The following is a conversation between Freada Kapor Klein, Partner at Kapor Capital, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Freada Kapor Klein, Founding Partner at Kapor Capital and Co-chair of Kapor Center
Denver: The need to “build back better” in the wake of the cataclysmic events from this past year is at the top of most people’s minds, but good intentions are no longer good enough… or are piecemeal solutions. Freada Kapor Klein, a partner at Kapor Capital and co-chair of the Kapor Center, understands better than most what changes are truly needed to assure for an equitable, diverse, and inclusive rebuild. And she is with us now.
Welcome to The Business of Giving, Freada!
Freada: It is my pleasure to be here.
Denver: Let’s begin by having you tell us about Kapor Capital and what sets it apart from other venture capital investment firms.
Freada: So Kapor Capital has very specific investment criteria, and we talk about gap closing. So the core of the seed stage tech startup has to close gaps of access or opportunity or outcome for communities of color and/or low-income communities. So it can be in any sector. It can be a fintech company. It can be an edtech company. It can be a healthcare company. It can be an energy company. But the core business — not philanthropy — the core business has to close gaps.
And so, we’ve been around for a while and since 2011 have been 100% gap closing, and it turns out that’s pretty profitable. We released our impact report, and we beat out the guideposts in the field, which are Cambridge Associates and PitchBook. We beat their top quartile in terms of financial returns from 2011 through the end of 2017. And so, we’ve done that also with a set of founders who are pretty close to the 59% underrepresented founders.
Denver: Let’s talk a little bit about that — concessionary returns. That has really been something that people have always talked about, that if you want to do good in this world, that’s wonderful because we’re here to more than just make a profit, but you’re going to have to give up a little to do so. So what I just heard you say from that report, that is, in fact, not the case.
Freada: That is no longer the case. If that was ever true, that is conventional wisdom, but haven’t we seen conventional wisdom be wrong many, many times?
Denver: Amen.
Freada: And we are not an exception. You can look at a firm like Generation Investment Management that was started by Al Gore and David Blood. They’ve been at it, I think, 17 years now. They have north of $25 billion under management, and they have a very rigorous set of sustainability criteria. Sustainability writ large, not just in terms of environment, but sustainability in terms of, for instance, how a company treats people. And they have been in the top five funds in terms of returns… top five funds in the world, for every year since they’ve been reporting their returns.
Denver: Is this changing the way investment is done? Because, again, we know that the common understanding is you do have to give up a little bit, and you’re coming forth with data. Has that changed the way people are investing? Or is it really not permeated out to the general public and investors at large?
Freada: Yes and no. So I think you’re absolutely right. It has not completely sunk in and changed practices, but a lot of people are paying attention. And as I understand it, 2020 was a record year in terms of those funds investing in environmental and social governance, ESG criteria.
And so, I think it is a rising trend, and I think that will be accelerated by the Biden-Harris Administration because they’ve put a clear stake in the ground about environmental sustainability. And so, obviously, the companies that pivot in that direction, or the startups that meet those needs are going to be in high demand.
Denver: I think you’re going to see a lot more B Corps. Finally, after a fledgling start, they’re beginning to gain momentum. Well, for companies that you do invest in, Freada, you require the founders to make a commitment, which you have aptly named “The Founders’ Commitment.” And that has four pillars, which spell GIVE. Tell us what each stands for.
Freada: So we were the first venture capital firm — five years ago already, 2016, before any of this was trendy — to ask our founders… not to ask… to actually require of our founders that they make a pledge to build a diverse team and to build an inclusive culture. But it’s not a check-the-box exercise, nor is it a gotcha exercise. We help them.
And so, the first thing that we ask our founders to do… and by the way, I think it’s really important to point out that the whole idea for The Founders’ Commitment actually came from our founders. They said, “Look, we know there are people out there who are looking for purpose-driven, impact-driven, mission-driven companies, and we want to be able to flag ourselves for those candidates out there. And so they asked: Is there a way, is there a stamp of approval that they could actually put on their website or on their job descriptions? So I think it’s very important to give our founders credit for coming to us with the idea.
So the four pillars, the “G” is to set goals. And we do not have cookie-cutter goals. We do not have quotas. We help our founders establish goals that make sense for their business. One of the guideposts we give them is: Think about having your employee base match your customer base. And if you think about it, that is just simply good business. And so, no two of our companies set the same goals unless they have identical customer bases.
