Welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more guests reach more social entrepreneurs and make more positive impact in the world. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Jim Brookerman and our topic is Tech for Good Using software and data to solve society's biggest problems. Jim is a leading social entrepreneur, author, MacArthur Fellow, recipient of the Skoll Award for social entrepreneurship, and distinguished alumni at Caltech. After starting two successful for profit AI companies, he went on to found Benetech, the award winning tech nonprofit building tools for people with disabilities and human rights defenders document and analyze abuses. His current nonprofit projects at Tech Matters include Aselio, a shared modern contact center for the crisis response field, Terraso, software for people on the front line of the climate crisis, which I want to ask him about and the Better deal for Data, a data governance reform movement. Jim, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thanks Paul. Delighted to be here.

My understanding is there's been something like 20 tech for good enterprises in your history.

Did I hear at least? I think that's part of the entrepreneurial journey. Right. You try to start, you know, you might have hundreds of ideas and you try to like convince people that this new idea is worth their engaging with. You know, there might be 50 or 100 of those and then you actually try to start something and start actually building something and I've had I don't know, 30 or 40 of those and then eventually just winnows it down until some of them made the cut.

Yeah, I just put an episode in the can that's going to go live on Monday about my third active venture. Right. Right now I was just telling you a little bit about it and M Tech talks. We're not here to talk about that, but I'm here to say I hear you loud and clear like and in many ways in this time where things are so there's so many headwinds for social entrepreneurs and I want to hear your strategy but in many ways this is an incredible time to start something. If you have a lean and smart mindset, which is something I know you're really passionate about and we're going to about today, but give us just so we get a little bit of better sense of your journey. Jim, some of the more kind of the ones that have moved the needle a little bit more, both as social ventures and as companies. One of the. Well, let's talk about Benetech first.

Right. What was that what was the social impact thesis and how did it work as an actual venture, who was it for, why did you start it, etc.

So the background was that one of my early AI companies that raised $25 million in venture capital had invented a technology that could read anything, any document. And we were going after commercial markets like insurance and the government and legal. I mean, these are all places where people were going to save a lot of money using our AI tools. But the social application was helping blind people read, which I thought was just the coolest thing you could imagine doing with our tech. And so built a prototype, showed it to our board of directors. At the time I was the VP of marketing. And they went, jim, great. The Reading Machine for the Blind demo worked.

How big's the market? And I said, $1 million a year is what we think. And they went, you're nuts. But what does that have to do with our $25 million investment? And they vetoed the product on the spot. So like a year later I went back and I said, you know, I'm thinking of moving on. I'll sign a non compete if you let me start a social enterprise to make reading machines for the blind. Give me a really incredible deal on the product that would, you know, that our company had made. And I was wrong about it being a million dollar a year. It was $5 million a year within three, and it was slightly profitable even though it was organized as a nonprofit.

It's the only tech venture I've ever been associated with that beat plan, but partly because our expectations were so low, because we, you know, and my investors wouldn't have cared about the difference between 1 million a year and 5 million. Neither of those were interesting to them. That's not why you put up $25 million. It's so you can make 250.