Sure. It’s a bit difficult to describe for Americans in particular. I mean, you think about how old Europe is, right? My husband, the first time he came to Cologne, he was blown away by the Roman ruins in the city.

It’s hard to appreciate the age of this city. I remember being like nine or ten years old when it celebrated its 2,000th birthday.

Of course, there is also some very ancient history in North America but it doesn’t tend to be expressed in monumental cathedrals and other ancient architecture.

We know Cologne’s monumental Cathedral is sitting on top of a bunch of prior churches that are sitting on top of a bunch of earlier temples. So that has been a very sacred space for literally millennia. I like to joke that every time they dig a subway tunnel in Cologne, they find either more ruins — or unexploded ordnance from World War II.

You know, Cologne was bombed pretty badly. And the rebuilt city is spectacularly ugly. It’s still got the Gothic Cathedral but everything else was bombed to smithereens so they rebuilt the old part of town. But the general face of the city is sort of mid-century modern and not in a good way.

Yes, I just turned fifty this last year, and the Greens were definitely still sort of a far-left Splinter party when I was a teen. But now today, there’s one thing that people don’t really appreciate about Germany. We actually ended up with what I think is the single best democracy in the world, after having been the worst aggressor of the 20th century. We created this beautiful multiparty democracy — which today includes the Greens.

They came out of the anti-nuclear movement — that was the rallying cry in the late 70s, early 80s. And a lot of the Green leadership came out of the student protest movement of the late 60s.

Those people who created the Green Party, they ended up in power for a period, and they’re now in power again. We’ve had a Green foreign minister. And the Food and Ag minister, not surprisingly, is a Green Party member who is Turkish-German — so it’s the first time that we have had a Turkish-German minister in the cabinet. So yes, the Greens are definitely part of my formative experience.

I was too young. Not to say that I didn’t have friends who got into the student politics of it all. When I was about fourteen, I went to a boarding school on Lake Constance. And from there, I really began my international meandering. I left Germany when I was sixteen to go to an international high school in Canada, and so I didn’t really get involved in politics that much.

My economics teacher in high school, a place with the remit to educate the next generation of global leaders, he really brought a very holistic perspective to economics. He had personal experience with what was then called developing countries, and the detrimental effects of the predominant economic paradigms on local populations.

I ended up going to the University of St. Andrews to take a joint honors program in economics and philosophy. They are right in the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment, which is a weird way to say that David Hume was an influence. And Adam Smith, because I literally went to school down the road from where he grew up and worked.

Yes. That was the influence of Richard Norgaard, one of the founders of ecological economics, who was really the reason I went to UC Berkeley to do my Ph.D.

Oh yes — it was literally the only program I applied to in the U.S.

Well I really didn’t want to work with anybody other than Dick. I had read his book Development Betrayed as an undergrad. So then I really wasn’t interested in going anywhere else.

I was interested in how humans really don’t understand nature very well, unless we can think of it as natural resources, i.e., something to be extracted and mined and turned into quote, unquote, useful things.

There are areas like mining and oil and diamonds and growing food, in which we’re extractive in nature. But I was curious about how nature becomes a natural resource. What’s that shift? I mean, it’s such a social construct.

And what was wild about this time — you’ll remember this — the Rio Conference was just happening in 1992, the first United Nations Earth Conference. The new discussion about the need to preserve nature and preserve the Amazon rainforest.

And you had these just wildly divergent estimates and opinions about how valuable the rainforest is as a source of potential future economic value to humanity. And one area where this played out was like, you know, in estimating the future value of the rainforest in giving us life-saving drugs. And the estimates were literally off by four orders of magnitude. So I started digging into how we come up with these estimates of the value of nature. And come to find out that not surprisingly, it’s a total construct.

Yes and you know, I never wanted to be an academic. I went into the Ph.D. program not for science’s sake — it was a tool to help me do the things I wanted to do. I had an informational interview with a scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund to find out what it’s like being a Ph.D. and working in an advocacy organization. After a while they said we have this project on marine protected areas, we could really use an economist — and so he hired me as a consultant.

