The idea of doing good while making a healthy profit is rapidly gaining ground, particularly among wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs but also among foundations and pension funds. Social impact investing — for-profit investing for social good — has crossed into the mainstream and is driving investment decisions.
Researchers in Bethesda, Maryland, have spent eight years developing a handheld device to quickly assess potential brain trauma in injured U.S. soldiers and athletes with concussions. Jean Case and her husband Steve, who co-founded AOL Inc. (AOL), invested in BrainScope Co., the device's developer, through their family office in 2008.
I started out my search for a summer internship looking for opportunities where finance and sustainability converged. Naturally, impact investing was one the fields where I started to look for opportunities, and managed to find a summer position at Sonen Capital.
This week, the apartment of former child actress Liesl Pritzker was filled with a group of determined and affluent investors who are challenging each other to go all the way with their money... all the way to 100 percent impact.
Impact investing represents a potential additional funding stream for development, but the field is still evolving and those working in it warn we may be expecting too much, too soon.
One measure that impact investing is gaining more traction is the growing collection of books written about that topic. Most of them focus on international investing, but now there are some that address domestic programs as well.
Impact investing represents a potential additional funding stream for development, but the field is still evolving and those working in it warn we may be expecting too much, too soon. While the field may be beyond its initial phase, stakeholders focused on building the infrastructure and proving its case agree that there is still much work to be done.
Charly Kleissner is a former tech entrepreneur and early pioneer of impact investing. He moved from Austria to Silicon Valley in the mid 1980s and worked for Hewlett Packard, as well as alongside Steve Jobs. Two of the start-ups that Charly worked for were successfully sold, and one (Ariba) went public in 1998. He and his wife Lisa co-founded the KL Felicitas Foundation to support social entrepreneurs around the world and to bring like-minded investors together to redefine the meaning and purpose of investing in the first place.
While a large part of the San Francisco Bay Area is busy discussing the latest definition of "hipster" and inflated tech valuations, there is another trend currently creating a lot of buzz. This one is related to the notion of "doing well, while doing good" by addressing social and environmental challenges through the deployment of capital.
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