[00:00:00] Lynne: Hello. And welcome to frankly, speaking with Lynne Franks and friends. I'm Lynn Frank, your host. And this episode, I sat down with my friend, Shelley Taylor Shelley is an extraordinary woman, a serial entrepreneur, a creative inventor of new ideas, way way before her time in creating social purpose businesses in all levels, and right now, the creator of a new app called RefAid which is helping refugees and humanitarian issues all around the world.
[00:00:38] Shelley and I met when her late son Shakur was at school with my daughter, Jessica and Shelley will also be talking about how she had to recreate her life after his very sad death when he was 32 years old, and how she has in that time. Literally built new ideas, new business, and rebuilt herself. I know you're going to look forward to hearing this incredible moving and inspirational conversation
[00:01:08] So welcome Shelley. And I want to start, because I've known you so long. I want to start with your beginning because you have truly had an amazing, extraordinary life and story. You know, you've had your ups, you've had your downs, but it, can you continue on with so much energy, whatever it is you're doing and terms of careers, since I've known you, you've had quite a few, which go from being a nomad chef, doing incredible dinner parties all the way through to doing cutting edge technology to help millions. So let's start from the beginning because your, your childhood, your background was very interesting cause your parents. So tell me about your parents because they were so different and diverse, and that diversity is in you. Of course.
[00:01:51] Shelley: So let's start at the beginning. So my dad was black American and his parents were musicians. And his mother actually is known for having created Seattle jazz. She's that whole kind of music that's associated with Seattle jazz, even though she wasn't recorded. I remember Quincy Jones who kind of grew up in their house telling me about her style of piano, which was I can't really describe it because of course. I don't know enough about the
[00:02:22] Lynne: When would that have been about the thirties,
[00:02:24] Shelley: would have been the twenties and thirties.
[00:02:28] Lynne: blues jazz on the
[00:02:29] Shelley: So it was, yeah, it was definitely jazz. And um, that was a period of time when the musicians black musicians throughout the south were not allowed to stay in hotel. So they had like an underground railroad where they'd stay at different people's houses. And in Seattle, although it was a little bit more liberal at the time, people would come through and stay at their house and they had a little basement where there was a piano bar and that. I kind of remembered after I started doing my nomad chef restaurant at my home that I actually grew up, or I was born into a house that had an underground kind of illegal speakeasy bar in it. So that was my grandmother.
[00:03:06] My father was a musician and he was the one who taught Quincy Jones, how to play music because Quincy was in their house all the time because his mom was not really in great shape. And so he had all that great music background, but he gave it all up. When he met my mom, I think probably in high school at a high school dance of some kind where he was performing my mom, who's white, actually German Jewish with a little bit of Mexican in that they met and that was an interracial marriage, which at the time was still pretty unusual in Seattle. A little bit more common there than maybe other parts of the country.
[00:03:45] They got married, and my mom went to university to college and my dad traded a saxophone to go to college. He thought that would be a much better use of his time. So he became an anthropologist and she became a therapist. So that's kinda my parents that was like way back in the, I guess they got married in the fifties. So I was born back then. And they were divorced when I was three, but I had very hippie parents.
[00:04:12] I actually lived in a commune for a few years with my mom my sister and a bunch of hippie type. Where they were dropping acid, you know, all the time. And uh, then I moved into my own commune on not my own, but it was the other people, not my family when I was about 14 years old. So that's kind of, that's kind of where I came from. And that was Palo Alto. So Palo Alto is where Stanford university is. And of course there was all kinds of crazy stuff going on. When I was growing up with the Vietnam war, I was really. active in demonstrations. I remember getting to. Cast and run over by horses, like, when I was probably about 14 years old and there was all this wife swapping and husbands swapping and all that taking drugs and everything going on all around me. Plus the war. I became a baby black Panther when I was, I guess, about 12 or 13 years old.
[00:05:00] Lynne: did not know that about you. How amazing
[00:05:03] Shelley: It was my white mother who would drive me to San Francisco from Palo Alto. Park two blocks away so that none of the black people at the black path is, would see me go in to my little, my little youth Black Panther meetings. So that was always such an interesting period of time.
[00:05:19] Lynne: It was a most interesting period to be in Northern California to be around south San Francisco, extraordinary time and the time of the beats and everything going on and grateful dead. And Haight-Ashbury, I mean,
[00:05:31] Shelley: The music was amazing. The
[00:05:33] Lynne: I am view on that one. And then you got accepted by Stanford at a ridiculously young age or a
[00:05:38] Shelley: Well, I actually got accepted to mills college, which was a private women's college, like the equivalent of a Radcliffe or east coast school at 16. I was the youngest person to go to college university. And um, then the next year I went to Stanford as well. So yeah, I was, pretty
[00:05:59] Lynne: Overachieving. So you were at two colleges at the same time at 16 and 17 years old. Unbelievable. Well, knowing you it's not unbelievable.
