Investing in Impact | Impact Investing: Recent Episodes
Causeartist
Investing in Impact interviews impact investors and VC's from around the world on their individual journeys and to connect impact entrepreneurs with insight into funding, scalability, and insights to inspire more impact companies around the world.
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In Episode 62 of the Investing in Impact podcast, Causeartist contributor, Rafael Aldon, speaks with Jessica Burley, Investor at Planet A Ventures, on investing in early-stage startups that are developing climate change solutions.
Jessica Burley is an investor at Planet A Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in climate tech startups. She holds a Politics degree from Cambridge University and has a background in climate finance and sustainable development. Prior to joining Planet A, she worked as an analyst at a climate VC firm and as a researcher for the United Nations.
What is Planet A Ventures?
Planet A Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in climate tech startups. The firm was founded in 2022 and has raised €160 million for its first fund, which it plans to invest in early-stage startups that are developing solutions to climate change.
Planet A's Investment Thesis
Planet A invests in climate tech startups that are working to decarbonize the economy. The firm's investment thesis is based on the following pillars:
- Science-based targets: Planet A only invests in startups that have set ambitious science-based targets to reduce their emissions.
- Impact: Planet A measures the impact of its investments on the environment.
- Diversity: Planet A is committed to investing in a diverse set of startups, including those founded by women and people of color.
Some of the Companies in Planet A's Portfolio
Some of the companies in Planet A's portfolio include:
- Carbon Re: Carbon Re is a company that uses artificial intelligence to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
- Makersite: Makersite is a company that helps companies manage their product supply chains in a sustainable way.
- one.five: one.five is a company that makes circular biomaterials that can replace single-use plastics.
Planet A Ventures is a leading venture capital firm that is investing in climate tech startups. The firm's mission is to accelerate the transition to a sustainable economy. Fridtjof Detzner and the team at Planet A are passionate about making a positive impact on the planet, and they are committed to investing in the next generation of climate tech innovators.
If you are a startup that is developing solutions to climate change, I encourage you to reach out to Planet A Ventures. The firm is always looking for new investment opportunities.
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Thanks to all the Causeartist Partners - Check them out here.
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This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
In Episode 61 of the Investing in Impact podcast, Causeartist contributor, Rafael Aldon, speaks with Arman Anatürk, the Co-Founder and CEO of HackCapital, on building the infrastructure platform for sustainable finance.
Arman Anatürk is the Co-Founder and CEO of HackCapital, an investment platform that aims to unlock billions in new capital towards private companies working on impact solutions. He is also a founding member of FoodHack, the world's largest foodtech community.
Arman is passionate about using technology to solve some of the world's biggest challenges, such as climate change and food security. He believes that HackCapital can play a key role in mobilizing capital towards these important areas.
Arman is a strong advocate for building community and infrastructure to support impact investing. He believes that by working together, we can create a more sustainable and equitable future.
About HackCapital
HackCapital is a platform that provides purpose-built fundraising and liquidity tools for impact funds and startups. The platform offers a variety of features, including:
- Roll-up vehicles: This feature allows startups and syndicates to roll up multiple investors as a single line on their cap table. This can make it easier for startups to raise capital and for investors to track their investments. Bring in an unlimited number of smaller ticket investors, without crowding your cap table.
- Feeder funds: This feature allows fund managers to roll up multiple investors as a single LP into their fund. This can help fund managers to raise capital more quickly and efficiently.
- Micro vehicles: This feature is designed for emerging managers who are looking for an alternative option to quickly set up and raise an investment vehicle.
- Custom structures: HackCapital can also help investors to structure investments into target assets. This can be helpful for investors who are looking to invest in specific impact sectors or regions.
In addition to these features, HackCapital also offers a number of benefits, including:
- New investor base: HackCapital can help investors to access a new pool of investors who are interested in impact investing.
- Increased liquidity: HackCapital's platform is designed to accommodate secondaries, which can help investors to sell their investments more easily.
- Fully digitized: HackCapital's platform is fully digitized, which can save time and money for investors and fund managers.
- 24-hour setup speed: HackCapital's platform can be set up in a matter of hours, not weeks.
- Neutrality: HackCapital is a neutral platform, which means that it does not compete with its investors or investees.
- EU based: HackCapital is based in Switzerland and Luxembourg, which gives it a strong legal and regulatory framework.
HackCapital is a valuable tool for impact investors and fund managers who are looking to raise capital and manage their investments more effectively. The platform's features and benefits can help investors to access a new pool of investors, increase liquidity, save time and money, and achieve their impact goals.
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This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
In Episode 60 of the Investing in Impact podcast, Causeartist contributor, Rafael Aldon, speaks with Laura Ortiz Montemayor, Founder of SVX México and GP at Regenera Ventures Fund, on preserving biodiversity and advocating for real Impact Investing.
Laura Ortiz Montemayor is a living-systems thinker and mompreneur. As the founder of SVX México, she is deeply passionate about fostering Regenerative Culture, preserving biodiversity, and advocating for Impact Investing. Laura's ultimate mission is to redirect capital towards serving life rather than controlling it, and she dedicates her efforts to transforming investment paradigms.
Over the years, Laura has focused her work on driving social, economic, and environmental justice through providing advice and education on Impact Investment. She actively contributes as a board member of the Mexico Impact Investing Steering Committee and Taskforce (AII MX) and volunteers as a mentor for ALTERNARE A.C. Laura is also one of the founding members of the ASEM (Mexican Association of Entrepreneurs).
Currently, Laura and her business partner, Stevie Smyth, are diligently structuring their inaugural fund, Regenera Ventures. This fund is dedicated to investing in the regenerative transition for rural Mexico, with a gender lens and a landscape approach. Laura's expertise has reached an extensive audience, as she has taught impact investing, climate finance, and regenerative economy principles to over 1,400 Latin American investors. Her valuable insights have been shared in various countries, amplifying her impact on a global scale.
Prior to her entrepreneurial journey, Laura accumulated over eight years of experience in wealth and asset management, working with prestigious institutions such as BBVA and Citi Banamex. Her educational background includes a degree in International Business from ITESM (Tec de Monterrey), along with certifications in Impact Investment from Oxford University, Regenerative Entrepreneurship from UCI, Venture Capital and Private Equity Seminar from RiskMathics, Investment Management training from ANDE, and Behavioral Economics from NYU.
Laura's commitment to making a difference extends beyond her professional endeavors. As an angel investor in Desplastifícate and a micro investor through collective finance in two other social and environmental impact companies, she actively supports ventures aligned with her values. Laura's unwavering dedication and diverse experiences make her a true force for positive change.
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This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
In Episode 59 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Machtelt Groothuis, founding partner of Rubio Impact Ventures, on backing entrepreneurs who unite powerful impact with a scalable commercial business.
Machtelt is a founding partner of Rubio Impact Ventures, an impact investment firm that backs entrepreneurs who unite powerful impact with a scalable commercial business. She is passionate about using capital to drive positive change and has over 20 years of experience in the impact investing and social enterprise space.
Before founding Rubio Impact Ventures, Machtelt was a Managing Director at 3i, a leading global private equity firm, where she led the firm's impact investing activities in Europe. She also served as a Director at AlpInvest Partners, a leading global private equity firm, where she focused on investments in the healthcare and technology sectors.
About Rubio Impact Ventures
Rubio Impact Ventures is an impact investment firm that backs entrepreneurs who unite powerful impact with a scalable commercial business. They believe that the most valuable companies will be the ones solving humanity's biggest challenges.
The Rubio Impact Ventures team is passionate about using capital to drive positive change. They have a deep understanding of the impact investing landscape and are committed to finding and supporting the best entrepreneurs in the world.
The investment philosophy of Rubio Impact Ventures is centered around long-term partnerships and collaborative relationships. They aim to be more than just a source of capital by actively working alongside founders to help them navigate challenges, refine their strategies, and scale their businesses.
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In episode 48 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Chirag Gupta, Managing Partner at 8x Ventures, on investing in Deep Tech and its potential to impact the world for billions of people.
Chirag has 15+ years experience in venture capital, startup mentoring, strategy design, strategy execution, organisation design, investment banking and business analytics.
He trained in Strategy, Finance, Human Capital and Statistics by top global universities – Harvard University, University of Chicago, Nanyang Technological University and the University of Delhi.
He has award-winning experience in managing C-suite clients for building organizational level strategic frameworks, organization restructuring, and strategic manpower planning.
About 8x Ventures
8X Ventures invest and enable startups that will lead disruptive innovation and create sustainable value to industries and economies.
Focus areas include:
Geographies: Asia (primarily India and Singapore), MENA (primarily UAE, KSA, and Egypt), and Europe
Industries: CleanTech (primarily Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Solutions), Smart logistics, Smart mobility, and Industry 4.0
Technologies: Artificial intelligence (AI), Big data, 3D printing, Robotics, and Internet of things (IoT)
Check out the Impact Investor platform here.
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In episode 47 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Lawrence Yen, Founding Partner at MIH Impact Venture Capital, on impact investing, Taiwan, and the future of sustainability in the region.
Lawrence is based out of Taipei and Shanghai, currently work with a group of family offices from Taiwan. They setup an impact investment arm starting 2020, with focus in environment+ technology and social value and equality enabling businesses.
Lawrence was born in Taipei, raised and educated in Canada and moved to Shanghai in 2005.
Their partners come from businesses in hardware, software technology, retail, textile, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and a slew of other businesses in Greater China.
The mission is to find passionate business founders with great products that contributes to sustainability and social values, and to invest both financially as well as channel and distribution.
Lawrence believes for earlier stage companies and impact companies, by merely contributing funding is insufficient; hence, coming from family businesses in various sectors and supply chains allow them to help up-and-coming companies and ideas grow in Greater China.
From Shanghai and Taipei, he explores sustainable businesses across the world, and try to find angles to help aspirational founders build businesses, as well as invest.
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In episode 46 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Tom Ferguson, Managing Partner at Burnt Island Ventures, on the future of investment s and water technologies.
Tom brings a decade of experience in water and startups to lead BIV. His start in water came as the lead author on the first CDP Water Disclosure Report in 2010, and he joined Imagine H2O in 2015 to build out the organization’s programming portfolio, which now encompasses 3 global programs vetting 500+ startups per year.
Companies selected under Tom’s tenure have raised $600m+ and achieved 5 exits. He holds an MA from the University of Edinburgh, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
About Burnt Island Ventures
Burnt Island Ventures is not a cleantech fund, because in cleantech water is a $900 billion afterthought. You can’t be good at water unless you only do water. Burnt Island Ventures funds the best entrepreneurs in water, worldwide. That’s it. This is a giant, esoteric, and foundational market for the entire global economy.
We are at a turning point. From the wildfires of the Western US to flooding in Niger, climate change is here. Water resources across the world will be under increasing stress as the world warms. Products and services that allow individuals, governments and companies to navigate this change will see more and more demand.
Entrepreneurs are emerging with the skill and insight to meet that demand, developing solutions to water problems at scale. Burnt Island Ventures exists to find, fund and support the best of these founders.
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In episode 45 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Eric Archambeau, Co-Founder & Partner, at Astanor Ventures on investing in DeepTech to power the future of nature and regenerative agriculture.
A global food enthusiast and not-for-profit activist, Astanor’s co-founder Eric has been supporting healthy food education and regenerative agriculture training for over a decade. The former Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur turned venture capitalist (App Annie, Betfair, Freenow, Onfido , Spotify, Xing) was Global Chairman of the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation and co-founded Quadia – a Geneva-based impact investing firm that offers private investors and family offices tailored strategies and portfolios that deliver social and environmental impact.
Previously, he lectured at graduate business school INSEAD, where he founded the Social Entrepreneurship Department and was one of the co-founders of Social Impact International, a social entrepreneur accelerator program in India and Hawaii with a focus on sustainable agri-food programs.
Eric’s ambition to revolutionise the food sector led him, with long-time business associate George Coelho, to launch Astanor Ventures in 2017 to invest in disruptive companies creating systemic change in the food and farming sectors while restoring the cultural dimension of food, ultimately inspiring people to cook meals that are sustainable, delicious, nourishing and that build a connection to nature.
About Astanor Ventures
Astanor is an impact investor, delivering financial, social and environmental returns in equal measure. We believe in the future of an agrifood system that provides affordable nutrients for 10 billion people, preserves and regenerates natural resources, actively contributes to decarbonization and protects land and ocean biodiversity.
Astanor is driven by a pressing urgency to combat climate change, biodiversity loss and improve the health of humanity and the planet.
Sustainability and impact were part of the firm’s founding principles and remain an area they are committed to excel in. The mission as impact investors is to find, support and scale the most disruptive, impactful solutions to accelerate progress towards global sustainability targets.
Check out the Impact Investor platform here.
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In episode 44 of the Investing in Impact podcast, Causeartist contributor Rafael Aldon, speaks with Sheeba Sen, Co-founder of Hasten Ventures, on developing large scale ecosystem regeneration projects.
Sheeba Sen is the co-founder of Hasten Ventures. Before Hasten Ventures, Sheeba was the Founder and CEO at Alaap, an organization working in Kumaon to bring back the native forests of the Himalayas through innovative community driven models. She’s studied Law at Oxford University and International Relations at LSE before working for Aarohi as an Executive Head.
About Hasten Ventures
Hasten Ventures designs and develops large scale ecosystem regeneration projects. Our approach is founded on bundling regenerative technologies and processes to address forests, water, soil, food and energy needs of a landscape and its people. Through the implementation of our high quality and high integrity projects, we aim to sequester and store CO2 at scale, exponentially improve biodiversity in the region, significantly improve water and soil assets and create economic engines of growth in our project regions.
At the heart of the projects is ecosystem restoration through regenerative forest, air, water, soil, food, and energy solutions using an integrated systems approach. The goal of Hasten Ventures is to build natural capital infrastructure to heal the planet while creating opportunities for economic development & social equity.
Their goals include:
- Create dense native forests comprising 500 million trees by 2030
- Sequester 100 million tonnes of CO2e by 2030
- Increase biodiversity exponentially in all projects
- Create long term sustainable livelihoods for local communities
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In episode 43 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Jasiel Martin-Odoom, Senior Investment Associate at Unreasonable Collective, on the current trends in impact startups across Europe and Africa.
Jasiel began his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs in London after gaining an MPA in Social Impact, Innovation and Investment from New York University. He covered broadly Global Business Services, and European Building, Construction & Distribution Companies. He joined the Unreasonable team in 2020 as the Portfolio Manager for UK & EMEA.
