Founded On Purpose

Kt McBratney: [00:00:00] Welcome to Founded on Purpose, the show where we get to know the people working to align business and impact, profit, and purpose. I'm your host, Kt McBratney. Each episode, we ask our guests, all entrepreneurs, investors, and ecosystem builders, the same set of questions. And while the questions may be the same, the discussions and the insights they unlock are beautifully different.

Our guest today works at the intersection of creator sustainability, storytelling, Equity and systems change. Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed& Spark and FilmForward, where she's helped storytellers raise more than 62 million for stories that matter and leverage the power of film to create better workplaces and professionals.

She's also a filmmaker herself, including the upcoming feature documentary, Ratify, about the 100 year fight for the equal rights amendment. Emily, welcome to the show.

Emily Best: Thanks for [00:01:00] having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Kt McBratney: Well, this is going to be fun. Like I said. We're going to run through eight questions. I don't know where they're going to lead us, and that's part of the adventure, and I'm so glad you're here.

You've been such a champion in the startup world, leading Seed& Spark for 11,

Emily Best: 12

Kt McBratney: years, so we're diving into a wealth of different experiences. You're also a Techstars alum and longtime mentor, so you've got, you've got perspectives. You've got some, uh, soapboxes you're not afraid to stand up on, and that's what we're here for.

Emily Best: I also have some tea.

Kt McBratney: Okay. With let's go, let's go. Let's do question one in one word. Emily, what is your purpose?

Emily Best: Agency.

Kt McBratney: In what way? Say more.

Emily Best: So I, it's funny that you asked me this question because, uh, for a long time, I sort of thought of myself as [00:02:00] like slightly scatterbrained get just sort of like following my nose and getting involved in all sorts of things.

And recently I realized all of my work, my own filmmaking, um, Seed and Spark, Film Forward, uh, the People's History of Tech, all of these projects are about making sure that people really understand and can apply their own agency. So at Seed and Spark, it is about giving creators all the tools they need to just go green light themselves.

Right? And then we launched the distribution playbook, which was giving them all the information they need to go build the distribution that they want to, to reach audiences in the way that they want to, without any barriers. Um, People's History of Tech is about helping people understand themselves in relationship to technology as deeply a part of the history of technology, and maybe even more so than the people who built it.

Um, and that's really about helping people understand [00:03:00] themselves as a part of, uh, the history so that they might exert their agency over how we build the future. Um, Ratify is all about political agency and, uh, and agency as it is written into the law for, uh, for gender equity. Um, so yeah, I just think this was like a very recent discovery for me, but I realized like the thing that I want everyone to do is build.

Feel like they get to decide how they do things, how they live their lives, how they shape their lives, how they tell their stories. Um, yeah, that's the, that's the sort of core central purpose.

Kt McBratney: It's amazing how sometimes something seems so obvious when you explain it, like you just did. I, as somebody who's known you for years and have had the, the, the joy of working together in the past, I'm like, yes, that makes total sense that those.

Of course it's that, that thread is so strong and it's amazing how sometimes It takes a little bit of time and hindsight and also like [00:04:00] a special moment to recognize what that is.

Emily Best: Yeah, just like 44 ish years to figure it out.

Kt McBratney: Hey, it's better than 45, right?

Emily Best: Yeah.

Kt McBratney: Um, well and something else, like when you talk about agency in that way and with those specific examples, what I hear is actually something that's counter to how a lot of those industries are built.

Would you agree with that? Or is agency, how does agency come into play and typically like how entertainment is done professional and, and, and people development,

Emily Best: I mean, we'll just go right here. Like capitalism is not designed for individual citizens to have agency. They don't, it doesn't want that. It wants centralized power, centralized, uh, resource and the, the money and the decision making funnels upward.

Right. Um, to me, agency is the ultimate distribution of power. Um, the ability for individuals [00:05:00] to harness resources, garner resources. Um, so for me, it's like fundamental to like the big S system that we live under. Um, and, uh, and that's part of why it's important to me, because the thing that I am interested in, in pushing back against and building, uh, alternate pathways from are the big S systems that we live under.

