn’t. Not her vision. Not her IP. Not her investor relationships. Her people. A note for impact investors. If your diligence checklist asks about TAM, churn, CAC, LTV, and unit economics but skips retention, culture, and how the founder treats her team, you’re missin

    59 min
  4. How to Survive Your Biggest Client Failure (and Turn It Into Your Scale-Up Strategy)

    Apr 16

    How to Survive Your Biggest Client Failure (and Turn It Into Your Scale-Up Strategy)

    In 2021, Disruptia won what every early-stage social enterprise thinks they want: A big business-to-business contract with one of Colombia’s biggest financial groups. Train 200 people across 28 municipalities. Digital marketing, data analytics, front-end development, UX, e-commerce. English on the side. Then, help them find work. They placed three. “We directly employed three people of 200. It was bad.” That’s Paula Porras, co-founder of Disruptia, a Colombian workforce platform that exists because the labor market in Latin America runs on a lie. The story most companies tell themselves is that qualified talent is scarce. Paula and her co-founders tell a different one: eight million working-age Colombians are ready and willing to do the job. Women, victims of the armed conflict, young people from rural areas, people with disabilities, people whose parents never went to university. The talent isn’t missing. The bridge is. Take Carine. She’s 23, from a low-income family in Bogotá. No one in her family went to university. She had the right attitude, a growth mindset, a desire to work. But without a bachelor’s degree or formal job experience, no traditional platform would match her. So to earn a living, she handed out flyers at traffic lights, day and night, dodging cars and motorbikes. Disruptia calls people like Carine “disruptors.” She’s one of 8 million. Disruptia creates more stable and higher earning career pathways for people like Carine, and it is life-changing. The ILO confirms the shape of the problem: youth unemployment across Latin America and the Caribbean sits at 13.8%, nearly three times the adult rate. In Colombia specifically, about 44.7% of young workers are employed informally. No contract, no pension, no protection. So the math is brutal. And the dream contract nearly broke Disruptia before they understood any of what they understand now. Here’s what Paula learned. Six lessons that won’t show up in a VC deck but might be the most useful thing a social entrepreneur reads this month. Before the lessons: the moment Disruptia was born Paula started in corporate finance, got her heart broken in 2012, and signed up to volunteer at a Colombian nonprofit called Somos Capaces as a distraction. The volunteering turned into her life. She ran the organization for years, trained people in conflict resolution across Colombia, Kenya, Pakistan, Syria, the Philippines. Then in 2018 she and her co-founders heard something that changed everything. A young man who’d been one of their brightest students at Somos Capaces had graduated and couldn’t find work. “He was unlocking wrapped cell phones. For a gang. Because he couldn’t find a job when he graduated from school, so he needed to earn a living. He was really smart.” That’s the tension Disruptia lives in every day. The talent isn’t the problem. The opportunity to use the talent legally, formally, and at a living wage. That’s the problem. Every contract they take is an attempt to close that gap for one more person. And sometimes, as in 2021, the attempt fails spectacularly. Lesson 1: Scale kills mission-driven work before product-market fit does Disruptia had placed cohorts of 7 and 21 people in Bogotá. When the financial group said do 200 across 28 municipalities in six months, they said yes. They didn’t have contacts in most of those municipalities. The internet dropped in and out. Participants couldn’t relocate. And Disruptia didn’t know the local employer ecosystems well enough to make matches. Paula’s diagnosis is blunt: “We needed humility. We weren’t bold enough. We didn’t know. We were really new in the employability part. So I think we overestimated the game.” The lesson isn’t don’t scale. It’s that scale in social work requires the same ingredient as scale in distribution. Dense local networks. Jumping from two regions to twenty-eight didn’t just multiply operational complexity. It multiplied every single thing that only works when you know the people on the ground. If you can’t recruit locally, employ locally, and troubleshoot locally, you’re not running a program. You’re running a press release. Lesson 2: Bounce back by sharing responsibility. Don’t carry the bag alone. This is the lesson most social entrepreneurs miss, and Paula names it with an almost-English word she keeps using: corresponsibility. When a program isn’t working, go back to the client. Not away from them. “I think we’re good at explaining bad results sometimes.” What Disruptia learned after the financial group contract wasn’t how to hide failure. It was how to turn it into a conversation where the client owns part of the outcome. “This is not just like