Hello, World.
My career to date has entirely been in the for-profit sector. I started as an investor, spent a lot of time as an operator in fast-moving startups, and after starting my own family I was presented with the opportunity to explore the mysterious world of Family Offices. This opportunity put me back in an investor role, where I’m quite comfortable, but it also meant developing a philanthropic strategy—not an area where I have previously had a lot of experience. However, I’m a good learner and a quick study, so I started on a journey of educating myself about the world of “giving back.” I conducted over 80 interviews with people working in both the public and private sectors; I read countless articles from the SSIR (extremely insightful, btw); and I toured numerous nonprofit sites. What I started to realize is that there is clearly no one-size-fits-all solution for social impact, but I also didn’t find solutions that were particularly inspiring.
I kept seeking out the hustle, innovation and risk-taking that I was accustomed to in the fast-paced world of high-growth startups, but I became increasingly frustrated when I couldn’t find it. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying there aren’t incredible social entrepreneurs doing wonderful things in the nonprofit space. They exist and they are amazing, but what I have observed is that the principles of for-profit/entrepreneurship are not readily applied to the nonprofit world, and as such the nonprofit world has developed in a way that doesn’t support the same rapid iteration and scalability that I have witnessed in the “innovation economy.”
So I began to dig deeper to see if I could find new models for philanthropic impact. I started to explore the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (“CSR”) — quickly learning how powerful it is for business (but also historically a term/practice reserved for large corporations). There has been extensive research that suggests corporate philanthropy boosts employee retention, fosters employee engagement, enhances hiring efforts, and improves the bottom line. And I really started to get excited when I discovered that some high-growth startups were leveraging their capabilities to catalyze social impact at scale.
Today, an increasing number of pre-IPO companies are not only adopting philanthropic causes and social-good initiatives, but also building them into the framework of their businesses. Companies like Flexport, Riot Games and Appfire already have their own .orgs, where they are leveraging their core capabilities to do good in the world; PagerDuty, Postmates and Procore are other examples of (recently public) companies that are paving the way for what corporate philanthropy might look like in the future (and are all members of the Pledge 1% community!). These organizations are examples of how far-reaching and varied corporate social responsibility programs can be.
Take Flexport.org as an example: They move medical supplies during times of need. Now, there are of course wonderful charities, like Direct Relief, that are tackling this same need, but Flexport — a fast-growing, technology-driven freight forwarding company, with deep relationships with all of the major carriers that ship things around the world - is arguably better-positioned to do this at scale, or at least to act as a powerful partner.
So we asked ourselves: How can we empower more companies to go on this journey? How can we support startups and bold entrepreneurs who want to leverage their existing capabilities in order to manifest change in the social-impact domain? How can we spread the entrepreneurial spirit and scalability found in the for-profit sector to the nonprofit sector?
Some converging trends make this a particularly timely discussion to have:
Venture capital and philanthropy have historically remained relatively undisrupted, but we are entering a new period of innovation, one in which new entrants and novel capital models are starting to disrupt the innovation landscape;
There is a generational shift occurring, wherein both private and institutional investors are seeking to engage in some form of ‘impact’ investing, while simultaneously searching for philanthropic strategies that can replicate the discipline, innovation and effectiveness of their investment strategies. In short, the for-profit and nonprofit capital markets are converging;
There is a growing demand for companies of all sizes and stages, not just corporations, to give back to society and refine their approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (some cool ones here). Beyond the demands of public perception, enterprises are being challenged to attract a new generation of talent that is demanding meaningful work, with purpose beyond themselves.
Ultimately, Rise Together was born. We were founded on the belief that the category-defining companies of the future will be largely purpose-led with societal impact as a core pillar of company culture. Our mission, then, is to empower this change through catalytic philanthropic capital. We do this by investing in high-growth, for-profit companies led by mission-driven founders; and we enable these entrepreneurs to embed social impact into their company culture by providing them with philanthropic capital in parallel with an equity investment (which we call “Philanthropic Mirroring”). So far, our philanthropic mirroring solution has resulted in a teacher fast-grant program, donations to mission-aligned nonprofits, the (impending) creation of a new .org, and meaningful public-private partnerships with some of the most innovative teams.
Although our overall strategy is opportunistic in nature, we are currently targeting Series A and above and are focused on Health & Wellness, Sustainability & Climate, and Economic Mobility. Our main criteria is identifying mission-driven founders and companies that want to leverage their existing capabilities to drive societal impact at scale.
There is still so much more to learn. I may rewrite this letter in a year to announce a completely different thesis for Rise Together. I don’t even know how to clearly describe what we’re doing yet: We’re a new type of “impact investing”. We’re a new capital allocation model. We’re a new way of doing personal philanthropy. We’re an incubator for corporate philanthropy. We’re starting a movement to empower the future change agents of our society. Regardless, we know we are at the very nascent stages of this journey, but we are excited about the potential of putting nonprofit capital into the hands of today’s boldest entrepreneurs.