00:56  Tell us about your professional journey and what brought you to where you are today?

03:03 How would you define impact investments? And what does it take to be an impact investor or entrepreneur today?

07:40 Why should I as a CEO of a startup company be focused on ESG? 

15:02 What are the sustainability models that you're developing at Pitango and how is this relevant to HealthTech companies?

21:54 Is there an expectation that companies will have an Impact and Sustainability Officer? 

24:13 Is there going to be a personalization of expectation around ESG for health tech, specifically?

32:43  Could you tell us a little bit about GITA, the Global Impact Tech Alliance, which you founded?

38:29 Is there anything that, in the next 5 years or in 5 years, you are dreaming of doing once you've put in motion this train of ESG connected to impact? 

Gali: 30 years ago, you were the CEO of the Israel-Japan Trade Services. And today, we find you leading Impact and Sustainability for Israel's largest venture capital fund. Tell us about your journey and what brought you to where you are today?

Cecile Blilious: Well, first of all, I think that this shows very much that what I care about is people and the connection between people and cultures, and the ability to bridge between cultures. So, that's what I was doing 30 years ago, and I kept going, I founded a few startups and managed them. And then after the dot-com bubble burst, I joined some of our investors who were at the time setting up a new fund called the Noaber Foundation; who wanted to experience and start being really innovative about building a bridge between capital technology and values.  And they asked me if I would come along for the ride. And I said, 'Sure', that's really what interests me. And that's when we really started our research and our experiments in this industry, which later became the impact investing industry. So, I've been doing impact investing for almost 20 years now. I've always been an entrepreneur, even internally, even when I try to find new ways of blending those three dots on the triangle.  When I founded Impact First Investments, which was the first Israeli company that invested in Israeli early-stage startups, impact startups. I founded GITA, Global Impact Tech Alliance, which is a nonprofit that aims to scale the impact tech market. And even now at Pitango, like you said head of Impact and Sustainability, a role that didn't really exist before I took this role at Pitango. I think it large; it didn't exist. And I get to be the entrepreneur again, in trying to reinvent how venture capital mainstream VC should be run.

Chen: It's important for us to start with terminologies. Because there's, as you described it before, a big soup of different words used to describe different things. So, there's a lot of discussion, of course, around impact investments. How would you define impact investments? And what does it take to be an impact investor or entrepreneur today?

Cecile Blilious: So, thanks for asking this, it's really important. And maybe I'll start with the higher or the bigger part of this world of responsible investing, etc., with the terminology of ESG. ESG is environment, social and governance. And actually, this is a methodology that looks at how companies are managed internally. And it looks at their corporate governance, their carbon emission and responsibility towards our planet and the environment; and how they treat their employees, their supply chain. And with regards to gender diversity, inclusion and all that stuff.  ESG is like the framework. This has been employed since the 60s in the capital markets, particularly to mitigate risks. So obviously, if a company is not well managed or it doesn't treat its waste in a fair way or its employees or its supply chain, then it's more liable for risk; for lawsuits, for regulation, for all kinds of other trouble.

And just recently, the world of ESG started to look at ESG as part of an opportunity, not only as risk mitigation. So, ESG is really the larger framework. And today, it's becoming very clear that the private equity world is starting to use it but for venture capital, it's really the beginning. They haven't like ... We are, I think, really pioneering the usage of ESG as an opportunity and of course, risk mitigation in mainstream VC. Now, one out of $4 today in the world is managed around ESG concepts. And that is certainly very important.  If you look now at the regulations in Europe, the SFDR. The regulations in the SEC, they are thinking about diversity and inclusion in boards of directors, in management teams, etc. This is all part of the ESG. And it mostly looks at inwards; how the companies are being managed.

The world of impact investing is looking externally from the company product and business model and outside.  And that world is really designed as part of what we see as our Bible, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. These are 17 goals that were defined by the UN in 2015. That describes very clearly, what are the challenges that the world is facing society wise and climate wise, that should be addressed by any means. It can be through a nonprofit organization; it could be through a for-profit maximization activity.  And that actually looks through the definition of impact investing, which is the intentional ... So, the intention is very important. Intentional use, in our case, of technology and business, in order to create financial returns, 'in our case, maximizing returns because we're in the tech business', to create positive and measurable social or environmental impact.  So, that is the actual guidelines or Wikipedia definition that was described by the GIIN Global Impact Investing Network already back in 2008; and that's been the guideline.