one standalone project where you just are going to succeed. Because the employment sector is really complicated. It’s evolving, and it’s a different dynamic that it was 10 years ago.” If students aren’t showing up, something in the program design, or the client’s expectations, or the labor market context is off. Not just your execution. Share the diagnosis. Share the responsibility. That’s how you keep the relationship alive long enough to do better work with the same client. It’s also how Disruptia turned a failed contract into credibility. The financial group that gave them the nightmare contract became the reference that opened every subsequent door. Lesson 3: Relationships aren’t a distraction. They’re the moat. Early on, Paula watched David (her co-founder and partner) spend what she thought was absurd amounts of time networking. She was the work-focused one. Results. Output. Results. Output. “I was like, you’re wasting time with other things. What are you doing with all of these lunches?” She was wrong. Every government contract Disruptia won later traced back to a relationship David built in a year when they didn’t seem to be producing anything. “All of those relationship really paid off. Even if that wasn’t his intention, just cultivating those relationships at the end was really some of the things that also gave us contract opportunities.” The B2G (business-to-government) market in Colombia has bid minimums and track-record requirements that lock out most early-stage players. Relationships and alliances with organizations that already qualify are how you get in. Not a pitch deck. Not a cold email. A lunch, three years in advance. Lesson 4: Don’t send that aggressive email. Grab lunch instead. Under delivery pressure, founders default to clear, pointed written communication with clients and partners. And it lands like a slap. “Many of the things that have worked for us was like, ‘let’s grab some lunch’, or ‘how are you feeling?’ Really building that relationship, really trying to understand the struggle of the other person.” This isn’t soft skills. It’s the difference between a client who renews and a client who walks. Your participants and your clients both have their own pressures. Earned empathy separates operators from consultants. Lesson 5: Get the right people on the bus. Then keep changing the seats. Disruptia started with three co-founders, then four. All industrial engineers. All from Somos Capaces. Paula references Jim Collins’s famous framing from Good to Great: “You have to get the right people on the bus and then see where to go. Collins’s full idea: leaders who transform companies don’t start with where. They start with who. Right people on the bus, wrong people off, right people in the right seats. Then decide where to drive. Where Disruptia’s version is instructive specifically for social enterprise founders: the seats have to keep moving. Paula started as director. David took over. Paula Franco (a fourth co-founder) took over. Sebastián moved from technology to technology plus finance and back. Every year, they re-evaluated who was delivering and adjusted. “You cannot continue to do that every year. That can be a little bit of inconsistent. But at the beginning, we had to make a lot of adjustments.” Translation: early-stage social enterprises aren’t built by people doing the same job for five years. They’re built by people willing to rotate into whatever seat the business needs next. This is especially true when you’re bootstrapping. You don’t have the option of hiring in a specialist. You grow into the seat, or you leave the bus. Lesson 6: Late team decisions are the most expensive mistake you’ll make I asked Paula what her biggest learning was. She didn’t hesitate. “Not making team decisions at the right time because it’s too costly.” “It’s a toxic relationship. Just cut that. You can cut it in a good way that is healthy for both parts.” The research is with her. Management writing on startups consistently finds that leaving underperformers in place costs more than the awkward conversation of parting ways. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs 30% to 400% of their salary. In a small mission-driven team, a bad fit doesn’t just cost you salary. It costs you the energy of the people around them, the decisions they make that have to be un-made later, and the trust of clients who notice. The founder who waits six months to make a decision they already know is right is subsidizing a problem at the expense of their best people. A closing note on the “plush toy” problem When I asked Paula why she and her co-founders incorporated Disruptia as a for-profit rather than a nonprofit, her answer was about being taken seriously in a market. “The mindset was different of being in a nonprofit than a social enterprise.” There’s a version of the nonprofit sector where your work gets a pat on the head instead of a real contract. Where doing good work means being tolerated, not competed with. Disruptia’s co-founders watched colleagues leave Somos Capaces because the organization couldn’t pay them what they needed. They were