Right. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy. These things are actually not good for anybody who lives under them, except maybe like 10 guys who don't like it here enough that they're trying to go to outer space. So like, I don't actually know who's really happy under this, uh, paradigm. Um, so yeah, for me, it's like agency is the counter point to all of those systems.

Um, and. I think that if you can find agency through one avenue, [00:06:00] like if a creator can find agency in how they make, how they tell their stories or how they get them to audiences, that is an experience that becomes fundamental to your identity. And you're like, Oh, I'm a person who can do this. And then it's not that hard for that person to understand their own political agency or social agency or technological agency.

Um, and so that's why I think it's just like giving people the experience. Like the, the pleasure, the fortitude of, um, understanding and leveraging their own agency, I think is, uh, it has an, uh, sort of a ripple effect into the rest of your life.

Kt McBratney: Yeah. And what's interesting in, in that explanation, right, of how it is a counter agency is a counter to, to harmful aspects of these systems and the system.

What's really beautiful and what's, what's interesting, I think specifically for this show and this audience is the idea that you are doing this through [00:07:00] business, right? Which has to exist within capitalism and also bringing purpose and profit into it, right? Because you can't sustain, you can't sustain, you can't succeed quote unquote in business unless you are able to literally make money.

How hard has that journey been to figure out how you make money within a system?

Emily Best: It's the hardest thing I've ever done, and it doesn't get any easier. Um, the inertia against which we are building is so tremendous, and, um, my experience of it is, it's deeply Sisyphusian. So we're pushing a boulder up a hill, and there's, the hill is not ending. Like, it's just, like, it is an endless thing.

It's a massive hill. And so what it takes for us [00:08:00] to move upwards is all of that inertia against us forever. And I think the thing that keeps us going is finding the joy. So the thing about Seed& Spark is it's so fun, right? Like, we go out into the community and we teach creators directly and we offer a bunch of free resources and then they call us and they tell us how much their lives are different.

Seed& Spark. com Like it's rad, you know, and I know that actually probably we could, well, we charge the creators nothing for our services. We, we do it on a, uh, on a tips basis. I know that we could in fact, probably charge more for the services, but compared to everyone else in our industry, we're actually making a little more per transaction, um, in this, uh, more pro social like purpose built Economic infrastructure, just like the business model itself.

Um, and it aligns the values of all of the [00:09:00] stakeholders really well. Um, so yeah, I mean, like, and sometimes the, um, the balance is in these really like tiny little movements of making a decision, for example, to never spend a dollar on Facebook or Google ads ever again. And instead more deeply invest in, uh, education.

So we go into communities and we teach these workshops and actually, as it turns out, the ROI on that is nuts better. Like it's so much better. It's wild. So for example, like right now we can have a film festival, pay us to come teach and we'll teach to a room of a hundred people who have, or have not heard of us before, and regardless of whether or not they decide to crowd fund that year on Seed& Spark.

We have like a hundred brand ambassadors out of that. There isn't, and we, we did not [00:10:00] spend a dime. In fact, our costs were covered. And sometimes we make a little money on that because we're providing value to the film festival or the film society or the film commission. Whose job it is to provide that value to their membership or their citizens, right?

And so we can come and help those organizations do their job better. We can give all this information to creators. And then, and we're not asking for anything in return if they choose to use us, it's because we have demonstrated ourselves to be like the best possible choice with really, really good infrastructure and ideas about how to be successful.

Um, I don't know how much you would have to spend online to get 100 grand ambassadors. You might get 100 clicks, but 100 people who are like ride or die, seed and spark. Um, that's really hard to do. So I actually think that the, um, the unending vertical integration of the tech industry has kind of put blinders on some [00:11:00] people about what delivers actual value and actual ROI.

Um, and the fact that like we don't have a growth marketing team is not, in my view, a failure on our part, but actually a great success. Um, and in fact, the other crowdfunding platforms that we compete with have multi multi million dollar trust and safety teams, and we don't, and I'll tell you why. And it's not because we don't, um, deal with some of the same annoying, like, bot attacks and stuff like that, for which the infrastructure around that is actually not that hard to build.

