My 2016 is shaping up to be quite exciting: Aviary.vc – To keep up with the growth of impact-oriented entrepreneurs, Aviary is a new venture capital seed fund, focused on mission-driven for-profit conscious companies, i.e. companies that do good by doing business. If you are an accredited impact investor (or wondering how to do that), we’re building a community of co-investors. Contact us for...
Outside of California, where it feels like all investors are professional investors, and following up on last week’s post about one difference between Angel and professional investors, another difference is the way the deal terms get set, especially valuation. First-time entrepreneurs don’t understand how startups gets valued. Neither do first-time startup investors. In my MBA class...
As an entrepreneur, I’m well experienced at wearing multiple hats and in such, in viewing companies through a multitude of lenses: production, marketing, sales, finance, etc. The same is true as an investor, where I swap between two distinct hats: Personal and Professional investor. You’d think these two hats were identical, but they are not. They are complimentary, but are two quite...
Bouncing down an unpaved road in a far western Kenya (1 2 3 4 5 6), in the Rift Valley, I had a profound thought… There have been people living here for over four million years! That is an incredibly long history. An unfathomable depth of experience living off that land. In comparison, the Puget Sound region where I live wasn’t seen by human beings until about 6,000 years ago, when the last ice...
An ongoing discussion during the Investors Circle trip to Nairobi was about the tradeoffs between the companies founded by Africans and those founded by Americans, Europeans, and Indians. We met a few of both, and thus had a first-hand look to make (anecdotal) comparisons. Overall, the consensus was that natives like GreenChar and Totohealth had the advantage of deeply understanding their market...
The last site visit for Investors Circle in Nairobi was SunCulture, seller of solar-powered pumps and drop-irrigation systems for small farms across Kenya. Speaking of culture, one learning on this trip about East Africa was the blended nature of the populace. Not only are there dozens of tribes within Kenya alone, but added to that are the 100+ year old history of Europeans and Indians living in...
The other highlight of the Investors Circle visit to Nairobi was the visit to the factory where BURN Manufacturing builds its cookstoves. Charcoal cookstoves, as charcoal is the most popular fuel used for cooking by urban and peri-urban Kenya. Factory, as in a fully-modern manufacturing facility, little different from those found in the U.S., Europe, Japan, or China. One large building filled...
Continuing my visit to impactful African startups, yesterday my fellow Investors Circle members met with three (very different) startups tackling global health. First was MicroEnsure, an established, multi-country startup that is working in a very difficult space, selling insurance to the bottom of the pyramid. The key learnings from the meeting were the successful channels for reaching that...
Continuing on the Investors Circle trip was a day trip to western Kenya to visit two of the eleven Afya Research Africa clinics. First, the Afya Ubuntu Ruma Clinic. The clinic is on the grounds of the Ruma Women’s Center, a nonprofit run by a local church which provides services to women and orphans. The picture above provides no understanding on the remoteness of this location. We flew...
After visiting GreenChar, the next stop was another slum across Nairobi to meet Jibu, a multi-national for-profit startup tackling the problem of safe, clean, affordable drinking water in Africa. This has been a very difficult problem area for for-profits to tackle, do to competition with free, but unsafe water, along with the low purchasing power of the people who most need better sources of...
