by Mark Horoszowski
The world does not need more billionaires. It needs innovators that make life better for billions of people. Join us as we explore "social entrepreneurs" that prioritize purpose above profits, employees above investors, and communities above capital. <br/><br/><a href="https://helpingbillions.org?utm_medium=podcast">helpingbillions.org</a>
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June 9, 2026
<p>When Ousmane Conde was a kid in Guinea, his mother worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. And every night she came home and did the same thing.</p><p>“She would take the knife, cut a hole in a random place in the mattress, and pile cash in.”</p><p>He knew something was wrong. He didn’t have the words for it yet. The mattress was the safest place she had, because that’s where the family slept, and a thief would have to dig through it to find anything. Two decades later he went back and found the obvious thing he’d missed as a boy: nothing had changed. “I realized mattress banking is still the most common way of banking in my home country, Guinea.”</p><p>Then came the part that reframes the whole problem. He moved to the largest economy the world has ever known, and he found mattress banking here too. The Bronx. Harlem. Different mattress, same hole.</p><p>That’s the tension Ousmane lives in, and it’s worth naming plainly before we get to the lessons. He could have built WODI the way most fintechs get built: move fast, operate in the regulatory gray, raise from whoever writes the biggest check, and charge what the market will bear. He chose the opposite on every count. He sat on working technology for three years. He turned down an eight-figure exit. He says no to VCs. And he charges a dollar.</p><p>Here’s what a social entrepreneur can actually take from how he did it.</p><p>1. “Unbanked” isn’t a poverty problem. It’s a trust-and-access problem, and it’s everywhere.</p><p>We use “unbanked” like it means “too poor to have a bank account.” Ousmane’s definition is sharper. An unbanked person is someone who doesn’t have an account, or doesn’t trust the banks that exist, or can’t practically reach one. The nearest branch might be two cities away.</p><p>The data backs the wider definition. The World Bank’s <a target="_blank" href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/globalfindex">2025 Global Findex</a> counts 1.3 billion adults still without an account, and over half of them are women. In the United States, the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.fdic.gov/household-survey">FDIC’s 2023 survey</a> found 4.2% of households unbanked and another 14.2% underbanked. That’s roughly one in five. Black and Hispanic households are about five times more likely to be unbanked than white ones, and the second most common reason people give for staying out isn’t poverty. It’s that they don’t trust banks.</p><p>So when Ousmane says “In Africa, every shop is a bank, literally,” he’s not being poetic. He’s describing a parallel financial system that millions of people built because the formal one failed them. The lesson for any founder serving an overlooked market: don’t assume the problem is that your customer has no money. Sometimes the problem is that the institution never showed up, or showed up and lost their trust.</p><p>2. Make the store the bank. Meet people where the trust already lives.</p><p>WODI’s core idea is almost stubbornly simple: “stores become bank branches. The store owner becomes a bank agent.” The cash register becomes the ATM. You walk into the bodega where you already buy your bread, and you open an account, get a Visa card, or send money home.</p><p>The economics are why banks can’t do this themselves. Opening a branch runs somewhere between two and five million dollars, plus another half-million a year to keep it running. No bank will eat that cost to serve a neighborhood where people deposit five dollars and buy fifteen dollars of phone credit. So in the Bronx, where every corner has a shop but no bank, people get locked out. Branches open at ten and close at four. The people who need them most leave for work before six in the morning.</p><p>Ousmane’s framing of what he’s really selling is the part worth stealing: “the business we’re in here is a business of moving trust around.” You already trust the corner bakery. The owner watched your kids grow up. WODI’s bet is that handing that owner the software to act as your bank beats any slick app from a company you’ve never met. It’s the same model that turned <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cgap.org/research/publication/mpesa-how-kenya-became-cashless-economy">M-Pesa into the backbone of Kenya’s economy</a> through agent networks rather than branches. Ousmane just noticed the same demand sitting unserved on both sides of the Atlantic.</p><p>3. Restraint is a growth strategy.</p><p>This is the one most founders won’t want to hear. Ousmane had WODI’s technology ready three years before he switched it on. He stayed deliberately thin and waited for regulatory licenses while competitors, in his words, “report billions of dollars in revenue, but they’re not licensed to do it.”