Wallet Max Planet Positive Podcast with Investor Emma Leavy

​Join Bhuva Shakti, Founder & CEO at Wallet Max, as she speaks with investors looking to leverage inclusion and impact without compromising growth of investments.

​This month, Bhuva's guest is Emma Leavy, Investor at Gratitude Railroad where she oversees due diligence, portfolio management, and fund thesis development.

​About Emma Leavy:
​Emma Leavy is a Principal at Gratitude Railroad, where she leads the direct investing team for Gratitude Ventures Fund II. She has led 10+ transactions and sits on the boards of Cofertility and Climax Foods. She invests at the Seed / Series A level with an average first check of $1M into companies delivering both top-quartile venture returns as well as system-level impact in renewables, food systems, and social wellbeing. Emma started her career as a management consultant working with tech companies in the US and Asia, then pivoted into international development and impact investing. As the Director of Grant Programs at Comic Relief, she managed a portfolio of $167 million in impact investments and launched a new $6 million innovation fund. She has two postgraduate degrees that speak to the two sides of her heart (impact & business), a Masters in Peace & Conflict Studies as a fully funded Ransome Scholar at the University of St. Andrews and an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas.

About Wallet Max:
​Wallet Max is an inclusive global community of corporate executives and venture capitalists with a mission to expand fundraising access for high-growth startups in the technology, AI, fintech, and climate sustainability sectors.

Wallet Max's Planet Positive Podcast is a monthly interview with investors driving impact globally. Aligned with our mission to challenge the status quo, we showcase personal and professional journeys of diverse investors (Angels, VCs, PEs, Family Office, Corporate Venture) looking to leverage inclusion and impact without compromising growth of investments. Supporting sustainable innovations is good for people's wellbeing, planet survival, and financial profits.

​​About Bhuva Shakti:

Bhuva Shakti (she/her) is the futuristic founder and CEO driving sustainable innovation at Wallet Max, a global community of corporate executives, policy leaders, and venture capital investors expanding fundraising access for high-growth impact startups. With an MBA from Columbia University in New York and as a senior executive director on Wall Street for three decades, Bhuva has managed diverse financial portfolios and launched several digital transformation products for investment banks, capital markets, and payment networks.

​​Bhuva’s leadership and risk governance oversight, during the global financial crisis and the pandemic, was pivotal for the success of regulatory compliance and mergers acquisitions at the world's top banks and credit rating institutions. Bhuva is a board director and C-Suite advisor for people and planet friendly businesses, without compromising profits, and a keynote and TEDx speaker advancing economic inclusion and climate-fintech partnerships.

Join Bhuva and have a seat at the table to be on the forefront of planet positive investing. Get Tickets to an Upcoming Event Here.

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Learn more about Wallet Max and our mission on the website.

Transcript

BHUVA

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of WalletMax Planet Positive podcast. I'm Bhuva Shakti, based in New York, and the founder of Wallet Max. We are a global community of startups, investors, and executives focused on increasing sustainable funding access, especially in climate tech, fintech, deep tech, and AI sectors. We interview one impact investor every month for our podcast. We invite them to share their background, but more importantly, what differentiates them from the crowd. How do they prioritize impact along with profits and planet? We deep dive into their personal and professional journeys and their mission to uplift. Today, we are speaking with Emma, a principal at Gratitude Railroad, where she leads the direct investing team for Gratitude Ventures Fund, too. Emma has led 10 plus transactions and sits on the boards of Cofertility and Climax Foods. She invests at the seed Series A level with an average first check of $1 million dollars into companies, delivering both top quartile venture returns as well as system-level impact in renewables, food systems, and social well-being. Let me now hand over to Emma and invite her to say a few words about her background and career path. Over to you, Emma.