Now, still, this is not mainstream. Most of the companies that are now starting to think about their responsibility towards our climate and our population are looking at ESG.  Impact investing is a market of about almost a trillion dollars, which is still a very small part of the capital market, but it's growing all the time. So, I realized there is a sort of a alphabet soup out there; CSR ESG, impact investing, all these names. But at the end of the day, they're all converging around what is our responsibility as people and as businesses that are looking internally at how we run our businesses, and externally at how our product and business models are actually influencing and impacting our world.

Gali: I think I get the idea of impact externally or creating a product or technology that will do good in the world and to society. To me, and I'm putting myself in the shoes of an entrepreneur or a CEO of a startup. Dealing with ESG sounds like something a really large corporation needs to deal with or someone else. Especially, since we're in the health technology space, where basically everything we're doing is already meant to do better in society.  Why should I when I'm running after seed investment and working really hard to get this product that is going to be so important to society and to health, be worried about diversity within my workforce? Or how much impact I'm having on the ecosystem; ecological impact? I mean, why should I be focused on that? Is there really a way for me to measure it and say, 'This is worth it at the end of the road,' since everything is so difficult?

Cecile Blilious 08:51

I think this is an excellent question. And sometimes this is the pushback that I get. And it's supposedly never a good time to deal with ESG, and metrics and impact and all these things. So, when you're building a small startup, you're in the trenches; And you're building a startup, and you need to find your product market fit, and you need to hire people and all these things.  And when you're big, you already have all these people working. So, you can't really be bothered right now to think about diversity. Because let's say you have 30 people in the company and 10 on your management team, and you discover that they're all white men. Then what are you going to do? Fire half of them now? So obviously, if you look at it that way, then it's never a good time. 

However, if you look at it from the perspective of the benefits, then I don't understand how you cannot do it. I mean, would you set up a company that doesn't have a business model, that doesn't have a Technology Roadmap, that doesn't understand its market? Would you set up a company that submits no budget, no financial reports of your finances? Of course not.  But if you think about it, 50-60 years ago, that wasn't the case. So, the world is changing. And we are starting to agree that there are things that need to be agreed by everyone that should be best practices. For example, (there was a) gap in how you present your financial reports are consolidated.

It wasn't always done this way; it's a new concept. And the same goes for business owners in what you actually present.  So as an investor, you probably know that when a company comes in with a deck, they know already what this deck should include. So, my claim, not only my claim, is that building the company and the company culture in the right way, and reporting on it, internally and externally should just be part of what is normally done. Now, why should you bother, really?  So, first of all, it's been proven that our four major advantages to companies that are actually adhering to ESG and SDG. Number one, when you build a good company culture which is diverse and has a very large acceptance of people.

It can be gender diversity or other diversity. You find out that your company is more successful. Because you have more ideas around the table, you have more knowledge about markets that you might not know.  For example, if you're developing something in healthcare that is related to women. If you don't have any women on your board or management team, how would you know what women need or feel. And obviously, you wouldn't be able to think of new ideas or business models because you're not in that position. It's like if you're developing a product for blind people, and there's no one who is blind in your team, then how would you know what they feel. So, first of all, it's proven that when you build a diverse company culture, you have better opportunities. You are also able to attract the best talent.

And if you look at millennials today, you'll know that they're very interested in working for companies that are actually very conscious of diversity and of inclusion; diversity is not enough, it's about inclusion as well. And if you're not a diverse company, chances are they won't want to work for you.  So, if you want to attract the best talent and you want to keep them, you need to build a company culture that is diverse and inclusive. Number two. Not surprisingly, people who are coming to work in the morning with a smile and are thinking about the purpose of the company, the narrative encompasses, then they come to work with a smile and they're more productive.  And research shows that they are 30% more productive, that has a clear impact on your bottom line. Number two (three), when you're able to identify who your stakeholders are and how you're actually providing them value, which is real life value. And you find that and you blend that into your business model, into your product attributes.