[00:06:08] Shelley: Well, I think the thing that was more unbelievable is that I got pregnant when I was 18. And so I was sweating my second or third year in university and I brought my little baby to school and I was 19 and I was the first person they ever let bring a kid to class. So he actually went to class with me for two years, sat in classes and I would just breastfeed him there. And so he liked to say that he went to university, twice, once with me. And once when he was on his own.
[00:06:38] Lynne: The wonderful Shaka or who are we going to be talking about a little bit later? We met through Shaka's friendship with my daughter, Jessica, when they were at school together in London, when they were about 14 and stayed
[00:06:49] Shelley: Yeah. That's when it was.
[00:06:51] Lynne: until Shaka sadly passed. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. So there you were single mom because you weren't really with the dad very
[00:06:59] Shelley: no, I was definitely a single mom.
[00:07:01] Lynne: And at university, it two of the smartest universities in the world, both at the same time, age, 19 with this baby at your breast. And then watch what
[00:07:11] Shelley: And then what Well then my mom got sick. I think I actually got pregnant when I learned that she was dying of cancer. I think that's exactly the moment that I got pregnant. So knowing that she had a grandson on the way kept her going, but she died when I was 21. So I had kind of, that was the beginning of losing my family, I think.
[00:07:40] So I needed to support myself and my baby. I was always into business and I started my business career at about five or six selling cherry plums and walnuts in the neighborhood and carried on. I went to this very liberal arts college, but I was very much into wanting to make as much money as I could because I had these kind of hippie parents. My dad was very hippy anti-money my mom was not so hippy, but she was still, you know, a therapist
[00:08:07] Lynne: think it's always generations against generations because your parents were hippies. I remember seeing it a comic years ago, mad comic, where parents are happy, the children come book counselors or bake managers, or in your case, you became a businesswoman. And
[00:08:22] Shelley: I don't know if it's always, your kids didn't swing so much
[00:08:25] Lynne: well, my son became very Jewish and I brought him up a Buddhist. Let's not forget.
[00:08:30] Shelley: That's true. But they didn't go like hardcore into business, but I guess you were, and then
[00:08:34] Lynne: they were as a response to me being focused on business neighbor and the other way.
[00:08:39] Shelley: Well, yeah, I don't know if it's a swing or if it's not a swing, but I do know that I was very concerned about making enough money so that my kid could have all of the advantages that I pretty much grew up with. My single mom, somehow managed to put us in good schools and tennis lessons and travel and everything. So I wanted him to have that. So that meant I had to pick a career that was very money oriented.
[00:09:01] My first job was Oh, commercial real estate sales. So I was selling big apartment buildings. I took my nanny at 21, if you can believe it across country to Washington D C. So I had a big house on Capitol hill with a nanny at 21, and I proceeded to um, make as much money as I could selling real estate. And then I came back to California after my mom died and became a stockbroker. So I was a stockbroker and a fund manager for a few years. That's one of my
[00:09:28] Lynne: Many hats I'd forgotten about the stock.
[00:09:30] Shelley: Yeah. That was back in the, well that's back in the eighties. So I was into kind of creating the first socially responsible investment
[00:09:39] Lynne: There was social responsibility, always part of what, apart from selling expensive property in Washington Heights, but generally social responsibility was always part of whatever you were doing. It seems to me, it
[00:09:49] Shelley: was, kind of an odd thing. It wasn't something that I would have articulated at the time, but I do know I got bored with being a stockbroker. I wanted to make money, but it was not a very exciting thing to do. So I kind of naturally gravitated into this social responsibility, finding the right kind of stocks with the right kind of values when it was not a thing. Probably because I'm more curious about research and kind of new frontiers than I am about, you know, just sticking with the same thing. So I kind of reinvent myself every couple of years with some new the direction. Yeah.
[00:10:24] Lynne: So from stockbroking, where did you move? Did you enter the social responsible investment,
[00:10:29] Shelley: so I. Did that for about seven years, I was hired to run a venture capital company in Boston, which didn't work out. So I met a guy in London and that's kind of about the time I met you, I'd say.
[00:10:46] I moved to London because I was in between jobs and I was traveling through Europe and I came back to London and I thought, you know, this might be kind of a fun place to be. My son Shaka was being homeschooled at the time. So he was pretty freestyle. Decided to pack up and move to London. And in London, career-wise I started advising let's see the big fund management companies and I launched three of the first socially responsible funds in the UK and like early nineties. So I carried on with that whole thing.
[00:11:24] And that led to my next career, which was to do with publishing research studies. So I been really interested in like, what it is that investors thought about is way before. It was a thing to invest in socially responsible companies. But I started thinking about what were the criteria that they use to evaluate the risk And companies, for example, environmental risk and all these other things that they wouldn't have put in terms of values. But there was actually financial implications if they were to have a big oil spill. So I thought, let me look at what companies do in terms of their practices related to their customers and the government and their employees and all that, this was in 19 90, 91
[00:12:06] Lynne: And that now has become the most important thing for any large corporate in terms of how they are viewed because of the high importance of it to their investors and
[00:12:16] Shelley: and to their other stakeholders. Yeah. So it was definitely not a thing at the time and it needed a bunch of language in order to. You know, to even have a practice, you need to kind of create the language first. And so I kind of created all that language about multi-stakeholder model of doing business and corporate social responsibility and all that back then.