EMMA

Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast today. I'm really excited to share more about my story and also my work as an investor. My career started as a management consultant, which I think is a great training ground for just how to think and be in the professional world. But very quickly, I knew I wanted to move into international development. I applied for and was awarded a scholarship called the Ransom Scholarship to do a postgraduate degree in Peace and Conflict Studies, which I pursued at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. And that opportunity just launched a really fantastic portion of my career where I was in nonprofits for about six years. So I worked at a social enterprise in Nicaragua. I led financial inclusion at the Clinton Foundation, and then I was the director on the investments team of Comic Relief, which is a large British nonprofit. And at Comic Relief, I was distributing our grants budget. So in my time there, I distributed over $160 million in funds. Our thesis was really around poverty eradication for children and families. So we were doing things like funding vaccines, early childhood education, child protection, and it was very rewarding work. But the pivotal moment that caused me to transition my career from nonprofit work into what I do now, which is venture capital investing, was when I had the opportunity to launch this sidecar vehicle we called the Opportunity Fund at Comic Relief. It was a $6 million fund with a more flexible and innovative approach to financing, really trying to get at the core issues that we were tackling. So we were doing things like funding parenting classes in order to drive better outcomes for young children. And when I was working on that fund, I started to bump into impact investors more in the institutional space. And I was just fascinated by this double bottom line investing approach and really excited about the potential for entrepreneurs to drive real change in these really stubborn systemic issues that I was trying to create change in with grantmaking. So that was the spark that led me in a very different path. I decided to leave that career and pursue an MBA at UC Berkeley Haas, and I went all in on VC. Anything with VC, I did it. 

Actually, the company where I interned as an MBA student is where I work now, Gratitude Railroad. I've been there for three years in the principal role. It's been a winding journey, but I think many people in venture capital actually have similar twists and turns that lead them to be an investor.

BHUVA

So true. My journey is very similar as well. I started in management consulting, but I went into investment banking, but very much focused on financial inclusion and AI and ethics and compliance. Similar to you, I also went back to do my MBA to do everything related to venture capital because I thought, Okay, so we are doing Wall Street finance and everything. But then if we don't invest in what we want immediately, because we can't invest in climate 10 years from now. I thought that's the right pathway, and it has taken me to where I wanted to be today. So thank you for sharing that, Emma. Great story. And you also mentioned a quick thing, especially parental classes. So every time when we have to do something for children, with children, people always target children. But then I've learned a lot of lessons as a parent myself, where you have to involve the parent. It starts along with them. So that was a very great insight. Thanks for sharing.

And in your journey, it has led to, today investing, impact investing,- you've had been in social enterprises, so your journey has been building on top of each other. But then today's climate, the geopolitical, the macroeconomic situation, might not be as incentivizing for people to invest in startups, especially impact investing. Where do you see some of the opportunities and challenges, especially with respect to climate justice, be it in the US, rest of the world? What are your thoughts? 

EMMA

Yeah, thanks for asking the question. And just to tackle the first part of the question, which is why is impact investing still relevant? Well, I think companies that have a social or climate mission, they've often priced in these large external trends, things like climate change or increasing governance in a way that I find startups that are not mission-driven, haven't. So I still think that there is absolutely a financial case for impact investing, driving real value for investors. And then you also asked about opportunities at the intersection of climate and other issues. I'm so excited you asked this question because I think that it's actually a real challenge that in the impact investing space, climate investors have their category, and then the social well-being, the education and financial inclusion investors have their own conferences and meetings. I don't think there's enough dialog between the two groups. And to me, that's a huge missed opportunity because people live on the planet, we impact our environment. And then, of course, environment affects people, and they're just very interconnected and related.

So some of the areas that I'm particularly interested in as an investor is the intersection between climate and human health and the intersection between climate and wealth building or financial inclusion. One example that I'll give that I'm very excited about in our portfolio that I think really encapsulates how you can drive impact at this intersection is a company that we invested in called it's electric. it's electric is a New York City-based startup that has designed EV chargers that are meant for cars that are parked curbside. So in dense urban communities, many cars are not parked in a driveway. People are parked on curbside. And so these chargers are really designed for that community. And I think it's probably very well known that EVs are going to be an important part of us reducing global warming. EVs - they don't have tailpipe emissions, they don't use gasoline. So their climate footprint is just much less than non-EVs. However, they also have really meaningful financial and health benefits for the communities where they're owned. So studies have shown that owning an EV has really incredible savings over long term periods because you don't have to buy gas. And so for people who are EV owners, that's also a great benefit. However, EV ownership has really been more the purview of higher income Americans. So for Americans with over $100,000 in income, 14 % of them own EVs. And then if you look at middle income Americans, so people with $40,000 to $100,000 in income, only 5% of them own EVs. And so there's this gap in EV ownership based on your economic status. And there's also impacts in terms of health. EVs don't have emissions, and that's really critical, particularly in low income communities where air pollution tends to be a more challenging issue. There was a study done in California that I find fascinating that looked at EV ownership from 2013 to 2019. It found that in the zip codes where there was higher EV ownership, there was less air pollution, and there was also less asthma-related ER visits. I mean, all these things are interconnected. EV charging is connected to EV ownership, which is also connected to wealth building and human health. And for me, as an investor, I like to look at the whole picture and really understand what is going to be not just the first order impact, but also the second order impact for the end user of whatever the startup is producing. 

