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<ul class="summary-list"><li>Angela Mou is an LA-based entrepreneur and founder of online shop <a href="https://www.elevatejane.com/">Elevate Jane</a>, which sells accessories for smoking.</li><li>She works from her living room and brought in over $117,000 in two months during the 2020 holiday season.</li><li>This is what her job is like, as told to freelancer writer Danielle Bauter.</li></ul>I was cruising Instagram one day in 2017 when I came across these beautiful ceramic pipes and bongs, and wondered why no one had put them in a shop. I started looking for interesting and unique pieces and the more I looked, the more I found. I became obsessed with the idea of starting a shop for a good two weeks, and finally I decided to make it happen.To get started, I wanted to figure out how much it cost to buy the pipes and how much I could sell them for. So I pretended to be a <keyword id="10905219" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="smoke-shop">smoke shop</keyword> in order to receive wholesale pricing info, like line sheets and minimums.Once I'd found 10 or so pieces that I wanted, I started looking around for pop-up markets in LA. I applied for all the necessary licenses including a reseller's permit, and then I built my website and Shopify site. For two months I worked nonstop, and then launched Elevate Jane in July 2017.<h2>Before Elevate Jane, I'd worked in tech, hospitality, e-commerce, and marketing.</h2>In 2017, I was taking a break from a hotel company that I was working for in New York and figuring out what I wanted to do next, including moving back to LA. I grew up in Southern California, and I've been smoking weed since middle school. It's so prevalent in the culture here. I spent $10,000 to launch my business - $4,000 for buying inventory, $2,000 for legal fees, and then another $4,000 for setting up logistics, packaging, marketing costs, etc.<div type="image" title="petal pipes.JPG Elevate Jane Angela Mou" height="1724" width="2299" msid="81434942" hostid="261"></div>Early on, I did all of the traditional smoke shop things. I went to the trade shows, I saw the distributors, and I saw what I wanted to bring to the industry with my business.<h2>I wanted to create a one-of-a kind experience completely different from walking to your corner smoke shop.</h2>From the beginning I always wanted Elevate Jane to be an online store, and COVID-19 really pushed us to focus on that. I work out of my living room, and I have three employees - one full-time and two part-time. I shoot all the photos myself, so my workday is a mix of content creation, order fulfillment, purchasing, product development, and marketing planning. I like being involved with every aspect of the business.Over the years I've honed in on what helps me to stay organized. I'm dedicated to a paper planner as well as lists and white boards. It's a mix of being meticulous with schedules, but also going with the flow. <h2>In some ways, it's so much easier to be a solopreneur than to have partners.</h2>Often I can get things done more easily on my own. At the same time though, having to make every decision myself can inhibit me from completing certain things. Every year is a new set of challenges, but I'm grateful because they've all helped me grow and learn about the business.One of the things I hear consistently is that timing is everything. I feel lucky to have launched Elevate Jane in 2017 - and in Los Angeles, where it was a special time right before recreational legalization of marijuana. It was at the very beginning of the "Green Rush," when we started seeing millions and millions of dollars being funneled into the industry. New businesses had the opportunity to emerge and be influential.I feel like there was a shift in 2016 or 2017 when it became much more acceptable for women of color to be involved in the <keyword id="14728" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="60" keywordseo="cannabis">cannabis</keyword> industry. I've also aligned my business with a lot of like-minded progressive brands, and I feel welcomed with open arms as a woman of color in the cannabis space.Last year we had two products that did really well for us. On 4/20 we launched our first Elevate Jane original piece, <a href="https://www.elevatejane.com/products/mimi">Mimi</a>.<div type="image" title="elevatejane founder angela smoking Angela Mou" height="3600" width="2880" msid="81434943" hostid="261"></div>It was well-received from day one, and we also saw huge demand for it during the holidays. The other product line we focused on last year was <a href="https://www.elevatejane.com/collections/vintage">vintage sets</a>, like an ashtray paired with a joint holder or a pipe, which customers also loved.<h2>We brought in over $117,000 during the 2020 holiday season.</h2>In addition to doubling our holiday sales from 2019, we had rapid growth in our <a href="https://www.instagram.com/elevatejane/">Instagram</a> followers. Instagram is tricky, but I've always just tried to put out good and consistent content. For us, that means beautiful photos of our products and cannabis education. If I have a platform, I want to be doing good too.<div type="image" title="Angela Mou Elevate Jane" height="1891" width="2521" msid="81434945" hostid="261"></div>My Instagram intuition is pretty well-honed by now, and I know what works best for Elevate Jane and what our community wants to see. Now, one of my cousins also helps me with managing Instagram. We were also early adopters of Reels, which definitely helped us grow by getting us onto the Explore page.In July 2018, I decided that we were only going to sell pieces made in the USA because I wanted to support local artists and small businesses. Currently, 65% of the companies whose products we sell are women-owned and 35% are from people of color or immigrant-owned, and I'm always continuously seeking out more.<h2>My advice for starting an online shop is to launch fast and launch lean. </h2><div type="image" title="elevatejane angela floralcart Angela Mou" height="2145" width="2860" msid="81434947" hostid="261"></div>Before taking the leap, make sure your business is something you want to do every day. On the flip side, I know from personal experience that sometimes you can kill a passion when you make it your full-time "work," but you won't know until you try. I set Elevate Jane apart from the crowd by not listening to the crowd. I listen to my gut and only choose to carry products that I love. The products that do well are the products that I use myself. I've learned to let my intuition and genuine passion lead my buying.In the early stages of growth, it was incredibly discouraging at times when I was exhausted and felt full of self-doubt. The first step is to flip your mentality - I try to look at every challenge as an opportunity to grow and expand as a business owner.I practice a concept called "Amor Fati," which means to love one's fate. I've been through some obstacles in my life that felt devastating at the time, but I've learned that things always work out. If I can teach myself to harness challenging energy in a productive way, I usually end up in a better place. As an entrepreneur, you can make the most of every opportunity.

I spent $10,000 to launch an online smoke shop that made over 6 figures in sales last year. Here's how I broke into the cannabis industry as a woman of color.