</p><p>Why wait, when getting fully licensed can take three to five years no matter how much money you have? Because shortcuts poison the whole field. “Imagine two entrepreneurs. I and you are doing the same thing. You are gaming the system and I am not.” The honest one loses, so honesty has to be built into the company as a feature, not a hope.</p><p>He’d already proven he’d pay that price. In Senegal, PayCruiser was powering rent and retirement payments for millions of users when the central bank changed the rules overnight. Plenty of companies kept operating. He shut his down. “We’re not here to make money. We’re here to change lives.” And from his Boeing days he kept one engineering rule above all others: “you never want a single point of failure.” So WODI’s licensing runs two parallel tracks, bank sponsors and money-transmitter partnerships, so a single regulatory change can never switch him off again.</p><p>He also walked away from the obvious win. “We had an $18 million acquisition at PayCruiser, which we declined” [lightly edited for clarity]. The number wasn’t the point. Staying alive to finish the job was.</p><p>4. If you can build, you don’t need VCs, and you get to choose your cap table.</p><p>Ousmane is what he calls a founder-builder. He has an AI background, WODI runs on AI agents across legal, finance, and operations, and so a lot of what other founders raise money to hire for, he can just make. That changes the fundraising math entirely.</p><p>The headline: “right now we’re raising $10 million, we already have completed $8.7 million without drawing money from VCs.” The capital came from corporate partners and strategic backers instead, and the upside is control. “You get to choose who’s on your cap table.” He’s turned down sovereign-wealth-backed funds that offered checks because they didn’t share the mission. His reasoning is the kind of clarity that’s only possible when you’re not desperate: “money is not the blocker here.”</p><p>The Visa story is the practical playbook inside this lesson. He didn’t network his way in over years. He applied to a program called Visa FinTech Fast Track, basically a cold outreach. They called the next day. “In less than 24 hours, we had a meeting scheduled.” What closed it wasn’t a pitch deck. “Instead of telling them, we showed them this is what it does.” He walked in with a working product and proof of traction, not a promise. The sequence matters: build the thing, prove it works, then go find the partner who needs exactly that. Not the other way around.</p><p>5. Hire on the moral contract, not the paper one.</p><p>WODI grew from one person to twenty-five, and Ousmane learned to protect the culture with a single conversation he runs before any offer goes out. He calls it the scare-you-away call. He tells the candidate it will be the hardest job they’ve had, that “we are not going to pay you as well as your previous job,” that there will be nights and weekends. Then: “if you’re for the money, it’s not worth it.”</p><p>One of his best employees, a former banker with a kid, heard all of that and said yes anyway. That yes is the real contract. “The moral contract from the get-go” comes first; the paperwork just writes down what you already agreed. For early-stage founders who can’t outbid anyone on salary, this is the move. Filter hard for the people who’d show up before the money is real, because those are the only ones who’ll still be there when it gets hard.</p><p>6. Price for the mission. A dollar, not fifteen percent.</p><p>Sending money across borders is quietly one of the most expensive things poor people do. The <a target="_blank" href="https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/psd/remittances-and-the-high-cost-of-generosity">World Bank</a> puts the global average cost of sending $200 at around 6.5%. Banks average closer to 13 to 15%. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive region on earth to receive money, near 8.4%. The UN’s target is 3%, and almost nobody hits it.</p><p>Ousmane’s answer is a flat dollar per transfer, whatever the amount. Bankers don’t believe him when he says it. His logic is almost confrontational in its simplicity: “We can make money by just charging people one dollar. Why should we go and charge them 15 percent? There’s no point.” The principle underneath it is the line that ties this whole conversation together: “Money is a consequence, not a goal.”</p><p>Late in our conversation I asked Ousmane the question I think every founder in this space eventually has to face. You’re banking people into an economy that has real downsides. Debt. Concentration of wealth. Are you sure you’re helping?</p><p>He didn’t dodge it. He pointed back to the moral compass and to a saying he keeps close: we’re born naked, we die naked, and what we’re remembered for is what happens in between. A billionaire, he noted, doesn’t take the money with him. The point of building isn’t the exit. It’s whether a woman in the Bronx or in Conakry can stop hiding cash in a mattress.</p><p>When I asked what skill he wished he had more of, he didn’t say focus or discipline or vision. He said empathy. “There is no such thing as more empathy.” He prays five times a day, and he described it not as an obligation but a gift, five chances to reset and put himself back in someone else’s shoes.