Impact Investor Seeking Like-Minded Searchers

August 16, 2021

by an investor in San Luis Obispo, CA, USA

Hey all!
This morning while on a call with my partner, I was overwhelmed with a question. See we are looking to invest in searchers, we have a goal of funding 20 searchers over the next 18 months. When discussing what we are looking for in a searcher or opportunity, the question came up of what is the most important aspect. Is it return? Is it risk? Or is it something else? For me its Impact. Now that's pretty broad, Impact. How does one define impact? I'm not sure. So I wanted to ask you all. What does impact mean to you? Furthermore, where does impact come in to play for your searching? Also, if you are a searcher who aims to make impact, I would love to connect!

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Reply by an investor
from Indiana University at Bloomington in Austin, TX, USA

Hi redacted‌impact is a fairly vague term that needs to be applied to a specific and measurable outcome to which it's directed.

For instance, I spoke with another investor last week. He's on a mission to provide financial literacy and a hand up, to the employees in the companies he's buying. To him, that means that everyone in the company has an opportunity to participate in profit sharing and that each employee improves their net-worth by a set %. Of course, none of this means anything if you can't measure it over time.

For me personally, outside of my search, I set a goal of helping 100 entrepreneurs grow companies that positively impact 100 million lives, over the next 5 years. This is still vague, so what I do is figure out how to measure each businesses impact on people (employees, customers, and the community/ world). One of these businesses is helping rural farmers in West Africa to access the market for their crops, receive higher prices, and access credit so they don't go without food, water, shelter, or school fees. I measure impact in that business in terms of families served by the business. Today, that's 1.5 million families. In another business (this is some years back), we created kindness challenges and each time a challenge was completed, there was an impact score attached to it. The impact score measured how many people were touched in a positive way by the specific and intended action (eg if the challenge was to roll down your window and have a quick conversation with someone experiencing homelessness while stopped at a traffic light, and you completed that challenge, we'd score it with 3. Why 3? Because the person you acknowledge probably felt something, you felt something, and they or you probably told another person about it (so there was a ripple effect).

Feel free to DM me with any follow up questions. I'm a searcher pursuing a business with double bottom line (profit + impact) and run an advisory firm that works with impact entrepreneurs and business owners.

Reply by a searcher
from Carleton College in Leesburg, VA, USA

I'm glad to have run across this discussion, ^redacted‌, even after it's had a few months to cool. I am generally fascinated by a wide of variety of shiny big ideas, and I take it as a good sign that the vocabulary for these kinds of interests has grown over recent decades: "impact investing," "ESG," "micro-investing," and so on. I certainly care about facilitating a happy, healthy work environment and compensating employees well. For the past year, though, the cause that has caught my attention is North American manufacturing. The sector has deteriorated so nearly completely that profitable manufacturing businesses now seem like great benefactors in communities where they continue to operate. It feels good to make useful things with our own hands. Many workers want to be able to do that, so much so that non-profit "makerspaces" have popped up all around the U.S.

I am searching in advanced manufacturing: businesses that make high-quality high-tech hardware products with high barriers to entry and high impact on our ability as a society to innovate solutions to problems in energy generation, medicine, transportation, agriculture, and other areas. More specifically, I am searching in scientific instruments; in processing equipment and engineering for collecting renewable natural gas (methane from landfills and sewage treatment plants); and in small-scale equipment for localized, sustainable agricultural processing.

I would love to partner with someone who sees a penchant for big ideas as an asset.

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