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...
