Bant Breen:
Oliver Libby is the Managing Partner of H/L Ventures. Tell me a little bit about how you guys operate? How do you build a kind of impact investment portfolio?
Oliver Libby:
When we launched H/L ventures, we launched it as what would now be thought of as a venture studio. At the time, there wasn’t an understanding of what that meant. There were a couple of other shops in the country, like Beta Works and Idealab that were doing that, but no one knew what it was called. The idea is that you help entrepreneurs from a very, very early stage almost at the napkin stage, and you surround them with all the different forms of capital, that help someone build a business. It’s not just cash, it’s also relationships and experience, and services that would give you a much better, even chance of having a successful venture and properly supporting the entrepreneur. That’s how we’re structured at H/L. We’re now 12 years in kind of a company-building ecosystem, you can think of us as having like a Swiss Army knife of things that are useful for entrepreneurs. We provide managed services, we have a big platform team, and we do invest in almost all the businesses in the studio as well. It’s all in service of supporting the entrepreneur and particularly in a know we’re going to get into this but particularly because we work a lot with underrepresented founders working in impactful businesses, although unabashedly, we’re all trying to do this for profit. Those particular founder communities and subject areas sometimes need surrounding with a little bit more supporting connectivity than your kind of Silicon Valley.
Bant Breen:
I think they’re both good examples of a trend that’s happening today, which is a successful business is a purpose-driven business. A successful business is a social change business. How do you guys look at that? How’s it important for business today?
Oliver Libby:
I think we were on one of the great trends in the change in business earlier than most. And that trend is now so much of the mainstream business and mainstream asset management are moving towards social responsibility, sustainability, and ESG measurement. I love to go back and think a little bit about like, what the genesis of a topic area might be. When you think about kind of what we talked about as impact investing in social entrepreneurship, the impetus for that came from a little bit left field, right? It came from the philanthropic world, it came from a media pushing for certain outcomes. For a long time, your hardcore financial and innovation practitioners were like, “We’ll do the work of making money” because it’s always been the model that has always been learning, earning, and returning. You spend the first third of your life learning, then another third, making a bunch of money, and then the last third, you can give it all back to the community. That’s been the Rotary Clubs and Churches and that has been the model for a long, long time. Only recently have people said, “Wait a minute, why does it have to be split up that way? Why can’t you just push everything if we’re going to be lifelong learners.” We’re going to be lifelong learners. We’re going to be returning to the community from day one as well. That I think makes a big difference and if I can share one more point, we live in an era now where the major industries that humans have created can influence people on the planet in ways that were never the case. Again, in 1850, we weren’t talking about planetary impacts of particular industries. Now, we have to contend with that and it makes sense for us to become, for example, in America, the dominant power and sustainable materials and sustainable energy. Why would we not do that? Because that’s going to be what saves people on the planet. By the way, it’s going to make a ton of money for our economy, and for the innovators and entrepreneurs who are doing it.
Bant Breen:
Oliver, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
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