BHUVA

You just mentioned everything that I had in my mind. One is it's electric. Tiya Gordon is a very good friend of mine, and I didn't know that you were an investor, so that's surprising to hear about that here. Tiya has been part of our community for a long time now. She's been part of our pitch competitions and also a lot of community events here in New York City. Great to know that you are an investor in her company. Additionally, one thing you mentioned, I've been preaching that everywhere, and I'm glad to hear that climate is not separate. Climate is at the intersection of food, air, water, mortgage, home insurance, everything. You can't just have verticals and then climate as a vertical. It should be cross-cutting across every industry because like you mentioned, it has a financial inclusion component and a healthcare component. It's not climate separately. I'm so happy that we have such synergy. So thanks for sharing that, Emma. I want to quickly deep dive into one other thing that you mentioned. You see, a lot of opportunities we continue to invest. In fact, this is the time for the private markets to be more bullish, especially the current political landscape. It's very volatile, both in US and globally. We see a lot of big corporations are shifting priorities. But we as venture capital investors in the private markets, why do we think it is still relevant to invest in food, renewables, social well-being for the long term? 

EMMA

Yeah, because these challenges are here to stay. They're not going away. Then I'll also say that I think there's incredible opportunities right now in climate investing because there has been what is probably a needed correction in terms of valuations in the industry. And so, yeah, I really try to live that saying that when others are fearful, you should try to be bold as an investor. And so we obviously are not taking our foot off the gas when it comes to climate investing. I think it's great opportunities. And I think the time is now. 

BHUVA

Yeah, valuations have been severely off, right? Before the pandemic, it was too high. It went down during the pandemic. It tried to correct itself, and I think now it's getting stable. So that's a very good point. Crisis is the time where investors need to be looking for good opportunities. I've heard that quite a lot as well. In terms of investing, we have established that there are opportunities in the middle of challenges. But how do you ensure profits or return on investment?

EMMA

Yeah, for us, it's the primary question because we are absolutely targeting top quartile venture returns. We are not a concessionary fund. We are competing with all the other venture capital firms that are out there to drive returns, but we're doing it with an additional lens of trying to also have positive impact in either climate or social well-being. I think the quick answer is just a lot of hard work and looking at a ton of startups and having a really robust pipeline and finding the winners that are in there that can deliver on the two things that we're trying to deliver on. I'll give one example of an area that I'm excited about digging in that is actually an economic challenge, but I also think it's an opportunity, which is around supply chain technology. So with tariffs increasing for many companies, and many companies really starting to feel margin pressure, a lot of the supply chain technology companies that I'm looking at are having enormous inbound interest. And many of those also have sustainability benefits because they're reducing the amount of inputs that need to be used, they're reducing transportation costs, all these things that require energy and resources. Even in these challenging times, I think that there's absolutely upside to be found. Supply chain resilience after the pandemic, all of us have realized how critical it is. It only boosts sustainability, but it's not like 100% domestic or 100% international. There should be a balance of where we can accommodate each. When you're dealing with supply chain and cross-border challenges, Now we have volatile regulations. There is a regulation today, tomorrow, it could be different, both in US and globally.

BHUVA

How are you making bets and trying to be cognizant but still taking the risk for the return on investment?