    1h 11m

  5. Mar 26

    This Founder Is Helping the 9 Out of 10 Businesses Banks Ignore

    Mercedes Bidart left New York on a humanitarian flight during COVID, moved to a country she’d never lived in, and started lending $10 to people no bank would touch. Here’s what she’s learned building Quipu into a breakeven fintech that wants to become the credit bureau for Latin America’s informal economy. In Latin America, nine out of ten businesses are micro-enterprises — fewer than ten employees, often a single person with a food truck, a sewing machine, or a box of handcrafted bags. Together, they face a funding gap of more than $1.4 trillion. They are the engine of their economies. And the financial system pretends they don’t exist. Banks won’t lend to them because they have no credit history. Traditional microfinance institutions struggle to serve them at scale. And the alternative? Predatory lenders charging 20% interest — per week — who show up at your door if you don’t pay. Mercedes Bidart, an Argentine political scientist who grew up in a family of small business wonders set out to change this. She built Quipu, a fintech that uses alternative data to assess creditworthiness for people the traditional system has left behind. Starting with $10 loans and a dataset they built from scratch, Quipu reached breakeven this year — and now has its sights on something much bigger. This interview was full of lessons I think every social entrepreneur, impact investor, and business builder needs to hear. 1. The Best Ideas Don’t Arrive — They Emerge Quipu didn’t start as a credit scoring company. It started as a community marketplace with its own digital currency… and it didn’t work. The original concept, called Quipu Market, was a platform where informal businesses in underserved neighborhoods could upload products and transact with each other using a local community currency — money that stayed in the neighborhood. Mercedes and her co-founders spent a year going door-to-door, uploading businesses onto the app. “The app was s****y, like it was terrible,” she laughs. “So it took two hours uploading each business and helping them take the pictures of their products.” It didn’t work. But what they saw while doing that grueling fieldwork changed everything. What micro-entrepreneurs needed most — especially post-COVID — wasn’t a marketplace. It was working capital. They had the equipment. They had customers placing orders. They didn’t have money to buy supplies. “We noticed that actually what they needed after COVID was working capital to buy supplies again and start selling again because they had their fridge, their oven, the food truck, but they didn’t have the final supplies to start cooking the hamburgers again.” Mercedes references Otto Scharmer’s Theory U from MIT — the idea of “leading from the emerging future.” Rather than clinging to the original plan, the Quipu team followed what the business itself was telling them. “No, let’s be the credit bureau. Like this is even bigger. It’s not just lending. And when we understood that, then it was like, okay, this is what it’s emerging.” The takeaway: Your first idea is a vehicle, not a destination. The founders who build lasting companies are the ones who stay close enough to the problem to see what’s actually needed — and brave enough to follow it when it points somewhere unexpected. As Mercedes puts it: “I don’t think that you just know. Rather, you are passionate about the topic, then the solution comes by implementing different ideas.” 2. When There’s No Data, Build the Dataset Yourself Here’s the chicken-and-egg problem at the heart of financial inclusion: you can’t assess credit risk without data, and the people who most need credit have no data because they’ve never had credit. Most institutions look at this and see a wall. Mercedes saw a research project. “To build a data set, as this is an informal economy, there’s no information, there’s no data available. We needed to build the data set ourselves.” Quipu started giving out loans — beginning at just $10 — specifically so they could generate the data needed to train their risk models. They captured unconventional data points: photos of businesses (originally uploaded for the marketplace), videos showing inventory and stock, answers to onboarding questions. Then they watched what happened. “You need to capture as much data as you can, allocate the capital, and then see which type of data was actually predicting risk and what is not working.” They even designed the experiment like researchers: 50% women, 50% men. And they needed some people to default. “We needed people not paying us because that’s the way you train the model.” Today, Quipu has allocated more than 40,000 loans and uses this proprietary dataset to sell credit scores to banks, microfinance institutions, and digital wallets — proving that the people rejected by the traditional system are bankable when you measure the right things. The takeaway: If the infrastructure you need doesn’t exist, build it. The most defensible moats in emerging markets aren’t built with code — they’re built with proprietary data and user trust that nobody else was willing to go collect and build. 3. Protect Your Mission with Math, Not Just Documents A lot of social enterprise advice focuses on legal structures — benefit corporations, mission lock clauses, third-party certifications. And those matter. But Mercedes offers a more practical (and arguably more effective) approach to mission protection, especially in the early stages: don’t give any single investor enough power to change your direction. “I think because we don’t have one big investor. We have about 20 investors. So then none of them are able to move our decisions.” Quipu has raised across SAFEs (Simple Agreements for Future Equity), which means no priced round yet, no formal board, and governance control stays with the founding team. But that doesn’t mean she’s being casual. She’s being strategic. By raising from many smaller investors instead of one large lead, she’s created a structure where the founders make the decisions — and the investors can recommend and suggest, but can’t dictate. This echoes a finding from Harvard’s Noam Wasserman: 65% of high-potential startups fail due to co-founder conflict, often triggered by misaligned incentives from investor pressure. Keeping control distributed is one way to prevent that dynamic from taking root. The takeaway: You don’t need perfect governance documents on day one. But you do need a capital structure that keeps the founding team in the driver’s seat. Sometimes the best mission protection isn’t a clause — it’s a mission-aligned cap table. 4. Build an Advisory Team with Skin in the Game Most startup advisory relationships are polite fictions — a name on a website, a quarterly coffee, maybe one useful intro. Mercedes decided she needed something different. “Now I’m bringing industry leaders that went through some of the things that we need to do.” She built a formal advisory share structure — equity that vests not just with time, but is accelerated based on hitting specific milestones. An advisor on risk? She hired someone who spent ten years at a bank buying credit scores. Someone who knows the buyer’s side of the exact product Quipu is selling. The milestones are concrete: generate a certain amount of revenue, deliver a specific number of bank partnerships. If the advisor contributes to growing the company’s value, they vest faster. If not, the equity stays on the table. This approach was informed by a peer — a fellow Cartier Women’s Initiative fellow named Komal — who shared a negotiation framework that changed how Mercedes thinks about all her stakeholder relationships: “Negotiation, you need to make the pie bigger. So it’s not about how much you get and how much I get, but actually is how much we can grow the pie.” The takeaway: Advisory relationships only work when there’s real accountability. Design advisor vesting around the specific outcomes your company needs to unlock. And remember: the best advisors aren’t the most famous — they’re the ones who’ve been on the other side of the table you’re trying to reach. 5. The Fundraising Playbook Is (Mostly) B******t — Learn from Peers Instead Mercedes has no patience for conventional fundraising wisdom. She’s heard it all in accelerators and incubation programs. Her verdict? “All the theory that I’ve learned in accelerators… I think it’s b******t.” The problem? The Silicon Valley-exported playbook — create FOMO, close the round in a month, or you’re a failure — doesn’t map to reality for most founders. “It makes you feel that you are the loser because they you need to make the FOMO and people need to invest in a month. And if you don’t close the round in a month, then you are lost.” What actually helped her? Talking to other founders going through the same thing. “The best is talking with peers, not just learning from the “experts”. And in the end, is learning by doing.” Mercedes also shared her conference strategy, which is far more methodical than most founders realize is necessary. She researches attendees a week and a half before, connects on LinkedIn with a personal note, pre-books meetings, leaves room for serendipity, and tries to speak at the event whenever possible. “If you’re a speaker, then you are positioned in a different way. Even if they don’t go to your panel, they might talk to you because you are a speaker.” This reminded me of the podcast with Minhaj of Drinkwell, who outlined the extensive research and outreach that went into every event. She also noted an uncomfortable truth about fundraising dynamics for women: happy hours and after-event drinks — where many investor relationships get cemented — feel fundamentally different for women founders. “

