This is episode StartWell’s CEO and Founder Qasim Virjee sits down in our studio with Karim Harji – a leading researcher, educator and investor on the topic of Impact Measurement and Investing.

Karim Harji brings over a decade of international experience in impact measurement and impact investing. He is a Senior Fellow with the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation; Programme Director of the Oxford Impact Measurement Programme at the Said Business School, University of Oxford; and Managing Director at Evalysis, an impact measurement and management consultancy. He is an Associate Fellow at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Research Associate at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation at Carleton University.

Karim was previously a co-founder and Director at Purpose Capital, where he established and led its Impact Investment Advisory practice. He was the Co-Chair of the Impact Measurement Task Force convened by the Government of Ontario, the Canadian representative on the Impact Measurement Working Group of the G8 Social Impact Investment Task Force, and an Advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation on social impact measurement. He co-authored the strategic assessment of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Impact Investing Initiative, and the global market review, “Accelerating Impact: Achievements, Challenges and What’s Next in Building the Impact Investing Industry”.

Recommended Resources:

https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/programmes/oxford-impact-measurement-programme

http://www.innoweave.ca/

http://www.evaluatingimpactinvesting.org/

https://ventureforgood.org/

This time around, our Founder Qasim is joined in studio by Corey Caplan the Senior Director for International Sales at StartWell Member company Gusto Worldwide Media.

Headquartered in Ottawa, Gusto is the world’s leading producer of native 4k food and cooking content, available for television and digital platforms. Seen in more than 170 countries, its award winning series include One World Kitchen, Fish the Dish, The Latin Kitchen, The Urban Vegetarian, A Is For Apple, Crate to Plate, The Edible Roadshow, Licence to Grill and Cook Like a Chef.

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Qasim Virjee 0:03

Don't try don't try try. Alright, welcome back to another episode of the start. Well, podcast My name is Qasim, if you haven't listened to any of our editions before this, I am the founder and CEO of start well and today I'm joined in our studio at main campus here in downtown Toronto on King Street West with one of our members who hasn't joined us before on the mic, but we've talked a few times in the halls about doing this. Now we're doing it, we're doing it. I'm excited for this conversation. So Cory Kaplan, please introduce yourself. Who are you?

Corey Caplan 0:47

Well, you've said my name. That's That's great. As a first start, my name is Cory Kaplan, and I am the Senior Director of International Sales for a company called gusto worldwide media.

Qasim Virjee 1:00

So it's not gusto. Gusto

Corey Caplan 1:03

gusto. I think it's whichever way you prefer to pronounce the word. Delicious. Gousto the Italian

Qasim Virjee 1:12

sounds so tasty. Delicious, is exciting thing, you know? Gousto but if it's like gusto, it's like it's kind of fast.

Corey Caplan 1:18

No, no, it's Gousto. Yeah, say? Say it with say with some some some passion and gusto and, and power. Right, right. So what do you know about gusto? What do you know about what did they tell you about?

Qasim Virjee 1:32

Tell me if this sounds correct.

Corey Caplan 1:34

Okay, let's see how let's see how well you do here.

Qasim Virjee 1:36

My scattered memory. Seems to have the story as a couple of years ago, there was a combined production company and television channel here in Canada that was launched called Gousto. That produced content akin to Food TV, food themed reality television, and, and essentially broadcast its own, you know, productions on Canadian television. Yeah. And that's all I pretty much. Okay. Oh, wait, the curveball, of course, is that most recently, just before you joined us at start, well, the company separated the, if I'm right, the broadcast side of the business was segmented off to Bell Media. And then the licensing arm and content production arm is still together. And that's what you work for.

Corey Caplan 2:30

I will I will clarify. I just I will clarify all of that. No, it's not it's not all wrong. I'm just trying to see how well of a job I did explaining the company to you. But now I will explain it in you know, much more elaborate detail for your for your listeners. So again, the company is called Gousto. worldwide media. The company's been around for quite a while. So it's actually no it's been around in, in, in different forms for about 25 years. Oh, wow. And the company founded by and still run by CEO, and President and Founder Chris Knight, in which city is in Ottawa. So the company is based in Ottawa, right. And I'm working here remotely for for the for the company. But it's been around for a while, and it's always been in the TV production content and sales business. Here in Canada has produced a lot of different kinds of programming for various networks in Canada, the US and around the world, including unscripted series scripted series movies of the week, what have you. We have always

This time around, our Founder Qasim is joined in studio by Corey Caplan the Senior Director for International Sales at StartWell Member company Gusto Worldwide Media.