It's, uh, it's that we give personalized feedback to every single creator who comes through. Thank you. By the time you get through that process, there's no flippin way you're a fake creator building a fake campaign. And as a result, we, I think we've had two films in our history ever not get made. One, cause the team fell apart and they had to like deal with [00:12:00] getting their backers their money back.

Um, and that was like interpersonal conflict. It had nothing to do with fraud. Um, and the other was a filmmaker, like the circumstances changed and they went back to their backers and they're like, I can't make this film now, but can we pour the money into this film? And the backers were like, yeah, great.

Like, we're in it for you. So I really do think there is like so much of how things are done in capitalism that we like have just given away to however tech companies do it. That are decidedly not always the best way to do things. In fact, like, often not always the best way to do things.

Kt McBratney: I want to go back to something you said about joy.

Which ties actually beautifully well into question two. So we'll start from centering on that place of joy. What was your most recent win?

Emily Best: That's a great question. I mean, We crossed the threshold of 60 million raised for creators and 5, 000 projects funded, which is like [00:13:00] for a tiny team who has raised like one, I don't know, one, one hundredth of what any of the other platforms have raised in investment.

Like we've just sort of like done it with our own creativity and chutzpah up until now. Um, that feels really, really monumental. Um, it seems small, but we just did a workshop on transitions. Um, so change management is like all of the external context, right? It's like the actual process, the, like the, the, whatever's changing.

People are changing or the company's changing, whatever. Transitions are the internal process, right? The actual human part of coming to terms with the new circumstances and feeling your new sense of belonging and all those things. We literally just today did a transitions workshop. And I got to hear the team reflect on their own experience of the transitions.

We've had a really tumultuous last year as everybody has, it's been a wild economic landscape. Um, [00:14:00] and it was just really beautiful to like watch this team be together and share vulnerably and, um, and really see them kind of standing in their own power. That agency. That agency. That agency comes through again.

That's the thing that, like, if you ask me, like, what's the triumph, it's gonna always be that. Right? It's gonna always be, like, where, where can I point to that I see people really finding agency? Um, yeah. We love a through line. We love a through line. Yeah. It's, that's been really tremendous. I mean, like, I could give you more, like, economic, like, deals closed or whatever, but, like, That's not the shit that sparks my joy, to be perfectly honest.

Kt McBratney: And, and that's the beauty, I think, of this question, is it opens up. It's not saying, what is your most economic, what's your most recent economic win or your best KPI? It is truly up to the guests to interpret what feels like their most recent win. And, and the answers are always different and always just so eye opening.

And for me to, to get to witness that, I'm like, [00:15:00] it is amazingly cool. And some of them are external and some of them are internal and some of them are measurable and some of them are felt and. That's the beauty of the experience of building companies like this, and with this intention is that it's a very human thing.

Now you talked, so for the third question, you touched on a bit of this and many of the big components of this, um, as you talked about some of the systemic and industry standards and practices that we exist in, that we build in, that we work with, that we try to work around or try to change, but what is the single biggest missed opportunity in your field?

No cheating by describing several things that come together into one.

Emily Best: For a person whose entire existence is synthesis, that's a very challenging last thing that you just said to me. Um, the biggest, well, I will tell you actually about an opportunity we might miss right now. [00:16:00] So the entertainment industry is in absolute shambles and that's because they bought.

To me, the, the infrastructure of big tech, we have completely re vertically integrated entertainment and it's failing miserably, um, and it is resulting in massive consolidation, massive layoffs, like terrible deals for creators, labor strife, on and on and on. And, uh, right now there have never been more tools available for creators.

To control their own destiny and, and collectively and collaboratively build a new sustainable ecosystem for let's say, independent movies and TV. But like democracy, it only like the vote itself does not make [00:17:00] democracy. It is exercising the vote that makes democracy. So all these tools and frameworks and education that are out there do not build a new infrastructure.

It is creators choosing to use them that builds the new infrastructure. And my fear is right now we're at a moment where like, there's a ton of tools and access out there. So we just partnered with Kinema to release the distribution playbook, which is this massive and comprehensive guide of tools, resources, education, frameworks, um, to really encourage filmmakers to take distribution into their own hands, but we can't make them do it.

