changing the way the world works and how it impacts us brian how right so i put a lot of burden on you changing the way the world works but you really kind of are right i don't know that scares me depends what you mean by that well let's talk about the only interesting to a lawyer like me but we're technically an austrian federation which means that each site kind of have one vote in the global co operative and we're growing rapidly so we're about double the size we were a year ago and there's many more that would like to open and in each city we have a similar focus but we really allow a lot of flexibility for what the individual founding team in any one location wants to manifest there or what they think the community in the study needs from impact but this is really where all of a lot of business takes place it seems to me is that accurate so it's interesting i think that there is no easy way to capture exactly what we do or find ways to do it more efficiently that's something we're always working on  we have a lot of different moments that my team refers them as well that was a hub moment where we say that's that's the sort of thing we're about and a lot of it is happen somewhat what might appear accidentally but it's really setting the stage for the accident to occur and so the sort of things that we see as hub moments are times when someone very influential  in the business or philanthropic world comes and makes them solve the bell ball to our members who are generally on the earlier side of ventures and we really aim to do three things well provide inspiring work space provide curated community and targeted programming and events and our focus is on purpose driven ventures that aim to build the world we want to live in so we're structured leg gnostic we work with for profits and nonprofits as well as many service providers and that's relatively similar at any impact how you visit and you know where in the basement you know well but if we were to walk up stairs with several more floors i see people all over the place  almost looks like you know a place where a bunch of college students have come to study but there's people of all ages i think our oldest member is in his eighty's i don't know our youngest member but we do have two organizations that do incredible work with youth here in seattle both shoka has the leading youth ventures study based out of impact of here and then one world now ran by chris and hayden who's actually in the show can follow she runs her organization here and they teach arabic in mandarin to use and send them on trips overseas and really disrupt and a very positive way in the course of a young person's life through that exposure to a different culture so we get a lot of youthful energy around here but i don't know quite who the youngest member is we tend to have a cluster and the twenty and thirty somethings but certainly plenty of members on either side of that range and you mentioned you were a lawyer how come you're not off making a bazillion dollars being a lawyer and instead you're making whatever running this organization yeah so my background prior to law school was more on the global development side academically that's where i did my studies specifically on urban issues within global development and i went to law school with the intent of going to work on public law issues so kind of with the belief that in order to have any sustainable solutions to the issues the world is facing you really need strong rules of law in the economy where you're working because if you don't have kind of basic pillars around legal rights economic rights and property rights in place as well as just equal access to the court system nothing else matters and so i went to law school that intent and fell in love with entrepreneurs accidentally you know one of those looking for an extra class to take happened to stumble into a community development and  from there found myself really constrained by the billable hour so that i was working very long weeks making a lot of exciting introductions offering a lot of advice whether they wanted it or not but not doing a huge amount of legal work and so i really wanted to find a model that allowed me to continue to invest my time energy resources into darfur if that were particularly inspiring to me and not worry about whether or not they could afford a lawyer sourly rates so i  transitioned the firm and joined a team to help launch impact and i've been very glad with that solution so i don't know if there's a billions of dollars to be made out in the legal world i didn't see them when i was there but  i'm quite happy with the solution the impact in seattle itself is that like all the rest of the impact hubs around the world you know i've only had the opportunity to visit a handful of others there some individuals in that work that have got to visit quite a few and i'm jealous of them and i'd love to do an around the world trip so if anyone out there wants to sponsor me on you know around the hubs in thirty days and as far as the other hubs i've visited obviously geography makes it easier to visit the ones with the north america as i think we do have a lot of similarities to our sister how we have to sister hobbs one in australia and one and the bay area and we have a lot of similarities with our sister in the bay area which was the first one to open in north america and really has been incredibly generous leader for the impact of movement we've seen a lot open in the last few years since they planted themselves and san francisco so i'm out there i'm watching this i'm a social entrepreneur i've got a good idea i don't want to spend a ton of money on office space why would i be considering an impact hub wherever i am yes so certainly the majority of our members we have over five hundred here in seattle are members because they're interested in the golf community programming but most of all the work space and so in that aspect were really joining a more global movement which is a recognition that for many information age workers they can work from anywhere the last census within the us said that thirty percent the workforce consider themselves mobile meaning have lopped laptop can travel  so the last few years we've seen a number of responses to the death of the traditional workspace and that comes from the increase in coffee shops increase in home offices but both  community and so what impact hub and many other similar organizations offer is a mobile flexible work space that works with your schedule doesn't require you to conform to our schedule and at the same time offers and really incredible vibrant access to community and you just can't get that anywhere else so the work space is important but really at the end of the day we don't desire to have the best shared work space or co working space in the world we desire to have  space that someone comes alive and so our impact hoben oakland had this great phrase and they said hub is where you bring what makes you come alive and so that's one of our aims is to be the place where  people bring their whole selves to their career to their calling and really don't feel like they have to segment what they care about in their personal life their family life and their community life from what they do in their work life so if you've got five hundred members here in seattle there's some five hundred offices here i know so we do have offices here in seattle that's not true in every impact tab we have some private offices where an organization is able to close the door and have the same space every day and we have about twelve of those currently and are expanding actually within