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Sarah Dusek is the investor & founder of Enygma Ventures, an investment fund that focuses on helping women-led businesses in Africa grow & scale. Sarah Dusek and her husband believe in the fact that the world of investment finance has to be reimagined globally. That’s a field that has been predominantly ruled by males for a long time, but with Enygma Ventures they plan to empower women to help level the playing field, with a constant drive towards improvement & growth.
Helping Women-led Businesses in Africa
Helping women-led businesses in Africa can sound like a difficult mission, but Sarah Dusek is a seasoned entrepreneur that isn’t new to challenge. In fact, she’s also the co-founder of Under Canvas, the leading US adventure-hospitality company that focuses on offering luxurious glamping accommodations in the very close proximity to America’s most famous national parks.
She started that company from scratch, and together with her husband, they were able to turn it into a multi-million dollar business, which led in 2017 to Sarah’s receiving a spot on the coveted Inc. 5000 list, as well as Sarah being named to the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women list from Ernst & Young. Sarah Dusek and her husband have sold the company in 2020, but that gave Sarah lots of knowledge & experience which she now puts in service of helping women-led businesses in Africa.
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Podcast with Sarah Dusek. Helping Women-led Businesses in Africa.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business, people, world, company, money, africa, create, life, big, capital, canvas, solve, women, venture fund, moved, felt, raise, fund, managing, sold
SPEAKERS
Sarah Dusek, Mike Malatesta
Mike Malatesta 00:04
Get path started. And I’ll just count down 321 And we’ll go, is, is the correct correct pronunciation of your last name Dusek or is it Dusek. Okay,
00:20
perfect.
Mike Malatesta 00:20
Okay. Okay, here we go 321 Hey Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Dusek 00:33
Thanks for having me.
Mike Malatesta 00:34
I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time because, well it took us a while to get it scheduled, and you came so highly recommended by Cynthia Cleveland I thought to myself, Okay. She definitely didn’t disappoint me when I talked to, to her so I figured anyone that she has worked with or that she recommends is someone that I’m going to be very interested in and I think all the listeners will as well. So, um, so yeah let’s get going I started every show at the same simple question, Sarah and that is how did happen for you.
Sarah Dusek 01:10
Because we could go in so many directions. Yeah. How does it happen. I’m going to answer that question in the context arrived bill and sold the company 18 months ago now, 20 months ago, I sold a company called Under Canvas, and we grew that company from nothing, I started that company with a $14,000 gift from my in laws. My husband and I had a dream. To make the outdoors, accessible, and to see if we could find a way to create and preserve incredible wild places and create beautiful places to sleep under the stars. So how it happened for me. I guess my answer to that question is a $40,000 loan from an from our in house. My in laws to make it a multi million dollar business,
Mike Malatesta 02:03
and how okay so what was the pitch. Yeah, so to get your in laws to, I mean I know they love you and all that. But, what, what was, what was the pitch the motivation. What was the plan.
Sarah Dusek 02:18
Okay, desperation on our part in 2007, and oh eight rolled around here we find ourselves in the middle of the great financial crisis of the early 2000s My husband and I had started a small business in the UK where I’m originally from. And we were developing houses,
02:44
we weren’t, we were
Sarah Dusek 02:46
young, and doing old renovations Rex and and employing unemployed youth in our, in our town and we had a bit of a social entrepreneurship model working and it completely collapsed due to the financial crisis and suddenly we found ourselves. Owning properties we no longer could sell because suddenly the markets just fallen out right everything. And we had a mortgage of our own to pay, I was pregnant with our first child. He suddenly had no income whatsoever. Of course, at that moment in time when the world is imploding and much like this last year did for many, many people right with to pre 2020. Another great crisis. I remember just being utterly horrified in this moment and thinking, I’m about to give birth to our first child, we’ve got no home security because I don’t know how could afford to stay in our own home, so we decided to move out of our homes, we literally rather than lose it, but we better rent it out so someone else could pay our mortgage, an out of desperation we sent to our in laws, could you learn this, any money. Could you help us, because we’re stuck being exceptionally privileged, I, I believe that we are privileged human beings that have family and have people who can provide a safety net and I know not everybody has that. But it was our family of friends, network really that helped create a safety net for us in that moment, and gave us freedom to try again, and create something different, And my husband I moved back to my mother’s farm, we moved to Montana across the,
04:37
across the pond
Sarah Dusek 04:39
to buy heavily pregnant body. Actually we took our child born by the time we left. Okay. He was just a few months old we traversed the pond. Camped out with in laws for a while, they loaned us the money and we started all over again from scratch. It was brutal,
Mike Malatesta 05:02
and where, where was the ranch in Montana.
Sarah Dusek 05:06
In the far north of Montana very near the Canadian border right in the middle of the prairie. Okay.
05:14
Wild.
05:15
Okay, pretty desolate.
Mike Malatesta 05:17
Have you have you watched the show Yellowstone at all. Have you seen
Sarah Dusek 05:24
Ponce de.
05:26
Okay,
Mike Malatesta 05:27
it’s like, it’s like the I call it the ranch mafia it’s like is that what it was like out in more where you were. Yeah. Okay. I, I got into it and I really, I mean, I’ve watched all that there is to watch but sometimes it just gets I, like I say it’s like a mine it’s like, it’s like a mafia in Montana, so I was wondering how much, at least with your experience, how much real life that was. Okay, good. Well I’m glad I’m glad to know that your, your, your in laws haven’t taken it to that level.
06:15
They’re on the Canadian border.
Mike Malatesta 06:18
And before 2008 happens Sarah, what if I stand when I read correctly. School, is that correct. So what were, what were you aspiring to become.
06:36
Originally,
Sarah Dusek 06:37
I went to law school and you decided I did not want to be a lawyer. Okay, most of my life reading legal contracts, I probably spent most of my day, closing deals and reading contracts and editing contracts. So it has come in very handy but I think when I was young, and just watched too much la law, quite honestly, okay, attracted me to the legal profession was the sense of justice, and the sense of fighting for the underdog, and the sense of the little guy taking on the big guy and winning. And, you know, amazing American drama shows here we are back with another great TV show, right.
Mike Malatesta 07:19
There’s pattern. Okay,
Sarah Dusek 07:24
podcast about the power of TV and our lives folks, yeah.
Mike Malatesta 07:28
Okay, so my life didn’t didn’t match with what you had imagined it would be, did you realize that when you were still in school or were you still thinking, Oh, yeah.