[00:12:38] And strangely I published the study called the rewards of virtue. And in that study, there was a little bit of research on annual reports and what the companies say in that ad reports. And it had a lovely little matrix as I love like categorizing information and I'm going okay. Selling this study and people kept looking at that little table and saying, oh, I love the way you've analyzed these annual reports. And so, so bizarrely, I became kind of the world's expert in annual reports, which is such a boring sounding thing, but it was all about what it is that people say in them. And quantifying all that verbiage into some kind of measurement of, you know, how socially responsible they are, how much do they talk about their strategy, blah, blah, blah. So that was another complete change in direction from my company
[00:13:26] Lynne: And this was all when you were based in London, wasn't it? I remember you
[00:13:29] Shelley: in, I was there for maybe I think I was in London, 25 or 30 years. So a long time I got there in 89. So, and I just left five years ago when Brexit happened. So. I mean, I think of myself as a Londoner by, by adoption and to. The UK wins in a phobic. I'm like I'm out of there. yeah. So I think that's kind of, that was a strange kind of journey from going from corporate responsibility into corporate governance and disclosure and transparency.
[00:14:06] And then from that, I went back to my son, finished high school and I went back to California with him. And I was sitting there in downtown Palo Alto, the center of Silicon valley in the mid nineties. And guess what? The first websites started coming out and most people don't even realize it. But the first thing you could see on a website was a PDF of an annual report. So there you go. I'm suddenly the world's expert on websites because I did all these years of studies on what Andrew reports say. And That's what they're using to create the content of
[00:14:47] Lynne: That's right. I remember you'll office in downtown Palo Alto. I
[00:14:51] Shelley: Yeah, exactly. That was a Bubba
[00:14:53] Lynne: And you had all the access of all those great, bright young people at Stanford. You used to work with
[00:14:58] Shelley: And I had to all those companies, all the Silicon valley companies, and it was kind of the,
[00:15:03] Lynne: You weren't. You were a silicone valley company before they were silicone valley
[00:15:07] Shelley: yeah, in fact, they didn't really refer to it as Silicon valley. Back in those days, It was Palo Alto and
[00:15:13] Lynne: Palo alto and you have them all
[00:15:14] Shelley: and
[00:15:14] Lynne: Embryonically.
[00:15:15] Shelley: Apple at HP. All those companies were there at the time
[00:15:19] Lynne: I mean, the thing is Shelley in truth. You come up with these it's a little bit like me, but I come up with different things before their time and you do them and you do them very well. And then you CA I think you get bored and you go onto another huge project where all those were coming up behind you now with their silicone valley thing going on. And it become these enormous companies, but you were just so ahead and so smarter. That's what happens to visionaries. Unfortunate.
[00:15:46] Shelley: And I think it's, it is definitely a little bit around boredom. It's something about is. something about, like, I get excited about learning something new. I mean, right now what I'm doing is completely unrelated to anything I've ever done before. And I love it because I get to just learn all kinds of stuff.
[00:16:04] And these guys in tech, you know, I, I go to these conferences and. Their eyes just kind of go past me as if I'm not there. Right. Cause I'm this older woman and I'll eventually get somebody to like shake my hand and I'll kind of push their head to face me and I'll say, what do you do? And they're of course, happy to talk about themselves, but then I will make them listen to what it is that I do. And I'll watch their heads start jerking back around to, oh, you mean you do know what you're talking about in tech, right. But they're like, you're old enough to be my mother. How do you know about. And it's really just about applying my interest in
[00:16:43] Lynne: Well, let's talk about apps because you were creating that app, the music, entertainment industry information up you, you weren't in Palomar. So you come back to England at that point and you were in Notting hill gate, and the first sort of cool co-op working space down at the bottom of Ladbroke Grove and on Portabello Road. And you were working there on a concept, which again, So way ahead of his time. Do you want to talk about that? Because in a way it's connected a bit with what you're doing now.
[00:17:10] Shelley: it is directly connected. It was another weird path. Exactly. Um, So that was based on research that I'd done about websites for music and musicians. And I said uh, you know what, I think that musicians need a way to generate money online. This was the time of Facebook kind of, and MySpace especially, taking advantage of musicians and Not paying them for anything. Right. Those first sites like MySpace and Spotify, they just stole the music and paid nobody.
[00:17:41] So I guess I didn't think of it as a mission per se again at the time, but it was an accidental mission, which is what if I could think of a way. I could put all these musicians music online and give them a share of advertising revenues. If they made money, the opposite of what MySpace was doing. So that was all dicked down. I was really exciting. That was in 2006 to 2009 or 10. It was a pretty exciting time and Yeah, a lot of the stuff that we came up back then, facebook has only now doing in the last couple of years.
[00:18:16] So it was way ahead of like we had video chat rooms where you can listen to music and you could talk to people while you're watching ballet or listening to music or it all kinds of great stuff.
