Awarepreneurs Interview - Jim Fruchterman

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.

So talk to us a little bit about balancing that. What did you learn about balancing the return on investment that most investors are looking for and the return on social investment that you are clearly motivated? Like having had numerous, you know, you have, you have your foot in both worlds. As an entrepreneur and a tech startup guy and a deeply committed social entrepreneur for decades, how have you learned to navigate those two worlds and how do you both speak about it and personally make sense of? Sometimes these are very divergent worlds.

Well, for me, the difference between the for profit startup world and the non profit tech startup world is not as big as you think. Right. We have customers, we build products. Most of them are able to pay for them, though some cases Somebody else is paying for them. If we do a crap job on our product, they don't want it and then we'll fail. Fail to make money for a for profit, fail to make social impact as a nonprofit. So there are so many things that I took away from my for profit background that was about how do we get, how do we get marketing? How do people know about this? Because it turns out that it's not about the product, it's about people to know about it so they'll buy it. Right.

Convincing them that they want your product is, you know, 80% of the battle. So, so coming into that, it was just so. So if you peel back the hood of my tech social ventures, a lot of the roles look the same as if it was in a for profit. Right. We have a head of engineering, we have the senior tech guy, we have the, the product manager, we have the user experience person, we have the outreach person. That's what nonprofit sector calls marketing. Right. And so, and, and it's just what are your financial goals there? To break even at scale.

And if you're in a for profit, that's obviously breaking even is not your goal. Right. You gotta, you gotta be because, because you're trying to make investors happy and you're trying to get wealthy yourself as an entrepreneur. And so as a nonprofit entrepreneur, the bargain's different. It's like, want to make enough money to pay my staff and if I can, you know, do 10 times more good next year while still being able to pay my staff, I want to do that. And so it's, it's kind of an interesting dynamic, especially as kind of, you know, as an engineer. I think of this a very analytical way. It's like, you know, what's the business model for that? How's it going to get to scale? What's our cost per acquiring customer? All the standard stuff that I would do as a tech entrepreneur come in handy as a nonprofit tech entrepreneur.

I want to talk about some of those principles which I know you're really passionate about. I want to ask you one more of the actual products that you're building. This is a newer one, Terraso. I'm not sure pronouncing that correctly. Right. But software for people on the front line of the climate crisis, that's something I'm very passionate about. Tell us a little bit about how the product works, who's the customer for it and what's the business model for it.

So I think what we're aiming for is we want to make a difference in the, in the climate crisis, and there's a climate gold rush going on. You know, people are making a lot of money in clean energy even today, right. And so, so the money in climate is in energy. It's in building technology for hedge funds that are going to invest in this. And, you know, and, and, and the average farmer in the world not getting a lot of attention. So our vision was, what if we built tools for the people on the front lines, the farmer, the rancher, the forester, the local leader, the head of the co op, the people who are like closest to these things and what are they trying to do? They're trying to make a living and survive what's going on. Right. They want to know, how do I make enough money for my family or for my co op or, you know, our community when things are changing.

And so we came up with, we went out there and we talked to a lot of them. And what people end up buying or using isn't always what you think they will. And so obviously we're helping them collect data and do maps and access information about the soil and about these things. Some of our hottest features, story mapping. How to tell kind of a multimedia story where you've got maps and photos and videos and text and audio. And how do you make, how do you make an average person able to tell a compelling story? Whether it's why you should pay me a green premium, because I farm regeneratively, why you should buy our products, why you should visit our place, why you should stop doing this terrible thing to our land, you know, whatever it might be. And so that's one of our hot features. I think our other big one is what is the dirt under this scrub in this field? What's that dirt? If you know what that dirt is, what soil type it is, then you have a pretty good idea of what will grow there and what makes simultaneously economic sense, but also environmental sense.