The second pillar, the “I” in GIVE, is invest. And we ask people to invest in the tools and technology that mitigate bias in every aspect of hiring, assignment, performance review, promotion. And some of those companies, some of those people of tech companies are actually in our portfolio. And some of them, we actually subsidize to help our founders. Startups should not have a lot of cash lying around. Startups are lean and scrappy and invested in the future. So we help them invest in those kinds of companies.
And it might be something like interviewing.io that builds an anonymous platform for technical interviews. So you know nothing about the candidate except their ability to code. And actually, isn’t that all you should be caring about? And another one that we have offered to help subsidize for our founders is tEQuitable, equitable with a “T.” And it is a tech-enabled Ombuds service. So it is handling and problem-solving on issues of bias or harassment or bullying because startups don’t — we hope — don’t have the need for a full-time Ombuds, may not even have a full-time people ops person. But this way, they can stop problems early and get some very important trend data.
The third pillar, the “V”, is volunteer. We know from data outside of our portfolio that helping employees get invested and engaged in their communities makes a big difference in terms of their engagement, their productivity. So we suggest that founders organize volunteer opportunities for their employees, and to whatever degree possible, with underrepresented communities, especially as it overlaps with their customer base.
And the final pillar, the “E” in GIVE, is educate. And that’s something that we actually help our founders do. After the murder of George Floyd, we actually put on a whole series of workshops for our founders as well as for the employees in our portfolio companies about how to step up and speak out about systemic racism.
Denver: But you don’t really lay these expectations on your founders without helping them along the way. You really truly are a partner in this journey.
Freada: Exactly. We do not want to put another hurdle. Starting a company is hard enough; sustaining a high-growth startup is really a Herculean task, and we are their partners along the way.
When we “build back better,” we ought to put people at the helm whose lived experience tells them about the problems needing to be solved.
So the lived experience of our founders is incredibly moving, and they are passionate about fixing problems that they themselves have experienced. It makes them better entrepreneurs. It makes them, as our returns speak to, it makes them more successful companies.
Denver: And if I can throw another “V” in there for you, because I know how important it is to you, that is the values that these companies uphold. Speak a little bit about those and what you look for in one of these startups.
Freada: Well, for instance, values are critically important. We do look for values alignment. We want our founders to have their lived experience generate the ideas for their business. And actually, I saw an article in Fast Company recently responding to a call about “build back better,” and somebody made the point that: You know what? When we “build back better,” we ought to put people at the helm whose lived experience tells them about the problems needing to be solved.
So the lived experience of our founders is incredibly moving and they are passionate about fixing problems that they themselves have experienced. It makes them better entrepreneurs. It makes them, as our returns speak to, it makes them more successful companies.
Denver: I had the president of Fast Forward on recently, which is a nonprofit accelerator, and the companies that they invest in, 84% of those founders had lived the experience. And there are a couple of things about it, I guess. Not only do they better understand it, but they often don’t jump to another job for a better opportunity because it’s somewhere deep in their DNA, I guess.
Freada: Exactly. And they know that they’re helping themselves. They’re helping their family members. They’re helping their neighbors. They are helping people who have gone through really difficult situations. They’ve got the scars, but they’ve also got the grit and the tenacity and the vision about how to solve it.
Denver: Freada, let me ask you about impact investing from the standpoint of these recent issues we’ve seen arise in the past year around systemic racism, and racial equity, and racial justice. Do impact investors need to further calibrate and refine their investments in light of this?
Freada: Absolutely. It ties right into what we were talking about in terms of lived experience. And so, I think that the venture capital community is very far behind at taking diversity seriously in terms of who’s at the investment table. A lot of the VC firms say, “Well, partner positions don’t come up very often. It’s expected to last 10- to 12 years.” But who’s around the table has everything to do with who you invest in. And so, I think those linkages have started to be demonstrated by: How many women are at the table? How many African-Americans are at the table? How many Latinx are at the investment decision-making table? And what does that do in terms of changing the construction of the portfolio?
So, I think it is critically important that VC firms themselves look to bring diversity into their ranks, that they also educate themselves about systemic bias and racism, and look at the ways in which it might have crept into their decision-making despite their best efforts.
The best part of startup culture is the opportunity to experiment, to iterate, to sometimes fail. And so, to take that good part of startup culture and translate it into the organizational culture of tech was really an important innovation.