Sarah Dusek 07:39
And much to my parents for, at that moment in time. I then spent the next sort of eight years of my working career working for NGOs, and mostly in foreign markets so I first came to Africa, and moved to Zimbabwe in 1999. I spent several years in Zimbabwe, and then spent the rest of my time on the Far East, raised in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and traveling throughout the region. Working for various nonprofits, and doing
08:13
development work.
Mike Malatesta 08:15
And so what kind of work can you, can you give us an idea of what you know you were actually doing and what you were accomplishing what you were trying to accomplish.
Sarah Dusek 08:24
Yeah, when I was, when I was in Africa I was a Youth and Sports worker, and spent much of my time doing AIDS education programs. So I would train local Africans in a particular age education program that would then run the program that would run in schools, and then we travel across the region. Pitching interest training in education, because that was sort of 20 years ago now, that was really the the forefront of the AIDS epidemic was just becoming well known, known to be widespread spread problematic issue. And so the work I was involved in was most AIDS education and youth work primarily, and later in the in the forest I spent much of my time taking teams from one country to do projects in other countries, and working with the urban poor and humanitarian type staff have worked with authors who worked with children we worked with development projects we worked with drug addicts, a whole gambit of
09:35
urban
Sarah Dusek 09:37
and rural actually projects, trying to create change solve big problems. And one of the things that led me out of that work, actually was just the huge frustration around not being able to drive enough change, not being able to solve enough bigger problems. And that was really what led me into business. The realization that to solve any of our big world problems and we all know we’ve got plenty of them. You really need innovation, and you really need a vehicle that is able to adapt, evolve, and is designed to solve the problem. And the great thing about business, and I’ve been in business now for almost 15 years, over 15 years. This idea that business is a vehicle that depends on you has to be sustainable, because the business can’t exist unless it’s profitable if it’s not profitable, long term it will fail. So that’s a very different model than a nonprofit model, you’ve got the sense of how do we create something that doesn’t constantly rely on outside sources to fund it. And things go out of fashion, really quickly into your work for example, it’s a business, potentially a sustainable and potentially business is this is this idea that a business exists to solve a problem. And so I started to explore and I went back to school and wrote a thesis on this very idea of can business,
11:19
be a vehicle for
Sarah Dusek 11:20
transformation business being missional. Could it be, could it could it redefine and help solve some of some of our big world problems, and could it be the best vehicle to do that.
Mike Malatesta 11:38
And how did you research that What did. How did you study.
Sarah Dusek 11:42
I spent two years researching that but at the end of that research product realization. I became more and more convinced this was this was this was true, that our best shot at trying to sort of overcome some of the world’s biggest problems is through business, and sustainable solutions in particular, and realized, gosh, well if that’s true. I want to test it for myself. And I want to understand what it takes to run a business. So that was sort of the beginning of our own journey, my own journey into getting into exploring business and at that time, having having been somebody who loves the underdog somebody who was champion of the poor, champion of wanting to sort of see, right the wrongs righted, the idea of going into business was very much like you know pretty much going over to the dark side. Okay, good and evil sides. On one side so good voice on the other side, not so much, and business in my mind at that time was very much in that other county, making money’s evil corrupts everything and it’s this is a sort of dark vehicle that’s, you know, we see sharks and people, you know, counting other people and all the rest of it, and so it was kind of such a mind, then, for me, this idea that actually business could be a vehicle for, for doing good.
Mike Malatesta 13:14
Interesting. Yeah. Okay, interesting because so much of the funding comes from. I mean, I guess ultimately all of it comes from business, either directly or from tax revenue right I mean, yeah,
13:32
totally.
13:33
So what’s it. Oh, go ahead,
Sarah Dusek 13:35
logical sense. Yeah, I think, I have just really positioned them as sort of two polarized extremes and they’re really not that hard.
Mike Malatesta 13:44
Yeah, like we’re on the right side. No, and the right side and the wrong side can’t mix sort of thing.
Sarah Dusek 13:54
And that’s true. Yeah. And so sort of the journey to explore, going into business, learning about business started from the ground up, but as I said before the financial crash in 2007 and eight, we had started my husband I started a small social enterprise project where we were developing random and renovating houses, and employing unemployed youth and training them and giving them skills plastering painting tiling electrics, all sorts of different sort of practical skills and training them to hopefully enable them to have a trade that they’d be able to get future work, etc, is the idea to help in time projects to generate profit. Yeah,
Mike Malatesta 14:40
and was that was, Was, Is that your husband’s background, your construction or management disaster management,
14:49
okay. Over these last few decades,
Mike Malatesta 14:52
yeah sure, and it’ll continue. Actually, it’s a good, it’s a good business. Yeah. And when you, So um, let me go back to the NGOs for a second because you said, things go out of style, or out of fashion quickly, and I assume you’re, you’re, you’re talking about the missions that people or organizations will support to the kind of, if they don’t, what, what, take me into that world for a second and, you know, especially with that statement and kind of walk me through how it actually happens.
Sarah Dusek 15:32
Yeah, I think the reality is that we have things that are sexy to fund and things that become unsexy to fund. I mean even, even right now, we can see very currently very appropriately this sense of it’s suddenly become more appropriate to fund and invest in, or promote women led businesses in the US or people of color back and people of indigenous origin. It’s just been a surge of we’re recognizing this is significant, it’s important that we weren’t doing it and we must do it. And the same thing happens in the NGO world to this is that we recognize as a problem, we’re going to do something about it and it’s in everyone’s face and it’s in the news and we’re on it for a short period of time, and maybe a decade, and then maybe not a lot of progress is made, and then that thing slips off the reader and then something else pops to the surface. And that’s, that’s problematic for solving big problems really.
Mike Malatesta 16:45
Yeah, I get, well there’s no, you mentioned sustainability of business you know there’s no sustainability in a model that’s dependent upon the whims of donors or the government or right I mean it’s just.
16:59
Exactly, exactly.
Mike Malatesta 17:01
Yeah.
Sarah Dusek 17:04
Business is such a great vehicle because to stay in business you have to stay cutting edge, you have to stay, you have to have some competitive edge you have to stay relevant, you have to stay in tune with your customer. In order to be able to continue to drive ongoing revenue and therefore profits. Asked to continuously evolve, We can all think of those companies that didn’t evolve didn’t catch the next wave didn’t go with, with the new trend and went out of business.
Mike Malatesta 17:36
Yeah, there’s plenty of them, right, although
Sarah Dusek 17:40
some huge behemoth companies you know, even blockbuster, we’d never imagined would have gone out of business.
Mike Malatesta 17:47
Yeah, yeah.