A lot of our funding is coming from the Bureau of Land management and the U.S. department of Agriculture because they manage a lot of lands and what they don't want you to do is let the land that you're leasing from them erode away. And so, you know, so how do you graze your head of cattle or whatever it is, but still leave the land in as good a spot as you found it, maybe better.

Beautiful. So before we hit record, Jim, one of the things you said to me is that bad ideas are the ones that people often try first, which I thought was a great quote. And one of the things you've been really passionate about. You're there in Silicon Valley, have been for I don't know how many years.

Since I dropped out of Stanford.

Since you dropped out of Stanford. Okay. Which was yesterday, I think, if I remember correctly. Right. So there's some principles that you've learned in doing this work to help people kind of navigate that not all ideas are going to be successful from a marketplace or sustainable because they're not going to sync up with the customers. Customers aren't going to find the value that you're talking about here. And there's some principles that you've learned to leverage. And you've been writing about this in your new book, which we'll talk about soon.

Right. But talk to us about some of the principles that you want social entrepreneurs to get better at.

So when I identify my bad ideas and I name specific technologies, the common thread is a belief that people will do what you think they should do instead of what they will do. Right. And so what that means is I've got this great technology hammer and that person over there, they're a nail and I'm going to go tell them why they need blockchain. The Metaverse. Generative AI. Fill in the blank. An app. Right.

And if you go about things that way, it's not a surprise that it fails 95% of the time. Because the things that really do work are being very focused on product, market fit, product, user fit. Am I actually solving a problem this person has? Because if I am, they're going to want to buy my product. If I'm just telling them that they should want my product, but they don't actually internalize it at all. They won't. And so, and so by 5 bet I just ha. You know, it's, you know, you need an app. Well, they don't have an app use case.

We need to build a giant database in the sky. Well, will anyone actually ever look at that database? You know, you need the Metaverse. No, probably not. You know, blockchain, Definitely not. Right. Gen AI, maybe. Right. And so part of the whole goal of sharing these bad examples is to say, what are these common threads that make it a bad example? Don't be like that.

Be more human centered, Be more aware of this. And then, and if you are going to do something that look like the 5% of these that succeed, and here are the common rules of what makes them succeed, whereas the other 95% fail. Yeah.

One of my mentors said one of the quickest paths to suffering as a social entrepreneur is to tell people they should live the way you think they should live as opposed to the way they're actually living? Right, right. So you put a lot of thought into this and you're tossing out some vocabulary that are pretty common. Right. So product market fit, human centered design, these are really important frameworks and a lot of us have heard about it. But like, let's go down a layer. Talk to me like I'm a really smart social entrepreneur who has an idea for making the world a better place. But I don't yet honestly know if I've hit that golden threshold that is product market fit. How do I get clear that I'm not treating everything like I have the hammer and everybody's the nail? How do I actually know if I'm in one of those 5% cases where I really do have something that is good for the world and that people actually will use it once I build it?

So my method. Very kind of comment. Right. Let's identify 10, 20, 30 potential customers that represent the range of the market. You know, if I'm going to be international, I should talk to some people outside the US if, if I'm going to be, you know, in this, if I'm going to be in education, I should be talking to school principals as well as frontline teachers as well as the procurement manager for the school district. Right. These. And, and so if I go to them and I say, you know, tell me about what you're doing, tell me about some of the problems you face.

Hey, I've got this great idea that I think is going to help solve one of your problems. And if their answer is great idea, but I have these 10 other problems that I'm more interested in talking about, well, that's signal, right? That's like, great idea, but not for me. And so Sometimes I have 20 of those conversations and everyone's saying, great idea, but it's not on my top 10 list, then it's like, you don't have a product. So that's how you start down. The product user fit. Thing is, have those conversations describe your dream and if the person who you think is going to benefit from it goes, well, wow, yeah, no, I've. This is a painful thing that I encounter every week. And if you can take that pain away from me, I would pay you to take that pain away from me.