our current space offer about twenty more but the majority of members are more in a coffee shop style set up and i know we're going to be able to show some clips of the people working so they have shared task we have kind of a quiet zone where this more individual workstations in the more of a collaborative zone there are two different floors and we think about how the furniture set up to encourage collaboration versus more heads down work people are welcome to really choose any space they want to work out of during the day so the first floor that's the collaborative space that's right and then the second floor which you know we have seen as well that's the space where where people are really kind of head down that's what we think now of course members make what they want of it so it's always interesting to walk through the second floor some parts of the day it can feel like a zoo in other parts of can feel like a library so that is part of the fun of being here the question is always how do you enjoy it energy and still manage to get the work done you need to get done by the way a lot of people my age think that millennial don't work hard that's not what i'm saying i'm seeing these these people working very hard and most of them as you mention are are millennial yet interesting to see some of the shift in what it means to do good there's a number of good studies out there i only have anecdotal stories which is always a risk but i'm going to rest them anyway i know that there was an individual who was writing about his recent visit to the harvard rowing club he was a graduate maybe in the eighty's from business school and he said then him and all his colleagues talked about you know how many millions of dollars are going to make in the next few years and that was kind of the conversation in the club and he said coming back there you know thirty some years later he slowly heard what sort of impact am i going to have in the world in the next few years and then maybe the secondary question was and how my going to do that good also doing well for myself how am i going to be able to have landed value where i can both great impact and make money at the same time but just an interesting anecdote regarding the shift in how we approach doing good so i think there's a lot more people who no longer believe that we need to go an incredible job of making wealth and are now in the phase of moving from success to significance being a demanding generation i think the millennial generation wants at the same time ten we have significance at the same moment of having success can we didn't do well together absolutely i think it's possible and i think there's a number of really inspiring ventures both here impact obscene addle and throughout the network and obviously beyond the network where a small sliver of the kind of movement that's happening what's exciting to me from a global scale is the impact of network has no affiliation outside itself meaning that it really is a voluntary gathering of individuals within major cities throughout the world who say a different world is not only possible but it's happening and we're the ones to help make it happen and for the most part there's a belief that market driven approaches do matter and certainly we have people on all sides and phrases that someone used to scribe it once was an underground railroad for the new economy bruce herbert who runs a social responsible investment firm here in seattle use that when i was describing hub to him and his idea was that these places throughout the world where you know you can go and find others who are moving on the road to freedom and the road to freedom you know obviously it's a nice poetic term but what does it mean it certainly means an economy that cares less about the genetic lottery where opportunity is equally available or at least made more available regardless of where you were born and who your parents w e certainly means measuring value at the point of stakeholders and not just shareholders and by that i mean stakeholders are the employees of a company or organization the community in which it is located then vironment that are the facts and the consumers of the product or service that creates one of the favorite questions that i get to ask of companies as who do you want your customer to become and measure your value point that you're creating value in their life a a more generous economy and one that has a belief that collaboration as opposed to consumption is the new way forward and we're seeing that all around the world and it's interesting that you say that because you  use words that don't sound business like to me someone who grew up in the business world a long time ago you're using purpose driven you're using social entrepreneurship you're using words that are different and this really the coming thing or is it already come is it already here are people whether they're millennia old or whether they're older they truly are trying to make a difference in their business lives at the same time that they're building a business is that it so in terms of sheer numbers when you look at for instance it's one measure and maybe it's not the best but when you look at where you know the trillions of dollars that flow and investments every year i think that everyone is seeing the writing on the wall that this is happening it has happened and it will continue to happen so i was right in the introduction you are changing the way the world works right so my my title here at impact how this town cri some for some way global as i'm sure you know that's attached to their jobs and that's partially given our geographic location but also the type of ventures we have or industries and organizations we have both here in the study and throughout the pacific northwest  and what incredibly charitable city so we're always ranked as one of the most willing to give cities and we're also very educated and so people tend to know a lot about what's happening the world and they care about it and they're eager to learn more about it so we have a great ecosystem in those regards and i think there's every reason to think that it's not that it's a matter of rank or claim the status but in terms of public move the ecosystem forward that seattle really is poised to be the capital of so software ship where showing going to be showing some websites from impact hubs from around the world and there are some of the earth i don't necessarily say that they're your favorites but are there are some that are are different and some that are similar what are some of the differences and some the impact of zero on the world sure so it ranges from all sorts of things the great thing is it's you know again this commitment to kind of trust and collaboration and entrepreneurship across the network and a lawyer that hasn't a visual expression in each city is really in response to that city that's one of the reasons why i wanted to be part of the impact of network is because i saw far too many times in my past work in global development people coming in from outside saying here's the solution and impact hubs are always people from the ground up saying we need new town hall where then aspiring entrepreneurs of the city of this region can gather and collaborate together around their shared intentions of what should be and i'm very careful with that phrase shared intention as opposed to shared beliefs because i think the diversity within that is really incredible we don't all share the same beliefs about how we get from the current state to you know the great white north  freedom to go back to the underground railroad analogy but we do have a shared