</p><p>He started this whole journey because of a voice he couldn’t quiet at his comfortable Boeing job. “It’s just this voice in you that’s telling you, yes, but there is so much more.” Most of us hear that voice and turn up the radio. He took out a knife and went looking for the hole in the mattress.</p><p><strong>Want to Learn from Purpose-Driven Founders?</strong> Subscribe to the Helping Billions Podcast. </p><p>Have a founder we should interview? <a target="_blank" href="https://helpingbillions.org/p/apply-to-be-a-guest">Have them apply here</a>, or <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSca_MVh_Z7i9lNINpJCrqnc9fydvzpGU9denH3mvolM9VKWGw/viewform?usp=header">nominate them here</a>.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://helpingbillions.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">helpingbillions.org</a>
May 21, 2026
<p>Forty venture capitalists looked at Little Thinking Minds and said no.</p><p>Not because the company was broken. It was profitable. It reached roughly half a million children learning to read Arabic across more than ten countries. Paying private schools, government contracts, third-party-verified results. The VCs liked all of it. Rama Kayyali, who co-founded the company and ran it for two decades, remembers what they told her:</p><p>“We love you. We’ve been following your story. It’s amazing what you’re doing. We relate. Our kids have the same problem you guys are tackling. But, it’s not interesting for us because it’s not fast growing.”</p><p>They believed in the problem. Some of them had kids with that exact problem. They just didn’t want to fund a company that grew the way hers did: steadily, profitably, without a hockey stick.</p><p>Then in April 2025, Seesaw, a US learning platform used by more than 25 million educators, students, and families, acquired Little Thinking Minds. Seesaw kept the Arabic brand. Kept all 70 staff. Hired 20 more people into the region and started building an Arabic platform on top of what Rama’s team had made. </p><p>So sit with this for a second. The trait that made Little Thinking Minds uninvestable to 40 VCs is the same trait that made it worth buying. Rama didn’t reach a good exit despite refusing to chase hockey-stick growth. She reached it because she refused. </p><p>Below are six things her story can teach any founder building for impact.</p><p></p><p><strong>1. A VC “no” is a verdict on fit, not on your company</strong></p><p>This matters because founders read rejection as a referendum on the business. It usually isn’t.</p><p>Little Thinking Minds was solving a real, large, measured problem. The World Bank estimates that<a target="_blank" href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/brief/what-is-learning-poverty"> around six in ten children in the Middle East and North Africa</a> can’t read and understand a simple, age-appropriate story by age 10. Arabic literacy is a genuine crisis, and Rama had a product with evidence behind it. None of that was the issue. The issue was that venture capital is a financing model built for a specific shape of company, and hers was a different shape.</p><p>It didn’t help that she was raising in a region with almost no capital designed for what she was building.<a target="_blank" href="https://impactentrepreneur.com/impact-investing-in-mena/"> Only about 2% of global impact-investing assets</a> are deployed in MENA. Rama puts it more bluntly:</p><p>“There are no impact investors in the Arab world. None. Zero.”</p><p>When a VC passes, they’re answering one question: will this return our fund in the time our fund needs it back? That’s it. A no means you don’t fit that instrument. It does not mean the company is bad, the problem is small, or the founder is failing. Rama collected 40 nos, and the company kept reaching more kids the entire time. Separate the verdict on your financing from the verdict on your work. They are not the same audit.</p><p><strong>2. Use grant money to buy proof, not to run the company</strong></p><p>Before Little Thinking Minds ever raised a Series A, Rama needed to know schools would actually pay. She found out using money she’d never have to pay back, and never let herself depend on.</p><p>The company won a spot in USAID’s All Children Reading challenge, one of 13 companies selected globally, and used the grant to run a controlled pilot in Jordanian public schools. An independent firm ran the evaluation: treatment group against control. The result, in her words: “the results were significant. They were statistically significant.” Published research later put the literacy improvement at 25%.</p><p>That pilot did two jobs. It proved the product worked, and it proved schools were the right customer. Only then did Rama raise the Series A.</p><p>What she didn’t do is build the business on grants. She came close. When fundraising got hard, the donor route looked tempting. But she’s direct about why she’s glad she resisted:</p><p>“You cannot build a business on... donor funding... thank God that wasn’t our business model.”</p><p>Anyone who watched the 2025 USAID cuts gut organizations overnight knows why that instinct was right. Grants are excellent for buying evidence. They’re a dangerous thing to mistake for revenue.