The famous thing in venture capital is they would rather invest in painkillers than vitamins. Right. Back to. You should take this, you should take your vitamin as well instead of this painkiller. Painkiller is going to make your, your foot hurt less. You know, okay, I want that. And so now the next step on that road then once you've had this sort of idea that the customers are kind of interested is then you try to build a prototype. And you don't spend a year building your prototype, you spend two weeks mocking up a prototype and then you show it to a user.

And the ideal outcome is, I'll buy that right now. It's like, well, it's just a mock up. It doesn't work. Well, it looks like it works. I want it. Then you're also on the right track.

Yeah, yeah. I can give an example from tech talks. Right. We had a impact. We want to have a user we wanted to help, which was even though New Mexico is the first majority minority state, in other words, we have a very diverse population here who's involved in the tech world. Doesn't look like New Mexico even here. And we had a theory that we could do something about that and engage non traditional tech folks into tech careers and tech workforce development programs and engage them in a way that the state hadn't seen before. And so we did it right.

We, we launched something. We got a donated venue. One of it was a Courtyard. It was 97 degrees in June in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And we were using fans and shaded structures to do this venue. And the young people that we were trying to engage were so engaged at the end, they didn't want to leave. And they were helping us fold up chairs and I was like, go home, it's hot. We're so grateful you've been here.

They're like, nope, this was amazing. It needs to happen again. And we're going to be here till every chair is folded up and they help us take the whole thing down. Right. Even though we didn't expect it to them, other folks in our ecosystem saw that and said, this needs to happen more. Please let us help you.

Right, yeah. And that sort of aha moment of we've hit the nail on the head and it's the right hammer and the right nail is a great feeling as an entrepreneur.

It's pretty remarkable. So. And you know, it was relatively lean. It took us about three months to kind of get together the curriculum and relatively lean in terms of budget. And we launched quickly. We didn't wait too long to launch, even though it was messy. We didn't have the air conditioned venue we want, but we launched it anyway and we got the feedback and pretty confident next year we're gonna have A really nice air conditioned venue. Right.

You can always. I mean the essence of an enterprise is learn while you're doing.

Exactly, exactly. So a recent example. So okay, so that tells us a little bit about product, market fit and how we get there. Another term that you hear get tossed around but might not be as familiar in the social enterprise space, Jim, is human centered design. What is that and why is it valuable to social entrepreneurs who want to make an impact?

So an example of non human centered design is sitting down and saying, I'm going to create a widget and just using your brain power, deciding what the widget should be, how big it should be, how much it should cost, and then you spring it on the market and then the humans in the market usually don't want it. And so that's the opposite of human centered design. So that kind of process of actually building a prototype and getting feedback and then adjusting the prototype and getting more feedback, that iterative approach that's at the heart of human centered design. And you're iterating with the humans that you think are going to be using your product. So. And now. So that's the core of the process. But then there's a lot of things that people have learned about what works for humans and what doesn't work for humans.

So there are design principles which we don't have to rediscover. If you hire someone who actually knows what they're doing in human centered design, they're going to make a bunch of shortcuts because they already know, gee, most humans don't like having 32 levers on one panel. Right. Or whether it's a virtual panel or physical panel. Right. They would much prefer to have three buttons or three knobs. And so I'm kind of joking, but this is a basic design thing, is that you don't give people too many choices because they won't like it. So that kind of human centered design elements and depending on what kind of product you're building, there are best practices in web design or app design, assuming you actually have an app use case or appliance design or whatever your product happens to be.

Yeah.

In our episode title, Jim is about using software and data to solve the problem. So it's a bit of a paradox. Right. We want to use human centered design, but we also want to get leverage by using the tech that's available to us as social entrepreneurs to be able to have more impact at scale. How do you balance software and design, I'm sorry, software and data, with a real commitment to human centered design to get something that actually helps the people we want to help and has that sort of care and empathy and real usability baked in, but doesn't lose the potential scale of the kinds of tools that you've built so many times in your career.