EMMA

Yeah, I think you expressed it perfectly that we still have to take risks, right? This is a risk-taking business, and an investor needs to always be taking the right risks, so we can't stop moving forward. But it's also really important to try to keep an eye on everything that's unfolding. It's ever-changing. And We have an internal process of trying to understand how the external macro environment is going to impact all of our portfolio companies, but it's a shifting landscape. It's complex. So within our portfolio, we have some companies that are benefiting from the current macroeconomic conditions. And then we have others who have been impacted negatively. So it really is a mixed bag across the portfolio that we're seeing. I think in this environment, it's more important than ever that as investors, we try to really support our startups and help them to get to the next stage of growth.

BHUVA

Yeah, if not us, who else? We continue to take risk, but also balanced risk. We do our due diligence and ensure our return on investment and so on. Now, is there any success story, other than it's electric, you'd like to share that you have invested in personally from Gratitude Railroad?

EMMA

Yeah, absolutely. There's a few. It's always hard to pick, but I'll share one company that was one of my earlier investments when I first became an investor called Glacier. So Glacier makes robots that pick and sort recycling with computer vision and an AI algorithm. And they're just really innovating in the waste industry, where right now a lot of the picking and sorting is a job that's done by humans. And it's a really dirty and dangerous job that, it's really hard to keep seats filled. And so bots are able to do this much more efficiently and much more safely, and with the same or higher accuracy as a human. So we participated in the seed round, and they just raised earlier this year an oversubscribed Series A, which we were excited to participate in. I've just been thrilled with the way the waste industry is starting to embrace their technology. I've also been really excited about the data that they're collecting, which they also are innovating with and their customers are using in order to make better decisions. So for me, that investment perfectly encapsulates a successful company that's creating a lot of change, but also has a really deep impact for making our recycling system work better. I'm just excited about that team and what's next for them.

BHUVA

Yeah, Glacier is a great example. You mentioned social well-being, food, renewables, as your focus. Now, you've seen AI coming into all your sectors. Glacier is one such example. Now, in this example, we have robots helping humans be better, have better health, perform better, so that humans can perform something else that's closer to their passion.

How do you segregate an AI company that comes to you because AI is hype today versus a real AI company that's truly transformational like Glacier?

EMMA

Yeah, you ask a good question. So I think some AI integrations are just table stakes at this point. I do a lot of health care investing, and it's pretty much table stakes to have an AI integration. If you are providing direct services that supports providers to be more efficient through things like notetaking. Pretty much every company that I'm talking to has embraced AI in some way to increase their efficiency. So you have that use case of AI. And I mean, indeed, my firm, we're using AI to improve how we manage our own processes internally. And then you have the companies that are really using AI to build something innovative, to serve a customer set that couldn't be served before, to analyze information in a way that just provides totally new insights. So that's a separate category in in my mind. And I'm seeing the impact of AI across

every single vertical where I invest. And in all sorts of different ways, in workforce development and education, we're seeing AI provide really tailored content to different types of learners, unlock time for teachers, so that way they're not doing busy work and can actually be teaching and engaging.

In the climate space, we're seeing AI do a lot of many different things, innovations and insurance tech, how we can underwrite and price risk. And then there's also the second order impacts of AI infrastructure. So with the boom in data centers that are being built, I'm seeing a huge slate of companies that are trying to make those data centers more efficient. In trying to limit their impact on the water of the areas where they're being built. I really am seeing the impact just all across the spectrum in everything that I'm looking at. But as an investor, I think it's really important to try to discern the signal from the noise when it comes to AI because everyone's using the terminology. As I said, some things, everyone's doing in order to be more efficient. Then there's those few examples of where people are truly innovating and creating something unique with what AI is unlocking.

BHUVA

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. All of us need to be AI aware these days. Last year at all the conferences, all I heard was generative AI, and this year it's agentic AI. I don't know what's coming up next year, but trying to focus on key things like the data center cooling, which is also very important for sustainability and climate action. It's really critical. You also mentioned insurance sector. That's an overlooked sector because, again, a cross-cutting industry where climate is critical. It could also involve your home mortgages or business insurance or risk of running your business itself, regardless of the type of business. Those are great examples. We've been talking about a lot of success so far, and how do you differentiate and still make the bet & take the risk. Can you also talk about a mistake that you have made? How did you navigate? Are there any valuable lessons, both before Gratitude Railroad or today at Gratitude Railroad?