Then the result is that you build a strong and resilient product, and a very strong and resilient narrative that creates very strong and resilient customers.  So actually, there's even a premium on impact products where people are willing to pay more and be more loyal in times of dire stress, just because you are attentive to their needs and you provide them real value. So, all of that, weaving that into the narrative of the company helps you get to more clients and be more resilient, hence, also more profitable.  And the last item is that by embedding these things into your company, and by identifying the impact that you can make through the Sustainable Development Goals, you can access capital which is not accessible if you don't do that.

Now, all of these are good reasons and profitable reasons and also the right thing to do. Why go into this project of diversity, inclusion and carbon emission, etc., etc.? "The stick" ... So, that's the carrot approach which I take. "The stick" is coming. It's coming, whether we like it or not. Regulation is coming. You won't be able to raise any capital if you don't have diversity. Regulation is coming also in terms of your carbon emission. So, it might be strange for companies to think that if they are, for example, a software company, they also have carbon emission. Their operations also do have carbon emission. So, if you don't know what it is and you're not aware of it, and you're not trying to reduce it, then maybe your customer will tell you that you can't sell to them because you don't have any review of your carbon footprint. So, that's coming. So, we are all a part of the larger supply chain that is going to be asking these questions pretty soon.  So, I always urge companies to start thinking about it before their biggest customer comes in and says, 'Oh, by the way guys, please provide us with your diversity and inclusion policy and how many women you have on your management team.' 'Oh, if you don't have any. I'm sorry, we can't buy from you anymore.' So, why wait?

Chen: This is a perfect opportunity to start talking about Pitango, what it is and about the sustainability models that you're developing while you're working there. And if you could connect it, how you work with the HealthTech, health care companies or portfolio companies, that will be creative.

Cecile Blilious: So, Pitango is a mainstream venture capital fund. It's one of the oldest and largest in Israel with about $2.5 billion dollars under management. This was 83 active portfolio companies, more than 80 exits. We just IPO'd a couple of companies in the past month. I mean, it's one of the leading firms in Israel.  A couple of years ago, the partners decided that impact investing is not just a sidekick anymore, because they were my partners that Impact First Investments. And they were very much aware and an active in the work that I did in impact investing. They realized that the world is converging into adopting ESG and SDG, you know this alphabet soup that we talked about, into mainstream operations.

And not as a sidekick, and not as a separate pool of capital, where this is where we do our impact. Whereas the other capital is where we just do our normal business, but instead, thinking about how to integrate impact and sustainability across the board. And that was a really bold move. It was a very important decision that, I think, began was the first venture capital fund in the world to take that decision and appoint somebody who's just responsible for that.  So, when I stepped into my role, I think one of the things that Nechemia (Chemi) Peres told me when we talked about the possibility of me joining the team, he said, 'I will let you hold the helm of a really big ship.' And I liked that, I liked that thought. Of course, it's a big ship, it moves slowly and nothing changes in one day. However, there is a whole acceptance of all the partners throughout all the funds, healthcare, early stage and growth, which operate in parallel, to integrate metrics on ESG and SDG into everything we do. 

So, in practice, what does that actually mean? When we screen new companies that are coming in and the investment teams want to go forward with a company that they screen, this is when I step in with a due diligence questionnaire which is focused on ESG. It's not focused on the sustainable development goals for the simple reason that most entrepreneurs just don't know what they are. So, I'd like to educate them.  So, I'm not coming in and saying, 'Okay, please provide us with your SDG with your product.' And instead, let's first look at who you are in terms of how you manage yourself. So, if you're three entrepreneurs with a PowerPoint presentation, great.