Well, I think that modern software and data technology enables us to make people more powerful. If you think that's what you're doing with your technology, you're on the right track. For example, with the current AI wave, it's like, what's the part of your job that's the most drudgery? And can we automate that so you can spend more of your time helping people in person as opposed to doing data entry in the back office? That's just a great example of how software and data can help doing this. Here's the other thing is people play at different levels of scale. If you're software and data, your scale is hundreds of thousands of people, Millions of people. Tens of millions of people. That's what you're designing for. It doesn't make sense to design a software product for 10 people.

It just costs too much. But if you can spread that over a million people, suddenly it costs almost nothing. What building technology that helps a million people helps you do is it makes it very cheap to listen to what those million people want right now. The everyday example people now know is like Amazon will suggest books for you to read or Spotify will suggest songs that you'll listen to. Right. Or whatever because they've got so much data that they're actually going, well, people like you liked this book, this product, this artist, and you know, it's software and data, but it's invisible that it's listening to so many people and using that data to make better recommendations and hopefully make you a happier customer of whatever they're selling. And so, and, and, and that ability to, you know, the machines will not have empathy. But if you can scale up the data that helps the humans who are in the system, they're trying to manage the programs or the business, make them more powerful, then that insight helps them kind of scale up their empathy.

I'll give you an example for one of our products. You know, a Salo is it's software for people who are operating basically 911 for kids around the world. So the National Child Abuse Hotline or National Helpline, whatever it might be. And you know, we're using the technology to try to, right now we're shaving off 40% of the time that the counselors spend not with kids, right? Same staff helping 40% more kids. And so that delivers more empathy because you're using the human for the hard part, the empathy part, and you're using the computers for the data entry part and getting the kid to the right person who speaks the right language. The technology is great at that. So I think those opportunities to scale that up go up and I have lots more examples. But that's the way we're thinking about how are we going to make the people more efficient, more effective, more powerful in whatever they're trying to do.

Get an education, have better health, have a better job, whatever the social goal is that drives their interest in whatever you're doing.

Great. In a minute. Jim, I want to ask you, I want to take this Salo, I love that as an example. I want to unpack that a little bit more and walking through the processes that you're recommending in your book. And I want to talk about the book as well, how you did that. Pull back the curtain a little bit using a real life company as an example so our listeners can learn from you. Before we do that, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you feeling stuck growing your impact business? A lot of founders I work with hit the same three roadblocks.

Number one, too many priorities. You're spread thin and not moving the needle. Number two, around capital. Figuring out how to raise the right kind of money feels really daunting. Number three, business model fog. You want both impact and profit, but the path to achieving this isn't clear. You're not alone. In my 18 years as a coach, I've worked with 30,000 plus impact leaders and teams and had over 300 deep dive conversations with top social entrepreneurs and impact investors.

On awarepreneurs, I've seen what actually works and how to get unstuck. That's why I offer my 90 minute strategy sessions. We'll cut through the noise, get clear on your best opportunities and leave you with three to seven action steps plus implementation support. If you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and actually move forward with focus and confidence, let's talk. There's a link in the show notes below. Welcome back everybody. We are here talking about tech for good. Using software and data to solve society's biggest problems.

And I should, should have said before the break, all of these companies will be in the show notes. Go check them out so you can see some awesome technology that Jim and his team are building. So yeah, let's do that Jim, just like I always love real world examples. It's some of the things that our listeners really enjoy. So using a sailor, what a great example of an impact focus. You know, 40% more time actually helping kids as opposed to the bureaucracy of, you know, you want to document carefully when you're serving. My first career was in community mental health, so I have some sense of the calls and what those conversations might be like with kids calling crisis hotlines. Right.

Those are very important conversations and they have to be documented and taken care of well, but the humans documenting it mean the humans aren't taking care of the kids. So how did you identify some of the real world problems where software and data could help? And give us an example of how you use some of these same processes. Human centered design, product market, fit with that company as an example.

