“We believe if you combine purpose-driven terrific entrepreneurs solving the world’s biggest problems, you should outperform your peers,” he told Crunchbase News. “But that’s not the kind of stuff we wanted to invest in.” “We would get pitches for yoga mat cleaners, or people selling a lot of used clothing and putting it into a business model that just reeked of first world hubris,” he said. “When the fund first started, we did get a lot of people coming to us thinking of us as a social impact fund,” Beebe told Crunchbase News. At the same time, the firm was looking for “top venture performance.” It is by this reasoning the venture firm, also a B-corp, prefers to describe its investment strategy as “World Positive.” It’s a nuance that’s easy to miss, even for founders looking for cash. When the firm came together five years ago, the partners’ intention was “to invest in entrepreneurs we felt were purpose-driven and going after some of the world’s biggest challenges, or pieces of them at least,” said Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious. We suspected the latter, and we were right-for the most part. So to settle the confusion, we asked the firm directly to find out if we were getting caught up in semantics, or if this seemingly intentional differentiation stems from the fact that traditional impact investors have earned a reputation of being laissez-faire about returns. It’s a bold idea, and in its marketing material, San Francisco-based Obvious specifically states that it “invests only in companies where every dollar of revenue is also delivering some environmental or social impact.”ĭespite that promotional language, the firm doesn’t want you to call it an impact investor. Its mission? To invest in startups that make a positive impact on the world. Obvious Ventures was founded in 2014 by Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, along with Vishal Vasishth and James Joaquin. Freelance Writers: How To Pitch Crunchbase News.Something Ventured: Startup and VC Diversity.
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