And if they don't do it. We will miss what I believe is a two to three year window of opportunity to build meaningful infrastructure outside of Hollywood While they are trying to figure out what to do with their like big tech vertically integrated mess. Is that fair? Did I cheat? Did I did I say no? I don't do anything at all.

Kt McBratney: And also I know it's a hard question, [00:18:00] especially for you and how like Interwoven all of these things are it's the kind of one of the joys of it being my show is I can say this is The rule this is the rule because I mean, it's it's very it's very challenging to Be an expert in so many ways of your own company in the fields that it's in.

Like every founder is, like investors are from their perspective, ecosystem builders from theirs, and zoom out so that someone who might not ever have thought about the mechanics of that field go, Oh yeah, that, that feels right. That feels irrefutable, but now I'm going to flip it. Talked about being right and irrefutable.

When was the last time you were wrong?

Emily Best: Well, I don't know, this morning, probably. Um, uh, Oh, I'm gonna give you a personal one that was actually, like, one of the most devastating things that has happened in recent memory, which is yesterday morning, uh, my son wanted to take his Pokemon [00:19:00] binder to camp, and the previous day, he had taken his Pokemon binder to camp, and he, uh, My husband went to pick them up, and one of the counselors pulled him aside and was like, he can't bring them out to camp anymore.

And so we were like, okay, we're gonna follow this rule. And the next morning, Cody was like, I want to bring my binder to camp. And I said no, and I explained the rule, and my son is nothing if not a negotiator, and if he can't make headway on negotiation, he is young enough that he will resort to meltdowns.

And I was extremely firm that we were not going to bring the Pokemon Binder because we'd been pulled aside and told, please don't bring this Pokemon Binder. And it turned into probably the worst, like, it pushed him to panic attack. I can't entirely tell you why. Uh, and we finally got to camp, and I showed up, and there were six kids in the corner with their frickin Pokemon Binders.[00:20:00]

Kt McBratney: Oh, the twists. It hurts. It hurts.

Emily Best: And bless my son, he just turns to me and goes, see. Uh, so, uh, That one's gonna like, I don't know if I'll ever recover from that actually. Uh, and, Uh, I don't know. Both of us are gonna need therapy now. But yeah, I think, and the thing I was wrong about was not enforcing the rule which we had been told to enforce.

The thing I was wrong about was giving a shit about that rule in the first place.

Kt McBratney: Mm. Also, shout out to therapy, this has come up multiple times on the podcast already. I'm like, we will be at some point inserting sponsored by some kind of mental health and therapy provider because it keeps coming up. Uh, not accidentally, I don't think.

Okay, so we're gonna, this, this one I think is going to be challenging. We're moving on to question [00:21:00] five. I cannot believe how fast these questions go, that we're five out of eight. So we're past the halfway point. This one may be challenging for you or absolutely not. My assumption is, because you might have a few to choose from, a few different answers to choose from,

Emily Best: The more you build these up, the more nervous I get for you to tell me the questions.

Kt McBratney: Oh, no, no, no, no! That's not the intention, but I like that I'm effective in building a bit of suspense. Um, Emily, what hill would you die on? Name one. Tell us one.

Emily Best: Do you want to know what's so funny? So, the Seed& Spark team meets every Monday and it's just for social time because we're a distributed team and we need some time to just get to know each other.

And so, I will pose a question at the top that we'll all go around and answer. And recently, my question was, what is the dumbest hill you will die on?

Kt McBratney: Ooh, I love that.

Emily Best: And, uh, my dumbest hill I will die on is, uh, I believe there [00:22:00] should be mass global standardization of the faucet, specifically the shower and bath faucet.

That like, there is no reason that a person like a, you know, a person in her forties with like a lot of education and experience. That person should walk into a hotel or a friend's house and just like not know how to turn the shower on. It doesn't make any sense. It's wild! Yeah. So, uh, so that's like my very small hill that I will absolutely die on.

I don't care what the design people say. Uh, there should be standardization. We should just know how faucets work.

Kt McBratney: Yes. And if there's like, you know, legacies of this is how they used to do it. It used to be chaos in faucet design. That's fine. But we can, we can, we can pick some standards. I've never thought about that before and I love it.