So, you don't have a lot to go on in ESG. Fine, just so you know, we care about this. And we're going to help you build your company culture in a way that is inclusive, that is diverse, and that allows you to really adhere to ESG parameters.  And we will help you do this; we don't expect you to just know how to do it by yourself. We even have a clause in our term sheet that states exactly that; that we care about diversity and inclusion and ESG. And that we will help the company achieve those goals, but they commit to it as well. So, it's kind of the Magna Carta. When you give a term sheet, and that includes a clause on ESG, that's really tops.  After we make ... When we make the analysis, it's about this questionnaire, it's about a scorecard that we have which is internal where we score the company. And based on that, and some discussions with the entrepreneurs. I build a screening two-pager, which goes to the investment memorandum, to the Investment Committee and is considered. And when we take the decision to invest in the company, we actually start working with a company on implementing the recommendations in the investment memo. 

And that already brings in the companies very smoothly into the process; onboarding them. And if the company does have a potential positive impact through the SDGs, which is most of the, of course, the healthcare companies of course, then we also work on that. Next to that we also have existing portfolio companies, which many of them are large companies; some are unicorns.  And we don't want to miss the opportunity of making an impact with those instead of waiting another 5, 6 years until early-stage startups mature. with them. We have an impact migration process that I lean, I onboard them.

I explain to them why it's the right thing to do, why it's a profitable thing to do and how we're going to do it. Usually they appoint a task force, which is the Impact Task Force, depending on the size of the company. It can be 3 people; it can be 15.  And then, we work on integrating the ESGs. So, taking a snapshot of, what's the situation right now? What can we improve? What are the KPIs that we can track in terms of progress? Then we move to identifying stakeholders and start thinking about the product and the Sustainable Development Goals that the product relates to. And we build all that as part of the sort of the benchmarking document of the company. 

Which is where they take all the material that they put into their marketing material; the business development. How they hire people; how they raise capital on their investor deck, how they publish themselves on their websites, newsletters, and everything else. So, a good implementation, a good migration, ends with the company actually bringing all of that into its DNA. And you can really see it across the board.  So, you see it in how they deliver themselves to the market, how they speak about their product, how they speak about the value that their product brings. And that is good integration.

So, I built a strategy that I call "From the ESG to the SDG Continuum", because not all companies will go all the way to SDG. We try to place them in a scale that helps them grow and integrate those metrics. And eventually, the goal will be to have all companies go through this and report. Now that's the depth of it. The breadth so the and the width, I would say low hanging fruit, is to have companies respond and report on two important things. One, is their diversity in the general team, in the management team in the board and what they're doing in order to increase it. And the other is the carbon footprint analysis to calculate it, reduce it, and eventually offset what is left. This is the width.

Gali: So, is there an expectation that companies, even smaller companies, would have an Impact and Sustainability Officer or somebody? Would that sit next to business development? Is there some sort of expectation of staffing around a role like this?

Cecile Blilious: Certainly not for early-stage startups. Basically, we work with them on implementing. So, identifying, understanding, implementing, improving, we work on that with them together. We always like to have somebody from the management team participate in that so that the KPIs are actually linked with the business KPIs and the growth KPIs, so that we don't speak different languages.  And as the company grows, and if we're talking about larger companies, usually there will be somebody in charge. Not necessarily as an officer whose full-time job is to look after ESG. But more the companies grow, you'll see that this is becoming something of an issue. For example, in the people's (Human Resource) department usually, there's somebody who is in charge of thinking about diversity of thinking about inclusion. 

Creating workshops around inclusion, around preventing sexual harassment or all kinds of things. So, in that respect, it becomes part of their DNA. In the marketing area; Usually, when the marketing people understand the value of identifying the ESG and SDG brings to them, it just becomes part of their language. So, I think overall in the company, it's being adopted as part of the DNA.  With large companies right now, we don't demand it. But I think we will start seeing large companies appointing someone who will be responsible for that part in the company. Simply because it's also going to be regulated. And it's going to be something they will have to report to the SEC if they go public or to their larger European clients, if they're active in Europe. So, I think it's going to become something that needs a little bit more attention than just doing it as part, "as a sidekick" of other things. But we're not there yet.

Gali: I think it's very clear from what you're saying that it's not going to be a 'nice to have', it's going to be a 'must have'. So, we definitely have to pay attention to this. I do want to focus on a little bit on the HealthTech sector specifically. Is there a different view? Or do you expect there's going to be a personalization of expectation around ESG for health tech, specifically? Is it something that we can see coming from Israel?

