Just a note about this episode, I was traveling in Colombia, and I only had a portable headset. And the room was quite ugly, So the sound on my end was subpar. I'm sorry about that. It's the best I could do under the circumstances. And what John and Greenlight are doing his incredibly impactful work. Please hang in there. And again, apologies in advance for the sound issues. Echoey.

Wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you 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 for values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to John Simon. And our topic is enabling local communities to create change that scales nationally. John is the cofounder and board chair of Greenlight Buff and an active entrepreneur and investor in both the for profit and nonprofit sectors.

He's also the managing director at Sigma Prime Ventures, where he focuses on software based businesses and disruptive technology businesses. John, welcome to the show.

Paul, thank you for having me. It's really a joy to be here. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Such a great topic. And I was doing some research just to give an An ample of, like, why I think this is important. I live in New Mexico. Listeners, New Mexico has 2.2 1,000,000 people in the whole state were a fairly rural state. And there are over 10,000 nonprofits in New Mexico. So do the math. There's There's, like, a nonprofit for, like, every 22100 people in our state. That's gonna be relevant in just a minute, but I wanted to give a little back proud because I'm the kind of person who pays attention to to stuff like that.

So, John, to start off with, what would somebody wanna know your background, your backstory, and how you got interested in helping scale change nationally by paying attention to what's happening in local communities.

Yeah. Well, the way the way I got to where I am now, which is, spending about half my time on the Greenlight Fund as the co founder and board chair, and about half my time on the venture capital business. In in my capacity at Greenlight, it's, you know, helping scale a nationwide network that is hopefully gonna impact 10% of children and families living in poverty across eventually 30 cities plus across the United States. And then in terms of my business Activities it's trying to find and invest in and help mentor and coach the the world's best software entrepreneurs that I can find and my firm Sigma Prime can find. The way I got here was, I guess, you know, first of all, to just love creating things and building things. And, after, you know, college and graduate school, I was lucky enough to get a job with a venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, that hired me as a summer associate. And that was really where I first started to learn about the magic of creating things and seeing entrepreneurs create things. And, you know, since then, that's where I decided to make my career first, eventually as an entrepreneur myself, starting my own company at 27, Having licensed some technology from Harvard Medical School to build a company around that would help impact treatment for prostate cancer and other kinds of urological disorders, Building that from just an idea to eventually a multi 100 person company and a public company, and then, eventually selling that company And cofounding a venture of capital firm called General Catalyst and spending the next, you know, 30 years, investing in and Mentoring and coaching software entrepreneurs, all across the country, you know, that that that was kind of prelude to seeing the opportunity for Greenlight because I saw how innovation spreads in the for profit sector, but not the not for profit sector.

And the fact that you have children and families In need and all kinds of metrics that are out of whack in in in in cities around particular outcomes and all these great models that really work and work at scale We're actually never gonna get to a city that's that's needed. I start to envision a nationwide network of of green lights that would actually Decide on together with the city, like, what does the city need that it doesn't have? And then pull in something that it needed And sort of reenvisioning the way things would actually spread. And, I guess, that's a little bit about How I got to where I am now and living the problem was what really enabled me to to co found and help create the Greenlight Fund with my Partner in Greenlight and and co founder and our national CEO, Margaret Hall.