Social Entrepreneurship

Man, I love the internet. I've just started a new business overnight that I actually think has promise. Would you pay $1.99 a month to keep track of fields that you care about, but just don't have the time to be heavily involved in?

The last year has seen a resurgence in the email newsletter as a social medium. High profile tech leaders like Jason Calacanis have abandoned blogging in favor of a direct email list. Companies like Thrillist and Groupon have built million (or billion) dollar businesses on the backs of email. And people are starting to notice.

Last year, I started "NList," a personal mailing list designed to make it easier for me to share things I thought were important, enlightening and interesting with friends and acquaintances -- many of whom I don't regularly see or speak with. I've averaged about one NList every 4-6 weeks. It's been an amazing experiment and I hear all the time from people who love the personality and immediacy of the medium.

When I saw letter.ly, a new startup from Sam Lessin, I had to try it. The idea is simple: paid newsletter subscriptions. You sign up for an account, set any price you want, and you're off to the races.

While most of the early users are charging for their personal newsletters, I'm in a slightly different position. My NList is about the social experience of staying in touch, and I'm not going to add a pay wall to that. When it comes to my specific industry knowledge, I already have this blog which I update ~30x/month. Not to mention a constant stream of Posterous, Twitter, and Facebook shares.

I started thinking, however, about all the people I talk with who are interested in social entrepreneurship, but only tangentially connected to the field. They don't necessarily have time to follow the day-to-day rhythm and pulse of the field. For them, the quantity of content on blogs like this actually become a barrier to entry because they don't know what to focus their limited time and attention on.

The 4th of July is a day to celebrate the most important parts of the American idea. For me, nothing is as important to our sense of national identity as the belief that people always have more they can achieve and more they can give. On this holiday, it's worth pausing to recognize a new generation of startups founded upon that very same principle.

A fascinating story circling around the internet these days is the recent discovery that Thomas Jefferson replaced the word "subjects" with "citizens" in the declaration of independence. Whether it was just a typo or an actual inflection point in the language of the Founding Fathers, we don't know, but regardless, the difference between the terms is significant.

The difference between subject and citizen is all about agency to create the shape of the future. Citizens engage and participate in their own destiny, and as such, the shift from subject to citizen required an expansion in beliefs about of what individuals were capable. That expansion continues today, as it gets harder and harder to think that the differences in economic achievement around the world have to do with talent or capacity.

Bill Clinton often says something like "talent and creativity are distributed equally across the world, but opportunity is not." That's true, but it is not only opportunity that is distributed unequally. Our assumptions about what people have the capacity to do have dictated the shape of our institutions, which in turn has segmented the world into the capable and incapable.

From the moment people enter schools, we begin to make assumptions about what people can and can't achieve and put them onto tracks that make those assumptions self-fulfilling prophecies. Good luck to a kid determined to be slow early on. For people who come from poor places and poor backgrounds, these assumptions begin even earlier than that.

I've kept a quote book for over a decade (I have several volumes now) and I love them. So, as a follow-up to my last education-funding post, I had to share some with you. Maybe you can add them to your own volumes.

Founder of Vittana Kushal Chakrabarti has some poignant appeals for investing in higher education in developing countries. "Students have done everything they’ve been told to do, got good grades, and worked hard to get into college. There are no student loans in developing countries. It doesn’t matter if you’re admitted to top schools if you don’t have the money. We’re working toward a common goal in providing 12 years of education,” Kushal says, “but we’re dropping them off at the last one mile. What if you put in a few hundred dollars and could tip that?”

Kushal sees his program and those like it as the next step in education investment. He says, “Education is not just about literacy; it is about being able to make a living. We know education is the one thing that breaks the cycle of poverty. Consider a family where your mom is stitching doctor’s pants versus a family where your mom is a nurse. You see life in a completely different way.”

Ashni Mohnot, Founder of Enzi, believes that when we invest in student's education, we are investing in the future of the world and we have the power to shape that future. She hopes that people will eventually use 401ks to invest in human talent like they would invest in stocks. "Let's allow ordinary people to shape the world they want to live in--to create more engineers or teachers," she says. "It's a completely new and almost crazy way to value human talent and invest in it, quite directly."

The idea behind both of these programs--to bring greater opportunity for students in developing countries--is summed up well by Ashni: "If you're smart, people will invest in you regardless of your background."

That's the kind of world I want to live in.

Photo Credit: Carol Mitchell

People working there will tell you that we're entering a new era of African talent, and it's being largely facilitated by the explosion in affordable mobile technology and computing power. Yesterday the State Department announced "Apps 4 Africa," a collaboration with Kenya's iHub incubator, Appfrica, and SODNET to get East African web developers designing applications to help their communities and countries.

Of all the social entrepreneur subcommunities, it's hard to find one as consistently creative, dynamic, and successfully collaborative as the group focused on unleashing African technology talent. While many of the organizations and individuals in the community have been involved much longer, as a whole it burst into many people's view a few years ago with the launch of Ushahidi.

Ushahidi began as a call by Keynan blogger Ory Okolloh to the East African tech community to help figure out a way to better track and create a collective memory of the violence that spread in the wake of the 2008 disputed elections. Since then, it has create an open platform that has been used to track violence, elections, and disaster response. Recently, many of the folks behind the platform have helped launch the iHub, an incubator and coworking space for Kenyan tech talent in downtown Nairobi.

Not long after that, Appfrica launched. Appfrica includes a media property that is one of the best sources for African tech news and commentary and Appfrica Labs, which is part web development client firm and part incubator for new home built applications. They've done an array of awesome things, including their ongoing work with Ushahidi to create a machine intelligence tool for separating valuable, usable information out of the general social media stream in the wake of a disaster.