<div type="image" title="Trump shushes press conference" height="2571" width="5141" msid="76733757" hostid="261"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>When the <keyword id="1754604" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="coronavirus">coronavirus</keyword> <keyword id="43587" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="pandemic">pandemic</keyword> struck, I accepted that my kids' school year was effectively over. For hope, I turned my sights to September. </li><li>Thanks to Trump's haplessly negligent response, the best-case scenarios keep getting worse, and a full schedule of in-school education looks unlikely before September 2021.</li><li>Kids only have one shot at a childhood and a primary education, and Trump has made both experiences measurably worse for an entire generation.</li><li>This is an <keyword id="6356002" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="opinion">opinion</keyword> column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.</li></ul>The day everything shut down in New York City, back in March, I had the sinking feeling that the coronavirus pandemic wasn't going to be a short-term crisis. I didn't have the scientific expertise to come to this conclusion, I just had little faith in the powers that be to effectively guide the public through such uncharted waters.There was so much <a href="https://twitter.com/billdeblasio/status/1234648718714036229?lang=en">obvious cluelessness</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-for-the-coronavirus-crisis-from-six-other-disasters-11584719497">such little precedent</a>, and a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-confusing-country-misinformation-could-have-deadly-consequences-2020-3">frightening</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-inability-communicate-causing-government-coronavirus-pandemic-chaos-2020-3">vacuum</a> of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-confusing-country-misinformation-could-have-deadly-consequences-2020-3">leadership</a> at both the local and federal levels that it just didn't seem that hopeful timelines like "<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/15-days-slow-spread/">15 days to slow the spread</a>" or President <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-easter.html">Trump's fever dream</a> of re-opening the country on Easter were going to come to pass.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-new-york-ghost-town-made-mixtape-cope-2020-4">Losing everything</a> that made my expensive, stress-inducing city worth living in was tough, but even more consequential was the indefinite shuttering of schools. Though it wasn't certain at the outset, it quickly became clear that the school year — in person at least — was over and a return to classrooms in September would be a difficult, but possibly reachable goal.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-made-me-to-talk-to-my-kids-horrors-history-2020-3">Maintaining the sanity and functionality of a family of five</a> in an apartment over three months' in the virus' epicenter is not an experience I'm eager to replicate, but I still recognize I'm among the luckiest. That didn't make it hurt any less to watch my fifth-grader's realization that she'd miss out on all the "big little kid" joys that make the last few months of elementary school special, before childhood innocence is met with the maelstrom of middle school. It was mildly annoying that my second-grader would ask on a daily basis when she was going back to school, but it was miserable to realize she had eventually stopped asking.We're now much closer to September than we are to March, and the outlook has not improved.No vaccine or herd immunity is expected this calendar year. The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-says-antibody-test-results-wrong-half-the-time-2020-5">antibody tests</a> are <a href="https://journalstar.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/health/covid-19-antibody-tests-not-reliable-right-now-bryan-doc-says/article_9d64a0b9-b05f-5a29-ac19-e846f88fea6e.html">still a mess</a>. And the city is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/nyregion/Coronavirus-restaurants-reopening-ny-nj.html">slowly and tentatively attempting the reopening process</a> that has gone so disastrously for other parts of the country, while definitive results of <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-23/lapd-coronavirus-cases-spike-adding-to-debate-over-role-of-protests-in-spread">whether recent protests</a> were "superspreader" events <a href="https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/06/30/black-lives-matter-protests-did-not-cause-an-uptick-in-covid-19-cases">remain to be seen</a>.As the school year came to a whimpering end last week, many New York City parents were emailed tentative plans for the next school year that aren't really plans at all. School might open with a full schedule and full attendance. Or it might be in-school half the time (or less) and distance learning for the other half. Or it might be all distance learning. Helpful! I'm going to take the safe bet, which is the most pessimistic view possible, and plan accordingly. New York's partial re-opening means sidewalk cafes and haircuts are back, but for how long? Several cities and states that re-opened are just as quickly re-closing amidst a spike in COVID-19 infections. This didn't have to happen. And while <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-hero-andrew-cuomo-helped-create-new-york-disaster-2020-4">Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio</a> deserve historical infamy for their initial coronavirus responses, <keyword id="3828720" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="President-Donald-Trump">President Donald Trump</keyword>'s name is the most deserving to become synonymous with this virus.<h2>Trump's coronavirus failures are his legacy</h2>Not every federal failure is Trump's alone. Institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (<keyword id="6379474" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="cdc">CDC</keyword>) <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/cdc-coronavirus.html">didn't cover itself in glory at the onset of the coronavirus</a>, producing faulty tests, failing in its role as an accurate data repository, and communicating mixed messages to the public. Trump, the president, distinguished himself as a failure in numerous other arenas. After <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-suspension-entry-immigrants-nonimmigrants-persons-pose-risk-transmitting-2019-novel-coronavirus/">suspending some travel from China</a>, he essentially wasted the entire month of February, doing little about the virus besides repeatedly insisting it was no more dangerous than the flu and that it was "under control" and soon to miraculously disappear. He did, however, find time for other much less important activities. For example, the president decided to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cpac-play-fbi-peter-strzok-lisa-page-anti-trump-texts-2020-2">meet in the Oval Office with Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson</a>, both briefly famous for playing superhero characters in the 90s. The crucial business Trump needed to attend to while coronavirus spread across the country was talking with Cain and Swanson, the stars of a "<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cpac-play-fbi-peter-strzok-lisa-page-anti-trump-texts-2020-2">deep state"-themed play</a> staged at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that week.Besides giving <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-inability-communicate-causing-government-coronavirus-pandemic-chaos-2020-3">public addresses</a> and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-confusing-country-misinformation-could-have-deadly-consequences-2020-3">press conferences</a> riddled with dangerously inaccurate information, about the availability of tests and the use of hydroxychloroquine as anti-COVID medication.March was another month of missed opportunities by the president, who <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1242504551468617731?