Hi. This is Paul Zalazar, and welcome to a historic episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. Today is our 300th episode celebration, and it took me, like, 4 times saying that to get it out because I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this moment. I'll tell you a story.

On Saturday night, my very sweet girlfriend, Eva, took me out to a wonderful tapest place for dinner. And we were celebrating 300 episodes. And she asked me, how does it feel? And, you know, I'm usually kind of a wordy guy. I've got graduate degree. And, you know, my first training is in community mental health, and I'm a podcaster. No. I'm an introvert, but I certainly am somebody pretty comfortable with words. I'm Jewish, and one of the names for Jews are the people of the word. Right? So it was surprising to both her and I when I didn't have a lot to say. And really, as I sat with it, the most honest answer is that metabolizing, which is something as 2 introverts, we say to each other a lot. We kinda laughed, but it's true. Like, I'm a little bit out of loss for words. When I started my podcast, I didn't think about getting to this moment. 300 episodes. And I look back over a 1000 strategies that our guests have shared you know, I do now a solo episode every

once a month. So, you know, I don't know. Is it 225 guests or something like that? That part I didn't documents so well. But a whole lot, over 200 guests, over a 1000 strategies,

and over 300,000,000 people that our guests have worked with in their businesses and in their nonprofits and in their initiatives. And that's kinda mind boggling. And, honestly, I didn't think about this moment of the journey when I was getting started. But one of the things that I have been doing is reflecting back on why I started. And what does that mean for where we are now? So

there's a Forbes article that you've heard me mention before if you've been a listener for a while. And the title of that article is research finds

conventional accelerators aren't a good fit for social entrepreneurs. Think about that for a minute. Accelerator is language for something that's supposed to increase the success and to increase the pace of growth. for business, any kind of business. And research this research is quoted out of Michigan. I'll put a link in the show notes. But what it finds is that the failure rate actually goes up according to the most recent research for social entrepreneurs take part in more traditional business development accelerator type experiences. And I knew that. That research wasn't yet done 6 years ago when I started this podcast, but I I could watch what was happening that a lot of people who are listening to good advice, to very smart folks with a lot of business acumen or marketing acumen or, you know, expertise in a particular skill area. But it wasn't necessarily working very well in the social enterprise space, and What I wanted to do is to create a very accessible, a very inclusive way to share what people who have actually built something at scale and having positive impact and also having strong revenue I I wanted to share that with you. I didn't even know you back that, but with you, right, in an inclusive and really as accessible way as I knew how. And podcasting hit a lot of those notes. You don't need strong Internet. You can download a podcast episode onto almost any device, really cheap cell phone or cheap tablet. Right? So you do need at least some tech, but the most minimal tech, very small bandwidth compared to a video. You don't you can't, you know, play a YouTube video on certain old phones or very cheap phones. Right? and you can listen to a podcast even on in those conditions.

So there was a variety of reasons why I leaned into podcast and got really excited about it, launched it, but never thought I would get here. So here we are. And I'm still metabolizing, and I am an introvert. It's not normally my way to, like, say, oh my gosh. This is so awesome. I'm so awesome. I'm like, I