Denver: You have been at this longer than anybody else that I know, and that would be diversity and inclusion in the tech community. And as you said, we’ve moved forward and we’ve moved backwards, and we did a little bit of a side shuffle. Give us where you think it stands today, and also whether recent developments in this world and in this country are really going to lead us to meaningful change.
Freada: Some good questions. I have been at this longer than anyone in part because I’m old so I’ve put many, many decades into this effort.
Denver: We are both very young, so we are going to strike that from the edit.
Freada: So in 1976, before most of our founders were born, I co-founded the first group on sexual harassment in the United States. And what has been absent, perhaps “erased” — intentionally using that term — from history is the fact that most of the sexual harassment cases brought at the earliest time were brought by African American women. And so, I always had an intersectional lens towards looking at the issue of sexual harassment, always had the lens of what’s going on in the workplace culture. So I have been at diversity efforts a long time.
And in 1984, having just finished my doctoral dissertation, I was hired at Lotus, the high-growth startup of the 1980s, and my job description, which unfortunately I have not seen often enough… my job description was to make Lotus the most progressive employer in the US. That was a really fun challenge and an important and serious one also. But what it said is the best part of startup culture is the opportunity to experiment, to iterate, to sometimes fail. And so, to take that good part of startup culture and translate it into the organizational culture of tech was really an important innovation.
And there are things we did at Lotus in the 1980s that sadly companies still aren’t doing. One of those is in the mid-1980s, we tied manager’s compensation to their survey results. How their employees rated them was sort of a collective upward review on: How was your manager doing at living the Lotus values?
Denver: That’s way ahead of its time.
Freada: Yes. And so, part of a manager’s variable compensation was: Were they walking the talk or not?
Denver: The work you did in the 1970s around social justice and advocacy, and I know that you were deeply involved with the Bay Area Women Against Rape, how has advocacy changed over those 40 years…aside from the internet, of course. But do you see any ways in which we go about it effectively today that’s really different than the way it used to be?
Freada: I think it still has the same roots, and some of the roots are some of the basic principles in community organizing. And I think what we saw this last round in both the general election and in the Georgia election is that it was the people on the ground going door to door in communities where they were already well-known and well-trusted, that that is what made the difference in voter turnout. So, I do think the people connection has been a constant.
As you mentioned, though, social media has dramatically transformed that kind of all the ways in which people can connect with each other, can find out about events, can find out about anything as simple as how to get a ride to the polls, or can find out on the internet if you just lost your job due to COVID, how can I get food for my family? How can I get access to job training to re-skill?
Denver: Do you see a lot more company activism and CEO activism coming out of this? I was beginning to see it before the pandemic. Dick’s not selling guns, and Nike and Colin Kaepernick. I just wonder what your take might be in terms of what you see happening out there with companies and with CEOs in terms of becoming more vocal around issues.
Freada: I think that’s a very important trend, and so I linked two things. Link one is direct employee activism. We’ve seen it at lots of places. Google in particular recently. But we’ve seen it in Amazon. We’ve seen in other companies. But I would link also the employee activism to the trend towards stakeholder capitalism, away from shareholder capitalism. And I think that’s a very important global shift that allows room for employee activism and simultaneously, CEO activism.
All of the data suggests that younger talent cares dramatically about the purpose of their company, the mission, whether it does good or does evil in the world, and expects their CEOs to speak out, which puts a big burden on CEOs, and it also requires authenticity.
We saw an awful lot of companies issue check-the-box performative diversity statements after the murder of George Floyd, and some of those companies, some of those CEOs are being held accountable now. “OK. You made this statement. What have you done? How have you enacted it? How have you lived up to it? What have you changed about our hiring? What have you changed about our community engagement? What have you changed about our product strategy?”
Denver: In terms of hiring and promotions, talk a little bit about meritocracy. I’m reading Michael Sandel’s book right now. And I know you’ve had a lot to say on this. And meritocracy is, again, theoretically advancing based on talent, effort, and achievement. Speak to us what you know about it and what you’ve learned. You’ve done a lot of research.
Freada: I have. Thank you. So my view of meritocracy is, it would be a nice thing if we ever achieved it. We are nowhere close to achieving a meritocracy. And it isn’t because people don’t value it, and it isn’t because people don’t try; it is because the human brain is wired to be biased.
