#13 Andy Kuper: The Impact Investor Changing The World

In this episode, I’m joined by Andy Kuper Founder & CEO of LeapFrog Investments - a pioneering impact investment firm that has reached over half a billion low-income people with access to essential healthcare, financial tools, and climate solutions. Under his leadership, LeapFrog has raised over $3 billion from global investors and, earning recognition from Fortune as one of the top companies changing the world.

Andy embodies the conviction that purpose andprofit can scale together - transforming industries, delivering outsized returns, and proving that humble, mission-driven teams can reshape the world.

Key Takeaways:

• Markets waiting to be restructured hold the greatest potential.
• Small, dedicated teams can change the world.
• Profit and purpose can coexist and drive success.
• See through your customer’s eyes. Assumption is theenemy of insight.
• Lead with humility. Listen, learn, and stay curious about what you don’t yet know.
• Serve, don’t prescribe. Meet fundamental needs rather than defining them for others.
• Uncover unmet needs. Meeting customer demands sustains; anticipating them transforms.
• Let experience speak for you. Delighted customers are your most powerful marketing engine.
• Celebrate progress. Recognise milestones, share credit, and strengthen collective resolve.

Andy is an extraordinary guest. I trust you will enjoy listening to this episode as much as I did recording it.

Show Links

Website - https://www.georgiedickins.com

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgiedickins

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@GeorgieDickins-q7x

Transcript

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Hi, I'm Georgie Dickens, host of Stratospheric Leaders, the podcast where I get to have inspired conversations with extraordinary leaders from across capital markets. Join me to hear their game-changing strategies, the personal stories and powerful soundlights behind the stratospheric success. Every episode packed with wisdom, insight, and real-world lessons. The stuff they simply don't teach you in business school. If you want to elevate your game, and most importantly, those around you, this pop comment is for you. Enjoy. Andy, I am delighted to welcome you to an episode of Stratospheric Leaders. And for the listeners, Andy Cooper is the founder and CEO of Leapfrog Investments, the pioneering impact investment fund that has reached over half a billion low-income people worldwide with access to essential healthcare, financial tools, and climate solutions. Under his leadership, Leapfrog has raised over three billion from global investors. And Andy, you recognize my fortune as one of the companies, top companies changing the world. And what I love is the time that we spent together is you are so much a vision leader. And you show that PowerPoint and profit can scale together. Transforming industries while it's delivering both impact and extraordinary returns. My worry is I can only disappoint after that introduction. But thank you. And while I may appear to have the capacity for independent judgment and to decide how hundreds of millions of dollars are deployed, in my children's case, I just say yes. Okay, well, again, that that's very similar in other household, actually. So I get it. I totally get it. So you are well, not that children should have favourites, but clearly, as you said, they know where to come. Exactly. Um I'd love to hear about Leapfrog's uh origin story. Where, like the genesis, where did it all begin? So I'm South African by origin, and I think one of my most formative moments uh was that I went to the only unsegregated school under apartheid called Woodmead, and I was there on the Union Building Lawns in Pretoria the day Nelson Mandela moved from prisoner to president. At his inauguration, there were about 50,000 of us standing on the lawns, almost everybody of whom had been involved in the anti-apartheid struggle in some way or other, multiple races, backgrounds, histories. And there was a sudden boom just as he stepped up. And we all looked up and we thought, oh, this is the counter-revolution that's come. Uh, we're all in trouble. And everybody kind of hit the ground and looked up, and there were the jets of the Air Force trailing six colours of the new South African flag, so now saluting Nelson Mandela as president. And everybody got up and pointed up and said, Those are our jets. And there was this profound moment where the world had been very badly structured in that country and more generally, and a dedicated group of people had changed that, had restructured things very fundamentally, so that you had a different level of agency, a different level of control, and a different level of fairness in the world. And there were there was a moment there where you felt like you really could, with a dedicated group, change the world. And as I've gone through various iterations, and I've been in the nonprofit sector, I've been in the public policy space, I've been in academia, and then over many years in the business and investment space, I've had that sense that things can be very badly structured. Markets can be very badly structured, and often some of the greatest opportunities that exist are to transform those, and a dedicated group of people can really reshape the world such that you can have thoughts and you can do actions that you would have never thought imaginable. And really, the history of Leapfrog was uh based on that experience because I came to understand by helping develop many successful ventures uh and organizations that you could fundamentally look at the world and say capitalism is brilliant, but it's very badly structured. There are a lot of businesses that are not getting the capital they need. There are a lot of people that are not getting the goods and services they need to lift themselves securely into the middle class. And by the way, that was an emerging markets view, but it's a global view. It happens in the developed markets too. And surely there must be a way to ensure that these capital markets work better, that they get behind these businesses and that they serve these many, many billions of people better so that that works for the economy, but also that those people are able to rise and achieve much better futures for their families and their societies. And that sense really stuck with me, and everything that I've done since then has been dedicated to that kind of transformative vision. And I love what you said when you uh you said a dedicated, dedicated group of people reshaping the world. That really landed for me because you look back through history, revolutions