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... by the US government, Department of Commerce. After that, they started to share so they
were allowing other department of commerces from under the 115 countries were controlling
the internet and at some point they said okay this is going to be too much for me to handed
off and in 1998, they created ICANN to run the internet but cleverly kept their consul
which is the Government Agency Company, the GAC, which is the trade association of the
department of Congresses as well as other cross-bound. I mentioned that cause I'll talk
about it later. But anyway, I can start a damn path of saying oh, let’s consider new
top-level domains so we have dotCom, dotOrg, we have dotBiz. What else could happen? So
they tested a few improved dotInfo, you've heard of dotTravel, maybe not. You've heard
of several others. After they have launched a few, they said we can't do this anymore
without a processing place. It sorta was like I want to do .info, okay, go for it. Gotta
be a little more precise than that so they spend the last 6 years writing an application
process which is being approved in June. In June, what all our companies are going to
be looking at is that all of a sudden the internet's going to go from dotCom, dotBiz,
dotOrg to another 600 different dotNames. Some of them are generic and some of them
are specific. So dotIbm is an application, dotWayneinstitution's an application, dotCitibank
is an application, dotIbm is an application. Other things are community driven, dotBerlin,
dotSFO, dotNYC, dotGAY and other things are completely an investment. So, somebody's launching
dotWine, somebody's doing dotSport, somebody's doing dotNews and these sorts of things. So
the interesting challenge for all of our trademark attorneys in the future, there's a big future
for trademark attorneys, is that they're going to have to consider how is my company being
represented in the internet now? So in addition to country codes and everything else there
are and how they’re going to be specific codes. The reason why this is really important
tonight to spend a little time talking about this first and then we'll talk about dotGay
second is that it's really to rebirth of the internet or not going to be the same anymore.
Right now, one of the best examples is from a safety standpoint of the internet, if I
was dotRedcross and people were making donations to anything that says dotRedCross, they know
it's going to the Red Cross versus right now there are tons of sites out there fishing
for people to get more donations in Japan, crisis in Japan and many many many many people
are being taken advantage of because they don't have the security in really knowing
that it's the right that they're giving to. The other side of that world that's going
to change things is on information. So because it's dear to my heart, we can talk about dotGay
and so all of a sudden now you're typing in, you're looking to find if a company is gay-friendly
or if I type in ibm.gay and I get my IBM/page and I see my HRC viewed on that /page, it's
pretty well done. You know, where they stand on a lot of things. It's also if we type in
bar.gay or you type in lawyer.gay or you type in whatever.gay, you're now literally going
to a whole new world that is focused on the gay and lesbian community. First is going
to a site that may have been set up by the exgay organization that looks like it's a
gay spy, you're now going to a safe place in the gay and lesbian community and when
I realize this from this phone call from this gentleman who is a domain grabber, is actually
what they call him, we're now going to a higher level of domain of grabbing because now it's
like the whole domain. It's not a name in the domain; it's like the whole enchilada.
So anyway, brilliant man, very helpful, knew that this needed to be in a community and
so we were very thankful that we understood of that many many phone calls that we made,
we understood what this was, an opportunity. And as a marketing company, we also saw the
need because the gay and lesbian communications globally in Iraq and past the publications
are changing, the unwind components are changing, social media is chaging, so everything's changing,
every 6 to 9 months is not changing, every 3 years or 4 years or 5 years it's happening
much much faster and this becomes a global space for the community that allows good things,
both as a marketer who's looking to track and show the investment of the dollars available
in the gay community but also as a huge homosexual who really wanted to do something different
and wanted to challenge corporations, and wanted to give back to the community and wanted
to take an experience of losing a lot of friends with *** and AIDS and not having the internet
for information back then, to a new place were what happens if we can network all the
gay and lesbian community, so that we can network ***.gay. We can network center.gay,
bisexual.gay, questioning.gay, and stupid.gay. Lots of very positive networking can happen
and the reason why this whole change on the internet is going to change globally for us
hugely is because this really is no less than providing gas electric and water to our house.
It's going to become a pipe line to the whole community so there's a lot of if these were
just sold to an internet investment company which is always a risk, it would be developed
for a benefit for the community or just do so real estate community. So the opportunity
we have is to make it, something that could grow our business, that can grow our community,
that can grow or community services and can start of putting some numbers and names around
of how many of us are aware because, believe it or not, less than a year ago, we got a
phone call from somebody in Wisconsin saying to great program, thank you for bringing the
tourist but we don't have homosexuals in Winconsin. And I just come back from the gay softball
world series where about 7,000 of them where in Washington, so anyway, it's a great opportunity
and looking forward to sharing more.
>> SPEDALE: Thank you so much. We really appreciate that and thank you all for giving an introduction.
