At a demo day in San Francisco on Wednesday, Joyce Kim’s
presentation of her financial tech startup sounded a lot like a tech
startup pitching venture capitalists for funding. She scrolled through a slide
deck and stood at a podium, sporting a t-shirt of her startup.
Until she came to her financials. In a pilot, people around the
world used her tech to complete 6 million transactions country to country,
she said. The fees she collected came out to approximately 20 cents.
Ms. Kim’s venture is not a typical tech startup. It is not trying
to join the billion dollar club, and its goal is not to make money.
Her startup, Stellar.org, is one of a new breed of tech
non-profits whose ambition is for technology to help solve some of the world’s
most intractable problems such as global poverty and climate change. Ms. Kim
participated in Fast Forward, an accelerator funded in part by Google.org, the
philanthropic arm of Alphabet Inc.Google+0.64%,
and investment management corporation BlackRock Inc.
Also this week, startup accelerator Y Combinator announced a new
research lab, YC Research, designed to tackle work that requires a long time
horizon and seeks to answer very open-ended questions.
These non-profit startups are doing everything their for-profit
peers are doing: modeling themselves on lean startups, writing scalable
business models and attending accelerators.
“We’re not doing this with the goal of helping YC’s startups
succeed or adding to our bottom line. At the risk of sounding cliché, this is
for the benefit of the world,” wrote Y Combinator president Sam Altman.
The problems these startups take on resonate with what many in
Silicon Valley see as their mission to solve the world’s ills.
The demo day in San Francisco was the culminating event of Fast
Forward’s 13-week accelerator program. Started in 2014 by software entrepreneur
Kevin Barenblat, founder of social-marketing company Context Optional and
social entrepreneur Shannon Farley, founding executive director of Spark, the
largest network of Millennial philanthropists, Fast Forward provides workshops,
mentoring and $25,000 in seed money to a cohort of tech non-profits. Google.org
and BlackRock pitched in $1 million.
“The non-profits said they felt like weirdos because they didn’t
fit into tech accelerators as a non-profit, and they also didn’t fit into
non-profit communities as tech companies. This program is designed to bridge
these connections,” Mr. Barenblat said.
In addition to Stellar.org, eight other startups also presented.
They included TalkingPoints, a platform for parents who don’t speak English to
text a child’s teacher and Callisto, a confidential way to document and report
sexual assault. The founders were more diverse than those at most pitch events.
Of the nine founders on stage Wednesday evening, just two were white men.
The approximately 60 angel investors at the demo day opened their
wallets after the presentations ended, handing out about $150,000 in funding,
according to Mr. Barenblat.
“People can see the passion in the entrepreneurs, they understand
what their challenges are,” said Mr. Barenblat.
At the pitch event, held in warehouse-style San Francisco office
of Alphabet Inc., Ms. Kim played up her site’s technical chops. “Under the hood,
it’s a decentralized, distributed database,” she said. Before pursuing this
startup, Ms. Kim worked in venture capital before launching the startup a year
and a half ago.
Instead of measuring profits, Ms. Kim determines her success by
how many people her startup is able to impact. Her goal is to create the
financial system for the world’s poor. There are currently 2 billion “unbanked”
people in the world, so she has her work cut out for her.
Citation from Wall Street Journal (blog) : http://goo.gl/5cSvLo
No comments:
Post a Comment