</p><p><strong>3. Let the paying customer fund the mission</strong></p><p>Here’s the model that made the whole thing durable, and it’s worth stealing.</p><p>Little Thinking Minds sold its platform to elite private schools in places like Dubai at full price. It also sold to governments at high volume and a much lower per-student price, which is how the product reached public-school kids, refugees, and children in low-resource communities. The premium customer subsidized the mission customer. It’s the same logic that lets India’s Aravind Eye Care fund free surgeries with the patients who pay.</p><p>Investors, Rama found, were happy with one half of that and uneasy about the other:</p><p>“Investors love us reaching the government school sector because that’s where the volume is, but they don’t like the idea of... refugee communities”</p><p>Which is why, for years, she didn’t call her company what it was. The phrase “social business,” she says, “scares them.” So she didn’t use the words.</p><p>“We never actually called ourselves social entrepreneurs... We were ashamed to say that.”</p><p>She pitched a “for profit edtech company, cutting edge, innovative.” Same company, different vocabulary depending on the room. “you feel like you have to have two personalities,” she says. The lesson isn’t to hide your mission forever. It’s that a cross-subsidy model lets the mission survive contact with investors who’d otherwise kill it. The paying customer makes the impact customer possible, and you don’t need anyone’s permission for that.</p><p><strong>4. Companies don’t get bought. They get sold.</strong></p><p>When Rama’s board started raising the idea of an exit, she had no idea how it worked. So they gave her a line she now repeats:</p><p>“Companies don’t get bought, they get sold.”</p><p>What that meant in practice: she had to stop spending all her time running the company and start spending real time positioning it. “I had to shift my focus from growing the business... to positioning it.” Speaking at conferences. Being visible in the sector. Becoming a known quantity. That’s how she ended up in a room with an edtech M&A specialist, and how that specialist connected her to Seesaw.</p><p>An exit isn’t a thing that happens to you. It’s a process you run, with its own work, separate from the work of operating the business. If you wait to be discovered, you’ll wait.</p><p><strong>5. Judge an exit by its terms, not its headline</strong></p><p>By the standard that should actually matter, it was a great one because it accelerated the growth and impact of her work. Seesaw kept the Little Thinking Minds name in the region, because 20 years of brand equity is worth something. It kept the whole team, 70 people, 70% of them women, instead of trimming it the way acquirers usually do. Then it added 20 hires and committed to building in the region rather than treating the office as overflow.</p><p>Rama has seen the other version:</p><p>“Sometimes when I’ve seen some of the acquisitions that happened, the office here just becomes a back office”</p><p>And what got the company there wasn’t a growth rate. It was everything the VCs couldn’t price:</p><p>“It’s not about just the numbers. It’s not about the bottom line. It’s about the impact, the reach, the content we’ve built, the teachers we’ve empowered, the students who started to have more confidence in the classroom.”</p><p>If you’re a founder choosing an acquirer, or an investor pushing for one, the deal size is the least durable thing about it. Who keeps their job, whose name stays on the door, what gets built next: that’s the exit.</p><p><strong>6. Don’t let the company become your identity</strong></p><p>The hardest part of this story isn’t financial.</p><p>Rama spent 20 years as Little Thinking Minds. So completely that people stopped using her name: “people here, they don’t even call me Rama. They just say, oh, this is little thinking minds.” When the acquisition closed, the question waiting for her was: “who am I when I’m not little thinking minds?”</p><p>She had help with that question, and this is the part founders skip. Across the whole life of the company, Rama worked with coaches, mentors, and a therapist. Not as a luxury. As infrastructure for a job she describes as lonely in ways you can’t take home to family or friends. The founder who built a company that survived 40 nos, COVID, and a six-month due diligence is the same founder who did two decades of deliberate work on her own head.</p><p>Build the company. Don’t vanish into it. There will be a day it isn’t yours, and you’ll want a person still standing when that day comes.</p><p>Forty investors told Rama Kayyali her company wasn’t interesting because it wasn’t fast. She built it her way anyway: slower, profitable, locked to the mission. Two decades in, the company that bought it wanted precisely that. The growth curve was never the asset. The company was.</p><p><strong>Want to Learn from Purpose-Driven Founders?</strong></p><p>Subscribe to the Helping Billions Podcast.</p><p>Have a founder we should interview? <a target="_blank" href="https://helpingbillions.org/p/apply-to-be-a-guest">Have them apply here</a>, or <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSca_MVh_Z7i9lNINpJCrqnc9fydvzpGU9denH3mvolM9VKWGw/viewform?usp=header">nominate them here</a>.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://helpingbillions.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">helpingbillions.org</a>