Cecile Blilious: So, first of all, in terms of the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, that's a low hanging fruit. I mean, any company that is building its product or its mission around treating patients; creating better healthcare outcomes, creating more access to health care, streamlining health care, so that everyone can have good care. I mean, these are all things that are predominantly aimed at doing good. So, it's easy, right.  However, if you don't have a clear identification of who your stakeholders are. And not only your customers, you'd be surprised at how many stakeholders a company has that are not their paying customers. Then you maybe you're missing out. And maybe you don't really understand the real-life value that you're bringing even to your customers. Or how can other stakeholders support your product in order for it to reach a bigger market share or make it easier for your customers to adopt it.

There’re so many ways that you can really help the company with its market penetration and scale. If you're doing this in a way that looks at the SDGs, understand what is the relation between that particular SDG and/or the particular indicator, and the company product or different products and bring that into the narrative. So, companies that are in the healthcare domain should be very easily capable of tying their product with the SDGs, creating an intentional impact that can be measured with time. That I think is easy. It's a matter of expertise and knowledge, something that right now companies don't have. But there are experts and consultants out there that can help them.

And I think that this is part of building the ecosystem. So, definitely the gospel can come out of Israel with regards to healthcare, digital health and all the rest.  With ESG, though, that's not the case. Just look at any average ... I mean, look at the 1000s of companies in Israel that are active in healthcare and tell me how many of them have women cofounders or women in management or diverse populations in their workforce? How many of them pay attention and are accountable for how they produce? What do they do with their waste? How they are actually mitigating the risk of, I don't know, usage of water?

How much electricity they're using? How do they review their supply chain, and make sure that there's no modern slavery in that supply chain? So, that's where I've been for the MedTech companies and the ones who have a material production. For the digital health companies, of course, we're not talking about material production. But even they have operations, which they need to make sure are friendly to the environment.  So, I think that the ESG is not there. And that is true for every company, not only healthcare companies. But it's not fair to assume that if you're building a healthcare company, then you will by definition, have an impact. You have to first of all, build your company in a way that as I said, ESG-wise, makes sense and is inclusive, etc.

But also, externally speaking, when you're aiming your product.  If you aim it through the indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals, that will bring you huge value in understanding exactly where you're going; Which other companies or other organizations that are doing things in a similar domain that you can maybe connect with or partner with; Who are going to be your competitors that are maybe not using that. How can you use your SDG indicators to have extra points in tenders certainly versus governments and large healthcare organizations that are government funded?  These are all things that matter and they have a strong influence on your bottom line. But they don't come by nature just because you are a health care company you have to work in it.

Chen: If you have already made checklists, these 1000s of companies can work with to see how far they are in their current status versus where they ought to be in a few years’ time. We'd love to share it with the listeners too. And if you don't, perhaps you can prepare something.

Cecile Blilious: Unfortunately, there's no, yeah ... We haven't ... So, nobody's been working on this till now. It's really a new way to address that field and I'm so happy that we're having this conversation so that we can really spread the news. This is what we need to do; we all need to be on board. There is no current benchmark. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked, 'How many women would be enough in the Supreme Court?', she said 9, right. She didn't say, 4 or 5, she said 9; the whole Supreme Court. So, there is no benchmark saying we want this or that to be what a normal company should look like. I mean, normal company should probably be gender wise, should be equal. We're not even there yet. Not to talk about minorities and the people from the LGBTQ community, people from the periphery. I mean, there's so much to be done in order to be more inclusive. 

So, what is the benchmark and how do we reach it? Nobody knows really yet, but we have to start collecting data. But at least what we do know is that a company that starts off and says, 'Okay, this is how I'd like my dream company to look like. Now I'm going to try to reach those goals by maybe when I hire, ... tap into different pools of candidates that I might not have access to.  So, if you go through the methodology of a friend brings a friend brings a friend, you end up with all white male, because that's what they look like. So instead of doing that, try to reach into different pools of people. Or take a decision not to present anyone with a job offer, unless you have at least interviewed one diverse candidate for that same role and decided that it's not the right person.