Sarah Dusek 17:49
And Kodak, another one, we’ve never would have imagined that those cameras film would have
Mike Malatesta 17:56
just disappeared completely right, companies that had the world by the, you know what, You know at one point and it’s just like yeah I can go away. Yeah. So you say you get into the this, you know, developing houses, and I wanted to ask you about the social mission component to it, which I think is fantastic I wonder as you were going through it. Well, did you ever think, oh my gosh this is so awesome I would never do it a different way. This is pre financial crisis, or were there challenges where you were like, boy, it would be nice if I would just hire someone who knew what they were, who already knew what they were doing.
Sarah Dusek 18:46
Anytime you wanted to do any social good. There’s always an easier faster way to do it yeah doing that,
18:55
Yeah, okay,
Sarah Dusek 18:56
we see that, you know, that’s, that’s one of the great challenges business has today and you know there’s a huge call from society, we were trying to hold our corporations to account, more. We want them to be more responsible, we want them to lead we want them to take action where they don’t necessarily need to take action. We want them to be responsible partners in managing climate change we want them to manage their waste we want you to. But yet, it’s a whole lot easier not to write. Often it’s a whole lot more profitable, not to. And that’s, you know, that’s juggling the balance of how do we how do we grow companies do we grow companies for more than just the bottom line. Right. I guess when I, when I think about, you know that pendulum swing from the dark side to the good side. It’s very possible to live too far over here that says nothing really ever matters than just making profit. And the reality is that many companies exist today, with only that mentality. And I think as consumers, and customers. We’ve got to be a voice in the mix that says, it’s actually professionally. Yeah, and it’s not, it’s not what’s going to move the world forward. Being profit focused only is short term thinking, and I’ve got one more planet to exist and we want to build a better world for our children, we can’t think short termism which is what pocketmine profit, focused, businesses, only private purpose businesses will do.
Mike Malatesta 20:39
Right. Yeah, and it’s kind of an interesting it’s kind of ironic and interesting because, particularly with a public company publicly traded company there’s there’s tremendous. Well, at least for most publicly traded companies take out some of the newer ones that you know haven’t figured out how to make a profit yet but you know there’s tremendous attention paid to quarterly results so you have to do better every quarter. So, but, but the irony, I think, and I’d be interested in what you think about this is, do you take the executives, and even the individual shareholders sort of out of that environment, put them in their regular day to day home environment, and all of a sudden, profit isn’t the most important thing at home. You know, it’s, it’s kind of it’s kind of, I don’t know if it’s a conundrum or irony, I’m not sure exactly what it is you probably have a better word for it, but it’s kind of like everybody, if you take them out of the, the work environment and put them in their home environment, you know there’s a lot of things that matter a lot more than money. But in, but in business I’ve always been trained, money is the most important thing, and not only that I get punished when it’s not, or when it doesn’t work out,
Sarah Dusek 22:00
which is why we’ve got to instill a stronger sense of multiple stakeholder. And ideally, companies that are on the stock exchange should be valued According to multiple bottom lines, not just,
22:18
okay, yeah, holding account
Sarah Dusek 22:20
to the sense of impact, sense of EC ESG, as you know as a stakeholder multiple stakeholders in the table, not just shareholders, because you’ve got employees, employees, stakeholders and customers or stakeholders planet as a stakeholder and how are you how are you actually doing on managing those things, not just profitability. But I think if we, if we started to think, and rally companies According to multiple factors, and not just one, we would start to see huge improvement. And huge impact because at the moment we’re relying on companies to voluntarily make these kind of commitments. And there are a handful of amazing companies that made incredible commitments, right, private company privately owned companies who can make those decisions about what their bottom line therefore looks like. But, but we’ve probably gonna see that as more mainstream, again, rather than niche, which apparently definitely is held and we recognize gosh, if this vehicle is, is utilized to its fullest potential. What could happen in the world to be extraordinary.
Mike Malatesta 23:46
Sure, it’s just, it is, and it is, I think it is happening slowly, but there’s a tremendous gravitational force or inertia to overcome, I mean, you know, it’s kind of like being trained forever that the color blue is actually blue and then someone tells you no, it’s not blue, it’s actually red and blue, and you’re like, No, it’s blue, you know, it’s just, it’s just tough. It’s tough.
Sarah Dusek 24:16
Unless there is a trend in an enthusiasm at the moment we’re moving in this direction, probably need to do more to make that a reality and make it easier for companies to make those kind of choices
24:32
for, for the good of everyone right. Okay, so
Mike Malatesta 24:36
your business in the construction business or home development business gets gets crushed by the financial crisis, your in laws, you know, help you out. You, you, with your newborn child you your husband, your new more child you moved to North West, Montana, and I can’t help but be thinking why would going back into business be something that’s even on your radar after going through that experience. Yeah.
Sarah Dusek 25:11
Everybody said to us, everyone. I can think of anyone actually you said to us. Yeah, that’s a great idea. And almost everyone said to us now would be a time great time to try and go get a job. Try and, you know, just kind of, you know, especially to my husband is obviously I was home with a newborn, and was definitely getting let off the hook. But, but the sensor. Now it’s just the time to play and say Do
Mike Malatesta 25:39
something safe.
Sarah Dusek 25:41
Now’s the time to just, just get any recover, just get by just, you know, just try and look after yourself. And in time, maybe then new opportunities will, will, things will come right. I think what happened for us though, and both, both my husband and I would definitely call ourselves dreamers, probably if you’ve listened to this podcast for more than five minutes now, you probably already knew that. But the sense of, we didn’t feel like it was right to go backwards. It wasn’t time to play it safe. It wasn’t the time to hunker down and it was the time to make big bets. And we were young, we didn’t have a lot to lose. Right. And the reality is is there’s no good time to start a business, ever. And in fact it’s harder when you’ve got more to lose. When you don’t.
Mike Malatesta 26:41
Right, yeah, you’re right, yeah.
Sarah Dusek 26:44
You can see already got nothing. You can’t go much further, you know, so there’s not far at all, so you might as well take big shots and make quick risks. At that moment, right, that was really what we decided to do we decided to continue sort of focusing on living our dreams, man selling ourselves short with, you know, just going after something to buy, buy time, because that’s what that would have been. And so we made a big choice. We’ve made a choice for our family, of what we wanted our lives to be like, how we were going to navigate ourselves in rough waters, and we will go sleeves up and start all over again. It was hard, definitely it was hard but I also think it would have been hard to try and find a job at that time anyway. It was,
Mike Malatesta 27:40
it was a horrible, right,
Sarah Dusek 27:43
tough economic times, and so we made the decision on the basis of what’s, what’s right for our family and this moment and what feels like moving forward for us, rather than moving sideways or backwards.