April 30, 2026
<p>If you’re building a social enterprise to last, you’re signing up for a decade or more of HARD work. And the longer you’re at it, the more life shows up uninvited. A parent dies. You get married. Friendships fade. The market collapses the week before your Series B.</p><p>Most founder advice doesn’t account for any of this. It’s tuned for a sprint: eighteen months to product-market fit, forty-eight to a Series A, and an exit story that fits on a Forbes cover. Mission-locked founders don’t run that race. We’re building things that take a decade or two to actually matter, and the only way to make it that long is to build the conditions for your own survival into the work itself, and to do the same for the people building it with you.</p><p>Steph Speirs spent ten years building <a target="_blank" href="https://www.solstice.us/">Solstice</a>, a community solar company that made clean energy accessible to roughly four out of five Americans who can’t put panels on their own roof. She sold it to Mitsui in October 2022, the last good year for clean-energy M&A before the market turned. She’d just buried her father. She’d just gotten married. The thing she’s most proud of isn’t the exit. It’s that she made it through as a real person, even more in tune with the people and world around her. And now, she's at it again with her latest venture, Future in Bloom.</p><p>In this amazing interview with Steph, we uncover what I’m calling the Founder Sustainability Stack: five concrete things she built, on purpose, that let her keep building when most founders would have given up.</p><p><strong>1. Find a peer cohort. Don’t let it dissolve.</strong></p><p>Steph applied to twenty grants in Solstice’s early days. Twenty rejected her. <a target="_blank" href="https://echoinggreen.org/">Echoing Green</a> was the first to say yes. But the money wasn’t the highlight of this Fellowship, the cohort of peers was. Eleven years later, Steph’s group still gathers monthly.</p><p>“There’s a group of us that have been meeting for now eleven years on a monthly basis and sharing our ups and downs.”</p><p>This isn’t networking. It’s something more specific. A founder spends her day managing everyone else’s motivations: the team, the board, the customers, the investors. Almost no one in her life is allowed to see her scared, confused, or stuck. A peer cohort is the room where she’s allowed.</p><p>The data on founder mental health is grim. <a target="_blank" href="https://michaelafreemanmd.com/research_files/are%20entrepreneurs%20touched%20with%20fire%20%28pre-pub%20n%29%204-17-15.pdf">Research</a> by Michael Freeman at UCSF found that roughly half of entrepreneurs report a mental health condition, and they’re significantly more likely than the general population to experience depression and anxiety. The thing that protects against it isn’t grit. It’s other founders.</p><p>If your fellowship doesn’t fund the cohort, fund it yourself. Find five founders at your stage in adjacent industries (not competitors). Lock in a monthly call before you need it. The version of this you build at year two will save you at year seven.</p><p><strong>2. Build a real support network outside the company.</strong></p><p>Founders are professional motivation managers. The job is to be the steadiest person in every room. Somewhere in your life, you need people who get to see the other version. The version that’s terrified, exhausted, or genuinely lost.</p><p>For Steph, that was her partner. She was able to share things with him she couldn’t share with even her co-founder, because she was always, in her words, “managing everyone else’s motivations.” Her co-founder needed her to be steady. Her husband didn’t.</p><p>This looks different for everyone. For some founders it’s a partner. For others it’s a parent, a sibling, a friend group from college, a therapist they’ve kept for a decade, a chosen family. The form doesn’t matter. The non-negotiables are that it exists, that it’s not transactional, and that it gets protected like real infrastructure.</p><p>Research on entrepreneurial wellbeing keeps landing in the same place: perceived social support is a stronger predictor of founder mental health than money raised, market traction, or hours worked. The founders who last aren’t grinding alone. They built a network of people who knew them before the company and will know them after.</p><p><strong>3. Innovation comes from your own scars plus exposure to worlds that aren’t yours.</strong></p><p>Solstice’s most original product wasn’t a solar farm. It was the Energy Score, a proprietary credit-scoring system based on utility repayment history rather than mortgages and credit cards. Steph built it because most solar financiers require a FICO score of 680 or above, and roughly half of America doesn’t have one. The product that was supposed to save people money on their electricity bill was excluding the people who needed those savings most.</p><p>Why did Steph see this when other solar founders didn’t? Two reasons. One personal, one structural.