Podcast: Finding Purpose on Grounds
An interview with the Founder and President of Profit with Purpose, UVA’s first undergraduate impact investing club
The story in words and pictures
Hello. My name is Mohammad Malik. This is me (graduating high school) with my family in 2014. I’m from Manassas, Virginia — the town that’s not quite northern or southern VA and where all the Civil War battles happened. My parents are Pakistani — we own and operate a business of gas stations and convenience stores in the area.
Today, I am a fourth year at the University of Virginia. I study Economics & Global Sustainability. In other words, I care about how people and businesses make decisions that affect me and you today, but also affect the children and world of tomorrow.
I’ve been lucky enough to take a boat load classes around the school and around the world. They pushed me to give a damn about the problems in the world and do something about them. When studying abroad, Denmark taught me that no one has to do everything but that everyone has to do something., Pakistan and Cape Town taught me how to dream and respect the past.
By the time I was entering my third year at UVA, I had learned to embody this quote from Nelson Mandela:
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
By age 20, I’d been places, seen things, and met people that I could never have imagined for myself. I was so lucky and grateful. I didn’t have a second to waste so I hit reset on all my commitments — doubling down on what made me feel alive and cutting out whatever didn’t. With this mindset and new-found free time, I was itching to dedicate my time to something.
The summer prior to third year, my buddy Fizzy told me a couple guys from the Commerce school, Mark & Conner, wanted to start an impact investing club. I was interested, intrigued. Long-story short, we brainstormed, built a team, and launched Profit with Purpose (PwP) in fall 2016 with a mission to educate, connect, and empower students to think about investing differently.
My role was operational; I lead training and curriculum. I was tasked with the design, development, and delivery of the PwP training program. There was only one problem: I had no idea what I was doing.
Sure, I read a few reports, talked to a few people, and took a few classes about impact investing, but I didn’t feel comfortable with my level of understanding. Luckily, the awesome folks over at SE@UVA took a leap of faith on me by sponsoring my trip to Frontier Market Scouts, a fellowship program that helped me get world class training, gain exposure to industry experts, and muster up the confidence to teach others about this space.
We worked all throughout the fall. There were lots of hours of white-boarding our deep conversations about the purpose of PwP, organizational structure, and our marketed “experiential education” product.
We decided on a workshop series on the investment process where members could learn how to find, analyze, and pitch early stage companies solving problems in areas that mattered like healthcare or energy. We’d managed to recruit ~20 people around this idea and launched into our MVP.
Our first semester was tough. We struggled with building the right team to grow this organization. Our program felt more like a class — boring and a brutal to be in. Personally, I struggled with keeping the flame going. At times, willpower was low and it got really dark. I questioned whether anyone else truly cared about what we were working on.
Despite it all, we stuck through it. We changed our program (read about it here). We spent may hours strategizing and building systems to create more sustainability and shared vision across leadership. We asked for help from partners and mentors.
And it worked. Our second semester, applications grew 3x in number and 10x in quality. We learned from surveys and 1-on-1s that members thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Retention grew and our hard work was paying off. We were building traction and personally, I felt great about what we had built…and others did too! I’d been asked to speak to the SE@UVA Advisory Board about our impact. Starting PwP helped me land an internship with Village Capital, a company I dreamed of working with, and be a Clockwork Fellow.
This past semester, Spring 2018, we were coming off a high and didn’t take our foot off the gas. We grew our community and impacted more students and social entrepreneurs. We received funding from the Jefferson Trust to grow our reach. We traveled to NYC to build relationships with practitioners, see impact investing first hand, and bond within our own community.
The future is bright. Our team has brought us this far and I couldn’t be more confident in the next generation of leaders of Profit with Purpose. We’re building support systems like an Alumni board to better guide and create access for future generations. We’re strengthening partnerships to help us deliver a better experience. I’m hoping the work we’ve accomplished with PwP will inspire future generations of students to start something that will last and something that matters.
I’m sad to be leaving but happy to start the next chapter in my life. This has been the most formative and rewarding experience I’ve ever had and I have to give thanks to the inspirational and awesome team by my side, the mentors who showed me the way, and the partners who have supported us!
Onwards.
Thank you to Niko Marcich for production support with the podcast, check out his work at The Global Inquirer.
