What is Good and Useful?

I invest in things that I want to exist in the world. Things that are Good and Useful.

In the last 5 years, I’ve invested in nearly 50 companies and venture funds. Most of those investments (40+) were “angel investments” — investing my own capital directly into very early stage companies as they were just getting started.  Investing is focused on gains: you put amount X in with the goal of getting X+gains back, or likely with the goal of getting 2-3X (typical) or even 100X back (which gets a lot of press but is a huge outlier).  When I invest in an early stage company or a venture fund, I want gains on my investment, but I want something more as well. I want positive impact to people and places when the product or service is in the hands of its customers. I look for teams, products, and companies to invest in that are Good and Useful.

When I started investing, I had to use my core values and instinct to evaluate opportunities.  I would get excited about the idea of the company/product/service/team and have this very strong feeling that it was something I wanted to exist in the world.  A perfect example of this is when I invested in Backstage Capital, in 2015, as Arlan Hamilton’s first limited partner investor.  I think I actually used the words “I want this to exist in the world” when I agreed to invest at the time.  She was doing something that was so different and so needed, and even if it took a long time or didn’t fully work out as planned (spoiler alert: it got big, fast), I wanted to help her to get a real start, which would in turn allow her to help all of the underrepresented founders in her pipeline.

I talked about my interest in things that are Good and Useful in the Backstage Capital documentary “jOURney”. (Use the link to jump to my statement about “Good and Useful,” 5 minutes into the doc.)

To get my interest, investments should have both potential financial gain and be Good and Useful.  I look at potential financial gain first, as a baseline - this is more of a calculation and less of a values-based and subjective judgement.  Then I look at whether it’s Good and Useful and even try to judge how much of those things it is.  I might see something that has the potential to make a ton of money, but doesn’t satisfy Good and Useful enough for me to go for it. 

I quickly found that, for me, choosing investments is about values and impact.  Being Good and Useful are part of my core values, and I choose teams, products and companies that are aligned with these values and primed for impact.  To me, Good is a moral judgement, as in “not evil”.  It’s something that improves conditions, and/or mitigates and prevents harm.  Things that are Good do the right thing, they do the just thing, and they increase equality, for the benefit of a diverse spectrum of society.  Useful is anything that makes a productive impact and improves its user’s experience when it is applied. It is a measure of practicality. Something Useful solves a real problem for real people and improves what it’s applied to (processes, scope of opportunity, enfranchisement, etc.)  This is my definition and it can be different for others. And, there’s nothing that says that all investors are not also looking to invest in things that are “good” and “useful”.  It’s my shorthand for the values alignment I look for.

By combining my assessment of the potential for returns with my values-based assessment of Good and Useful, I am able to invest with a multi-faceted thesis across a broad range of industries.  I thought Backstage Capital was Good and Useful in providing a solution for the gap in the market of underestimated founders and companies that were overlooked by most investors.  I’ve invested in a handful of companies that are applying technology and business solutions to diversify candidate pipelines for hiring.  I’m an executive producer (which I think of as the media equivalent of investor) for We Are Not Princesses, a documentary film that raises awareness for, and humanizes, the refugee experience of Syrian women living in Beirut.  I’ve invested in companies that use technology to solve for challenges in everything from government procurement to vacation rental management that all have aspects to their businesses of driving economic and social equity.  The common thread amongst these examples is that they fit my definition as something that is Good and Useful, they are entities that I want to exist in the world, and they are things that I want to have an impact on.

If you are working on something that is Good and Useful, I want to hear about it.