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Kevin Jones
san francisco, CA
Raising a social enterprise expansion capital fund at Good Capital (equity from investors into non profits and for profit social purpose businesses that can offer a financial return. Think microfinance but on a larger scale.
Recent Activity
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Kevin commented on the article |This is some good hard hitting reporting here. so congrats Nathaniel on standing up and calling somebody out. that doesn't happen enough, or doesn't happen out in the open in this social capital space. and if IC did what's reported, and it wasn't the work of some clueless consultant who just promised results, then this is troubling. I admire IC's ability to get attention to its cause. It's hard for an organization to keep up with its momentum, I know, I've been there. It's easy to get lost when things get big an keep moving fast. IC, btw, is a deep partner of GoodCap portfolio company Better World Books, and BWB has had a really productive relationship with them; resulting in, I believe, hundreds of thousands of dollars being given to literacy causes. They are powerful in their ability to mobilize people for a cause. I admire them.
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Kevin commented on the article |(self promotion notice). It's been shown that mission focused businesses can succeed at scale, but not that the mission can survive the exit. We at Goodcap.net are trying to fix that. So i would put our investment in Better World Books on the list; with five percent of the founders stock set aside for non profit partners to vest based on their mission performance. It's both a linking of the non profit and for profit worlds that has not been done and it is a unique piece of mission insurance. the non profit will be there at the table when or if the company sells, and we will have set a price on literacy that has to be factored in to the sale price. We are instituting the same feature in the term sheet of our third deal.
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Kevin commented on the article |a skoll foundation board member told me says jeff is a work in progress on this issue. people who know me wish I was.
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Kevin commented on the article |Thanks. It took a lot of creativity and a lot of hard work to get it done. Wes Selke of our team really led the way in folding in a philanthropic, mission focused metric into the nuts and bolts of how you run a company and report out the results, even down to handing off equity to the mission aligned non profit partners. I think we and the company have collaborated to bake the mission so deeply into the way this company works that it can't be extracted without incurring higher operating cost and deep brand erosion at the same time.
And we are selling the story around that value so that that alue will be preserved because people will see it and, if we do it right, put a value on the company that encompasses its social, environmental and financial value. We're at least putting that value out there and compensating our non profit partners for it. If the market validates our efforts, we will do well, our investors will do well and the mission will have scaled to a much higher impact as well.
We may be wrong, and the value won't remain after exit, but we are doing our business in the daylight, so people can learn what we were thinking when we did it and what we thought would work.
We have the operations dialed in this company. Now we are starting to work together on the branding. -
Kevin commented on the article |going niche is an interesting approach. i might go with infrastructure plays, things that enable other things but that are less sexy to fund. pieces of the ecosystem that ought to be there. would require a systemic analysis and identifying gaps, key leverage points (if this bridge were crossed, this whole field would be opened up) where infrastructure might be most strategic.
the natural role of the government is to fund infrastructure that supports the economy and the culture. -
Kevin commented on the article |First, off I find it hard to engage with a question about your tax status being about who you are, or having such a big role in defining what you want to do with your life. The moral dilema around tax status is such a binary framing (non profit = good, for profit = selling out). This is a chump's game that your great grandfather set you up to play. Do not want to be in a ping pong game. Maybe we could apply a Settlers of Cataan type of game to this question and make it more interesting.
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Kevin commented on the article |Great thread, guys, and original thread, Steve. trying to synthesize and add, I think new ways of measuring are in a sense just including what has always been allowed to be called externalities. Good business is good business, I think. If you work to enhance the ecosystem, what my father, a country weekly newspaper editor in Appalachian Mississippi called building a community in which your business can survive. I think our metrics are collective, but they also need to explicitly include the voices and views of the marginalized, women and children explicitly. my friend sabina Alikre is working on that at http://ophi.org.uk/ and USAID and the World Bank is starting to use them. I'm bringing her work into the world of fair trade through some partners.
when we start counting things in a new way, we need to make sure we look around and that all the stakeholders are at the table when we create the new currency/value exchange. it has to work for the marginalized and those without power or wealth for it to work for all of us. -
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Kevin commented on the article |Good post. and if there are a lot of child abuse fighting orgs in a town, how well are they working together? collaboration is maybe a useful metric.
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Kevin commented on the article |good points. and since many social enterprises are for profit because that's the best way to scale their social impact, expanding the definition of business into maybe two categories, those focused on maximizing profit and those focused on maximizing impact by making a profit to make the mission sustainable might also be in order.
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