Social Venturing
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I spent more than a year researching best practices in social enterprise support around the world. I backpacked through Europe, Australia and the U.S. to talk to more than 50 support organizations that specialize in empowering and training social entrepreneurs. I slept in hostel bunk beds, on friends' sofas and in countless AirBnBs. Driven by an insatiable desire to learn from the people behind the scenes - Social Venturers - I analyzed the pros and cons of various program models: selection criteria, curricula, Alumni support, teaching and facilitation styles, impact assessment, online learning tools, and so on. I published all of my research and invite you to take a deep dive into my discoveries by heading over to Social Venturers.
Tea After Twelve featured highlights of my adventure in Making Money By Doing Good. |
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Personal Branding as a Do-Gooder, August 2017, published in tbd*
“'Many Entrepreneurs and Business Owners completely avoid building their personal brand in fear of being seen as that shameless self-promoter', says Alex Pirouz in '5 Ways to Successfully Cultivate Your Personal Brand'. Hitting the nail on the head, anyone? I feel like a disappointment to Millennials: I don’t know how to brand myself; tooting my own horn is super uncomfortable. Despite all the cool work I do in different countries and the incredible people I meet and get to work with, I have trouble thinking of myself as something or someone who should be marketed let alone intentionally promoted. It’s simply not my jam." Read more. |
Building Ecosystems for Social Change
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The Eship Series, June 2017
Following Kauffman Foundation's inaugural Eship Summit, The Eship Series is a collection of reflections and thoughts captured in a mad writing marathon lasting three days post-Summit. Enjoy! |
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It's Love, Actually. Ending My One-Sided Relationship with Ecosystem Building, April 2017
"Ecosystem building and I have been going through a rough time lately. It’s not like we’re breaking up but it’s fair to say that we need some time apart, figure out what we see and value in one another, imagine life without the other, find some assurance that we are still in this for the right reasons. Over the last few weeks I have really started to question the value and appreciation of the work we are putting in day in and day out as ecosystem builders." Read more. |
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Virginia Venture Summit, April 2017
"In April 2017 I was fortunate to host a panel on social entrepreneurship at Virginia Venture Summit. I had invited a group of practitioners who were willing to spill the beans about what it means to run a social enterprise in Virginia. For all those who could not be there, here’s a quick recap: Following Felix Brandon Lloyd’s keynote about his journey as a social entrepreneur, the room had settled into an attentive silence. Ever since I moved to Richmond a year and a half ago, I have been advocating for social entrepreneurship and the power of business to be a force for good." Read more. |
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1 Million Cups Richmond, March 2017
1 Million Cups is a weekly event for local entrepreneurs to meet and present their startups to the thriving peer network of founders in Richmond. The coffee is highly encouraged. As the first speaker in 2017, I shared our lessons learned from Unreasonable Lab VA, discussed the role of purpose-driven business in Central Virginia and the B Corp movement. |
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RVA Womens Day, March 2017
"In early February, my colleague Kathy came over to my desk and told me about a B Corp she recently discovered, Beautycounter. 'I would like for Becky from Beautycounter to come to the office and talk about safe body care and beauty products — what do you think?' My response? Ab-so-lutely! Supporting female entrepreneurs who run socially responsible businesses is my THING. And in the true form of women hatching a grand plan, a waterfall of ideas ensued that tumbled out so fast we couldn’t stop ourselves." Read more... |
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Branding Your Startup Ecosystem, March 2017
What’s the story you tell yourself and others about your region’s or city’s startup scene? What is your brand? Do branding and marketing have a place in ecosystem building? Aren’t they corporate and antiquated terms anyway? During our last Startup Champions Network Summit we spent the better half of a morning working on best practices for ecosystem branding, a topic that I have put a lot of thought into since I came across Richmond Magazine’s headline “Are we the next Austin?” and thought to myself “Hell no!”; and it started even before that. Read more. |
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Strengthening Ecosystems for Social Entrepreneurs, February 2017
"I spent a good year visiting social enterprise support organizations such as incubators, accelerators, summer schools and universities in Northern and Western Europe, Australia, and parts of the United States. I spoke to more than 50 of such organizations to understand their programming, Alumni and mentor engagement, business models, approach to impact assessment and so on (learn more about Social Venturers)." Read more. |
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Startup Champions Network, since January 2016
Startup Champions Network (SCN) is a national community of practice of over 80 innovation ecosystem builders across the US. Founded in 2015, the mission of Startup Champions Network is to build a national network of best-in-class innovation ecosystem builders and connecting them to people, resources, and events around the nation to support their communities and their work. Read more about my experiences in Becoming a Startup Champion and Building Innovation Ecosystems: Highlights from the Startup Champions Summit. |
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Pre-accelerating student founders at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2016
In the first half of 2016, I ran a pre-accelerator for student entrepreneurs at Virginia Commonwealth University. In a team of four, we facilitated two cohorts within three months programming each walking them through labs of customer discovery, prototyping and pitching. "After twelve weeks of spending Thursday nights with our nine startup teams and uncountable boxes of pizza, we took a month off and jumped right into the next cohort. It’s time to reflect on the good and the bad and what’s next for a successful program." Read more in Passing The Torch. |