This is an entrepreneur and a storyteller, like creative brain thinking is like, do you see this? This could be better and we would all benefit.

Emily Best: And then I wouldn't have had the experience of taking all my [00:23:00] clothes off and getting into a shower in Abu Dhabi at a conference and then having to get dressed and call the front desk for somebody to come and show me how it works, humiliating.

Kt McBratney: And I'm sure jet lagged and just.

Emily Best: Yeah, just, um, yeah, bad.

Kt McBratney: Now I'm thinking about mine. I mean, one of mine is I absolutely will refuse to use a blue pen unless I have to. Like, I just think blue pens are so bothersome and unnecessary. I don't know why they exist. And every single lawyer is about to chime in and say, well, if you're going to sign something binding, make sure it's in a different color ink than it's printed, but yes, I get it, but it's just, shouldn't be blue ink.

It feels wrong to me. It's completely arbitrary. I don't want to use a blue pen. I'd rather use a crayon. Or, Oh, see, great for you. And that's the thing. I love it for you. I love it for anybody else, but I, I want agency over my ink color. Please.

Emily Best: I love this for you.

Kt McBratney: Yeah. Thank you. Oh, I love that we're in a fun mode because we're [00:24:00] about to talk about play.

Emily Best: Okay. And

Kt McBratney: that's something that's important to the work that we do with the team at Renew, but also in this ecosystem of like really, really hard stuff, even if it's not a company that is founded in purpose, like we're all committed to and very, very, um, very much value. But building a company, building anything, is hard.

It's a very hard choice to choose to do that job every day. And so, we believe, and I believe, that play is super, super important, while also there's all these different things that we need to balance. Work, family, the world's on fire, all of these things. How do you play and how do you make time for it?

Emily Best: Um, every morning I walk out into my garden.

I have planted really kind of an absurd number of flowers. In a very, like, literally, like, tossing handfuls of seeds and seeing what happens, kind of a way, and it has exploded, I have, I don't know, 24, 000, uh, Black Eyed Susans, and Cosmos, and [00:25:00] like, it's really crazy. Like, I didn't really realize what I was doing.

Um, but I go out, uh, into my garden and just kind of consort with the flowers. I know that sounds silly, but like, you know, I'll make a little bouquet or I'll, you know, um, top some of the flowers that have died or I'll like just a little bit of flower garden maintenance. And, um, it's in part because I think this, um, like zoom life is very extractive.

Um, And it makes it hard for me often to be able to hear the little voice deep inside. And so I have to go outside and spend some time consorting with the little voice deep inside and staying connected to her. Um, because that just makes me, um, more grounded, literally, um, more connected to my own feelings and responses, more aware of myself.

Um, Um, this is literally like chest up in the zoom world [00:26:00] when in fact, actually all of our wisdom is really kind of chest down. Um, and so, uh, yeah, so that has really helped me. Um, and usually right around five o'clock, my kids are in the office being like, can you play with me? Uh, so that will be some version of like Magnetic chess or Uno or Barbies or, you know, something like that.

Kt McBratney: I love that. We're, we're deep into, uh, listening to a pod in, in my, uh, post, post work hangout. And so everyone who has a meeting with me that goes up until five o'clock knows that they will hear at some point, The very iconic across generations, probably for all time of, um, bellow through the house. I love that.

Also, no one would have guessed you had a green thumb from your, from your setup. I mean, it's shocking that going outside and being with plants is, is [00:27:00] one of the ways that you play.

Emily Best: I like digging in.

Kt McBratney: I look at that and I'm like, I don't want to kill your plans even just by being in their presence. So I'm, I'm glad that your green thumb is that strong that it consisting, not mine.

Okay, you've been in this entrepreneurial world for a while. You have been asked your advice on so many topics, so many different situations, and I have a hunch you've been given advice, whether you want it or not, on so many occasions. How do you know what advice to take and what to let go of?

Emily Best: Wow, that is such a great question.

Um, because I think I think

Kt McBratney: journalism paid off.

