#19 Edward Yee 🇸🇬 - Financing grassroots innovations

<p>🇸🇬 Edward is a serial social entrepreneur from Singapore, passionate about financial inclusion. His purpose is to amplify the impact of innovators that are traditionally left behind with Givfunds.</p><br><p>💪 He shares with us his long journey understanding his purpose, startup after startup, trip after trip, train after train, and his long journey from struggling in primary school to completing 2 Master Degrees at Oxford University.&nbsp;</p><p>We discuss why he stopped a successful startup that did not fit his purpose, how he turned dyslexia as a strength during his childhood, and deconstructs the innovative model of Givfunds to identify and support grassroots innovators.</p><br><p>🚆 Enjoy the conversation with Edward who is, according to his own words, “a misfit who has surfed trains in Bangladesh, got treated to beers by transgender sex workers in Vietnam, and partied in Mexican cartel villages!”</p><br><p>🎤 ”How do you reach the social entrepreneurs at grassroots level who are doing great work, at scale and at low enough cost? There's a reason why the pioneer gap still remains unfilled because nobody could crack that market. Nobody knew how to reach them and find out whether they're genuine, whether they're really impactful, whether or not they're financially sustainable. So it was really a blue ocean for us”.</p><br><p>❤️ <strong>TIMELINE:&nbsp;</strong></p><p>5’ - Turning dyslexia into a strength</p><p>11’ - Learning about finance and entrepreneurship during military service</p><p>14’ - Co-founding and leaving a growing startup&nbsp;</p><p>24’ - Riding trains in Bangladesh to find a purpose</p><p>30’ - Finding a new co-founder inside a train in India</p><p>34’ - Unlocking investments for grassroots innovations</p><p>50’ - Setting personal rules to achieve a decent work-life balance</p><p>60’ - The importance to reverse-engineer your life to meet your goals</p><br><p>🗒️<strong> References:</strong></p><p>About <a href="https://www.givfunds.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Givfunds</a>.</p>