Mike Malatesta 27:59
And in your in laws were supportive, obviously, but what, what. So talk to me about the inspiration what for Under Canvas, different than what you were doing, I am assuming and I shouldn’t, that there’s some connection between the NGO work you were doing and this idea but I don’t know where did it, where the inspiration come from.
Sarah Dusek 28:26
We arrived, northwest Montana out into the prairie, beautiful wild open spaces. I, for the first time I stood, I stood on land, and I looked out at these big wide open spaces, I was reminded of being back in Africa, reminded of wonderful, incredible Safari experiences that I fell in love with. When I was first on the continent 20 years ago, and I must have said to Jake at some point in time, gosh, this feels, this looks like, you know, the wild open savannahs of Africa, the big plains of Africa, which really sparked an idea, which was, okay, how could we earn a living. My parents are in those farmers, how could we earn a living off the land. How could we create a bridge, and not farm, but utilize what we have in our hands, and try and build something new from scratch. How could we create a lifestyle for ourselves so we were thinking really small, and thinking about could we read develop differently because obviously, we’ve been in the development game, right, renovating and building houses, It’s like, three, could we build differently. We looked at it from a social entrepreneurship space, and now we’re starting to look at it from our from our very sort of environmental space, and we started to talk about this idea, could we allow people to come out here and enjoy this wild and amazing places, but how do you do when you don’t want to damage, what was already there. How do you create access for people to come and stay and enjoy an experience, but not actually ruin the very thing that you want them to experience right most most development. Generally, tears everything down from, you know, you bulldoze everything you dig it all up, you landscape it you manicure it, you know, make it beautiful you water it a lot. Almost.
Mike Malatesta 30:33
Try to make it look like it belongs, like it was like it’s always been there. No,
Sarah Dusek 30:37
but somewhere else. Yeah, like how do you do development, without which still making it feel like it’s wild. And still, you know maybe if you remove the past structures, but it could look exactly like it did before, without changing very much at all. Okay. So it started a new ecological journey for us, which was researching about development in a completely different way. Starting to think about building a profitable business model in a completely new way that hadn’t been done before. And so we, we nurtured this reasonable idea to recreate the support experience, which I already have experienced and loved in Africa and nurtured the idea of how do we how do we do that here. Could this work here. Is there something that would make sense. So we started one of the first time companies in the US was back in 2009.
Mike Malatesta 31:36
Was that a word at the time by the way was glamping a word then because I did you did you invent it because I don’t think it’s been five years from the first time I heard the word which means I’m late to the party, but it was, what were you calling it originally
Sarah Dusek 31:55
luxury camping
Mike Malatesta 31:56
luxury camping. Okay,
Sarah Dusek 31:59
I think, actually, was probably a British word.
32:02
Okay. I have no
Sarah Dusek 32:04
idea where it came from, it definitely didn’t originate with me, I definitely can’t take claim on that. But it was very early days of using that terminology. And we were probably one of two or three glamping locations in the US. At that time, kind of started about the same kind of time, but experimented with this idea of creating unique accommodations tented accommodations how in wilderness type locations.
Mike Malatesta 32:34
It was your first sight on the ranch, or was it it was okay so how could we do it without farming. Yeah, yes, use part of the farm. Yeah, okay, use part of the red
Sarah Dusek 32:48
part of the farm, and, and to this day, that original camp is my oldest son’s favorite camp that we ever have built.
32:57
Right.
Mike Malatesta 33:00
and how calm, is it because his money. Is it because it’s your grandparents property or is there some other reason. Yeah, okay.
Sarah Dusek 33:14
Reasons to it. It’s very isolated, and my oldest child is a huge introvert he loves getting out there when no one else is. Yes. That’s a great it’s a great spot. But it was not a profitable business there. What we started there. We had, we had, we created a very small unique upscale camp there, which gradually we evolve adapted moved and recreated what became our has become our largest business model that exists today. And today is has nine locations around the country outside of national parks large scale glamping resorts, with the intention of how do we preserve and protect amazing beautiful pieces of wild land, and create access to them, how do we develop ecologically. Today, the Canvas uses about a 10th of the water, the similar sized hotel uses it makes a minimal impact on the land its footprint is very vague, and the environmental impact of what we know this so minimal, we often off grid with solar power and most of our estates. We’ve been working on a zero waste initiative for the last few years.
Mike Malatesta 34:45
And how did you go from, you know, I’ll call the one on the ranch concept. How did you go from a concept that wasn’t profitable to a concept that what that became profitable and was able to grow because this doesn’t sound like. Nothing’s easy this sounds difficult actually, Because I’m thinking to myself, you know, securing the land all that but even trying to permit something like this is strange. For most parameters right they’re like, Well, wait a second, it’s not a building, it’s not a it’s not a tent, just a tent, you know, it’s kind of, so how did, how did you. How’d you guys do that.
Sarah Dusek 35:27
Yes, we probably wrote most of the country, inadvertently probably have written most of the country’s regulations around glamping because of the developments that we ended up.
Mike Malatesta 35:39
The lawyer part of it, here comes the lawyer Yeah,
Sarah Dusek 35:43
pioneering what the regulation should have explained, because when we went to local authorities to get things permitted, we ended up working with them to help them figure out how to permanent delivers. And we’re done it before. And so some of those some of those situations were painful and challenging and long and frustrating and someone somewhere amazing and went super fast. Yeah, this is this is the struggle when you pioneer anything, is you have to write the rulebook, so that other people can come behind you want to make path where there is no path. That was very much the, the journey with within the Canvas before. And honestly, is, is the work that I’m doing now also and that we’re still pioneering we’re still trying to create roads when they’re on our roads.
36:41
Toward.
Mike Malatesta 36:42
Yeah. And I think I read that he was it was it your first sight on the farm that got basically destroyed by a storm and you had. It just
Sarah Dusek 36:54
was actually worse than that it was our first proper camp in Yellowstone National.
36:57
Okay,
Sarah Dusek 36:59
our first real camp outside of the national park in our first year of operation there, there, and we still haven’t really figured out how to do everything properly yet, and we’re still trying to sort of make the rules, because he went along and storm come through one evening at that camp. Camp. And I remember just thinking. We’re done.