all start with a small band of revolutionaries, people who can see an unmet future, and people who've got the I don't know whether it's the it's yeah, courage and commitment and drive and passion and energy to really revolutionize, you know, transform. Yeah, absolutely. Our our first value as Leapfrog is humble people with a world-changing ambition. And really, revolutions can go very wrong if the people get arrogant and self-involved and they can become as destructive as the prior regime. So it's incredibly important that that group of people have a level of humility about how much they don't know while not losing the immense ambition to change the world. And so much of my experience in countries like India or Kenya or Indonesia or Vietnam, where we invest, uh, has been that you have to take an attitude of learning and you have to go and spend time and listen to understand and engage local leaders and local people in a way that allows you then to bring capital, to bring expertise from elsewhere in a way that's helpful and that's successful. So many others arrive thinking they have money and all the answers and expect everybody to just jump, which of course they do in the short term. But over time you only create sustainable success, and you only really are able to operate across multiple environments if you have that level of humility combined with the ambition to really make that change. And that is an antinomy, that is something that one really has to keep in them in your mind. Uh but importantly, Leapfrog is founded on that idea of bringing things together that you might think would be kept apart. Our second value, for example, is excellent investors with an impact soul. So again, those are not two things that are automatically brought together. But of course, if you're going to be an excellent investor, you're going to generate more capital for areas of impact. You're going to have more money to put into these companies that change people's lives. And if you have an impact soul, you're not going to go and do destructive things in the society that result in regulators and politicians jumping on you and you having a bad time there as well. So again, this kind of antinomy, this kind of bringing together of opposites really works. And still on the back of every single leapfrog business card, since I made the first one in a Kinkos in New York and went back to my office in a Starbucks, it says profit with purpose. Those magical words, profit with purpose. Because really Leapfrog is dedicated to these synergies and ultimately to the idea that profit and purpose can be brought together, and that where you do purposeful things, you can generate stronger returns for your investors. And where you generate strong returns for investors, you can end up raising more capital and getting more capital intermediated to these businesses and peoples to change their lives. Yeah, and listening to that, you know, two truths can be true at the same time. You know, they can uh coexist. You said there about an attitude of learning, and and it really struck me that it's such a rare quality to truly listen to somebody. Um, you know, people say, Yeah, I'm a great listener. I have lots of leaders who say they're great listeners, but actually to truly listen, to engage, to be curious, to ask the questions, to give people space to speak, to share their stories, and ultimately, you know, what I heard you saying there is then you can it you can you can bring them solutions in a way that's meaningful and valuable for them. Not what you think is valuable, but what they're telling you that, you know, you you can spot the gaps. Absolutely. I was in Vietnam last week uh meeting with a banking group that we invested behind called HD Bank and talking to great to the chairman and the vice chairman, incredibly impressive human beings, but also to the staff and the customers. And it was talking to the staff and the customers that I came to understand where the value add really lay. Talking to a woman who uh had had to previously, before she had the right technology and before she had the help of AI, go around a business park until 10.30 p.m. in the evening and not see her children because she was getting home so late, now able to get home by 6 and spend time with her kids. Well, that says a lot about the quality of jobs that Leapfrog and its companies are helping produce. But it also says something about efficiency in that institution. That bank is cutting hours and hours off the time that agents are taking to do things, uh, and it's probably going to have a competitive advantage as a result, and that's something for us to really build on, to have a more efficient agency force and to be serving customers more swiftly and efficiently so that they have a better customer experience. So when I then am able to look at that bank and say, how do we help this bank? I'm able to say, wow, well, our customer experience team could really contribute in these and these ways, not just, oh, that's a nice bank, we want them to do better. And that's because we really listen, we pay attention and build our companies and our business process, our investment process from the customers backwards. Now, of course, there are over 500 million people that Leapfrog's companies reach. Uh, and so we have a large sample, and we come to understand if you're serving a woman who is using a smartphone, she has a very different way of interacting and a very different set of health needs than a man with a brick phone. If she's in Ghana versus in India, she might again have very different needs, or in a rural area, or in Mumbai, in a big city, very different needs. And so we've come to understand that you need to go, you need to listen, you need to spend time understanding these human beings, but then not tell them what they ought to do, but try to serve their fundamental needs. One of the things I love about capitalism is that in the end the customer is right. And in these cases, just because you're talking about millions of customers with very low perch uh ticket purchases doesn't mean the customer isn't right. And so Leapfrog's reframe was instead of saying, like a lot of people did, ooh, poverty yuck, or look at those poor people, or I'm so great to be serving them, we said those are emerging consumers and producers. Those are people who are the masters of their own destiny, and we need to build everything to serve them. And that dedication and that sense of listening and responding to them has been at the heart of why I think we've been able to grow and do what we've done. Yeah, uh and I I you know, listening to you there, you know, at the heart, at the core, and and and and I I also hear