Emily Best: Huh. I think, uh,

I worry about giving this answer because I don't want it to be discouraging to somebody who's early in their journey, but I think the answer is gut and experience and those two things are related. [00:28:00] So like your gut is actually only as good as the sum of your experiences up until that point. Um, and also there's a whole lot of gut reaction that happens that is.

It's a little bit mystical, you know, like it can have to do with the vibe of the person who's giving you the advice or the circumstances or whatever. So I think, especially early on in your career, really listening to your gut around, does this person have my best interest, you know, does this person have my interests in mind, do we share the same values, etc.

Um, and then over time. You are actually starting to like, Hull anyone who doesn't fit that bill anyway, so you're getting better and better advice Because you're, you're taking it, you're more selective about the set of people you would take it from in the first, you'd solicit it from in The first place, right?

So early on in my career, I was asking anybody all of their experience And I definitely got sidelined by certain things that [00:29:00] sounded good or, or came from people who seemed like they knew what they were talking about or were important in different ways. And, um, yeah, I like definitely, I wasn't, um, relentlessly asking enough, do this, does this person share my value system?

And I think over time, to me, I evaluate based on how deeply aligned we are from a values perspective. Because then I know they're giving me advice with the same, like, foundational core beliefs. Right? Um, yeah, I, I, to me now that's, that's very straightforward. Um, and that's how I figure out who I'm soliciting advice.

Kt McBratney: I really appreciate the caveat at the beginning of that too, because that's true for you now. Right? And, and that's reflective of your experience based on this point in time. And that's, that's a beauty I think of questions like this is, You could have a different answer five months ago or five years ago or at five years [00:30:00] old.

And in sharing and having guests on the show share this, my hope is that people can weave together what feels right to them for this point in time. And so for folks early in their career or earlier in their entrepreneurial journey, that might not ring true for them right now, but it might also have echoes of truth because You have a point.

I see. Go ahead.

Emily Best: Well, I have one more thing to add, I think, which is that, um, I think advice is only helpful if you actually have a clear vision of what you want and what you're trying to manifest for them to react to, because otherwise they're just going to tell you how they would do it. And I don't think that's helpful.

Um, uh, I, I say this to filmmakers all the time when they ask for feedback on their films, I'm like, tell me what you are hoping to convey, and then I can talk to you about. How successful or not, I think this was in conveying that, but it's not [00:31:00] helpful for you to just show me a film. And then for me to tell you how I would do it, if it were my project.

Yeah. Right. So I think that having that clarity, and I think sometimes it's hard to have the confidence to say, this is what I am trying to manifest because that's risk. It's risky. It's vulnerable to say, here's my big idea. Um, cause then I can actually react to it. I had some. A wonderful young entrepreneur approached me recently about a streaming platform that she wants to build.

And it shares a lot of similarities to what we built and shuttered at Seed& Spark many moons ago. And so I shared with her my perspective as a person having like built something similar and shuttered it. And what I chose to give her instead was a sense of what some of the barriers are, or some of the challenges are.

To building that thing in the way that she was describing, um, because I wanted to make sure that she was preparing herself for the [00:32:00] costs that I didn't necessarily see yet reflected, um, some of the challenges in marketing and scaling that I didn't yet see reflected, um, so that, like, my job at that point was not to share advice but experience, and then let her do with that what she pleases based on her vision of where she's going, because, like, at the end of the day, I was like, I want you to win.

We need you to win. Yes. Right. So I just want you to go in with eyes wide open in a way that I did not. So if I can prevent you from doing that, then that would be better.

Kt McBratney: Yeah. I feel like that's so similar as you were talking, it made me immediately think of, of now in my role, when people ask me to review a pitch deck, I can't review that pitch deck of how I would tell that story if it was my company.

Cause one, it's not. And if you know what you're trying to convey with that story and what your end vision of what you're building and what that business looks like, I can share my feedback or give advice from my experience as a founder, um, and [00:33:00] operator, and now this, in this season as an investor on how to tell that story the most effectively because you're so close to it when it's yours, when it's your project, when it's your film, when it's your company.

And it is hard for me and I have to shift how I do it when they're building something adjacent or with similar in purpose to what I built.

Emily Best: Yeah.

Kt McBratney: Because I have to say, here's the experience I have, here is the question I always got asked about this aspect of it. Because I, again, I wasn't prepared for those things.