[00:18:26] Lynne: we still hasn't come around.
[00:18:28] Shelley: no, it's still,
[00:18:29] Lynne: Th there was God. That's amazing. And I think all the stuff you've done, I mean, at one point you were, I think that's when you listed in Palo Alto, you were doing these reports on what was coming next to these big companies. I can't, I don't know if
[00:18:40] Shelley: Yeah. Yeah. I did a bunch of studies on
[00:18:42] Lynne: a bunch of studies about what was coming next and you know, and you did sell them very well.
[00:18:46] These people would pay you so many thousand dollars to get each of reports, but did they actually realize just how spot on you were or were they paying lip service? Because you were so spot on, you were
[00:18:56] Shelley: Well, one of my I think the biggest things that I look back on of. Influence that I had was that there was this age in Cadbury who bought my steady, the rewards of Ritu. And that became his Bible for how a company should be run in terms of this multi-stakeholder and corporate social responsibility approach. Yeah. And that he went around the world. Making his companies follow this and that then became kind of adopted by the RSA and the whole good company initiative came out of it. So I have to say, not everybody listened to what I had to say, but
[00:19:33] Lynne: No, it's the same. I mean, it's the same with me. I mean, I'd say things at the time. Like you, you know, different level. And then years later people say, well, I heard you say that about social responsibility and being good companies. And of course we're just catching on to it now, but it's ironic because we were ahead of our times and capris of course ended up selling and selling. And now I think they're part of Kellogg's or something like
[00:19:57] Shelley: Yeah and it becomes kind of part of the whole collective consciousness because there isn't a way to like completely take responsible. We come up with ideas, you know, and they just kind of melt into the ethos and become
[00:20:09] Lynne: Yeah of the big companies, but I just feel that we can't let go of this whole belief in business for good. It has to, I mean, it has to happen, but if we look at the companies that were representative at the time, Ben and Jerry, Body Shop and even Unilever to a degree, I mean, they all, you know, they all sort of sold on and then sold on to another one and then sold. And especially these
[00:20:33] Shelley: Or sold out.
[00:20:35] Lynne: And then the people they sell to, and I know this from relationships, all these guys, they were taught to the people, buying them and who would promise to keep this as companies with the same values. And that lasted for about two seconds. And L'Oreal who at the time bought body shop, they don't own it now. And a huge deliverable of Jen Ben and Jerry and all the rest of them. Yeah. We're going to be good guys, but it doesn't work necessarily that way for the big companies, like.
[00:20:57] Shelley: And I think one of the things that's kind of, I mean, disappointing, The older you get, the more you realize everything's just in cycles. I go to these conferences sometimes I'm sick of 'em now. But to this conferences on social responsibility and the young people will stand up and they'll say, oh no, it's completely different now. And I'll say, that's what we said, like, okay, the eighties, the nineties came around and everybody's like, it's totally different. Now It's a real thing. And I'm like, Then 2000 would come around and I said, literally, I've been doing this for 40 years. And every 10 years the generation says, oh, now we're really doing it.
[00:21:30] I'm not a hundred percent sure that we're in a period of real sincere corporate social responsibility. Or if it's just become established that you have to
[00:21:39] Lynne: It's greenwashing. It'll always be greenwashing. There's no question about it. That's why they've got PR companies working for them to show them how they can be seen as good companies to keep their stakeholders happy. So yes, they've got so many people of color working there. They've got so many women and editor, but the reality is they are based on profits and You know that doesn't always work with.
[00:21:59] And if you look at the boards of directors that make these decisions, they mostly made up still of middle-aged middle-class white men in suits. You know, they don't have the vision to take the risk, I
[00:22:10] Shelley: They don't have the experience because you can't get it from that particular path only you have
[00:22:15] Lynne: No, but, so what do you think then about somebody like Musk about Elon Musk? Because he's such a,
[00:22:21] Shelley: he's a big brain. He's a big brain. one thing.
[00:22:24] Lynne: He's got a lot of courage in his own way, but then he's got a lot of money to have
[00:22:28] Shelley: And I'm, I'm a bit scared of him to be honest, I feel like. Too much money in the hands of somebody who's such a libertarian is a dangerous thing. I'm not sure. I mean, you have like, people like bill gates who has a lot of money, they've definitely taken different paths around how they think money should be used responsibly. I'm sure that bill gates has his downside, but basically he's not bad
[00:22:54] Lynne: Well, he's, he's hated by, um, anti-vax is over here in the UK. That's for sure. I mean, I don't, I don't get involved in that conversation,
[00:23:01] Shelley: I mean, I think there are some companies and some people who've made a lot of money who are doing less bad. I feel like Elon Musk is not one of them. I think he's probably capable of if he sticks to space and to engineering, he's probably great, but, taking over Twitter and the values that he has, I'm kind of scared of the impact they're going to have on society.
