‘We need to shift the entire system to a very different one that has led us to where we are today’ 

Those were the words of Daniela Barone Soares during our recent insightful conversation. Daniela is CEO of Snowball, an impact investing fund focused on mission aligned businesses solving social and environmental problems.

During the episode, Daniela ran me through Snowball’s investing strategy, where the impact case is the investment case. ‘We need to find ways of communicating a common framework to investors in a way that investors can compare and contrast across companies’. They view impact as something that must be measurable and not just qualititative.

But how do you quantitatively compare the impact potential of a company helping poverty-stricken individuals to a company helping autistic people find work? ‘You need to see how each one is executing against their own strategy’, she explained. ‘At every junction, impact as well as financial performance is informing our decision-making’. Snowball does not just measure impact at one moment, but always looks at how impact is changing and how it can improve over time.

You can hear the conversation in full on Episode #17 of Impactfull 🎯

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What drives Sabine Lochman? Meet an important figure in the ESG & sustainability landscape.

She explained her background and how she entered the industry after studying history and law before, and the skills she developed thanks to this pathway. She spent fifteen years at Johnson & Johnson, rising the ranks to become Managing Director of Government and Strategic Business before becoming Global Head of ESG Measures for Moody’s. She is now focusing on ASCEND, her own advisory practice at the crossroad of corporate law, sustainability and digital transformation.

But as with all things sustainability, it wasn’t all hope and visions of a prosperous future. “We are not on the train of only warming 2°C, but 3.5°C. And to make it simple to listeners, that would mean the sea levels would rise by 1.5-2m, giant fires, and mass migration”, warned Sabine.

“This is not something we can forget and think it can be done by the future generation. It must be done now”, she continued. Cross-fertilization is needed for different generations to cooperate and work together to find and execute a solution.

Nevertheless, I left the conversation feeling strangely hopeful for the future. Sabine showed me a clear path toward a greener world generated by a just transition for all and promoting nature and biodiversity. She used the global covid response as an example of the possibility to create a sustainable world overnight, demonstrating that a similar response is possible to solve the global climate crisis.

You can hear the conversation in full on Episode #16 of Impactfull 🎯 

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How can we improve the sustainability of big corporations: by boycotting their products, or by driving change from within?

Antoine Argouges believes it’s the latter, and founded Tulipshare to help individuals do this. Tulipshare allows users to buy stocks in publicly listed companies and aggregate these shareholders to drive change from within these corporations.

“To change the strategy of a business, you have to change the value it creates for its shareholders”, he argues.

Tulipshare is already reaping the rewards of this strategy, as it was able to drive change from within Johnson&Johnson, achieving 15% of voting support for discontinuing the sale of talc-based baby powder despite a collective ownership of ~0.00001%.

I had a super insightful chat with Antoine, as he explained how he entered the consumer space from the online dating industry before founding Tulipshare in an effort to revolutionize the system we live in which he is deeply unsatisfied with.

Antoine Argoues is committed to having a positive legacy on the planet and positively impacting people’s lives.

You’ll find all this and more in Episode #15 of Impactfull 🎯 

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‘There’s always a discrepancy between what companies want to disclose to investors and what investors should know’.

Those are the words of Patrick Wood Uribe: musician, teacher, board member of a social NGO, and CEO of Util!

Patrick is not your average CEO, having previously worked as a professional violinist and as a university professor. But also because he’s CEO of one of the most interesting startups in the sustainability ecosystem.

Util is an AI company that has built a universe of concepts all connected to the 17 UN SDGs and 169 targets. It does so by scanning 120 million articles and academic journals to provide evidence-driven sustainability data. It wants to answer a simple question: ‘How do you scale impactful investing?’.

I tackled Patrick on the unexpected findings from Util’s data points, and here is some of what I learnt:

👉 Renewable energy scores highly for ending poverty and hunger.

👉 Sports can be a source of peace.

👉 Covid was beneficial for gender inequality!

You’ll find all this and more on Episode #14 of Impactfull 🎯

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Joumana Hosri — clients call her “little miss sunshine” — is leading a 55-year-old family business into distributing solar panels in the middle east. Solar panels are supposed to be the perfect way to produce electricity under the scorching sun of middle eastern countries.

It’s the cheapest way to produce electricity in most parts of the world. Yet, solar energy generates only 3.6% of all the electricity we consume. What are the challenges to deploying it across the world?

This paradox is something I wanted to explore with Joumana. From financing hurdles to recycling materials and sourcing from China, I got my first masterclass on how this industry works and what is preventing further adoption.

In this episode you will learn:

It’s on Episode #13 of Impactfull 🎯

#impactinvesting

#solarEnergy 

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He’s not a relative of the famous Kobe Bryant but he’s a rising star, because what he does is important for our planet.

Vincent Bryant is the founder of Deepki, which raised > €160m to help real estate owners reduce their carbon footprints. So when I got the opportunity to interview him, I didn’t think twice.

Vincent believes that it’s too late to avoid climate change.  It's time to adapt.