So, I'm not saying to compromise on any talents and I'm not saying to compromise on any financial returns or in any market. I don't want to compromise on anything. On the contrary, I just think that we have to be open-minded to be diverse. And eventually this will bring better results. Even if we don't believe it, like [32:00 - unintelligibly], it's still true. So just trust the research on that and try to be more inclusive.  So long story short, this is about building a new way of building companies; how you create the company, who is in the company, what your product looks like, what are the targets that it's targeting, who are its stakeholders, how do you actually address them. And all of that will bring you better financial results and better business results as well. So, when we have everyone on board, it's going to be easier to compare and say, 'Okay well, you know, they do this, we do that'. We're not there yet.

Chen: Say I must admit that going into this meeting or conversation, I was sure that sustainability is only about the environment and materials and logistics and fulfillment. I had no idea that it's about people, or people are as important, than what I imagined. And thank you for this educating meeting. I want to ask you about your other activities, because it doesn't seem that you're busy enough. Could you tell us a little bit about GITA, the Global Impact Tech Alliance, which you founded?

Cecile Blilious: Of course. So, since I've been an impact investor for so long, I found myself having to reinvent the wheel all the time. How do we build the structure for the companies to adhere to? How do we go forward with measurements? How do we help companies scale and reach their next step of financing, etc. And I was really frustrated from having to do everything by myself. Now, I know and I knew then also that there is ... Not a community.  But there are impact investors out there who are dealing with tech. But a very small in the impact investing community, impact and tech is very minute, I would say. So, out of almost a trillion dollars invested in impact, only about 2 billion are invested in impact tech. And it's not because the opportunities are not there. And it's not because technology doesn't have the ability to scale and be totally disruptive.  And really, if we don't have much more technology in the impact space, and much more impact in technology, then we will never fix what needs to be fixed in this planet of ours. So obviously, there needs to be something more done. So, I tried to connect and create a community.

And I found that the community exists, only it's very dispersed; few and far between.  But if we had a way to connect everyone together and work together on best practices; work together on terminology, share deals, talk to each other, learn from each other, get talents in, then we would scale. I waited patiently for someone else to do it. Actually, I really thought that the global impact investing network would do it because they were the ones who did exactly that for the impact investing market in late 2008.  And I thought, 'Okay, you know, they'll just step into tech'. And the same thing that they did for the impact market, which grew by 100% year over year since they did it, they could do for the tech market.

But they kept telling me, 'Look, we are a capital market people, we are financial people, we don't understand tech. Tech is difficult.'  Early-Stage tech is even more difficult. You have to be agile; your business model keeps changing all the time. Nobody knows where you're going. It's all projective. Nobody knows really, what is going to happen. We have no idea. So, I said, 'Okay, if nobody else is going to do it, then probably I have to do it'.  I teamed up with Leehe Skuler who is really one of the top professionals in impact and tech. And together with Marcio Lampert, who is a tech entrepreneur and he used to manage the Dualis Fund. We set up GITA as a global community that is looking to bring everyone together; speak the same language, create material which can be accessed by anyone, from startups to accelerators, to consultants, to investors, to mainstream VC investors, to anyone really, academics.

Anyone who wants to start scaling tech and impact. So, we built a community. We have also two additional chapters except Israel, one in Finland and one in Germany. We actually had a very big unconference; successful, in-person last week. And we have hundreds of members already, all of them are practitioners. And we're building this network of knowledge. It's really ... If you will, GITA is a cross between LinkedIn, TED, Wikipedia, on impact and tech. So, you're looking for a good methodology to manage and measure impacts. Here you go. You're looking for some education on how to build a course and curriculum on how to teach impacted tech. There you have it. So that's the idea. We're still building it, obviously, it's not all there. But it's growing and it's pretty amazing. 

And I think that gradually, there will be convergence also with the groups of mainstream VCs that are integrating ESG and impact in tech, which is like further down the spectrum. And there will be some convergence as major businesses, like Pitango, will understand that including impact and sustainability means a spectrum. Some of the companies will have only a good ESG structure where they are really diverse, they take care of their corporate governance, they take care of the environment and that's it.