Mike Malatesta 37:35
Yeah 2008
Sarah Dusek 37:39
It’s over. It’s this is never gonna work. This people will not pay to stay in tents that that don’t can stay up when the wind blows. So, super superduper tough, really, really tough, but amazingly in that in that moment. This is, this has been a real life lesson for me actually every time, every time we hit all or every time, you know, It looks like the end looks like, you know, the world has just come plummeting down. I think the reality is, it never has. The darkness is never the end right, there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. We just sometimes need other people to help us get back up. Yeah, so knocked, or we get so blown about literally in this, in this particular incident by circumstances that life throws at us almost always through a change of circumstances. I mean that’s just. Unfortunately, the reality of life. But we need each other to help put ourselves back together, sometimes without a great team. That year, it was my staff who said, this isn’t that bad. It’s gonna be alright we can do this, we can put this back together.
Mike Malatesta 38:59
Yeah right, sure. They control your drama, it sounds like Yeah, yeah.
Sarah Dusek 39:10
I was way more drama than anyone else was there. No, no, we got this night, everybody was back in their beds. Our neighbors all rallied, who were the neighboring businesses all around us came helped us out tents helped put things back together, get clean bedding for everybody. We had everyone back in their beds by 11 o’clock at night, and they gave a single refund out that night which.
Mike Malatesta 39:37
Oh my gosh. People were like this is cool. Right.
Sarah Dusek 39:49
An extraordinary, extraordinary example of how other people’s spirit could carry us along. Right. The end of ourselves, and we reach, you know, we reach rock bottom. And then we realize, you know, we think it’s the end. It’s not, it’s not the end. Yeah. There’s more, there’s more to come, and sometimes we have to change course and sometimes it looks different than, than what it did like it before. But we get so afraid sometimes of those circumstances, those moments happening.
Mike Malatesta 40:24
Yeah, it’s like, think of a friend of
Sarah Dusek 40:27
mine just messaged me last week and I was complaining to her about where I’m at out trying to raise money for our new business now we’ve got a venture fund investing in women led businesses in Africa. And I was complaining to her about how hard it was to raise money in this climate, how hard it was as a first time fund manager to raise capital, right, and to get people to buy into the vision they have to invest in, in African entrepreneurs. And she wrote back and she just said to me, you know, you’re just at that point in your storm has come through, it’s flat and everything, and it looks like the end of the road. But you know, it’s definitely not. It’s definitely your do we’ll come back, you will find a way, you will you will manage to overcome it just looks like that right now. And sometimes some of us just need to remember, it just looks like this right now. It just, it isn’t the end. Right.
Mike Malatesta 41:32
I think about it like when you were talking about that I think like darkness is the education that comes from things you didn’t anticipate happening. It’s just, it’s not the end, it’s just, you know, it’s like, it’s like taking a shot to the head in a boxing match, it’s, you know, kind of, you see stars for a little bit right and then it’s like, oh wait, there’s still, there’s still the rest of the fight here back. So, yeah, I’m not gonna let that happen to me again. I wasn’t expecting that. Now, I know, right
Sarah Dusek 42:06
now we know how to enable tends to stay up through 100 mile an hour winds, you know, now we know. You know, all those things are just there to their learning experiences they just, they just happen to be painful. And that’s, you know, I think that’s one of my key learnings of driving with business, creating success. Some, however we deem success, success, right. So, can you stay with us. Can you take a few beats to the head, and still keep going. And can you, and you’ll keep getting up after you get knocked down, because if you can, because that’s, that’s, that’s really how you win with boxing matches right yeah,
Mike Malatesta 42:52
you just keep going. Yes.
Sarah Dusek 42:55
right can stay longer than anyone else. Can you be more resilient, can you overcome huge obstacles. Can you can you handle big challenges, and those who can thrive. Right.
Mike Malatesta 43:12
What in 2019 You, you sold the business or most of the business I don’t know exactly, but you’re obviously on to this new path which I really want to spend some time on. But, you built this great, great company. In, a new sort of rising Lee interesting niche, I guess I call it. And what made you want to do something else or what, what was the motivation that or what happened I guess what came what what came along
Sarah Dusek 43:50
and being true to myself, have more dreams, or more dreams and visions and have no goals and so we solve a large chunk of a company and at the end of 2018, but I am still very committed to under canvas I still sit on the board, still very passionate about the business. And I’m still a minority owner now, not a majority owner anymore, but still huge advocate for the business. So passionate and Rancis my all always will be. But I think one of the things that sort of triggered, that is we needed to raise more capital for the company anyway. In order to continue to grow. We had to put more capital into the company and an opportunity arose capital off the table, chairs and putting capital into the table into the company. And so, it just, it felt like the right woman had time to do that, and to begin to explore the possibilities of doing other things but we’ve also dreamed about companies in excellent shape, had a great team, great operating team still does. And, which allowed us some freedom. To be continued to pioneer struggle for entrepreneurs often is a need to pioneer the need to keep doing shiny and new is very real, and that can be hard when a when a business is in a certain maintenance mode but repeat or doing more of the same. And so, Jake and I and my husband started fixing explore the possibility of matching a venture fund.
Mike Malatesta 45:45
Not just any venture fund I mean you. So before I get in. Not just any venture fund. So I want to get into that one final question though is on your last day of work full time work at at under, under canvas leadership work, what can you, can you tell me what that was like for you.
Sarah Dusek 46:08
Yeah, it was an emotional wreck my last full working day, CEO of the company. We, we had our annual staff retreat, which I spoke to with the whole company. And I shared my onward vision for them going forward for my heart and soul, for my desires for the company to continue to keep them on track going where they should go doing what they should do things the way we believe they should do them. But so I spent a whole day with our team had a big celebration very celebratory party that evening. It was a very, very emotional, difficult day, and actually took me many many many months to recover, emotionally, from the loss, actually that the huge loss of no longer being involved in the day to day operations, right. A huge, and a huge part of my life I’ve spent almost almost 10 years at the helm under canvas and so I’m hugely passionate person and I don’t ever do anything by hand, since I’m always very emotionally involved in everything that I’m doing so, when it comes time to extradite herself. It’s very tough, very, very tough so probably spent probably spent most of my 2020 grieving the loss. The loss of my day to day life with under campus. Thankful for pandemic, resilient, strong business. Yeah, really hard, really hard to let go of something that you’ve built from scratch, and I’m not going to be involved in its day to day decisions anymore.
Mike Malatesta 48:07
It’s a really weird dynamic because you’re sort of, you got what you want it. In other words, you build value in the business and someone recognized the value and was willing to pay for it. So you got what you wanted but you aren’t you know you. You also lost what you had sort of, it’s, it’s hard
Sarah Dusek 48:32
to find it very difficult, sort of relate to, and I find it difficult to even comprehend really it’s like how can you be sad when you, when you achieve what you set out to do.
