>Cathy Clark
The Impact Investor
The Impact Investor
Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism
Cathy Clark
Jed Emerson
Ben Thornley
Cover design by Michael J. Freeland
Cover image: © Wavebreak Media/Jupiter Images
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Foreword
When I reflect on impact investing and its prospects of growth to a size somewhere between the $100 billion of microfinance and the $3 trillion invested in private equity and venture capital worldwide, I often think back to the origins of venture capital – the starting point of my professional life.
Venture capital was a response to the needs of tech entrepreneurs, just as impact investing is a response to the needs of a new generation of social entrepreneurs who seek to make a meaningful difference in improving people's lives.
No one had thought of creating ten-year, illiquid funds, investing in small companies with very limited track records of performance, led by young people with no business experience. The response came because people sat around a table and said, “We see the future, and we have to provide the tools for it.” When I set up what became Apax Partners in 1972, few in Europe knew what an entrepreneur was, and fewer still believed that entrepreneurs would achieve much of consequence for our daily lives. Forty years later, they have completely transformed our world.
The microchip, the PC, the mobile phone, and the Internet, with its search engines and instant access to information and people, have revolutionized the way we live. They have brought a transformation as momentous as that which followed the creation of the alphabet and the invention of printing. Entrepreneur-led companies have overtaken those that led their fields for nearly a century. IBM was overshadowed in the space of a couple of decades by a start-up named Apple, which is now the largest company in the world by market cap; Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle made it from start-up to being among the world's top thirty companies in just three decades.
The tech entrepreneurial revolution was driven by innovation and risk taking. It transformed the mind-set of governments about how economic growth should be achieved. In the United States, in the space of twenty-five years, it has been estimated that fifty million jobs were lost by smokestack industries, while sixty million jobs were created by new companies.
Our prospect now is to provide social entrepreneurs with the financing they require, and in this important book, Cathy Clark, Jed Emerson, and Ben Thornley provide the first detailed insight into how that financing has – and widely ought to be – provided.
However, even as the outstanding funds profiled in The Impact Investor work tirelessly to pioneer a new “Collaborative Capitalism,” there is much work to do building market and public policy infrastructure to help a new generation of entrepreneurs replicate their success.
The Social Impact Investment Taskforce and the Role of Government
Understanding this need for infrastructure and the paths to its creation has been the charge of the Social Impact Investment Taskforce, announced by UK prime minister David Cameron in June 2013 and established by the G8. By the time this book is published, this group, which I have been privileged to chair, will have just concluded its deliberations and published its report.
The Taskforce included a private and a public sector member from seven G8 countries and the European Union (EU), and observers from Australia and development finance institutions; it held hearings in different countries and created four working groups and seven National Advisory Boards to advise on the enabling infrastructure for impact investing in various local contexts. In total, the Taskforce has engaged more than two hundred of the world's foremost experts on impact investing in responding as vigorously as possible to the social challenges we face.
The Taskforce has played a particularly valuable role, clarifying the role of government in impact investing and informing the approaches of its different member countries by sharing examples and lessons from efforts in each jurisdiction.
For the United Kingdom's part, Bridges Ventures, which is featured in this book, provides one of the earliest examples. Bridges Ventures was created as an outcome of the UK Social Investment Task Force fourteen years ago, which I was also privileged to lead, and, after securing half of the funding for its first fund from HM Treasury, has gone
