Featured Event 


Purpose School Symposium: Poverty & Power
Join today for a conversation about working together to bridge cultural divides, and the difference between intent and impact.

Hosts: Kevin Jones of SOCAP & Stacey Monk of Epic Change
When: Today - Friday, January 4th at 11 am EST
Where: Google + 
Learn More: Purposeschool.org

If you are looking for proof that seed funding may be about to take off, look no further than legendary Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla becoming an investor in the new Unitus Seed Fund.

Seed funding in mission-focused businesses doesn’t pay for itself, most of the time. You can’t raise a $100 million fund for, say, mobile apps, and spray and pray, and then get enough winners to make it pay. The deals in this context have to be examined much more closely because they are often working in difficult conditions on problems that are really hard to solve. That means it’s hard to raise enough money that gets out the door fast enough to have a large enough operating fee to make it possible to hire the best people to evaluate all the options and make those hard decisions and then work with the companies afterwards.

Up until now, seed funders have been small and subsidized by corporates or philanthropists, which is a huge restraint on the growth of the industry.
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Sometimes being a non-profit is the exactly right thing to be.

Rock Health – a really interesting digital health incubator in San Francisco – has attracted funders from Kleiner Perkins to GE, to long-time life sciences VC, Aberdare, and other powerful players. Each of 14 companies gets $100,000, and a five-month intensive incubation in their offices in San Francisco on the third floor of a building in Chinatown. On average, the four cohorts they’ve had in the past year have attracted another $800,000 in additional funding apiece.

Rock Health is a non-profit and doesn’t take a piece of the money action. But in their case being a non-profit gives them a competitive market advantage. As their CEO Halle Tecco explained, they get digital health startups ready for trials with the patient populations of large health care systems. The for-profit startups armed with growth capital (that are Rock Health’s incubator participants) would never have been allowed access to hospitals and their patients unless they were brought in by a non-profit.
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Picture this: a $300M fund providing equity and debt expansion capital to positive-impact small businesses, boosting local economies while generating market-rate income returns to investors. Not just accredited investors … any investors. Sound good? It can be done, via a business development company (BDC). If you’re not familiar with BDCs, you're not alone.. 

A BDC is essentially a way for private investing to go “public”, with the added benefit that BDCs were specifically structured for investing and building in small, private companies. It’s a US structure, part of the Investment Company Act of 1940, and has been around since 1980. BDCs have a unique set of features that align nicely with impact investing: 
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