48:41
Yeah, right. Yeah,
Sarah Dusek 48:43
liquidity build something that was great to create a household name, you know, could you not be more proud. Very proud. I just lost it all at the same time. I think that’s, that’s one of the hard things about building businesses to sell. It’s like saying I’m going to put one of my children up for sale.
Mike Malatesta 49:03
Right. Yes.
Sarah Dusek 49:05
Because this you know this baby that you’ve birthed you’ve literally burst, and has been as painful as raising children often is this suddenly suddenly grown up from home, and you get to see it on the weekends, occasionally what they come home for the holidays, but it’s not, it’s not the same anymore. Yeah. Definite wrench, I think it was something I was. I wasn’t expecting. And I wasn’t anticipating. I didn’t anticipate with the things that would happen. Go down the way they did. And I think if I if someone had told me this is what is likely to happen and this is what you will. This is what how often happens to founders who sell companies, it might have been helpful to have understood the journey a little bit better but it was a shock. It was a shock.
Mike Malatesta 50:09
Yeah, it’s almost like maybe I needed a little therapy of a couple of months beforehand here to get myself ready for what this is going to be like because nobody’s equipped no school for that, then you know, there’s really just not equipped can’t study it like you did business, you know, impacting NGOs, you know, so.
Sarah Dusek 50:31
Yeah, I mean obviously every business is different and every leader is different but you know I think I heard multiple people growing their businesses from from scratch, and sold them and found the transition, sexually painful exceptionally difficult and it’s very hard to hand over your baby to someone else who doesn’t necessarily want to manage or treat your baby the way you would treat your baby. So it’s, it’s, it’s a tough deal. And it’s, it’s super hard to navigate. And also your, you know, all, all your relationships, all your friendships and your co working, you know, my whole life for a decade was tied up with under canvas, right. And suddenly you lose your day to day connections with everyone as well.
Mike Malatesta 51:20
Yeah. And it’s not just as I’m listening to you I’m thinking what’s not just handing over your baby, the business, your baby, but you’re also, you know people that you’re very close to have helped you build this thing you’re actually there being adopted by someone knew. Well, exactly, yeah, they don’t have a choice, it’s kind of
Sarah Dusek 51:47
ironic. Yeah. It’s an extraordinary journey. And the reality is creating keep pioneering, you do have to at some point, the fortune started in order to be able to do more new things. It’s impossible otherwise, it doesn’t mean it’s exceptionally hard and sexually difficult to do prime.
Mike Malatesta 52:17
So speaking of hard, and dreams. You sell the business you get through this period and you’re probably not an avid I’m not Overmind I sold it five years ago and I still think about it sometimes in ways that I, you know I should be over I think so you’re probably still feeling that from time to time but yet you.
52:41
Yeah.
Mike Malatesta 52:44
Maybe you’re right. Just get used to. Okay, good point.
Sarah Dusek 52:49
Like normal grief when you use somebody you love. It’s not like you stop grieving, you’re grieving just changes over. And so as intense. Or as painful, over time, but you still rescue them, and you still still love them. You know, maybe that seems a bit dramatic for the business, but certainly, certainly, my own reality with with letting go of a company and people that I love dearly.
Mike Malatesta 53:22
So how did you determine what your next dream was going to be and where you were going to go to accomplish it, I mean you, you moved to Africa to do it. I’m with. Yeah, I mean you kind of like, Yeah, I mean you had ties there but I’m thinking myself okay build this business in the US, people know you. You know you’ve, you’ve got a reputation you’ve sold the business successfully if you’re going to start a venture fund. You know you started where you know people right but no, your, your, your path is different. What’s. How come.
Sarah Dusek 54:00
Yeah, I mean the, the investor phenomenon for me, was born out of a sense of, honestly, anger, which is a terrible thing to say out loud, venture capital, private equity industry in the US made me angry. That’s nothing about the particular people in the industry, it’s just a system. And this sense of, again, you know, this is dark side light side sort of mentality of, you know the way deals were done away. Generally, very few women if any were ever in the room. It’s things that are deemed to be acceptable terms that necessarily aren’t very equitable, and this frustration over Gosh entrepreneurs are the real value creators, there are no other people on the planet that create value from nothing, right, are the only people in that world, you build something from scratch and create jobs, you, you build economic systems that out of nothing and just never felt like that was really appreciated or understood. And yes, you know, dollars change hands, but usually quite high cost, right, and the way Deals Go Down never necessarily feels particularly fair, certainly, to me, it felt, challenging,
55:44
okay
Sarah Dusek 55:45
person at the table, always had my own sense of just gosh so few women ever get funding, while I was definitely a very very fortunate minority of women to have ever attracted serious amounts of capital into their business. and I was like gosh that’s so wrong. It grieved me intensely. And when you look at the stats today, even, I mean, last year we went, went back about 30 when they went back about 30 years in time, in terms of quality in terms of slipping in terms of what we, what we’ve achieved and where we’ve got to and then of course the pandemic, not just for six, so many ways. And, you know today even like we’re less than 2% of all venture capital in the world is going to women that founders, ridiculous small percentage for really no good reason. Right. Other than that, it’s not that women aren’t capable, it’s not that we don’t make great judgments and we don’t build great businesses and we don’t aren’t sophisticated enough, or, you know, it’s often that we’re not networked enough, we don’t look like the people who are holding the keys. We did, we didn’t necessarily go to the right schools, or be in the right club, and most deals, get done today, you know, because you knew someone who knew someone who could make an introduction for you and you could get in front of the right person or you could access the gatekeepers and knew how to present the right kind of information to the, to the right gatekeeper. Right, sure.
Mike Malatesta 57:29
Get a playbook
Sarah Dusek 57:30
and have a playbook. Exactly. And so I felt like bring it to the venture capital world funding, of course, likes, breaking into this closed up palace. Great. I did not have the keys to the, to the kingdom for. I just after sort of raising huge amounts of money for my, for our business, and effectively creating some liquidity out of it, I just felt like I need to help other women, knock down the doors to the kingdom. And I, I can only do that by being someone who has some of the keys. And so how do I put myself in the room, as someone who could be a gatekeeper. How could we leverage some of our own capital to that how can we raise more capital to do that. And how could we champion women to build and scale and grow, amazing businesses. I think I think one of the things that’s become really apparent over the last year in particular with, particularly with the pandemic. And the issues of racial injustice, and some of the huge sort of things that have shown how in equal our societies still are, and that how, how we think we’ve made a lot of progress but we actually haven’t really made this much progress and we’ve got this much to go on I 2020 exacerbated inequality, highlighted. So clearly, again, How, how we’ve got to go and I think that underlying struggle. Underlying, we don’t have just racial disparities or economic disparities in one country, right, we have we have a global system that has huge economic disparities we have nations who have wildly different economic scenarios for their, their citizens than others. Sure. Like how do we overcome that. Because whilst that still exists, we have the threat of more pandemics, more disease, and more spread, and we have the threat of terrorism, and we have the threat, you know we have multiple threats that are create you know climate, climate is maybe your biggest threat of all, is like, whilst we allow inequality, we, we allow the opportunity for for threats to us all to continue to exist. And so for me is just getting back in this room, of how are we, how do I take responsibility for playing my part in doing something about that. And so we started a venture fund to focus on investing in women, investing in women in Africa, with this idea of investing to counteract inequality through race, gender, geography, knowing that those three inequalities are very apparent in our world. And we’ve got to deploy capital to do something about them. And here we are at the beginning for a very difficult road trying to navigate boom in the road where no one’s built one before.