you say, like, you know, we don't make assumptions, you know, we don't, you know, we don't know what we don't know. And you said there, and can you repeat it again? Because it's you said is it that you go backwards, the customer backwards. So uh what was the phrase you used there? I think it was really we build our businesses and our investment process from the customer backwards. And so we try and understand them very deeply and their needs and their unmet needs, and then we try and think what products and services, what structure of distribution, what underlying process will work for them to have a positive customer experience. And then we try and support our companies to develop products and distribution and ways of engagement that really speak to the true needs of those customers. And then you find that your marketing costs drop dramatically because people have such a positive experience that they share that by word of mouth in their community. You find that your brand magnetism, the stickiness of your customers, also increases, and you find that regulators get behind you because they know that you are a reliable partner to portfolio companies, and that ultimately you help those companies to look after the customers well and not to end up with explosions of problems here and there. So you end up having this incredible level of support from key constituencies, not just from the customers, if you actually have that ultimate focus. And with that focus, you know, we we just mentioned a minute, you know, it's listening to the customers, paying attention, getting feedback. And you mentioned it's not just you know meeting people at C-suite level, uh, that you know, when you're going into C it's staff, it's customer, you know, it's speaking to everybody to really get that um that that all-round view. What's most surprised you, and and by that I mean what's an assumption you may have you've made in the past about feedback you were expecting to hear from customers, but actually it was it was you know quite different to what you'd anticipated. So um Libfrog's companies serve tens of millions of people, for example, with credit. Uh, and credit is the lifeblood of many businesses as you're building businesses. Uh and I was in India meeting a garage owner, uh, and I went in assuming that he had a certain set of needs based on his income level. This is the owner of a small business, and these are the things that are going to matter to him. And I assumed that everybody around him was in that same space. And as I spoke to him more and more, I learned that his parents, who were still living with him, had been people selling fruit on the side of the road in India. Extremely, extremely poor people with one kind of experience, one set of needs. He was a garage owner, but he was also, he had also managed to save and support a business that sold textiles across town, and he was gaining getting transport across town constantly. So he had a different set of needs as an expanding business person. And it turned out his daughter had an MBA from MIT and was working at Amazon in Seattle. Now, when you look at what it is to provide credit, or for that matter, savings or insurance or any other product to that person's family, you shouldn't make assumptions because they are operating with such different needs across these geographies. And if I may say, you know, the ones that the grandparents are in the night we're in the 19th century, the parent is in the 20th century, and the grandchild is in the 21st century, and they have very different needs, very different products that work for them, and probably very different expectations of what your company needs to do to service them and provide these kinds of products and services. So one thing I really encourage people to do is to think about not just that customer, but the architecture around them, the relationships around them, in their family, but also in their community. Often with uh savings, with credit, with these areas, a lot depends on the attitude of the people around you in healthcare as well. And what you are and aren't prepared to do is determined by your community and by what is familiar or unfamiliar to your community, and that has a huge effect on how you market products and how you serve people. Yes, so listen, ask questions, don't make assumptions. Um yeah, and I and I think listen and silent, someone shared this with me a while ago. Listen and silent, now an anagrams of the, you know, got the same letters. And I was like, wow, so if you know if we listen, we are actually being silent and we are holding space to get valuable data points that you know that feed into strategy, feed into that vision. And just to just uh uh to rewind a little bit, like Leapfrog, you know, we talked about the Genesis. I'm always interested in the names of companies because you know typically there's a story behind it. What is the story behind the name Leapfrog? Uh I I have to tell you that the first award we won was from Private Equity International for the name. And at that point I had zero dollars. And so I was extremely excited to have an award to send around to potential investors. Um, and I waited at this point for the magazine to arrive, and it arrived, and I opened it, and we'd co-won the award. And the other people who had won the award were Adult Entertainment Capital. So I decided I did not want to co-brand with uh with them. Uh, but I was very pleased that the name had that resonance for people, and it really has through the years captured something of people's imagination because in the development space, in international development and poverty relief and so on, the idea of uh leapfrogging from one stage of development to another, going from a sclerotic landline grid in a country to mobile with 5G and uh and mobile money uh is a very exciting one because you don't have to take decades and decades and decades to enable these countries and these industries to rise. So that's one idea. Another idea is that uh when I looked at um what sells, it turns out all of us walk into wine stores, almost all of us, and have no idea of the difference between the different wine bottles. If there is an animal on the bottle, we're 30% more likely to buy it just by the positive association. Really? So I was really excited, I like the idea of an animal. And then finally I looked around and I saw some of these names. And you know, what are in the names are like dark like rock and these kind of very solid, stodgy things. And I thought, no, I want something that has a level of dynamism, a level of sense that this is the future, this is going far. And so Leapfrog captured all of that. Uh, and there was also a wonderful