[00:23:22] Lynne: But I'm also scared of Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg and the metaverse. And I'm also, and I'm scared of Bezos and Amazon, and you know, these few billionaires trillionaires, you know, with so much power and so much money is
[00:23:35] Shelley: checks on their power and, uh,
[00:23:38] Lynne: they don't pay taxes where they should. And
[00:23:40] Shelley: And I mean, I don't have any problem saying that. I do think that Zuckerberg, not just Facebook, but him, because everything trickles down from the top, it's definitely responsible for a lot of genocide in the world. You know, having the algorithm that responds well to hate, the generates more money from hate. I think we have a lot of things like that to fight against which actually is one of my big missions, you know, with one of my apps is to create information that comes from vetted sources of organizations who care about people so that the sources of information are not generating revenue for bad behavior. So I think it's really important to fight against those things.
[00:24:18] Lynne: So let's talk about, of course, the huge change that came in your life while you were doing all these amazing things. In that time you were working on this totally visionary concept of an app for entertainment and for musicians to get paid. And it included restaurants and cooking and food, which has always been a big love of yours.
[00:24:36] And then the horrible time that you went through when the wonderful Shaka, your son and beautiful Shaka, died in a horrible situation. And it was a shock for everybody that loved him, which for many, many people. For you as his mother, it was horrible. I can't even imagine losing a child and I want to know what pain you went through, but that then changed your life considerably. didn't it? It It sent you on another journey, I guess.
[00:25:03] Shelley: Uh, So the first part of that journey had to do with the first one. I was a mom at 19, so he died at 32. I had only ever been a mom. I've never even had a year of being an adult. So I had kind of literally the biggest identity crisis I could have, because I didn't have a sense of self that was separated from my son. And we kind of grew up together and moved countries. And even he worked with me for the last couple of years of his life and at our, at the music entertainment company. So I was kind of lost at sea and didn't really see ever finding a way to live.
[00:25:50] I read a book in that first year, which talked about research on 80 mothers, lost their only child or all of their children, which is pretty much the same thing. And uh, the research said that only 50% of mothers regained a will to live. And it came at the seven year mark. And I remember feeling like that's such a long time to wait, but I kind of committed that I would be one of those women who regained my will to live because I did not have it. It was basically a battle for the first three years of um, how to stay alive each day. Um, I don't have a sense of God or religion and there wasn't some outside thing I could hang my beliefs are courage on. So it was like, for me, it kind of how to, what do I do to get up every day?
[00:26:48] And, um, so my first year I kept working, I kept running the company that Shaka worked out with me and the banking crisis happened in 2009. And so I ran out of the company, ran out of money. We'd raised 10 million. I raised some of the first black woman to ever raise $10 million in the, probably in the world. And, uh, I kept going for a year, but then we needed to raise another 50 million to compete with Spotify and iTunes. And I couldn't So I had to wind down the company, which was, you know, kind of like a second loss, obviously, not as big a loss, but it took away my daily thing that kept me going, which was my employees and investors and everything.
[00:27:29] So there, I had this like, you know, like all this empty space that I had to fill as something. I couldn't really leave the house. Todd, to describe how paralyzing it is to lose your only child and identity. Couldn't really leave the house. So I started a writers group, which I taught people, screenwriting. People came to my house, a half a dozen people and gave me people to see once a week. I started my my nomad chef secret restaurant because I literally lost everything. When I lost my company. I didn't have a penny and. A friend suggested that since I loved in dinner parties, I should just try one of these secret restaurants. Two weeks later, I had the first one. Thank God I did them every two weeks or every week. At
[00:28:15] Lynne: I remember I had a birthday, one of my birthday parties is one of your secret dinners. It was brilliant. The food is
[00:28:22] Shelley: And the conservatory and I could serve like 25, 35 people. And I actually made enough money to kind of pay the bills, but more importantly, there's leftover food that was really good. I got to combined with the writing group once a week and the secret restaurant, I got to see people, but I didn't have to talk to them because I was not really capable of talking. I was not capable of responding to questions. I could just like hide and I was okay.
[00:28:48] But this writing group I said, let's give ourselves a carrot. If we all write a screenplay, as soon as we'd finished one, we'll go to Hollywood and we'll try to sell our script. So I rented a giant house in Beverly Hills. The whole of us went out there. I had a lot of dinner parties. I don't think anybody's sold their scripts, but we had so much fun. You know, it gave us something to work towards some combination of that. And my, um, restaurant kind of got me started my cooking, got me started back in the world again. And when I decided to take this group to LA, I thought, oh, we'll I'll make a documentary about this journey. I'll try to like, as if I could predict that I would feel like living again, I said all make a film about what it's like to. Come to the point where you want to live again, right? Like what's that journey like?
[00:29:36] Well, it was kind of faking it, but faking it until I made it. So I did a film in his footsteps and I went to all the places that Shaka used to live, all the places that we live. And I did dinner parties and it took me probably a year to make this documentary. In the film. I knew that it was for other people like me who had lost everything. That's who I thought it was for to prove them that you can keep living.
