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...
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...