As a Senior Investment Associate, Jasiel's particular passion for impact-focused VC investing led to him joining Unreasonable Collective's deal team that makes Series A and B impact investments into tech companies solving problems of Climate Change Management & Reporting, Built Environment, Mobility & Transportation; and Food & Agriculture.
As part of Collective's 100% diverse core deal team, he is responsible for sourcing, screening, diligencing and contributing to investment decisions made by the team. He also leads the deal team's sourcing efforts in UK & EMEA leveraging his prior experience as Portfolio Manager.
Over multi-year engagements, Unreasonable partners with family offices and foundations, help multinationals future-proof their strategy by grounding it in sustainable innovation, and we facilitate public-private partnerships with governments looking to sustainably reach their goals. Below are just a few of the initiatives we have co-founded alongside our institutional partners.
About Unreasonable Collective
Unreasonable Collective is an invite-only club for investors globally. Collective members benefit from a highly curated portfolio of growth-stage ventures, pooled capital designed to deliver competitive terms, and intimate community experiences. Together they invest at the nexus of global impact, advanced technology and profit. Think of the Unreasonable Collective as your personal deal flow engine for curated investments positioned to create robust returns while solving pressing global problems.
Members of the Unreasonable Collective are connected to exclusive opportunities sourced directly from the Unreasonable Fellowship. The Fellowship currently includes 311 best-in-class companies that have raised more than $9.2 bn in financing, are headquartered in 50 countries, and are positively impacting the lives of more than 1.4 bn people.
Check out the Impact Investor platform here.
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In episode 42 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Alessa Berg, Founder and CEO of Top Tier Impact, on the future of carbon credits, ESG, web3 and its place in the paradigm shift of impact investing.
Alessa is an entrepreneur, investor and advisor to funds and companies. Her thought leadership sits at the intersection of positive impact and emerging technologies.
Alessa was born in Switzerland and is fluent in 6 languages. During high school, she started focusing on neuroscience while working as a windsurf and snowboard instructor on the side. Alessa created her first business at 11 years old and has been investing in the blockchain and biotech sectors since graduating from Oxford University. After covering product at early-stage technology startups, Alessa worked in private equity at Blackstone and in venture capital at Mosaic Ventures. She’s the youngest member of her Oxford degree’s advisory board.
Alessa founded Top Tier Impact (TTI), the global ecosystem of impact and sustainability leaders. The TTI Group’s mission is to accelerate the mainstream adoption of impact and sustainability as the way of making investments and running companies.
It has an active private network of 500+ impact investors, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders across more than 40 countries, an advisory business focused on ESG & climate risk scenario planning, an impact investing unit and a policy unit that bridges the gap between private and public sector within net-zero energy transition topics.
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In episode 41 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Rafael Aldon, Impact Investor and Co-founder of regenr8, on his journey into impact investing and the future of regenerative business.
Rafael will be co-hosting upcoming episodes on the Investing in Impact podcast feed and the Disruptors for GOOD podcast feed.
Rafael is a founder-focused Venture Capital professional with extensive experience in investment and startup growth strategies, including investments with advisory and Board positions in FinTech, InsurTech, DeepTech & SaaS companies, predominantly in S.E. Asia and Europe. Rafael is driven by a passion for nature and the transformative power of technology, and is a student of regenerative leadership.
About regenr8 - regenr8 is pioneering regenerative venture capital approaches in Asia to invest globally in purpose-driven founders building highly-scalable technology companies that fit under the core themes of Energy & the Environment, Food & Water, Circularity & Zero Waste and Social Inclusion.
The future of business is regenerative. Regenerative businesses are inspired by nature, in harmony with people and the planet and go beyond sustainable to actively address urgent global challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change or inequality.
They are on a mission and seek to collaborate across continents and cultures to support a global community of founders, investors, professionals and partners who share the vision to accelerate positive impact business models.
regenr8 partners with a global network of Family Offices anchored by SE Asia families in key regional locations, proving the means for generational family wealth to create prosperity whilst supporting regenerative approaches that create abundance for future generations.
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In episode 40 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Rekha Unnithan, Managing Director and Co-Head of Private Equity Impact Investing at Nuveen, on deploying over a billion dollars in capital to address income inequality and climate change.
Rekha is the Co-Head of Private Impact Investing. Rekha was an early visionary and established the intentional and leadership impact investing platform for TIAA, and is responsible for executing Nuveen’s private equity impact investing across Inclusive Growth and Resource Efficiency.
Prior to joining Nuveen in 2012, she worked for Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a vice president in the Institutional Investment Group. She has also held various positions at Merrill Lynch in Institutional Investments, and Investment Oversight and Risk Management.
Rekha graduated with a B.A. in Economics from Yale University and an M.B.A. with a specialization in Financial Instruments and Markets and Social Innovation and Impact from New York University’s Stern School of Business. She holds the CFA designation. Rekha is a board member of Aeris, a non-profit organization that helps investors make and monitor mission investments.
Rekha is also on the Advisory Board of the Operating Principles for Impact Management and serves as the Chair of the Emerging Markets Private Equity Association’s Impact Council.
Nuveen, a leading global investment manager with over $1.3 trillion of assets under management, recently announced the final close of the Nuveen Global Impact Fund, LP and affiliated entities (the “Fund”). The Fund, which is the first private equity impact fund raised by Nuveen, has secured a total of $218M from a diverse mix of global investors, with the aim of generating strong financial returns and addressing two of the greatest sustainable development challenges: climate change and inequality.
Additional information about Nuveen’s first two deals out of the Nuveen Global Impact Fund can be found here: Annapurna and Advanced Battery Concepts.
Nuveen made its first impact investment in the 1980s and has since invested over $500 million in direct and indirect private equity capital across over 200 portfolio companies in alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Today, Nuveen manages over $5.8 billion across all of its public and private markets impact investing strategies.
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In episode 39 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Will Peterffy, ESG Director at Interactive Brokers, on his life's journey of ecological discover and building the next generation mobile trading platform for socially conscious investors.
Will is on a mission to arm millennials to gen Zs with tools to invest in the future and make “impact” in the world. From giving back to planting trees all based on personal values and cause.
A lifelong environmental advocate, Will has made it his mission to help humanity right its relationship with the earth. As ESG Director of Interactive Brokers, Will has led the development of IMPACT, a mobile trading platform for socially conscious investors. IMPACT solidifies Interactive Brokers’ commitment to sustainable practices.
Additionally, Will has built an organization called “One Small Planet” whose mission statement is to harmonize the wealth of people and planet through the deployment of vital capital. Will views the launch of the IMPACT app and One Small Planet as a manifestation of his life’s purpose.
The son of Hungarian immigrant and Forbes billionaire, Thomas Petterfy, Will is determined to make an impact for his generation.
With IMPACT, users select their personal investment criteria from 13 impact values and principles across a variety of categories including environmental sustainability, racial and gender equality, clean water, LGBTQ inclusion, and ethical and transparent business practices. Users can also exclude investments based on 10 categories including animal testing, corporate political spending and lobbying, and environmental pollution.
Based on their preferences, the IMPACT app identifies companies that correspond with the categories and provides impact scores on existing portfolios and holdings. The user may then choose to customize their portfolios to align with their values.
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In this episode 127 I speak with George Coxon, Director of the Nano Foundation, on Nano providing the world an environmentally friendly and sustainable currency for a greener future.
George is Director of the Nano Foundation, Director of Appia and Advisor to the Global Blockchain Initiative. Nano is a digital, borderless currency, designed to bring financial inclusion to all and democratize the global economy. A degree in Evolutionary Anthropology amplified George’s fascination with social behaviors, giving her a wide understanding of the ways by which efficient, decentralized digital money can empower the underbanked by offering a sustainable and fair medium of exchange anywhere on the planet.
George is clear that an economy that is open to all and empowers those that are marginalized, not only financially but also socially and politically, will be more robust and resilient.
About Nano
Nano is the world's most efficient decentralized currency with 0 fees, network settlements in av. 0.2s and a carbon negligible footprint. It is a new currency that happens to be digital. Simple. Just like the cash in your pocket, choosing to transact with nano ensures that 100% of the value is transferred directly to the recipient. Created to facilitate both local and international payments, choosing to use nano makes moving money across borders effortless and feeless.
Nano was created to perform efficiently without the need for mining, an energy-intensive mechanism to process transactions. Instead, nano uses an innovative voting system where no mining is required.
This efficient mechanism allows the nano network to use magnitudes less energy than other digital currencies, providing the world with an environmentally-friendly, and sustainable currency for a greener future.
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In this episode I speak with Jon Hillis, founding member of Creator Cabins and CabinDAO, on the vision of creating an embassy for DAOs, and building a decentralized city for DAO operators.
Jon is currently building Creator Cabins, a community of cabins for independent online creators in the Texas Hill Country near Austin. Today, Cabin is a place to get together IRL(in real life) with your internet friends. In the future, the hope is that it becomes one node in a network of decentralized properties, owned and operated by small groups of independent online creators and entrepreneurs.
Cabin is an experiment in the future of cities: decentralized physical nodes tied together by a shared culture, economy, and governance structure. The density of creative energy of San Francisco or New York, but wherever and whenever you want it to be. If you were designing a 21st century city from scratch, why would you put it all in one place?
First step: building bridges and becoming an embassy.
DAOs today are somewhat like disparate nations, all working toward goals of decentralization, innovation and new forms of collaboration, but operating in distinct silos. As a first step toward building a global decentralized city, Cabin will build bridges both online and IRL for DAO operators to collaborate and further their individual projects.
What is a decentralized city? Read more here: Tech stack for decentralized cities
Jon is also creator of capital.community. If you are building for independent creators and online communities, he would love to help via capital.community. They sponsor the Creator Coop and the Creator Fellowship.
Jon was the director of product for shoppers at Instacart, where he helped millions of people earn money independently online. Now he also lead the Carrot Angels syndicate to reinvest in the Instacart community.
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In episode 38 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Sandeep Farias, Founder & Managing Partner at Elevar Equity, on democratizing access to essential products and services for over 40 million households and catalyzed billions of dollars of capital in 41 companies.
Sandeep Farias is Founder & Managing Partner at Elevar Equity. He leads Elevar globally and is responsible for the firm’s strategy and organizational development, while engaging with entrepreneurs in India and Latin America to think through inflection points in their entrepreneurial journeys. Working with Elevar teams in India, United States and Mexico, he plays a key role across markets in determining the firm’s investment priorities, underwriting of new investment opportunities and portfolio management in India and Latin America, and fundraising.
Sandeep has close to 25 years of work experience in diverse areas such as emerging markets investing, governance and regulation, organizational design, transactions and structuring, and corporate law. He founded Elevar in 2008, being passionately driven by working with early stage companies that foster economic development for low income communities; particularly in financial services including MSME finance and microfinance (where he played a leadership role in the sector’s transformation over a decade from the non-profit space to formal banking), affordable education, healthcare and agricultural services.
Sandeep started his career in 1996 after completing an integrated law and arts degree from the National Law School of India University (NLS). Over the next eight years, he worked mostly on cross border transactions at two leading corporate law firms, Amarchand Mangaldas and Nishith Desai Associates (NDA), worked in house on Wipro’s NYSE listing, and taught at NLS. At NDA he led the corporate law team and founded the firm’s award winning social and development sector practice. Prior to founding Elevar, in 2004 he established Unitus in India and actively partnered with some of India’s leading microfinance institutions / banks, which were then in their formative years.
About Elevar Equity
Elevar Equity fuels the economic resilience and vibrancy of underserved customers and low-income communities by investing early growth capital in entrepreneurs building at the intersection of inclusivity, affordability, and massive scale. Led by an entrepreneurial emerging markets team passionate about addressing issues of access and inequity, Elevar invests in businesses that demonstrate a direct correlation between high impact and returns. So far in its 15-year journey, the Elevar Method of investing has democratized essential products and services for over 40 million households and catalyzed billions of dollars of capital into 40+ companies across India and Latin America.
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🔥 40 Social Entrepreneurs to Watch for in 2022 🔥 - See the list here
In this episode I speak with Rodney Williams, Co-founder of SoLo Funds, on building a non-predatory FinTech startup for underserved communities in America.
Rodney has been recognized with numerous awards, including Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 in 2012; the Ernst & Young EDGE Award in 2013; Cannes Gold Lion award in 2015; Tech Entrepreneur of the Year by Black Enterprise, 2016; NAACP Inspiring Innovation list 2017; 25 Inspiring Entrepreneurs Under 40 by Entrepreneur Magazine 2016; Entrepreneur of the Year in Connected World Communications in the Ohio Valley Region by EY in 2017; Ebony’s Power 100 in 2018 and CNBC Disruptor 50 List in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019.
Rodney attended West Virginia University, where he earned his BBA in finance, his BA in economics, and his MS in integrated marketing communications.
Rodney also holds an MBA in finance & supply chain management from Howard University. He is a member of the 2019 Class of Henry Crown Fellows within the Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute.
SoLo Funds is a mobile lending exchange that connects lenders and borrowers for the purpose of providing more affordable access to loans under $1,000. SoLo was created to disintermediate the predatory payday lending system. Today, SoLo is one of the fastest growing fintech companies in the country.
SoLo’s story starts the way every SoLo request begins: with someone needing a hand. Co-founders Travis Holoway & Rodney Williams were noticing that family members, friends, and roommates were asking for financial help here and there, and they understood why. There weren’t any fair, reputable options for small, short-term loans.
They decided to create one by harnessing the power of community. SoLo was formed in 2018 to create a viable, non-predatory option for moments when life happens. SoLo tap's into the power of community and generosity to form an online safety net that is mutually beneficial to all of its members.
Travis and Rodney know that SoLo is needed because they needed it. Our loved ones needed it. And they know that SoLo makes a difference because nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Today, SoLo is driven to new heights, but grounded in the same hope and mission: to build a community that enables financial autonomy for all.
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In episode 37 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Lindsay Siegel, Head of Impact at Company Ventures, on creating, investing, and building a community of entrepreneurs seeking to build with purpose.
Lindsay leads Company Impact, with a mission to shift the culture of tech for a more equitable and sustainable future. She supports founders in the community and beyond through training and coaching to help leaders build with intention, operationalizing their values and commitment to equity and inclusion, creating governance structures for data ethics, and establishing their accountability to all stakeholders. In addition, they offer workforce development efforts that ensure greater diversity in the tech sector.