[00:30:00] So at the three-year point, I finished this film, which it got into a bunch of film festivals, and what it did was regenerate my will to work again. Because I was sure I was never going to be able to work again because my only reason to get up in the morning was because I was a mom. And I'm like, how am I ever going to want to work if I don't even have my son to care about anymore, or who cares about me? But this whole thing about producing a film is very much like running a business, being a producer. You probably know that it's the same as running a business. So by the end of this three years, I had a documentary that I had produced and I was ready to go back to work, which I thought I would never be able to. I'm not a filmmaker. I'm not a filmmaker now, but it did kind of leapfrog me into the next business.
[00:30:47] Lynne: We should show that film. You know, I have a little, well, you don't know, but one of the things I have here at the Seed Hub where I've ended up in Somerset is we have a little cinema club thing. And every month we show a movie of some kind. So I would love what we talked about you earlier today, you visiting, but we could show the dot. We could show you, tell your story. We can show the film. I'd love to see it cause I've never seen it. I would
[00:31:11] Shelley: Yeah, that would be Great. I mean, I would have publicly released it except that I'm in business. And I don't really want investors in people who I do work with to think of me as the mom who lost her kid. It's kind of a gut punch to a lot of people to even hear that. So I just kind of share it with people. People who are having a hard time, people who I think, other moms, but more than anything, it seems like young people want to watch it because it's. Contextualizes pain and suffering and overcoming, I guess, you know,
[00:31:41] Lynne: I think it's a huge vehicle for healing for others. And you know, there will be more platforms and there are getting to be more platforms where people really want to have an example of something that's going to hit. Well, I'm just an example, but some input from scientists is going to heal them.
[00:31:54] Shelley: And how do you get, how do you get through hard things? My answer is. Do your way through them. it's not really about thinking and feeling. It's just like getting up in the morning and whatever you can relate to
[00:32:09] Lynne: by day. Really?
[00:32:10] Shelley: chop wood carry water. Right. Just doing.
[00:32:16] So that's what got me into this new thing, which I think you were going to ask about. So I read that book that said at the seven year mark. The 50% of mothers regain the will to live. And I was at Ronnie Scott's on the seven year death day anniversary uh, with some of my son's friends. And I just had this kind of a thought that hit me, which is I had been seeing the news of all the migrants coming from Syria. I had seen the baby on the beach dead. Little island on the beach, and I just had this wave of. Oh, my God. I have this music app business, which I'd started, you know, another company, which people really weren't using so much this digital fan clubs. yeah. I had the technology, but people didn't really feel like they needed to have their own digital fan clubs. So I'm like I saw these refugees. I had this thought at the seven year mark, which I will not forget because you know, seven years it takes to regenerate all of your cells. Seven years. They said it would be before I would feel that will to live again.
[00:33:20] And I got on the phone the next day I got on Facebook and I tried to find people who I could talk to about refugees. Cause I really didn't know anything myself and I had met a woman who came to my dinner, who was from Libya. And I found her on Facebook and I said, can I ask you what it's like to be a refugee?
[00:33:36] And, you know, do you think they'd like to have an app like this? And she said, oh, my boss would love to hear about that. He works with the red cross and I had no idea. And it was like just the seven year magic that happened was that I then over the weekend created this app called RefAid, for refugees, and it grew virally because people needed help, but more importantly, the nonprofit sector needed help organizing itself because everything is done on paper, you know? Like where's the services. Oh, we've got a whiteboard or we've got wall with services taped to it. So I kind of helped them create a database where all these services would live and they'd all push into the app and then people could find what help they needed. And it's in 41 countries now.
[00:34:20] So that was accidental. There was no business model didn't make any money from it, but it just kept growing. And then about three years ago, I kind of realized that it was a bigger problem than just migrants and refugees. It was entire sector of government and nonprofits that needed digitalization. And I kinda like to say, if you can imagine Amazon trying to deliver books, but not having any live inventory management, it wouldn't work. But the way that NGOs are, they have their product, which is services, you know, like food banks or whatever. And they're doing all that without any live inventory management, they couldn't tell you what services they had were. So this was kind of became my mission to help them be better at giving help to people who needed help.
[00:35:06] And so RefAid led to that which led to just a few weeks ago, me deciding that it was even bigger problem than just listing services, that the entire humanitarian sector needed helps with logistics and supply chain to try to get the goods, like all this stuff we're seeing that needs to go to Ukraine. It's really slow and cumbersome to get medical supplies from one place to another, because the organizations didn't Ukraine used to be an education, but now they're helping refugees and they don't know how to do a deal with the United Nations in order to get things from here to there. So you need to apply like Amazon type logistics to another sector right? So I just created this whole new software. Not exactly from scratch because it's built on my existing platform. I just created that in the last few weeks. And again, that's something I knew nothing about, supply chain and logistics, that's trucks and trains and planes moving big stuff, right? So when I was just in um, at the Ukraine border, I was just visiting, how does this, how does it all work? And I went to see an airport there and I'm like, well, how does it work? Like, how does this stuff,
[00:36:15] Lynne: So you've just been into Ukraine, checking it out in
[00:36:18] Shelley: I just went to the border of Ukraine and Poland. I didn't go across because it was huge queues to get in and out. Plus Plus is a bit of a war going. So I the airport I went to is right at the border and he said, yeah, people are sending stuff from like Pittsburgh. On private planes to land at our airport in the dumping it off with no destination in mind, haven't cleared customs. Like it's a total mess. It's amazing that anybody is getting any help cause it's chaotic. So I'm like, okay, let me put some order into this. Like I did with annual reports. So let me just take this sector, try to create some kind of system to manage it. And that's my latest.