    1h 15m

  6. Mar 12

    She Taught Herself to Code. Then She Built a Million-Woman Movement Out of an RV — Without a Dollar of VC.

    There’s a scene in Julia Taylor’s story that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s October 24, 2018. She’s sitting on a plastic sofa in an RV parked in Moab, Utah. Her parents are visiting. She’s refreshing a screen, waiting for her very first sale — a $97 course she built in real time for a beta group of women who wanted to learn what she’d taught herself: how to code, how to build a website, how to start a business from scratch. The sale comes through. Then another. By the time she sits down for breakfast, over 90 women have signed up. That’s $13,000 in revenue for a product that didn’t fully exist yet. Today, Geek Pack has trained over 10,000 women entrepreneurs in digital skills, reaches more than 150,000 through its community and platforms, and is marching toward a vision of equipping 1 million women by 2030. Julia is a 2024 Cartier Women’s Initiative Fellow, has landed close to half a million dollars in non-dilutive grant funding, and built a brand partnership with Verizon that started with a shared vision and a post-conference handshake. She’s done all of it bootstrapped. Profitable from day one. No VC. Four people on the team. In our conversation on the Helping Billions Podcast, Julia was refreshingly honest about every part of the journey — the parts that worked, the parts that didn’t, and the gut-wrenching moments in between. Here’s what stood out. 1. You Don’t Need VC to Build Something That Matters Silicon Valley has done an incredible job of equating ambition with fundraising. But Julia’s story is a reminder that massive impact doesn’t require outside capital — it requires a clear problem, relentless customer listening, and the willingness to start before you’re ready. Julia launched Geek Pack by selling a course she hadn’t built yet: “It’s gonna be a beta launch. It’s gonna be a ridiculously low price and I’m gonna build it in real time.” That’s not sloppy. That’s lean startup methodology in its purest form — validate demand before you build the product. And the economics tell the story: that first beta turned into a multi-million-dollar program. This matters for impact entrepreneurs especially. Research from Capchase found that bootstrapped SaaS companies outperformed VC-backed peers across nearly every financial metric in 2022, including growth efficiency and margin. And only about 3% of startups ever secure venture capital. For the vast majority of founders — especially those in social enterprise — bootstrapping isn’t the backup plan. It’s the actual plan. Julia put it plainly: “I love being for profit and I really love owning my entire business because I get to make all the decisions. If I want to create 10 scholarships for people to go through our program, I get to do that. Just like that.” That’s the kind of agility VC-backed founders trade away. 2. A Big, Scary Vision Is a Business Strategy — Not a Poster on the Wall In late 2021, Julia enrolled in a program about transitioning from small business owner to CEO. The first assignment was to articulate her mission, vision, and core values. Her initial reaction? “Come on, like that’s so corporate, that’s so fluffy. Let’s get on to the meat of it.” She was wrong. And she’ll tell you herself it was one of the most important things she’s ever done for the company. Her coach gave her a deceptively simple framework for building a vision: include a number and a period of time. That’s it. Not a paragraph. Not corporate jargon. A number and a deadline. Her first vision was to support 100,000 women in five years. She was terrified to say it out loud. They hit it in two years. So they went bigger: equip 1 million women by 2030 to build profitable, sustainable, impactful businesses. What makes this powerful isn’t just the aspiration — it’s the operational discipline it creates. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras called this a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) in Built to Last. Their research found that visionary companies using bold, clear goals outperformed comparison companies in fourteen out of eighteen cases studied. A good BHAG is tangible, energizing, and requires no explanation. People “get it” right away. Julia’s version of this? She literally tracks how many times per week she says the vision statement out loud. Her team can rattle it off in seconds. Her community members email to say they’re proud to be part of it. “One of my KPIs as a CEO is how many times a week do I say our vision statement.” That’s not vanity. That’s alignment. 