Headquartered in Ottawa, Gusto is the world’s leading producer of native 4k food and cooking content, available for television and digital platforms. Seen in more than 170 countries, its award winning series include One World Kitchen, Fish the Dish, The Latin Kitchen, The Urban Vegetarian, A Is For Apple, Crate to Plate, The Edible Roadshow, Licence to Grill and Cook Like a Chef.

In this episode Yuriy Blokhin breaks down how the Lightning Network represents the values for distributed networks that core blockchain hacker communities support around the world. Though an employee of Bitfury, one of the largest companies in the world focused on developing solutions for the Bitcoin Blockchain, Yuriy develops partnerships that benefit the adoption of Lightening as an open-access secondary protocol on the blockchain that makes it more relevant for transactional data.

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Yuriy Blokhin 0:45

We're back in the studio once again for the start well podcast. This is Qasim, the co founder, whatever you want to call me of start well in Toronto, Canada. And this time I'm joined in the studio with Yuri blocking. Who is the head of partnerships at I guess BitShares Lightning Network? Yeah. And sorry for mispronouncing your last name my.

Yuriy Blokhin 1:08

That's the lead right Latin pronunciation. Okay, there. Yeah.

Yuriy Blokhin 1:12

And then the non Latin pronunciation. Block him for him. Okay, so Yuri blocking. Yeah, there you go.

Yuriy Blokhin 1:18

Yeah, that was perfect. Thank you.

Yuriy Blokhin 1:19

Um, so, you know, let's just jump into it. I think there's so much on this topic that, you know, our listeners and people in the world, of course, in general, are just, I think hungry to learn about in terms of, you know, Bitcoin blockchain, where there are problems with that connection of the two and and what's ahead of us in the near future, and even the current state and who's doing what in the scene to help advance the technology to make it more usable. I think that's kind of a rough context for this conversation. But firstly, if you'd love to, I would love for you to introduce yourself. Just tell us a little bit about what you do.

Yuriy Blokhin 2:00

Yeah, thanks, Qasim. So I started in the tech industry about 10 years ago. And I guess my longest journey so far was a this chat app company called kick, which was started about eight years ago, in Waterloo, Ontario, and I was the first employee there. And you were the first employee? Yeah, employee number one. Yeah, I kick and I helped helped build the first versions of the backhand infrastructure, but eventually moved them to a variety of business development, product management roles. So I kind of have received this very kind of comprehensive tech startup education at Kik. And after that, and traveling the world. For a year and a half, I joined a bit of theory, just during this kind of latest cryptocurrency boom of the 2017, early 2018. And the reason I joined it was specifically to help help that theory build the Lightning Network, which is a way to scale. This kind of the biggest problem of Bitcoin that people make a lot of people have heard already about is this is the ability to send transactions efficiently, cost effectively and time, efficiently. And so Lightning Network was only publicly launched about like, four or five months ago. But it's growing exponentially with a lot of very hardcore, high quality development talent, all around the world working in a very distributed fashion, there is no single point of failure in Lightning Network, there is no organization that kind of owns the project. It's at the very least five major organizations around the world contributing like the bulk of the work. And then there are like 1000s of small independent hacker developers who are working, like on their own time. And like, it's, it's a very, very interesting community to be part of. So it really leaves up to the ethos of distributed work industry, bit of distributed development.

Yuriy Blokhin 3:59

And it seems like I mean, it definitely reflects from what you how you describe the Lightning Network, and it kind of reflects a lot of the ethos of open source culture and the whol

Join our moderator, StartWell’s CEO Qasim Virjee in a discussion about how cryptocurrencies are ‘mined’ and the business models supporting this new sector’s evolution.  This live panel discussion was recorded in person as part of StartWell's guest speaker series on July 12, 2018 and included: Scott Howard (Cofounder, ePic Blockchain Technologies), Shelly Gray (ex-COO Greenminer, now Canada Blockchain Group), Scot Johnson (CEO, Digital Shovel) and Alim Khamisa (Director – Research & Business Development, HyperBlock)