EMMA

What a good question. Well, I think every investor has their running slideshow in their head of companies that are doing incredibly well that I passed down. So of course, It does haunt me, and they should, right? I think it is important to, or I feel it's important to maintain a slight sense of paranoia around your pipeline. And ensure that you're hopefully seeing everything that aligns with your investment thesis. So thinking back to a specific example of a time I passed on a company that is now doing fantastically well. I just had a really different view of the market. I just didn't understand the market. I didn't believe it would be as big as they were projecting. I thought that the actors in it And it's an old-school marketplace, would be not as quick to embrace technology as it ultimately ended up being. So that was a miss on my side that I still think about, of course. But I also think that those mistakes are the things that I learn from the most. And this is an industry that I love, and I intend to make my full career because I just get such a kick out of my job. I just enjoy it so much every day. And it really rewards people who stay in it for the long run. I feel like now, over three years in to being a professional investor, I just have a very different view of things than when I first started. And also I'm starting to see the results of my early investments come forward and to learn from those. And so I'm sure I'm going to make many more mistakes that I'll learn from in the years to come, but ultimately, those are going to be the things that teach me the most.

BHUVA

Yeah, it's so true. All of us investors have those few failures or mistakes or missed opportunities, but I think it's a point of learning and moving on and seeing what best fits the need of the hour. Now, talking about need of the hour, there are a lot of trends. Since we already established climate as cross-cutting every industry. Where are the emerging trends that you are excited about? Of course, you can't focus on everything, but how do you track, not miss the future opportunity, but not necessarily try to cover everything?

EMMA

Yeah, it's a great question. As you alluded to, I'm an investor who invests across multiple sectors, so I see a lot of different companies. I need to say nimble. Two things popping up that I didn't have on my radar that they're just incredible opportunities. But with that being said, there are a few trends that I'm really excited about and absolutely keeping my eye on. The first one I'll to mention is that decarbonization and climate change are fueling just a massive demand for skilled labor, such as HVAC technicians, electricians, solar installers, energy auditors, people who could do home retrofits. And these are jobs that have upward mobility. So I think that there's this incredible opportunity to support that green jobs revolution with education, workforce development, and technology that makes those jobs easier to do. So that's one area that I'll identify, that I'm absolutely looking for deals and opportunities in. Another one that I'll mention is within the financial inclusion and wealth building category, which I'm really passionate about, and I think it's a great time to be investing in Fintech because the valuations have come down quite nicely. I'm pretty excited about a new generation of fintech and prop tech companies that are really tackling the gap in homeownership through things like down payment assistance, shared equity models, and rent-to-own platforms. Home ownership has been a path to wealth building in the United States for such a long time now, and I think trying to open that up and open up home ownership, when the housing market is so challenged right now is pretty interesting and exciting.

BHUVA

Two great trends because the first thing you mentioned is decarbonization. Similar to AI, AI may not replace every job, but then if you are able to reskill and upskill, you can work together along with AI because AI is not going anywhere. Similarly, in the climate space, you also have a lot of upskilling and other reskilling opportunities. So that's a great thing for the future of work. Secondly, also, you rightly mentioned things about PropTech and Fintech. Climate Fintech is a very big passion of mine because I know Fintech exists and climate exists, but if you don't combine them together, you can't fund scalable solutions. I'm a very big supporter of that. And PropTech has been coming into my view quite a lot these days, especially when we talk about ensure tech and climate involvement. There's a lot of real estate and prop tech coming up, so very much aligned with the trends that both of us are seeing in the industry. Thanks for sharing that. Now, what is the unique investment thesis that you have at Gratitude Railroad? There are so many other venture firms, specifically also focused on Seed Series A. How are you different? How are you uniquely positioned? You can talk about it either from US, rest of the world, or industry perspective.

