The other highlight of the Investors Circle visit to Nairobi was the visit to the factory where BURN Manufacturing builds its cookstoves. Charcoal cookstoves, as charcoal is the most popular fuel used for cooking by urban and peri-urban Kenya. Factory, as in a fully-modern manufacturing facility, little different from those found in the U.S., Europe, Japan, or China. One large building filled...
Continuing on the Investors Circle trip was a day trip to western Kenya to visit two of the eleven Afya Research Africa clinics. First, the Afya Ubuntu Ruma Clinic. The clinic is on the grounds of the Ruma Women’s Center, a nonprofit run by a local church which provides services to women and orphans. The picture above provides no understanding on the remoteness of this location. We flew...
After visiting GreenChar, the next stop was another slum across Nairobi to meet Jibu, a multi-national for-profit startup tackling the problem of safe, clean, affordable drinking water in Africa. This has been a very difficult problem area for for-profits to tackle, do to competition with free, but unsafe water, along with the low purchasing power of the people who most need better sources of...
Impact investing is not a mindset, it is a spectrum of opportunities. A spectrum, as impact investing spans the plethora of investment opportunities, asset classes, and risk profiles, plus the vast array of impact. This post comes midway through my first trip to Africa, on a trip organized by Investors Circle, and thus with events focused solely on early-stage mission-driven for-profit...
It is not easy being a startup investor, and even more so as an impact investor. In the tech sector, ask an Angel or VC how they choose their investments, and the most common answer is: team, team, team, team, team… idea. Push them on that an you’ll find one other unspoken criteria hiding at the start: opportunity size. In the impact sector, things get far more complicated. Which is more...
The more one dives into startup investing, the most one finds Catch-22’s. This post is about the tradeoff between being inventive and copying a known business model. Novelty. The risk-averse investors who make the high-risk investments in startups tend to like new ideas. They are early adopters of new ideas and new technology. They enjoy the excitement that comes with novelty and...
The idea of mixing impact with investing is catching on, with a slew of articles in the press:
Impact Investing Done Right
Putting the Greed in Good
What are the prospects for Impact Investing?
The Zuckerberg LLC is Good for Impact Investing
The Jersey Shore and the Impact Investing Strategy
The Impact Investing Illusion
As nascent markets turn into established and proven industries, there comes a critical moment when the time is right for consolidation and scale. For clean cookstoves, that moment seems to be quickly approaching, if not already here. Five years ago was clearly too soon. Five years ago, the UN Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was born, setting a goal of 100 million stoves by 2020. From...
The last time I presented at an event for investors, the first five people all asked me the same question, “Any exits yet?” The more years I spend focusing on revenue-based investing, the more that question is getting on my nerves. Perhaps some of that is on me, as the talks I give are generally titled “Investing without Exits” or “Alternative Exits” or...
Way back in 1991, Geoffrey Moore’s now seminal Crossing the Chasm taught the startup community how to jump over the chasm between the early adopters and early majority customers. It’s a great book that I wish I could recommend far more often. That is a wish rather than a commonplace occurrence as well before that chasm comes another, larger gap. The “pioneer gap“, also...