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1242504551468617731%7Ctwgr%5E&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2020%2F6%2F8%2F21242003%2Ftrump-failed-coronavirus-responseonse">less than two weeks after</a> the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic, was already talking about reopening the country in time for Easter.He'd spend a lot of April having <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-aid-andrew-cuomo-donald-trump-treat-us-well-2020-3">political spats with Democratic governors</a>, threatening to cut off federal aid to their states unless they were nice to him. And despite his own White House's stay-at-home guidelines, he was supporting anti-lockdown protests <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1251169217531056130?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1251169217531056130%7Ctwgr%5E&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2020%2F6%2F8%2F21242003%2Ftrump-failed-coronavirus-responseonse">with tweets like</a>, "LIBERATE MICHIGAN."In May he moved his attention to opposing mail-in balloting — an important issue in a presidential election year where crowds are a public health threat — despite the fact that both he and his vice president recently voted by that method. For a time he was a daily guest (via screen) in America's homes, but Dr. Anthony Fauci was almost completely sidelined in the month of June. That's because Trump has turned his attention away from keeping the public informed and toward things like moving his nomination acceptance speech to Jacksonville because the Republican National Convention's original home city, Charlotte, refused to allow a massive, indoor event to take place. He also tried to cram thousands of people into an arena in Tulsa for a campaign rally, but <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-yelled-aides-when-he-saw-empty-tulsa-rally-was-2020-6">they mostly stayed away</a>. A <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-devotion-cronyism-getting-people-killed-coronavirus-pandemic-covid-2020-5">faithful believer in cronyism</a>, Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of securing personal protective equipment (PPE) for first responders and essential works, yet shortages persist to this day. Now he's taking his self-serving amorality to new lows by <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing-slow-down-response/index.html">freely admitting</a> that he's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/us-coronavirus-test-sites-ending-funding-5-states-2020-6">cutting federal funding</a> for coronavirus testing to five states <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/experts-warn-against-trumps-end-support-coronavirus-testing-sites-2020-6">because the rising positive test counts</a> are bad for him politically. And he's still so bizarrely opposed to masks that <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pressure-mounts-trump-set-good-wear-mask/story?id=71539550">even Republican senators are publicly chiding the president</a> to set a better example.And in some parts of the country that had previously remained unscathed by a breakout, new epicenters are forming. <h2>Schools out for...ever? </h2>There's no good reason to believe Trump is suddenly going to become competent, just as there's no reason to believe everything from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-decision-to-oppose-masks-bizarre-self-sabotaging-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-6">masks</a> to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/george-floyd-protests-end-coronavirus-lockdowns-permanently-police-brutality-racism-2020-6">the admissibility of the virus outdoors</a> won't be politicized in this ever-increasingly tribal country.That's why I'm preemptively accepting the next year of my kids' education will be a complete wash. They will miss out on crucial social milestones. Friendships may fray. Sports won't be played. Their intellectual growth and their educational enrichment will be stunted. As the misery of the coronavirus moment inevitably extends into an era, I'll never be able to let go of the fact that it didn't have to be this way. While there's plenty of blame to go around and some points in the crisis where the right course of action was unknowable, there were many actions that could have mitigated the tragedy experienced in the US. When I look at my bored and unstimulated kids slogging through the charade of distance learning this fall, I'll get sad. And I'll get mad and remember it didn't have to be this way. And I'll think of Trump.<ul class="read-more-links"><li>Read more:</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/police-rioted-george-floyd-riots-justifying-protests-2020-6">Police rioted, justifying the point of the protests</a></li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fireworks-conspiracy-theories-panic-boompilled-boompilling-government-police-2020-6">A panic over fireworks shows how quickly conspiracy theories can spread</a></li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nypds-shake-shack-hoax-stop-taking-police-word-2020-6">Stop taking the police solely at their word</a></li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/george-floyd-peaceful-protests-looting-riots-destruction-righteous-cause-2020-6">Destruction swings at the system, but the punch lands on peaceful protests</a></li></ul>

Coronavirus ruined my kids' school year, Trump's response has ruined next year

Carson's not sure why he's never been able to kick his shoplifting habit. It started in his teens, when he and his friends would steal beer, and escalated when the installation of what he describes as "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/self-checkout-alienating-shoppers-according-to-new-research-2024-1">self-checkout silliness</a>" made it easy to buy a couple of things, phantom swipe the rest, and walk out of Walmart with "a huge amount of shit." In his early 20s, he took a chair from Target by just waltzing out the front door with it. He figured everyone would assume he bought it.Maybe there was a time when he could chalk his behavior up to young-adult antics, but Carson is no longer so young. He's in his 30s, lives in New York, has a good job at a nonprofit, and he still shoplifts regularly. (Carson, for obvious reasons, is a pseudonym. The same goes for all the shoplifters mentioned in this story.) A couple of weeks ago, he snatched some Benadryl from an airport shop to help him get a good snooze on an international flight. He often pockets small items at the drugstore. One of his favorite places to steal from is Whole Foods. "It's really impulsive," he told me. "I'm just shopping with my own bags and slipping small, valuable things." Salmon lox, he notes, fits nicely into a laptop sleeve.Carson estimates that he "saves" around $1,000 by shoplifting each year, but it's hard to say since he might not get those expensive cheeses if he actually had to pay for them. He recognizes the fact that being a "white dude" gives him a certain amount of privilege in avoiding employee suspicion. And before you ask, no, he doesn't feel bad about it, especially when he pilfers from Whole Foods. It became an "open field" at the high-end grocer after Amazon <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-buying-acquiring-whole-foods-for-42-a-share-2017-6">acquired it in 2017</a>, he says, in large part because of Jeff Bezos."It's run by a guy who's shooting