About Company Ventures
Company Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm in NYC that provides a foundation for entrepreneurs building with purpose. In addition to investing in pre-seed/seed companies, Company Ventures operates the Grand Central Tech Residency, an annual program purposefully built to support NYC’s premier founding teams. The program provides rent-free space in the 1M sq. ft. midtown NYC tech campus to 25 startups per year with no equity requirement. Since the program’s inception in 2014, 127 program companies have raised $1.9B from top VCs.
Company Ventures operates by a give-first credo. For the better part of a decade, they have selected great founders building great companies the right way, providing each the ideal environment to build with no strings attached. These founders leverage the community to achieve a depth of perspective and a breadth of network access that no single seed-stage venture platform could provide on its own.
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In episode 36 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Kianga Daverington, Managing Partner at Acre of America and ACRE DAOs, on using the application of distributed ledger technologies to scale impact investing.
Kianga is the Managing Partner at Acre of America Partners LP, a Hudson Valley, New York impact investment firm focused on the application of distributed ledger technologies to solve problems for rural communities.
ACREinvest is their new blockchain venture focused on creating compelling Web3 infrastructure, virtual network services and social incentives for DAOs and other peer-to-peer permissionless stakeholders. They recently launched ACRE DAOs, a Web3 portal for a decentralized impact investment club and its related community ERC20 token: ACRE Impact.
The mission at ACREinvest is to regenerate the way capital markets work & for whom.
Kianga's legal career began as a Corporate Associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York City after graduating from Spelman College and Yale Law School. In later in-house roles she supported the fixed-income derivatives, FX, derivatives prime brokerage and energy trading businesses at Goldman Sachs, and derivatives and physical commodities trading at Lehman Brothers.
When Lehman collapsed in 2008, Kianga left Wall Street and founded a new media (internet and social media) communications business for the arts. Her work included a curatorial and experimental exhibitions program, Kianga Ellis Projects, featuring emerging artists who were commenting on technological change or using digital technology in their practice.
After returning to the law in 2014, she founded a boutique derivatives and commodities trading law firm, Daverington PLLC, and began focusing full-time on the crypto assets and distributed ledger technology sector in 2017.
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In this episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Dr. Angela Jackson on leading New Profit’s $15M Future of Work global fund to invest in entrepreneurs and companies developing innovative technical solutions to upskill low-income and entry-level workers at scale.
Dr. Angela Jackson leads New Profit’s Future of Work Initiative, which seeks to close the career-readiness gap for Americans from low-income backgrounds. Angela’s career started in the private sector leading business development for organizations like Viacom and Nokia. While working internationally, she began to wonder: if multinational companies can deliver their products consistently and with quality at scale, what would it take to deliver social interventions like education and health in a similar manner?
She began to tackle this question by founding Global Language Project, a social venture that aimed to transform how we prepare students with skills to succeed in a global economy and workforce. Angela completed a Doctoral degree at Harvard University, where her focus was on this question, along with the role of scale and strategic capital deployment and philanthropy in systems change initiatives.
Angela’s work with New Profit allows her to marry her research interests with practice. She currently leads New Profit’s $15M Future of Work global fund to invest in entrepreneurs and companies developing innovative technical solutions to upskill low-income and entry-level workers at scale. Angela recently launched a $6 million Future of Work Grand Challenge, powered by XPRIZE and MIT Solve, to rapidly reskill 25,000 displaced workers into living-wage jobs in the next 24 months.
About New Profit: New Profit is a venture philanthropy organization that backs breakthrough social entrepreneurs who are advancing equity and opportunity in America.
Her work and writing has been featured in CNN, Huffington Post, Chicago Trifubune and Harvard Business Review. You can read her thoughts on the intersection of race and the Future of Work on Medium and follow her on Twitter at @angjack.
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In episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Gideon Cohn and Monica Meng, Co-founders of Good Capital Investment Group, on using the power of divesting and investing to create a portfolio to fit your values.
Gideon Cohn co-founded Good Capital Investment Group with the idea that clear, conscious investing can be profitable and accessible. While working as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ at Highbridge Financial Group in New York, Gideon saw firsthand how invested money could match client values and social progress. Clients took pride in doing good with their hard earned money.
After graduating cum laude from the University of New Hampshire and Boston University’s Certificate of Financial Planning program, Gideon obtained his CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ (CFP®) certification. He holds FINRA Series 7 and 63 securities registrations as an Investment Advisor Representative of Commonwealth Financial Network®.
Gideon continuously strives to improve our world. He has led humanitarian trips in developing countries, volunteered as a mentor and participated on several committees of a local union. In his spare time, Gideon is a commercially rated pilot and in a previous life, flew cargo planes in Alaska.
Monica Meng genuinely believes in doing well, by doing good. She began her career in finance in an analyst program at Citigroup. She worked in product management, sales, and operations on various teams including private equity services, fund services, and supplier finance. After leaving finance to pursue her passion in education, Monica became a preschool teacher in Manhattan before transitioning into education technology. She worked at various ed tech startups (Nomster Chef, ChitChat VR, Knovva Academy) in business development, marketing, and instructional design and as a UX researcher at Google. These experiences have led Monica to co-founding Good Capital where she works to promote socially responsible investing and financial empowerment for women.
Monica has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been featured on the Type A Podcast, How to save the world podcast, and as a workshop leader with Outwild.
Good Capital Investment Group is a financial planning and sustainable investing firm striving to be the change we want to see in the world.
Securities offered through Commonwealth Financial Network®, www.FINRA.org / www.SIPC.org. Good Capital Investment Group, 660 White Plains Road Suite 540, (914) 458-1284. This communication is strictly intended for individuals residing in the states of CA, CT, IN, MA, ME, MO, NC, NY, VA, VT. No offers may be made or accepted from any resident outside these states due to various state requirements and registration requirements regarding investment products and services. Review our Terms of Use: www.commonwealth.com/termsofuse.html
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In episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Alexander Holt, Founding Partner at Limitless Ventures, on his journey through addiction and how private and philanthropic capital can be a catalyst in prevention and recovery for millions dealing with mental health issues.
Limitless Ventures is an independent growth capital sponsor in the lower middle market combining private and philanthropic capital to scale multi-disciplinary solutions for those impacted by mental health challenges and substance use disorder. They are a team looking for opportunities to support recovery across all walks of life.
The investment committee represents a broad array of perspectives as they invest along the continuum of care, seeking to solve the continuum of pain. Limitless Ventures believes in excellence, both through team and in the opportunities they seek. The organization is open to all types of thought leadership, seeking balance across neuro-diversity, equity backgrounds and inclusive perspectives.
They believe that mental health and addiction broaden the ESG framework, mandating a new category, "H" for Health based impact investment metrics. "ESG+H" is a risk, which their principles, philosophy and portfolio seeks to mitigate and thereby paves the way for standardizing the economic and impact measurements across the healthcare and financial communities.
Limitless is not aligned with any sect, denomination, or political party. The firm does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any other causes. The primary purpose is to return capital to our investors and to help people, heal people.
Limitless Venture’s Founder Alexander Holt started the “Recovery Fund” in 2018 with the goal of creating 500,000 sober lives in the next 10 years through LV’s investments. Limitless Ventures is an independent growth capital sponsor in the lower middle market combining private and philanthropic capital to scale multi-disciplinary solutions for those impacted by mental health challenges and the addiction epidemic.
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In episode 35 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Adrian Rodrigues, Co-Founder of Provenance Capital Group, on allocating capital into regenerative natural resource investments through blended capital structures.
Adrian is a Co-Founder and a Managing Director of Provenance Capital Group where he helps develop blended capital structures that catalyze resilient biological systems and businesses. Before Provenance, Adrian co-founded the boutique consulting firm Hyphae Partners where he helped companies finance and build regenerative business models. Additionally, he worked at Patagonia within its Venture Capital arm Tin Shed Ventures, helping author a standard for Regenerative Organic Agriculture and exploring Regenerative Organic Land Funds. He is an experienced asset allocator, fundraiser, and business model innovator.
Adrian spent six years at Morgan Stanley helping long time horizon investors manage their asset allocations and diligence investment opportunities across asset classes and sectors. He has also lectured on food innovation at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business and designed and taught an entrepreneurship intensive for farmers at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture.
Adrian is a graduate of Berkeley Haas’ full-time MBA program. At Haas, Adrian was a Portfolio Manager of the Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund and a Member of the Center for Responsible Business’ Student Advisory Board. He also serves as an inaugural advisor for the Investor Resource Council of J.E.D.I. Collaborative, which aims to frame the business case for embedding equity, justice, diversity and inclusion into our entire food ecosystem. He received a B.A. in English from Williams College, studied English literature at Exeter College, Oxford University, and holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.
Also mentioned in the podcast:
Soil Wealth Report - Croatan Institute
Sponsors for Educational Opportunity
Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT)
About Provenance Capital Group
PCG is a financial services firm focused on allocating capital into regenerative natural resource investments. We offer our clients deep expertise, superior guidance, bespoke access, and trusted partnership in the transition to an economy that is focused on people, planet, and profit.
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In this episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Liesel Pritzker Simmons & Ian Simmons, founders of Blue Haven Initiative, on using innovative impact investing to enhance competitive returns and positive social and environmental change.
Liesel Pritzker Simmons is Co-Founder and Principal of Blue Haven Initiative, where she oversees, as an investment strategist, a portfolio focused on holdings that generate competitive financial returns and address social and environmental challenges. The portfolio spans asset classes, from traditional equities and direct investments to philanthropic programs.
Liesel co-founded Blue Haven with her husband, Ian Simmons. Together, they systematically assessed their portfolios based on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) criteria and financial performance. The restructured portfolios became the foundation of Blue Haven, one of the first family offices created with impact investing as its focus.
Liesel is also Co-Founder of IDP Foundation, a private Chicago-based foundation focused on achieving universal primary education. There, she helped create the IDP Rising Schools Program, which leverages microfinance networks to empower nearly 450 low-cost private schools—established and managed by local entrepreneurs—in some of the least-developed regions of the world.
Ian Simmons is Co-Founder and Principal of Blue Haven Initiative, where he oversees a portfolio focused on investments that generate competitive financial returns and address social and environmental challenges. This portfolio spans asset classes, including private and public equity, fixed income, direct investments, alternative investments and philanthropic programs.
Committed to initiatives and corporations that advance investing and strengthen democracy, Ian is the President of the Foundation for Civic Leadership and Chair of the Youth Engagement Fund. Ian serves on the board of directors of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, Social Finance, Issue One, Organizing for Action, the National Advisory Board for Public Service at Harvard College, and Karibu Homes, an affordable-housing company in Kenya.
Blue Haven Initiative IS One of the first family offices created with impact investing as its mission and focus, Blue Haven seeks market rates of financial return on its investments as well as maximum social and environmental impact. It applies a rigorous portfolio-management lens to for-profit and philanthropic capital with the goal of aligning financial performance and public benefit. With this approach, Blue Haven considers the nuanced ramifications of its investment choices while pursuing financial returns appropriate to each asset class or venture.
When investing, Blue Haven seeks to put capital to work in highly productive ways: helping mission-driven projects and companies achieve scale, supporting entrepreneurs whose innovations spur change, and partnering with other investors to accelerate economic progress. Active in frontier markets and in the United States, its in-house team and their advisors are dedicated to sourcing direct investments, conducting due diligence and managing its portfolio over time. In addition to funding early-stage, innovative businesses that improve standards of living, create economic opportunity, and deliver products and services cleanly and efficiently to underserved communities, Blue Haven also invests in traditional asset classes through third-party investment managers.
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In this episode, I speak with Josh Goldman, Ph.D., Co-founder of KoBold Metals, on the future of efficient and sustainable mineral exploration and how EV batteries can create a circular economy for mobility.
KoBold Metals is developing artificial intelligence to improve the efficacy, efficiency, and sustainability of critical mineral exploration and development. KoBolds principal investors are Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate technology fund overseen by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other global business leaders and Andreessen Horowitz, the premier Silicon Valley venture capital fund.
The mineral exploration company uses machine learning and other scientific computing techniques to increase the ethical supply of critical materials (i.e., Ni, Co, Cu, Li, Pt, and Pd) needed to build electric vehicles and personal electronics.
The sustainable and efficient development of new mines will be needed if electric vehicles are to become widespread, but before new ore deposits can be mined, they must be found.
KoBold is the first full-stack exploration company that combines the world’s top mineral explorers with an outstanding team of data scientists and software engineers to bring a comprehensive skill set to bear on exploration.
Josh earned his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University for experiments in atomic physics that demonstrated how trapped electrons could be used to make quantum computers. He also holds master’s degrees in history of science from Imperial College London and applied mathematics from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. in physics from Cornell.
Josh was an advisor to top executives at oil & gas, electric power, and energy equipment and services firms with the Houston office of McKinsey & Company. Josh was at the forefront of McKinsey’s deployment of advanced analytics, leading operational transformations that delivered 10%+ performance improvements in power and oil & gas equipment engineering design and sourcing and power plant operations. His work on strategy and corporate finance ranged from E&P business unit growth strategy, to electric power utility disintermediation strategy, to acquisition target scans and due diligence.
As principal of Phase Change Resources, Josh led business development, sourcing investment opportunities and leading commercial underwriting and valuation of all PCR transactions. He also wrote PCR’s proprietary forecasting and valuation software and led PCR’s big-data digital prospecting efforts.
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In this episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Craig Jonas Ph.D., CEO and Founder of CoPeace on using the holding company model to create a long term impact investing approach.
Dr. Craig Jonas is a lifelong entrepreneur with success across business, academic, and athletic industries. Craig has over 30 years of experience in management with a passion for team-building and drawing individuals with big ideas together.
Craig founded CoPeace in 2018 after serving as COO of Basketball Travelers and BTI Events, an elite sports event management and media conglomerate, for over 20 years. In his role, Craig supervised international sporting events and tours worldwide. He served as the head or deputy head of the American delegation for the Summer and Winter World University Games from 2007-17.
Craig has always had a passion for bringing true impact to global sport, supporting the idea that sports can bring cultures and people closer together. He was one of the first American coaches to travel to South Africa post-apartheid to host basketball clinics for local youth. Craig also represented the United States at the International Olympic Academy in Greece after earning national basketball “Coach of the Year'' honors.