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Qasim Virjee 0:18

Is my cryptocurrency the economics of that? And I don't know where this conversation is gonna go, because I don't know, personally one person sitting up here with me. And to that end I've done my introduction and we're going to get them to do their and so if you guys could just tell the miner Governor like randomly that was yours you're going to share it just introduce yourself

Alim Khamisa 0:42

kick it off so my name is Leanne Cammisa you work for hyper block comm have a research there. We are primarily a mining company but also focusing on custody trading and

Scott Howard 0:55

buttresses Scott Howard are one of the cofounders of epic blockchain. So we're Tennant Castle, so we hang out here

Qasim Virjee 1:04

at Paramount.

Scott Howard 1:07

And we build microchips for blockchain mining. So we're in the design space we build, we build machines, that doesn't matter.

Shelly Gray 1:17

Hi, everyone. My name is Shelley green. I'm from Canada blockchain group. And we do a variety of stuff we do. Mining, we are hosted. We are also in developments with chips similar to spots, maybe a little bit more advanced but but similar, I'm also into the the education of just spreading the word if regards to this industry, what we can do to improve how we can work together, we can build it, we can ensure that we have a very long and successful future.

Scot Johnson 1:57

Everything they do is Scott Johnson, I'm with digital shovel. We focus on building modular mobile mining units who act as a host and to sell a solution to other miners, like the rest of them here.

Qasim Virjee 2:14

Well, that's all I got my own. I'm good. Thank you. Why is louder than you're really really good panel. And I'm very excited to engage you guys in this discussion, we've got to do a little bit of one on one to start, because I'm an ignoramus. And I don't know much about this topic. Except for what Scott as one of our member candidates, that struggle is told me the corridor and bathrooms and stuff. Yeah. Throw that out there to see, you know, bathroom Chatter is very important. So the topic is the economics of mining. And I think it's really interesting that out of the four people here, two people are involved in no three people involved involved in hardware. Three people are miners, or run operations that do calculations for money. Matt, Matt pimps and prostitutes all of you to some degree. So, okay, so we could take this topic in many ways. But let's talk really quickly about the basic tenets of m

Her work has been covered in publications around the world - including the Guardian, Vice, NPR, the Globe and Mail and others - StartWell member Natalia Juarez joins Qasim in the studio for this session, telling us about her journey to establishing a consultant practice that uniquely helps people navigate romantic challenges in their lives.

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Unknown Speaker 0:05

Yeah

Qasim Virjee 0:21

Dolla dolla bill, yo. All right, welcome back to another episode of the start, well podcast, we're really banging them out from the studio here on our King Street main campus in Toronto, Canada. I'm Qasim the CEO of start well, you can find out more information about our podcast at startled Co. If you have come to us through our syndicated partners, you can get to us again, through iTunes, subscribe, and get all the updates on demand on your iOS device. If you're on Android, I'm not quite sure how to help you. I don't know I should know that answer. I'm sure you can find us other ways. But otherwise, find us at Starla co slash community. That's where all our podcasts are archived. And with that, I will basically let my guest today, Natalia Juarez introduce herself, and then we'll jump into some of her unique career experience as a consultant, personal consultant, I would say I don't know if that's correct. And entrepreneur, what she does, is very personal with her clients. It has a backdrop of a long, interesting career path that is ancillary to what she does now, but has kind of come together. I think it sounds like to me to position her really at a good place in her efficacy as someone wanting to help people in a unique way. And we'll talk a little bit about the way that she does what she does as an entrepreneur. So with that, the seventh podcast begins. Welcome to the studio, Natalia.

Natalia Juarez 1:53

Thank you. So hi, everyone. I'm Natalia Juarez, and I'm the founder of better breakups. So what I offer is breakup coaching and dating strategy. And so I used to be a teacher, people always kind of find that interesting. Like how I made the transition, I taught for eight years, and in my last three years, I had a holistic daycare.

Qasim Virjee 2:14

What does that mean a holistic daycare? It was,

Natalia Juarez 2:16

um, well, I was a certified teacher as well, so and a yoga teacher and the parents just kind of love that. So I used to do yoga with the kids, and they just like ate really well. And

Qasim Virjee 2:26

it's what age of kids did you have under your care?