himself into outer space," he said. "It just became so hard to find the reason that you actually hurt anybody by doing this." As much as retailers are quick to point the finger at organized operators for their theft problems, there's another group that gets a lot less lip service: the opportunists, like Carson, who are pocketing things from time to time because they feel like it. These shoplifters have existed forever — adults with decent jobs who are firmly in the middle class. And they're everywhere."It's your normal, everyday person, doesn't matter sex, gender, age, whatever, it's just people that see an opportunity and go, 'Huh, I bet I could steal that and nobody would know,'" said Joshua Jacobson, a loss-prevention professional in California who's worked for half a dozen major retailers over the past decade. "They're like a giant organized mob, they just don't know each other."Shoplifting is illegal, and there are costs to it, even if you don't love the company that's bearing them. Many people find this sort of behavior objectionable and unethical. But after chatting with members of the smallest-time thieves brigade, it was clear that they generally aren't concerned about the moral weight of their actions — they choose to ignore it, or they don't really consider what they're doing as wrong.Much has been made about the increase in retail theft in recent years. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/target-says-shoplifting-retail-crime-cause-million-dollar-profit-hit-2023-5">Major</a> <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/home-depot-fights-shoplifters-special-power-tools-2021-7">retailers</a> and industry groups have sounded the alarm about the rise in organized retail crime, horror stories (and videos) of smash-and-grabs are readily available online, and it seems like half the items in many stores <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/locked-up-merchandise-drugstores-annoys-shoppers-cvs-walgreens-rite-aid-2024-8">are locked away behind glass</a>.But there's also <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-we-dont-actually-know-whether-retail-theft-big-problem-2024-3">a lot we don't know about</a> retail theft. It's not clear what percentage of theft is organized, what's a one-off, and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-war-organized-retail-crime-target-cvs-victorias-secret-2024-9">what's the result of drug addiction or mental illness</a>. Shrink — industry-speak for <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stop-blaming-theft-shrink-target-walgreens2023-11">inventory that's gone missing</a> — is also caused by employee theft, operational failures, and things just getting lost. So understanding just how much is stolen by the most nondescript, "regular" people is hard to know.In recent weeks, I spoke with nearly a dozen of these non-organized middle-class retail thieves to get a sense of why and how they do it. I also talked to loss-prevention professionals and retail industry analysts about what they're seeing. The takeaway: A lot of people steal, from small-stakes stuff at the drugstore to larger items worth hundreds of dollars at hardware chains. Their motivations are generally not the direct result of economic need, but instead, people make a moral (or amoral) judgment about what goods are unjustly expensive, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/inflation-hidden-cost-work-salary-negotiation-boss-conflict-2024-10">especially as they deal with the recent bout of inflation</a>. They view it as a way to get back at The Man — many have concocted a code of conduct that amounted to pilfering only from big, evil retailers (and, in one case, overpriced corporate ski resorts).Case in point: A lot of the one-off shoplifters I talked to steal from Whole Foods with a very clean conscience. "No, I don't feel bad about stealing from Jeff Bezos," one 20-something occasional shoplifter in Washington, DC, told me. Her loot of choice is passion fruit, which she rings up as a cheaper item — bananas. She's even memorized the code: 4011. Another shoplifter, a 30-something man in New York who asked to be referred to as the "Parmesan cheese bandit," echoed the anti-Bezos sentiment. The only people who know about his habit of stuffing a block of Whole Foods cheese into his sweatpants pocket after hitting the gym (which he developed after seeing some TikTok videos about Parmesan's high protein content) are his brother — and, he said, "maybe the fucking surveillance people, I don't know."The National Association of Shoplifting Prevention <a target="_blank" href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/#R1">estimates</a> that about one in 11 people has shoplifted during their lifetime and that men and women are equally likely to be the culprit. Some surveys suggest that number could be higher, like <a target="_blank" href="https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/shoplifting-survey/">one in five</a>. Survey data, however, often doesn't account for the difference between someone who shoplifted a candy bar one time as a kid and someone who does it with regularity.Ernesto Lopez, a senior research specialist at the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, told me there's not much difference among income groups when people are asked whether they've ever shoplifted, because, again, "ever" is a pretty long time. But what we do know is that about 80% of shoplifting incidents only involve one person and that the average value of shoplifted goods has been increasing.One <a target="_blank" href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/">2008 study</a> found that shoplifting was more common among individuals with at least some college education and individual incomes over $35,000. As <a target="_blank" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/shoplifting-crime-surge/680234/">The Atlantic</a> recently reported in a story on stealing, a 2001 study on a drugstore chain in Atlanta found that a third of shoplifters were middle-class, four of 10 were women, and white people were as prone to shoplifting as Black and Hispanic people.Those stats track with Lopez's experience. Typically, the less serious and more accessible a crime is, the more people are going to do it. It's easy to go into a store, take something, and walk out. Jeff Prusan, a security and loss-prevention consultant to the retail industry, said most shoplifting incidents that occur and are apprehended "are sort of by your average, everyday person.""Middle-class petty theft is death by a thousand cuts for us," one loss-prevention officer in Texas told me. At the hardware chain he works for, a lot of "regular Joe Schmoes" come in and pocket something under $100. One of the most popular items among thieves is tape measures — some people will even pop off the tag and just put it on their belts like it's their own. The store loses thousands of dollars in tape measures every year. He estimates for every three they get in stock, just one is actually sold. "They'll be buying something that's worth $1,000 of materials for a job, but then they're still going to pocket that tape measure because they feel that they're either entitled to it or they just didn't want to pay for it, or they feel like they're getting one over on us," he said.When I ran this by Keith, a since-reformed shoplifter who used stolen items from Home Depot to help renovate his house, he confirmed the tape-measure thing. "That's the kind of thing you can help yourself to. That's not even stealing. That's just allowed," he said. "I don't even feel bad about not feeling bad."While many small-time shoplifters aren't particularly proud of their behavior, they aren't deeply ashamed of it, either. In the current economic and cultural landscape, they don't see their behavior as particularly devious or out of line, or, at