Previously, Craig served as vice president for business development for the broadcast media technology firm, Sportvision, best known for bringing revolutionary visual enhancements to live sports broadcasts, including American football’s yellow first-down line and baseball’s strike zone. Prior to Sportvision, Craig served as the executive vice president of Coach’s Edge and helped initiate its $100- million merger with Sportvision.
Craig earned his doctorate in conflict management from the University of Kansas, where he also taught leadership, marketing, and management courses to undergraduate and masters students. As an undergraduate student, Craig attended Carleton College in Minnesota, and went on to complete his graduate degree at Colorado State University. Craig is a father of two sons. He lives with his wife, Seanna, and dog, Fergus, in Colorado.
About CoPeace:
CoPeace is a first-of-its-kind holding company in the impact investing space. We are building a portfolio of carefully-screened, for-profit companies which are achieving measurable social and/or environmental impact, while providing competitive returns to investors.
A unique CoPeace feature is that a direct investment in the company, and its holdings, is accessible to the average investor, not just wealthy accredited investors.
CoPeace is a Certified B Corp and also registered as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). As a Certified B Corp and PBC, CoPeace meets the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability and is one of only 400 companies worldwide with both B Corp and PBC designation.
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In episode 34 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Sean Doherty, Chairman of the JDRF T1D Fund, on using a combination of venture capital and philanthropy to drive cures for type 1 diabetes (T1D) by catalyzing private investment.
Sean Doherty led the concept-creation, design and capital financing of the Fund, and he has driven its strategy since inception. Sean retired at the end of 2018 from his role as Managing Director of Bain Capital, LP, a private global investment firm which he joined in 2005 as the firm’s first general counsel. In this role he built a pioneering and industry-leading deal lawyer and risk management group during a time of rapid growth and institutionalization of the alternative asset industry. He also had a diverse operational and constituency management role at Bain Capital, where he led crisis management, press and external communications, government relations, branding and philanthropic initiatives and was deeply involved in governance matters and capital raising. Earlier in his career he worked at Ropes & Gray LLP and was a law clerk to a federal district judge in Boston. Prior to law school, he was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, in which he served on a Middle East Force frigate from 1990-94.
Sean and his wife, Suzy, have been involved with JDRF since 2002 when their son Finn was diagnosed with T1D at the age of 2. He served on the JDRF International Board and its Executive Committee from 2016 to 2019 following more than a decade of service on the JDRF New England Chapter Board, including two years as its President.
He received a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a B.A. magna cum laude in Government from Harvard College. He serves on the boards of directors of two companies with T1D programs and is also a member of the board of trustees of Thayer Academy in Braintree, MA.
About The JDRF T1D Fund
A philanthropic vehicle run as a venture capital fund. Launched in December 2016, the T1D Fund was established to create a new investment market aimed at delivering solutions to people living with or at risk of developing T1D.
They are now one of the largest disease-focused venture philanthropy funds in the world, with $100m in assets and our philanthropic dollars are spurring private investment to ultimately secure the billions we need to generate cures.
The portfolio consists of therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and vaccines, with an emphasis on cure-oriented therapies.
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In this episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Joshua Haynes, Managing Partner at Masawa Fund on working in 35 countries, speaking 7 languages, and using natural medicine, technology, and workplace wellness to help billions of people live impactful lives in the global economy.
Joshua's story and path is incredibly powerful. He overcame depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder. Tough childhood raised on welfare by a single mother = grit + perseverance.
He displays over 20 years leading curation at the nexus of innovation, technology, and social impact. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, data analyst, software developer, consultant, digital product + service designer.
Joshua also served as a Diplomat in the Obama Administration (USAID), managed $190M in impact grant funding for the US & Swedish Govs, pioneered new impact partnership types and ways of working.
Degrees from Boston University (Finance); The Fletcher School, Tufts University (MBA).
Masawa is the mental wellness impact fund. Through a laser focus on financial viability, social impact maximization, and founder resilience + organizational health, we nurture capital to nurture minds.
Masawa invests in organizations with products proven to directly or indirectly result in improved mental wellness:
- Natural healing approaches: nutrition, exercise, natural medicine, mindfulness, etc.
- Technology-accelerated recovery: software and hardware innovations
- Workplace wellness: approaches to impact people where they spend the most time
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In episode 33 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Michael Pellman Rowland, Impact Expert and Board Member at Baseline Wealth Management, on the future of food technology and how it helps mitigate the threats of climate change.
Michael previously worked as a Senior Vice President in wealth management for 15 years at Morgan Stanley in New York. He specializes in portfolio management, financial planning, and impact investing.
Michael graduated with an economics degree from Hamilton College and has held Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and Accredited Domestic Partnership Advisor (ADPA) designations. He is an active thought leader in impact investing and was recently included in the inaugural list of Forbes Top Millennial Wealth Advisors. He is passionate about food sustainability and has a column on Forbes.com that covers the ‘future of food.’ Michael and his wife dedicate a large part of their free time to animal welfare.
About Baseline Wealth
Baseline's mission is to make a difference for their clients, while also delivering financial returns. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations can help decide where best to invest. By putting ESG factors at the heart of their investment process, the company believes they can generate outcomes for clients while also addressing some of the greatest challenges on Earth.
Baseline has developed a robust in-house expertise on ESG investments, and apply this knowledge to client portfolios so that it aligns perfectly with financial and personal goals. As an extension of this initiative, the company leverages its expertise in Impact investing, sourcing unique and bespoke investment opportunities that are positively reshaping the world as we know it.
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In episode 32 of the Investing in Impact podcast I speak with Joe Waltman, Executive Director of GiveCrypto and Product Manager at Coinbase on using crypto and blockchain technologies to deliver funds directly in the hands of the impoverished and the unbanked.
GiveCrypto is a nonprofit created by Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, to distribute cryptocurrency to people living in poverty. By using crypto and blockchain technologies, the organization put funds directly in the hands of individuals living in difficult circumstances around the world.
Join the world's most trusted place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Try Coinbase here. (affiliate link)
Examples we discuss on how GiveCrypto has impacted lives around the world:
- Direct crypto payments to individuals living in refugee camps where currencies are forbidden inside the camps
- Direct crypto payments to women living with domestic violence issues and no financial means to leave their abuser
- Helping local merchants accept crypto payments
- Helping impoverished individuals set up crypto wallets
- Delivery simple financial services to individuals left behind by traditional banking systems
According to Groundswell, there is substantial evidence that unconditional cash transfers are an effective way to help people. Distributing crypto is similar to transferring other forms of money to people. The organization expects many recipients will find ways to convert the crypto into their local currency. Some may transact crypto-to-crypto as well. It may also help spark economic growth by giving access to property rights and financial services on an open network. A great deal of work needs to be done to test these hypotheses and see what it most effective.
The GiveCrypto Mission
The mission is to financially empower individuals by distributing cryptocurrency to those most in need. GiveCrypto connects donors and recipients anywhere in the world. Over the past three years, they've impacted the lives of thousands of individuals and their families via direct crypto transfers.
Over one billion people have a smartphone but don't have access to basic financial services
The organization not only identifies recipients in need and distribute funds to them - they also connect those people to a truly open financial system. All it takes is access to the internet.
Crypto democratizes the philanthropic process. As a society and donors, we can send cryptocurrency directly to any recipient and they’ll receive it instantly. This includes people without bank accounts and those living in places where fiat money is “broken”.
Watch the how it works video.
How will the fund operate?
GiveCrypto.org will be an evergreen fund (or endowment) that is designed to live and grow forever. It will grow in value based on new donations and if the value of cryptocurrency continues to grow.
What types of currencies will you accept?
GiveCrypto.org is cryptocurrency agnostic. The organization currently accept the following currencies: BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, XRP and ZEC.
Is my donation tax deductible?
Yes. Donations through the site are tax deductible through our fiscal sponsor the Pledge Group. You will need to provide your name and email (and receive a receipt) for the donation to be tax deductible. You can also donate anonymously but the donation will not be tax deductible.
How do you prevent fraud?
The organization uses a combination of data collection validated with backchecks, verifiable evidence and blockchain analysis to minimize and prevent fraud.
Where do recipients use the funds?
The organization recruits at least one vendor that accepts payment in cryptocurrency. Additionally, recipients hold the crypto and exchange it between themselves. In the future, GiveCrypto will offer cash-out options.
Are you programs OFAC compliant?
Yes. They've have drafted a comprehensive sanctions compliance policy and screen all of our program participants against all relevant lists.
See more FAQs here.
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In this episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Erik Wallsten, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Adobe Capital on investing in Mexico and Latin America through social and environmental companies.
Erik Wallsten is a Partner at New Ventures Group, Mexico’s leading social impact acceleration platform. He is also a Co-Founder of Adobe Capital, Mexico’s first triple bottom line impact investment fund.
We speak in length about about his impact investing journey and the opportunities for social entrepreneurs in Mexico and Latin America. We also discuss some of the portfolio companies within Adobe Capital to understand what areas in the region have been impacted the most by the funds strategic capital allocation.
Erik speaks passionately about housing, education, and healthcare within the region and his support for exceptional impact driven entrepreneurs who are able to create innovative, profitable and scalable business models to address the most pressing social and environmental challenges.
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In this episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Peter Bruce-Clark, Partner at Social Impact Capital on funding ambitious entrepreneurs building world changing companies.
Peter is Partner at Social Impact Capital. Peter was Head of Business Development at RCI, a investment technology and alternative lending platform backed by 8VC and Soros Fund Management. Prior to that, Peter created both an early-stage AI venture capital firm focused on investing in companies using machine learning in high-impact areas of application, as well as a specialist strategy and management consultancy for institutional investors, Kalytix Partners (acquired), founded by Dr. Ashby Monk and Prof. Gordon Clark. Peter has extensive management consulting, investment research, and industry analysis experience.
In addition to his work, Peter has led research on impact finance and strategic investment at Stanford University, collaborating with Planet Heritage and White Sand Investor Group. His publications include Sovereign Development Funds: The Governance and Management of Strategic Investment Institutions, which was published in the The Oxford Handbook of Sovereign Wealth Funds (2018).
Peter has an MPhil in Business Administration and Finance from the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and a first-class honors BA in English and Critical Theory from Queen Mary, University of London.
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In episode 31 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Andrée Simon, President and CEO of FINCA Impact Finance, on empowering low income women and men to take control of their financial future through an innovative global network of microfinance banks.
Andrée Simon is the President and Chief Executive Officer of FINCA Impact Finance (FIF), a global network of microfinance banks and institutions. FIF’s network of 20 community-based banks offer responsible and affordable loan and saving products to more than two million people across the world, empowering low income women and men to take control of their financial future.
Previously, Andrée served as VP and COO, returning to FINCA after serving for several years as President and COO of Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization dedicated to financial, educational, and interpersonal support of women survivors of war, poverty and injustice.
Prior to this, she was Deputy to the President & CEO of FINCA for more than seven years, where she was pivotal in redesigning the organization’s business model from donor-based non-profit to a for-profit operating structure. Andrée has significant experience in corporate strategy and she has held various business and advisory roles in other organizations, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Andrée has been a board member of Women Advancing Microfinance International and is currently a member of the Board of Directors for the FINCA Microfinance Holding Company.
As the head a financial institution with more than 9,000 employees in 20 countries –including Tanzania, Uganda, Pakistan, Haiti, Afghanistan and more– Andrée spends half the year in these remote locations, learning from her customers on how they could best access financial products, whether it is as simple as a loan, and savings account or a mobile money application.
Andrée has been named one of the Top 100 Fintech for SDG Influencers by LATTICE80 and has written extensively on responsible financial services in numerous publications including International Banker, Euromoney and The Financial Times.
She is fluent in French and Spanish. She earned an undergraduate degree in international relations from the University of Virginia, an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and an M.B.A. in finance from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
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In this episode I speak with Jenny Xia Spradling, the Co-founder and Co-CEO of FreeWill, an online will creation platform aiming to channel $1 Trillion towards charity over the next 10 years!
FreeWill is a social good enterprise that's generated more than $650 million in committed funds for non-profit organizations around the country. Partnering with organizations like the American Red Cross, United Way, Save the Children, Human Rights Watch, and Defenders of Wildlife, FreeWill is currently facilitating about $3M pledged to charity every single day! They did this by building an intuitive and warm estate planning platform that encourages charitable giving during the process. Serving the 70% of Americans without an up to date will, it takes 20 minutes or less, is completely free, and generates legally valid wills in all fifty states. FreeWill is aiming to channel $1 Trillion towards charity over the next 10 years.
Jenny is a veteran of McKinsey and Bain Capital, where she helped to launch the firm’s first impact investment fund. She is the cofounder of Paribus (acquired by Capital One). She holds a degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and also holds a MBA from Stanford University.
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In this bonus episode, I speak with Daniel Epstein, founder of Unreasonable on his long journey of building his impact portfolio of companies and supporting over 200 entrepreneurs who have raised more than $4B in financing, generated over $3B in revenue, and are impacting the lives of more than 400M individuals across 180+ countries.
Daniel has been named by Fortune Magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, Daniel’s life has been shaped by a fundamental belief that entrepreneurship is the answer to nearly all the issues we face today. By the time he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy, he’d already started three companies. In addition to being on FORTUNE's "the World's 50 Greatest Leaders" list alongside the likes of Bill Gates & Tim Cook, Daniel was awarded Inc. Magazine's “30 under 30 entrepreneur”, and Forbes identified him as one of the “top 30 most impactful entrepreneurs.” He also received the prestigious “Entrepreneur of the World” award along with Richard Branson & the President of Liberia at the Global Entrepreneurship Forum.
Daniel’s unfettered belief in entrepreneurs led to him founding and being the CEO of Unreasonable. Unreasonable is dedicated to supporting growth-equity entrepreneurs positioned to bend history in the right direction. Part investment firm, part media house, and most importantly a global community, Unreasonable partners with multinational institutions and revered brands to align them with impactful growth-stage entrepreneurs. Today Unreasonable actively supports over 200 entrepreneurs who have raised more than $4B in financing, generated over $3B in revenue, and are impacting the lives of more than 400M individuals across 180+ countries.
Daniel speaks frequently on topics ranging from how multinationals and governments can better work with disruptive technologies, to working with public companies on how to create a worldclass and entrepreneurial culture across their employees, to the future of capitalism and our ability to profitably solve the most pressing challenges of this century. Daniel has given keynotes across more than 30 countries, has spoken at the White House, the UN General Assembly, in front of audiences larger than ten thousand, as part of annual corporate events and in closed door sessions with Fortune 50 executives and their boards of directors. He personally advises CEO's of multinationals on how to become more entrepreneurial and works with multi-billion dollar family offices on creating a new type of financial legacy with their investments — producing above market rate returns while combatting societal & environmental challenges.
