Marie So and Carol Chyau, co-founders of Ventures in Development, at Kempton’s Virtual Cafe

It was a great delight to chat with Marie So and Carol Chyau, co-founders of Ventures in Development, after I blogged about their ventures in early March. My chat with Marie and Carol on air and off air gave me a great sense of their devotion and joy of being social entrepreneurs (helping people via a profit generating sustainable business). I really admire their effort in helping some very impoverished people in remote western China where there aren’t running water and most basic amenities.

The chat was Kempton’s Virtual Cafe’s first Skype conference call, where Marie called from Hong Kong, Carol called from Shanghai and I was in Calgary. We start our chat with my virtual cup of Tim Horton’s coffee, and Carol and Marie had some tasty yak butter tea (酥油茶) where we chat about their businesses - Mei Xiang Yak Cheese and Shokay (maker of luxury product using yak down (the Tibetan word for yak down is “Shokay”) and there personal experiences.

Please click here to listen to my chat with Marie and Carol (in mp3 audio) (or you can download or stream the program here).

*** Note: My apologies for the poor audio quality in parts of the chat. I have applied some audio magic to try to improve the listening experience but small parts of the chat are still tough to hear (drop outs and time delay, etc). Fortunately, most of the chat has good quality audio.