| So I moderated this conversation last night and there are a couple of important elements to keep in mind. 1. This is actually happening. Rafe Furst, who is the investor who first put this into action, has actually made this sort of investment in at least 2 (and maybe more now) people. So it's jumping off the page. 2. The Thrust Fund model that this article discusses and that Kjerstin (the girl in question) is working on is slightly different, in that it is more heavily focused on social sector organizations, where the "gain" for investors is even more complex then just making a new type of financial bet. 3. The reason this is coming up for mission related ventures is that there is simply less funding available for social (vs. web) startups, the costs of building a successful organization are often higher, and frankly, the entrepreneurial class is just at an entirely different place than the foundation class that has traditionally been in charge of funding nonprofit ventures. 4. What came out of the conversation last night is that this is not a type of investment that someone would make for a purely financially strategic reason, although Rafe would argue that it's extremely financially strategic in that you get a piece of a rockstar's success, wherever that success comes from. Instead, most investors that I've seen interested in this (and a couple made commitments on the spot last night) are thinking about this as a new way to combine mentorship and investment. |