Moving to SocentVC.com

After a little less than a month on WordPress.com’s free hosting, I’m moving to my own site at SocentVC.com to take advantage of the additional flexibility I can get there. If you’ve bookedmarked this site, please re-bookmark at www.socentvc.com, as I will not longer be updating here.

If you are currently an RSS subscriber, there’s nothing additional you need to do, as I’ve changed the feed URL from the back-end. You’re good to go!

If you want to reach the new SocentVC.com links to the posts I originally posted on this blog, please click below:

• Welcome!
• The GIIN and the Importance of Ecosystems
• Beyond Profit Magazine
• Understanding New Technologies
• Chrome OS, A Game Changer?
• Hydros Bottle. Clean Water. Anywhere. Anytime.
• Impact Investing: A Call to Action
• A New Shopping Model, Just in Time for Black Friday
• Flashback to Xanga
• VC and Entrepreneur Demographic Disparities

VC and Entrepreneur Demographic Disparities

In early October, Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners wrote about the VC gender gap in the provocatively-titled “Are VCs Sexist?”,  where he talked about only 5-10% of the VC industry being female, and only 25% of VC partnerships having a single woman partner. As a result, these barriers to these barriers to the VC industry are resulting in the loss of “50% of the world’s best talent!” It seems to me that this is applicable to social VCs, as well, to a great extent.

Even though I’ve only been more closely involved in the VC and startup arena for a short while, another disparity seems to be present as well–that of race. It seems that almost all the bios I run across on VC websites seem to portray partners that are either white or Asian (both East and South), with few other races/ethnicities present.

And even for entrepreneurs, it seems like most of the ones I run across (at least on the East Coast) seem to be similar. Sure, there are plenty of South Asian programming and IT guys, and maybe a few East Asians as well, but it seems as if African-American and Hispanic entrepreneurs are not nearly as well-represented.

Now, before people start calling me names, let me just admit that 1) I know I am new to the space, and 2) I am no sociologist. So my observations are just that of the layman, not an expert or industry veteran. With that said, a blog entry I read recently on the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s website did confirm that I was not only only one to have thoughts about these things. (The SSIR is specifically focused on the area of social entrepreneurship, but I’d guess that the same likely applies for regular entrepreneurs too).  Marcia Stepanek, founding editor-in-chief of Contribute Media, considers the following argument: “Unless you’re a Caucasian and unless you’re an MBA, it’s tougher to get support for your good work trying to start a social enterprise.”

Flashback to Xanga

The world of social media has exploded in the past 2 or 3 years, but I was reminded yesterday of one of the first popular blogging / social networking sites yesterday from the beginning of this decade, Xanga. A good friend of mine wrote a blogpost yesterday reminiscing about the days when she used to blog regularly on Xanga.  While I never never really jumped on the Xanga bandwagon in middle / high school, (LiveJournal was my blog of choice), I did have other friends who had them, making me familiar with those infamous quiz posts in which you answer a series of questions and then “tag” a certain number of other friends to do the same. (This practice seems to have been made a resurgence on Facebook with today’s high-schoolers).

Anyways, this friend wrote about the “6 Weird Things About Me” post she had made in February 2007 and has tagged me to do the same, so here goes! My latent inner high-schooler reveals itself.

A New Shopping Model, Just in Time for Black Friday

Have you ever needed to buy something that you can’t get cheaply on Amazon or another online retailer, or just needed to purchase something quickly without having to wait for it to ship? Of course you have. It’s the way that shopping worked before the online era!

But now that you’ve gotten used to comparison shopping online, the reality of how clueless you are price-wise when shopping at brick-and-mortar stores really sets in. Many times, it’s difficult to obtain prices, and even when you can, you still have to fumble through multiple catalogs or call the store directly for the latest price. Calling 20 stores just to do some price-checking is a complete waste of time, right?

Jack Abraham, a 2008 graduate of Penn’s Wharton undergraduate program, thought so too, leading him to create Milo.com. “Abraham said he started the site out of frustration. ‘I do the majority of my shopping locally, and it’s hard to figure out what’s available without driving to the stores or calling them.’”

Now, you can check prices at some 42,000 stores across the United States, and also get descriptions, reviews, and information about whether or not a certain item is currently in stock. Just in time for Black Friday!