“We are all on the bus. The question is no longer, shall we hit a wall? We will. The question is, at what speed?”

But he is also an optimist.

He replied: “You know real estate assets are always been vulnerable to physical risks (floods, heatwaves). Climate change is just making them more vulnerable. We are seeing a number of real estate assets that were not designed to withstand high temperatures — especially around the Mediterranean — and are therefore repurposed into less air-conditioning intensive assets such as car parks or logistic sites”.

What I’ve learned in the episode:

It’s on Episode #12 of Impactfull 🎯

Link to the episode in the comments ⬇

#impactinvesting

#ESG

#green real estate 

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How to fight child labor?

Few things are more disheartening than seeing a child, hammer in hand, breaking big rocks into smaller ones to sell for pennies. Yet a recent report from the UN estimates that child labor rose for the first time in two decades to 160 million globally as a result of the pandemic. Than 10% of all children on earth. Almost all of them are forced into it.

When I met Eleanor Harry and she told me her story, I felt guilty because I didn’t know anything about child labor. She grew up above a nursery. She became a teacher and then she worked in fashion where she research the topic. Now she uses AI to address it. I got curious.

Me: “Why is child labor important?”

“It deprives young minds of the basic education and social bonds necessary to thrive in a well-functioning society” she replied.

I felt stupid. Because when you put it this way it's obvious.

The topic is so vast and complex that it sometimes feels too far away.

But it affects most of us in the developed world because child labor is lingering in the supply chains of the products we buy.

What can we do about it?

Push companies to capture data in their complex supply chain, identify the root causes, and promote initiatives and projects that can help their suppliers fight it. Unfortunately, stopping working with those small suppliers is not fixing the problem.

In this episode, we talk about:

→ What is child labor (a lot), where it happens, and what we can do about it

→ Why you should read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari or watch Home a documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

→ Manchester City (disclaimer: this podcast was not sponsored by @Marketing Manchester)

My favorite quotes:

→ “London may be the capital but Manchester is the soul. This is where the industrial revolution started”.

→ “How do you learn the most? Don’t be the smartest in the room. Ask stupid questions”. 

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What makes Ananda special is that they have been supporting, over the last 13 years, high-social impact projects across Europe. They have deployed €200m to back startups that employ people with original and sometimes complex backgrounds, train them, and provide purposeful job opportunities. We discussed a some of them.

- Turning disabilities into superpowers with robotic prostheses (Open Bionics)

- Bringing the skills of autistic people into the IT sector (Auticon)

- Addressing the global mental health crisis with digital therapy (IESO)

Ananda is first and foremost a human adventure. So when Florian agreed to tell me about its humble beginnings, I listened.

It all started with a "road trip" across Germany to find social entrepreneurs. 12 years ago my peers from Venture Capital asked "what are you doing, can you live from this, are you sure, this is not VC" now they call me for advice about impact investing, I think the perception turned 180 degrees.

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Nous n'héritons pas de la terre de nos parents, nous l'empruntons à nos enfants.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

C’est une citoyenne de ce monde prête à relever tous les défis. Née à Téhéran, passée par Paris, Tokyo et New York, sa mission aujourd’hui est d’aider EDF, le plus gros producteur d’électricité en occident à mesurer la performance extra-financière du groupe.

L’échange est riche, et j’ai réalisé à quel point EDF était incarné par 3 autres lettres: ESG.

Il est rare de trouver un groupe dans lequel les enjeux d’environnement (renouvelables, nucléaire, électricité), le social (syndicalisme, formation de plus de 160000 collaborateurs), et de gouvernance (actionnaire étatique, responsabilité civile) sont si présents.

J’ai passé une heure à décrypter avec elle les dessous de cette entreprise singulière, ainsi que son engagement personnel pour la planète et la société.

→ Comment le nucléaire donne du sens aux renouvelables pour accompagner une transition énergétique durable

→ À quel point il est difficile de préserver l’équilibre entre les besoins des Hommes et ceux de la planète.

→ Le besoin de repenser l’extra-financier en entreprise non pas comme une contrainte bureaucratique mais comme une opportunité stratégique et humaine.

→ L’importance de donner aux mauvais élèves de l’ESG l’envie de progresser pour rattraper les premiers de la classe. 

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The sustainability landscape is an exciting mess. Some call it diverse and rich. Others call it bullshit. It’s definitely hard to understand all the pieces of the puzzle.

That’s why I’ve spent the last 6 months interviewing people operating behind the scenes to help sustainability projects mature and thrive.

One of them is Maxime Mathon, a master networker connecting people across the sustainability value chain (consultants, agencies, regulators, investors, and other stakeholders).

I’m amazed by his depth of knowledge and breadth of expertise in this domain. Together, we scratched the surface of sustainability:

→ How ESG investing started in the 2000s

→ Cultural differences between the EU and the US

→ Why open data is going to play a major role in the future

→ The benefits of a multi-stakeholder approach

→ The evolution of global reporting standards

It’s on Episode #8 of Human Finance 🎯 

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