Zen proverb finally that said, leap and the net will appear. And so much of being an entrepreneur is about deciding leap and the net will appear, or I will make it appear. Uh, and that resonated for me too. So all those things came together in the founding of Leapfrog and in the name. And it's it's so interesting, and I love that Zen phrase, leap and the net will appear, or I'll make it appear, because as an entrepreneur, um you can't always see that it's not always a defined path. You know, a lot of it they you know they talk about you're you're building the plane whilst flying it. And I'm sure again, uh when you were starting out, who were the believers? You know, who were the people that um that that supported you? And and and the kind of the second part to that question is there are going to be people who say you're reckless. This is never gonna work, like you're crazy. And and so what did you you know, when you get the you know, the naysayers, what did you do with those voices? Um I would say when I started out and I said to people, I'm going to enable 25 million low-income people to get financial services and uh change their lives, and I'm going to raise a hundred million dollars to start to put this thing with profit and purpose together. Pretty much my mother and my wife and my sister believe, but not many others. Okay. And I was really fortunate that uh President Clinton uh And his team, I met a relatively junior person at the Clinton Global Initiative, and I talked my way up uh until uh they could see that this was a truth that was worth exposing in the world, and they uh put me into the the uh plenary uh of uh of the Clinton Global Initiative, and I stood up and President Clinton said that this was gonna be uh a fantastic big thing in the world. Uh Pierre Midjar, the founder of eBay, was in the audience, was already talking with him, his team, uh, and he tweeted it out. Uh, and very soon people started paying attention to this. Um, I would say that it was still a ratio of probably 99 to 1. And I'm I'm always uh uh I always make the joke half in jest and half in truth, and I'm glad that dating prepared me for this level of rejection that I uh that I had to face uh in the early days. But you know, Gandhi once said if you're the bearer of a truth, you can bring down empires. And I think there was something in my story and in the leapfrog story that was a truth that needed to be heard and that won round uh incredible entrepreneurs and early believers, and eventually the development finance institutions uh and then later insurers and uh private equity investors uh came to believe and put in the first 42 million dollars. And today, of course, we have billions under management, and we have a wide array of institutional investors, over a hundred different sophisticated investors. But I'm always so grateful to the first angels and the first one from this institution and the first one from that institution who really believed this uh this crazy guy who had this idea of profit with purpose in his head, and that everybody thought, well, that sounds like a contradiction and utterly impossible. But well, I work a lot with entrepreneurs and I often think they are called crazy, but it's because they can see a future others yet can't. And they can visualize it, and to them it's so they can touch it and it's it's it's getting people on that journey. And when you said about, you know, it it uh it's it was like the 99 to one, but I think if the one is you've got the founder of eBay, President Clinton, visibility, it's it's having those key people who believe and who can help you get your message out there, and what an extraordinary journey you've I mean, extraordinary. I'm gonna underscore and highlight that word extraordinary because I mean it really is an extraordinary journey, and you're so likable, and there's such you can see the passion and enthusiasm that it comes out of you. And I and I and I I you said about that early ambition, you know, what what you what you hope to raise, the the the amount of people that you wanted to, you know, you were going to you know support on on and on low, you know, the low-income people. And I like I'm wondering as you say that, like how much confidence did you have in that early, you know, that early ambition? Did you know, did you, did you really, did you see the scale of what it was going to become? I had a sense it could be big, but often I think people look at a founder and they think that what is created was you know born from their head and they knew it all from the beginning. My real lesson on that is your idea, your fundamental idea as a founder or as a CEO or both is a magnet for extraordinary people, for opportunity, for capital, and all of those things will lead to something so far beyond your initial imagination that you can't possibly know it in what shape it will take at the start. And people love to pretend that they look back and they knew exactly what was going to be created. I never believe that. I think it evolves, and hopefully, you listen enough and you learn enough from the people around you that it evolves in ways you couldn't have known and couldn't have expected. I started Leapfrog when I was 32. Uh uh I certainly had a ton of growing to do, and I and I hope that I changed and my vision changed through the years, and that my vision now is different at a scale that is, you know, 25 times our original vision. Uh and now looking 25 times ahead, you know, you multiply those by each other, it should be 625 times bigger. Uh, and I hope I would not have exactly the same view at this point as I had then. So I really believe in having very specific plans, but also believing that the people will make history, that small group you and I spoke about. And if you look at Leapfrog, it's less than a hundred people who are backing 40-something companies and their management teams who together are employing 320,000 people, who together are serving 569 million people. And if you think about the leverage in that, uh, they're really what you want to do is have great people on your team who can shape what you do and who can come up with things you wouldn't otherwise do, because the way those you know, less than 100 people uh show up and what they create ripples out to so many millions of people that you really need to bring the best of each person in the team to bear and not think that one person has all the answers. And it's partly why I built a partnership. And from the beginning, by the way, I was the youngest partner with people who had many more years of experience than me often, uh, because I think that the partnership model often allows for that diversity of perspectives and