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In episode 30 of the Investing in Impact podcast, we speak with Maya Winkelstein, CEO of Open Road Alliance on using a hybrid philanthropic model to make over $50 million in grants and low-interest loans to organizations and companies across the impact sector.
Maya Winkelstein is the CEO of Open Road Alliance, a hybrid philanthropic and investment initiative focused on advancing solutions to Keep Impact on Track. In her role, she is responsible for the organization’s overall strategy and management of the global Open Road Alliance team.
Since its inception in 2012, Open Road has made over $50 million in grants and low-interest loans to organizations across the impact sector which have encountered unexpected roadblocks. Through this strategy, Open Road has kept over $411 million of impact on track across all sectors and geographies, for both registered nonprofits and for-profit social enterprises. The organization also conducts research and advocates for the adoption of long-term, system-wide risk management practices in the philanthropic sector.
Maya served as Open Road’s inaugural Executive Director, and previously worked as an Associate Director with the consulting firm williamsworks where her clients included the Eastern Congo Initiative, Nike Foundation, PATH, Tostan, and TOMS Shoes. Prior to williamsworks, she served in multiple roles across the nonprofit and government sectors focusing on program development, fundraising strategy, and corporate partnerships.
Maya writes and speaks frequently about Open Road’s work and its growing research expertise on ‘Risk Management in Philanthropy.’ She is a regular speaker at forums including Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, Skoll World Forum, and PEAK Grantmaking. Her work has appeared in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Chronicle of Philanthropy, The Foundation Review and many other publications. In 2017, Maya was featured in the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s ‘On the Rise’ series and Huffington Post’s ‘Women in Business.’ She is a former Board Member of the Global Press Institute and a current member of the Leadership Advisory Council for GrantAdvisors.org.
Maya holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan; MSc from the London School of Economics; and Certificate in Finance from Georgetown University.
About Open Road Alliance
Our loans help social enterprises and nonprofits overcome obstacles to impact as they challenge the status quo to create a better world.
From the tele-health company requiring additional equipment and staff due to rapid demand during COVID-19, to the social enterprise facing a delayed Series A investment due to Brexit, Open Road loans ensure innovative efforts to address the world’s greatest challenges can carry on without interruption.
Our investment strategy is designed to keep impact first. We seek to maximize social returns while meeting financial requirements. We exist to serve the social sector, not the other way around. If you think that you are eligible for a one-time Open Road loan please submit an initial inquiry.
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In this classic episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Elizabeth Yin, Co-founder of The Hustle Fund on changing the landscape of traditional venture capital and opening up access to aspiring founders.
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Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
Elizabeth has reviewed over 20k startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.
The Hustle Fund invests in pre-seed rounds. Not seed. Not post-seed / mango seed. Pre-seed. As their mantra states - "We invest in hilariously early startups". The Hustle Fund's first check is usually $25k unless the team has worked with the founder before. Most of the time, founders can expect to receive a response from the team between 24 and 48 hours after having a call.
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In episode 29 of the Investing in Impact podcast, we speak with Dan Miller, Founder and CEO of Steward on creating an innovative online lending platform that helps fund the growth of regenerative agriculture for the next generation of regenerative farmers.
Dan Miller is the Founder and CEO of Steward, a private lender providing regenerative farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and producers the capital they need to expand and sustain their businesses. And through our innovative online platform, qualified lenders have the opportunity to join in our mission and help fund the growth of regenerative agriculture by purchasing loan participations. It’s really that simple.
Steward's story begins with its founder and CEO, Dan Miller. Ask Dan what inspired him to create Steward, and he'll tell you about early mornings spent crabbing with his father on the Chesapeake Bay.
This was the experience that rooted him to the land, but it was a meeting with a well-known chef in Dan's hometown, Washington D.C., that would plant the idea of Steward in his mind. This chef spoke of the difficulties facing the independent farmers that supplied his restaurant: the more specialized the farms were, the harder it was to get a loan.
Dan felt that instead of forcing farmers to fit within a box, it should be the other way around. So he committed himself to creating a system that empowers each unique farmer to steward their land sustainably, with consumers—the people with the most to gain from sustainable farming—having the opportunity to join in their success.
After graduating from the Wharton School with a B.S. and M.B.A., Dan co-founded a pioneering investment crowdfunding business called Fundrise. In 2010, it was the first and largest real estate crowdfunding platform in the United States, and has since raised more than $500 million. It's this experience, combined with a passion for agriculture, ecology, and local food that led Dan to launching Steward in 2017.
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In episode 28 of the Investing in Impact podcast, we speak with Jacqueline van den Ende, Co-founder of Carbon Equity, on enabling access to alternative investments such as Climate Venture Capital, Climate Private Equity, and other asset classes.
Jacqueline is an entrepreneur and investor passionate about building high impact ventures. In the Philippines she successfully founded Lamudi Philippines and over the past three years grew it to be the clear market leader in online real estate. Prior to that Jacqueline worked as an investment professional in the private equity firm HAL Investments and as a Partner at Peak Capital. Prior to that she founded De Kleine Consultant, a non-profit Management Consulting organization which now employs over 200 students in three countries.
About Carbon Equity
Carbon Equity is looking to move the needle on climate change by connecting Capital to Climate technology by the billions. To mitigate climate change we need to rebuild pretty much every inch of our fossil fuel-dependent economy in a historically unprecedented amount of time. Carbon Equity, through its climate fintech solution, seeks to offer retail investors climate investment products that actually move the needle.
This means euro for euro direct investment in R&D, technology and scaling of companies (in contrast to secondary market investments). We do this by enabling access to Alternative Investments such as Climate Venture Capital, Climate Private Equity and other asset classes - with direct climate impact and attractive financial returns.
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In episode 107 of the Disruptors for GOOD podcast, we speak with Prince Constantijn Van Oranje, Special Envoy for TechLeap, on connecting startups, investors and community builders to create a thriving Dutch startup ecosystem.
Prince Constantijn is Special Envoy for TechLeap and co-founder of Startup Fest Europe, as well as Director of Digital Technology and Macro Strategy at MAP in London. He was also a member of the ' High Level Group of Innovators ', a group of 15 independent members that advises the European Commission on innovation and entrepreneurship.
The Prince started his working life at the Cabinet of the Commissioner of the European Commission, H. van den Broek. After this, the Prince completed an MBA course at INSEAD in Fontainebleau and did an internship at the International Finance Corporation in Washington DC. He then worked as a strategic business advisor at Booz Allen & Hamilton in London and as a policy researcher for RAND Europe in Leiden and Brussels, where he later became head of the Information Policy and Economics Team.
From 2003 to 2008, the Prince also worked as a European communications advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2010, the Prince made the transition to the European Commission, first as an advisor and later as Deputy Chief of Cabinet, and Chief of Staff to Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Digital Agenda.
In 2017 Prince Constantijn and Princess Laurentien founded the ANBI Number 5 Foundation with the mission to connect people who are committed to innovation that contributes to an inclusive, just and sustainable society.
About TechLeap
Techleap.nl helps quantify and accelerate the tech ecosystem of the Netherlands. Creating the optimal climate for tech companies to scale with programs and initiatives for improving access to capital, market and talent.
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In episode 27 of the Investing in Impact podcast, we speak with Daniel Blake and Joellen Nicholson, Managing Directors of University Impact, on using Donor-Advised Funds (DAF) to innovate and scale impact investing.
University Impact (UI) is a nonprofit that invests in companies and nonprofits solving social and environmental problems. Investments are focused on funding the most promising social ventures.
UI's goal is to create the next generation of social impact leaders and provide capital to social ventures solving social and environmental problems. UI does this by providing undergraduate and graduate students with an immersive, hands-on learning experience in impact investing and philanthropy.
The associates learn to perform rigorous due diligence and measure social impact through debt and equity investments. Students can then use their experiences to do social good throughout the entirety of their careers. UI hosts the unique Triple Donor-Advised Fund and helps you create the most impact with your investments.
What is a Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) and the University Impact Triple DAF A DAF?
The DAF is a giving vehicle that allows donors to make a charitable contribution with an immediate tax deduction. Donors are able to recommend grants and impact investments from their DAF to organizations solving social and environmental problems. Donors can contribute to their DAF and recommend grants and investments as frequently as they would like.
Daniel Blake - Daniel’s background is in building and scaling startups. He started his first company, EcoScraps, in 2010 and sold it to a Fortune 1,000 company (Scott’s Miracle Gro) after 4 years. He has been on the board for two companies that have sold to publicly traded companies. Daniel’s companies have created marketing campaigns that have driven millions of engagements in a matter of weeks, creating stories that garnered national (cover story for Inc., Forbes, stories on Discovery Channel, etc.), and have led to deals with groups including: the US State Dept., United Nations World Food Programme, Amazon, Google, some of the world’s largest food companies etc. Daniel has done business with Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Amazon etc. His products have sold approx. $100 million in retail sales.
Joellen Nicholson - Joellen has over 18 years experience building shared value partnerships across sectors focused on inclusive value chains. She has led marketing programs, partnerships, plus sustainability, and social impact initiatives with leading brands like the Gap, Disney and Macy’s. As the Director of Programs at the nonprofit Nest, she supported business growth and social compliance for over 100 global MSMEs, with on-the-ground projects in India, Guatemala, Haiti, and Namibia. She also launched Nest’s Maker’s United program in Birmingham, AL, a multi-stakeholder initiative that galvanized local, regional, and national resources to support the entrepreneurship and small business development for an inclusive US-based maker’s ecosystem.
In addition, Joellen co-founded basik 855, a social venture that developed a new co-creation model with Cambodian artisans. As an advisor to start-ups and NGO’s, Joellen consults on business models and program strategies that incorporate social impact and sustainability. Joellen is a pro-bono advisor to Animaná | Hechos x Nosotros, a non-profit NGO with UN consultative status, that is advancing sustainable fashion in LATAM and inclusion of MSMEs. Joellen holds an MSt in Social Innovation from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Supply Chain Management and Marketing from Michigan State University.
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In episode 26 of the Investing in Impact podcast, we speak with Zécca J. Lehn, General Partner at Responsibly Ventures, on using multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to invest in impact startups.
Zécca Lehn is the General Partner of Responsibly Ventures, based in California, backing U.S. PreSeed startups in both Social and Sustainable Tech—using multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guidepost per investment.
Over the past 15+ years, he has worked as an Environmental Economist, Data Scientist, Non-Profit Board Member, and Co-Founder. He grew up in an off-the-grid Japanese-style home, on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest. Through his world travels and living in Scandinavia during his early 20’s, he discovered a deep love for people, planet, and diverse cultures.
For the past years, he has produced the podcast posi2ive, on Venture Scale Positive Impacts. He also leads regular community roundtables and interviews on Clubhouse– for posi2ive’s current community base of 4k+ members.
He holds a degree in Environmental Economics from Western Washington University, and a Certified Specialization in Data Science from Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, he’s certified under the UN Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). He often speaks on panels, podcasts, and publishes articles on the PreSeed VC impact arena.
Zécca is also launching a private beta community of GPs / LPs / Angels / Family Offices / Institutional Funds focused on VC Impact.
Learn more about the community here.
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In episode 25 of the Investing in Impact podcast, we speak with Catherine Griffin, founder of ImpactableX, on using data to power meaningful impact at scale.
"If we're really going to address our biggest global problems, we're going to need our most powerful technologies delivered via business models with massive potential to scale. We need to drive innovative and financial capital towards solutions with the greatest potential for meaningful, material impact from the very beginning." - Catherine
Of the hundreds of founders she has served, nearly all of them have great aspirations for impact. Their passion for their mission drives them at a fundamental level, yet they crave a deeper understanding of how exactly - and to what degree - their work materially affects our resources and vulnerable populations and contributes to the resolution of our greatest challenges. They crave data to validate it and speak to its potential over time.
Over the last 5 years, GoodCompany Ventures developed and refined a forward-looking, data driven approach to social impact modeling, which equips founders with the ability to articulate how their products and services generate social & environmental value, and the scope of their impact potential at scale. As a result of the success with leading social entrepreneurs, impact funds and academics, they have now made this product available to the impact community at large.
ImpactableX empowers founders' stories with analytical legitimacy, grounding and validation, enabling them to build their businesses with impact data rather than intentionality, and share much more powerful stories about the full potential of their innovation with partners, customers and investors.
The ImpactableX methodology was developed by GoodCompany Ventures, an award-winning accelerator and innovation consortium. It has been used by leading social entrepreneurs, Impact Funds and Academics, including TSEF, Wharton, Stanford, USAID's Global Innovation Exchange, and Techstars, among several others.
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In this bonus episode I chat with James Duft and Jessica Kellner about our new partnership, the new elements of Causeartist that will be rolling out, and the future of the Causeartist platform.
James Duft: With 15 years of experience in the world of national event and magazine media, James is a whiz at networking, partnership development, and operations and logistics. Among his greatest hits: creating the multimillion-dollar event series, Mother Earth News Fairs; partnering with UC Berkeley to host a beneficial business gala with speakers including Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts, and Jostein Solheim, CEO of Ben & Jerry’s; and helping produce large-scale music events.
Jessica Kellner: Jessica has more than a decade of experience in content creation and brand management, attracting vast audiences of enthusiastic print, online and social media readers in an array of niches. Most recently, she was the founding editor of Mother Earth Living, a national natural wellness magazine that’s amassed hundreds of thousands of print readers and a social media universe that includes more than 2 million fans. She’s also the author of Housing Reclaimed: Sustainable Homes for Next to Nothing.
My passion for Causeartist and the Causeartist community has spanned nearly 10 years. Even though I’ve been at this for a while, I’m more excited about the people and stories that occupy this space than ever before. The impact business world is only getting larger and louder — in the best way possible — and I’m excited to watch Causeartist grow right along with it.
Today, I’m excited to announce the relaunch of Causeartist. I’ve reached an inflection point with the brand: A solid foundation has been established, and with the right individuals on my team, I can see nearly endless opportunities for enhanced storytelling, a broader community of friends and partners, and a greater influence on the impact business movement. I believe I’ve found the right team, and we’re already progressing toward a bigger, better Causeartist.
