132: Top 20 Countdown

Top 20 Countdown: Week 12

Welcome to Innovation City—powered by Venture Cafe—where Tyler Kelley and Michael Johnson, Co-Founders of SLAM! Agency, interview innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s episode is the twelfth of several highlight shows where we are taking a look back at our top 20 favorite interviews and conversations of all time. Today’s featured guests are:

• Freddy Sidi, President and CEO of Chargello
• Janisse Rosario-Schoepp, M.P.H., Ph.D., the Vice President of Operations and Strategy at Health Foundation of South Florida

Some key points from Freddy at Chargello:

• What to expect when starting a business:
• The need to pivot
• Plans change, plans fail
• Prepare to take your hits and get back up
• The difference between being in the software business and being in the hardware business
• “Are you solving a problem?”
• Solving problems that are unknown often offers the biggest opportunity
• The trouble of inventing solutions that don’t scale
• Products can work in Miami, or San Francisco, that don’t work anywhere else, because of the specific ecosystems of those cities
• “Solve a problem. Make sure that it scales. Make a difference that matters.”
• Listen or watch Freddy’s full episode here

Some key points from Janisse at Health Foundation of South Florida:

• Public Health’s focus on population health, improving overall health of populations
• Creating a built environment that supports a higher quality of life for its residents; grocery stores, spaces to exercise
• Health disparities in minority communities; lack of open space, parks, after-school programming, access to grocery stores and healthy foods, through streets and sidewalks
• Creating a culture of health
• Give people the space and opportunity to practice the healthy behaviors that health representatives have been trying to teach communities for years
• Social determinants of health
• 40% of what drives poor health resolves down to: whether people have access to jobs, primary care, and transportation
• 30% comes down to healthy behaviors
• Genetics makes up 10-15% of health determinants
• The struggle of changing cultures internally at the Health Foundation; moving away from the traditional role of a foundation as grant-makers or grant-providers, to a role as co-partner to the organizations that they give grants to
• Shaping the markets; aligning with other funders. Using the Foundation’s public capital to unlock other private capital
• In the past, private businesses had a natural investment in their local communities; globalization has changed that. Janisse and her coworkers are thinking about how to drive reinvestment in local communities
• The Anchor Institution Initiative, and other ways the Foundation, and Miami, are ahead of the national curve
• Engaging the private sector to re-invest in the communities around them
• Miami’s long history of committed private businesses headquartered in Miami
• Disruption within philanthropy and hospitals; creating pool-funded models to address the social determinants of health
• Impact investing; earning a financial rate of return, but with a social impact
• Listen or watch Janisse’s full episode here