those divergent capabilities that go beyond uh what any one person can do in terms of creativity, understanding, execution, and the ripples that then go out into the world. You've used the word ripple, and uh I I always like the ROI, I think ripple of impact. You know, what is the ripple of impact that idea that conversation is creating? Because there's an echo. And and and I think when we start to, you know, really all of us, you know, to start to think, you know, everything has a ripple. It brings more consciousness to the choices that that we're making. Uh and you said then no one person has all the answers. And I think as leaders and entrepreneurs, it's to recognise when you've got that strong bench of talent, you're not expected to have all the answers, but it's having the team around you and bringing out the best in each other. And you've uh attracted over the years such an extraordinary bench, um, uh a bench of talent. And and I'm wondering if you were to put yourself into their shoes, you know, what do you think has drawn them to working with you, to being you know a partner at Leapfrog? Well, I think the idea of practicing their excellence, which is investing or operations across a very distributed firm, uh while having a higher purpose. There's that line, why have a job when you can have a purpose? has really resonated for everybody. These are people who were brilliant in their industries and often at the heights of their industries and lionized in their industries, uh, some of the folks who came across. And then there are folks who joined us much earlier in their careers, but were the highest performers in their universities or in their early jobs, and who felt there must be a meaning beyond this, and yet I want to do this thing brilliantly. So that is something in terms of the excellent investors with an impact sole value that we have that I think unites us all. I also think we're just really inspired by the companies. If you look at the companies we invest behind, um, you know, we we, for instance, our healthcare team invested in a company called Good Life. It was a small chain of pharmacies in Kenya and turned it into the largest retail healthcare provider in the whole of East Africa. And that is a company that went from a situation where anyone walking into a typical pharmacy has a 30% chance of getting the wrong medication. It's either fake or misprescribed or a placebo, through to a company that looks like Boots when you walk in, has 150 stores, serves millions of people, and has path labs, has uh uh nutritionists, has all these forms of advice and support. And where our partner was actually a subsidiary of Toyota, and they just acquired the whole company from us, by the way. So it was a brilliant exit for Leapfrog's investors. But if you're a healthcare person or you're an investor in Africa, being able to be part of that is incredibly special. If you're in India, we were speaking about credit earlier. If you're in India, we got behind Northern Arc, this relatively small group. We were the first institutional investor that said, you know what, let's not build one microfinance institution. Let's support all the microfinance institutions that are serving low-income women across the society. Let's open the gates of the capital markets to them. Let's structure it so that they can get more capital that they can put into funds and other vehicles and deploy into these microcredit institutions and serve many women. Well, today that institution has IPO'd and serves a hundred million women with credit. I almost said low income, but a lot of them are not low income anymore because they've used the credit to lift their families out of poverty. Now, if you're investing in Asia or you're investing in financial services, you want to be part of that. And so I think the actual activity that we do and the immediacy of it, uh, that it's not grand theoretical box ticking, it is genuinely changing lives in a deep way at an unprecedented scale in diverse ways, that profoundly resonates for people. Because once they've seen that, once they're doing that, how can they go anywhere else? Yeah, and and and I'm wondering, listening to you there, you know, when you talk about the scale of the impact and the immediacy of the impact as well, and you know, and and the scale at which your you know the companies are changing lives. How uh uh what's the it's I I suppose I'm wondering, do you take a moment to kind of breathe it all in to be like, well, I I know you want to change the world. There's a there's such you're so mission-led. And I I'm wondering if you take a moment to pause to really feel the feels of what you're creating. Georgie, honestly, this has been a journey for me. I used to just get to the one milestone and then be off to the next one. Uh and I at a certain point got feedback that the team needed to stop and celebrate a little bit. They couldn't live in the six-month to 20-year horizon all the time. And I think I am much better at it. I'm just coming out of our global leadership uh offsite in uh Vietnam, where we did do a lot of celebrating in various ways of the achievements of the firm, you know, a record fund that we raised last year for uh investing in financial services and healthcare, a successful launch of our climate strategy, as you mentioned, reaching uh over 500 million people with essential services. And of that, uh 413 million are low income. So that's 10% of the world's low-income population now, reached by leapfrog companies, which is a massive achievement we were really celebrating. Um, and and fundamentally, above all, building something that is so far beyond me, where there are incredible people in every position. I looked around that table and there wasn't a leader. I wanted to find someone else to do their job. I felt these are extraordinary humans and extraordinary professionals, and they can carry this incredible mission. And I really did take time to say to the team, look at what we have built here. Yes, we want to reach a billion people, low-income people, by the end of this decade with essential services. Yes, we want to grow into the many multi-billions and show a different way of doing capitalism. Yes, we want to crowd in many of the world's largest institutions. We've started a number, but many, many more of them, into impact investing. Yes, we're gonna lead this asset class or this strategy into the tens of trillions. But for now, you do need to stop and say, wow, this is so much further than we imagined before. I so appreciate the people around me. I so appreciate the midnight oil that was burnt, the time away from families when we're on the road, because this is a distributed firm, uh, the