Hi. This is Paul Zoellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Dan Barker, and our topic today is investing in climate, health, and equity tech startups.

Dan is the president and CEO of Halcyon, an incubator and investor in early stage and impact driven startups from around the globe. Dan joined Halcyon from the Mastercard Center For Inclusive Growth, where he was vice president focused on supporting cutting edge research on financial inclusion and entrepreneurship. Prior to Mastercard, Dan was vice president for social impact at BlackRock. Dan Barker, welcome to.

Thanks so much, Paul. Excited to be here.

I'm thrilled to have you. You've been doing great work for a long time.

Oh, thanks. I'm glad you think so.

So give us a sense. How did you get into this whole idea of investing and positive impact, particularly sometimes with founders who haven't always had access to the kind of resources that you and your team provide?

Yeah. It's kind of a a long and and winding road and on a straight path to to me getting into the space. I actually studied international relations, thought I would be a diplomat. That was the career path I was on. And actually swore that I would never do anything that had social in the name. Both of my parents were social workers who did amazing work. And I always say that it's a privilege to have 2 parents who are better people than you are. You have something to live up to, but I saw how much it took out of them.

And so social impact wasn't really on my radar. But early in my career working in international development and global health, saw how many models that we had created that were really focused around charity and development aid, which I believe is still hugely needed. It's an important thing, for us to do. But they weren't models that scaled. They weren't models that sustained themselves. They were models that empowered the people they were trying to benefit. So, you know, early in my career, having that experience, learning a lot, and getting to work with some of the best minded in international development, I did start asking some questions about what would it take to see a different model and got more interested in the private sector. I started off my career in nonprofits, mostly in think tanks, so in the world of ideas.

I wanted to get a sense of how do you make these big ideas about how to impact the world, how to improve health, how to make our environment better for us and for the planet, how to increase equity. Really started to think about what are those models and actually drove me to the private sector first in kind of a big corporate America. I got to see what that looks like in big institutions, many of which were trying to transform themselves. And how do we incorporate purpose and impact because the world had changed? And during that journey, I actually got introduced to Halcyon when I was running a pro bono engagement, one of the big firms I worked for. I got to see what it looked like to work with companies that were starting with impact at the core of their business model. And that was something that was really exciting, and they're very circuitous path. I actually landed back here at Halcyon almost a decade after I had started working with them in a pro bono relationship and now have the opportunity to work with businesses that, by their very nature, are gonna have a positive net impact on society and the environment and starting that out with their their core premise.

In a minute, I wanna ask you a little bit more about Halcyon. But first of all, just you've you've walked in 2 different paths that are very interesting, being the social impact person or on a social impact team for very large organizations and trying to have impact that way. And now Halcyon, like, pretty early stage trying to help social entrepreneurs along their journey and help them scale. Just just as somebody who sat in both of those seats, what can you tell us about, like, you know, what have you learned? What are some of the pros and cons of those two different approaches to having impact?