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Blue Future Partners, a venture capital fund of funds, recently interviewed me on ESG in venture capital. Here’s what I said:
In your career in tech and VC, how has your focus on ESG responsibility changed over time?
There’s an old line from Victor Hugo: “If a man is not a [liberal] at twenty, it is because he has no heart, and if he is one at forty, it is because he has no brains.” To some extent, I’ve followed the reverse path.
Earlier in my career, I thought of myself as a libertarian and didn’t spend many calories thinking about the ESG impact of my work. But then I had a family, and I realized that many of our biggest social challenges have no libertarian solution, and no one has built a functioning libertarian society. A lot of these challenges became grossly apparent in 2020: social instability, climate crisis, public health crises, national security crises, disinformation. If I don’t think through the social implications of my work, then I’m free-riding on the hard work everyone else around me has done to make a liveable society. In the short run, I might make more money by ignoring all my social responsibilities. But in the longer run, the result is a dysfunctional society.
I see a clear cultural change happening in the investing universe, as more people pay attention to ESG objectives and apply an ESG filter to their investments. Bank of America has predicted $20T to flow in ESG (Read more...)
There are many ways to invest successfully. Public stocks, bonds, private equity, real estate, venture capital, etc. And within each category, there are so many different investment opportunities.
In public stocks, there are something like 5,000 listed stocks in the US. In venture capital, there were something like 30,000 companies that raised venture capital in 2019.
How do you make sense out of all of that opportunity?
I’ve always been a fan of knowing what you are looking for and ignoring everything else. We call that thesis based investing at USV, but it is actually more than that.
We can say that we are looking to back trusted brands that increase access to capital, wellness, and knowledge, and we do. But we do more than that. In each of those sectors, we go deeper and identify specific areas within them that we want to target. We call those “deep dives.” We identify areas we want to focus on and areas we don’t want to focus on.
All of this is a relentless effort to figure out what we are looking for and then go out and find it. It is not a static thing. It is a dynamic thing. A pandemic comes along and rocks our world. Time to revisit the thesis and the deep dives. When the pandemic ends, and it will, we will factor that into our thinking too.
In a world with so much opportunity, it pays to ignore the vast majority of it and focus (Read more...)
On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following individuals are featured:
This will be a unique segment where, Founder of Neu, Kwame Boler, will discuss his startup story and how he chose New Stack to participate in the funding round.
To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.
Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.
On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following individuals are featured:
This will be a unique segment where, Founder of Neu, Kwame Boler, will discuss his startup story and how he chose New Stack to participate in the funding round.
To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.
Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.