What happens in Seattle (and elsewhere)

As the collective we bootstrap the impact ecosystem, hole after hole becomes more apparent. Business models. Talent. Funding. Etc.

Far less obvious, but as important, is the information hole. Specifically, the lack of information on what is happening around the impact-oriented world. And where it’s happening. And who is making it happen.

This is one assumption I discovered very quickly into launching Fledge, my conscious company accelerator. I had assumed there were blogs like TechCrunch and GeekWire covering the news of impactful startups, covering the investments of the impact venture funds, covering the transition by foundations from grantors to impact investors.

Without such a blog, we’re left with networking, grapevines, and the occasional big gathering to discover what is happening in one’s own city, and other cities.

I do a lot of networking and a lot of first-meeting phone calls with people in other cities. Dozens of times I’ve told the story of what happens here in Seattle. The (seeming) uniqueness of our ecosystem. And the boastful challenge that we’re leading the world on for-profit social good (and the nonprofit side too thanks to the Gates Foundation HQ here too).

The key to Seattle’s uniqueness is 220 & Change, a city block housing Impact Hub Seattle, Social Venture Partners, and Pinchot University. The combination of these three key tenants almost three years ago then attracted nearly all of the social good ecosystem as tenants of the Hub. Fledge operates within the Hub, along with Unitus Seed Fund, Elevar Equity, Slow Money NW, Community Sourced Capital, MercyCorp, Oxfam, and other impact funders. Sustainable Seattle, Seattle Good Business Network, and other ecosystem-building nonprofits are tenants too. Seattle Toniic meets at the Hub, with half of its impact investing members being the impact investors who funded the launch of Seattle’s Hub.

Beyond my own conversations, we have some confirmation that something special is happening here in Seattle. A few years ago, the Kauffman Foundation sponsored a series of videos showcases entrepreneurship in various American cities. For each city, they picked two themes that showed off something special. For Seattle, that was for-profit social good.

This all said, what I really want to know is what is happening in every other city. I want to know how much longer I have to wait for ImpactCrunch or ImpactWire to replace the grapevine with a daily news feed. Who out there is ready to tackle that project? If you know that person, please introduce me. I’m eager to help fill that hole.

[Image by https://www.flickr.com/photos/sworldguy/16450660366]

Back in the dot-com bubble, my second-ever startup filed the paperwork to go public, but the NASDAQ topped off before we were able to complete that process. It’s long been a life goal to be part of a company to finish that process. That goal was not only achieved today, but by Africa Eats, my eighth startup. I’m now CEO of a public company. 🙂 Africa Eats is an investment company...

There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...

Who invented double entry accounting? The ubiquitous system of general ledgers, income statements, balance sheets, and cashflow statements found throughout businesses and quite a lot of households? This is yet-another of those concept so taken for granted that they seem to have been around “forever”, but thanks to Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by...

Many of the everyday details in The Work of the Stock Market told in between the history facts are often just as interesting as the history itself. Case in point, if you read the history of time zones, it seemed like the standardization was complete in the U.S. and Europe by the end of the 1800s. Yet in 1922… The difference in time between London and New York is four minutes and one second...