The U.S. State Department sends delegations to visit Fledge every month or two. We’ve had visitors from: Norway, Albania, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland; Oman, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Jordon; Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia; Bangladesh and Pakistan, and more. The delegates that visit are typically either social entrepreneurs or working for (typically government sponsored) organizations...
As the collective we bootstrap the impact ecosystem, hole after hole becomes more apparent. Business models. Talent. Funding. Etc. Far less obvious, but as important, is the information hole. Specifically, the lack of information on what is happening around the impact-oriented world. And where it’s happening. And who is making it happen. This is one assumption I discovered very...
I appreciate the way David Brooks thinks (an op-ed writer for The New York Times), but I don’t recall him writing often about conscious capitalism. David’s piece from last Sunday’s paper, entitled “The Moral Bucket List“, is one of those stories that everyone needs to read. My only critique is that I know it is possible for people like this to be aware how their...
Carol Sanford, host of The Responsible Capitalist Podcast, talks to Luni Libes, a serial entrepreneur and Entrepreneur in Residence at Pinchot where he teaches entrepreneurialism. His latest venture is Fledge, is a social business accelerator and investment vehicle. This Responsible Capitalist podcast talks to him about how he selects applicants and his methods for determining whether or not an...
Sometimes others take the words right out of my mouth…
Last week, blogger Michael S. Malone asked the question, What is “The Purpose of Silicon Valley“? Seems quite a pertinent question to those of us who have left the world of tech to embrace the world of conscious companies, where our startups are truly changing the world.
Read the whole story on MIT’s Technology Review.
The selection criteria at Fledge, the conscious company accelerator are easy to explain. 1) Team, 2) Impact, and 3) Odds of success. The subtleties within each of these concepts and the whole selection process takes a bit more explanation: 1. Team Unlike most of the other accelerators focused on social good, Fledge is behind the scenes, a for-profit impact investment fund. We invest in every...
Another year, another 2,200+ impact investors, foundations, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs gathered together at SOCAP, the social capital conference, the intersection of of money + meaning. With up to 11 simultaneous sessions over multiple days, plus a dozen scheduled meetings, and two dozen unscheduled, I barely scratched the surface of the event. In this post, I summarize a few of my...
By this definition we have at least 2.6 billion deep sinners – the 37% of people in the world who live on less than $2 a day. They are the future Steve Jobs’, Mohandas Gandhis, Madame Curies and Pablo Picassos who will instead eke out a living as drug dealers, child soldiers, prostitutes and destitute slum dwellers. The three trillion dollars or more we have wasted in misguided development aid...
Most people follow a century-old paradigm of philanthropy, popularized by Andrew Carnegie back at the turn of the 20th Century. Simply put, maximize the return of investments, and give a portion of those earning to charity. In Carnegie’s case, those investments provided him so much wealth, that despite giving away an equivalent of $5 billion in his two decades as philanthropist, enough of his...
Income inequality has finally floated to the surface of the news. It’s nice to see this issue being talked about, but much of what I’m seeing is focused on the symptoms, with solutions like “just pay the workers more”. What I’d prefer are some opinions on the root causes, purposefully plural as this is not a simple issue. I believe I have uncovered one such hidden cause. It lies down in the...