What does our relaunch entail? Here are some of the projects we’ve got in the works:
- First, you can check out this page to learn more about the expanded Causeartist team. These are media experts I’ve been collaborating with for years, and they couldn’t be a better fit for this important work. Our latest podcast features two of them, and you should tune in for that one to hear more about what we’re working on together.
- Our new and improved story submission page and process welcome contributors of all kinds to be a part of the Causeartist voice. Check it out, and drop us your ideas.
- We’re building out a Causeartist editorial advisory committee — including business and thought leaders from various backgrounds and business sectors — to bring new ideas and diverse perspectives to the table as we plan our content. Our first two committee members:
- John Montgomery: One of leading legal minds behind California’s benefit corporation legislation, John’s career has centered on counseling startups and emerging growth companies with a triple bottom line in mind. He currently runs Lex Ultima.
- Kate Byrne: A media-strategy veteran, Kate held executive positions at BusinessWeek, Inc., and Fast Company, served as President of SOCAP, and has recently joined the team at Katapult.
- We’re accelerating our content production and made tweaks to design elements across our web, email, and social media entities. Make sure to follow us in all of these places to see what we’ve been working on!
- We’re also expanding our brand partnership offerings, with a really cool project kicking off this year: the Causeartist Collective. Stay tuned for more details soon.
To celebrate our relaunch, we partnered with six amazing impact brands to arrange an amazing giveaway. Learn how you can enter to win $900 worth of the coolest ethical products here.
We hope you know that none of what we do would be possible without you. Your support of Causeartist is invaluable, and your ideas are, too. If you have a few minutes, we invite you to hop in and complete this survey, which will help us deliver the best content to you in the best way.
Thanks for being here. Onward and upward!
Grant Trahant
Founder of Causeartist
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MDIF is a not-for-profit investment fund for independent media in countries where access to free and independent media is under threat. We provide affordable debt and equity financing supported by technical assistance to media companies that provide the news, information and debate that people need to build free, thriving societies.
Harlan has managed debt and equity investments in over 50 news outlets on five continents. He has extensive experience of working in emerging and frontier markets as an impact investment manager and attorney. He was MDLF’s Deputy Managing Director from 1998 until his appointment as CEO in 2011. Before joining MDIF, Harlan served from 1996 to 1998 as Deputy General Counsel of the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundations Network.
Prior to that, he practiced law in the New York and Los Angeles offices of Morrison & Foerster, specializing in international litigation, intellectual property and new media law. He received his JD from Columbia University School of Law in 1989, and holds a BA in International Relations and Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
MDIF manages its investments through a fund structure that includes private equity, debt and hybrid funds. With a current portfolio of more than $100 million, all of our funds provide financing to independent media in countries where access to free and independent is under threat. They include:
Emerging Media Opportunity Fund I
EMOF I is a $12.9 million private equity fund, providing early- to mid-stage growth capital to independent media companies in select emerging and frontier markets. It has deployed capital in countries including India, Brazil and Indonesia to a portfolio that includes rapidly growing digital players and younger startups. EMOF I is now closed to investors.
MDIF Media Finance I
MMF I is a $6 million blended-value loan fund providing affordable loans to independent media in OECD-DAC countries. It has invested in companies in countries including Malawi, Serbia, Ukraine and India. In a ground-breaking partnership, MDIF and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) provide investors with 55% first-loss protection. The fund pays a coupon of 4% to investors. MMF I is now closed to investors.
MDIF Media Finance II
MMF II operates on identical terms to MMF I, providing investors with a 4% coupon and a 55% first-loss guarantee. MMF II is currently open to investors.
MDIF General Fund
MDIF’s original evergreen fund currently invests in more than 20 countries. Since 1996 it has provided more than $100 million in debt and equity investments to leading independent media in 40 countries. The fund is currently open to investors.
Digital News Ventures
MDIF launched Digital News Ventures in 2012, a $3.8m seed fund focused on information and news-related startups. DNV invested equity in young media companies experimenting with innovative approaches to delivering news, encouraging public debate or increasing the sustainability of independent media businesses. Placing investments in 16 companies in ten countries around the world, DNV is closed to investors.
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In episode 23 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Graham Singh, CEO of Trinity Centres Foundation, on an innovative approach that transforms church properties into modern and inclusive community hubs to create local impact.
For nearly 15 years, Graham been involved in finding new vocations for church buildings. He provided leadership for 4 projects in the UK and Canada, including at the Trinity Centres Foundation’s pilot site, St Jax Montreal. Graham’s doctoral research and practical work in this subject inform much of the Foundation’s approach. Prior to his work with church buildings as a minister in the Anglican church, Graham worked within the global advertising sector in London, England. He is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario, St Mellitus College (via Cambridge University / Ridley Hall) and the London School of Economics. He is fluent in French and English.
The Trinity Centres Foundation Story:
The Trinity Centres Foundation connected with experts from the social innovation, urban planning, property, finance, management, accounting, legal, government and faith sectors.
What we heard was the need for a more radical option.
What we heard is that 10,000 of canada’s 28,000 church buildings will close within the next 10 years.
What we heard was a call for a secular solution to what began as a faith problem.
What we heard was a frustration at too many band-aid solutions and the need for a totally new strategy for the building of social infrastructure.
What the organization decided to build was a model that could connect, advise, invest and run the solution: joining with all levels of canadian government, investment funds and social innovators to create a new community hub model for our most strategic buildings.
The Trinity Centres Foundation was established in 2018 as a pan-Canadian charitable organization with the goal of lovingly preserving, restoring and repurposing underutilized churches into dynamic spaces for dialogue and interaction accessible for multiple uses to a multiplicity of different individuals and groups.
Applying a new social business model that generates both societal and economic value, the Foundation is committed to enabling churches to continue to bring about positive change, while maintaining a secure financial future. In the process, innovative new ways will be found to deliver services, while advancing social inclusion and revitalizing communities and local neighbourhoods.
From Churches on the Brink to Hubs of Buoyant Communities
Church buildings are among Canada’s most underused assets — all the more so in recent years — and yet, these sites should never be sitting empty and idle. In addition to serving as places of worship, they should be active and enriching gathering places for members of their respective communities day and night and day in and day out.
Commonly referred to as community hubs, TCF’s transformed church buildings constitute a new form of infrastructure that advances and builds on core values like friendship and belonging. Serving to both reflect and strengthen communities, these hubs are welcoming, inclusive and inspiring places where people can go to socialize, pursue common interests, gain new knowledge and find support when needed.
The transformation into hubs constitutes a way for local churches to offset shrinking congregations, reinvent themselves, and to remain afloat and relevant. Whether located in high-density urban neighbourhoods or more remote rural settings, each hub is as unique as the community it serves and is defined by local needs, services and resources.
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In episode 22 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Luis Felipe Adaime, Founder and CEO of MOSS, on creating a carbon credit marketplace and the world’s first green digital asset, a carbon credit-backed token.
Moss is the largest environmental platform in the world. With global operations and headquartered in Brazil, it started operating in early 2020, when it launched the first carbon credit-backed token, MCO2, used to offset carbon footprints. MCO2 is audited by international institutions and registered with Verra, a foundation that regulates the global registration of voluntary credits, following a strict global protocol.
Luis worked from 2012 to 2019 as the portfolio manager and partner for Latam equities long only funds at Newfoundland Capital Management. While at Newfoundland, Luis created the largest Latam ex-Brazil fund in the region for US and Canada endowments and pension funds, and the largest local equities fund in Argentina.
Previously, he was a Managing Director of York Capital Management, working as a Portfolio Manager for the firm’s investments in Latin America. Prior to York, Luis was a Partner at BRZ, a Brazilian hedge fund, working as a commodities Analyst and Portfolio Manager for both their value and long/short funds. Luis began his career working as a Latin American financial institutions Research Associate at Credit Suisse and later moved to the bank’s proprietary desk in São Paulo.
Luis holds a B.Sc. in Management Science and Engineering with minor in Economics from Stanford University and graduated cum laude from Phillips Academy, Andover. He is a native of Brazil and is fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
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In episode 21 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with David Nikzad, founder of Emotional Intelligence Ventures, on his angel investor journey and the future of the psychedelic industry.
Over the past 2.5 decades he has invested in real estate, nightlife, technology and wellness. He left the mainland over a decade ago to work on a retreat center in Maui called Lumeria, working there on his own emotional intelligence (Ei) while continuing to invest in and guide startups.
Through his family venture fund Reinmkr Satsang and his holding company Orthogonal Thinker Inc., David put the first checks into companies such as Betterment🦄, Vidyard🦄, InstantCab Ridecell🦄, Wefunder, June Software TaptoLearn, Talkable, Aisle50, TutorSpree, OrangeFund2, Quartzy, Ridejoy, GazeHawk, RealCrowd, InvoiceASAP, Meadow, Mellows, ConfidentCannabis, FOBO Yardsale, BlockRx, SericaPay, Solti, AdStage, Arcview Capital and more.
He has personally incubated companies through Orthogonal Thinker like SuryaSpa, KitchenNation, MauiRaw, Randy’s Remedy, EI.Ventures, and Pure Mushrooms.
Orthogonal holds secondary shares in anchor companies such as Airbnb, Republic, and Equipment Share.
Over this last decade, David has become hyper-focused on his two children who live on Hawaii, and on his current role as Executive Chairman of Orthogonal Thinker Inc, which encompasses all of David’s family’s holdings.
His latest journey, Emotional Intelligence Ventures, is focused on creating the new standard of mental wellness through developing novel psychedelic therapeutics, medicinal mushroom formulations, and unique treatment protocols and delivery mechanisms.
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In episode 20 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Koen van Seijen, Senior Manager at Toniic and host of the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Podcast, on the future of farming and agriculture.
Koen has extensive expertise in increasing deal flow, and scouting and selecting social enterprises with scalable business models. He has over five years of experience, with a strong focus on the sustainability sector, agriculture and Africa. In 2010, Koen combined his passions for storytelling and sustainability when he co-founded StoryTravelers, a company that promotes sustainable tourism businesses using visual stories. Before this, he was also part of the founding team of the Impact Hub Milan and also spent time as a Host at the Impact Hub Rotterdam.
Koen also supported Aqua-Spark, an impact investing fund based out of Utrecht, focused on sustainable aquaculture companies. As part of the deal flow team at AquaSpark, Koen created the deal flow pipeline from scratch, and went on to screen over 350 companies. Koen studied Business Economics at the Universiteit van Tilburg and also serves as an Advisor for the Ecosystem Return Foundation, which is dedicated to restoring large ecosystems in a financially sustainable way.
For people who want to learn more about investing in regenerative agriculture and food:
Check out the course Koen created.
Great introduction into the world of regenerative agriculture, the book Growing a Revolution by David R Montgomery.
Koen interviewed him here.
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In episode 19 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Bobby Turner, CEO of Turner Impact Capital, on building one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing social impact investment firms, positioned to invest $3 billion into solutions to address societal challenges across the United States. Those solutions include three major sectors - Housing, Education, and Healthcare.
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Over the past two decades, Bobby Turner has established himself as a pioneer in the area of social impact investing. Since founding Turner Impact Capital in 2014, he has rapidly built one of the nation’s largest social impact investment firms, with over $3 billion in investment potential to help address some of the country’s most pervasive social issues with real estate solutions.
As former Chairman, CEO and Co-Founding Partner of Canyon Capital Realty Advisors (CCRA), he oversaw a commercial real estate and mortgage asset portfolio totaling over $12 billion and was responsible for launching several groundbreaking funds that helped define the “triple bottom line” investment movement. In his years as a social impact innovator, Bobby has dedicated himself to providing sound financial returns for investors while fostering opportunities for the communities in which his funds invest.
Bobby is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S., Finance) where he serves on Wharton’s Board of Overseers and where he has endowed a number of initiatives focused on social impact and triple bottom line investing. Today these programs have grown to include curriculum development, summer internships for students interested in pursuing social impact careers, financial scholarships for minority students, the Turner Social Impact Society and the Lauren and Bobby Turner Executive Speaker Series for Social Impact.
“Most investors believe if you are going to impose a societal objective on a financial return you’re going to sacrifice yield. I just refute that. Our results do, too.” Bobby Turner, CEO
About Turner Impact Capital
Turner Impact Capital brings a multi-disciplinary investment approach to underserved communities where large mismatches exist between the supply and demand of community-serving infrastructure and related services. They pursue compelling opportunities in markets where the traditional investor has been either the government or philanthropy. These opportunities are often overlooked by conventional investors and intensified by demographic trends.
By harnessing market forces, Turner Impact Capital is creating sustainable solutions to some of our society’s most pressing challenges on a broad, nationwide scale.
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In episode 18 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Pratibha Vuppuluri, Head of Investments at Unreasonable Group on diversity in venture capital, social impact unicorns, and the mission of the Unreasonable Collective.
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Pratibha Vuppuluri is the Managing Director on the Unreasonable Team overseeing the global portfolio of 200+ high growth impact companies and leads on facilitating capital introductions for the venture base. She brings ~20 years of Banking experience with expertise across a variety of industries including, Renewable Energy, Industrial Technology and Sustainable Agriculture.
Pratibha graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelors in Applied Economics and Management with an academic publication and completed her Masters in International Affairs (International Finance and Economic Policy) at Columbia University.
Unreasonable Group recently announced the launch of Unreasonable Collective, a unique invitation only member club for sophisticated and accredited investors interested in investing in high growth ventures operating at the intersection of impact and technology. Membership to the club will provide opportunities to co-invest alongside top institutional groups, via managed syndicates, generating societal and environmental impact as well as exceptional returns.
The Collective’s innovative growth financing structure builds on the emergence of two crucially important trends in impact investing: redesigning an investor base to build inclusivity in the capital ecosystem and encouraging collaboration between funders to amplify impact and accelerate venture growth. As such, the Collective membership recruitment strategy will ensure that at least 50% of its members are women, people of color and from the LGBTQ+ community; and leveraging pioneering co-investment models through its syndicated approach, it will co-invest with many of the world’s leading venture capital and growth equity firms, in Unreasonable ventures.
The Collective’s highly curated global venture portfolio spans a wide range of sectors including Mobility & Transportation, Agriculture, Clean Energy, Alternative Protein, Digital Health, Education Technology and Industrial Automation. Members will also benefit from pooled capital designed to deliver competitive terms.
