All language subtitles for [Dutch] 05 Melanie Yorb V022.en

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the other element we also added is that

i sold the one euro

company to a foundation,

you know the worst sale ever you know

but i did this because

i wanted to protect the social mission

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hello my name is melanie

ryback and i am the CEO

and co-founder of radically

open security

non-profit companies started and

this is the world's first

post-growth startup incubator

i am american i am from

south florida, that is where

I grew up almost in the

American South, but not quite,

we actually call it the southernmost

municipality and in South Florida

but yes

it's kind of interesting place

that of course, how it was

like 30 years ago, is very

different from what it was is now

back in that time it was very bad

houses a political house you know it

with the proverbial white posts fences a

little nimby and

you know everyone just wanted

to enjoy the sun and have a good life

that's you know nothing wrong with that

but at the same

time you know, I mean

it first started to change a bit then

you know we had the election with

gore vs bush and then we had the

whole dangling chads episode, then it

changed a bit more of course after 9 11

and of course it changes continuously

now, i'm from a

predominantly liberal family but I have

conservative parents and in that sense

I mean sometimes they vote Republican

and my dad is a bit of a fan of trump

unfortunately um that's yeah i mean,

i guess when i was younger it wasn't

as much of a problem as it is now but,

i think when a kid grew up sometimes

you come across kind of attitudes

and decide you want to do

things a little differently

i moved from the united states to the

netherlands for pretty good reasons

just because, i mean

i think i feel better with the culture

here you know

i mean the netherlands is a

very social capitalist country

it has really great

social safety nets

socialized health care

all kinds of facilities for

the less fortunate you

hardly see homeless here

i'm not sure where they put them

but i'm sure they are still there but

you know,

but i just went back and have

san francisco boston visited a few other

cities and the number of homeless

people in the US is huge,

so i really enjoy it here, i mean

especially, here in

amsterdam, just because

this is a very nice one

progressive, progressive fishbowl

is where you can perform interesting

experiments social experiments

business experiments and even for the

top government they still understand

you know why you want to do things

to help other people, i mean them maybe

you sometimes know CEOs

of big companies, but they are

still Dutch so in that sense

I get a lot here

support for some sort of my

progressive somewhat socialist business

ideas I think I don't

would get so soon in the united states

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radically, open security is a

cybersecurity company that specializes

in ethical hacking and various types

security audits, so radically open security

has about 50 people, we have had

hundreds of customers and

we have conducted security audits.

also called penetration testing

on everything from google to

the corona reporter and before you know

the european commission you know

but also I.T companies core

internet universities, i mean it's

SMEs, but we also do non-profit cyber

security work at cost on a zero

margin basis for non-profit NGOs

in civil society I strive to conduct

my business in the same way

run like when I led my research

team when I was still in college

I mean the point with academics

is that we measure our success

in positive impact I still do

I mean even though I run a business now

I would say the main

difference is the financing model

I now have clients

instead of grant proposals

write gh to be honest i think

customers are a little less work

and they are considerably easier to

deal with so yeah, but in that sense

but I see what I do as applied

research in many different ways,

I mean of course cyber security

we are at the forefront

in what we do i mean the fact

that we run tests on the latest

technologies the fact that we

also help design technologies

looking at the defensive

side and incident response and

ransomware and you know

on that side that it applied computer

science research, but I also think

what we do with the business model.

extractive companies,

but it's really hard to implement,

because if you go

to a lawyer and you say hello,

do i want a non extractive

build a business to make sure

no value passes unnaturally

middle class salaries and a pension

can you tell me how most lawyers will

we're not sure

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I don't think I ever really

knew what I was doing

you know I at some point uh

i never wanted to start a business

you know me in that sense i mean

I was an academic eh led

a research team on the free

university of

amsterdam i switched to

the industry just because I kind

of wanted to see how applied

computer science research looked

like, you know, on the part of the

industry it was never my dream to

become an entrepreneur,

but it was more that I had some

philosophical disagreements with the

leaders in cybersecurity consulting.

worked in ing bank's cybercrime team

and I appreciated the lack of

openness and transparency

in the workflow.

I was also one of the

market leaders at the time

and I thought you know

we can do this differently,

so I decided to leave to start a

cybersecurity company, simply because

i thought that's secured

is a fundamental human right, it's not

just this cash cow that you can milk and

I really wanted a non-commercial

entity on the commercial market

to compete with the incumbent to

trying to take the whole

thing to the next level,

so of course you know that you

non-profit companies start and after growth

mean most of it wasn't

really on my radar i knew i did wanted

to make the company different but I

didn't know how

so I spoke to mafia laymen of the

annelmet foundation and he said to

me you know melanie there is a real one

elegant construction

of the dutch church

so churches sometimes want a commercial

spin-off so that they are on the one

collect money in some way and then

that money with the tax

benefit goes back to the church a famous

example of this in the underworld

country is the language institute

regina chele also

known as the nolan fonfert

and you know the unstarted it

language institute it is

extremely high quality

moxie miller earned her Dutch there but

then the money goes with the tax benefit

back to the nuns that's how it works

so we decided to love our uh so-called

commercial spin-off a cyber security

business and our so-called church

nl-net foundation of course michael is,

if you give i want you to give all

your profit to me and i was like a great

idea, so basically

it works like this:

you must donate 90 percent or more

of your profits to charity each year

unkind and if you don't or if you are late

you will get this nice letter from the

explosion teens say hey where is that

donation you don't want to get that

letter, i had it but the point is that i

myself as an entrepreneur wanted a

belt and suspenders to force myself

to cross-subsidize charity with

our profits and when I say profit,

I mean profit, no turnover

of course you know we

be paid by our customers i need my

pay contractors who do the work

we reinvest where necessary in the

platform of the company i.t project

management business development all

other types of overhead

to be paid and if we know

there is a big expense coming up

next year, we can also create reserves,

but the uh profit that's

basically the part that

we do not reinvest that you

would otherwise pay out to

shareholders, so that's basically

the money we can afford to lose

despite reinvesting what we

need to create a stable and bl

to build a company,

the first seven years of our b

standing we have almost three

art million euros donated to a mlnet

which is great and then they spend

that money on open source projects

digital rights initiatives basically

everything for an open and transparent

internet de y give

away the money i have, actually

very little to say where that money

goes but they are a good funding agency

with a call for applications and

the triage and judging and all

administration and bureaucracy they

arrange everything we give them just it

money and yes for

the rest, I mean by

making sure you know we're using that

profit, you know, for the social good.

you know but no me

but i did this because i

wanted to protect the company's social

mission, so I just wanted to make sure

that that company wasn't mine, but

it was more of a you know something

for social well-being and we

also implement elements of what'

steward ownership', also in

the company in the sense of

trying to avoid

selling the business,

so now with the board we're

using, I'm pretty much okay with it

people stacked t i know at some point

i will veto any eventual sale of it

company i also want to implement

gold share but i have to decide

how I'm going to do that exactly

because it's not clear to me yet who I

would like it to, I'm still working on

that, the point is i have to

make sure you know, seen

the fact that I didn't

make this whole thing

non-profit and non-extractive, except

for the extract for a good cause, i need

to make sure it stays that way

you know and even just thinking

about the future uh eventually know

like a succession plan like if I ever

leave and the next generation takes

over, do I have to make sure that that

structure is locked up there, because I

got to make sure that next

generation, they don't go

change and that they are not going to

undo the non-extractive nature of the business,

you know, there are

low profit entity forms that

there are like the

babe on the rise

corporation in the united states

i mean you have a lot of uh

but what they're trying to do

is try to find this balance in the

so-called triple bottom

line right people planet profit

there is only one problem um as

muhammad yunus say says it is best

when there is a tension between the

people and the planet versus the prophet

the prophet always wins

but actually it is

problem even in our semantics

because if you examine the word profit

everybody thinks

they know what it means,

so of course you would say that my

company needs profit to

survive, but the problem is that

the word profit actually has a double

meaning so on the one hand you have what

i would call margin reinvested so I sell

something to you I put some money

in there, on top to invest

again in building my

company The meaning of the word profit

is financial extraction and that is what

pays my maserati and my yacht and my private

island. It is needless to say this

is not only not essential

for running a successful business,

but it's even harmful because that money

that you are out of business

for the benefit of that one

percent is cash you can't reinvest

in building a better business it's cash

that you can't use to better pay

your staff or lower prices for customers

or improve the quality of

your products and services or

doing research and development

so basically financial extraction

is a competitive disadvantage

on the market, but

these two contradictory

definitions of the word profit

are embedded in the same word

and this causes confusion because

then you know as people well

say of course my business needs profit

to survive i am good if you have it

about reinvested margin completely

agree when you talk about financial

extraction not only

do i disagree, but it is

harmful, you have

as much uh confusion

than with all that

is not for profit,

because an NGO would say we absolutely

want to eliminate financial extraction,

but then they also say but then I am

not allowed to have a reinvested margin

this is where you start to get the

problem, because

NGOs and non-

for-profit organizations fall into

something I call the subsidy trap,

so what that means it is similar to the

poverty trap but uh they are dependent

of these grants donations you know

grants and of course, given the

political climate sometimes dry these

things on they are not reliable

funding sources, but when these NGOs

want to switch to a more sustainable

source of financing, such as

starting a business, for example, is

the problem that they risk losing

their charitable status from the

tax authorities,

so this is a problem

because NGOs and non-profit organizations

need more sustainable financing

sources so that's another problem with

this double meaning the third

problem therefore comes down

so on the triple bottom line

triple bottom line people planet

profit yes there is that profit again

so what we have in the end is

people planet reinvested margin

financial extraction.

The financial extraction

is the green wash when

we take out green wash

want to remove social enterprises we

need to eliminate financial extraction

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follow your own internal north star

if you want to start a business

you are most likely going to meet

the business incubators and they

are going to give you this capital skill

exit silicon valley story

understand that you don't

have to do things this way

there are other people who

want to build purely socially oriented

companies, even non-extractive

companies to care for that social

orientation and you are not the only one

so all i can say is read

for example throw away

cks at the google bus

by douglas rushkoff i

think really excellent

articles are like those in

jeffrey funk's american affairs uh

that's great check out

some of the new ones

economics uh you know writers i

mean kate rayworth is an obvious but and

Tim Jackson too, but

also uh muhammad yunus

and his concept of social affairs, you

know, I mean, he came up with the

concept of non-profit business long

before hai dat did, so you know his book social

building business extremely inspiring

is charleseisenstein also as i said

is a very good one to read

and for the rest uh if you what

If you want more information, also

about my own work, you can go to

https colon slash

non-profit dot

ventures and understand that

there is a whole community of

entrepreneurs who in this way

and if you ever want information like

If you have any questions or if you just

want to discuss your business idea,

please don't hesitate to get in touch

on with

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you