Bo Ghirardelli 4:39
No, I think the reality was that we had some funders back in the Bay Area who helped seed the work in Morocco. And, you know, after you know, we were getting real results. We had some of those funders say, you know, hey, like this same problem exists in Oakland. And on a trip back, started talking to some some local community organizations and talking to people they serve. And sure enough that it was absolutely true that young adult entrepreneurs who are experiencing poverty were not being served by the existing ecosystem. And so that gap was and that need was was compelling. And, and why move back home to keep doing this work here?
John Corcoran 5:27
I’m curious if there was ever a point where when you were in Morocco, where, you know, you’d gone from teaching, teaching English, social studies, Teach for America, and then all sudden, you’re halfway across the world away from home? And did you ever think like, oh, my gosh, what I get myself into? As you’re in the midst of this historic, you know, revolutions are happening in different countries and things like that. I know, I felt that in life, like there are times when you just gotta like, oh, my gosh, like, what did I do?
Bo Ghirardelli 6:01
Yeah, definitely moments like that. I mean, I think I still think teaching was actually the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And so I’d say starting starting out the, you know, first job doing that, I think, was what was prepared well for, for what happened. But you know, it was a lonely lonely times, and, and certainly, lots of lots of challenges, just with the day to day that you just wouldn’t expect more think about when you’re starting a business in a country you’ve grown up in, right, that you got to overcome. There’s a lot of learning new culture, learning subcultures within that country. And figuring out how to navigate you know, life and and the way people work. And is isn’t just not the same from place to place shocker.
John Corcoran 6:56
Now, you’re back in in the Bay Area where you grew up, and you have this model that you’ve worked, that you’ve used in North Africa, and then you start knocking on doors of different companies around the Bay Area saying, Hey, we’ve got this idea to invest in little, you know, micro businesses and help young adults to start businesses here in Oakland Bay Area. That must have been hard from the beginning. Because these these companies, you know, these large companies in the Bay Area, I’ve got a no shortage of different nonprofits out there to choose from.
Bo Ghirardelli 7:31
Yeah, absolutely. I think I think what was compelling to our early funders, and who weren’t necessarily the bigger corporations we partner with now was just that the reality that, that there was a gap in the ecosystem and services, right, I think some nonprofits have very similar services to a lot of other nonprofits. And they have a hard time differentiating themselves, so they can have that that trouble. But I think the pointing to the obvious gap, and then pointing to the demand we were seeing from the entrepreneurs, we were targeting in our community was compelling enough to them. And sure enough, you know, what happened, you know, in the after those early days was, you know, 2015, we received 5000 applications from entrepreneurs, young adults across the country, who are saying, hey, I want what you the you’re doing this doesn’t exist in my community either. And so it wasn’t just Oakland and the Bay Area that was experiencing this, this gap or this need. And if you no doubt that that evidence of demand for what we’re doing was was really one of the more compelling things for some of the companies that we work with us, we took that that evidence to them and said, Look, this is a much bigger problem than 100 people we’re serving now. And this is this is 1000s of people we could be serving. And so that took us down a path of of launching and transforming ourselves from a brick and mortar nonprofit, to a tech nonprofit, so that we could build a digital platform to deliver our business mentoring services, our entrepreneurship training in our startup grants program, to entrepreneurs in every state, rural urban environments, etc.
John Corcoran 9:21
So, and that must have been a big leap. What was it like as you kind of unveiled that or rolled that out or discussed that with, you know, donors and other supporters?
Bo Ghirardelli 9:32
Yeah, but we had to reinvent ourselves right. And so I roped in my longtime friend and tech entrepreneur, Nick Kerry, who’s was also is also the co founder of blockchain.com, which is one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. And at the same time he was co founding that he you know, he was like, hey, sure, like that guy really care about this and and really worked with me to lay out the the technology vision for the organization. And, and then we pitched that to Accenture as our largest corporate funder. And they, they helped us hire and staff, the team. And we did it through a really innovative partnership with them where they, they gave us designers, product managers, front and back end engineers. And and essentially seconded those people to to our organization. And that’s what we built our skysthelimit.org platform, you know, with that team and still have some of them working with us to that.
John Corcoran 10:31
My wife works at a community college and community colleges are interesting, because when the economy does really well, enrollment goes down, when the economy does not do well, enrollment shoots up. Have you experienced something similar, like that, where, you know, if jobs are plentiful, there aren’t as many people coming into your organization. And if the unemployment rate goes up, then you’ve got a lot of people who are coming, looking for your services. And maybe at the same time, too, that people aren’t as likely to make donations because the economy is not doing as well.
Bo Ghirardelli 11:05
Yeah, I mean, I think the the nature of our work with our corporate partners is so is one of very long term partnership, right? So that that has, and we go deep, we create a lot of value for them, while creating value for our entrepreneurs and in for the volunteers we serve. So having a mutually beneficial arrangement with with all of our partners is, is really important to us. And I think that’s that’s helped us, you know, run the long run the long marathon here of being over a decade in to the to the organization. Um, but as far as, like, what drives more people come to Sky’s the Limit, I think it’s really just about the aspirations of young adults, we’ve seen pretty steady growth and steady demand for what we do. Whether the economy is hot, or whether the economy’s down, I mean, certainly during COVID starting businesses in the, you know, that are brick and mortar, that, that went away. But, you know, we serve the first generation of digital native entrepreneurs, right. So, so building companies, virtually, or delivering products and services, where there’s no, you know, face to face interaction, that all comes quite naturally to our entrepreneurs. So we, we’ve seen pretty just consistent demand. And, and certainly, whenever people feel like they, they aren’t able to achieve their dreams in the existing realm of opportunities that they’re facing, and sometimes that that well, economy’s hot, or well, the economy is cold on both of those, both those situations really see entrepreneurs questioning whether what they’re doing now is actually achieving their dreams. And entrepreneurship is a path for that. To help people feel like they’re chasing their purpose, their meaning, what they love they’re passionate about. And so that’s who we serve a lot of.