Mike Malatesta 1:00:58
But you’ve already from what I read, you’ve already raised or deployed $3 million. Maybe it’s more than up, then by now I don’t know, and what kind of businesses are you are you backing Sarah like those are that’s significant amount of money and I’m thinking to myself, you know, traditionally, pro lending you know in countries like Africa you know micro lending and, you know, it’s more. There was, that’s a very large amount of money compared to some of the things I, I’ve heard and of course I’ll acknowledge that I am so far from being any kind of expert on this. So my knowledge base is limited as well.
Sarah Dusek 1:01:39
I’m just backing women like me. So, women who have the possibility for scaling and growing a big business that they might have a small business today, just like I once had. But my whole Mo is how can I be, how can I be the angel I didn’t have. How can I be the champion for women to grow and scale, big global businesses that that could, you know, take on some giants, and they may be slow today but that have huge potential to be you know, some of the next corporate soccer next generation, for example. So, yeah, we’re not playing in the, in the micro
1:02:23
yeah base, okay.
Mike Malatesta 1:02:26
Yeah,
Sarah Dusek 1:02:27
looking at looking at all sorts of sectors and all sorts of businesses, and the common theme being there, women lead, and they have the potential to be something really quite big and really quite special.
Mike Malatesta 1:02:41
So I’m thinking that, I know you’ve, you’ve written about, and you’ve talked about the challenges of raising a fund, which is always hard to raise your first fund it harder with a fund with a new ish type focus in a country, you know, that’s you got you, you, you basically layered on off. Yeah, you laid on you while you wrote in one of your things on forest Business Council that, you know, your, your dreams have to scare you and if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m scared witless, is what you said about what you’re doing and I kind of applaud you for that. But you are doing something that is very very different. I imagine the demand is people want to talk to you, entrepreneurs want to talk to you because,
1:03:33
Yeah.
1:03:36
Last year,
Mike Malatesta 1:03:37
4000. Oh my goodness.
Sarah Dusek 1:03:41
I find that many, many more have huge potential than I was able to fund last year. And so, the, there’s, there’s so little capital being deployed on the continent, the African continent, I think last year. I’m not sure what the 2020 stats because I think they got messed up because of COVID but the 19 stats were something like, about billion dollars was deployed across the whole continent, and just 16 countries make up the population of America. There are 55 nations in Africa. And so, just. billion dollars, deployed in venture, and it was less than 2020
Mike Malatesta 1:04:27
Yeah, I mean we’ve, the US has like many
1:04:31
bigger than your this parrot Yeah.
Sarah Dusek 1:04:33
Yeah, exactly, I think, in the US. We were looking at 132 billion in 2019 have been just venture capital and private equity, not, not Spax
Mike Malatesta 1:04:47
not IPOs nothing yeah
Sarah Dusek 1:04:49
IPOs, just, you know, pure venture venture funding wildly different economics. Is there a lack of talent on the continent, absolutely not, is, is their lack of opportunity and access to capital, absolutely yes. Is Africa, maybe our last frontier, really, in terms of economic progress, definitely it is. There’s a lot of ground to be made up here, and a lot of a lot of transformations still needs to happen, know most of the world’s serious, serious poverty is found on this continent. And how do we how do we resolve that. Well,
1:05:40
yeah.
Sarah Dusek 1:05:43
You know, I think there was some crazy stat that I read the other day that I’ve been reading raised his prospects in the first year already exceeded capital being deployed to Africa for the last however many years or whatever and it was. It was wild numbers the comparisons. There was another one that was the amount that had been raised for Reddit for the game stock, yes, phenomenon that happened at the end of the last year surpassed all the money, just that one deals the past all the money that went to women led founders, right. So, we got, we got some weird dynamics going on, you know world, in terms of access to capital. And, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at capitalism what makes a world goes around, go around. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s what makes everything function, it’s, it’s how we all live or not one of us lives without it. It’s who gets it, who has access to it, who doesn’t have access to it, who has access to cheap money, we met another rabbit hole we can go down. The average African pays about 20%, interest, meant
1:07:09
to borrow money.
1:07:10
Oh gosh, Okay.
Sarah Dusek 1:07:11
So, we live in wildly different. So how do we how do we close some of these gaps, how do we, I think our crazy Christmas, that we can solve some of our record problems in my life. If we choose to. And I think we could solve poverty in my lifetime. If we choose to. I think we could solve our climate issues, and our, you know, issues with change, quite frankly, we have to solve the issue of climate change, in my lifetime, otherwise there will not be a planet grandchildren for Iran in 100 years time so you know how serious we get about tackling any of our big world issues really is up to us. But the future of our world depends upon it. Right. And so, kind of get in the arena, and we got to say, what’s the issue that I’m going to champion. What’s, what’s the piece of the pie that I’m going to take hold of as mine, and it could be something as small as kind of fixed, how much plastic we use a normal recycled, you know how much plastic do I use in my house, it could be something as simple I’m going to limit my co2 output, it could be kind of manage where my money goes and who gets access to my money and how I invest it, and there’s so many ways that so many different levels. we can choose to make an impact and we can choose to focus on driving impact, or just taking care of ourselves and maximizing is maximizing our life, profit, right, right now, everybody knows that the most important thing. The thing that makes us what happened is, it’s our relationships and our families. It’s the people that we care for. It’s, it’s no money. But yet, so much of the time we let that drive every other decision in our lives. And it will derail us all ultimately it will be the thing that derails our world. And as we can see it, you know, so many things have already really quite badly to reorganize the counter we fix them. And we do something about that. So, that is why, that’s why I’m, I’m in this particular arena, championing women, championing women of color, championing women on the African continent. The true underdogs in our world, and championing them to win.
