Focus on the goose that lays the golden eggs

At Fairbridge, our mission is to be the partner of choice for the most brilliant mission-driven Founders focused on bridging society’s widest progress gaps. We believe these founders will take the lead to help overwhelmed public institutions, civic organizations and CSR initiatives to deliver sustainable solutions to the pressing problems we face today. But why focus so much on the Founder?

The philosophy

The world’s investor collective is diligently harnessing capital, technology, and people to maximize the global productivity of capital. We have mastered capital and technology and exploiting their value is nearly commoditized. The Founder remains the variable with real value to unlock. S/he is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and navigating the biology of such a complex process is the key driver for outsized outcomes.

Below, I’ll elaborate my thoughts on these ingredients for value creation.

Capital
Capital is the lubricant and fuel for innovation. Capital flows where it’s loved–––where there’s respect, return, and purpose. We have mostly figured out the constraints of capital.
Liquidity and time: We have developed markets and mechanisms e.g., primary/secondary, collateral, bankruptcy processes etc. that facilitate the liquidation of assets. And, technology now allows the average retail investor to get in and out of positions quickly.
Opportunity cost: Better information, improved skill, and financial engineering have enabled better management of opportunity cost. Innovations like index Funds and ETFs also make diversification easier.

Technology
Rapid technological advancement that started in the 90s laid the groundwork for unprecedented innovation.
Capacity and power: We have unlocked unimaginable technological capacity: (storage, network, processing, battery) and power: (computational, electric & battery, processing, efficiency). Yesterday’s miracles of “1,000 songs in your pocket”, “marrying the internet with movies”, and “making transportation as reliable as running water for everyone…” would have been impossible just a few years before they were realized.
Knowledge: The knowledge for using technology is broadly disseminated and sometimes accessible without knowing how to code (Shopify, etc.). Broader access will connect knowledge with local/proprietary context and imagination, which will drive unprecedented levels of innovation!  

That said, it’s tempting to crown technology as the miracle ingredient of innovation. A better way is to view it as an amplifier of intent; human intent.

People (Founders)
The Founder is the magic ingredient because of powerful attributes that are neither replicable nor generalizable.
Capability:  A Founder’s operating expertise, her lived experience, personality, and how those shape her unique perspective can be channeled through purpose to build remarkable businesses.
Moral authority: A Founder can drive the direction of a business from a deeper place that a hired gun cannot. Gillian Tee the Founder of Homage uncovered that her relentless drive for building a caregiving business was driven by the memory of her own caregiver who died of cancer when Gillian was little. Such a source of inspiration, maybe a calling, can lead to a Founder commissioning unconventional markets or making counterintuitive decisions that unlock extraordinary value.
Stewardship: A Founders’ mission is the delivery of her vision to customers with consistency. In the process, she can build a successful business and generate significant personal wealth. How she stewards these responsibilities e.g., with succession planning, charitable donations, and time, is consequential to incremental global return.

Where to find the goose

A growing proportion of exceptional Founders are driven by a deep sense of stewardship for important societal problems. . This growing supply of talent (BCorp launches are a proxy) and the widening of access gaps in human development is why we are betting on this space. We’ve been finding Founders who are:
Exiting the fancy and fast “jobs”: Millennials working for tech that’s now become big tech. These Founders are revisiting their lives and seeking higher purpose as they contemplate the world they want their kids to inherit.
Immigrants and first generation: Immigrant, first-generation, or Founders currently abroad targeting US markets for problems for which they have experience and unique perspective for in their countries of origin.
Returning diaspora: Diasporans who migrated to the US with a goal to learn and return to build their countries, got stuck here for a while, and now have gathered enough experience, personal wealth, and courage to go follow through. 

Follow the goose…

At Fairbridge, we have invested in a few of these Generational Founders. They are brilliant, they care, and they are focused on building things that matter. We are looking for more of them and we are spreading the word about them to all investors!

Asking for help! 

I’d love to rally folks behind Fairbridge’s work on Bridging Progress Gaps^TM and I am asking for your support.
Sharing: Could you please help us spread the message by sharing this publication with your friends and on your your social channels!!! I also welcome your thoughts directly on this topic.
Collaboration: I am looking for guest authors to write or co-author articles with so we can advance thought leadership on this topic.

Thank you!