SOCAP18

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 the sheer number of cards with amazement, and at the same time it explains why I’m feeling in need of a week or two of vacation.

But alas, the next step is to type in all those names and email address, try and remember who everyone is, and send appropriate follow-up messages. Life in 2018! 🙂

for tech investors… written by AI, edited by Luni… The Case for Impact Investing As a tech investor, you know that there’s a lot of money to be made in the tech industry. But what if you could make money and do good at the same time? That’s where impact investing comes in. Impact investing generates both financial and social returns. These investments are made in for...

Why am I an impact investor and a teacher of social/mission-driven entrepreneurs rather than sticking with software startups like most everyone else? Simple. It’s what the world needs. I spent the first twenty years of my career as a software entrepreneur, building venture-scale software companies backed by some of the biggest name in California venture capital. Five startups, four of which...

Seven years ago I wrote and delivered a talk about how we leave the big problems of the worlds for the philanthropists to solve, but they just don’t have enough money to do that. The 2020 update to that talk is below. Short story shorter… the total amount of money in philanthropy is less than $1 trillion, less than the value of just Microsoft alone, a tiny fraction of the total...

A few weeks ago I posted a graphical update on the UN SDGs globally. That was the first progress report I had seen. A reader today pointed me to the U.S. status and per-state rankings. The map is not surprising, closely mirroring the national voting preferences with the Northwest and Pacific coast states ranked ahead of most of the middle and south. And also not surprisingly, none of the states...

You can’t work in impact without talking about the UN Sustainable Development Goals. For impact investors, the SDGs are our de-facto standard ontology to describe our interests. What isn’t often discussed is the progress of these goals toward the 2030 deadline the UN set. At this point, seven years away, that deadline, unfortunately, seems ridiculously short. It feels like most of...