So how that started is that the founder of the Child Helpline movement, the woman who started Childline India and Child Helpline International, came to me and said, jim, you're a nerd. I trust a famous consulting company has done a strategy plan, and it's a whole bunch of technology stuff, and I don't get it. What do you think? And so I looked at this deck, and half the deck was an app that they thought that the Helpline Movement should build. And I said, giroux, I don't think you need an app. I think that's a dumb idea. And she said, why? Because you don't have an app use case. There's a reason people call 911 and why they don't go to the Google Play Store and download an app and set up an account. They want to get help right away.

And so she said, well, what will you do instead? So I don't know. So anyway, I ended up talking to the heads of 20 national child help lines around the world. You know, North America, you know, US and Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America. And everyone had built their own product from scratch, and none of them had their own tech team. So they were all outsourcing to consultants, building a platform from scratch. This is a terrible idea because you're the only customer for that software. It doesn't really work as well, and you're the only one paying for upgrades and maintenance.

You're never going to have the scale to make it sustainable.

Absolutely. And the other thing I found out is that the Helpline movement, and this was five years ago, 95% of what they're doing was phone calls. And I don't know if anyone's interacted with a teenager lately, but they don't do a lot of phone calls, they text. And so our breakthrough was, okay, what these helplines need is they need a product that works across different countries, that integrates text, texting, secure web chat, Facebook messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, yada, yada yada, and just basically built an interface, a cloud interface for the helpline counselor so that they could work on any of these channels and made it really easy for them to do the data entry. So not only did we talk to the heads of the helplines, but we also talked to like the senior counselor and, or the, or the supervisor. And so by coming up with these requirements, went, okay, we got a live one. We went, we raised. No, a little bit more than a million dollars to build sort of the early version of this.

We partnered with 10 national help lines and over a 15, 16 month period, every month we'd release a new version of this and they would test it. I jokingly called it testing progressively less broken software. And by the end of that period, some of the people who are beta testing with us said, we want that. And we went live in Zambia. And then now we're up to 20 countries. We help almost 2,000 kids a day spread across those 20 countries. But it was that going through that process, the iterative design process, the listening to them, seeing the structural problem, because basically the commercial call centers, the sales forces of the world and things like that, they're great for sales and marketing hotlines, and they're not that good for counseling and referral helplines. So built on top of the same basic technology, we're not reinventing texting or voice, but, you know, we're able to build a product that actually solved the problems of these.

And then when we see a new customer, we meet a new national helpline or even regional helpline, they'll say, wow, you anticipated everything that's causing me pain. That's right.

Well, it's.

Because now, by now, we've talked to 100 of your peers and we built a product that is all only what they've been asking for and everything that's at the top of their priority list. That's the next thing we're going to work on.

Beautiful. Jim, you've been doing this for decades. You gave us some great examples, but you wanted to help others learn how to do this, and you got a new book that's all about this. Tell us about the book.

Well, I spend time every week helping mentor people who are social entrepreneurs trying to actually solve these problems. And when I was a young social entrepreneur, I Got a lot of mentorship, so I tried to do that, but I don't have enough time to handle all the mentorship requests I get. So I thought, wow, what if I wrote something up where I actually summed up not only these lessons, but then gave lots of real examples? So in my book, I talk about 60 different nonprofits that are using technology to make a big impact. And they're illustrative of the. When did an app make sense? When did a giant database in the sky make sense? How did you overcome this financial problem? How to finance this? How do I find the people? How do I. What do I do about intellectual property? What? You know, it's just, you know, and of course, where do I find the money? Is probably the most frequent question I'm asked for help on. And. And, you know, raising money.

