Hold for Impact Stream | Will Little & Michelle Schubert - Impact Stream

Transcript

Okay. Is it good to go? All right. We're switching it up a little here and doing our first fireside of the day with Michelle and Bill from Impact Stream. Okay. I like that energy. All right. Right. So, I was talking to Michelle before this panel and she was telling me how I impact stream is using open source software to reform the not for-p profofit space. It's super cool. So, if you are wanting to hear this talk, please take a seat now and let's tune in. I'm going to kick it over to Will for introductions, but I'll start with Will and I are co-founders of Impact Stream, a 501c3 that is exactly what she said, using open source software to bring

reform to the nonprofit spaces. >> All right. So, we titled this a uh nice academic title here. We're going to showcase a novel protocol for onchain impact capital allocation for transparency, efficiency, and public reporting. Before we dive in, we have a little short two-minute video that we're going to hopefully the audio works on this. Is we think the audio is going to be good. >> All right, we'll we'll we'll see what happens. A little closer to me. All right, >> if you want to hold the mic.

>> No. >> Should we step? >> Hey, Roberto, it's frozen. Classic. >> All right. >> Yeah, start over. We should just start talking. >> Yeah. I don't know what happened. Hey, can you come up here real quick, >> Roberto? >> We should start talking.

>> Yeah, >> this is what I was hoping would not happen. >> Yeah, just run. Can you figure out what happened and get it running? >> So, there you go. >> That's working. >> Okay. Can you play it with the audio? I don't think the audio is up. Is he working on it?

>> This is HDMI. >> Yeah, I know. I know. >> If it doesn't, it's no huge deal. We'll just try it. We got to give it like 30 more seconds.

There are >> billion people that suffering in our world right now. There we go. >> All right. >> I think we got it. >> Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's do this. See if it works. >> There are billions of people that are suffering in our world right now. And so it's hard not to ask the question, how can technology and emerging technology especially help human beings on our planet right now?

>> There's so much wrong with nonprofit work and so much of it can be fixed uh or at least helped with blockchain technology. How do you remove all the bureaucracy from it? How do you apply as much of the donations to the actual cause? >> What if we could allow local people to vote on projects that they submit to help their local communities that are developed by their local entrepreneurs? >> Uh and with impre the idea that that the community submits the idea and then the community votes on which ideas to fund first, right? to meet.

>> That's all right. We will just talk through it. >> All right. Is that showing up? No, >> it's okay. Just keep going. >> All right. There we go. >> Okay. >> All right. So, we're gonna be talking about a novel protocol for onchain capital allocation. And I've been going to these my name is Will Little. I'm one of the managing directors at Proto Ventures. And I've been going to these conferences for 10 years. And people have been talking about how do we

actually use blockchain for good? And I um there there are a lot of good protocols for moving money and donating to nonprofits and things like that, but not a lot of people on the ground actually using this technology dayto-day. And I kept wondering, why aren't people actually doing something about it? And I realized, you know what, why don't we just actually do something about it? So, um Michelle, can you just share a little bit about what Impact Stream is and your a little bit about your background and you know, why impact stream's important to you? My background is in nonprofit space. I was a missionary and nonprofit worker for about 10 years. The better part of that was spent in economic development, helping local communities like the ones you saw uh develop

entrepreneurial programs and start and scale small businesses. There was so much, as we all know, there's so much fraud and so much bloat, so much inefficiency in nonprofit space that it's no wonder it's so hard to actually raise money for nonprofits because most of the time you bring up a nonprofit or bring up donations to somebody, they don't know how to trust a nonprofit. They're like, I give money to something. How do I know if 80% of that is going to overhead? How do I know if the money I give actually goes to the cause that I cared for? And so essentially we teamed up and said, "Hey, we know how to build technology. We know international economic development and nonprofit space. Let's combine these

things and create a transparent and accountable way to move money in within a nonprofit and let's do it open source hoping that every nonprofit out there could copy and paste and do the same thing. So the cool thing about impact stream in addition to the idea that we are prioritizing local voices, we are going to a local area launching uh the app, the impact stream app and saying hey come up with solutions to the problems your community is facing and then vote on them so that we the outside world knows what you guys need and also uh only vote on projects that you believe are viable that you yourselves can implement given the right resources.

And so uh after that we go raise money. This the app stackranks all of their votes for what they wanted to accomplish. And what they said we would be able to implement this. We would be able to implement a school for adults that never went to school as children that teaches basic reading and writing and math. Great. We would be able to drill a well and uh make it a solar solar powered well for clean water. we would be able to upgrade a medical clinic so that we could actually give birth in these areas, stuff like that. So, they came up with a bunch of uh projects they wanted to implement. They all voted on them. The app stackranked them and then we went around and got donations. And the great thing here is that because it's all on chain,

including the votes of the local people, uh donors can watch their money go from one wallet here in the States to a wallet of the people swinging the hammer in West Africa. So you get to see did money get siphoned off along the way? Did it go straight there? What are these pools of money? What are these wallets? Oh, those are attached to different projects, different things like that. So that's kind of the that's impact stream. Those are kind of the problems we're solving and that's what we've built in order to solve >> because if you think about it as an industry, we have a human coordination mechanism to allow transparency, efficiency, and public reporting. Our protocol does that in such a way that

we're demonstrating it first in West Africa for for entrepreneurs and people who need basic human needs. The next round that so our successful pilot round we ran ran last year. This year we're running around where we're going to support entrepreneurs literally with zero interest loans and we're going to be doing development grants to ensure that they have the basic human needs that they need techn you know from an education and clean water and healthcare perspective. So now that we've developed this protocol, you can imagine how this will expand to anywhere that money needs to be moved and and we're hoping that taxpayers demand that governments use the impact stream protocol for tax