3. “Talk to People” Is Not Cliché — It’s the Entire Strategy We all know the advice: talk to your customers. What Julia actually demonstrates is how — especially when you’re starting from zero. She didn’t have a research budget. She didn’t hire a consulting firm. She used Instagram stories, a free Facebook group, and an email list. She told stories about her life — traveling in an RV, building a business — and then asked questions and listened to the answers. “I built this ecosystem where my ideal audience is coming to me telling me what their problems are, and I’m able to talk to them one-on-one.” The insight wasn’t complicated: women wanted to start businesses but didn’t know how to do the tech part and felt too intimidated to ask for help in existing spaces. Julia had lived this exact problem herself. When she was learning to code, she went to forums for help and got mocked. So she created the opposite: “I’m going to create a community where there is no such thing as a silly question and where mean people are not allowed.” The lesson for entrepreneurs isn’t just “go talk to people.” It’s: create a low-friction way for your target audience to talk to you, add value before asking for a credit card, and build in public so people can self-select into your community. What Julia describes is essentially a modern version of the Lean Canvas process — problem discovery through direct engagement, not assumptions. 4. The Hardest Part of Mission-Driven Leadership Isn’t Growth — It’s Contraction Here’s where Julia’s honesty made the conversation extraordinary. After explosive growth in 2020-2022 (fueled by a perfectly timed free event called Geek Week right when COVID hit), the business started contracting. Ad costs rose. Consumer spending shifted. Revenue strategies that had worked for years stopped working. By the end of 2023, Geek Pack was six figures in the red. Julia tried everything. Workforce development. Nonprofit partnerships. Grant applications. She called it the “spray and pray method.” The team went from ten people to six, and then she hit the wall. “It was April 1st of this year, sitting here at my desk, my husband walks in and I think it had just hit me. And he’s like, oh, how’s your day going? And I just fell apart because I realized that I had to — I literally did not have another option except to let people go.” What made the layoffs even harder: the team members she had to let go had come from her own community. Women she had trained. Women who believed in the mission. For mission-driven founders, this is the gut punch that Silicon Valley’s “fire fast” advice doesn’t fully account for. When your team members are also your community members, and your mission is about empowering people, letting someone go isn’t just a business decision — it’s a contradiction of everything you’re building. But here’s what Julia did right that every founder should learn from: She was transparent about finances from the start. When the hard conversations came, “no one was surprised because I was transparent with the whole team about the financial state that we were in.” She knew how her team members preferred to receive bad news. Through personality assessments and direct conversations, she’d asked team members early on: how do you want to receive difficult information? Some preferred reading it first. She honored that. She kept explanations factual, not emotional. “Very little of it was emotion or feeling. It was all data points.” She didn’t regret fighting to keep people. “On the people side, I don’t think I would have done anything different because I am very confident knowing now that I literally did everything I could to keep them as long as possible. And that I’m proud of.” If you lead a team, here’s your takeaway: the investments you make in transparency, trust, and understanding your people during good times are exactly what carry you through the worst times. You won’t know when you’ll need them, but you will. 5. Your “Competitor” Might Be Your Best Partner One of the most surprising turns in Julia’s story happened at a conference. She was on stage, sharing Geek Pack’s vision — 1 million women by 2030 — when someone from Verizon approached her afterward. “No way, that’s our vision too.” Verizon runs a program called Small Business Digital Ready. Julia had always assumed they were competition. Instead, they became one of her biggest revenue streams through a brand partnership. That one conversation reframed Geek Pack’s entire business model. Julia realized that brands — banks, fintech companies, insurance companies, software tools — wanted access to her trusted community of women small business owners. This created what she calls a “double flywheel”: individuals come into Geek Pack for training and community, while aligned brands pay for access to that audience. “My audience trusts me. If I say go and use this tool, they probably are.” The lesson: if you’ve built trust with a specific audience, that trust is an asset. And your biggest growth opportunity might come not from selling more to your existing customers, but from partnering with organizations that want to serve the same people. 6. Invest in Coaches, Even When You Think It’s “Hogwash” Julia was candid about dism

    1h 24m

  7. Feb 5

    What 4 Years of Failure Taught This Founder About Restoring the Ocean (And Building a Business)