[00:36:55] Lynne: It's amazing. And if the world ever needed it more, the
[00:36:59] Shelley: Because it's for it's disasters, it's fires. Our software is being used for um, emergency management in San Francisco bay area.
[00:37:07] Lynne: Yes. I saw something on your website about that. So with all these fires, it's used being
[00:37:11] Shelley: Same thing. Yeah. It's the same as disaster in a war. You need to get stuff from one place to another. You need to have some way of communicating between these large organizations so that they can have a single point of visibility across all of the borders of what's, you know, what's going on here and that.
[00:37:30] Lynne: do you have to have quite a backroom or a group of people working for you on this? How does the whole thing work and how do you pay for them?
[00:37:38] Shelley: So we have some customers. We don't make a lot of money yet. I think we will, over the next couple, two, three years make a ton of money. But the thing that's important about software is if it's well-designed, it doesn't require a lot of people. That's what software is good for is replacing all the people that are running around using paper and pen to make lists of things Yeah. Me too. I use my little pad for everything, but. So now we don't have a very big team at all. I won't tell you how many we have, because people would be shocked at how much we do is so few people, but we have this enterprise grade software platform that's being used all over the world and it really works. And it's just because it's so well designed that it works and we don't need a lot of people for it.
[00:38:21] Lynne: Incredible. And so as you said at the start of this tour, 41 countries that you're now in helping with the logistics of people, finding the humanitarian resources that they need to survive, which otherwise is in total chaos, it's extraordinary. And how do you see that? I mean, what is the, is there a vision to take that farther? Does it grow more?
[00:38:43] Shelley: Well, technology, um, It doesn't change that quickly, actually. And we're in 41 countries, helping migrants, displaced people. I would like to be in all countries helping um, more than that particular group of people, but helping people like me and you. My son's dad had a stroke a few years ago and I have another app which is called Life Spots. And it does the same thing as RefAid but for anyone.
[00:39:07] Lynne: So, if you had a stroke, you would immediately find out the right place to go to for help?
[00:39:12] Shelley: Yes. And in fact, what I realized is that I opened my own app when I was out there in California, because his family didn't know anything about disability, transport. And I'm like, well, they have these services that you just, I said, let me look at my app. And there was like, oh yeah, we have vans for people who are in wheelchairs to take them to the Baptist appointments. And so I think my goal is that I'll map all of the social services available everywhere in the world. So we can all find the help. we need when we need.
[00:39:39] Lynne: So, it really needs to get the word out that doesn't it. You really need to get the word out there because this is phenomenal. And it's about people knowing it's there and accessible and finding out how to use it. So if people wanted to know more, would they go to your website or how would they
[00:39:54] Shelley: Yeah. There's kind of there's contact forms on the chellus.com website and on the ref.com website. So if it's related to.
[00:40:05] Lynne: can find out how to download
[00:40:07] Shelley: The apps. Yeah, exactly. And if they're like nonprofits or they work with nonprofits or government, for example, we kind of see ourselves as enablers. So my focus is helping the service providers do a better job of providing services while we do have these apps for the public. My goal is to kind of help the sector itself, get better at doing what it's doing. So.
[00:40:32] Lynne: Well, I mean, for example, if I can just bring up, I know we're running out of time, but I like hundreds of thousands of other British people put our names down saying we'd take Ukrainian refugees. And haven't really heard anything since, because they can't get the visas. So is that, they can't get into come and be here? I know a few people that have managed to get ahold of people personally, somehow, but they can't. So is that something that your app could help if people wanted to get somewhere in England or the visa thing is such a bureaucratic nightmare. That's specific to the
[00:41:03] Shelley: So it's more likely in the UK. that what would happen is anybody who is, who got there, could find the services they need once they were there. A lot of the people come in illegally migrants from countries, not just Ukraine, Ukrainians have been offered help in a way that no other group
[00:41:20] Lynne: I know, cause I'm very close with Syrian refugees and Afghans and the women and they need help so badly.
[00:41:27] Shelley: So I will say that. And the rest of Europe going to Poland was amazing to see. I mean, that's where Auschwitz is right. Going to Poland and quite a few others. And um, it was amazing to see the population of Poland has gone up by more than 10%. The cities have opened their arms and the way they're handling opening their arms to refugees is amazing. It's kind of a role model for how I think we should all be whenever there's a war. Even a brown people or especially of brown and Asian people, but it is pretty powerful. So, I'm hoping that's going to give us some more compassion that, you know, the Ukrainians themselves will understand, like those of us who have some Jewish or a lot of Jewish and us understand, you know, like this could happen to anyone, right? It's not just something that happens to people in Africa. This is something that could happen to anybody at any time.