moments of resilience when COVID struck, or when we had very difficult moments in the markets with currency ructions or challenges that companies faced, you know, this was not a smooth journey, and I would never want to pretend that it is. And I think part of what we rarely celebrate, above all, is our resilience. Because if you really are resilient, so that if you start losing money for investors, you go and you get that money back. Uh, and if the cycle turns against you, you then accelerate into the cycle and get heroic outcomes uh with that action. Uh, you know, if you really take that attitude, you can get through so, so much that inevitably comes your way when you're building a business across dozens of countries. Oh, there's so much to unpack there. And uh but but it it but one of the pieces that you meant, I think this is really important for all, not just leaders actually, you know, celebrate the milestones. And you and I talked about, you know, you can get to the summit, and you know, you reach the summit and you're like nexting, next big summit, but actually take a moment to take in the view because there's a journey of setbacks, challenges, uh you know, things may not have gone your way through external, you know, variables. We talk about you know, COVID, you you know, so we're adapting and and so it is don't miss those moments because they're so motivational and actually and there's so much that goes into those mo you know milestones. And sharing credit for those milestones. The thing I find frankly bizarre and confusing is when uh founders or leaders uh try and take all the credit for the thing created. Uh and it's such an ephemeral thing that falls away almost immediately. Versus if you share credit, which is actually much more accurate, those people feel so endorsed, supported, enlarged, enabled by the sharing of that credit and by the recognition of what they have done. And they're able to go then and do so, so much more. So it's a much better medium to long-term strategy as well as the right thing to do. Uh, I love that quote by Socrates said who said it's rational to be moral. Uh, I really am struck by the need to not only stop and celebrate, but make sure that the credit is given where credit is due and you share it as widely as possible. And yes, occasionally people will take credit for something you came up with. That's fantastic. That means they've internalized so much what what you said or what you did previously that they've lost track of the fact that it was yours, not theirs. Brilliant. Your internal marketing or external marketing has really worked. So embrace it and be happy with it. And and to your point, give people credit because it has a multiplier impact. I mean, it it yields high returns there. And you with you you touched on the word resiliency, and you strike me in our conversation, someone that is energy rich, and equally it's such, you know, emotions are contagious, there's a kind of contagion, and you have such incredible energy. And agency sits with each of us to manage our own energy, you know, because like like a you know, um cars and our fuel tanks, you know, we have an energy bank account. And so as as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a as a as a leader, traveling a lot, you know, you there are a lot of uh you know debits coming out of your out of your your energy bank account. How do you make sure the credits go in? So you and and and I so you kind of stay fit for purpose, and by that I mean so you can function and and be incredible at what you do. Well, energy has to be renewable, not just extractive. This is true, actually. This is true. And so I think you have to think about what fundamentally renews you. And different people are different, right? There are a lot of introverts for whom time with themselves and time to think and time to look out the window and time to listen to music is the thing that does it. And I admire and appreciate that. For me, it's the time with people who I really love and care about. And if I don't get date night with my wife in a week, or a walk with a friend on the weekend, and of course my weekly nap on the weekend, I am not a renewed resource. So I think you really have to learn what are those things that energize you. I also think recognizing the things that suck your energy out is so important, and we're also driven by I ought to do, I ought to do X, Y, or Z, that we end up undertaking activities that remove a huge amount of our energy. So, for example, if you are an intuitive person who likes people, doing a ton of process and documentation and so on is utterly exhausting. An hour of that takes the same energy as eight hours of networking, which just makes you walk out excited and wanting to have dinner with some of the people you just met. Similarly, if you're a person who really likes systematically cranking through that to-do list and getting the process along and carrying everybody with you, and you're asked to go and be in a random networking function where you just chat to people and you can't see where this is going right now, that's going to exhaust you, and so you shouldn't do that. So, really understanding what works for you in your daily activity is important. So, with my co-founder Gary, we have very different styles and very different things that energize us, and we're very careful to discuss what gives him energy and what he should be carrying, and what gives me energy and what I should be carrying. And we actually found that the other was able to carry it so much better and do it so much better if we align not around where things ought to sit or what we each ought to do because a CEO does this and a COO does that, and a person in Sydney should do this, and a person in Johannesburg should do that. You know, these sort of general aughts, but instead aligned around who we were as human beings. Uh, that just worked hugely better. So that after 18 years, I can't recommend the starting from who you are and energy point higher for designing the organization. My simple line around this is don't draw the organizational boxes and then shove people into them. Hire great people and draw the organizational diagram around them. I love that. I and you you said there about you know, it's about knowing our you know our renewable fuel. And and I I've always believed all good leadership starts with self-leadership, and self-leadership is about awareness, understanding ourselves from the inside out. And you said there, you know, your what fuels you having a nap on a Saturday might be very different to my, you know, to what fuels me. But and when we know what our fuel is, it's prioritizing that and protecting it and or