dollars so that you can see where the money is and that corruption isn't happening. >> Yeah. So can you share a little bit just why is this work so meaningful to you personally >> having worked in areas all around the world that are severely impoverished my goodness you can't you can't walk away and not do anything right uh and especially from like you know the book of James says why would you you know pray over someone and say go be warmed and filled but then you don't do anything about it that's not that's not going to help anybody. You actually need to go do something about it. And so knowing that we in the west are often

blessed in like more in financial ways, knowing that we have technology that we could uh implement in order to help these, you know, we get to see actual literal people's lives change. People that have, you know, orphans for instance, this was a hard one to raise money for in the previous nonprofit uh paradigm. in this new nonprofit paradigm. It was a lot easier to raise money for, but there's literal orphans in this part of West Africa that we were working in who have skin rashes and eye problems and tummy problems because they constantly drink impure water every day.

They don't have clean water. In fact, when it rains, that's when they go out to collect water from holes in the ground. And that's their drinking water, that's their bathing water, that's everything water. And so to then see that when we offered a solution to the local people and they were able to say we want to build a well, we want to build it in that location. We want to build another well, we want to build it in that location. We want to start uh you know there was seven pilot projects uh that the community uh settled on and most of many of them were clean water, some of them were education, some of them were healthcare and then one or two were entrepreneurial. And so it was really interesting to see the local people got to choose and then we got to see we've went and visited two years

later and that was last summer and we got to see the we got to see the clean water. We got to see the people's lives who have been changed through you know uh you know how life was previously versus how life is now because of their own their own doing like they're the heroes of the story. They came up with the idea they implemented it. They swung the hammer. They built the wells. Uh so it's it's a really cool really cool to see them taking control of their like prosperity >> and there's a new layer to the internet coming. You all do you all know what it is? It's called wire blockchain and what wire is it's a fork of EOS and you are going to be able to trade assets from

any blockchain. So assets are going to be secured on their native chains and then traded on this new universal transaction layer. And the reason why I bring that up is because the next 2 to three billion people who are going to participate in the global digital economy are not going to use 17 different wallets and 14 different scary bridges and the ridiculous UX that we have right now. And so I'm happy that Dave Leland, the CEO of Wire Wallet that's going to be building on top of Wire Blockchain, his company is actually donating the version two of the impact stream app so that when we run our second round in Togo, the entrepreneurs there will have a delightful experience and then they're going to be able to

transact under the hood on a universal transaction layer so that they don't need to worry about whether it's it's the Cardano universe or the Stell universe or an Ethereum universe or a Salana universe. It now just has a universal accessibility that really matters for the next, like I said, the next two to three billion people that are coming on this on this into the global digital economy. So, what do we need? What's what's next for impact stream? What what Michelle, what do you what do you see this year looking like? And and what are our our our our needs are? >> Our needs are participation. One thing is that we're looking for currently looking for a CEO uh to run impact stream and technically maybe an executive director but we want them to be a CEO type that views this as a

startup >> because there's software we're building right on top of our protocol >> and we're trying to get it adopted by local comm community like local um not only local communities in other countries but also local counties in the US to run government spending on. So we're actually trying to get adoption. We're actually trying to move it forward and we really need somebody who can, you know, uh, is passionate about that, understands it and, uh, can also raise money. That's another thing that we need is just donations. Uh, the great >> impactstream.eth given this is ETH Denver.

>> ImpactStream.eth is our wallet if you want to participate. The great news there again is it's transparent. We have extremely low overhead. We right now don't have any employees. It's all volunteers between us. We got Mark over there volunteering >> folks here. Yeah. Um, Robert volunteering. We have a handful of volunteers that really care about what we're doing. >> We'd love your help volunteering, too. >> So, volunteers, donations, and if you know somebody that would be really passionate about this and be a great CEO, let us know. So, >> yeah. And so, we talk about running rounds. So, we did our pilot round in Togo, West Africa. We're hoping to we're going to do our second round that I mentioned where we're doing the

entrepreneurs and the development work. And then we'd like to showcase it later this year other rounds that show the range of the protocol. I'd love a local government to use it, maybe a local religious organization, maybe another NGO. So if you're working with an NGO or something like that and would like to run around with us at Impactream, we would love to work with you. >> Yeah, we want constant uh proof of concept. We want to show hey this works not only in West Africa not only when we send money to West Africa it works everywhere. Uh it transparently moves money in in a very easy way and it's scalable because we don't need to double check on anything. We're building in ways of community attestation. So even if we're uh scaling globally, locals in

the area get to say either thumbs up or thumbs down. Yes, that well got drilled. No, it didn't. Here's a you know I'm going to report that or flag it. Um, so we're really building in a way to scale and accomplish transparency, accountability, and uplifting local voices. >> So, yeah, thanks. I I do want to give Michelle a shout out. She is the CEO of a company called Madrada, which is a tokenized private equity venture, and it's going to be streaming every second on Wire Network's universal transaction layer as another showcase as an entrepreneur building in this new paradigm of the internet that's coming.

So, as a VC, I'm looking to fund my third fund writes between 100 and 300K checks. I'm looking to fund entrepreneurs that are thinking about the next generation of the internet, thinking about this new universal transaction layer that's being built for the entire web three web3 blockchain community. And I would love to talk to you. So, yeah, follow us on Twitter and uh appreciate y'all uh paying attention here. >> Thank you.