Natalia Juarez 2:30

Well, before that, it was mainly teaching kindergarten, loved kindergarten. But this kind of ties in with entrepreneurship, because when I decided to start the daycare, as a result of the fact that it was so how to find a good teaching position here in Toronto. I advertised the daycare and the majority of parents who were contacting me all had, like newborns. They were like a year old. So yeah, so I had to pivot my business. And I just hired someone who was more familiar with infants. And I, I learned as I went, I loved it.

Qasim Virjee 3:01

It's very interesting. Because yeah, the demand curve, it seems to be like this. There's more availability of kind of later, I don't know, slightly older kid programming than newborns. Newborns in early toddlers discovering this stuff. It's all very new to having a nine week old baby at home. But um, you kind of like either, there's a lot of people that seem to bring in support to their house like doulas, and night nannies, and nannies. And if you can't afford that, you know, what do you do? And even then the price might be comparable to care. But, you know, spreading the cost of care across multiple children by, you know, having a daycare or whatever. It seems to make sense.

Natalia Juarez 3:42

Yeah. And what I kind of saw was that, you know, a lot of the parents and even the parents a

In this colourful conversation Salimah, the co-founder of Artery, shares some unique experiences founding a 6 million member youth-led environmental network, working as a journalist in Africa, the Middle East (pre-Arab Spring),the US and more - all apparently leading towards co-founding her new company called Artery - a unique digital platform changing the way creative experiences are accessed, shared and supported globally.

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Qasim Virjee 0:08

back once again in the Start wall studio. At start, well, King west or main campus in downtown Toronto, it's Qasim Virjee. I'm joined this time around for our sixth episode in the studio with Selena Ibrahim, one of our partners. The company's name is artery Singh company sounds wrong. The movement I don't know the the thing that is artery is what occupies her. She'll be telling us a little bit about artery itself, but I'm really interested in hearing the backstory and some context around why it exists. So we'll waft in Wayne and provide your ears with all sorts of goodness in a second. Salima, I'll let you introduce yourself and let's take it from there.

Salimah Ebrahim 0:52

Thanks, Qasim. Yeah, um, company movement community, really, that's what we're building. As Qasim said, I'm the co founder of artery. But before artery, I was a journalist and I worked around the world mostly in the Middle East and Africa, and even covered some US presidential politics. And before that, I found it environmental movement. And so I've been either building but

Qasim Virjee 1:17

I have to stop you there. I founded an environmental movement.

Salimah Ebrahim 1:21

It's true. It's true. Have you heard of the Spirit their castle? No, the spirit by really well, we've we've done our job mildly successfully. The Spirit bear was, is actually a white bear. It's Canada's panda that lives on the central coast of British Columbia. Wow. And on this one island on the central coast in the Great Bear Rainforest, very small island, about a quarter of a million hectares. One in every 10 black bears gives birth to a white cup. And when they discover this, the in the early sort of 20th century, they thought it was a misplaced polar bear, or maybe even albino, but they actually found out that it was a double recessive gene. And it was a subspecies of a black bear. And so the spirit bear when I was 1415 years old, we heard I heard about the spirit bear from a friend of mine, Simon Jackson. And we ended up creating an organization called the Spirit bear youth coalition, wow, in his basement over burgers and chocolate cake. And it started out as a letter writing campaign to bring awareness to encourage government to create a wilderness conservancy around protecting this bear because to save the spirit bear with to save the habitat and to secure the gene pool. And so it started out as a small letter writing campaign. And then over the course of the next decade, it turned into a global movement of we grew to 6 million people in 64 countries. And then we, we did save the spirit there. And so it was my first lesson at the power of giving people you know, a tool or a cause to self organize around and how you can really unleash that. So

Qasim Virjee 3:07

yeah, that's a fantastic, you know, little sojourn into your history is a segue from the bio, but a while and you were a teenager when this all happened? Yeah,

Salimah Ebrahim 3:18

it was started. You know, like I said, when I was like 14, we really got going on about 15. And over that next decade through university, and even overlapping when I was a journalist in the Middle East, I would be by that point, by the time I was in my 20s, we had gone from a letter writing campaign that was like, very, very grassroots, like we were in every school in Canada and every high school and then later on in the US. But by that point, we had, you