What is impact investing? It’s a question that gets asked a lot, even in the crowd that calls itself impact investors. I explained the general idea on-stage at The Nature-Accelerator in just three and a half minutes:
Last week was my sixth consecutive SOCAP in San Francisco. If you’ve never been, SOCAP is the largest impact investing event in the world. Over 3,000 attendees. Hundreds of speakers. Big and messy, but one place where you can meet 50 people in a week, all working toward the same goal of improving the planet. The impact above is the pile of cards I collected during the week. I stare at...
Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation wrote a nice explanation of the need for and sweet spot of impact investing, Somebody’s Gotta Get Rich. Impact at problem-solving levels of scale doesn’t come from one-off businesses. “Levels of scale” as in making a noticeable difference in the world, rather than simply telling a good story imagining a world different from how it is today. Kevin...
One of the challenges of being an “impact investor” is explaining to others what you mean by “impact” as the definition varies from person to person. The best explanation I’ve ever heard came from Ted Levinson of Beneficial Returns on a panel at a recent SOCAP 365 event in San Francisco (which I heard on the “Unusual Investments” episode of the new Money...
Venture capital should never have become the standard way for us to fund new businesses. As an asset class, it’s uniquely designed to fund disruptive innovations. It does this by funding ventures that are likely to fail, but — if successful — can result in outsized outcomes. In other words, it’s a ‘home run’ based model. For a venture capitalist, seeing 6 or 7 out of 10 portfolio companies fail...
Multiple times per year I host U.S. State Department delegations, Eisenhower Fellows and other people eager to replicate a startup ecosystem in their home city/country. They are always surprised when I talk about Seattle as a city that has a thriving ecosystem, with the two richest men of the world, both entrepreneurs, with hundreds of other millionaires created from those same pools of wealth...