So the job I took eventually was with Ecotrust, which is a very innovative organization headquartered here in Portland, Oregon. It’s chartered as a nonprofit but has always done really interesting things with business models. I came on initially as a project lead, then became staff economist, then took over the whole portfolio of what is essentially an internal consulting firm.

I built a profit center inside the organization that was providing consulting services internally and externally. I guess I’m just a natural entrepreneur, I’ve always been entrepreneurial. And then in the early 2000s, as social media took off, I thought there ought to be a way to harness technology for the scaling of solutions to the world’s wicked problems.

And that’s really then what prompted my departure. We incubated a project inside Ecotrust that really wanted to be a standalone tech play. But by that time, I’d become president, doing fundraising and solving problems. Like yeah, like in administrative problems, not interesting problems. So I left to take that project and turn it into a standalone company, which became the precursor to what is now my company Armillaria.

Yes, in a way. Because of the work we had been doing at Ecotrust, I was very familiar with impact investing, and I was very successful as a fundraiser for a non-profit.

When I stepped out with what was the first version of Armillaria, to raise some finance, to scale it, all of a sudden my fundraising mojo wasn’t working anymore.

I’d been selling ideas for more than a decade by then. But suddenly, it’s not working. That’s because my fundraising environment had changed. The world of non-profit fundraising is a lot more inclusive than the VC world.

I was trying to raise money from middle-aged white guys who just didn’t know what to do with me or my company. Which is of course an experience so many women founders and founders of color share if they want to build a company outside the Silicon Valley norm.

So I thought, well this is screwed up. And that’s when I read the first manifesto — the one that Jen [Brandel] and Mara [Zepeda] had co-authored, “Sex & Startups.”

I know, right? It was just laugh out loud funny. Especially as a woman, when you have sat with these VCs who will ask you these asinine questions. I mean, I literally had a group of them at one firm suggest maybe I should consider hiring a boy CFO. So I could get him to draw us an “up and to the right” hockey stick.

I looked at them and said, you do realize I’m a Ph.D economist. If I wanted to draw you a fucking hockey stick, I would do it myself!

I was introduced to [Zebras co-founder] Mara Zepeda that same year, 2016. And then we co-authored the response. We asked, if you don’t like VCs, what is the antidote? And that’s when we came up with the Zebras. And then as you know, the rest is history.

It’s both-and, actually. Zebras Unite is a hybrid enterprise. We’re organized as a co-op, with the golden share held by a nonprofit organization. That’s how we anchor the mission.

Our vision and our purpose is to mobilize capital, community and culture for founders of all different stripes. Especially those that are locked out of traditional financial markets that just don’t get what we’re trying to build.

I head up our capital circle. People asked us early on, how can I invest in the Zebras? Are you going to create a fund? You know, they just love to give us money and for us to invest it, which is a nice problem to have.

But as a first time fund manager, you run into the same issues as you do as a woman entrepreneur, as a black entrepreneur, which is you have to prove yourself over and over and over and over to financial markets, right?

A friend of mine, Bettina von Hagen, who heads up a super innovative investment management firm, EFMI, is now on her third fund. It’s taken her fifteen years and she’s finally raising a $115 million fund. It’s just too freakin’ slow.

And so we said, Is there a way we can hack this? Can we hack the way in which we mobilize capital to more entrepreneurs of more stripes? And so here in the U.S., the answer is just like, shockingly simple. How about we just invest in people of color? Who are already solving this problem.

Because we’re seeing in the U.S. that the whole access to capital problem is exacerbated a thousand-fold by the systemic racism of our institutions, including financial markets.

So somewhere along the way, Mara and I helped conceive a revolving loan fund for women entrepreneurs in Oregon. And we ran into some challenges around that. And then we said, surely we’re not the only people who have difficulties trying to build an innovative vehicle for an underserved group. And sure enough, we looked around and there were literally dozens and dozens and dozens of capital innovators in the U.S. who are building character-based loan vehicles, who are building private equity vehicles, revenue-based vehicles, all catering to systematically underserved communities.

In Denver, in 2019, we brought together a few dozen of them, just to compare notes. We discovered there was an opportunity and an interest to band together and say, how can we solve for this missing intermediary infrastructure that would benefit all of us.

