Innovative finance + impact tech
Welcome to your innovative finance + impact tech headquarters.
I’ve spent over a decade exploring, creating and advising in these fascinating worlds and can help you explore how to use innovative financing structures and emerging technologies to create deep impact. Whether you are an impact founder or an impact funder, I'd love to work with you to build and enable tools, platforms and systems that will revolutionize the world of impact finance.
I help entrepreneurs and early-stage funders that want to use innovative structures to create better options for early stage funding that allows increased access to funding and better integration of impact priorities. These structures include:
Recoverable or Reimbursable Grants
Convertible Grants
Forgivable Loans
Revenue Based Financing
Dividend Based Financing
Equity Redemption or Buy-Backs
Outcome Based Contracts
Impact Linked Debt Instruments (SIINCs, Social Success Notes)
Worker Cooperative Conversions
And can advise fund managers that are:
Building their impact thesis
Incorporating Impact Carry into their fund
Designing a CrowdFunding structure or an Evergreen Fund or Holding Company.
I also help development funders, governments and foundations leverage their catalytic capital through:
Capital structure positioning and blended funds
Guarantees
Outcomes payments
I can also help you understand how to use the blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, remote sensors and IoT to build out the tools, platforms and systems necessary to more effectively measure impact, allocate capital and structure funds.
Impact Linked Compensation Convening
Is impact linked compensation the missing piece to drive accountability for impact and avoid impact washing? If so, how do you even start to approach the design and implementation? We are conducting the largest study to date on the fund managers (GPs) who use impact linked compensation, and the limited partners (LPs) who invest in them. This research is being conducted in partnership with The ImPact and with support from The Tipping Point Fund on Impact Investing.
Join Our Upcoming Convening #5: Putting ILC Learning into Practice - November 8th, 10AM EST / 4PM CET
This convening will highlight the themes and learnings from the survey results, the convenings and the interviews.
Visit www.impactlinked.co to learn more and RSVP
Upcoming Adventure Finance Courses & Workshops
These courses are designed to help you understand the entire spectrum of innovative financing options for purpose-driven companies and impact-focused founders. You will learn to assess funding options, build a network of like-minded founders and funders and gain access to resources you need to design your own innovative finance toolkit.
Content for the course is based on Aunnie Patton Power's book Adventure Finance as well as new research.
There are currently no upcoming courses or workshops, but watch this space to keep up to date with future and upcoming workshops.
Adventure Finance
In May 2021, I published my first book called Adventure Finance. You can find the book website here: Adventure.Finance.
About the book
The venture capital model doesn’t work―at least not for 99% of startups and small businesses. In this 99% are a lot of companies with incredible potential: businesses headed by female founders and those from diverse racial backgrounds, organizations headquartered outside of venture capital hubs, and purpose-driven enterprises that are creating social and environmental impact alongside financial success.
Counter to what the press-savvy venture capital world would have you believe, there are a lot of funding options out there for startups and small businesses. Adventure Finance is designed to help you understand some of these options, and walk you through real examples of how other founders and funders have put them to use.
In simple, approachable language, the book breaks down the different types of funding options available from revenue-based financing to recoverable grants to redeemable equity to distributed ownership and more. Through a mix of storytelling and research-based frameworks, based on a decade of research and experience in investing in early-stage companies, this book will give you the ability to determine how each of these structures can contribute to your own funding journey.
The goal for this book is to shift the conversation about startup funding and help founders and funders widen the spectrum of “mainstream” investment options in order to make the venture financing world more inclusive and purpose-driven.
You can order the book on Amazon or Palgrave Macmillan’s website.
See below for a preview of the book over three Impact Alpha articles.
“Impact investing was created to revolutionize capital markets. Instead, we are replicating them. This needs to change. The good news is, the structures we need to reform the capital system already exist.
COVID provides an opportunity for impact investors to step into a leadership role within capital markets, as the amount of private and public capital needed to save the global economy is put into stark relief. The question is, are we going to revolutionize capital markets to make them more accessible and inclusive? Or are we going to continue to replicate the current system?
We always seem to find excuses to avoid tackling structural issues in our capital system that perpetuate the asymmetry of access, equity and power. Now is the time to re-examine how we are allocating capital rather than just what our capital is funding—or more bluntly reassessing what type of world our capital is building.
The impact investing community needs to focus on three big ideas: redesigning risk capital, incentivizing impact in deals and funds, and committing to communities through distributed ownership. Here’s a blueprint for how we start—first, with redesigning risk capital. ”
Innovative Finance Toolkit
As part of my work, I’m currently building out an online Innovative Finance Toolkit to help you systematically think through the options available to you as an entrepreneur or funder. Right now, this information is hosted on a Prezi, which I use in lecturing and workshops. The goal is to turn it into an interactive online experience.
Click here to design a workshop for your organization or check out my free MOOC on Coursera - Innovative Finance: Hacking Finance to Change the World.
