My social startup is not a training ground for your billion dollar corporation.
I need to get something off my chest. Being an entrepreneur is stressful on the best of days. Running a purpose-driven organization doubly so. Add in being knee-deep in a Series A round of funding and I was pretty sure I had hit peak stress. I was deeply wrong. A trusted partner, one of the world’s biggest companies, started aggressively poaching my team. This is a cautionary tale for social entrepreneurs: trust is our currency, spend it wisely.
Our org.
On a day-to-day basis the majority of my time is spent dealing with the countless stakeholders a global social startup has. From the women we invest in to build schools, to the families of children at those schools, to local farmers, to our customers that support our mission, there are no lack of demands on our attention and time. In true startup fashion, every person on our team works the hours of two and bears the stress of a dozen more.
To mediate this we rely on partners. Collaborations with world class organizations means we can do things we couldn’t dream of by ourselves. Training teachers in new countries? The International Montessori Association steps in and helps get it done. Physically building schools in marginal urban slum communities? Enter TECHO in Latin America or someone like Ikhayalami in South Africa.
We collaborate because, ostensibly, collaborations ease the burden on our organization. They free up time and resources to expand our reach, grow our business, and invest more in the people who need it most. In an increasingly complicated and interconnected world this is the paradigm for almost every social enterprise I can name.
Trust
Because our approach is so collaborative our organization’s main currency is, in some ways, trust. Our customers trust that we follow through on our obligations to use their money to do something amazing. We, in turn, trust that our partners on the ground can follow through on tight budgets and schedules to make projects a reality.
Finally, and this should go without saying, we trust our partners not to actively sabotage us to further their own agenda. One of my favorite things about running a social enterprise startup is the sense that, at least with most of the people I run in to, we’re truly in it together. Petty differences fade away in the face of massive challenges and truly important causes.
Recent events have made it clear that this all but evaporates as the scale of the partner we deal with grows and their mandate changes from social to financial. Big corporations, at a fundamental level, simply don’t care. Maybe it’s more apt to say that they’re explicitly built not to care.
Trust as currency works at a small scale, where participants have something personally on the line and share a certain camaraderie. Trust as currency means absolutely nothing when you start dealing with multinationals. Perverse incentive structures for these giant firms strips the humanity out of decision making. Trust devolves into something merely instrumental — a veneer maintained as long as useful and discarded when convenient.
ABNC
For the sake of not calling out any firm in particular here I’m going to rename them. Let’s call them ABNC.
ABNC approached us a few years ago having heard about our winning the 2015 Hult Prize for social enterprises. They were looking to start servicing more social enterprise clients. They wanted us to be a showcase client and offered us an irresistible deal on accounting services. They became a trusted partner, freeing us up to focus on other aspects of our business.
Early last year ABNC approached us with the opportunity to send some of our team to a mentorship group. They’d have the opportunity to be mentored by some of ABNC’s top managers. They’d be introduced to the kinds of people that might help us push our cause forward. It was a no-brainer. For a while, everything was great. Eventually the cracks started to show.
Towards the end of last year one of my staff came to me and told me how they just received an aggressive job offer from one of the managers in the mentorship group. She turned it down. A month later another one of my staff approached me. Job offer from another ABNC manager. She also turned it down. ABNC’s “mentorship group” began to look less like an altruistic way to help support local social enterprises and more a recruiting funnel — a cynical way to poach talent from noteworthy local startups.
Two weeks ago another one of our best team members approached me. She had received yet another offer from ABNC, her third in the past year. It was too good to turn down. She explained that ABNC is starting a social enterprise consultancy and they wanted her to be a manager. She’s leaving in two weeks. My heart fell.
Picking up the pieces
To say this is devastating, both personally and professionally, is an understatement. This is one of our very first hires, somebody I’ve personally watched bloom from a shy new grad into an amazingly effective advocate for our cause. As we slog through fundraising to take what we do to the next level, losing someone so fundamental to our success is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.
This article, however, isn’t really about hurt feelings, the future of one startup, or how unfair the world is. It’s not even a indictment of ABNC’s actions. This is an admonishment of myself for suffering from such (temporary) naivety.
I hate myself for it, but I can’t help but admire the cruel, cold logic of ABNC in this situation. If I wanted to start a social enterprise startup consultancy of course I’d be trying to poach staff from the best local examples of such. There’s a limited amount of qualified people out there — in the zero-sum business world if you have them then I don’t. In that world not aggressively pursuing the best people available is actively the wrong thing to do. You could, you know, lose your bonus or something. In that world trust, history, partnership, and camaraderie mean much, much less than effectively capitalizing on opportunity.
My essential blindness was in assuming that because they’re playing along with us they must, at least in some way, be playing the social enterprise game. That game’s rules, the idea that trust matters, that we’re in this together, and that a common cause unites are all essentially new. They’re the rules we’ve set for ourselves as social entrepreneurs in search of a new paradigm —rules for building companies that share wealth rather than concentrate it.
Those rules, as should surprise nobody that pays any attention, are nowhere to be found in the rulebook of traditional business. That text has but one page, one line: “by any means necessary.” As much as we might insulate ourselves from that by who we choose to associate with, exposure is inevitable. As social enterprises our best efforts will be disrupted so long as we naively operate alongside established interests that view us as a resource to be drawn upon rather than invested in.
Moving forward
My lesson, and a warning to social entrepreneurs, is this: know whose rules you’re playing by at any given time. You’re playing tennis in a swimming pool full of sharks — a game on a field ill-designed for you and hostile to the best of intentions. We must not miss the forest for the trees. We must remember that our job as social entrepreneurs is as much draining that pool as it is continuing to play our chosen game, no matter how important we think it is (and it is).
We close this chapter by saying goodbye to someone we care deeply about, our team one person lighter. We come out the other side with our hearts heavy but with our resolve doubled. We give thanks to ABNC for making things crystal clear. By being the exception, a lone dark spot in a field of beautiful bright people committed to doing business a little better, our appreciation for all those who maintain the trust deepens.
-Taylor, CEO@IMPCT