Because their product might not have an impact to the Sustainable Development Goals. But a lot of the companies who do will actually go through that analysis as well; it's going to be a spectrum. And gradually, these worlds will converge. And the word impact will go back to being a word in the dictionary. Everybody will do it. Everybody will just think about being good to our society and our planet, in all possible ways.  And that's just going to be the regular way that business is done. And when investors will look and review companies, they will not only look at risk and return, they will look at risk, return and impact. This will be part of the mainstream and the ones who won't do it will be the exception.

Gali: I want to live in that world. I think that this is why we do this podcast. It's quite obvious that you have many things that you've done. And I'm assuming you have many things that you still would like to do.  So, is there anything that, in the next 5 years or in 5 years, you are kind of dreaming of doing once you've put in motion this train of ESG connected to impact? Do you have some sort of dream that you can share with us?

Cecile Blilious: That's hard to say. I think that my main vision is to really mainstream impact and really make it so that this just becomes part of the normal way of doing business. I wish I could say that in five years, this is going to be mainstream. On the face of it, it's moving really fast. But 8, 9 months ago, I was involved in building a group that is now called VentureESG.  And we started a few VCs saying, 'Okay, so what do we do about impact in sustainability ESG into mainstream VC'. And we started thinking of how to build a group of interested VCs that might want to integrate it. We are now at the 150 VC mark in that group, in 9 months. So, now many of them are just beginning, right. They're just asking themselves what they should do, but they don't need to reinvent it. We've done this already. The people who walk forward ahead of the camp are the pioneers, who have this job to go against the current and basically, reject all the pushback, who don't believe in it, or cynical, who thinks it's just hugging trees and all this & that. But we're past that.

The ones that are coming in now I can just tap in the knowledge and expertise and experience of others have done it already. So, I think it's growing and it'll grow exponentially fast.  The big asset managers, and the big asset owners are starting to include that as part of their due diligence. So, now asset owners want to invest in VCs or in even direct investing, they start asking these questions. Both, because it's becoming a regulation and both, because they find it important. And it's the millennial generation that is taking over and they care about these things.  So, to me, my dream is to be able to say, 'Okay, look, we have these 1000s of VCs which are premium, everyone from the biggest and the brightest, everyone's including that. Now, what's the next step?'

And that's going to be I think, my challenge. When that happens, how do we really make sure, of course, that there's no impact washing; that we're all staying in the same wavelength in terms of what we're trying to achieve and that we have real life results. So, to me, if I could have like a dream, my dream would be that this would be part of the conversation and would be implemented everywhere with the "carrot" approach by looking at the advantages and the value of doing that. And not because there's some sort of a 'must' or regulation; even though that's coming. But I think this is really, ... I believe in the goodness of people.  Because it's not about the "blah, blah" and speaking about it; it's really about walking the walk.

You said, Gali, that you want to live in a world that I'm describing. We all do. It's our responsibility to create that world. Entrepreneurs, that's what they do. They don't like something, they change it. It's our role to make that happen, certainly for our children and grandchildren, but also in our lifetime.  I really do believe that we can change, we can make an impact. If we do this in the right way, authentically. We are also able to accept the challenges and accept our failures, which are happening, obviously, it's not always working. But that just makes us better people. So, to me, I want to make sure that when my kids and my grandchildren talk about me or think about me, they think about me as someone who's made a difference or at least tried to make this world a better place. Not as a cliche, but as a real thing, like really practical. So that's my dream.

Chen: Cecile, I don't think there's anything I can ask after this final closing by you. And I only wish you, Gali and myself, that we will live in that world. And that is it’s not too far or it's not somewhere over the rainbow. It is somewhere that is really within reach.

Cecile Blilious: Yes, it's within our reach and we should all work on this together. It's about collaboration. It's about the tide that lifts all boats. It's about sharing knowledge. It's about accepting each other's faults. It's really about working together. We can't do this alone. There's this African proverb that says that, 'If you're not fast walk alone, but if you want to walk far go together'. I like the 'go together' part.

Cecile Blilious's profile in Linkedin

Pitango Venture Capital website

The Global Impact Tech Alliance