How to Give Back to Our World: The reason why we need more Collectives of Impact makers.
In my daily reflection, I thank how lucky I am to be alive, how I am supported by my family to pursue my passions, and for how far I have come as a founder and ecosystem builder: Cofounder of the 1st coworking space in Thailand like HUBBA and influential tech media company Techsauce, bla bla bla. But as those achievement fades into memories, one of the ways I keep my ego in check is to ask myself, “How can I be a better tool and resource in this fragile world?”
A big driver for my constant existential crisis derives from a book given to me by Yoseph Ayele late 2015 at the Asia New Zealand Foundation’s Leadership Summit for which I attended as a Young Business Leader Initiative Alumni. Having met him for the first time, we hit it off musing on the usual topics around startups and innovation, conferences and convening people, and our love for New Zealand. Besides trying to pitch me to attend a crazy annual retreat of changemakers and thought leaders called New Frontiers which was up until this year held deep in the farming hills of Upper Hutt, Wellington, he gave me a book that I could confidently, changed my life. That book is called, Big World, Small Planet by Johan Rockström and Mattias Klum.
While the book doesn’t look like a typically Best Seller and veers on the academic side with rigorous scientific facts but also great photography and stories, it summarizes a point that most of us want to ignore or forget: “We’ve entered the Anthropocene — the era of massive human impacts on Earth — which redefines our future. Our actions are now threatening to trigger tipping points that could knock the planet out of its stable state.” In a nutshell, the authors and researchers implore readers that unlimited, exponential growth is not physically possible in a world where we have finite resources but an ever increasing population. The more we consume, the more we destroy other life on Earth, including our own. Therefore, the best way forward to keep us from killing ourselves is to understand the concept of:
“Abundance within planetary boundaries requires a deep mind-shift. Not growth without limits. Not limits to growth, but growth within limits.”
But for most of us, myself included, this used to not be a question we care to ask. We are too busy with our current job, startup or project, and especially in Covid-19, we are all just trying to survive and get by. Changing the world seems to be the past times of billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and sometimes Elon Musk when he’s in a good mood. For everyone else, there’s a sense that our actions and efforts are too little to move the world. Why know something bad when we have no ability to solve it? While ruin the joy of living, of shopping, of travelling around the world when what we know could give us grief?
Unfortunately, this was one book that I couldn’t put down or “unlearn”. I read it on my flight back from Malaysia in 4 hours straight and decided that beyond just building another coworking space, another community of startups that want to be the next unicorn, and an ever-scaling tech conference that the world will be a better place with more newly minted billionaires, I was deluding myself that I was doing my part. Yes our communities and spaces has its place in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. But they are a starting point, and they are not enough to make a dent in the universe. It seems like putting a bandage on a cancer wound, and sometimes our innovation can be downright killer like Theranos. I needed better ideas and answers on how I can be useful and how we can bring personal agency back to our lives.
Thus began my global search for answers. While I travelled the world far and wide, attending conferences, joining global networks like the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and Obama Foundation Leaders and volunteering my time at the UNDP Youth:Colab program, I was secretly trying to find this answer in the congregation where the brightest minds with the most “dangerous”, cutting edge ideas were hanging out. Not only did I find a tribe of people who cared about many of the same issues that I did like climate change, education, inequality, innovation, but I was educated on many things that were equality important like the refugee crises, politics, and human rights. But a recurring theme that brought a lot of us together in Asia, whether it was 10 years ago when I was in the social enterprise space in Thailand or still today is the lack of resources and support from investors, corporations, grant making organizations, civil society and governments. Our ambitions were strong, our project’s track record is proven over many years and global partners, and our commitments were clear but it still took years of public speaking, networking and pitching to get our ideas heard. There simply isn’t a robust network of people willing to invest in impact organizations, or so it seems.
That is beginning to change, however. For a simple problem like ocean plastics, by the end of 2019, a new fund backed by the biggest FMCG companies in the world called Circulate Capital raised $106 million to invest in innovations to stop the flow of 8 million tons of plastic waste into the ocean each year (on top of the 150 million tons of plastic that already exists). This does not include Alliance to End Plastic Waste which has up to $1 billion dollars at their disposal. While it can be argued that the world destroying $2.5 trillion dollars worth of value in marine ecosystems and a billion dollars just wouldn’t cut it to save our oceans, it is a small step in the right. Corporations of any size now realize that they cannot keep making profits without addressing the injustice and grave damage that they have created to society and the world. This kind of access to capital was unthinkable a decade ago, when social entrepreneurship was a seen as a fad for a tree-hugging, hippy bunch and folks like me who were active in this space were seen as delusional. Now it has become a mainstream career and business opportunity, one of which is attracting more and more young people who are tired of having to come and clean up for the previous generation.