</p><p>The personal reason was her mom: a single immigrant parent raising three kids in Hawaii on a salary below the poverty line. A bad credit score. A boss at a call center who once told her to go back to her old country. Steph remembers her mom telling her, and it’s worth slowing down to read this:</p><p>“In America, your credit score is your destiny. It determines whether you can get a car or an apartment or sometimes even a job. Even though we have a bad credit score, it does not mean we’re bad people.”</p><p>The structural reason: before Solstice, Steph was in a fellowship at<a target="_blank" href="https://acumen.org/"> Acumen</a>, serving in low-income villages in India and Pakistan. She watched microfinance institutions there pioneer alternative measures of creditworthiness, using social connectivity, behavioral data, and mobile-money repayment history. All of this was years before any US bank looked twice at the idea. M-Pesa was leapfrogging Apple Pay in East Africa.</p><p>“I love the idea of taking solutions from the global South and bringing them to The United States, because there’s this hegemony of thinking that the West exports all the innovation out to the global South, and that’s just not the case.”</p><p>Vijay Govindarajan at Tuck has been writing about this dynamic for years. He calls it <a target="_blank" href="https://hbr.org/2009/10/how-ge-is-disrupting-itself">reverse innovation</a>. Most US founders never look in that direction. They benchmark against US competitors, attend US conferences, hire US talent, and miss models that are five years ahead in markets they’ve written off as poor.</p><p>The CFPB <a target="_blank" href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/data-point-credit-invisibles/">estimates</a> roughly 26 million American adults are credit invisible (no FICO file at all), and another 19 million have files too thin to score. Those people pay rent on time. They pay their phone bills on time. The system just doesn’t see them. Steph saw them because her mom was one of them, and because she’d already watched another country build an answer.</p><p>If you want a product nobody else can copy, the formula is straightforward. Find the problem your own life made you angry about. Then go spend serious time in the place that’s solving it differently than your industry knows how to.</p><p><strong>4. Grow yourself at least as fast as the company.</strong></p><p>By year seven at Solstice, Steph had collapsed her identity into the work.</p><p>“I had given up everything in my life. I put off a lot of things for work. It was my entire identity. It’s what I did from when I woke up to when I went to sleep.”</p><p>This isn’t a moral failing. It’s what the founder role rewards in the short term. Push harder. Sleep less. Take the meeting. Skip the social gathering. Cancel the trip. Every individual decision looks rational. The aggregate decision is a structural risk: you become a person whose entire being depends on a single company performing. That hurts both the human and the company that human is supposed to be leading.</p><p>Steph’s recovery was learning to keep becoming a person. She took up free diving in Hawaii during the pandemic. (Sixty feet down on a single breath of air after one weekend of training. She’d been afraid of swimming deeper than three feet before that, which she joked was a little embarrassing for someone from Hawaii.) She took up spear fishing. She reconnected with the Hawaiian view of nature as ancestor, not environment.</p><p>When she was preparing for what came next, she made three lists. Everything she’s worse at than the average person. Everything she’s better at than the average person. What she wanted her life outside of work to look like. The third list, she told me, didn’t exist when she started Solstice. At the end of a decade, it was the one that mattered most.</p><p>The hidden lesson under the lesson came from free diving. The panic feeling underwater, when your body is screaming for air? That’s not actually your need to breathe. It’s CO2 buildup. The fix is to slow down.</p><p>“When your instinct is to freak out, the answer is to probably go more slowly.”</p><p><strong>5. How you treat your people is the strategy. Not in addition to it.</strong></p><p>Here’s the question Steph never got asked.</p><p>She raised significant capital across multiple rounds. She went through extensive diligence with multiple investors. Fund analysts, partners, MBAs with spreadsheets, the works.</p><p>“Never once did I get asked by an investor: how do you retain your talent? How do you treat your people? And that is one of the most important reasons why a business succeeds or fails.”</p><p>Solstice didn’t hire its first HR person until year eight. Steph and her co-founder split the role between them. She calls it a huge mistake. People problems don’t wait for the founder to have time. They explode. Without a specialist, every blowup landed in the founders’ laps and pulled them away from the work that only they could do.</p><p>The proof of how much her team mattered came when her father died. For the first time in eight years, Steph couldn’t go to work. She told her chief of staff and her co-founder she needed two weeks. The company kept running.