least, it's not any worse than what the corporations they're stealing from are doing.Sharlene, a 30-something from Illinois, has never seen anyone shoplift at the grocery store where she works, but she hears the alarm go off when someone walks out of the side door, usually with stolen alcohol. It doesn't bother her — she steals herself. The first thing she took was a thong, in high school, which she was much too embarrassed to actually buy. Now, it's mostly essentials she feels have gotten too expensive — deodorant, groceries, makeup. Most recently, she took liquid eyeshadow from Ulta Beauty, because she wasn't sure if she'd like it."I know that this is not a moral thing to do if we're talking about morality," she said. "And then I'm like, 'Fuck capitalism.'"Donovan, who earns a six-figure salary and estimates he has stolen six figures worth of stuff, told me he has a "pretty strong code" about his habits. "I never steal from small businesses — I never have, nor would I. I basically try to focus on corporations that I don't like," he said. There's a "certain class" of things he doesn't pay for — toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, meat. At the grocery store, he sees lifting some items as earning a discount. He's been spotted and asked to leave stores multiple times, and he's been seriously caught twice, which resulted in him having to hire a lawyer, pay a fine, and, in one case, take part in a diversion program that he thought was good, though it didn't work on him.Donovan's working on his habit in therapy. He has a lot of financial anxiety — his parents weren't poor, but they were bad with money, and in his adult life, that's translated to an "insane amount of frugality." He recognizes he doesn't need to shoplift, but there's satisfaction in saving money, and it's not like he's particularly optimistic about his economic prospects. Even with his good salary, he can't afford to buy a home where he lives. So he takes out some of his rage at our "late-stage capitalism nightmare" by snagging a few items."It doesn't feel like a world in which I can really get by and build a life very easily anymore, " he said.None of the shoplifters I spoke to for this story expressed a significant amount of guilt about their actions. Some said they felt some embarrassment, especially at the idea that they might get caught, but no one was really losing sleep over their activities.One 30-something mom recently took a $160 closet organizer from Target on a whim after pushing it to the front of the store and realizing that the minimum-wage workers there probably didn't care if she paid for it or not. Another shoplifter, a 20-something schoolteacher, worries she might be a bad influence on her younger sister, but it doesn't deter her when she stops by the grocery store to load up on cheese and jam for what she's decided will be a free (for her) charcuterie night. Plus, she's Asian, the model minority that people wouldn't usually suspect of stealing. Another shoplifter, a 20-something master's student, told me she thinks there's a line between "ethical stealing and nonethical stealing," with "unnecessary items" like jewelry or watches falling into the latter camp. She worries some about getting into trouble, but if Walmart isn't going to provide her training on how to use their self-checkout equipment, "then you cannot punish me for not using it correctly."There's no blanket explanation for why individuals shoplift. People often develop post hoc reasons for why they committed an offense, and rationalizing is a fundamental part of human nature. The logic I heard was oftentimes flawed, or, at least, your mileage may vary on how much you buy it. As <a target="_blank" href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/04/wealthy-people-shoplift-rob-steal-why?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Post_on_Reddit">The Guardian</a> wrote in 2019, some psychologists attribute it to unresolved losses and traumas; others point to the dopamine hit and the thrill of outsmarting the establishment. For some, it's an addiction; for others, it's an in-the-moment compulsive act. And rationalizing our behaviors to ourselves, whatever the justification, is a defense mechanism against difficult or unacceptable feelings.Despite the extent of petty shoplifting, most retail experts and loss-prevention people I spoke with said that organized retail crime was their focus. It's where they say the big dollars are lost, and it's the type of thing you can build a case on and prosecute people. Even if an individual does take enough to meet the felony threshold, cases are often dropped to misdemeanor charges.Random shoplifters are also hard to catch. Unless you're 100% sure you see someone pocket an item or have complete confirmation they're skip-scanning big items at self-checkout, for liability purposes, it's not worthwhile to pursue it. The chances of nabbing a small-time opportunist are "slim to none unless we happen to walk into them putting something in their pocket," Jacobson, the California loss-prevention professional, said.There are costs to theft. If enough stuff gets stolen, corporations start raising prices, which hurts everyone. Stores may also put everything in glass cases, which hurts their business and makes for an annoying shopping experience. And Jeff Bezos isn't dealing with the day-to-day of shrink; front-line, low-paid employees have to manage it. Ultimately, the mini acts of rebellion may end up hurting the little guy on a broad, shared scale. David Johnston, the vice president of asset protection and retail operations for the National Retail Federation, said that many consumers are even complicit in professional retail theft because we're unwittingly buying stolen goods — on the street, online, even in local stores — we think are just discounted. Or, we don't ask questions when we find something outrageously cheap."If I can purchase branded merchandise or I can purchase large quantities of similar merchandise from someone at a much lower price than I could at a national mass merchant or the branded retailer themselves, I have to double think my purchase," he said.It's tough not to feel somewhat nihilistic about today's economy. Wealth and income inequality are daunting and seemingly unsolvable issues. Corporations prioritize their own profits and often display little loyalty to their workers. These feelings were only reinforced by an inflation surge in which profit padding likely played a part."If most of this is happening in Walgreens and Walmart and places like that, I don't know, is it a problem?" Donovan told me. "These massive, multibillion-dollar corporations that have all of this insane amount of wealth, and people are just reclaiming some of it."The more I reported this story, the more I realized how many people steal a little bit. I had friends confess they pop $10 of groceries into their bag every time they shop at Whole Foods or admit that they never ring anything up as organic at self-checkout. One person revealed that a cashier recently rang up her blood orange as regular, and she didn't correct them, which is a gray area but is technically stealing. Who among us hasn't walked out of a Walmart before realizing we forgot to scan one item in the cart? Or perhaps you got a refund on a stolen package it turns out was just delivered to a neighbor?To many of these everyday petty bandits, shoplifting is a way to take back some power. They know it's illegal, and in many cases, they're aware of the costs and possible consequences, but it's also a small, subversive way to feel some sort of economic agency, whatever their income level.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/emily-stewart">Emily Stewart</a> is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

America has a shoplifting epidemic. The thieves aren't who you think.

