Transforming the Venture Capital Space: The Story of Evan Baehr
Over the past month, I had the pleasure of connecting with Evan Baehr, the current managing partner of Learn Capital and conducting an interview with him over Zoom. Learn Capital is a venture capital firm driven to invest in entrepreneurs whose ventures focus on better and smarter learning. Before we get into the insights I gathered from this one-on-one interview, let me provide some background on Baehr.
An honors graduate of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, Baehr obtained an M.A. in Ethics from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard’s Business School. During his time at Harvard, he founded the first chapter of the Adam Smith Society, the largest organization of MBA’s committed to capitalism. After graduating, Baehr worked for Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund, the U.S. House of Representatives as a legislative aide and staff director for the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives.
Now, during the interview process, I was interested in the ventures Baehr decided to pursue after finishing his degrees. The first one that caught my eye was Outbox, which was founded with the aim of digitizing postal mail and sending it to one’s tablet. “The process was simple: The service would be free, with mail opened, scanned, and stored in a digital mailbox which users could then tag, search and archive,” says Baehr. The company would earn revenue through advertisements that would be displayed when the mail is shown. The target audience for Outbox was busy mothers and Baehr states, “Moms would have had immediate access to their mail on the go, making it possible to flip through it in the car or at the kitchen table and you could have still requested to get physical copies of anything — such as party invitations or holiday cards.” However, the U.S. government saw the threat Outbox posed since its aim was to disrupt the U.S. postal system; therefore, Outbox was shut down before it could be fully launched.
To Baehr’s surprise, his story would not end here as he says, “After Outbox got shut down, we were originally planning on giving the money back to the original investors; however, they told us to keep it and invest it into another venture. We were totally caught off guard by this because we had no other idea at the moment.” This turn of events led Baehr to his next venture: Able Lending.
Able Lending was backed by Peter Thiel and Mike Maples, who were also the original investors in Outbox, and the aim of this financial technology company was to as Baehr says, “ serve the Fortune 5,000,000.” Baehr’s argument was that the small businesses are what need financial backing as “the millions of small businesses in the U.S. make up two-thirds of jobs available in the country.” The concept behind Able Lending is that they would vet small businesses that needed financial help and would give loans to those that aligned with the same values as Able Lending. We will get to the core principle behind those values later on; however, for now, Able Lending was such a success that even Forbes proclaimed it, “capitalism at its best.”
Currently, Baehr serves as the managing partner for Learn Capital, a venture capital firm founded on the principle that learning is the foundation for a thriving society. Throughout all of Baehr’s previous ventures, human flourishing was implicit as it was never mentioned explicitly with Outbox or Able Lending, but one could see the link between both human flourishing and the companies’ missions; however, at Learn Capital it is more explicit as it is one of the driving forces behind the company. Previously, I mentioned that we would get behind the core principle behind the values of Baehr’s ventures. Human flourishing, or in other words, the optimal development and prosperity of every human being’s potential and the right to live well, is the common denominator behind all of his ventures. Baehr and Learn Capital prioritize ventures that “create products and services that empower individuals with the capacity, knowledge, and tools to thrive.” This mission is what sets Baehr and Learn Capital apart from all their competitors and enables them to earn continued success in the space.
This article contains edited versions of Baehr’s responses as well as information collected from his website.