[00:42:20] Lynne: Yeah, well, there's even Russian threats for the UK right now that were in the paper today. Not do good. So all I'm, you know, I could keep going for hours, but I know that we've, you've got other things to do as well today. But if you saw the future in some way, Improving growing, learning, surviving, and the future for our, for our, for my grandchildren who, you know, only too well, but for every you of the seven generations to come, how would you see? What could we do differently?
[00:42:48] Shelley: Well, you know, I was talking to a friend who's an extreme anti-vaxxer and now, and take government as well in Cal in Colorado. And he was just railing at, you know, all the bad and everything. And I'm like, he says, I'm never going to vote. And I said, well, what are you going to do? You know, to change things? And I think it comes down to individual effort. Like right now I'm supporting a family of 10 Afghans. Right. I put them in a safe house in Afghanistan. Got them. visas and paid for them to fly to Pakistan. For me, I feel like that's like very personal work that I'm doing. And there's a family of four little girls. Those four little girls are going to be amazing women, right? I feel like the only thing that we can actually count on being able to do is individualizing and localizing our efforts. I think that the rest of it is, it's like too big to try to think about.
[00:43:38] Lynne: Yes, it has to start with self and what we can do in a small way in our own community, or even in the global community that can make some difference.
[00:43:49] Shelley: A ripple. And that's why I focused on software that helps make that like personal connection, because I feel like it's amplifiable if we can use technology. As the amplifier, but not the effort. The effort has to be the individual effort. And that's really where I think most people are very frustrated and angry after COVID and you know, even more with the war and everything, I think the inflation they're getting so angry and it's really about you can't really be angry if at the same time you're being compassionate and helping people, right. It
[00:44:18] Lynne: Yeah, no, absolutely. Compassion is huge. So I just want to finish up now. I know you're younger than me, but equally I've forgotten how much younger.
[00:44:26] Shelley: not going to tell you how.
[00:44:27] Lynne: Well, I you're somewhere in your sixties. I know that. And uh, and you told me that congratulations, you've literally just married your long-term partner, which is wonderful, but you want just don't you feel, and I'm, I am 74 and quite open about it. And uh, it's like, we still got so much to do. And it is, if you like our generation of wise women who have been, you know, very. Who are in a position to really support and help and use our knowledge and you mentioned earlier about, you know, young men at tech conferences, sort of looking the other way. We have so much to give, and I hope that all women of all ages, I'm working mentoring young 14 year olds here in my own little town at the moment, is we can realize what we've got to give and how necessary it is for women to collectively come together in collaboration and create this compassionate future with me.
[00:45:20] Shelley: Well, I think the reason that I don't talk about my age is that in technology, the biggest taboo that I have ever come across in my entire life is. age. I thought it was enough to be black and a woman, but I didn't have a clue as to how Bad. Yeah, it's so bad. And so I'm, so I think that's something that We have to work on because we do have so much more to offer and we're so much healthier than other generations. It will be around a lot longer.
[00:45:48] So I don't know how to do it, but one of my big goals is to kind of prove to men, oh, you know, old white men. An old black woman has like a lot to offer and probably even more, I think I'm 10 X, whatever they have, right?
[00:46:04] Lynne: Well, it's all about energy. I mean, you don't look like an old black woman. You don't like a beautiful woman, ageless woman with huge amounts of energy. You haven't got a line on you. So I mean, it's like, you know, we still got so much to do you and I, and it's been such a pleasure to have this time with you. Cause we haven't spoken properly for a long time cause you are constantly on the move. It's hard to keep up and you're busy. So I have asked you, I hope next time you're in England, you'll come and stay with me and in person meet some of the Seed tribe and create some magic with me here in Somerset.
[00:46:35] And meanwhile, I feel very emotional right now because we really have been there and back together over the years. So thank you. Thank you so much. Shadi Taylor, you are a hero. You're an amazing woman, human being. I love you very much, and I'm so grateful to have this time with you. God bless.
[00:46:50] Shelley: Thank you so much.
[00:46:52] Lynne: in this conversation, you would have heard Shelley talk about how she recreated a business and an income for herself after the untimely passing of Shaka, and her business imploding too. So she took her passion of cooking and entertaining and became the nomad chef, entertaining people at home for dinner and supper, parties, creating an income for herself and doing something she enjoyed.
[00:47:23] What hobby or passion do you have that you enjoy so much? You could see it becoming an income stream and a business for you to maybe not your main activity, but something you could really enjoy and would actually help you financially. Have a think, write it down, try it out.
[00:47:42] Thank you so much for listening. And I do hope you try out this episode, seed exercise in insight inspired by Shelley. If you like what you hear and want to learn more practical methods to help you plant the seeds in your own empowerment journey, then please subscribe to this podcast, rate it and review.
[00:48:06] Also make sure you join our Seed network if you haven't already and together with thousands of like-minded women, you'll make friends promote your business and share your stories. There's it said network.com to find out more meantime until then I'll see you next time.