And that’s not always a bad thing. What that means is the human brain is wired to associate two things together. And before we had language, let alone the internet, we needed to be able to associate two things together. We needed to be able to associate: those mushrooms are tasty, would be good in my stew, might make me high, and those mushrooms will kill me. We can’t have to keep learning that all the time.
But that ability of the brain to associate two things means, in the words of some neuroscientists and those who’ve looked at systemic bias, that what happens is that the culture becomes the thumbprint on the brain. And so, if you live in a biased culture, you absorb it, and then you act on it. And so, biased culture, especially in tech, means that we have these ideas. We have these patterns of who’s a technologist, who’s a founder, who’s a star engineer, and those are highly exclusionary. Most of what we see in tech is shorthand, and people are using pedigrees as shorthand, and what they really need to be looking at are the skills that people have.
So as we talked about with the platform interviewing.io, that is an anonymized platform. It even has voice masking. So the interviewer and interviewee know nothing about each other, and they go through this interactive coding exercise. So a fascinating illustration of bias is that, the founder, Aline Lerner, says, 40% of the people hired off of her platform — so that means they were the best coder in that interactive coding exercise — 40% of the people hired off of her platform previously applied to that company and were rejected at/or/before the phone screen. It means they never even got the chance to show their coding skills, which we now know were far superior to other people’s coding skills.
When we’ve got thousands of resumes being screened by keywords, people who learn to code, as Black women in the military, get thrown out. They’re looking for computer science degrees from selective universities, and so they miss a lot of great coding talent.
We need to be training managers and organizations about how to be truly welcoming to new talent. We don’t just need to be training underrepresented people about how to fit in.
Denver: No question. Speaking of Fast Company again, I was just reading yesterday, Gerald Chertavian’s article. He’s the CEO of Year Up, and he was talking about grade inflation and that you need to have these four-year college degrees. And you recognize, as you kind of pointed out there, it doesn’t have as much to do with your competence and your skillset as people think.
And of course, Maurice Jones is now starting OneTen.org, which is trying to place a million people in Fortune 500 companies, people of color who have not got a four-year degree. That would be a big change, I guess, in terms of just changing this whole playing field.
Freada: It certainly would be a big change. And so, I think a couple of things. One is, with programs like that, and I started a program SMASH.org about 18 years ago– Summer Math and Science Honors Academy for underrepresented high school students of color, have girls from low-income backgrounds, as sort of a college access program over three summers.
So one of the things that we found out, and I think that other programs — Year Up, that you mentioned — other programs need to pay attention to is: What are the sort of soft skills that you need to help students or your young adults who you’re transitioning into corporate environments or tech companies… How do you help them survive the culture?
Because the culture is not neutral. The culture is one that is highly biased and built around a set of assumptions about who you are and what you might like to do when you have a break, and what you might like to eat as a snack. All of those things are subtle, but cumulatively, they send signals about whether you’re welcome or whether you’re not welcome. So we need to be training managers and organizations about how to be truly welcoming to new talent. We don’t just need to be training underrepresented people about how to fit in.
Denver: SMASH Academy is an extraordinary organization and your CEO over there, Eli Kennedy, is going to be on this show in a couple of weeks, so I am so looking forward to that.
Sticking with them for a little bit, what are some of the changes you’ve seen in the way we educate our children as a result of this pandemic? It’s really taken a lot of those innovative tools that you’ve been on the cutting edge of and accelerated everything pretty dramatically.
Freada: Indeed, COVID has been just a devastating pandemic, especially to communities of color, especially to low-income people, especially to people who are on the front lines. And in the pivot that lots of people, organizations, schools had to make, we’ve learned a lot about digital tools. We’ve learned a lot about virtual learning, but so many people have been left behind. So if we talk about our SMASH scholars that are from Title I schools… and Title I schools means you’re eligible for free and reduced lunch… 40% of our SMASH scholars had not had any education from March 2020 until the summer… till we got access to them again. So I think we are going to be seeing for quite a while the long-tail effect of this pandemic.