putting that in our diaries because you know our your mission needs you to be energized, it needs you to have vitality and also longevity. Absolutely. I mean, my my parents met in psychology class, and so I I'm definitely a product of that experiment of trying to know yourself and empathize with others in terms of where they are coming from and understand the psychodynamics between you. And I think there are so many layers that the world places on top of us where we view people in through their position in the company, their age, their gender, their race, their whatever the implicit uh categorizations uh that we've been taught to make, when instead what we should be doing is trying to work out who is this person in their individuality and what is it that moves them. And I I've tried really hard, we all, it's an ongoing journey, we all make mistakes, we all have various biases and blind spots, but I've tried really hard to see, truly see the people who I'm working with and truly align their activity around the things that make them a renewable resource and allow them to really leap to heights that they never expected and that therefore allow the company to leap to heights that no one ever anticipated. Yeah, and you use this word eyes there, and I think it's have eyes that see and ears that hear, because often we're in that constant go, go, go. But actually, if you take a pause and are really conscious, you can see, well, look, what what motivates your your COO might be very different to another partner. So it's really, really tuning into them. And I want to uh just underscore a few of the stats that that that that you shared. Early because I think it's, I mean, the numbers are so extraordinary, but your portfolio companies have reached over five half a billion people, 559 million people in the last year. And that's including more than 403 million low-income emerging consumers living on less than $11.20 a day. And at the same time, your portfolio companies have generated over $7.1 billion in revenues with an average annual growth rate of 22% and a 9% rise in profit margins across active companies in funds three and four. Extraordinary. And I'm like, what's next? So we talked about accelerating the month's turns. You know, what does success look like for you? And I don't know what the time frame is because you said earlier on, you know, your team say we don't always be in the six month to 20 years. So what does success look like for you? Well, first we want to reach a billion low-income people with essential services by the end of this decade. So, yes, we have reached almost half that number, uh, but there's a long way to go. We also want to offer them a more diverse array of essential services and goods through our companies. So Leapfrog companies offer payments and remittances and insurance and savings and credit and so forth in the financial services space. They offer all sorts of inpatient and outpatient health care of various kinds, but increasingly we're doing work in the climate space. And we've launched a climate strategy that I announced at Windsor with uh that the king and the US President uh that now focuses on areas like uh clean energy for homes, uh, clean transport, for instance, with two and three-wheel uh bikes and auto rickshaws that uh exist in their tens of millions, um, in areas like food and agriculture and in the built environment. And we see this climate piece as incredibly important going forward. I think it's important to say that the whole dialogue on climate in the world is focused on only two of three legs of the stool, and this entire world, the stool, will fall over unless we get that third leg right. So the first leg you hear about in climate is decarbonizing the wealthy countries. And of course, that's incredibly important. They can't just have dirty fuels and dirty ways of operating. Then you hear about green infrastructure in the global north and the global south. Yes, you need cleaner infrastructure that is, you know, heavy buildings, trains, these sorts of things, and they've got to be built and operated. And that's really important that as that those giant things don't end up spewing out uh gases and other things that destroy the environment. But what isn't talked about enough, the third leg, is emerging consumers and producers. So over half the world currently has a small carbon footprint. They don't have that much wealth, they're not flying on planes, they're not, they may be driving a two-wheel vehicle, not a truck, etc. etc. So those people are now getting wealthier and wealthier in our markets. And if they end up having the carbon footprint that you and I have, we are gonna blow the world's carbon budget so profoundly that it doesn't matter what happens in the rich countries, because it's more than half of humanity growing manifold times in terms of their carbon footprint. We've actually done a study with CGAP, part of the World Bank Group, and with uh with other major institutions like Temesec that shows that even if the entire rich world hits all its Paris targets uh for carbon reduction, uh the and if our developing markets keep going at the pace they're going, we will hit 2.8 degrees warming, which is far beyond what the world can tolerate and will result in massive destruction, heat, drought, waves, everything you can imagine being rained down on all of us and our children and grandchildren. So it's incredibly important we start a global dialogue around how you get green technologies rather than dirty technologies into the hands of four billion emerging consumers and producers. And that opportunity is enormous. We back, for instance, in India uh Battery Smart, which is the largest battery swapping business in the country. So instead of people lining up with their auto rickshaws outside a gas station, I've literally stood there opposite the gas station, seeing them line up for an hour to put in fuel at a gas station that has a you know a giant rent because it takes up so much space. Our battery swapping stations, which are about fiftieth of the size of a gas station, sit there. The riders come in on their bikes or their auto rickshaw, stop, jump off, pull out their battery, drop it down, scan another battery with their mobile phone, lift it up, put it into the vehicle, put the lid down, and keep going within less than two minutes. And what does that cost? Well, the bike is 30 to 40% cheaper because it doesn't have an engine and it doesn't have a battery in it, and it's 30% cheaper to fill up because you've got the battery rather than the fuel, and it saves people an hour to two hours of queuing a day of productive time. This is what we call the green discount. It's actually