Impact investing is not a mindset, it is a spectrum of opportunities. A spectrum, as impact investing spans the plethora of investment opportunities, asset classes, and risk profiles, plus the vast array of impact. This post comes midway through my first trip to Africa, on a trip organized by Investors Circle, and thus with events focused solely on early-stage mission-driven for-profit...
It is not easy being a startup investor, and even more so as an impact investor. In the tech sector, ask an Angel or VC how they choose their investments, and the most common answer is: team, team, team, team, team… idea. Push them on that an you’ll find one other unspoken criteria hiding at the start: opportunity size. In the impact sector, things get far more complicated. Which is more...
Entrepreneurs fret over the 30-second “elevator pitch”. In my twenty years starting startups, I did twice pitch in an actual elevator. But here in 2016, entrepreneurs should be fretting more over their 140 character, one-line “tweet pitch”. Why is this so important? Simple. Your startup is going to listed on a dozen sites online, and all of them will include that one-line pitch: LinkedIn, Angel...
The more one dives into startup investing, the most one finds Catch-22’s. This post is about the tradeoff between being inventive and copying a known business model. Novelty. The risk-averse investors who make the high-risk investments in startups tend to like new ideas. They are early adopters of new ideas and new technology. They enjoy the excitement that comes with novelty and...
The idea of mixing impact with investing is catching on, with a slew of articles in the press:
Impact Investing Done Right
Putting the Greed in Good
What are the prospects for Impact Investing?
The Zuckerberg LLC is Good for Impact Investing
The Jersey Shore and the Impact Investing Strategy
The Impact Investing Illusion
In the 21st Century, companies need to experiment to survive and thrive. This is even more true for startups, where the first idea to work may not be the best idea for the long run. With this in mind, my business accelerator, Fledge, ran an experiment this Autumn… FledgeX, an 100% online version of our intense entrepreneurial training program. The results were not entirely as expected. Time The...
The Social Entrepreneur podcast is for aspiring and early-stage social entrepreneurs; and for those who want to make an impact on the world. Stories about the grand challenges in the world and the solutions that they are creating. Listen to the interview on Stitcher or Soundcloud or download it on iTunes. Links to the talks and companies mentioned in the interview: 1st Fledge Demo Day, 50 years...
As nascent markets turn into established and proven industries, there comes a critical moment when the time is right for consolidation and scale. For clean cookstoves, that moment seems to be quickly approaching, if not already here. Five years ago was clearly too soon. Five years ago, the UN Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was born, setting a goal of 100 million stoves by 2020. From...
The last time I presented at an event for investors, the first five people all asked me the same question, “Any exits yet?” The more years I spend focusing on revenue-based investing, the more that question is getting on my nerves. Perhaps some of that is on me, as the talks I give are generally titled “Investing without Exits” or “Alternative Exits” or...
Way back in 1991, Geoffrey Moore’s now seminal Crossing the Chasm taught the startup community how to jump over the chasm between the early adopters and early majority customers. It’s a great book that I wish I could recommend far more often. That is a wish rather than a commonplace occurrence as well before that chasm comes another, larger gap. The “pioneer gap“, also...