On the positive side, we did accelerate dramatically the use of effective virtual tools and the way to bring communities together. So for instance, in our SMASH program, we had things going on simultaneously on 10 separate college campuses. What we found we could do– because we had to and we were virtual– but one of the affordances was that we could bring all 10 campuses together. The scholars could meet each other, and the scholars could work on building apps together, and the scholars could all go through the same experience of speakers and mentors. So we used to have a speaker series once a week on each of 10 campuses. Well, wasn’t it fabulous to have speakers be able to address 1,000 scholars at once and to get much higher-profile speakers?
So I think there are things we ought to think about. There are some people who are just gifted teachers. And if you are the best teacher of something… we have a professor at Morehouse who teaches this to the undergrads, but he also teaches it to our SMASH scholars at Morehouse. He teaches a course in the mathematics department called The Math of Equity, and students learn math by going through, it’s really data science. People learn the subject matter by going through real data, county by county, of what does one school district spend per pupil versus a school across town.
And so, it’s deeply, deeply engaging, which is another real core principle, and I hope we’ve learned it and we’ll implement it as we build back better, and that is the importance of culturally relevant curricula. You can make any subject matter interesting to kids or adults if you connect it to something they’re passionate about.
Denver: I think you’re even finding that a little bit with non-profit organizations who… we have a bad connotation about mission drift but you know what? If you don’t have mission evolution as a result of all this, you will become irrelevant. So you have to loosen up a little bit and recognize it’s a different world, and we just can’t stay exactly the way we were, or you’re not going to survive.
Freada: That’s right. That’s right. This has brought the need for new thinking and innovative thinking. I am hoping also what we’ve done is loosened the boundaries a little bit between nonprofits and startups, and the corporate social responsibility and employee engagement wing of things. I think if we start talking about goals and values and how we’re going to come together to improve education, improve communities, I think we can all learn a lot more from each other if we get rid of those silos.
Whether you’re nonprofits or whether you’re for-profit startups, who’s at the helm matters; who helps define the issues and the solutions makes all the difference.
Denver: I can’t agree with you more. But let me ask you about one of those silos, which is philanthropy, and that is also under the microscope as it relates to systemic racism. Who gets funded? How they get funded? Not to mention the source of wealth to begin with. What real changes would you like to see in the way philanthropy is conducted?
Freada: Where do I start? So, first of all, it is my view that philanthropic capital ought to be the greatest risk-taking capital. And indeed, what we mostly have is some of the most conservative capital, especially from the foundations with billions of dollars of endowment. They have incredibly slow and bureaucratic processes where it can be a year between when you submit a letter of intent and when you might actually get the funding. Well, in the context of a pandemic or in the context of a real crisis in education and in all kinds of gaps in this society, a year means life and death to many, many people.
So I think the whole model of philanthropy, there’s a certain level of condescension that’s built in. There’s a certain level of “We know better.” There’s a certain level of distrust. The kind of bureaucratic reporting that grant recipients are expected to do is just a complete waste of time. And again, because of this model that you’re supposed to meet all of your objectives, you can’t say, “We tried a bold experiment, and we stumbled, and here’s what we learned from it, and here’s how we know how to do it differently.” Instead, what gets funded are safe, incremental steps, and every grant report is “We met all of our objectives.”
If we met all of our objectives, how come we still have racism? How come we still have poverty? How come we still have climate change since so many billions of dollars of philanthropic capital are supposedly committed in that direction?
I think we have to pay attention also, and similar to what we were talking about, whether you’re nonprofits or whether you’re for-profit startups, who’s at the helm matters; who helps define the issues and the solutions makes all the difference. And unfortunately, philanthropy has not been going to organizations led by people of color for solutions that are supposed to be helping communities of color. So it’s less than 10% of philanthropic dollars go to organizations of color, which is just pathetic.
Denver: And I’ll tell you the money that does go there is all restricted. But with white-led organizations, very often, it is unrestricted because there’s a trust with the white-led organizations and a lack of trust with those led by people of color. So we put them in a box and can’t do what you just said — pivot, experiment, risk, or whatever. It’s got to be a very narrow confine.
Freada: In that way, there’s great similarity between the structure of philanthropy and the structure of mainstream venture capital. And in fact, there’s some overlap about where that money comes from that gets generated from high-profile, highly profitable startups that then goes into foundations. But it’s the same kind of distrust.