cheaper to have a green technology, and it's empowering for those people, and it's better for them as producers, as delivery drivers, or whatever it is that they do, or just getting to work for longer. So we think that this climate space is incredibly exciting because you have an opportunity to back companies that bring half of humanity, new technologically advanced tools that you aren't saying you ought to have this. You're saying this is better, it's cheaper, and it's cleaner. Adopt all of this. And things that are all of those things will win, and millions and millions of people will adopt them. And we see this all over the world now as areas that we can uh unfold investment and put enormous amount of capital to work and do very well for our investors with, and where many, many unicorns will be minted uh in places like India and Nigeria and Indonesia and Vietnam. People, of course, think about the Chinese consumer, a billion people who rose, an economy that grew 50x, but that is happening now in all those other countries, and hopefully all those other countries can leapfrog in terms of the green space, in terms of clean energy, clean transport, clean food and ag, clean buildings, uh, in a way that those consumers, even in China, couldn't at the time. So we really see these as all important areas: financial services, healthcare, and climate, because at the root of everything, if you have wealth, health, and energy, you can do almost everything else. You can pay for your daughter's school fees, you you can get to the to college, you can do what all these other areas because those are the three things at the root of everything. So we will continue to cascade out to hundreds of millions of people through our companies those three things wealth, health, and energy. I love that. Thank you so much, Andy, for spending time with me today. And to circle back at the beginning, you talked about, you know, this I think my words revolution, but you you this mission that you spoke to. And it's so profound, it's so purposeful, and you ignite people, you know, your your the the the way you speak and how you share your mission, it moves people. And it I imagine everyone you come into contact with, there's a bite of action because they see what you see. Your vision is compelling, and I said it's so inspiring. And I'll be one of your disciples, you know, because I I want to I want to help educate people as well. And I've and I've I've learned so much from you today. And this is just the tip of the icebook. And I know there's so much more having watched your TEDx talks, and that there is so if people want to, what would you like the the average, when I say the average, I don't mean the average but if we want to do more to support this mission, what do you you know, what's you're asking people? What could be a valuable call to action? Well, first of all, thank you so much, Georgie. And of course, having read what you've written and seen your speaking very powerfully. I'm very touched by that because I know you know where that comes from and that it's it's hard to do that. And so I really appreciate that. I I think the first thing is our website is a really rich resource, leapfroginvest.com. We've been working very hard to build not only an exemplary firm but an industry, and it's a good way into the industry. You can look at the companies, you can see the customer experiences, you can learn about the investors. It's really an exciting, rich world to go to. We also have a set of impact and investment results we come up with each year that is filled with video content and other experiences where you can really get familiar with these things. And if you just put leapfrog impact investment results into your browser, you can find that. I'm also uh a big poster on LinkedIn two or three times a week where I try and capture what I'm experiencing in the different countries and meeting different people and different company leaders. So hopefully people can follow that. In terms of action that you can take in your own life, I really believe throwing away a very outmoded notion that there's a conflict between doing good and doing business or investing is very important. We've all were brought up in a world where we were told they're for-profit and non-profit, and of course, those are complete artifices. Uh and you need to kind of look for ways to find money with meaning uh or profit with purpose and find places where those come together because sometimes those synergistic places are the most powerful for really changing the world and for moving you. So I think just being really attentive to it and not buying into the way the world has tried to organize things is really important in your own life. Whether it's by starting or supporting a social enterprise or seeing that a business can take new leaps into areas that are more impactful and can be oriented that way and can motivate its staff more that way, or whether it's saying, wow, the way I'll invest will be more attentive to the fact that there are big opportunities for profit out there in places that are untrammeled, places that people haven't looked, but there are companies like Leapfrog's companies that are doing that. That is something that I think we should all be more attentive to. And I think telling the story is also important, right? There are very well-resourced institutions in this world who are not interested in the revolution and the transformation, right? Um, who are spruking a very old form of capitalism that is not adaptive for economies or societies. And so I think really telling the story of leapfrog, of impact investing, of what any one of us does in profit with purpose is important because stories often break through so much more than uhy language and noble sentiments. And so when we talk about these are the companies, this is how this company lit up a hundred million homes in Africa. And so girls are not studying at night by candlelight and unable to avoid walking through the streets in dangerous times because the streets are lit up. When you talk about those stories, it resonates for people much more than saying, Oh, we need to get energy to Africa or something like that. So I really encourage people to tell these stories if you have them. You can find them in your own life, you can find them on Leapfrog's website or in the stories of impact investors, and to get out there and that narrative will progressively and change the world when it comes from so many different directions and it's carried uh as a truth by more and more people. Thank you, Andy. I'm truly humbled by this conversation. So thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Georgia. It's been such a pleasure.