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<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">CNBC/ Heidi GuzmanLeda Braga, who recently launched Systematica Investments, is one of the hedge fund industry's few female managers.</div></div></div>Women make up about half of the world's workforce, but are far from parity in the worlds of venture capital, hedge funds, private equity and other Wall Street investing firms. There are <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-why-hedge-funds-have-few-women-investing-for-them-2016-8">a lot of reasons for that:</a> a thin pipeline of candidates, biases, and lack of recruitment among them. What's certain is that it's not due to less aptitude for investing - some studies even show that female hedge fund managers outperform their male counterparts.A new survey of 791 industry professionals released by KPMG outlines where progress is being made, and what needs to happen to close the gender gap.First, some background. Here's KPMG:<ul><li>Women make up only 15% of hedge fund CEOs, 11% of private equity and venture capital CEOs, and 14% of real estate CEOs. For chief investment officers, those figures are 18%, 19% and 26% respectively.</li><li>79% of respondents, who were nearly all women, say it is more difficult for women fund managers to succeed in the industry than men. The overwhelming majority also said it's harder for women-owned or -managed funds to raise money.</li><li>44% said women are hindered by the stereotype that they are more committed to their personal lives/family than their work.</li><li>36% said women have less access to investor networks.</li><li>28% said women get less PR/visibility than men's funds.</li><li>29% of respondents said there's "weaker interest" in women owned/managed funds.</li></ul>"In alternatives, there are certain prototypical models of a fund manager: people with certain pedigrees and characteristics, physical and otherwise," PAAMCO's CEO Jane Buchan said in the KPMG report. "When someone conforms to that model, there's confirmation bias. However, if a fund manager is off-model-if, for example, they are a woman-as the research shows, they need to perform substantially better to get capital."Indeed, some research shows that women managers outperform men but don't raise nearly as much money.Here's KPMG on a 2016 study by Rajesh Aggarwal and Nicole Boyson of Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business. The research looked at performance of nearly 9,520 hedge funds from 1994 to 2013. "The sixty-two surviving female run funds in the study had better returns and similar risk measures than their male-run peers (of which there were 1,669), but lagged male counterparts in several significant ways: the female funds had significantly less AUM ($150 million versus $222 million for male-run funds), lower management and incentive fees but longer tenure than their male-managed counterparts.""Our data suggested no inherent differences in skills between male and female-run funds, but, in order to survive, women-run funds have to be better," Aggarwal, the study's co-author, told KPMG. "And even when they survive they don't have the same [assets under management]."So how does one fix the gap? Defining the problem is half the battle. One issue is that female fund managers often say they have trouble raising money from investors, while investors say they have trouble finding women managers."That's the dichotomy of both sides of the coin," KPMG audit partner Kelly Rau, who helped organize the report, told Business Insider.About six out of the ten investor respondents said they thought there was a lack of supply in women-run funds.One of the issues is size. Women tend to run funds that manage less money, which means they have less resources for infrastructure which bigger investors require if they were to invest. About one in five investors cited that as a top barrier to invest in women."Women are saying it's harder for us to raise assets, but we're here, we're here," Rau said. "And the investors are saying they don't think there are enough women to invests assets in."<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">LinkedIn screenshot.</div></div></div>The report highlighted some areas of optimism, however. Ten percent investor respondents now have specific mandates for women-owned/-managed funds, which KPMG called a "significant improvement" since their 2013 survey, in only two percent of investor respondents did."It's very encouraging," Kate Mitchell, co-founder of Scale Venture Partners, told KPMG. "We are no longer making the business case about why diversity is important-we are now talking about what we can do to change our numbers." <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-us-currency-dollar-bills-coins-money-cost-2016-11">Here's how much it costs to produce money in the U.S.</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="B3OXJ4NzE6KOUoBs9SfTfgdx_VxHddro" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Women think it's harder for them to succeed on Wall Street - but there's some hope

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">REUTERS/Brian Snyder</div></div></div><ul><li>A new study finds one Facebook like is all it takes for advertisers to tailor ads to your psychological profile.</li><li>Targeting ads this way resulted in a 40% jump in clicks and 50% jump in purchases.</li><li>The findings could be used for unethical purposes, but they could also help people live better lives, the lead author said.</li></ul> Personalizing Facebook ads based on a user's psychological profiles - not just their demographic traits, such as age or gender - can significantly increase the chance they'll click on those ads and buy things, a <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/07/1710966114">new study</a> has found.Researchers at multiple universities saw up to a 40% increase in clicks and 50% increase in purchases when people's ads were tailored to their specific level of introversion, extroversion, and openness to new experiences.<h2>The findings can influence small purchases or national elections</h2>Critically, these psychological assessments were made using not a robust test or analysis, but a single Facebook like that each person had made. Sandra Matz, a Columbia Business School professor and the study's lead author, said the finding is worrisome.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/34680037606/in/photolist-UQyfWS-T25xCD-9dFj9D-e2JXGP-BuBKwS-eqSY8D-9d7Hic-pAc1Sk-Y4bMMA-9H923x-8vGnwi-eSmRdt-9hY1oT-XFtZS7-HNA8pc-6BBZ5S-Xdj4SG-cuCKfN-894uN9-dJjN3C-oR7oB7-UmGWdN-dkZsiS-Ue8CxL-Rc8kx9-SvmvT6-dL5iGs-qsxvSu-9vcWHs-HTUYZ7-m1ttgd-WxP2C3-qNniSi-UpLmXH-UWXexK-k8SyKk-CqJyt-dSWp6a-kJ8ZAY-mKwwTF-4xd6Se-9ua2qD-r3cZDi-TrTahT-SanEjd-Saqts7-Sd3jiv-8CD84e-V466R7-SRWf2f/">garryknight/Flickr</a></div></div></div>"If you use it in a context where you're trying to manipulate people, you can try and get them to do something that goes against their best interest, like not going out on Election Day to vote," Matz told Business Insider. "That's certainly a context where you don't want to see it happen."Matz and her colleagues ran Facebook ad campaigns among 3.5 million users - many of them women between 18 and 40 in the UK - on behalf of select companies.They then looked at what individual users had liked on the site, which Matz said <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/13/facebook-likes-targeted-advertising-psychological-persuasion-academics-research">presented a clear window</a> into people's personalities, and designed the specific ads based on those likes.The findings suggest that even minor tweaks can substantially increase the chances you'll click on an ad and buy the product, said Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist and assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University, who wasn't affiliated with the study. For instance, a running shoe ad for extroverts might emphasize running with friends, while an introvert's ad would highlight running alone."Just by aligning the type of ad with your personality, they showed you can get a much higher click rate than if you'd misaligned them or just did it randomly," Cerf told Business Insider.Matz said psychological targeting isn't always a bad thing. Companies that help people save money or engage in healthier lifestyles could use the insight to better reach potential customers. But she said it's important to highlight the nefarious side, too."We want people to be, in a way, worried about it, so they take action," Matz said. "But we also want a more balanced discussion," in which people recognize that technology is neither good nor bad. Ads don't have to be amoral, and she said companies can use them for multiple purposes.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Facebook</div></div></div><h2>Facebook isn't the only place psychological targeting can happen</h2>Matz also emphasized that Facebook is just one platform where companies could use psychology to inform their ad experience. It can happen virtually everywhere, she said, provided the user has even a minimal digital presence."You can predict personality and psychological traits from pretty much any digital footprint," she said. "You can use people's Facebook likes, browsing history; you can do it with people's credit card transactions, smartphone data. There's really no way of escaping it, unless you say 'no' to the whole idea of any digital service." <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-x-unboxing-video-accessories-inside-apple-2017-10">Unboxing the iPhone X: Here's everything inside and what you'll need to get</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