Maybe instead of Zebras creating its own fund, what if we helped bring forth a shared loan loss reserve or credit enhancement facility for a range of innovators?

And that’s what the Inclusive Capital Collective is. From the Zebras Unite perspective, it is our intervention in the U.S. market. The intervention is the creation of a mutualistic infrastructure that benefits mostly BIPOC-led funds and entrepreneur support organizations. And we’re incubating it inside the Zebras Unite Co-Op. Our partners on it are our funders like the Surdna Foundation and Wells Fargo.

We just finished our annual planning exercise a few months ago. We’ll have more to say about all that publicly, and to the community in a bit. But we’re looking to formalize the education and skills that you need to run a Zebra company, both internally and externally. After all, Zebras Unite itself is a Zebra startup.

We’re actually our own guinea pigs, but together with Sheeza Shah, our head of operations, we’re beginning to build it out. Almost like a badging system for developing the skills required to run Zebras Unite. I’m acting as CFO, I would love there to be much greater bench strength across the company for people to run the financials.

It’s a hybrid model, it has unique needs around how we manage money, etc. And everybody needs to understand the bottom line. So there’s a corporate finance badge in our future as a team. If we’re doing that internally, why don’t we offer that up to others, other co-op members? Because if you’re running a company, understanding your bottom line and your run rate — but through a Zebra lens — is a necessary skill anyway. I’m looking forward to building out that offering.

Can we infiltrate the business schools? Can we have a Z-school? But we’re also looking at it in terms of educational offerings for and by founders and co-op members. The hard and soft skills of running our types of businesses.

And I see a lot of opportunity and interest to make a sort of purposeful intervention in the whole crypto craze. There’s a lot of hyperventilating on social media about the crypto economy, and as an economist, I’m just going, there’s nothing there.

It’s a tech fix in search of a problem. There is a very interesting body of work that we at Zebras Unite are going to have to examine, which is how you track patronage. How do you reward people for the value that they’re creating? And their contributions they’re making?

In my Capital Circle, I have a number of co-op members that are doing the hands-on work of helping qualify other co-op members for referral in our nascent capital ecosystem.

I think that is actually a really interesting opportunity for Zebras Unite to lead with purpose on whether and how we’re going to use some of these new technologies around distributive ledgers and wallets and tokens and so on. Because do we actually have a use case. So again, as an economist, I’m excited that there’s something there because we actually have a use case. We have a global community of people where we are very much interested in figuring out how we can compensate people for their patronage without having to figure out the damn tax laws.

And that actually takes me to the third big theme that I’m excited about, which is around collective ownership and mobilizing capital for that purpose. We’re not quite ready to announce it, but we will have a major effort in that regard, next year with some other co-op members, and some very exciting partners. We really want to solve that at some scale.

Again, how do we mobilize more capital into more founders of different stripes and with collective ownership, i.e., corporate forms that reward workers and other stakeholders. Zebras Unite being a multi stakeholder co-op, it’s also a problem we’d like to solve ourselves.

We have chapters in cities around the world, but I think the next move is standing up some regional presence, somewhere outside North America, that takes on a regional umbrella function. If we were to do this in the EU, it could solve the tax issues for our European members. I’m sort of agnostic whether that happens in Europe first or in Latin America or in Asia or Africa. I think there are opportunities and initiatives in all those locations that would potentially lend themselves to creating the first non-North American entity of Zebras Unite.

And then the question is, is it a federation? What’s the model for all that? So we may end up being some sort of federated cooperative.

I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I’m a pragmatist. You know, a friend of mine had this wonderful story of the three frogs that fall into a vat of milk. The optimist frog says, Oh look, I can drink all this and he drinks until he ups and dies. The pessimist frog says, Oh no, I’m surrounded by milk. I’m going to die, and sure enough he dies.

And the third frog just keeps paddling through the milk like frogs do. All he knows how to do is to be a frog. He’s paddling for so long he turns the milk into butter and then he climbs right out.

So that’s me, I’m that third frog. I just do what I know to do, which apparently is build complex organizations and initiatives that grapple with systems change. Then we grow them. And then we climb out of the vat.