I mean, I raised venture capital and, you know, in Silicon Valley, and I thought I knew how to raise money. And then I went in the nonprofit sector, I went, ooh, this is different, right? Because. Because, you know, when you're going to people who are investing where the social cause is a big part of this, you know, you have to make the case in somewhat different ways because you're paying them not just in financial return. Matter of fact, in many cases, they don't care about a financial return. They want to know, how does my $100,000 help you help 5,000 more kids or whatever their mental metric is? So you got to find out what that metric is. So that's why I was motivated to do that book. And my goal is that next time when I get asked for a, we call them karma consults because I don't charge anything for them. Next time I get asked for a karma consult, I'll say, ah, you need to read chapter five here.

I'm going to shoot it over to you. Read chapter five and then let's talk and we'll have a much better conversation because you'll start, you know, 80 or 90% of the way towards the points I want to make is instead of starting from scratch and going through the basics over and over again.

One of the reasons I. Exactly. But I started the podcast instead of writing a book.

It's the same. It's the same.

Let's get leverage here and offer something at scale, because same thing, I get asked way more than I can possibly do it. But I wanted to, you know, have a. More I like to say to my clients and also people I'm mentoring, let's make new and different, you know, mistakes instead of the Same ones over and over again. Right. So, so a book or a podcast is a leverage way to learn from the, you know, hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of examples. Now we have of mission driven businesses and organizations and let's get better at it as opposed to make the same mistakes as somebody 30 years ago who didn't have as many examples available to them.

So yeah, absolutely. And, and, and people resonate much more with a story that illustrates a point than having someone wag a finger at them and saying, you got to get this point right, you know, and so, so that's, that's the only thing is like, you know, my five bad ideas, I back them up with a lot of stories. Absolutely. Here, here are a lot of examples of why these people fail. And no, here's two or three that succeeded and what made them different. And if you're going to do this, be like them or sometimes you probably guess, I guess I want to invent this thing. I said, well, let me tell you, I know five people who tried and.

They each thought that was a good idea.

Right. And each of them failed. And here are the five different reasons they failed. So if you're going to do it to your point, let's find a sixth way to fail. Let's not go back and relearn that lesson.

So what's the book called and who's it for?

It's called Technology for Good. How Social Sector Leaders are Using Software and Data to solve Society's Biggest problems. And you know, I cover a lot of different sort of territory from the design question that you asked. How do you actually do the design, the bad ideas, the good ideas? You know, the good ideas include human centered design, moving to the cloud, which is, you know, if you're going to be doing software and data, that's where the action is. And then one of my favorite bits of advice is to kill the dinosaurs. Because, you know, especially in social change, the odds that the business model of the incumbent was developed in the 1940s or the 1970s or the 1990s is really high, which creates a great opportunity for you to invent around and kill the dinosaur by using hopefully some technology to greatly innovate how more cost effectively you can deliver your social good and displace the dinosaur.

Beautiful. So if you were going to say, this is the exact person that I think should read Technology for Good, like, who would that person be?

Anybody who's ambitious for scale in social change. So basically, because you can't get scale without technology in this day and age, Right. So I mean, you may have a great innovation in terms of in person programming, but, but you're going to have a real challenge scaling that up unless you're going to use software and data in a way to have again to actually get to that scale to train all those people to expand beyond your brick and mortar. And so it could be a non profit leader who's struggling with technology and is being sold a bill of goods by a consultant. Well, read the book and maybe you'll ask better questions. Could be board members. And of course a big part of my target audience is tech people. Tech people who would rather be working on a social enterprise than selling more advertising or more politicians or something else that isn't necessarily in people's interest.

That's one of my favorite folks these days. People who have the skills to actually make a difference at scale but haven't found the role that allows them to use their skills in that way. I'm having so much fun talking to folks and really want to, really want to make a difference. I'm having a lot of fun talking to folks like that. So it sounds like this would be a great book for me to send to somebody in that scenario.