John Corcoran 13:05
Now, you’ve had some success stories you had one individual recently launched a short term rental company generated $300,000 in revenue in a year, which is amazing. Talk about some of those different success stories that you’ve had.
Bo Ghirardelli 13:21
Yeah, I mean, we work with incredible entrepreneurs, and who are you know, after often underestimated by other other traditional ecosystem players and entrepreneurship, like venture capitalists, etc. And, and, you know, Justin was able to create this really easy like, found this mid term rental niche and was was able to build a successful business and tap into the networking community and have mentors and other entrepreneurs to learn from and support him in building that that business. You know, another entrepreneur Briana who’s who’s just incredible as you know, she she’s a victim of trafficking and she the the dream for her was to create a business where she could employ other victims of trafficking give them a place to heal from their trauma while she was while they were making money. And so that was really the intent behind her business and helped her worked with her exporter to launch a gourmet popcorn company which is delicious, delicious popcorn. Catrina’s Popcorn is the name of the company. And, and, and she was able to work with the network, Learn, Build, connect, and eventually secure some big partnerships that have allowed her to hire over over 10 people into our company and create a place for healing and for you know, for work too.
John Corcoran 14:56
That’s really cool.
Bo Ghirardelli 14:59
So, incredible. incredible entrepreneurs work with me. Asia is that is it a young entrepreneur who, through a through a tragedy in her personal life, where she lost her premature twins, and then gave birth to another set of premature twins, witness the lack of, of good infant formula for, for her babies. And this personal experience really drove her her business called Bunny, where she’s building a infant formula that is that is tailor made to fit the needs and the delicate needs of premature newborn babies, which is, which is a, you know, the many, many children and the current market just doesn’t doesn’t offer what, what she needed for her for her kids. So the, again, the entrepreneurs I think that that we serve have have tremendous at have overcome tremendous obstacles in their lives and building a business is just another another way for them to self actualize and chase the chase those dreams that they have. And and we’re proud to be supporting them all along the way.
John Corcoran 16:14
I imagine for you one of the harder parts of your jobs is kind of choosing who is your horse you’re going to support and and who not because, you know, don’t have the finite number of resources. And I imagine part of the calculus is well, who do we think is going to follow through on this? Who do we think is going to, you know, going to do the work that they need to do in order to be successful? Yeah, how do you how do you? How do you make that determination?
Bo Ghirardelli 16:47
I think we’ve we we don’t. Right, we don’t I don’t our team doesn’t? Well, the way we’ve think thought about that is looking at and providing an opportunity for all entrepreneurs, if they if they are committed to accessing the services and and in the community. For example, with our startup grant fund, we actually have the community select who wins those grant funds, we don’t have a central grant committee, we don’t have some group of people and secret making decisions. Instead, on our platform, making positive contributions to the community earns you points and you get to use and spend those points to vote on who should win startup grant. So you can see everybody’s profile, see what they’re what they’re trying to raise money for. And you can select yourself who wins. And so in that way the people are, who are creating the most value in the community have the biggest voice and deciding who wins our startup grants.
John Corcoran 17:52
Hmm, fascinating model, and then appropriate for a Bay Area based, tech focused organization like yourself, you’re looking at launching a DAO, which for those who haven’t heard that term before? What is that? What’s that going to look like for you?
Bo Ghirardelli 18:12
Yeah, we’re really excited about about the promise of blockchain technology to help communities feel real ownership over over them over their communities, but particularly in a virtual space. And so a decentralized autonomous organization is essentially controlled by a crypto token. And this token acts as you know, shares in this in this organization and this treasury and so what we’re planning on doing is moving our funds some of our funds for the for the startup grant fund, to this DAO, and then issuing the token to the community, in the same way that we issue points. Now, we’re going to replace that with a token. And so the entrepreneurs and volunteers in the community will will truly own and control this, this pot of money in a way that, that that they don’t now, and I think that true sense of ownership will will bring the community together. And so the money that we give out will only be one benefit to the, to this to this evolution of our model. But truly the the we think communities thrive when when they when people feel ownership over them, and that is what this will allow us to do. And we’ll be able to do it in a really transparent way. So he you know, one of the benefits of blockchain technology is the transparency around them and the trust that that that that builds so you the community will be able to see everything that happens see who’s voting and where and where the money’s moving, etc. So, and you know, we’ve heard from from some people over the years that You know, we think people are holding back from contributing to nonprofits because they don’t know about where, where the money is going or where the impacts happening. And we want to address that. And we think What tree technology is, is directly solving that problem along with a couple others that I mentioned.
John Corcoran 20:18
It’s a fascinating model. I’ve learned a little bit about it. And some ways that you know, there are other models in the business world, ERISA I think, is the name of it the kind of the model for employees to, to own interest in a company. But this is fascinating, the kind of next level ownership, management, all that kind of stuff. It’s gonna be interesting to see where it goes, well, Bo, this has been fascinating. Where can people go to learn more about you and check out Sky’s the Limit?
Bo Ghirardelli 20:50
Yeah, it’s right in the name, skysthelimit.org is where you’ll find us or you can or you can email me directly at Bo@skysthelimit.org If you’d like to learn more,
John Corcoran 21:00
Bo@skysthelimit.org not B-E-A-U.
Bo Ghirardelli 21:04
Got it.
John Corcoran 21:05
Got it. All right. Well, thanks so much.
Bo Ghirardelli 21:06
Thanks, John.
Outro 21:07
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