Advertisers can target you psychologically based on a single Facebook like, study finds

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>Marijuana's official designation as a <a href="http://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml">Schedule 1 drug</a> - something with "no accepted medical use" - means it is pretty tough to study.Yet numerous anecdotal reports, as well as some studies, have linked marijuana with several purported health benefits, from pain relief to helping with certain forms of epilepsy.Still, experts say more rigorous scientific analyses are needed. Use of marijuana, a psychoactive drug, can come with <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/physical-and-mental-effects-of-marijuana-2013-4">risks</a>, especially in people who may be prone to addiction or mental illness.&#xa0;And now for the first time, researchers have found a link between daily, decade-long weed use&#xa0;and a difference in how&#xa0;the brain&#xa0;processes&#xa0;reward.&#xa0;<h2>Addiction and the brain</h2>For years, researchers have suggested that such a link exists - and if it does, that it could play a powerful role in addiction. An important part of this line of thought is that addicts, far from amoral&#xa0;individuals incapable of making intelligent decisions,&#xa0;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/maia-szalavitz-unbroken-brain-treating-addiction-as-a-learning-disorder-2016-4">simply respond differently to drugs</a> - neurologically, psychologically, physiologically - than people who are not addicted. And this&#xa0;response&#xa0;is probably the result of many factors outside the person's control, including&#xa0;genetics, behavior, and&#xa0;environment.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>So for&#xa0;their <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.23250/full">study</a>, published on Wednesday in the journal Brain Mapping, researchers at the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas, Dallas took a look at the brains of&#xa0;53 daily, long-term pot&#xa0;users (14 of whom met the&#xa0;American Psychiatric Association's criteria for addiction)&#xa0;and 68 people who'd&#xa0;never&#xa0;used the drug daily. Then the researchers&#xa0;showed them&#xa0;with a series of objects meant to test their reward response.&#xa0;The&#xa0;objects included&#xa0;one type of fruit (the "natural cue"), a pencil (the "neutral cue"), and either a bong, a pipe, or a joint (the "cannabis cue"), depending on which one they said they&#xa0;preferred.Importantly, this study did not look at so-called "recreational users"&#xa0;- those&#xa0;who use the drug every&#xa0;few weeks or months. Instead, it focused on people who used the drug every day for an average of 12 years, several of whom met the criteria for being addicted to the drug and many of whom displayed some signs of past or present problems with weed.Why? Because the researchers wanted to tease out how&#xa0;changes to the&#xa0;brain's reward pathway might affect who used the everyday for years&#xa0;- and more importantly, why.Not surprisingly, when&#xa0;the&#xa0;chronic users were presented with either the bong, pipe, or joint, they displayed a stronger response in several&#xa0;parts of their brain linked with reward than they did when they were shown the&#xa0;natural&#xa0;fruit cues. In contrast, the non-users did not show a&#xa0;significantly greater response to&#xa0;either the weed or fruit cues, and some parts of their brains showed a greater response to the fruit than to the bong, pipe, or joint."This study shows that marijuana disrupts the natural reward circuitry of the brain, making marijuana highly salient to those who use it heavily," Dr. Francesca Filbey, the director of Cognitive Neuroscience Research in Addictive Disorders at the Center for BrainHealth and an associate professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, said in a <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607151239.htm">press release</a>. "In essence, these brain alterations could be a marker of transition from recreational marijuana use to problematic use," she added.<h2>Marijuana&#xa0;and the brain</h2><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>For&#xa0;another <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/05/1415297111.abstract">2014 study</a>&#xa0;also by Dr. Filbey, she and her team found that, compared with people who didn't&#xa0;use pot, long-term, heavy users&#xa0;tend to have a smaller orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region critical for processing emotions and making decisions. And, interestingly enough, the heavy users&#xa0;also appeared to have more cross-brain connections. Scientists think regular users may develop these links&#xa0;as a means of compensating for the difference in size.&#xa0;The regular pot users&#xa0;also&#xa0;had lower IQ scores overall when compared to the people who didn't use the drug.To arrive at their results - one of the first comprehensive, three-dimensional pictures of the brains of adults who'd smoked weed at least four times a week, often multiple times a day, for years - the researchers&#xa0;used a combination of MRI-based brain scans.&#xa0;Still, that study&#xa0;did not show that chronic weed use&#xa0;caused&#xa0;certain regions of the brain to shrink or that pot use caused lower IQ scores; it simply showed a relationship among those factors."We cannot honestly say that that is what's happening here,"&#xa0;Filbey <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/long-term-marijuana-use-effects-on-the-brain-2014-11">told Business Insider in 2014</a>.Similarly, the latest study does not show that chronic pot use causes a change in the brain's reward response; the reverse could also be true, that the changed reward response influenced&#xa0;the chronic pot use. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/medical-benefits-of-marijuana-2016-4">7 surprising medical benefits of marijuana</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="J2cDYzMTE6Ipz-Ou9rQ5Sajidxk8IB_w" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

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<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-conscious-investor" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a> <ul><li>Ross Baird is the president of Village Capital and the author of the "The Innovation Blind Spot: Why We Back the Wrong Ideas―and What to Do About It."</li><li>Baird points out that only one percent of start-up investment goes to African Americans, only two percent of capital goes to women, and 80% of all funding goes to only three states. This leaves many entrepreneurs overlooked. </li><li>Baird says if you are an entrepreneur that wants to change the world then think small. He says pick a very specific problem that you see in your job, in your industry, in your neighborhood, and try and be excellent at solving that very specific problem. </li><li>Baird's interest in social entrepreneurship started when he was working in microfinance in India. He helps us understand when microfinance is beneficial to the community and when it becomes extractive.</li></ul>Following is a transcript of the video.Sara Silverstein: Tell me what you do at Village Capital.Ross Baird: So at <a href="https://vilcap.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Village Capital</a>, we back entrepreneurs that are reinventing the system. You know we've got inequality at a 100-year high in our world. We're worried about the sustainability of our planet, we're worried about feeding a growing population, and we're backing entrepreneurs who have new ideas to solve some of those challenges that hit us in the face everyday.Silverstein: And are you focusing on the ideas that the entrepreneurs have or who the entrepreneurs are?Baird: I think, I think it's inseparable. You know we have a story I tell a lot. We have an entrepreneur name and he grew up an immigrant from Haiti. He moved here, age 11 and saw his mom get ripped off everyday by payday lenders, check cashers, people taking advantage of poor people like his family. He came here to New York, worked on Wall Street figured out how to <a href="https://www.lendstreet.com/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener">help poor and middle class families refinance their debts</a>, and he went out to raise a bunch of money and completely struck out.