“Our belief is that the next unicorns will be high growth, high impact companies that will utilize breakthrough technologies to solve environmental and societal problems in a profitable and scalable way. However, the capital markets model, especially in the later stage financing landscape, tends to be in the hands of non-diverse money managers. This needs to change not only to equalize the playing field for an inclusive financing landscape, but also for ventures who are actively looking for a diverse investor base that can bring smart capital, fresh perspectives, ground-up insights, expertise, and network access in domestic and international markets,” said Pratibha Vuppuluri, Head of Investments, Unreasonable Group.
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In episode 17 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Kyle Lukianuk, President of Good Returns, on philanthropic capital, CDFIs, public and private partnerships, and the future of impact investing.
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Kyle is a social entrepreneur interested in all things that aim to make our world a better place. He is deeply passionate about developing financially innovative ways to mobilize more resources for impact.
Good Returns is a network-based model established to help businesses to drive sustainable social impact in a way that supports their core business objectives. Based in Dallas,TX Good Returns leverages the resources of businesses and foundations to provide interest free loans to sustainable impact organizations around the world.
Good Returns is working to construct models for business where doing good and doing well are perfectly aligned.
Good Returns partners with companies to help build a better, more sustainable world. Leveraging the teams background in technology, banking, retail, marketing, finance, philanthropy, and private equity, the team works with companies to develop innovative, measurable corporate citizenship activities that help drive a company’s bottom line.
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In episode 16 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with George Tsiatis, co-founder of The Resolution Project on investing and developing socially responsible young leaders to create positive ventures.
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George Tsiatis is the CEO & Co-Founder of the Resolution Project. Since Resolution’s inception, George has been one of the driving forces behind the organization, co-developing the Social Venture Challenge, leading the design of the current Guides program, and imagining the forthcoming Resolution Institute and the SOLVE Summit. In his position on the Executive Committee of the Board, as President, he has led the Operations and Programs Committees. He also serves as a Guide to several Fellows.
Prior to taking the helm at Resolution, George co-founded and grew Group 113, a certified B Corp providing impact-focused organizations with branding and marketing services, and was the company’s Managing Director for over 10 years. He has played various roles in launching several additional entrepreneurial ventures over the years. Before Group 113, George began his career at a major New York City public relations firm. George also serves on the boards of the Hellenic University Club of New York and the Kew-Forest School.
George earned his BA with honors from Harvard with a Special Concentration in Byzantine Studies and his JD with high honors from St. John’s University.
The Resolution Project is a global non-profit fostering youth leadership development through collaborative social entrepreneurship. Founded in 2007, Resolution identifies young leaders through Social Venture Challenges and empowers them to make a positive impact today through Resolution Fellowships. Resolution Fellows receive dynamic, hands-on support to implement their ventures and to develop as socially-responsible leaders. With over 380 Resolution Fellows in 70+ countries, working in diverse, high-impact fields such as education, healthcare, human rights, water resources, and sustainability, Resolution is building a generation of leaders with a lifelong commitment to social responsibility.
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In episode 15 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Gideon Cohn and Monica Meng, Co-founders of Good Capital Investment Group, on using the power of divesting and investing to create a portfolio to fit your values.
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Gideon Cohn co-founded Good Capital Investment Group with the idea that clear, conscious investing can be profitable and accessible. While working as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ at Highbridge Financial Group in New York, Gideon saw firsthand how invested money could match client values and social progress. Clients took pride in doing good with their hard earned money.
After graduating cum laude from the University of New Hampshire and Boston University’s Certificate of Financial Planning program, Gideon obtained his CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ (CFP®) certification. He holds FINRA Series 7 and 63 securities registrations as an Investment Advisor Representative of Commonwealth Financial Network®.
Gideon continuously strives to improve our world. He has led humanitarian trips in developing countries, volunteered as a mentor and participated on several committees of a local union. In his spare time, Gideon is a commercially rated pilot and in a previous life, flew cargo planes in Alaska.
Monica Meng genuinely believes in doing well, by doing good. She began her career in finance in an analyst program at Citigroup. She worked in product management, sales, and operations on various teams including private equity services, fund services, and supplier finance. After leaving finance to pursue her passion in education, Monica became a preschool teacher in Manhattan before transitioning into education technology. She worked at various ed tech startups (Nomster Chef, ChitChat VR, Knovva Academy) in business development, marketing, and instructional design and as a UX researcher at Google. These experiences have led Monica to co-founding Good Capital where she works to promote socially responsible investing and financial empowerment for women.
Monica has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been featured on the Type A Podcast, How to save the world podcast, and as a workshop leader with Outwild.
Good Capital Investment Group is a financial planning and sustainable investing firm striving to be the change we want to see in the world.
Securities offered through Commonwealth Financial Network®, www.FINRA.org / www.SIPC.org. Good Capital Investment Group, 660 White Plains Road Suite 540, (914) 458-1284. This communication is strictly intended for individuals residing in the states of CA, CT, IN, MA, ME, MO, NC, NY, VA, VT. No offers may be made or accepted from any resident outside these states due to various state requirements and registration requirements regarding investment products and services. Review our Terms of Use: www.commonwealth.com/termsofuse.html
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In episode 14 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Liesel Pritzker Simmons & Ian Simmons, founders of Blue Haven Initiative, on using innovative impact investing to enhance competitive returns and positive social and environmental change.
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Liesel Pritzker Simmons is Co-Founder and Principal of Blue Haven Initiative, where she oversees, as an investment strategist, a portfolio focused on holdings that generate competitive financial returns and address social and environmental challenges. The portfolio spans asset classes, from traditional equities and direct investments to philanthropic programs.
Liesel co-founded Blue Haven with her husband, Ian Simmons. Together, they systematically assessed their portfolios based on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) criteria and financial performance. The restructured portfolios became the foundation of Blue Haven, one of the first family offices created with impact investing as its focus.
Liesel is also Co-Founder of IDP Foundation, a private Chicago-based foundation focused on achieving universal primary education. There, she helped create the IDP Rising Schools Program, which leverages microfinance networks to empower nearly 450 low-cost private schools—established and managed by local entrepreneurs—in some of the least-developed regions of the world.
Ian Simmons is Co-Founder and Principal of Blue Haven Initiative, where he oversees a portfolio focused on investments that generate competitive financial returns and address social and environmental challenges. This portfolio spans asset classes, including private and public equity, fixed income, direct investments, alternative investments and philanthropic programs.
Committed to initiatives and corporations that advance investing and strengthen democracy, Ian is the President of the Foundation for Civic Leadership and Chair of the Youth Engagement Fund. Ian serves on the board of directors of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, Social Finance, Issue One, Organizing for Action, the National Advisory Board for Public Service at Harvard College, and Karibu Homes, an affordable-housing company in Kenya.
Blue Haven Initiative IS One of the first family offices created with impact investing as its mission and focus, Blue Haven seeks market rates of financial return on its investments as well as maximum social and environmental impact. It applies a rigorous portfolio-management lens to for-profit and philanthropic capital with the goal of aligning financial performance and public benefit. With this approach, Blue Haven considers the nuanced ramifications of its investment choices while pursuing financial returns appropriate to each asset class or venture.
When investing, Blue Haven seeks to put capital to work in highly productive ways: helping mission-driven projects and companies achieve scale, supporting entrepreneurs whose innovations spur change, and partnering with other investors to accelerate economic progress. Active in frontier markets and in the United States, its in-house team and their advisors are dedicated to sourcing direct investments, conducting due diligence and managing its portfolio over time. In addition to funding early-stage, innovative businesses that improve standards of living, create economic opportunity, and deliver products and services cleanly and efficiently to underserved communities, Blue Haven also invests in traditional asset classes through third-party investment managers.
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In this bonus episode of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Dr. Lydiah Kemunto Bosire, Founder & CEO of 8B Education Investments, on using Income Shared Agreements to create greater access for African students to attend global universities.
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Dr. Lydiah Kemunto Bosire, a native Kenyan, holds a D. Phil in Politics from the University of Oxford, which she struggled to finance. In the years since, she has watched colleagues, friends, and family from the African continent turn down or forfeit opportunities to study at global universities because they could not secure sufficient financing.
She has seen African students, admitted to and attending colleges that would open doors into innovation clusters and leadership networks, cut short their studies and their ambitions, as necessary funding failed to materialize. For these reasons, 8B’s mission is personal.
Lydiah has a high-profile background in international affairs, including serving in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. Lydiah led the UN’s collaboration with the World Bank on the Global Concessional Finance Facility, an innovative financing window for refugee-hosting communities.
8B Education Investments draws from this experience of developing strategy and innovation with global implications. A scalable market-based solution investing in African human capital is necessary in a set of tools aiming to accelerate African prosperity and achieve shared prosperity.
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In episode 13 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Shankari Mylvaganam, the Director of Strategy and Global Partnerships at Unreasonable, on finding and scaling venture-based solutions to global challenges.
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Shankari’s impact investment expertise ranges from venture selection and portfolio operations advisory for Unreasonable Group's 200+ ventures (Series A to Series E), to working with Fortune 500 companies on ESG investment and corporate accelerators, to serving on the Advisory Board of two media-technology ventures.
Within M&A Advisory, Shankari has worked with Private Equity and Corporate clients on deals ranging in value from $50 million to $20 billion. She is experienced in leading teams across the deal continuum from diligence to transaction planning and capturing value post-deal.
Prior to this, Shankari worked in Strategy Consulting advising the C-Suite at MNCs and Private Companies, as well as Leadership of Federal Governments and International Institutions on growth, operations and organizational transformation. Shankari is also a Private Sector Delegate to the United Nations on issues of Public Private Partnerships and private investment into the social sector.
The latest project her and her team are processing is UnreasonableFUTURE, a global movement to ensure future generations thrive in the new economy. The Future of Jobs Report 2018, by the World Economic Forum states that 75 million jobs will be displaced worldwide through automation between 2018 and 2022, as many as 133 million new roles could be created.
The movement is a collaboration with Fossil Foundation, Pearson and Accenture, Unreasonable FUTURE is aligning the promise of leading edge technologies with the future of inclusive work and social equity.
The UnreasonableFuture portfolio aims to support the future of learning, up-skilling, and education and the other half are companies using advanced technologies (i.e. robotics, 3D fabrication, machine learning, nano-technology) to develop human potential and ensure inclusivity in the workplace of tomorrow.
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Bonus episode with Kate Byrne, President of SOCAP Global, on impact investing, the rise of women in global leadership, and rapidly moving an events business online in the wake of COVID-19.
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Kate Byrne is the president of Intentional Media(soon to be SOCAP Global), the purpose-driven platform whose brands SOCAP, Good Capital Project, and Conscious Company Media are at the intersection of business, meaning, and money. Byrne is the former VP of partnership, membership, and sponsorship for Watermark, the Bay Area’s leading women’s leadership community. She’s played executive leadership roles at the Tides Foundation, George Lucas Education Foundation, Future LLC, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and SF Gate and Inc — focusing on technology and its ability to advance media, drive revenue and promote social good.
SOCAP is the largest and most diverse impact investing community in the world. They have created a global ecosystem and marketplace - social entrepreneurs, investors, foundation and nonprofit leaders, government and policy leaders, creators, corporations, academics and beyond - through content experiences that educate, spur conversation, and inspire investment in positive impact. Programming includes the annual SOCAP Summit, SOCAP 365, SPECTRUM conference, World-Changing Women’s Summit and Money + Meaning podcasts.
SOCAP Virtual: A Global Impact Summit is the leading gathering of global changemakers addressing the world’s toughest challenges through market-based solutions, October 19 through 23. Hundreds of speakers during more than 150 sessions will explore the following themes: Radical Change. Impact Investing. Meaning. Climate Action. Global Health. Future of Work. Next Gen Leadership. Education for All. Resilience. Inclusion. Arts, Culture & the Creative Economy. Racial Equity.
The five-day conference will convene thought leaders from across the impact ecosystem including impact investors, social entrepreneurs, foundation and nonprofit leaders, government and policy leaders, corporations, academics and other innovative cross-sector practitioners committed to increasing the flow of capital toward social good. There will be intimate fireside chats, virtual workshops, a Digital Pavilion, Social Entrepreneurship Scholarship presentations and a host of virtual networking opportunities for one-on-one to small meeting formats.
“This year we will lay the foundation for a new decade in impact investing and a more just and inclusive economy. Now more than ever, creative market-based solutions are needed to address the world’s toughest problems,” said Cari Hanson, Vice President of SOCAP, the largest impact investing community in the world. “The speakers and conversations we’ve pulled together for our SOCAP Virtual Main Stage schedule were crafted with the goal of presenting such solutions — and to give attendees ways to take collective action to keep the conversation going long after the final session.”
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In episode 12 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Elizabeth Yin, Co-founder of The Hustle Fund on changing the landscape of traditional venture capital and opening up access to aspiring founders.
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Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
Elizabeth has reviewed over 20k startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.
The Hustle Fund invests in pre-seed rounds. Not seed. Not post-seed / mango seed. Pre-seed. As their mantra states - "We invest in hilariously early startups". The Hustle Fund's first check is usually $25k unless the team has worked with the founder before. Most of the time, founders can expect to receive a response from the team between 24 and 48 hours after having a call.
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In episode 11 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Justin Kulla, Partner at TZP Group on the future of Impact Investing and ESG in the global economy.
Justin Kulla joined TZP Group as a Partner of Impact Investing and ESG in May 2020. Mr. Kulla began his career at Credit Suisse where he was an engineer working in New York, London and Zurich, and at Google where he worked in business development. Following business school, Justin joined the Hearst Corporation's venture capital group focused on early stage internet and media investments.
In 2010, Justin was a founding member of Weld North, an education technology private equity firm backed by KKR. During his tenure at Weld North, Justin invested in Edgenuity, Imagine Learning, The Learning House and Performance Matters and held senior operating roles including as Chief Technology Officer at Edgenuity. In 2015, Justin founded and served as CEO of BusinessBlocks, an education technology company for working adults and small businesses. BusinessBlocks was acquired in 2017 by AmTrust Financial Services, a Fortune 500 insurance company and following the acquisition Justin served as SVP of M&A and Investments. Justin currently serves on the board of Errigal, Inc.
Justin holds BS and MISM degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MPA from Harvard University. He's a lecturer and mentor at Stanford, Menlo College, USC, and Tulane, a board advisor at 826 National, and a Term Member on the Council on Foreign Relations
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In episode 11 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Tiila Abbitt, Founder of Āether Beauty on disrupting the $500 billion beauty industry through actual clean cosmetics and sustainable packaging.