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Creative Mornings RVA, April 2016
As third speaker of Richmond Creative Mornings, I shared my story of growing up in socialist East Germany and making way way around the world until I found myself in Richmond, VA. See a recap of my talk on Creative Mornings RVA and peruse on my interview with Molly Hunter Korroch leading up to the talk. Special thanks to Gayle Turner who helped me tell my story in public for the first time and to everyone who came out and filled Dogtown Dance Theater to the last seat! |
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Social Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Startups
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What Military Fitness Taught me about Making it as a Solopreneur, September 2017
I have been with X-Team Fitness since I moved to the US in late July 2015. Originally I joined to shed a few pounds; little did I know that I would find much more than some weight loss. And weight gain. And a surprising amount lessons that I apply to my career path as a solopreneur. Read more. |
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Advice and Insights for Social Enterprise Startups, interview with Impact Boom
"There are so many heart warming stories out there and that's great, but if you're a social entrepreneur who wants to run a social venture be it for-profit or non-profit, I think every investor wants to see how their money is going to do good in the long run and not just be used up." Listen in. |
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How to Master the Business Model Canvas for Social Entrepreneurs, published in tbd*
With the wave of the Lean Startup Method, the business model canvas has become a regular in our startup vocabulary. You’ve maybe even tossed the term around yourself, but what does it actually mean and how do you actually implement it? Read more. |
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The Lean Startup for Social Entrepreneurs, published in tbd*
Pioneered by Eric Ries and Steve Blank (among many others) the Lean Startup approach suits the needs of social entrepreneurs. Not only because it keeps costs low (which matters as much in the bootstrapping startup environment as it does in the social space), but because it wraps the entire process of idea generation and development around the needs of the customer - the beneficiary. Read more. |
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Customer Discovery 101
A common challenge to startup and small business founders is the topic of customer discovery. So many founders fall in love with their idea instead of the problem and end up on a path that rarely leads to a genuine solution to a real problem. And I get it. Putting your idea out there to see whether strangers like it and would be willing to pay for it is intimidating. I’m not going to tell you that it’s not. Read more. |
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Sink or Swim: What's next for RVA's early-stage startups
If you have been following our journey over the past year, you know that we ran Virginia’s first social enterprise mini-accelerator last September. And before the program even started I found myself secretly wondering what is going to happen after. How were we going to continue if our first experiment proved successful? Read more. |
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What I talk about when I talk about Social Entrepreneurship
When I scanned the social enterprise news this morning, I was once more startled to come across an article titled “There’s no Such Thing As Social Entrepreneurship” followed by “How to Infuse Social Entrepreneurship Into Your Business and Still Make a Buck”. Both rubbed me the wrong way. Read more. |
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A Word on Social Innovation
Driven by our — the do-gooders' — constant desire for creating social change, nonprofits, governments, businesses and social entrepreneurs have embarked on a quest to seek the holy grail of innovation (read here why it’s not). We want to prove that we do things in a way that nobody has done them before, we venture off the beaten path to find a new approach that nobody before us has ever thought of. We are hungry for new, never-before-seen approaches of going about making a difference. We all want to be innovative. Read more. |
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Unreasonable Lab VA
See what we learned from running the first mini-accelerator for social entrepreneurs in the State of Virginia:Here's a great write-up by Molly Hunter Korroch in Richmond's own GRID Magazine. |
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What's your calling?
I originally wrote this post on a sleepless night in June 2016. It captures a lot of my daily work and why — even though it takes a lot of time and energy — I can’t give up this aspect of my work: Advising founders one-on-one. A couple of changes since the post initially went live: My mentees have changed, some dropped off, many new ones joined. More than ever, I think of myself as an advisor, not a mentor. Read more. |
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Business as a Force for Good: B Corp Certification and socially responsible business
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Field Notes on Inclusivity
Over the last two months, I have talked more about Inclusivity than in the previous five years combined. A good sign. No doubt. We’re making progress. My team and I dealt with criticism of not being inclusive enough at Unreasonable Lab Virginia, we discussed Diversity and Inclusion among a group of ecosystems builders from around the U.S., and I just returned from a three-day B Corp conference titled Towards an Inclusive Economy. Read more. |
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Measure What Matters: (Re-) Certifying as a B Corp, published on B The Change
I had barely gotten settled at my desk as a new B Keeper when the deadline for our re-certification appeared on the horizon. I assumed that answering a catalog of questions and providing some documentation could hardly take more than a month. Obviously, I had never gone through the process! To make things more complicated, I knew little about the internal workings of the company I had just started with, nor had I met all of my new colleagues. Read more. |
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