A financial company focused on facilitating funding for businesses in LMICs, like a broker-dealer, private equity fund, private credit platform (like Centrifuge), or even a stock excange.. The main positive impact is basically accelerating economic growth by increasing the availability of finance.
As a particular example, a few years ago, someone mentioned that emerging market infrastructure bonds attract limited investor attention as they have long duration (20 years) and thin secondary markets (so you often actually have to wait 20 years to cash out).
This might require some financial engineering to work, such as using a SPAC or tokenization to make these investments liquid, or bundling loans to reduce total risk.
My experience is that investors can be hesitant about private deals in emerging markets, so nurturing investor relations should be a huge focus area for such a business.
Given many problems of a contemporary research ecosystem, I would take a look at a decentralized science space for novel models of funding research, most likely aiming to create a platform company.
It’s also worth exploring the regenerative finance space. Though I find many ReFi not very promising or impactful, there are probably golden nuggets there. I spoke to a few people exploring a speculative but interesting idea of tokenizing in-ground gold reserves to make them tradable without extraction, thus mitigating carbon emissions.
I’m excited about privacy-preserving identity proofs (e.g., for KYC purposes), though this will require significant regulatory work to get traction. I spoke to two founders who built some technologies but didn’t deploy them due to regulatory challenges.
There are probably many good opportunities in deep tech, such as asteroid mining or gene therapy
On a side note, I think it’s useful to design an impact-focused business in a way that makes “value drift” less likely, e.g., by incorporating as a benefit corporation, having a stakeholder representation on a Board and/or an ethics committee, explicitly tracking impact, and nurturing positive corporate culture. I also speculate that worker cooperative model reduces propensity to engage in rent-seeking, but don’t have good evidence for that.
Thanks for this Boris! Very interesting. We’re exploring a couple of ideas broadly in this space.
We think essentially all ideas that get more investment into LMICs are interesting from an impact perspective; we’ve heard a number of angles on this. It’s a bit of a challenge to make sure you develop something ‘at the right level’, because the current state of development of the investment markets in most LMIC would require very highly risk-tolerant capital (which there currently is not a lot of), so we think solutions are more promising if they would plausibly lead to a higher total volume of investment coming in (e.g. if the founder comes from the investment side and has their eyes on concrete investors that are currently not investing in LMIC but would if X or Y was the case)
I’ve noted some of your ideas on our long list to explore! As I think you also flag towards the end of your comments, I think a couple of these would likely be interesting if we were to get applications from founders with deep domain expertise in these topics. We have had some people in the pipeline with experience in e.g. privacy-preserving identity proofs so that might be interesting to dig deeper into once we’re more clear on our top candidates.
We will definitely explore ed tech models; I like these examples that you gave. It will be interesting to see if some of the more commercial edtech successes in Western companies can translate to more LMIC markets where we would expect that effect on educational outcomes will be much larger but the spending on edtech solutions is likely much smaller; we’re exploring a couple of different ways to monetize.
Thanks again! We might post some of the results of our research into specific ideas on the forum at a later point!
Some ideas / sectors for impactful businesses:
A financial company focused on facilitating funding for businesses in LMICs, like a broker-dealer, private equity fund, private credit platform (like Centrifuge), or even a stock excange.. The main positive impact is basically accelerating economic growth by increasing the availability of finance.
As a particular example, a few years ago, someone mentioned that emerging market infrastructure bonds attract limited investor attention as they have long duration (20 years) and thin secondary markets (so you often actually have to wait 20 years to cash out).
This might require some financial engineering to work, such as using a SPAC or tokenization to make these investments liquid, or bundling loans to reduce total risk.
My experience is that investors can be hesitant about private deals in emerging markets, so nurturing investor relations should be a huge focus area for such a business.
Given many problems of a contemporary research ecosystem, I would take a look at a decentralized science space for novel models of funding research, most likely aiming to create a platform company.
It’s also worth exploring the regenerative finance space. Though I find many ReFi not very promising or impactful, there are probably golden nuggets there. I spoke to a few people exploring a speculative but interesting idea of tokenizing in-ground gold reserves to make them tradable without extraction, thus mitigating carbon emissions.
I’m excited about privacy-preserving identity proofs (e.g., for KYC purposes), though this will require significant regulatory work to get traction. I spoke to two founders who built some technologies but didn’t deploy them due to regulatory challenges.
There are probably many good opportunities in deep tech, such as asteroid mining or gene therapy
I’m also quite excited about education (see Primer or Dynamicland)
Concerns:
Can be hard for a generalist founder
Mostly don’t target LMIC
On a side note, I think it’s useful to design an impact-focused business in a way that makes “value drift” less likely, e.g., by incorporating as a benefit corporation, having a stakeholder representation on a Board and/or an ethics committee, explicitly tracking impact, and nurturing positive corporate culture. I also speculate that worker cooperative model reduces propensity to engage in rent-seeking, but don’t have good evidence for that.
Thanks for this Boris! Very interesting. We’re exploring a couple of ideas broadly in this space.
We think essentially all ideas that get more investment into LMICs are interesting from an impact perspective; we’ve heard a number of angles on this. It’s a bit of a challenge to make sure you develop something ‘at the right level’, because the current state of development of the investment markets in most LMIC would require very highly risk-tolerant capital (which there currently is not a lot of), so we think solutions are more promising if they would plausibly lead to a higher total volume of investment coming in (e.g. if the founder comes from the investment side and has their eyes on concrete investors that are currently not investing in LMIC but would if X or Y was the case)
I’ve noted some of your ideas on our long list to explore! As I think you also flag towards the end of your comments, I think a couple of these would likely be interesting if we were to get applications from founders with deep domain expertise in these topics. We have had some people in the pipeline with experience in e.g. privacy-preserving identity proofs so that might be interesting to dig deeper into once we’re more clear on our top candidates.
We will definitely explore ed tech models; I like these examples that you gave. It will be interesting to see if some of the more commercial edtech successes in Western companies can translate to more LMIC markets where we would expect that effect on educational outcomes will be much larger but the spending on edtech solutions is likely much smaller; we’re exploring a couple of different ways to monetize.
Thanks again! We might post some of the results of our research into specific ideas on the forum at a later point!