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Founded in 2018 by Tiila Abbitt, a passionate, highly creative product development professional with 11+ years' experience - including the international prestige beauty industry. Tiila has a BFA in sculpture and an MFA in fashion design. She worked in the fashion industry for over 5 years before transitioning to beauty. She is highly passionate for the sustainable beauty product realm. Tiila spent 7 years at Sephora in charge of product development for makeup collaborations and accessories. Her obsession with sustainability lead her to become the lead R+D for sustainable materials while also being on the sustainability leadership council for the retailer.
Being a global brand, Tiila quickly learned that in the USA, there are only 11 banned chemicals in color cosmetics while in the European Union, there are over 1300. Because of this, she learned how to formulate color cosmetics with a very large chemical ban list and how to substitute for cleaner alternatives. Tiila has had a long tenure passion for the organic product realm and has been a vegetarian for over 24 years, and also incorporating a plant based diet.
Always bringing natural, organic alternatives into her everyday (including learning how to cook organic food at an organic restaurant while in college) she started to look at natural makeup formulation and just found that none of the offerings could truly compete with the efficacy of conventional beauty. The space lacked choice of color and trend, as well as truly sustainable packaging.
Plastic makeup componentry is a huge source of pollution globally and Tiila really wanted to create a brand that was ethically-sustainable, beyond the formulation, but in everything that Āether Beauty creates.
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In episode 10 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Melinda Moore, General Partner at Moore Ventures on investing in the green economy and literally writing the book on raising money through crowdfunding.
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Melinda Moore is also the Co-Founder of TuesdayNights. She is an entrepreneur, investor, advisor and global speaker with over 20 years of experience, and two exits (STV Communications and LovingEco). Melinda is the author of How to Raise Money: The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding and has raised over 100 million via equity crowdfunding.
She served as the Senior Vice President for Entertainment Media Ventures. Her work has been widely recognized by Digital LA (Top 50 Digital Women in 2015), the Green Business Bureau and the National Association of Women Business Owners’ Hall of Fame. Melinda serves on the Board of A Sense of Home and has a B.A. from UCLA.
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In this bonus episode, I speak with Dinesh Tadpalli, Founder of incrEDIBLE, on creating the first company to mass-produce edible cutlery and help alleviate waste from 100 million plastic utensils used every day in America. Dinesh is an Impact based entrepreneur, hiker, engineer and angel investor. Crazy enough to sell his home for the sake of the planet and startup.
He is the founder of incrEDIBLE, edible spoons, and sustainable cutlery. Plastic cutlery takes 1000 years to decompose - compostable products take equally as long if thrown in the trash. This makes Edible Spoons the most ECO-Friendly option for your special occasion.
100 million plastic utensils are used every day. As the first company to mass-produce edible cutlery, you can help us grow to put an end to this crisis. Saving the planet never tasted this good!
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In episode 9 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Dr. Angela Jackson on leading New Profit’s $15M Future of Work global fund to invest in entrepreneurs and companies developing innovative technical solutions to upskill low-income and entry-level workers at scale.
Dr. Angela Jackson leads New Profit’s Future of Work Initiative, which seeks to close the career-readiness gap for Americans from low-income backgrounds. Angela’s career started in the private sector leading business development for organizations like Viacom and Nokia. While working internationally, she began to wonder: if multinational companies can deliver their products consistently and with quality at scale, what would it take to deliver social interventions like education and health in a similar manner?
She began to tackle this question by founding Global Language Project, a social venture that aimed to transform how we prepare students with skills to succeed in a global economy and workforce. Angela completed a Doctoral degree at Harvard University, where her focus was on this question, along with the role of scale and strategic capital deployment and philanthropy in systems change initiatives.
Angela’s work with New Profit allows her to marry her research interests with practice. She currently leads New Profit’s $15M Future of Work global fund to invest in entrepreneurs and companies developing innovative technical solutions to upskill low-income and entry-level workers at scale. Angela recently launched a $6 million Future of Work Grand Challenge, powered by XPRIZE and MIT Solve, to rapidly reskill 25,000 displaced workers into living-wage jobs in the next 24 months.
About New Profit: New Profit is a venture philanthropy organization that backs breakthrough social entrepreneurs who are advancing equity and opportunity in America.
Her work and writing has been featured in CNN, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune and Harvard Business Review. You can read her thoughts on the intersection of race and the Future of Work on Medium and follow her on Twitter at @angjack.
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In episode 8 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Craig Jonas Ph.D., CEO and Founder of CoPeace on using the holding company model to create a long term impact investing approach.
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Dr. Craig Jonas is a lifelong entrepreneur with success across business, academic, and athletic industries. Craig has over 30 years of experience in management with a passion for team-building and drawing individuals with big ideas together.
Craig founded CoPeace in 2018 after serving as COO of Basketball Travelers and BTI Events, an elite sports event management and media conglomerate, for over 20 years. In his role, Craig supervised international sporting events and tours worldwide. He served as the head or deputy head of the American delegation for the Summer and Winter World University Games from 2007-17.
Craig has always had a passion for bringing true impact to global sport, supporting the idea that sports can bring cultures and people closer together. He was one of the first American coaches to travel to South Africa post-apartheid to host basketball clinics for local youth. Craig also represented the United States at the International Olympic Academy in Greece after earning national basketball “Coach of the Year'' honors.
Previously, Craig served as vice president for business development for the broadcast media technology firm, Sportvision, best known for bringing revolutionary visual enhancements to live sports broadcasts, including American football’s yellow first-down line and baseball’s strike zone. Prior to Sportvision, Craig served as the executive vice president of Coach’s Edge and helped initiate its $100- million merger with Sportvision.
Craig earned his doctorate in conflict management from the University of Kansas, where he also taught leadership, marketing, and management courses to undergraduate and masters students. As an undergraduate student, Craig attended Carleton College in Minnesota, and went on to complete his graduate degree at Colorado State University. Craig is a father of two sons. He lives with his wife, Seanna, and dog, Fergus, in Colorado.
About CoPeace:
CoPeace is a first-of-its-kind holding company in the impact investing space. We are building a portfolio of carefully-screened, for-profit companies which are achieving measurable social and/or environmental impact, while providing competitive returns to investors.
A unique CoPeace feature is that a direct investment in the company, and its holdings, is accessible to the average investor, not just wealthy accredited investors.
CoPeace is a Certified B Corp and also registered as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). As a Certified B Corp and PBC, CoPeace meets the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability and is one of only 400 companies worldwide with both B Corp and PBC designation.
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In episode 7 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Brad Feld, Co-founder of Techstars and Foundry Group on turning his entrepreneurial and venture capital journey into global startup communities dedicated to solving complex challenges.
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Brad Feld is co-founder of the Foundry Group, and has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Brad previously co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and Techstars, and prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Feld was an early investor in Harmonix, Zynga, MakerBot, and Fitbit.
A writer and speaker on venture capital investing and entrepreneurship, Brad has written a number of books as part of the Startup Revolution series, and writes the blogs Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals. He currently is chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and on the boards of Path Forward, the Kauffman Fellows, and Defy Ventures. Brad holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Management Science from MIT and has completed 25 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 U.S. states.
His new book, The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, is an explanatory guide for startup communities. Rooted in the theory of complex systems, this book establishes the systemic properties of entrepreneurial ecosystems and explains why their complex nature leads people to make predictable mistakes. The Startup Community Way offers practical advice for entrepreneurs, community builders, government officials, and other stakeholders who want to harness the power of entrepreneurship in their city.
About the Foundry Group: The Foundry Group helps entrepreneurs and venture capital fund managers turn promising ideas into market-defining and market-leading businesses. They are committed to spreading the Foundry Group ethos through investment activity as well as in the other ways the team engages with the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
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In episode 6 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Erik Wallsten, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Adobe Capital on investing in Mexico and Latin America through social and environmental companies.
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Erik Wallsten is a Partner at New Ventures Group, Mexico’s leading social impact acceleration platform. He is also a Co-Founder of Adobe Capital, Mexico’s first triple bottom line impact investment fund.
We speak in length about about his impact investing journey and the opportunities for social entrepreneurs in Mexico and Latin America. We also discuss some of the portfolio companies within Adobe Capital to understand what areas in the region have been impacted the most by the funds strategic capital allocation.
Erik speaks passionately about housing, education, and healthcare within the region and his support for exceptional impact driven entrepreneurs who are able to create innovative, profitable and scalable business models to address the most pressing social and environmental challenges.
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In episode 5 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Joshua Haynes, Managing Partner at Masawa Fund on working in 35 countries, speaking 7 languages, and using natural medicine, technology, and workplace wellness to help billions of people live impactful lives in the global economy.
Joshua's story and path is incredibly powerful. He overcame depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder. Tough childhood raised on welfare by a single mother = grit + perseverance.
He displays over 20 years leading curation at the nexus of innovation, technology, and social impact. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, data analyst, software developer, consultant, digital product + service designer.
Joshua also served as a Diplomat in the Obama Administration (USAID), managed $190M in impact grant funding for the US & Swedish Govs, pioneered new impact partnership types and ways of working.
Degrees from Boston University (Finance); The Fletcher School, Tufts University (MBA).
Masawa is the mental wellness impact fund. Through a laser focus on financial viability, social impact maximization, and founder resilience + organizational health, we nurture capital to nurture minds.
Masawa invests in organizations with products proven to directly or indirectly result in improved mental wellness:
- Natural healing approaches: nutrition, exercise, natural medicine, mindfulness, etc.
- Technology-accelerated recovery: software and hardware innovations
- Workplace wellness: approaches to impact people where they spend the most time
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In episode 4 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Alexander Holt, Founding Partner at Limitless Ventures, on his journey through addiction and how private and philanthropic capital can be a catalyst in prevention and recovery for millions dealing with mental health issues.
Limitless Venture’s Founder Alexander Holt started the “Recovery Fund” in 2018 with the goal of creating 500,000 sober lives in the next 10 years through LV’s investments. Limitless Ventures is an independent growth capital sponsor in the lower middle market combining private and philanthropic capital to scale multi-disciplinary solutions for those impacted by mental health challenges and the addiction epidemic.
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In episode 3 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Daniel Epstein, founder of Unreasonable on his long journey of building his impact portfolio of companies and supporting over 200 entrepreneurs who have raised more than $4B in financing, generated over $3B in revenue, and are impacting the lives of more than 400M individuals across 180+ countries.
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that entrepreneurship is the answer to nearly all the issues we face today. By the time he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy, he’d already started three companies. In addition to being on FORTUNE's "the World's 50 Greatest Leaders" list alongside the likes of Bill Gates & Tim Cook, Daniel was awarded Inc. Magazine's “30 under 30 entrepreneur”, and Forbes identified him as one of the “top 30 most impactful entrepreneurs.” He also received the prestigious “Entrepreneur of the World” award along with Richard Branson & the President of Liberia at the Global Entrepreneurship Forum.
Daniel’s unfettered belief in entrepreneurs led to him founding and being the CEO of Unreasonable. Unreasonable is dedicated to supporting growth-equity entrepreneurs positioned to bend history in the right direction. Part investment firm, part media house, and most importantly a global community, Unreasonable partners with multinational institutions and revered brands to align them with impactful growth-stage entrepreneurs. Today Unreasonable actively supports over 200 entrepreneurs who have raised more than $4B in financing, generated over $3B in revenue, and are impacting the lives of more than 400M individuals across 180+ countries.
Daniel speaks frequently on topics ranging from how multinationals and governments can better work with disruptive technologies, to working with public companies on how to create a worldclass and entrepreneurial culture across their employees, to the future of capitalism and our ability to profitably solve the most pressing challenges of this century. Daniel has given keynotes across more than 30 countries, has spoken at the White House, the UN General Assembly, in front of audiences larger than ten thousand, as part of annual corporate events and in closed door sessions with Fortune 50 executives and their boards of directors. He personally advises CEO's of multinationals on how to become more entrepreneurial and works with multi-billion dollar family offices on creating a new type of financial legacy with their investments — producing above market rate returns while combatting societal & environmental challenges.
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In episode 2 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Jennifer Baldwin Pryce, the President and CEO of Calvert Impact Capital on investing $2 billion into mission-driven organizations across the U.S. and around the world.
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Over the course of their 25 year history, Calvert Impact Capital have raised more than $2 billion from over 18,000 investors to more than 520 mission-driven organizations across the U.S. and around the world.
- They have a 25-year track record of portfolio management with 100% repayment to all investors
- Calvert Impact Capital raises capital from a diverse group of investors, including individuals, institutions, and financial advisors in amounts as low as $20 to over $20 million
Calvert's portfolio partners reach all 50 states plus DC and Puerto Rico, as well more than 100 countries and organize their portfolio across nine sectors: affordable housing, community development, education, environmental sustainability, health, microfinance, renewable energy, small business and sustainable agriculture.
In 2018, Calvert Impact Capital disbursed $100.4 million in new and renewed loans to 100 borrowers. Collectively, those 100 borrowers made nearly $4.7 billion in loans to their clients. In 2018, the portfolio partners collectively served over 72 million clients (60% women) and created or retained more than 500,000 jobs.
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In episode 1 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Peter Bruce-Clark, Partner at Social Impact Capital on funding ambitious entrepreneurs building world changing companies.
Peter is Partner at Social Impact Capital. Peter was Head of Business Development at RCI, a investment technology and alternative lending platform backed by 8VC and Soros Fund Management. Prior to that, Peter created both an early-stage AI venture capital firm focused on investing in companies using machine learning in high-impact areas of application, as well as a specialist strategy and management consultancy for institutional investors, Kalytix Partners (acquired), founded by Dr. Ashby Monk and Prof. Gordon Clark. Peter has extensive management consulting, investment research, and industry analysis experience.
In addition to his work, Peter has led research on impact finance and strategic investment at Stanford University, collaborating with Planet Heritage and White Sand Investor Group. His publications include Sovereign Development Funds: The Governance and Management of Strategic Investment Institutions, which was published in the The Oxford Handbook of Sovereign Wealth Funds (2018).
Peter has an MPhil in Business Administration and Finance from the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and a first-class honors BA in English and Critical Theory from Queen Mary, University of London.
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Investing in Impact interviews Impact Investors, VC's, and Angel Investors from around the world to connect impact entrepreneurs with insight into funding, scalability, and company structure to inspire more impact companies around the world.
The podcast is also intended to follow along the journey as I go through the path of raising $2 million for Causeartist Ventures.
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