Venture for Good: The Impact-Focused Investors You Need to Know
I find the intersection of social impact and venture capital to be incredibly exciting. If you’ve followed me much at all — either via my Medium posts, my Twitter, or some things I’ve posted on the Accion Blog, you’re probably aware of my beat that focuses on a different flavor of venture investing.
Impact-focused venture capital takes the ongoing discussions of viral marketing, go-to-market strategy, fundraising, and all other topics in the startup world, and it applies a bit of a different criteria to what we define as “successful”. It also seems to bring a layer of transparency to the exchange between founders, the companies they run, the VCs that fund them, and the limited partners that supply the funds in the first place.
Why is this the case?
Well, many VCs operate with a high degree of opacity — after all, deals are the spoils of a competitive private equity marketplace, and you don’t want to always reveal your secret sauce. And while impact investors have their own proprietary sort of approach to things, there is a robust alignment around the mission: invest in things that serve the underserved or excluded. When we share more around what we’re doing — and how we’re doing it — everybody has the opportunity to benefit.
