From Venture Capital to Venture Philanthropy
Having Fun and Creating Impact in the Next Chapter
Throughout my career, I’ve sought out innovative entrepreneurs on the cusp of creating a big and lasting impact. I love seeking out founders who are onto something really big, ready to disrupt whole industries, solve problems, and change the way we live and work. In fact, the motto of the venture firm I co-founded, Emergence Capital, is “We invest in People who change the way the World Works.” We’ve been fortunate to be early backers of founders like Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Peter Gassner of Veeva, Aaron Levie of Box, Eric Yuan of Zoom, Rene Lacerte of Bill.com, and many many more. It’s been an amazing 20+ year ride and one that I feel so much gratitude for having had the opportunity to build an industry-leading firm with my partners.
Along the way, it’s been important to me to give back. I’ve sat on boards of non-profits, mentored thousands of up-and-coming entrepreneurs and investors, and donated financially to a small handful of organizations that my wife and I have been actively engaged with over the years. This past month, after almost 20 years at the helm of my firm, I decided to step back from an active investing role and focus more on how I wanted to have an impact for the next 20 years. I wrote a blog post about this decision here. My wife Ann and I recently started Greenbridge to pursue high-impact philanthropy and impact investing in the areas we are most passionate about making a difference. This is the first entry in what I hope will become a journal of that new chapter.
Thinking about where and how to start has been a little overwhelming. Unlike my former educational and professional paths, there is no set path here to success. While I treasure this newfound freedom, the breadth of problems to tackle can be a little paralyzing. While the pandemic this past year provided several extraordinary challenges, it also presented me with a unique opportunity to step back and ponder this next chapter. I used this time to more clearly define what success would look like in this next chapter. My goal was to optimize the joy, impact, and fulfillment of our giving.
As luck would have it, someone we knew from a great non-profit we had supported in the past was in transition to a new role and offered to help. We knew her well, trusted her, and most importantly, she knew us well, having spent time together hosting us on service trips to Kenya and Ecuador. Kim Plewes helped us more clearly articulate our mission and priorities for Greenbridge and we put in place a framework and process similar to the venture business I ran that we hope will lead to similar big outcomes over the long term. We are still early on the journey and learning a lot, but having a trusted and talented thought partner like Kim has made it a lot more fun.
Part of the goal in sharing this journey is to accelerate our learning and impact by connecting with others on a similar path. We do not claim to have all the answers but we wanted to share our current thinking and approach.
Here are the basics
Think big and measure progress
This process began at a very high level: looking out into the future to envision the kind of world we’d ideally like to see and the changes we’d be proud to say we helped enable. I’ve always believed in setting long-term and audacious goals. With bold ambitions and the right team, my experience has taught me that one can accomplish less than we typically envision in a year or two, but dramatically more than you can envision in a decade or two. The key is setting lofty missions that are never fully achieved, backing ambitious teams that are passionate about the mission, and then compounding the learning and effort over many years. These bold ambitions allow you to attract the talent and resources to build a high-performance team and culture that are essential to any great undertaking. Then the difficult but rewarding journey begins of getting a little better every day by experimenting, iterating, and scaling things that are working. By establishing stretch goals and relentlessly measuring progress, learning, and adjusting, one looks back with wonder after many years amazed at the progress.
Back people, not just ideas or organizations
As part of the process of identifying ideas and supporting organizations, I come back to what has always been a foundational element of my venture capital experience. Great teams win big and have the most impact in the long run. No matter what the endeavor is, identifying the quality, ambition, intelligence, passion, and character of the people involved is the most important due diligence you can do. As part of our process, I wanted to make sure I understood as much about the people and leadership involved as possible. I’m all about helping people and organizations fulfill their potential, so I care more about their learning and trajectory than about fancy resumes or accomplishments of the past. Identifying the great leaders of the future (sometimes even before they know themselves) is the hardest part of the venture capital business but is the one that is the most rewarding and unlocks the most value. We hope to bring this same sentiment and approach to backing social entrepreneurs.
Our values and guiding principles
We bet on people: We seek out organizations that have ethical, hard-working leaders who assemble innovative, strategic, and ambitious teams that are obsessed with learning to get better and are results-driven.
Long-term time horizons: We invest in organizations that attempt to create systematic, long-term change for beneficiaries. Venture Capital has the luxury of 10+ year time horizons. We have an even greater luxury of a 20+ year time horizon to maximize our impact.
Transformative impact: We look for organizations whose programming is truly transformative in a person’s life or can make a meaningful systemic impact on a big problem. We prefer supporting programs that have the opportunity and ambition to have an impact at scale.
Ownership mentality: Long-term behavior change can only be effective over the long term by helping people help themselves. We invest in organizations that provide the resources and support to make meaningful positive changes but not to create dependencies.
Bold & effective change: We seek out organizations who engage in regular evaluation of their programming to ensure they are achieving the most meaningful outcomes and are entrepreneurial in nature and spirit. We believe in tracking measurable results and in taking risks to have a greater impact even if that means more failures along the way.
Partnership and sustainability: Our investments act as a bridge, enabling the right programs and participants to connect and thrive. That is why we call it Greenbridge. We want to be a bridge from the world of today to the world we want to see tomorrow. We look to support organizations that have a path to self-sustainability and big impact.
Some questions we pondered as part of this process included:
From what kind of horizon do I want to affect change? Would I prefer to feed a person who is hungry today or work to close the gap in food insecurity long-term?
Where do I want to affect change? In my neighborhood? State (or province)? Nationally? Internationally?
What kind of change do I want to impact? Solutions that focus on the individual? On the community? Or systems-level change?
How quickly do I want to see tangible change? Protecting an acre of rainforest can happen pretty quickly but creating a solution for carbon capture might take a few decades.
The journey of creating philanthropic impact I’m sure will be different than the journey of building a successful business and I come to the philanthropic world with more questions than answers, but my hope is to leverage much of what I have learned in business to have a greater impact. Even though we are only beginning, we are already excited about the impact this year’s giving will have. In the months ahead, we’ll be posting about our areas of focus and the organizations we’ve chosen to support. In the meantime, I hope that sharing our journey will perhaps provide some ideas and enable connections with others on a similar journey.
Onward and Upward!
Jason