The State Department, again displaying the collaborative jones we've written about being impressed with before, is helping coordinate and add weight and heft to the competition. The team at State behind this project include some of the folks who worked with Ushahidi and other civil technology organizations to establish tools for relief in Haiti after the January earthquake.

The App 4 Africa contest will bring together the African tech community with local civil society. Local organizations will suggest challenge areas ranging from better development information to governance reporting issues to whatever they can dream up, which will seed the field of applications that developers will be asked to build.

Citizens can submit ideas through a variety of social media means, and the contest is open to any developers from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. International folks can participate as mentors if they have valuable skills to contribute.

The contest runs through August 31st. Check out the Apps 4 Africa website to learn more.

Photo credit: Barcamp Nairobi at iHub by whiteafrican

Hot on the heels of last week's announcement of venture funding for rural lighting startup D. Light Design, the Omidyar Network's has announced more funding, although this time it's from their nonprofit grant-making arm. They will give $2.3 million to Global Voices, mySociety, and the XYZ Show -- all startups that bridge technology and global good.

The funding comes as a part of Omidyar's program to increase government transparency and accountability. The goal of their government transparency funding is to increase the foundation upon which people base their civic participation. The three grantees accomplish this goal in different ways.

Global Voices is the granddaddy of global change social media platforms. Since 2005 it has been giving people around the world, connect by common interests in political reform, international development, and social entrepreneurship the chance to write about the world as they saw it. It is often the best place to discover what engaged citizens of the developing world think about what's happening in their own countries, and to discover a few of development from another perspective. The new funding will support a significant strategic expansion, with an emphasis on discovering new voices from less-heard parts of the world.

MySociety.org is a web shop in the UK that has been taking advantage of an increased volume of publicly available government data to give citizens better information. Rather than just create one site or application, they have built a variety of platforms from tools to help get local needs like filled in potholes met to easier interfaces for discovering MP voting patterns. The grant from Omidyar will help MySociety collaborate with African nonprofits and developers to build similar platforms around the continent.

The other grantee is Keyna's The XYZ Show, a satirical television puppet show that lampoons major figures in the country, and enables dialog and conversation about difficult topics. For those who are skeptical of the value of that, just think about the importance of satire in American politics - the Daily Show, Colbert, South Park. These are the cultural artifacts that keep us honest even when our general discourse goes completely insane. The funding will help expand the reach of the program with online engagement, distribution and more.

Read more about the grants on Omidyar.net

Photo credit: ItzaFineDay

I've been working in the nonprofit sector long enough to observe a special brand of dysfunction that seems unique to the field. For awhile I just thought I worked for crazy people (which may be true), but I'm also realizing that their hands are tied when it comes to borrowing business principles that could make nonprofits more effective. Here's the top three reasons they can’t:

Number 1: The IRS
I recently co-founded the nonprofit Project LACE and on our initial application to the IRS for tax-exempt status I made a mistake; I showed a positive balance on our projected budget at the end of the year. Yes, that was a mistake. I just thought the nonprofits I previously worked for didn't know how to save money for a rainy day. I didn't realize the IRS prevents them from doing so. There is no permission for long-term financial planning (unless you are lucky enough to have an endowment). That's insane.

Number 2: Puritans
I just finished reading Dan Pallota's book Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential. He illustrates that nonprofit ideology is based on a Puritan mindset which encouraged making lots of money in business. The catch was, you had to feel guilty, give some of your money to the poor, and then you could feel good about it. However, if you chose a life of service to the church, for example, there was no room for selfish interests and sacrifice was the only penance you could pay for being born a sinner (because people, according to the Puritans are inherently evil). Pallotta argues that someone can sell expensive sneakers to poor kids in the ghetto, for example, turn around and give some of that money away to a children's charity, and be a hero. But if you choose to dedicate your life to charity, the only way you can be a hero is by sacrificing your interests and having a "missionary spirit" which basically means that you work for close to free. That creates burnout and does not attract top talent to nonprofits.

Tesla is one of the most visible companies pursuing a future of greener transportation, and one of the few electric car projects to actual try to design vehicles with an aesthetic that conveys power and sleekness. Yesterday the company made it's initial public offering, achieving a market capitalization of more than $2 billion.

Tesla is in the news pretty often. It is led by Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of PayPal whose other company SpaceX just successful put a rocket that will eventually carry people for private space travel into orbit. Recently, the company made news when it signed a big deal with Toyota to help fund the manufacture of it's first general consumer sedan.

I think the company is worth tracking from the social entrepreneurship vantage for a number of reasons. First, it's a major, major for-profit play (they raised $200+ million from their IPO yesterday) to lead the emerging alternative energy car generation. Second, I think in general, Elon Musk-sized ambition is worth keeping track of for young entrepreneurs.

I've written before that I worry that social entrepreneurship has something of an ambition problem. Too many of the young entrepreneurs I see don't feel like the big, game-changing play is something that's possible. I don't think at all that everyone needs to aim for an enterprise that impacts a billion people, but I think that every new entrepreneur has to believe deep in their guts that that is a plausible path should it be right for them and their business.

Tesla is just at the beginning. It has yet to create a mass market auto. It has immense financial and infrastructure hurdles to overcome. But there is something immensely exciting about it. It's the first American auto company to go public since Ford in 1956. If we're optimistic, it could herald the beginning of the new era of more sustainable transport.

Photo credit: jurvetson