You've given the World Bank and your banks are somewhat focused on some form. Also given
our short period of time of going to do some interesting topics, I want to ask you guys
about sort of entrance and exit points particularly from your perspective and maybe, Lee, given
the fact that you're focused on the social impact of this investing, how do you, first
of all, source out earnings? What are your general criteria for something that would
have interests you and then once on board, what are the metrics you were looking at to
determine whether or not; it's been a successful investment?
>> DAVIS: I mean, given the Galeforce Capital is pretty new, it'll be hard to give you metrics
of performance but I can tell you how it's going to work and then I can tell you how
we've done and that's it so far. The way we source, typically, there are 3 ways. The most
successful is what I've told earlier which is the social enterprise competitions. Within
the country is where we operate and upon on-going operations, we do national social enterprise
competitions every other year and that's where local organizations can apply with a new idea
or with an existing social enterprise and they are looking to expand. The other is referral.
We get a lot of referrals especially from foundations or other social investors that
have an organization and their portfolio are telling that they have been working with or
think that it would be a good fit or may have a social enterprise element. And then the
last is our portfolio managers where a team of 50 people. So they are pro actively looking
for opportunities in the market. Now that the first time has Galeforce that we have
been doing this competition will be kicking off in June which is a global competition
and that's going to be all online. So it's going to be, initially, the first one will
be an English, we'll be promoting it globally through a whole network of partners and will
be two tracks. One on innovation, which are new social enterprises and one on Impact which
are existing social enterprises. That competition model has been most successful in sourcing
and building our pipeline. On a metric side, we have all these sort of traditional metrics
that you would find on the business side. In fact, for us, it's kind of the easiest
part. All of the social enterprises that enter our portfolio go through a regular business
process with us, not a single one has ever come to us with a really polished business
plans so we often spend our time first months with them really working on that much more
earnestly than getting to know the internal workings of the business and that business
plan becomes the baseline that we use going forward and we set up two sets of metrics.
Obviously the financial ones are much based on the projections of the business plan and
we have a tool, our Performance Management tool used to collect data from them. And then
the other which is a bit more difficult especially to aggregate other social impact indicators
because they are all very different business and they are all so very different social
purpose. Some of them are employment models, so there are metrics around the employment
creation that is generated as a result of the social enterprise whereas others maybe
more policy-oriented, human rights type of organizations so they uphold different sets
of social metrics. The social metrics are very complicated. It's a very messy area and
so the whole concept of the return of investment for there are endless things going on now
to try to find ways to aggregate those in some way and there are a lot of really cool
tools out there. But what we found is that they are only applicable to the segments within
the market. Our metrics for a certain type of social enterprise are very different in
a custom of way.
>> SPEDALE: And now we're going to turn it around and look a little bit more of giving
your background, Paul. Taking a little bit more of a financial perspective on this. Similar
question, since some of our audience are interest in storing companies, one of the basic characteristics
you look for potential investment and whether or not you've already engaged metrics and
what your metrics would look like going forward.
>> THOMPSON: Thanks. We look at our business on five strategies. We look at our businesses
prior to the manager but focused on a sub-sector which is the secret sub-sector centre. There
is some confusion around what we do. We are not looking at the management or so. The management
is LGBT. It is still his business targeting the LGBT market, that is primarily focusing
on the LGBT market. And just to say, one of the things that has been very interesting
to us is the propositions we have before the management of LGBT and I must simply say that
we believe that this market will provide more growth so we look at that propositions. And
if there are some of you that happened to not come for the business but for the LGBT
consumer sector that is something that we would have done. In terms of sourcing investments
one of it is good in footwork. When we launched the company we did supress how much we wanted
to get people talking to. Although we have got to because there are often very good competences
and not necessary that we have a duty to go and find the companies to invest with. In
terms of, due to the companies, for those who are in LGBT business is not about it.
We look at it as any form manager of that business. We wanted thorough business plan,
we want something brief and that would actually work to investors. We also particularly look
at the quality of the management and their ability to really own that proposition. Just
because of where we are can't be and we're trying to do a huge amount of stuff with not
on liberty source so we are also focusing at the moment on a specific area. And particularly
those businesses that are subs cure that when combined with other businesses, would actually
be able to neutral time to time and also you can across an organization that resolves as
well as concerning and also the ability and particularly on social networking sites prior
with advertising wherein we have an advertising with model that we could have buy to become
as an investment. So from that perspective that stands by a tradition of the project
manager. That's what we do. We also screen everything that we do and say that this is
a business that we feel comfortable getting involved with, this is the business that believe
and support the community and would actually support the development and agreement of deprivation.
That's very important to those who use by-product on what we do. We are very much focused on
it.