So if I can share it that way and then take it or leave it, like it's, it's, it came up, you know, earlier this week, actually earlier this morning, I'm like, I will never know your company as well as you do. That is the founder shop is to know their business past, present and potential futures. And while there's a ton of advice out there, being clear and steadfast in your vision while also.

Knowing kind of how to adjust and knowing that you don't know what will come is a great way to weather that. This is so [00:34:00] wonderful. Okay, we are rounding home base. That is my one sports analogy I think allowed in this show. I don't know. Question eight. I'm asking this of someone who has had the same title.

You've had the same quote unquote, if you're listening audios, I give heavy air quotes to that, the same title for 12 years. Of a company that has gone through many seasons. What would you say is your least favorite part of your job? And what is your absolute favorite part of what you do?

Emily Best: My least favorite part is fundraising.

Kt McBratney: Enough said.

Emily Best: My most favorite. That's easy. Uh, my most favorite part is teaching workshops to creators. Unexpected. Tell us why. Because I get to actually be there for the moment of impact, right? Like, creators are crowdfunding on Seed& Spark all the time, and they're getting contributions all the time, but like, I'm not there in the room with them when like, the light bulb goes off or the joy is expressed or whatever.

When we teach workshops to [00:35:00] creators, we are there in the room when the light bulbs are going off. And like, I'm literally witnessing them, like, assume their agency. And like, they, they become full of ideas and questions and, um, and, and power. And it's just the best, it's the best. Um, if that could be like, you know, a fantasy future would be, I can transition my role because we get to a scale where I'm no longer the appropriate CEO for a company of that scale.

And, um, and I can just go out and really do that work, uh, I would be the happiest person on the planet. I love it so much.

Kt McBratney: But starting your day in the garden.

Emily Best: Always starting my day in the garden.

Kt McBratney: Regardless.

Emily Best: Yes.

Kt McBratney: Oh my gosh. Emily, I love this, I love this, I love this. I am actually mad at time for moving so quickly.

Um, so that part, not happy about. Thanks, linear time. But really, really grateful for you sharing your time, [00:36:00] because I know that's one of a founder's most precious resources with us and with me today to share your insights and answer these questions, which audience, I do not tell our guests the questions in advance.

So they are coming in with trust and I do not take that for granted. So thank you for the time, for the trust and the insights. This is the moment where you. We are having shame-free self-promotion. Is there anything that you would like ch folks to check out, to look into ways you want them to get in touch?

This is your moment. Let us know

Emily Best: if you have a creator in your life you love. Please direct them to, or you, yourself, or that creator, and hopefully you love you. Uh, please direct them to seedandspark. com, uh, for, uh, funding and education and also to the distributionplaybook. com, uh, where you can find all of the resources that you will need to build distribution strategies.

If you're working in corporate learning and development and you, uh, wouldn't like never to have a boring, [00:37:00] crappy corporate training video again, you can reach out to us at FilmForward, which is FilmForwardExperience. com. That's Experiential Learning, built around the world's best short cinema. Um, Uh, if you care about equal rights and think that everybody should have equal rights in the Constitution, you might be surprised to learn that we don't have that right now.

And there is an equal rights amendment that is fully ratified, has, uh, satisfied every condition of Article 5 of the Constitution, which says how it can be amended, and is still hanging in the balance, and it really needs every single voice that To be raised and aware. Um, I've been making a film about this for the last eight years.

It is called ratify and you can learn more about all of that at ratify the film. com. Um, and finally, uh, I have a new collaborative storytelling project called people's history of tech. Um, and that is a place that you can go and tell your own story about your experience [00:38:00] with technology. Our season one is the mobile phone.

Um, We have a whole bunch of infrastructure and, uh, and moments in history and prompts for you to fill out, um, or it might be coming to a city near you as an installation, and you can go to peoplestech. com.

Kt McBratney: Thank you for all of those. We will drop those in the show notes, make it easy for folks to click and learn, learn more and dig into the work that you do, Emily, and, and really, uh, tap into that purpose of agency.

Thanks again for being here. It's always a joy. I loved it so much.