</p><p>Note who carried the company when she couldn’t. Not her vision. Not her IP. Not her investor relationships. Her people.</p><p>A note for impact investors. If your diligence checklist asks about TAM, churn, CAC, LTV, and unit economics but skips retention, culture, and how the founder treats her team, you’re missing the leading indicator that predicts whether any of the other numbers will hold. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231668/dare-great-workplace-state-american-workplace.aspx">Gallup’s research</a> on engagement has shown for decades that engaged teams outperform on profitability, productivity, and retention. The data isn’t new. The diligence frameworks just haven’t caught up.</p><p>For founders, the play is straightforward. Hire HR earlier than feels necessary. Build the leadership bench so the company doesn’t stop with you when something falls out of the sky and lands in your lap. When Steph left at the end of 2024, “everyone just moved up one spot.” Her co-founder became CEO. The company kept going. That’s what a real team looks like.</p><p><strong>Proof the stack works</strong></p><p>Here’s the test of whether any of this actually holds up.</p><p>When Steph left Solstice at the end of 2024, the company didn’t blink. Her co-founder became CEO. Everyone moved up one spot. The leadership bench she’d been building for years held. Solstice kept doing what Solstice was built to do.</p><p>Steph took six glorious weeks off. Then Yale asked her to teach a class on commercializing climate tech, the first time she’d been back on campus in twenty years. She said yes, and then pushed Yale to let her share the curriculum publicly:</p><p>“It’s not great that only 60 very privileged students get access to this curriculum that’s not really readily available in the world.”</p><p>That request became the seed of<a target="_blank" href="https://yalepodcasts.blubrry.net/category/future-in-bloom/"> Future in Bloom</a>, her new media studio. Steph’s read on the moment is direct. The cultural conversation about climate has been losing ground to political theater. Clean energy creates jobs and prosperity in places that need both, and the stories aren’t being told.</p><p>“Narrative and storytelling seem like a big gap. And I don’t know that the social enterprise space does it very well.”</p><p>Future in Bloom is adapted from Steph’s Yale School of Management course on Climate Tech Innovation and Commercialization, supported by the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. It combines studio interviews with climate tech founders, scientists, and investors with short documentaries shot in the field. So far the team has shipped a film about the largest geothermal plant in the country, in a Utah town of 1,600 people who love it. They’re producing one on the geopolitics of fusion energy after crisscrossing the US to meet the companies building it. Last month Steph was in the Navajo Nation filming a solar project. The thesis is the same as Solstice’s: clean energy is good for the people the dominant narrative usually leaves out, and someone needs to make it impossible to keep ignoring them.</p><p>Note what’s underneath all of this. A founder who made it through one decade with peer support, a partner she could lean on, a self that exists outside her work, a worldview wider than her industry, and a team that could carry the company without her — gets to do this again. Not from depletion. From choice.</p><p>That’s what the stack is for.</p><p><strong>All flourishing is mutual</strong></p><p>In the interview, Steph talked about the book <a target="_blank" href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-serviceberry-abundance-and-reciprocity-in-the-natural-world-robin-wall-kimmerer/11103aae5b752d02">The Serviceberry</a> by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the best-selling book, Braiding Sweetgrass. In it, Kimmerer shares that the foundational law of the natural world: <strong>all flourishing is mutual</strong>.</p><p>(Side note: I devoured this book the week following our interview and I can’t recommend it enough!)</p><p>The founder who flourishes alone is a myth.</p><p>The founder who flourishes for a decade does it because she built five things, on purpose: a peer cohort, a support network, a self that exists outside her work, a worldview wider than her industry, and a team that can carry the company when she can’t carry herself.</p><p>Build the stack early. Protect it.</p><p>The work will take longer than you think. The life around it will be harder than anyone warned you. And if you build this right, both of them will still be standing in ten years, and you’ll be flourishing in the world.</p><p>What’s in your stack?</p><p><strong>Want to Learn from Purpose-Driven Founders?</strong></p><p>Have a founder we should interview? <a target="_blank" href="https://helpingbillions.org/p/apply-to-be-a-guest">Have them apply here</a>, or <a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSca_MVh_Z7i9lNINpJCrqnc9fydvzpGU9denH3mvolM9VKWGw/viewform?usp=header">nominate them here</a>.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://helpingbillions.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">helpingbillions.org</a>
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