For more info, go to the New York Times article, which covered Milo.com’s fundraising announcement from Tuesday. Milo.com raised $4 million in Series A funding from True Ventures, as well as notable angels such as Ron Conway. And of course, start checking out Milo.com to make your shopping easier.

Impact Investing: A Call to Action

A little less than a year ago, Monitor Institute, an affiliate of the consulting firm Monitor Group, released a comprehensive report on the current state of the impact investing world. If you have read my post regarding the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), or the Antony Bugg-Levine’s article in Beyond Profit magazine but want to learn even more, then you should check out Monitor Institute’s January 2009 report on impact investing, which (like the GIIN) was also a Rockefeller Foundation-supported effort.

Click for a two-page snapshot, 16-page executive summary, or the full 86-page report.

Phases of Industry Evolution
I’ll let the links above do the additional explaining, but I do want to mention at least one of the main points made in the Monitor report, which is related to what I wrote about in terms of the necessity of an “ecosystem” for impact investing. The Monitor graphic below (click to enlarge)  summarizes perfectly the road ahead for impact investing, and as you can see, we are just beginning the “Marketplace Building” stage, or “Ecosystem Building stage,” if you will. The “centers of activity” and “infrastructure” shown below are a perfect parallel to Jeff Bussgang’s ingredients for vibrant venture capital ecosystems.
The next 10 years may very well be a “make or break” period for impact investing. “Will the promise of this moment be realized, making this new domain a major complementary force for providing the capital, talent and creativity needed to address pressing social and environmental challenges? Or will it remain a small, disorganized, underleveraged niche for years or even decades to come?”

Get Involved!
If you do believe, as I do, that impact investing can indeed become a major complementary force for change, then get involved! Email Rockefeller Foundation or the GIIN, or one of the scores of other related organizations mentioned in the Monitor Institute report, and see if you can do something! Contribute however you can towards the following five Priority Initiatives:

• Create industry-defining funds that can serve as beacons for how to address specific social or environmental issues
• Place substantial, risk-taking capital in catalytic finance structures
• Set industry standards for social measurement
• Lobby for specific policy/regulatory change
• Develop an impact investing network

“Concrete action will be required to build the marketplace that can address today’s challenges and tomorrow’s risks.”

All graphics are the work of Monitor Institute, used under Creative Commons license.

Hydros Bottle. Clean Water. Anywhere. Anytime.

Earlier this fall, I discovered that some of my fellow 2009 graduates from Penn had started a social venture called Hydros Bottle. Now that I’ve established a blog platform with a focus on social entrepreneurship, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to write about their startup, which has been featured in the Dell Social Innovation Competition and also received seed funding from the Wharton Venture Initiation Program.

Hydros Bottle  started off as an effort to “sustainably provide purified water to increasingly mobile, urban people in the developing world.” But as they discovered in the process of their initial research, the issue of low-quality water was one not limited to just developing countries. Hydros explains, “Many areas of the United States are afflicted with poor quality public tap water that is often laced with dangerous levels of heavy metals and toxins (Find out what is in your water). As a result, we decided first to focus on releasing Hydros Bottle right here at home.”

Many of you may have used filters such as Brita before, but the Hydros Bottle does the pitcher filters one better. No, wait… two better. In addition to using activated carbon filtration like Brita, Hydros Bottle also features a proprietary Inn-Lay technology to remove chemicals from your water. Furthermore, the Hydros Bottle is portable. Essentially, what you get is a bottle with a built-in filter, making it unnecessary to have a big clunky pitcher with you if you’re looking for filtered water. In the Philadelphia airport but don’t want to pay airport prices for bottled water nor drink Philly tap water? Just pull out your Hydros Bottle and fill ‘er up. The water simply flows through the built-in filter, and mere seconds later, you have clean filtered water to drink.

Worried about nasty odor-causing bacteria building up inside your Hydros Bottle? Not to worry. These bottles feature IonArmour microbial protection, which inhibits the growth of bacteria, mold, and other microbes.

To purchase one of these bottles, click here to get started. You’ll be buying a product that provides you safer and better-tasting water, helps the environment by avoiding wasteful consumption of plastic disposable bottles, and promotes a social mission of increasing global access to potable water. Also, enter the code “OperationHydros” to get free shipping and free filters for one year with your order.

If you’d like to read more about Hydros Bottle, check out Springwise’s recent feature from last Wednesday or visit Hydros Bottle’s FAQ page.