    In 2014, Vriko Yu was diving weekly off the coast of Hong Kong when she watched a patch of coral community she knew intimately disappear in just two months. “That is the moment when I realized what is really happening in the water is no longer what I read about the books,” she says. “It really is happening at a much faster phase than I’ve ever imagined.” That moment launched a decade-long journey from marine scientist to social entrepreneur—one that includes four consecutive years of failure, a pivot to 3D printing, and a company that’s now grown 19x to break $10 million in revenue. But here’s what makes Vriko’s story worth studying: she built Archireef without a traditional business background, without a refined founder’s playbook, and with what she cheerfully admits was “delusional optimism.” And that, it turns out, might be exactly what ocean restoration—and most hard-tech climate solutions—actually require. “This Is Probably Where We Stop” Before Archireef existed, Vriko spent eight years as a coral restoration researcher. She studied coral physiology, genetics, connectivity. She published papers. She moved the science forward. And she hit the same wall every academic eventually faces. “Our mission as a scientist is basically finding the problem, find a solution, publish, and then we move on,” Vriko explains. “I wasn’t satisfied at that point.” The gap between discovering a solution and scaling it haunted her. Conservation nonprofits and government advisors were doing critical work—but there was something missing in how solutions actually spread. “I think when we really, really want to make a change to reverse the damage, it really needs to get all hands on deck,” she says. “And I think that kind of opportunity and the pathway to really get everybody together was kind of missing.” So she co-founded Archireef as a vehicle to close that gap—turning academic innovation into commercial traction. The 4-Year Failure That Made Everything Possible Here’s the part of the founder story that usually gets glossed over. Before the 3D-printed reef tiles that made Archireef famous, Vriko and her collaborators tried the conventional restoration methods: coin grid blocks, metal rebar, standard approaches used across the industry. They failed. For four years straight. “What is really painful to see is actually a year after, in year two, you see that the survival rate dropped down to 20% and years of work just gone to essentially nothing.” That consistent failure forced a fundamental question: What do corals actually need to survive? The insight was elegantly simple. Trees have root systems that anchor them before they grow upward. Corals don’t—they only grow upward without that stability. “So for us, what we really want to do is essentially using these 3D printed reef tiles to essentially function as the root for corals,” Vriko explains. The tiles give coral fragments elevation from sandy bottoms and the stability they need to establish themselves. The results speak for themselves: 95% survival after three years, with older sites retaining 90% survival at five years. The lesson? Four years of failure wasn’t wasted time. It was research and development disguised as disappointment. The failures taught them exactly what traditional methods couldn’t provide—and pointed directly toward what would work. “I Was Delusionally Optimistic” Here’s where Vriko’s honesty gets refreshing. Building a hardware company in a nascent market—ocean restoration as a commercial enterprise—doesn’t pencil out on a spreadsheet. At least not in the early days. “If I were an accountant and look at every possibilities, I was like, the conclusion is your success rate is probably 0.0001%. Don’t do it.” She did it anyway. “I guess in a way, most founders also out there believe in your own and your own effort and your team’s effort in changing that possibility,” she says. “It’s no longer just if you’re looking at this paper and just on the stat, yes, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but I think at the end of the day when it comes to implementation, it’s a lot about people.” The research backs her up. According to Harvard Business Review, experienced founders with strong teams consistently outperform their statistical odds. And first-time founders have an 18% success rate—not great, but far better than 0.0001%. The difference? Betting on people rather than projections. Vriko’s team now spans 17 nationalities across 20+ team members. They went from a painted warehouse in Abu Dhabi—”we were vacuuming the floor with a lot of dust, so we essentially built it our hands”—to scaling toward industrial-grade manufacturing. The math didn’t support it. The humans made it happen anyway. Find Your Local Champion (They’re Not Who You Think) When Archireef expanded from Hong Kong to Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, Vriko needed to build trust in entirely new markets. Different cultures, different regulatory environments, different stakeholder networks. Her advice is counterintuitive: don’t just target the domain experts. “The champions that I found are usually not necessarily the one from a domain expert,” she says. “The super connectors are usually the ones that are sitting in the peripheral.” These peripheral players—often from embassy backgrounds or cross-sector roles—understand how to navigate different stakeholder perspectives. They know the politicians, the business leaders, and critically, they understand everyone’s incentives. “They could be coming from an embassy background where they know how to talk to the politicians, they understand the perspective of different stakeholders and understand what are their pain points and what would be their incentives to be part of this solution.” Her approach: lead with mission, not money. “Be genuine. There’s no hidden agenda. We are all doing this, lay everything out. Here’s the mission, here’s the toolbox. If you buy into that, if that’s something that is persuasive, somebody will come onto you, be on your side and make it happen because they believe the mission that you’re driving.” The result? “Mission first and implementation just comes very naturally.” This aligns with research from McKinsey on public-private partnerships for nature: successful collaborations require trust and alignment before they require contracts. “Don’t Assume There’s Common Sense” Managing a team of 17 nationalities means throwing out the standard HR playbook. “In something like that, it’s extremely difficult to lay out an HR handbook that says what you should do. There’s no way that you can operate that way.” Vriko’s framework is deceptively simple: don’t assume common sense exists. “There’s no common sense because people coming from different backgrounds, different experience would have a definition of common sense. So don’t assume everything—just lay it out very clearly.” This isn’t pessimism. It’s practical humility. When you stop assuming shared context, you start communicating more explicitly. Expectations become clearer. Disappointment and frustration decrease because you’ve front-loaded the alignment work. For management resources, Vriko recommends Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson (former Stripe/Google executive). It’s packed with frameworks for understanding different working styles without stereotyping—and practical templates for feedback and performance conversations. Her biggest personal growth edge? “Don’t talk about logic all the time. Be empathetic.” For a scientist-turned-founder, that’s a significant admission. And it points to one of the hardest transitions any technical founder faces: moving from being right to being effective. The Business Model Hidden in the Science Here’s where Archireef’s model gets interesting for impact entrepreneurs trying to figure out revenue. They don’t just sell reef tiles. They’ve built a four-stage product cycle: site assessment, habitat modeling, hardware deployment, and ongoing monitoring and reporting. The scientific method became the business model. “All of our clients actually work with us for a minimum of three years for data subscription,” Vriko explains. This recurring revenue isn’t just good business—it’s responsible science. You can’t claim restoration impact without long-term monitoring. But why do corporations pay for this? Regulatory pressure. Frameworks like TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures) and IFC Performance Standard 6 are pushing companies to disclose and manage their nature footprint. Banks, developers, port operators, commodity companies—they’re all facing increasing scrutiny on biodiversity impact. “We’re primarily focusing in the geographies and the industry that are at the forefront of having the nature risk,” Vriko says. “These are really the pioneers and also the ones that are really at risk if they don’t manage nature risk well.” The alignment is elegant: Archireef helps companies demonstrate genuine impact (not greenwashing), while building a sustainable revenue model that can actually scale ocean restoration. Visitors in Your Journey One of Vriko’s most honest reflections is about people leaving. “There are visitors in your journey. It sounds very cliché, but it really is. There are people that will be with you from point A to point B, and there will be different group of people to come with you and to join your journey from point B to C.” Firing people—especially early team members who believed in the mission—remains one of her hardest challenges. “Firing and saying goodbye to team members who really has been with the journey with you, especially since the early stage, it has been and still is one of the most difficult lesson.” Her approach: honesty over comfort, but always wit