There’s a woman Shauntel Garvey. I have to remember because she changed her name when she got married. She was Shauntel Poulson. She is a fabulous partner at Reach Capital, which is an edtech firm, and full disclosure, we are limited partners in that fund and happily. And Shauntel did a great Medium post, taking a look in the mirror at their own diversity outcomes. And this is a firm with three women partners — one African American, one Asian American, one white woman — and a Latinx man; looks completely unlike the rest of venture capital. And yet they found that they are more likely to say no to a startup headed by a person of color or by a woman. They are more likely to categorize the company as too early, and too early means you haven’t proven yourself yet. And that’s exactly what you were saying. There’s an ironic symmetry to what happens in philanthropy.
Denver: The word in philanthropy, or the letter that doesn’t exist, is risk. These foundations never want to risk, but you’re never going to have great gains. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever filled out a grant application which said, “What’s the risk of this failing?” It’s almost like it’s sort of just skipping along through the flowers that everything we said we’re going to do what we’re going to do, and we’re going to send a report back, and it’s — let’s say, it’s not real.
Freada: Exactly. And it’s to the detriment of the communities that are most in need. We did something pretty interesting at a meeting of many Northern California foundations. This is several years ago. We had a lot of program officers in the room, and we asked… I asked during my presentation, “How many of you work with your chief investment officers at your foundations to look at coordinating your efforts?” Exactly one hand went up, and that was our foundation. And I further asked: most program officers, senior program officers, who are making decisions about millions of dollars of deployed capital every year, have never met the chief investment officer of their foundation. To have those walled off as separate silos is completely ridiculous.
And to have people investing money… and so if you think about it as a 95%, 5% problem, so you have people who are compensated only on the basis of their returns and that’s 95%. The 5% is how much of the endowment you deploy every year. So if you have 95% of your funds invested in accelerating climate change, and you have 5% of your funds going to fund organizations fighting climate change, who do you think is going to win that? It‘s just a ridiculous proposition to not have those who are investing the money work hand in hand with those who are giving it away.
There is something very important about how representation changes one’s view of what difference we can each make in the world.
Denver: You’re absolutely correct. In fact, if it weren’t for the holiday party in many of these places, they wouldn’t even know who the other person was. It’s once-a-year for some eggnog or something. It’s nuts.
In closing, Freada, with all that’s happened and with this raised level of awareness unlike we’ve ever had before, are you optimistic that things are actually going to change for the better this time?
Freada: I am optimistic. And look, I have been doing this work for so long. I either have to come to the conclusion that I’m a masochist or an optimist, and I choose the latter. But I am indeed hopeful. And I’ll tell you what gives me hope.
I was talking to some colleagues and they made this observation about “Why are you always so hopeful?” And it’s because I spend my time with entrepreneurs. I spend my time with entrepreneurs whose lived experience are generating these amazing ideas for great startups that are going to employ a lot of people, that are going to be highly profitable companies, and that are going to have great positive impact in the world. So I have a lot of hope because of day-to-day interactions with entrepreneurs. I have a lot of hope because of things like our SMASH scholars, which are a reflection of the changing demographics in the US. And I think that makes me hopeful.
There is something real to the notion of critical mass, which researchers have been studying. There’s something real to see the representation — Who’s at the head of companies? Who’s on the boards of companies? Who’s leading the government, local and national? There is something very important about how representation changes one’s view of what difference we can each make in the world.
Denver: Well, your cultural imprint has left you a very, very positive person, and we are so glad about that. For listeners interested in learning more about Kapor Capital or the Kapor Center, tell us a little bit about the websites.
Freada: Kaporcapital.com is for the investment side of the house. We have our investment criteria listed. We’ve got our team listed. We’ve got information about the founders’ commitment.
The other thing we pioneered is we don’t require a warm intro, which most of the industry requires. If your startup, seed-stage tech startup, if it meets our investment criteria as stated on the website, you can go to the tab that says “contact,” and you can just submit your pitch deck, and it will be read. We have funded companies that came through the website where nobody knew anybody.
kaporcenter.org is the arm that is philanthropy, that is our research, that is our civic engagement. That is where you can find a lot of interesting publications, the studies we’ve done on who leaves tech and why, on access to computer science education. So that’s all to be found at kaporcenter.org.
Denver: Fantastic. Well, thanks for being here today, Freada. You are a breath of fresh air, and it was such a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks again.
Freada: Thank you! It was a true pleasure. And you’re such an enthusiastic interviewer. It’s just contagious.
Denver: I try to keep up with you.
Freada: Thank you.
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