Fledge is a global network of conscious company accelerators and investment funds, helping entrepreneurs create impactful companies and co-ops at scale through intense, short programs filled with education, guidance, and a massive amount of mentorship.
Each city runs (up to) one session per year. Each city’s program is a bit different from the others’, but all are focused on mission-driven for-profit companies, and all invest in their fledglings.
Th educational curriculum is based on The Next Step books and online classes, taught to fill in any gaps in the key skills entrepreneurs need to know to succeed: strategy, financials, marketing, sales, funding, etc.
All our cities share a global network of hundreds of mentors, who share their experiences, advice, and connections in 1-on-1 meetings with participants.
Every day, week after week, we push the participants forward, iterating business strategy, financial models, marketing and sales plans, funding options, and investor and sales pitches, plus we put a special focus on storytelling. The result is intense and creates lasting value for years after the companies return home.
We have been refining this service since 2012 and, to date, have helped hundreds of companies from dozens of countries. We’re eager for more. Our goal is to help foster a wave of companies that make a measurable impact in the world, collectively improving the lives of everyone on the planet.
We invest $15,000 (Peru), €15,000 (Europe), or $20,000 (U.S.) into each company we invite to participate, using revenue-based equity, which aligns our interests with the founders, avoids any pressure to “sell out”, and lets us invest in just about any market segment and most any country in the world. Plus, we make introductions to impact investors and make follow-on investments from our family of seed funds.
Fledge is an impact accelerator, working with mission-driven for-profit startups from around the world, helping them achieve their impacts by teaching them how to succeed in their businesses. But what do we mean by impact? “What is impact?” is a question asked each year at SOCAP, at every Big Path Capital event, every Toniic gathering and Investors Circle national meeting. This...
Humans have been wearing clothes for millennia. Every piece of clothing for the history of mankind has been worn, washed, and ultimately thrown away. Some may get reused by others for a while, but until today, all clothing has eventually become trash. That all ended today. Today Levi Strauss & Co (better known as simply “Levi’s”) announced the first ever pair of recycled...
The seventh session of Fledge has started. Seven new teams hailing from five countries: Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania, the Philippines, and the United States. Seven more mission-driven, for-profit fledgling companies, with big dreams. African Chicken is a distributed grower of chickens in Tanzania, working with dozens of smallholder women farmers, providing them chicks, then aggregating and...
One of the biggest challenges of impact investing is in measuring the impact of the investments. One would think that this would be an easy, solved problem, but it is far from simple. The impact ecosystem is still working through multiple methods of measurements, few of which provide a single value which can be summed, compared, and tracked over time. The Pinchot Impact Index is one proposed...
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reported that companies waste 30% of the energy they consume. For many businesses, this is equivalent to overspending on energy by that amount to achieve current production levels. You’d think that increasingly sophisticated technology would help reduce this waste. However, overspending is often the result of decentralized and siloed decision...
The other highlight of the Investors Circle visit to Nairobi was the visit to the factory where BURN Manufacturing builds its cookstoves. Charcoal cookstoves, as charcoal is the most popular fuel used for cooking by urban and peri-urban Kenya. Factory, as in a fully-modern manufacturing facility, little different from those found in the U.S., Europe, Japan, or China. One large building filled...
Fledge has been importing African entrepreneurs to Seattle for the last two years. This week we finally got to visit a few in their home country, as part of an impact investing trip with Investors Circle. Unsurprisingly, there is no substitute to seeing their businesses first-hand vs. seeing pictures and movies while sitting in downtown Seattle at the Impact Hub. No amount of pictures can...
From the mouth of one of the inventors of the modern accelerator, Brad Feld, how accelerators came to be and why they work. Given Fledge is based on the program and learnings of TechStars, this is highly relevant to our program too, despite Fledge being focused on impact vs. technology.
Thank you Fred Wilson for pointing out the video.
The Social Entrepreneur podcast is for aspiring and early-stage social entrepreneurs; and for those who want to make an impact on the world. Stories about the grand challenges in the world and the solutions that they are creating. Why does Fledge exists??? Listen to the interview on Stitcher or Soundcloud or download it on iTunes. Links to the talks and companies mentioned in the interview: 1st...
Yusuf Tura came to Seattle as a lone refugee from Ethiopia at age 16 to escape war and conflict in the country at the time. Today, the Seattle cab driver’s life has been transformed by a decision he made after returning home in 2007. When he got to his home town, he was shocked. All the trees had been killed off and stripped away by pollution from stoves that burn wood and dung. The dirty...