I hope so. And then I'm also hoping to reach people who are in tech business who feel bad that they can't work on the social problems because they don't make enough money. Like my old venture capitalists. They were perfectly okay with people helping blind people. They just didn't want to distract the business they had funded from making the money that, you know, that they needed to justify their investment. And so, but when I said, hey, will you give me, you know, an 80% discount on the product? Ford was all for it. It's like, yeah, you can go off and do that social good thing and not distract the team and come back once a year and tell us how great our product is doing helping blind people. Which, you know that that's a great payoff.

So that's another thing. So I tell people who are in industry, especially people who control a product, whether the product manager or the head of a division or founder, whatever it is, you know, be open to the social entrepreneur who comes and says, I need exactly what you've invented. I'm going to take it to a market that you're never going to go after. I promise not to gray market it back into your main market. Why don't you give me this deal? And people say yes 80 or 90% of the time to me when I ask them for that. And people are like, but those Silicon Valley types, they're all such greedy so and so's. And I'm like, well, they're very proud of what they've created and if we can apply it to something really socially important that will make them feel good. And every innovator, whether they're in the for profit sector, wants to feel good about what they're doing.

Yeah. So as we're in this conversation, Jim, we're seeing some headwinds in the social impact space. Right. Whether that's some clawing back of funding in the climate world or VCs who are being extra cautious compared to where they were two years ago, we're down. It depends who you ask. Is it 30 or 40% less in terms of VC funds being invested compared to 2020? But it's significantly less. You know, there's some headwinds. What would you suggest to an entrepreneur who's really oriented towards impact and is dealing with some of the particular challenges we're seeing here as we record this in August of 2025?

Well, I've got the flippant answer, which is, you know, we all need to do a lot more with less money. And the only way I really know to do that is to apply more technology. So of course I am the technology hammer guy, you know, so, but, so I think that's, that's one point. And crises, tough times, troughs in the cycle are all great times to be innovating, Right. Partly because often the old way of doing things locked certain things in place and entrepreneurs, innovators found barriers to actually breaking in because of the lock. But when things are in flux, when the incumbents can't do what they're doing, when the incumbents are laying off half their staff and in tech, a lot of, a lot of tech companies have been laying off a lot of people. And we have the AI disruption which makes people think maybe those jobs aren't coming back, at least not at those companies. And so it's like, all right, this is a great time to be innovating, trying to, and being willing to re examine things, whether that's, how can my team continue to deliver the programs or the products that we do, but with a third less staff? Because a lot of people are finding themselves in those situations.

There's a lot of creative combinations going on. Right. People are merging because they're just going, you know, I can't carry my own back office, they can't carry their back office. If we get together, we'll be able to carry you know, carry one back office between the two of us, whatever it might be. And, you know, you, you don't like to have to merge because you're in trouble. Right. You'd like to merge or do an acquisition when you're a position of strength, but you don't always get to choose the hand you're dealt. Right.

And so it's all about how you play that. So. And, you know, and we're, we're not. I mean, I'm not going to say we lost a quarter of our budget this year and we've had to lay people off, and it's been challenging, but the, the problems in society are out there. They're not getting smaller. And so that just means we have to say, all right, what's the new way we're going to go about it? How's a new way to finance this program? What's a new business model that we might have to pioneer that will bring in more revenue? And, you know, and we're scrambling like everyone else is scrambling. I mean, in some ways, it's easier to be someone who's got a fresh slate, you know, so starting something from scratch, I think that's a. It's a great time to be starting something when everything is crap.

I literally just recorded. Re recorded because I wanted it to be polished. An episode. I do a solo episode once a month. The solo episode was called the Startup Advantage in a Downturn. Literally just did a solo episode on that, Jim. So I'll put a link to that episode, but I couldn't agree more. That if you're lean and you're smart and you're starting from scratch with the awareness of what you're talking about, being very smart about listening to the market and being bringing new eyes to problems that have been entrenched for a long time, there are opportunities unlike anything I've seen in my 20 years in this space.

