The Exchanges

Q The company is called handprint, but we all, we often talk about footprints, right? If you're going hiking somewhere, or if you're creating carbon through whatever activities we use the word footprint. Why did you choose handprint?

A Footprint is the sum of all the negative impact you or company has on the world. And so it's a very commonly used term in, in business and sustainability. And also, of course, of course, we talk about footprints on the moon. And so it's like leaving an imprint, but the, the flip side of footprint is handprint. There is a, it's a scientific term that is not so popular, but it basically captures all the positive impact you're creating in the world. And there's an entire scientific methodology that mainly was designed by people at MIT that tries to help organizations figure out what is your positive impact in the world. And while business over the last 3040 years has done quite a lot of work in trying to optimize the measurement of their negative impact, this has often come at the expense of Measurement for the sake of measurement. And so what Handprint tried to do is really provide a counterfactual, an alternative perspective, an alternative approach to how companies should think about their environmental responsibility. And our overarching thesis is that the environmental responsibility of an organization should not be limited to simply reducing its negative impact. There's a much more aspirational goal to be found in working with companies to create a positive impact in the world. That appeals more to employees. It appeals more to customers, and it has A much better alignment a…

AI assessment note: “the flip side of footprint is handprint... it basically captures all the positive impact”

Q I haven't really seen them. There'll be like, save the children foundation or the UNICEF and these other kinds of things. And, and when you get to checkout, they'll go, oh, would you like to add a dollar for this thing? My answer is always no, because I don't know where the hell it's going. And why should I have to pay for it? The company should pay for it.

A So you're pinpointing the two critical barriers to success in the impact space for, from a corporate perspective. One is. Who's paying for it, right? The reality is it should be the company that at least ostensibly makes the contribution, right? So if you're asking a customer like, Hey, do you want to pay five dollars extra? The customer doesn't have a very interesting experience because if they want to do this, they might as well do private donations, right? They can just give to an NGO directly. So that's not very interesting. Secondly, if you're doing it in a way that doesn't give The customer end to end transparency on what is happening. Then you're really asking them, please have faith in me. I'm going to do something good with this money that you throw in the black box and trust us something good is going to happen. And that's also not a very appealing value proposition because more often than not, customers are quite skeptical and rightly so because they've been deceived many a time by companies making a variety of false claims, or at least claims that are not entirely true. So the way this would work from our perspective at Handprint is that one, we encourage all our customers, our corporate clients, that they should embed impact in the price. Does that mean that they are not going to increase the price? Well, that is something that's hard to figure out in advance, but …

AI assessment note: “you're pinpointing the two critical barriers to success in the impact space”

Q so you're talking about closing the loop and transparency. And whenever those two words come together in the last few years, the word blockchain is mentioned. Do you think it's necessary to implement a blockchain without tokens? You, you can actually do blockchains without tokens. Um, is it something that you've thought about or do you think it's not necessary or do you not know enough about it to comment?

A I do know something about it. I've been writing about blockchain for a few years and we've built a blockchain prototype with my nonprofit in the past. I'm definitely not an expert at the technical level. But it's definitely something that we're really interested in specifically for specific solutions that are very hard to do without a blockchain. Um, the tokenization of impact itself is not necessarily something you want to do on a blockchain, um, because it's going to create quite a lot of friction, especially in terms of corporate adoption, right? So unless if you can make it really opaque, So that companies don't even know it exists on a blockchain and they don't need to worry about private keys and all of that, then yes, it can work. But what is something that's really, uh, really important in our space and that's very hard to address without a blockchain is the idea of how do we prove that the impact that an organization creates through its financial contributions Is unique and is uniquely theirs. So if I'm as a, as an intermediary, if I'm selling, um, a forest, let's say a 100,000 trees in Indonesia to a company in the US, how is that company going to know that I'm not selling the same 100,000 trees to a company in Europe? This is a fundamental challenge in the impact space.

AI assessment note: “tokenization of impact itself is not necessarily something you want to do on a blockchain”

Q So they say, oh, you want to spend thirty million this year? All right. Well, it's, it's going to cost us three million to make that happen. Probably like that's ours. Um, how does your platform actually work in that regard? I mean, I, I know in my description in the intro, I talked about how you guys do it, but, um, how does the finances of it all work?

A The example of your friend in, in China is pretty interesting. So the way that handprint works is At its essence, what we do is we work with companies to enable them to link their strategic KPIs, KPIs that have nothing to do with sustainability. But we try to link those KPIs, the achievement of those KPIs, and they could be at a very high strategic level. They could be at a much more tactical level or even at a product level. So, but once we have a KPI that a company identifies as this is something that we really want to accomplish. If you then create some simple automation, but by using digital tools, APIs and whatever, um, and you link that automation to something good in the world, then achieving your strategic APIs has the positive externality of creating a positive impact in the world as well. And so this is by and large how our system works. So we have built tools that enable companies to Integrate online and offline sales with the creation of a positive impact or integrates the creation of attention in the form of advertising eyeballs to link that to positive impact or the volume of transactions or the number of unique website visitors or the number of times that you move in like a prospect in a CRM system from prospect to Leads or from leads to client. So any kind of action that has a digital fingerprint can be turned into a handprint. Now on the financial side, how doe…

AI assessment note: “Now on the financial side, how does that work for us? So we. Work as commercial agents”

Q team. And you're working in this field. How do you pitch to them the idea that we are different from other people. We actually make sure that this thing is done rather than say, you know, how do you get people to buy into this fact that like, you're trying to be different. You're trying to change the way. These things get done. How do you prove it to them?

A I don't think there's any real proof that is kind of a hundred percent watertight, right? So the way we exemplify this to our corporate clients has a lot to do, I think, with building trust and reputation. My own reputation as an academic, my, my co-founder's reputation as also a reformed academic. Uh, we've done a lot of work in this space, so we have Quite a lot of knowledge. We've written about this. We worked for the UN. Uh, and so I think that helps in appeasing the minds of, especially people in large corporates that are not very used to working with smaller organizations, that they can have faith that this is a credible organization with credible people. It's Equally challenging, I would say, to communicate those realities, well, I hope they are realities, inside our team, right? So, because a lot of people that apply to come and work for handprint, and there's heaps and heaps, don't necessarily understand what we do, or think they have a very rudimentary understanding, but are actually incorrect in their perceptions. And that has potentially a lot to do with the fact that we need to be better at communicating on our website. And so what exactly it is that we do, um, or we need to put out even more materials in terms of thought leadership. Like we've done like a regeneration first manifesto. We've done a recently a paper on the nature tech ecosystem that help us establis…

AI assessment note: “the way we exemplify this to our corporate clients has a lot to do... with building trust”