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image">JPMorganJerry Nemorin is founder of LendStreet</div></div></div>I said, "Jerry" - When I first met him, I met him a few years ago, I said, "Jerry, you've got a great idea solving a huge problem, where - what's happening?" He goes, "You know, the financial market works in patterns. I am a black guy, I come from South Florida, and I'm solving poor people's problems. I'm 0-3, you know."White guys in hoodies in San Francisco and New York do pretty well when it comes to raising money. We think that there are ideas that solve problems in people, places, industries we're not paying attention to and those are the entrepreneurs that we're trying to lift up and back.Silverstein: How did you get involved in this in the first place?Baird: So I started a company about nine years ago. I have always been an entrepreneur. I mean, every since I was a kid, I was running different hustles all the time. And I saw very often working - you know, I was living in India working for a start-up microfinance bank. And the microfinance industry is - $30 billion a year around the world is lent in $500 chunks to small businesses, near a 100% repayment rate. Totally transformed financial services in emerging markets. And the thing I saw in India was how businesses on the ground close to the problem can solve a lot of the problems that we have. And so I tried to take what I'd seen in the grassroots all around the world and apply it to the capital markets here where, you know, the distance from Wall Street to Newark might as well be half the world away even though it's only a couple miles.Silverstein: Is all microfinancing good? Is some of it bad? And how is it different from payday lending?Baird: Albert Einstein once said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes solving the problem and five minutes on the solution." You know -Silverstein: What does that mean?Baird: That means microfinance is a tool. All investing is a tool. Every microfinance bank, every bank is neither good nor bad, they're amoral. It's just what are people trying to do with it. I've seen microfinance banks that act in extractive ways and their primary goal is extract as much profit out of poor communities as possible. I've seen payday lenders do the same thing. I've also seen microfinance banks that are very good and say, "Our core goal is building wealth for the community and we've structured our business in a way that works for us." I was in India and there was a microfinance bank that was the fastest growing microfinance bank in India and they raised venture capital from Silicon Valley and they were pushed to grow 10 times faster. I would argue that because that happened they lost their impact. They started signing people up for loans who may not have needed them and you know, people had three or four loans at the same time and it - the bank grew unsustainably fast because profit dominated what they were trying to do and ultimately, the bank lost a lot of value because they lost a lot of customers and so it was an unsustainable way to operate a bank. I would say, you know, investing is neither good nor bad. It depends on what you use it for. Same thing with microfinance. Same thing, you know, there are people who lend in very poor communities who are very extractive. There are some lenders in poor communities that are payday lenders at good interest rates that are good. So I think you just have to look at what is this business trying to accomplish in addition to making money and evaluate it from there.Silverstein: And can you expand on the thesis behind<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Blind-Spot-Wrong-Ideas_and/dp/1944648615" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> "The Innovation Blind Spot,"</a> behind your book?<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Blind-Spot-Wrong-Ideas_and/dp/1944648615">Ross Baird</a></div></div></div>Baird: Yeah, so you know, going back to Jerry. 0-3 - he says, you know, as a black guy he has a hard time getting his ideas, his small little idea into the big market. One percent of start-up investment goes to African-Americans. Two percent of start-up investment goes to women. There are a lot of people who are overlooked. Jerry was from South Florida. He was trying to start his business in Central Virginia. Where you live matters. So roughly 80% of start-up investment goes to three states: New York, Massachusetts, California. If you're in Ohio or Florida or Nairobi or Mumbai, it's really hard to get your idea into the system. And Jerry said he was trying to solve poor people's problems. The biggest industries, the six biggest consumer industries: health, education, financial services, energy, agriculture and housing only make up 15% of the billion dollar start-ups that we've created. So we have a lot of money going to a few people and places and problems that are - make the lives of people who are doing pretty well more convenient, but the people working hard on the problems that really matter for the future of our society often have a really hard time getting a shot. And so "The Innovation Blind Spot" says here's how you can be, in your day-to-day life, more innovative. And here's how you can find ideas from the people and places and areas that you might not have otherwise thought of.Silverstein: And when you're talking about these entrepreneurs and start-ups, what size allocations are you making to them?Baird: So we will do, you know, $50,000-$250,000 investment in an entrepreneur who is solving a chronic problem that the market is overlooking.Silverstein: And how much have you put to work in these types of investments?Baird: So we've invested almost $10 million. <a href="https://vilcap.com/companies/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">We've invested in close to 100 companies</a> all over the world. And we found, we have a very different process for investing. We found very different results. So about 43% of our investment is in women compared to 2% in the mainstream market. About 34% are in people of color compared to 1%. Ninety percent are outside New York, Massachusetts, San Francisco, compared to 20%. So we've been able to get a lot of ideas out there and we're seeing some really exciting results.Silverstein: And can you make money investing in people and ideas that are making the world a better place? Baird: Yeah we are. I mean if you look at how our investments were doing and you looked at it blindly, we would, it would be a pretty promising - I mean, it's very early days. You don't want to declare victory before anything, but I think we're pretty excited about the results we have so far, even if you extract the mission for what we're doing. But I actually think our companies are performing well because of the mission they have. I mean everybody wants to work at a company whose values we believe in. Everybody gets more excited about investing or funding something that has what we believe in. So we think we've got a good business model with a very exciting mission, you're going to outperform over the long-term.Silverstein: And do you have any advice for people who might be coming out of school right now who want to be social entrepreneurs or want to be - who are capitalists that also want to improve the world?Baird: Yeah, you know, a lot of people think, "I want to change the world, bigger is better. I want to go, you know, to the biggest firm or the biggest city or whatever." And I would say the most impactful entrepreneurs I've seen embrace the mantra, small is beautiful. Pick a very specific problem that you see in your job, in your industry, in your neighborhood, in an issue that you care about and try and be excellent at solving that very specific problem. Because if you can change, you know, your line of your division at your first job, you can change your company, which changes your industry, which changes the world. Or if you can change your neighborhood or your block, you start to see a ripple effect. So I would say try and get as specific, and tangible, and small about the problem you're excited to solve, and your career will take you in really exciting directions.

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