EMMA

Yeah, you're absolutely right that there's so many different venture capital firms. For your founders, I think it's really critical to go through that matchmaking process of trying to find the right investors for you and to have a couple that's going to support your growth going forward. Well, I think we're unique in many ways, and I really love where I work. But I think something that's quite different than other firms is Gratitude's community focus. So going back to the history of Gratitude, we were actually started as a community for asset allocators looking to transition their portfolio to values-aligned investors. So this was back in 2013 when impact investing didn't have nearly as much awareness as it does now. And it was out of that community that we started to invest. And we still do a lot of community and ecosystem building work. So we have a network of over 150 asset allocators that are highly engaged in our work. They're investors. They participate in the convenings that they put on. We do learning and education events for our investors. And so for portfolio companies that they invest in, they don't just get me and my team cheerleading them and doing everything that we can to support them. They also get our investors who are just much more engaged your average LP set because we have this community platform and this way of engaging and working with LPs. Our LPs, investors and community members, are just this incredible resource. Many are professional investors themselves, exited entrepreneurs, people who own businesses, and the introductions that we've been able to make for our founders through that community for hires, for fundraising, for new clients, I think are just very high value to the folks that we've invested in. So that's a different way of working. And I think really attractive to many startup founders.

And then the other thing I often hear from the companies that we invest in is that they are really drawn to the fact that we're an impact investor. So for founders who started a company because they wanted to make a positive change in the world or they had a problem themselves and they wanted to solve for that or solve for their community, they want folks on their cap table who get that and are going to walk that path with them and help them to stay true to that mission, which can get challenging, especially when you get to that higher stage of growth and you have to make different business decisions. As an investor, we're absolutely willing to stand behind our companies and the missions that they have and don't believe that having an impact has to come at the cost of growth. I think those are some of the reasons I hear that companies want to work with us. For me, every day I wake up and think, How can I help our portfolio companies? That's my North Star. If I can do that by connecting them with our community, then I absolutely want to do that. 

BHUVA

I've heard about Gratitude Railroad quite a lot as well. One of the key tag lines that you are driving is "community-driven impact investment firm". That's very unique in itself. If I am going to an impact investor, I don't have to justify why I am focused on impact. I just have to explain the scalability of the solution itself. That's a big relief for founders. There's also the founder investor fit that you mentioned is really key because giving the check is day one of your commitment to work with them for the long term. You need to have that best fit. How investors are shopping, founders are shopping as well for the right investor, not necessarily for check size all the time, but also ensuring, Okay, after I get the check, can I continue to work with this investor? Those are very great things for founders to be attracted to you. Now, even when founders are attracted to your firm, sometimes they have to jump from early stage to growth stage. Not everyone is going to come to you at the growth stage or Series A. You have a seed and Series A focus. Sometimes, environment-conscious products, services, can have longer R&D or commercialization cycles. How do you balance that? How do you support founders in that scenario?

EMMA

Yeah, it's a balancing act because, as you said, some of the climate companies, they have a longer R&D road ahead of them. For us, we are investing in companies that are at that point of commercialization who have revenue traction. There's other investors out there who can come in pre-revenue and really fund the work in the lab and all the science that needs to be done. We're coming in more where there is product market fit developed or established. There's a market there. That's the time when we're getting involved in the company. I will also say, too, that for us as investors, we're a meaningful check coming into the cap table, but we are not taking lead roles in rounds. Something we look at with companies that have more R&D ahead of them is, do they have the right investors around the table to fund that? Because oftentimes we're a $750K track in a $15 million round. We want to see that they have the investors around the table that can continue to support the company through their various stages of growth. We do really look closely at the syndicate and evaluate if there's the right financing partners around the table to support long-term growth.

BHUVA

Thanks for sharing that. That's really important because you really need additional investors, and it's also important that the investors are able to get along in the growth journey of the startup. One thing I wanted to also quickly check in is regarding the privacy and security aspect. We are in a heavily regulated industry, especially when it comes to climate, using AI and also financial inclusion, wealth building, and so on and so forth. How do you balance that privacy, security, and ethics and responsible technology?