That said, one of the flaws I realized is that with these initiatives is the lack of long term focus and support. CSR programs and mega funds like these chase trends like plastic bags, to PM 2.5 dust or forest fires, and the to Covid-19 or the on to the next thing that is on primetime. Photogenic opportunities like marine pollution will get a lot of funding but more obscured opportunities like Beanspire Coffee’s quest to grow and export the best Thai coffee or SATI Foundation’s work to support Thailand’s underprivileged youth will never see the light of day without a scalable business model. There needs to be a better way to find these great entrepreneurs, support them with a strong network of collaborators and allies, and provide the mentorship, connections and expertise to support them to scale their ideas to the next level. Such a program just did not exist at a regional level, and it just wasn’t a popular idea.
Until of course, I met Changseong Ho, 7 years ago at HUBBA. Like me, he and his cofounder Jiwon Moon, they have always harnessed the power of their community to grow their business and thrived on the concept of collaboration. Among them was our previous startup, Viki, was a volunteer-led translator community that passionately translated over 100 million lines of subtitles for international videos with a collective mission to break down language barriers and exited the business to Rakuten of $200 million USD. We kept in touch ever since 2013, but last year, I got an email out of the blue for a coffee date.
When Changseong and an old HUBBA member Songyi Lee told me last year of their crazy idea to create the Y-Combinator like platinum-standard impact acceleration and investment program called Impact Collective which was a collaboration project between TheVentures and Citypreneurs, I couldn’t resist finding out more. What I discovered was that they were not just trying to build another fund and accelerator, but they were taking their past experiences with Viki, the blockchain community and beyond to create a new and radical investment model that relies on ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to the process of startup investment for the democratization of capital allocation. According to Changseong, Impact Collective’s core thesis was that “We believe this will lead to much enhanced diversity as well as greater financial performance. We have adopted this community-driven approach in our startup acceleration process as well. Regardless of where they come from and whether they are investment professionals or not, members of our society ‘collectively’ have the intelligence to tell which companies or projects make better impacts on our society and, ergo, which ones are best-suited to receive investments and community support.”
“A better way to allocate capital?” From there, I was sold. A lot of entrepreneurs I talked to know that the current Venture Capital model is broken, with many scammy, unhelpful, or downright shark-like investors dressed in dolphin’s overalls. Changseong and the team were willing to try something new, and to stake their reputation and money at it was a refreshing experience. From that moment on, the rest is history: I have now joined the team as the ASEAN Director, to help uncover the most promising impact makers in the region and to support our Regional Partners to help these venture grow across 4 cities in Asia Pacific.
While this additional role will help me to another calling card to the long list of things I already do, I am confident that this ability to not only host and mentor entrepreneurs in my coworking space and events, but also connect both Thai and Asian founders to investors and our program at Impact Collective will help all the communities I am a part of to become stronger. At the end of the day, despite a long list of recognition to work from many esteemed networks, none of these networks and acknowledgement matter if we cannot enable the entrepreneurs and innovators pursue their dreams, they’re going to quit and go get a day job that pays the bills. But there is no more time for “playing founder”, take selfies at conferences (or sometimes in front of exploding volcanoes) and talk banal platitudes about changing the world and making it a better place. Because we are no longer just talking about breaking the limits planetary boundaries, we are witnessing the signs of civilization collapse. The facts just now just hitting home: Covid-19 is just the start of a new normal that none of us can escape, even if we all head to New Zealand with Peter Thiel. That’s what make me so excited to join this Collective and I have found me answer to the question “How can I be of greater service to the world”. So I leave you with this last statement:
What if we cannot wait for the Next Generation. What if we are the Next Generation, if not the Last Generation, that everyone was waiting for. So the question is, what are you going to do about these inconvenient truths?
Find out more and apply now to Impact Collective’s inaugural cohort by 2:00 AM IDLW (the world’s last time zone) on 20 August 2020:
Another short but sweet documentary on the Anthropocene a.k.a. “The Age of Humans”.
5 transformational policies for a prosperous and sustainable world | Johan Rockström
