Social Capital
Social Capital
Social captial asks the question, “can an investor do well by doing good?”
Can It Be Done? The Patagonia Question
Social capital is a topic I have spent a lot of time with, both in my writing on this blog and website and in my own thinking. One pivotal moment for me was the SOCAP Conference in San Francisco, which is coming back in person this year (though I unfortunately will...
Social Capital Resources
For some of you close to me, SOCAP is a way-too-familiar refrain. SOCAP Global is an annual conference devoted to social capital or impact investing held in San Francisco. I love it and I talk about it often. When I first attended SOCAP in 2018, it was an eye-opening...
Is Social Capital Doing Good?
You know who’s not good at fighting fires? Arsonists. - Anand Giridharadas In the late nineteenth century, New York City had a huge pollution problem: horses. Specifically, horse poop, which littered the streets. The average...
Can Social Capital Investments Produce Market Rate Returns?
In order to properly frame this question, we first need a working understanding of a few shared terms. First: what is a market rate of return? Here’s a definition from My Accounting Course (emphasis added by me): Definition: Market rate, or the going rate, is the rate...
Issues Surrounding Social Capital
Social capital is an area ripe for controversy. Not that social capital, in and of itself, is bad or wrong -- few would say that doing well by doing good is a bad thing. Most people involved in social capital want to find ways to both succeed financially and succeed...
Introduction to Social Capital and Impact Investment
The first in a series of First Avenue Ventures blog posts on Social Capital. Social capital is a concept not easily nor well-defined. In this series, we define social capital as the use of capital (for our purposes, we examine it primarily as financial capital)...