    1h 13m

  8. Jan 21

    The Mission Never Changed. Everything Else Did.

    Two years ago, Ella Peinovich wasn’t sure her company would survive. Today, Powered by People—her platform connecting 500,000+ artisans across 100+ countries to retailers like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and West Elm—just hit its first million-dollar revenue month. They’re on the path to profitability. They recently became B Corp certified. What happened in between is a masterclass in what it actually takes to build a world-positive business that lasts. The Conviction That Started It All Before Powered by People, Ella built SOKO—a jewelry brand employing 2,500 artisans in Kenya to produce high-quality pieces for the US market. She sold into major retailers, built sophisticated supply chains, and eventually exited. But she kept seeing the same problem: a single brand can only create so much demand. If she really wanted to maximize impact, she needed to build infrastructure that could serve thousands of brands like hers. The deeper conviction came from watching what technology typically does to workers. On a visit to a watch factory in China, she saw one person managing six CNC machines—doing work that used to employ 36 people. The productivity gains went to the owners. The workers were left out. “Why does that have to be?” she asks. “Technology and the gains of technology really need to be shared with everyone... you’re benefiting people with technology, you’re not displacing them with technology.” That belief—that technology should amplify human creativity rather than replace it—became the foundation for everything she built next. The Weight of Purpose Here’s what rarely gets discussed about social entrepreneurship: it’s actually harder than building a regular business. Not just because markets are tough. Because when you claim to stand for something—sustainability, justice, dignified work—everyone holds you accountable. Your investors. Your customers. Your own team. “Most businesses that are just for profit don’t have to defend why they call themselves the best of something,” Ella observes. “It’s a sales pitch. For us, it’s not. It’s how we work.” Her team, she notes, are smart, passionate people who “keep us accountable to this mission.” They challenge the company constantly—which is an asset, but also means every decision carries extra weight. This is a feature, not a bug. But it makes the hardest decisions even harder. When Everything Changed Post-COVID, Powered by People was thriving. They were the go-to online destination for global artisan supply. Their wholesale model—buying inventory, attending trade shows, acquiring customers—was working. Then came logistics nightmares. Tariffs. Anti-globalization sentiment. A retail sector contraction that squeezed everyone. The business that had worked stopped working. Rather than abandon the mission, Ella rebuilt the vehicle for it. In January 2024, they completed a full transition: from wholesale (buying inventory, customer acquisition costs, physical trade shows) to a pure digital marketplace (no inventory risk, no CAC, retailers integrate directly). “We were doing a lot of hedge bets in the early days,” she admits. “We’ve just been shrinking and focusing on what actually worked.” This is true for so many scale-up founders: subtraction leads to scale, not addition. The new model is leaner, stronger, and more scalable. Artisan products appear directly on Nordstrom.com. Orders flow through automatically. Powered by People takes a cut without ever touching inventory. Same mission. Radically better execution. According to Ella, “I feel better in the business. It’s easier, it’s stronger.” The Framework That Keeps You Focused When you’re a purpose-driven founder navigating hard times, the temptation is to compromise. Chase a different market. Dilute the mission. Just survive. Ella’s protection against that drift? Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Concept—a framework she returns to for every major decision. The idea is simple: find the intersection of three things—what you can be best in the world at, what drives your economic engine, and what you’re deeply passionate about. Then ruthlessly stay inside that intersection. For Powered by People, that means: technology that empowers people (not displaces them), beautiful products consumers actually want, and the independent artisan sector they love serving. “We don’t want to be disingenuous to any one of our sort of critical values,” Ella explains. Every opportunity that doesn’t pass all three tests gets a no—even if it would make money. This discipline saved them when the market turned. The Hardest Decision To fund the pivot—to survive long enough to prove the new model—Ella had to make cuts. Two years in a row, she led layoffs at a company whose entire mission is providing dignified work. “When you’re a business that takes a lot of pride in employing people and providing dignified work,” she says, “that is the hardest bit of the job.” She felt the weight of it personally. These were people who believed in her vision, who invested in the culture