And the other thing I'd add is those layoffs mean if you have any traction whatsoever, the level of talent that is available, if you have a job doing something meaningful and you can pay any sort of reasonable salary whatsoever, the ability to garner talent right now is often meaningful work at a decent salary. You don't have to compete with Google, because Google slave people are right. We get talent that is just like.

Oh, my gosh, I've been running something we call our fellowship program for 25 years in my different nonprofits, and now nowadays we pay like 80 grand a year plus health insurance.

Yeah.

And we'll get. And it's only for a year, but it's helping people who are industry refugees who want to move into tech for good. Say, come work for us for a year. You're a great product manager, a great developer, business person, whatever it is. And at the end of the year, you know, you're. You've got a launch pad for a new job and a new network, etc. And, you know, and. And over the many years, a third of the people go back into regular industry, but they've been infected with the social good meme.

A third end up staying with us. They were so good, we found. And then we take them whatever our scale is, which of course is not Google scale by any stretch of the imagination, and then a third of them go into other parts of tech for good. But coming from us is a great place to get a job because it often helps to get a job if you already have a job with someone that people respect. In the small tech for good field, we tend to be respected.

So beautiful. So what's next for you, Jim? 40 years, a book, all these, however many different products, 20 of them actively like, you know, successful to a certain degree. Like what? What's on your radar as you look ahead the next five years?

Well, I want to spend a lot more time teaching. I started teaching at the London School of Economics last year, and I'd like to do more of that kind of classes. I teach the Tech for Good sequence in a social entrepreneurship master's program. So that's kind of my sweet spot. I want to do more karma consulting. I want to have more room for that. And I have a responsible data movement called the Better Deal for Data. And the idea is to get anyone who's in social enterprise to sign up for a set of promises around what they're going to use the data for.

And basically don't sell it to Facebook, right. Don't sell it to Google. You're going to use it to advance the interests of your clients, customers, users, and you won't sell them out. And the principles are a little bit longer than that, but they're easy to follow. And we're hoping to launch it by the end of the year. So, you know, I mean, I no longer run the social enterprises that are under my nonprofit. We've got general managers for all of them. And so my goal is just to spend more and more time at this field level and pushing the Better Deal for Data initiative.

So I think I'll stay pretty busy. But one of the things that, you know, part of writing the book is to, you know, it's now time for other generations to be starting these things because I've started an awful lot over a 40 plus year entrepreneurial career.

Yeah, well, Jim, I could hang out with you all day. You've done so much amazing things and I know you're busy and our listeners are as we're starting to wind down if there was something we didn't cover and you're hoping to kind of get that in under the wire here or there's something you want to leave our social entrepreneur listeners with as we start to say goodbye, what would that be?

Don't jump on the generative AI bandwagon. Wait until there's a product that you can test or friends you can talk to and see if it really solves more problems than it creates. It's a very exciting technology, but it's just another piece of technology and it has all the problems that new technology has. So just wait for a product, test it out and if it saves you a lot more time and doesn't create mistakes that hurt the people you're serving, then go for it.

Great. Jim, if somebody wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way to do that?

I'm on LinkedIn and I'm there all the time, so. And I'm the only Jim Fruchterman on LinkedIn and so, and my website is fruchterman.org my surname. So I'm sure those will be in your, your program notes. And so but yeah, I can be tracked down and, and I like to, you know, kind of respond to people there, even though I might say read my book and then let's talk.

Yeah, I wrote this for you. So read it, then let's talk. Yeah, absolutely. Jim, thanks for all your good work and thanks for being on the show today, Paul.

I'm delighted to spread the word to other social entrepreneurs.

So listeners, if you heard something in this episode that stirred something in you, please share it. That's how we can leverage our fabulous guests time. If you're ready to develop something in your business, whether you're navigating uncertainty and something that's already up and running or you're stepping into something new, remember about my strategy sessions. You could see more about those@paul zelizer.com and lastly, I just want to say thank you for your work to make the world a better place and please keep letting your values guide your business decisions.

It.