intention around what that might look like so in terms of differences between hubs and architecturally there's a lot of differences although  we learn from each other in terms of how to design collaborative work spaces where really the chance is so on all sorts of things that you know people love to be in community love to have collaborative space but they also need privacy options so one of the phrases that i've used to describe our design here in seattle is that community is the default the privacy is option meaning that there are small rooms where you can go into for an hour and you can reserve a very low tack by writing your name on the glass wall at a certain time slot during the day and we've copied that directly from other hobs so we learn from them in terms of that need for private options whether a phone call or a small person meeting so certainly space designs one element where you see some differences in terms of community there's different sides of impact tabs ranging from tens of members to hundreds of members there's different program focuses a lot of impact obs have some version of an incubator or accelerator program where they're working with ideas stage ventures and saying we think that by bring you new workshops and resources and access to mentors and in peer collaboration that we can help move you faster toward what it is you're trying to build and you know you've got that here we are privileged add a wonderful partnership with which is our our in house conscious company incubator we also have a partnership with cake which is called inclusive incubator and startup space primarily in tac sometimes incubators are seen as very exclusive you have to be at a certain level to have access to the resources so we kind of flip that paradigm on its head and when i say we should really say the managing partner louis lied us put that paradigm on his dad and said i want to make an incubator that anyone can access what's a hub around the world made and you look at it as a model for you that's a great question i draw inspiration from a lot of them i think that the impact hubs and australia are doing fascinating things  founder down there brad has really thought a lot about how we can influence more traditional corporations and so he helps them do a lot of workshops and trainings around the collaborative economy  teaching you know very large companies what it means to exist in a world where is that car and car to go and share car options are becoming not just the exception but norm how does that affect these companies which have existed in a non collaborative economy for so long drawn spiration from brad's programming i draw a lot of inspiration from the design of the hubs in london  really incredible indeed johari is an incredible architect who is also the founder of a hub in london and impact out in london that's just beautifully designed he's  terms of community tatyana glad added hub amsterdam as a pronominal community curator and she's been highly influential in the art of hosting programmes which has become a worldwide phenomenon how do you really hold the space for a community to hold the space for the conversation that wants to take place there and not presume you know what that is but create an opportunity that i can surface and so tachyon has been an incredible mentor and resource an inspiration in that regard couple a couple questions got to get to number one you mentioned traditional corporations in new york talking about it with regard to australia is there a place for the traditional corporation at impact hubs i think so  e obviously have a fair amount of members who are not working nine to five jobs another office in town but we also have a lot of members who come to us and after hours or before hours they come to us to get that other passion piece of their project done either through an event or through just utilizing the workspace in the meeting space but we've also partnered with a few larger companies and we think that we can really  incredible neutral space for conversations around corporate social responsibility and other issues that are of interest of what does it mean to be a good citizen as a large corporation in today's world and  love hosting those conversations well you have two very significant partners here and in fact of seattle one of them is the bainbridge graduate institute and the other one is social mentor partners and there may be others but but those two pretty significant partners how do they fit into all of this yeah terms of making a dent in the universe that's positive and so having partners at the forefront of either of those worlds is an incredible gift to both us and our members bainbridge gradual institute was the is first sustainable and the a program is still top ranked according to a lot of raging aging agencies and i read the net impact rankings and they were at the top there and they've been tapped to help teach other m b a programs how to incorporate sustainability into their curriculum it's now a requirement of accrediting agencies that you do so their tagline is changing business for good so they get to train hundreds of individuals both here in seattle and across the u s a lot of their students fly in for their intensives once a month it's not a traditional school in the sense that they're here full time they're working at companies very large companies very small companies very large organizations small organizations they fly in to bainbridge to get their training and they get to see really interesting leveraged results because they're working with folks who might have full time jobs so in terms of incorporating sustainability into the autocad design bird graduate student a law was largely responsible for that and autocad as you likely know is the largest in that space and now any architect or designer can see the sustainability a fact of choosing this piece of material over that piece of material and that's a direct result of the training that they received bainbridge graduates to the social venture partners as more on the venture philanthropy side of things so they  bring together individual members who collectively pool a limited partial portion of their resources for grant making but they also offer their own talents and knowledge and so it's a lot of business leaders in the city and i think they have over six hundred partners here in seattle loan where they launched who come together and really say what do we want seattle to look like so they have a focus on their given city but through social venture partners international which is based here in seattle they have over thirty sites worldwide where they're asking the same question we've seen in tokyo where there's a lot of overlap between impact of tokyo and s p p tokyo and they're helping us really advance for the first stage of the conversation what  like like in japanese society which is an exciting a new question in many parts of the country of course and we run out of time so when i get to leave you with this one question me if we were sitting here in the same place five years from now and i want to ask you how did you do with impact what would you say  i think that seattle will be known for grunge for attack for coffee and for impact and so we'll have made our city famous for being a place where inspiring all spirits come to launch world changing ventures will have seen an ecosystem where funders don't say i'm ready to give out of both my philanthropic and investment pocket but i can't find investable social to their ventures and can say look at this this is something that made me come alive and made the world a better place of the same time brian how impact