Mike Malatesta 1:09:54
So, how do people learn more about the work you’re doing and connect with you and you know participate. What are they, what do you want people to do.
Sarah Dusek 1:10:05
You can hop on over to our website which is enygmaventures.com. And that’s a Nygma spelt with a Y. And you can reach us there can reach out to me direct to our website. If you want any more information about the work we’re doing, or fundraise or anything about the things that we care about, I’d be happy to share more and I’m going to talk more.
Mike Malatesta 1:10:30
Why the why. Can enigma.
1:10:33
Why the why.
Sarah Dusek 1:10:36
Create Question. Well, and make Mazar mysterious. Yes, and the why, really is always been a while really within our Why is is always so fundamental to it’s why we go into Canvas. It’s where building and make, and it seemed appropriate that we have a while the middle of our name.
Mike Malatesta 1:11:01
Okay, I like it. Yeah, I like it. I hadn’t thought of that. So, you got me. So really good. Thank you. Oh well, Sarah. This has been so phenomenal to talk to you and learn about your journeys, multiple journeys your dreams, pursuing your dreams, having your dreams scare you. And, and, and also looking at an opportunity, and having a desire to solve the problem, and that’s what entrepreneurs do, and I, I’m really excited about the future for you I’m certainly excited about the past, but I’m really excited about the future as well and you’re just so, so open and willing to talk about your experiences, a lot of fun getting to know you.
Sarah Dusek 1:11:50
Thanks so much, Mike.
Mike Malatesta 1:11:54
Okay. Well, thank you. Hope that went okay for you.
Sarah Dusek 1:12:00
Great, great questioning, thank you,
Mike Malatesta 1:12:03
thank you. So, um, so what is what, like how do you how do you how do you participate as a, as a someone in the US, how do you participate in your fund.
Sarah Dusek 1:12:19
We have a US based company. Okay, so it’s pretty easy for us residents to be able to come on board and join us. Okay. It’s like making a record,
Mike Malatesta 1:12:33
just like anything else, okay. Yeah, so
Sarah Dusek 1:12:36
there’s no sort of foreign reporting that’s new, you know, no major cost of tax accounting or anything like that because we have all of that so that’s pretty easy,
Mike Malatesta 1:12:46
and it’s because it’s a fun, there’s no, we’re not investing in the funds investing in the individual companies and we’re just, you know, investors just invested in the Fund. Yeah. Yeah, okay. And what are the minimum investment levels you have
Sarah Dusek 1:13:05
$250,000
1:13:07
Okay. Okay,
Sarah Dusek 1:13:10
we just issued came once a year, and we just happened to be a business making investments in foreign companies effectively,
Mike Malatesta 1:13:19
and all the investments are in are in and we’ll be in Africa. Yes. Okay. Very good.
Sarah Dusek 1:13:27
Well, I, one caveat with that is we have done one deal last year which I actually quite like as a model in South Africa we found a great makeup company in South Africa was already selling a major department stores and doing really well here. We’re launching her business in the US, so we’ve put capital to work, to sort of give her an international platform already doing great today African founder of launching her in the US.
Mike Malatesta 1:13:56
Okay. Oh, fabulous. And have you attracted institutional money are you working mostly with individuals or what I’m,
Sarah Dusek 1:14:07
I’ve been working in both quadrants and, you know, talking to fund funds talking to individuals talking to deifies to get a classroom was not great year for raising capital, Very tough year. Everybody was very afraid, managing, managing dry powder and managing, managing resources, not knowing what’s going to happen. Yeah, but it’s been tough. We had a setback about a month ago where I thought I had wrangled our first close was close. But I had about $20 million earmarked from three or four, mostly from from some large institutional players. And one of them. Two of them got cold feet, which meant the other two of them got coffee. So I can’t go back to the drawing board again but a little bit. Two steps forward, one step back.
1:15:11
Yeah, keep going.
Mike Malatesta 1:15:12
Okay. Well, when I think about trends I mean, you mentioned the poverty trend and, you know, trying to solve that in your lifetime. I think it feels to me like there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that that is possible. I mean, in your lifetime so far poverty has been reduced dramatically, and you’ve got the biggest marketplace in the world to benefit for consumer to build to actually make consumers out of people who are presently not consumers because of poverty, right. Yeah.
Sarah Dusek 1:15:46
It’s such a huge marketplace and such, called such massive potential, I mean I think the stats were like by 2030, they were expecting 25% of the world’s workforce to live on this continent 25% of older people would be a
1:16:01
working age.
Mike Malatesta 1:16:02
Wow.
Sarah Dusek 1:16:04
So it’s like if we don’t create jobs. If we don’t build a structure for 25% of the world’s work, age, working for us to have actually have jobs, the implications and the complexities of civil unrest and the output of poverty if people don’t have jobs, the implications of that are horrific.
Mike Malatesta 1:16:28
Yeah, Sure, yeah. They sure are. Yeah, conflict,
Sarah Dusek 1:16:34
famine, I mean, it’s a huge problem. And we have to get out ahead of it and go, we’re certainly not going to create 25% of the world’s jobs, overnight, right, so we’ve got to, we’ve got to be building them now and everybody’s companies now we’re going to be classrooms for building staff that create large scale opportunities. And if we don’t do it here. Africans are not going to find work elsewhere, right so we got to do it on the continent. So,
Mike Malatesta 1:17:06
yeah right, We’ve already, we’ve already been through the taking Africans. Out of Africa to go work on other places we want to do that we want to create opportunity right there. Yeah.
Sarah Dusek 1:17:19
Imagine immigration and manage the flood of people from different parts of the world to other parts of the world but we got to do something about that and help create opportunities for people, so that people have, you know, can have dreams and come out futures can do what all of us want which is what most of us just want to give our kids the best opportunity and to, to have, we have them have a better life and maybe we did you know have a better starting point, we will have so that’s that’s true for Africans too.
Mike Malatesta 1:17:51
Yes,
1:17:51
we all have the same. Everybody wants that right
Mike Malatesta 1:17:55
and everybody
Sarah Dusek 1:17:56
wants the same things. Exactly.
Mike Malatesta 1:18:01
All right, Well, I like what you’re doing. So, good luck with your progress there and
1:18:08
I will.
Mike Malatesta 1:18:09
I’ll let you know when, when the show’s ready, and I’m looking forward to getting it out there and I really have enjoyed talking to you sir. Thank you so much and congratulations on, on what you’ve done and what you will do. I mean, I feel like it’s inevitable, so. Yeah. All right, well, enjoy the rest of your day and thank you so much for joining me. Okay, already take care, Bye.