she built. “It just made you feel like, wow, I let them down, I let myself down.” But the math was brutal: if the company dies, the mission dies. The only way to serve 500,000 artisans long-term is to survive short-term. “You have to fill your cup before you can overflow for others.” She wasn’t asking anyone to sacrifice more than she would. She wasn’t the highest-paid person in the company. She took haircuts before asking others to. When the cuts came, she led from behind—heads down, doing the work, giving space to a team that needed time to process. “There was a period there where, to be honest, I don’t think they wanted to see me around.” She was leading from behind, heads down, and she told herself: “This is also okay.” The rebuild wasn’t about rallying speeches. It was about results. “Success honestly is the only thing that allows us to really replace any of the sort of shared trauma in an organization.” She kept her head down, kept working, kept producing. And eventually, the numbers turned. The people who stayed saw the million-dollar months arrive. They saw the model working. “People have actually said, ‘You were right. This was the right decision.’” The Proof Today, Powered by People serves over 3,000 businesses representing roughly 500,000 artisans from more than 100 countries. Their products reach 200 million consumers monthly through partners like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, West Elm, and Anthropologie. Over 65% of their network is women-owned. 60% serve rural populations. They hit a million-dollar revenue month in July. Profitability is guaranteed. And that freedom matters—not just financially, but philosophically. The path to speaking truth runs through sustainability. You can’t be radically honest when you’re always fundraising. What Ella Wants Founders to Know A few things she shared that stuck with me: On vetting investors: Every conversation is two-way. If an investor sees your focus on impact as a limitation rather than a competitive advantage, “that is a clear signal to me that you’re the wrong person.” On managing your board: Keep them informed, but don’t ask permission. “I’m going to let you in on everything that’s happening, but pretty much as I’ve already solved it.” On finding honest feedback: “I don’t want people to just tell me what we’re building is great. I think that’s a disservice actually to entrepreneurs.” Seek out people who will tell you the truth—then keep pushing until you hear the hard stuff. On who you surround yourself with: “Be ruthless down to the friends that you choose, the partner that you have in life, the investors that you surround yourself, the advisors that you have.” Find people who inspire you and want to build you up. The Mission Never Changed Ella didn’t pivot away from her purpose. She pivoted toward it. She found a model that could actually sustain 500,000 artisans for the long haul—instead of burning out trying to do it the hard way. The marketplace flywheel is faster, lighter, more scalable. More artisans can participate. More retailers can access the catalog. More consumers can find products that align with their values. “We’ve never steered away from our mission,” she says. “How we deliver that has evolved a lot.” That’s the real work of building something that matters: holding the mission constant while letting everything else evolve. The mission is the constant. Everything else is variable. Want to Learn from Purpose-Driven and World-Positive Founders? Have a founder we should interview? Have them apply here, or nominate them here. Transcript Mark Horoszowski (00:13:26): Ella, welcome to the Helping Billions podcast. Really excited to have you on the show today. Ella Peinovich (00:13:40): Great to be here. Thank you, Mark. Mark Horoszowski (00:13:42): Yeah. So we’ve stayed in, I’m going to say in touch over the years, but it’s been kind of like, oh, I know a lot. And then we don’t catch up for a while and then we kind of catch up again. And so from afar, it’s been really cool to see this evolution, not only of Powered by People, which I really want to dive into, which is of course your current work, but even the journey of how you got here, before Powered by People, you were working in this space as well of helping smaller artisans and producers find and access markets for their products so that they can grow more sustainable livelihoods. At least that’s my interpretation, but can you kind of talk me through of like separate from the actual business that we’re going to dive into, what here gives you the kind of personal fire to chase this mission that you’re on? Ella Peinovich (00:14:36): Yeah, you’re right.This has been a life mission and I appreciate, Mark, that you recognize you’ve been probably

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The world does not need more billionaires. It needs innovators that make life better for billions of people. Join us as we explore "social entrepreneurs" that prioritize purpose above profits, employees above investors, and communities above capital. helpingbillions.org

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