Proclamation
It is our profound belief that when you shop your values knowing that 100% of your spend goes towards a cause that moves you, you will live an average of two years longer*
#consciouscapitalism
While listening to my favorite podcasts and scrolling through my curated Twitter feed, I’ve been noticing the hashtag #consciouscapitalism appearing more and more frequently. It’s a nice idea, but it’s nothing really new. After all, we’ve been calling it many things over the years; Social Entrepreneurship, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Social Impact Venture, Cause-Related Marketing, Purpose-Driven Startups, Mission-Driven Founders, Certified B Corps, Philanthropreneur, Social Good, and on and on. And while these are all truly great intentions, the question that continuously surfaces is how well are they working? I mean, how many consumer-facing do-good companies can you name right now? I’ll give you Patagonia, Toms Shoes, Warby-Parker, Bombas Socks, and Figs. Anyone else?
Not easy, right?
My Own Social Good Journey
Capitalism for good first appeared on my radar back when Bob Geldof, front man for the Boomtown Rats, got his mates together to record a song for charity – BandAid’s “Do They Know it’s Christmas (Feed the World)” which went onto raise countless millions for famine relief in Ethiopia. The success of the single spawned LiveAid the concerts for charity and copycat records like “We are the World”, the American song and relief effort bringing together US artists in the same format. Side note: Cyndi Lauper @ 2:47 the runaway winner, obviously.
This led me to Coventure Guiding Principle (CoGP) 1 – if you want to do some good, make it easy (and possibly fun) for others to engage.
I was moved by the cause-movement concept. I became a supporter of countless philanthropic organizations - Amnesty International, UNICEF, WWF (not wrestling), KCRW, PBS (mostly for the British shows), and many more. And like so many of my friends and associates, I justified that supporting these entities would be good enough to placate that inner voice constantly whispering “Oi, you should do some good in the world”. Yes, inner voice also has a British accent.
Observing these countless non-profits addressing countless issues across countless countries, brought to light CoGP 2 – provide radical transparency and keep it local.
Fast forward, mid-2000’s and the next occasion do-some-good appears on my radar is when Toms Shoes emerges with a clever One-for-One business model promising to donate a pair of shoes to a kid in need for every purchase of their pricy espadrilles. I, along with thousands of others, loved the concept. Me not so much as a consumer, but as an entrepreneur. What an ingenious method of differentiating from competitors, decreasing customer acquisition costs and amassing a devout and loyal following. Sure, it wasn’t perfect and had/has plenty of critics, but brilliant, nonetheless. Blake Mycoskie saw a need in South America, and rather than make it a non-profit to raise funds to purchase, manufacture and distrubute shoes, he fine-tuned a new spin on capitalism.
However, while it seemed to be an easy model to replicate, it proved otherwise. Remember Bob’s? Bob’s was Skechers take on Toms. It didn’t quite make the same strides and they’ve since relegated the brand to their lower leagues.
But it did lead me to CoGP 3 - the understanding that the concept of doing good through a one-for-one mechanism, or some variant of, only truly works if it’s part of the DNA of the company.
From a Line-Item Expense to the Reason for Being
Following the great financial recession, my cofounders and I embarked on several digital ventures, mostly based around positive game play for kids and tweens. Our most successful IP, Audree’s Amazing Adventures, was a family-friendly virtual world with its very own in-game currency built on our rudimentary and clunky Re:Generation Engine. Basically, gamers earned Re:Genz from doing some good in the virtual world which in turn could be spent on social impact projects in the actual world. The latter carried out by our non-profit partners across the globe, think charity:water, Global Giving, Girl Scouts, etc. I was thrilled that we got to incorporate a do-good engine, no matter how simple, into a game for kids and their parents and while we couldn’t really scale it beyond the initial million downloads, the platform and engineering team were acqui-hired by a major gaming studio in London.
I was thusly ingrained with CoGP 4 - make sure to always integrate a social impact engine into all future endeavors.
And whereas in my consulting gigs I was constantly fighting for the inclusion of a CSR expense line item, in my own startups they were central. Post Covid-19, they will be an essentiality.
A New Way Forward vs Business as Usual
There’s a strong urge to reinvent a new way of conducting business when the existing methods of business as usual have displayed their deficiency. What we’ve collectively witnessed, maybe experienced, during this pandemic, is this fine line between living and surviving; between standing on your own two feet to standing in a bread line; and the number of households who are just a day away from food insecurity, homelessness, or a health catastrophe are mind-numbing. We always knew things weren’t really hunky-dory and even observed the fragilities of the system if on the frontlines or one cared enough to dig deeper. And from the comforts of a coworking space, we could easily dismiss these realities by staying heads-down on our own ventures and justifying our preferred method of addressing this issue with the “I’ll wait until I’m a billionaire and pledge my fortune to philanthropy” strategy of deferred compassion.
Keep in mind, plenty of great startups, organizations, NGO’s, non-profits, corporations, individuals, and leaders have and are currently delivering brilliant outcomes that help keep this tenuous line from fraying and we should all continue to support their efforts.
And that’s CoGP 5 – don’t stop supporting, pledging, volunteering, or giving to impactful organizations that are doing some good in the world. Now more than ever, they’re going to need you.
Here’s a simple illustration I have pinned on my whiteboard:
Within the Social Enterprises circle, there are a diversity of models, methods, formations, concepts and styles, many of which I listed earlier. I have no doubt, there will be thousands more generated as a reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, especially as younger generations seeking out aligned values and goals of creating a better world, dive into entrepreneurship and march into the workforce.
These are precisely the entities, works, papers, startups, and individuals that I’ll bring to your inbox each week through this newsletter. The founders, operators, investors and souls imagining better systems with better outcomes. I’d like to keep these stories on your radar in the hopes that they seep into your own thinking and that you too feel the need to share the possibilities of a better way forward, rather than a going back to business as usual.
My Scribblings
CO3 is basically the acronym for my virtual startup studio, Coventure Coffee & Coworking. Maybe that’ll be the name for the podcast
The podcast is akin to the type of formats where startup founders and VC's in the tech space riff on ideas for their next money-making ventures, but instead of chasing unicorns, we take these ideas and integrate an authentic social good mission (zebras)
Which, maybe leads to a network of businesses (Powered by WeAreCO3) that do well by doing good, that bring about a better business model and a more sustainable and equitable economic engine
The Coventure Guiding Principles being the foundation for all startups in the network, with the goal that 100% of profits are directed to the mission
Thanks for reading this far. If any of your friends or colleagues are in the Social-Enterprise, -Venture, -Impact, or -Entrepreneurship space, your sharing this with them always appreciated. Cheers.
*The two years is purely anecdotal, but the science is rooted in hundreds of studies about happiness and altruism, in which the act of giving triggers dopamine in the brain, leading to an uplifted sense of being, resulting in optimism and positivity, leading to humans living longer