EMMA

Yeah, it's a great point because many of the industries that I'm investing in, they have access to really sensitive user data. I'll particularly lift up health care and financial inclusion. So you have people's health information, and then you have things like people's credit scores or financial history. And this is really sensitive information. And startups are often small teams that are doing a lot with a little. They are often scrappy with their resources. So I think it is really important to investigate how companies are handling this of sensitive data, given that there's so much pressure to move quickly and grow quickly, deal at all costs. So it is an area we dig into when we're diligencing. And I will say that our thesis of wanting to invest in impact-driven founders, I think, is one filter for folks who take this seriously. Another layer, I will say, is that in some sectors, I am very interested in investing in founders who have issue area expertise. Especially in healthcare, I really like it when the founders come from a healthcare background. They're a former doctor, they're a former nurse. They worked on innovation at a pharmaceutical company because that space just has this higher bar, I think, of technical knowledge that's needed. And with that expertise and background, I think people are... Those founders with those backgrounds tend to be very sensitive to the data and security concerns that come with the users that they're trying to serve and the market that they're trying to penetrate. That could be a differentiator between how you succeed and beat your competition and expand. That comes quite a lot, I also advise startups on the side, in addition to my impact investing role on product and operations. They're always trying to see, Okay, how can I build it fast, scale it fast? I'm like, Okay, you can build it, but you won't launch because you'll be stuck with privacy and security and so many regulations, so why not think about it at the start? So you can really build it and scale it immediately. That's a constant challenge trying to convince them.

BHUVA

Now, I know time is running out and we are almost coming close to the end. We started with talking about your personal journey, your long-winded pathway into impact investing. Now, having discussed so many things so far, how do you still think your personal mission fits into your impact investing initiatives for the long term at Gratitude Railroad? Do you see synergies? Has there been any changes since the time you started and today? 

EMMA

For me, It's really important that my work has meaning, I think. And I think for me, the key to having meaning is being a part of something that's bigger than myself and going beyond myself. And the startups that I work with are doing exactly that. And I think having that perspective of thinking about other people in the planet and the legacy that I'm going to leave behind just makes my life a lot more richer and a lot more textured than having maybe a more purely capitalistic perspective. So that's perhaps the philosophical question and then a philosophical answer. And I'll also say that I'm really motivated by working with good people that I like and respect. And I have met just some of the best and smartest and most caring people in impact investing over the past three years who I just want to work with. I just want to be around them because they're smart and interesting. And for me, that has been a real guiding light for a while. I want to keep staying in this space, being in this space, and making a career in it. I'll say to anyone who has a less than traditional venture capital background or resume, which was absolutely me. I was a nonprofit person, a nonprofit leader who wanted to get into venture capital. And I had many people tell me, “You can't do that. You don't have the right background for it.”

And here I am, five years later, really loving this career and feeling like I create a lot of impact in it. So I would just also say that different perspectives are really needed as investors, and that's actually your edge. And I think that my professional background in international development and grantmaking and overseeing $160 million grantmaking allocation gives me an edge as an investor. And so that's the perspective I bring, and I'm often told by founders that they want to work with me because of that perspective. I think for me, It has just created a ton of value in my life to be a part of an impact investing firm, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

BHUVA

Yeah, I share your same enthusiasm as well. I'm telling people, when you're doing impact work, you're building legacy every day. You don't have to wait 50 more years and see, Okay, so how can I start building legacy? You rightly also mentioned that point. You can still work with smartest, most profitable solutions and founders, but care is very critical. You want to be around them for a long time. That's also really - I see quite a lot, and that's why I'm doing what I am doing as well. A lot of synergies there. Thanks for sharing, Emma. I just wanted to quickly check in. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we wrap up? How can people get in touch with you and Gratitude Railroad?

EMMA

Yeah. If you're a founder, there's a form on our website, so please get in touch with us there. If you're building something in either climate or social well-being and at that seed or Series A stage, we'd love to learn more. I think our website is a great way to get in touch with us as a firm. I'm active on LinkedIn and try to post and share updates on our investments. Following me there is a great way to learn more about how we're investing and some of the incredible things that our portfolio companies are building. 

BHUVA

Thanks so much. It was really great talking to you. I can see from the start to now, we have so many synergies and we like what we do on a daily basis. There's no separation of passion versus work. Thanks so much for sharing that. I'll also share with our community all the links that you mentioned. I'll encourage our founders to submit their startups and reach out to you. Thank you for sharing.

EMMA

Thank you.