Calling impact angels: You hold the keys to impact innovation

Who will step up to back the radical startups solving our social and environmental problems?

That’s it. We’ve got to admit it. There’s something seriously wrong with impact.

Monolithic western NGOs afraid to relinquish their power. Rich kids and their passion projects for status. Corporate executives seeking redemption through CSR. Meanwhile impact entrepreneurs find it impossible to get seed funding.

It’s just not good enough.

It might have been good enough if we’d started 100 years earlier. Before we’d smugly booted the environment beyond safe planetary boundaries, setting in motion a chain reaction which will aggravate the social tensions already bearing their pointy fangs. But we didn’t. It’s just not good enough.

We need radical, breakthrough innovation to rend major societal changes and we need it now.

“We’re trying but it’s hard,” scream the impact sector “the system is stacked against us!” I know this frustration well — and it’s true — but we’re out of time to rely on incremental change.

Fortunately our American brethren in Silicon Valley have cracked the process for blitz innovation: Find visionary entrepreneurs, give them enough money and access to influential networks, and yell “Go get ‘em!”

Except this time we’ll choose entrepreneurs with a healthier balance between head and heart. We don’t need another Mark Zuckerberg wielding more power than any human being should.

Instead we must put our weight behind a new generation of impact startups led by innovators with high EQs and profound social consciences.

These are entrepreneurs who put two fingers up to personal gain at any cost. Capable, daring individuals who see ego and incompetence making a mockery of brilliant ideas and think ‘this mediocrity is unacceptable’. Mums and dads with the direction and drive to fix the world for their kids and everyone else’s kids, too.

We’ve met them. They’re brilliant.

They’re building airstrike early warning systems, online mental health services, bias trackers for the workplace, tools for fighting fake news online, discourse monitoring to soften extremism, automated cell culture for labs. The list goes on…

And they all have something in common: Finding early stage funding was a nightmare. These entrepreneurs have succeeded against the odds, but it shouldn’t have been so hard. The money should have been the easy bit — growing a company is difficult enough already.

Philanthropic foundations say they aren’t positioned to fund innovation. VCs will only back the most financially promising startups. Accelerators & incubators the same. And so the responsibility falls on private investors who actually care enough about what’s right to get their cheque books out.

These impact angel investors have smelt the coffee. Their moral compasses have guided them to balance financial returns with repairing society’s injustices and un-fucking the environment. The world is changing, and they’ll be damned if they’re on the wrong side of history. Governments should be showering them with tax incentives.

It goes without saying we think a lot of impact entrepreneurs and impact angels. We believe that together they hold the key to breakthrough impact tech innovation.

They’re brave, they’re righteous, and they’ve had enough. Us too. What about you?

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