Ag Faceoff: For-profit or Nonprofit, Which Wins the Social ROI Contest?
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Session Description
If you had $1 million to invest to improve outcomes for smallholder farmers, would you invest it as equity or make a grant? For-profit or nonprofit: which generates the higher social return on investment? Four expert practitioners will share their evidence and argue the case. They’ve made up their minds. Will they change yours? Let’s debate and then decide. Come ready to mix it up!
FORMAT: DEBATE
Time & Location
Time:
15:45 - 17:00, Wednesday, April 13, 2016
BST
Location:
SBS, Rhodes Trust Lecture Theatre
Speakers
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Speaker
Chief Investment Officer, Builders Asset Management
Alan Chang is Chief Investment Officer at Builders Asset Management, the investment arm of Builders Vision – a family office dedicated to promoting a healthy and humane planet. He previously served as Partner, Managing Director and Investment Committee Member at Capricorn Investment Group, where he spent 15 years. Prior to Capricorn, Alan worked at DFJ New England (now New Atlantic Ventures) in venture capital and at Montgomery Securities (now Bank of America Merrill Lynch) in corporate finance as well as mergers and acquisitions. Alan is a CFA charter holder and received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.S.E. from Duke University, graduating cum laude with a triple major in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Art History.
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Speaker
Willy Foote is founder and CEO of Root Capital, a nonprofit that offers farmers around the world a path to prosperity by investing in the agricultural businesses that serve as engines of impact in their communities. Root Capital provides these businesses with the capital, training, and access to markets they need in order to grow, thrive, and create opportunities for thousands of farmers at a time. Since its founding in 1999, Root Capital has provided more than $1.7 billion in loans to 770 agricultural businesses in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Together, these businesses have bought and marketed crops for 2.4 million smallholder farmers, reaching over 10 million people in rural communities.
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Moderator
Richard Fahey served as Chief Operating Officer of the Skoll Foundation from 2004 to 2021, where he contributed to the fulfillment of the Foundation’s mission to drive large-scale change by investing in, connecting, and celebrating social entrepreneurs and the innovators who help them solve the world’s most pressing problems. Richard now serves as Special Advisor to the Foundation.
As COO, Richard led the Skoll Foundation’s finance, impact measurement, technology, and other business management functions. He was the key executive staff interface between the Investment Committee and the Capricorn Investment Group which manages the Foundation’s endowment. Richard worked closely with the Foundation’s investment manager to align the Foundation’s investment capital with its mission.
Prior to joining Skoll, Richard spent nearly 25 years with the Hewlett-Packard Company in a variety of senior operations, infrastructure, finance policy, and controller positions. He earned his B.A. at Georgetown University in Economics and History, and his M.B.A at the University of Chicago.
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Speaker
Managing Principal, Capricorn Investment Group
Ion Yadigaroglu has been Managing Partner at Capricorn Investment Group since 2004, and is an early investor in iconic technology companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, QuantumScape and Saildrone. Capricorn was born from the desire to demonstrate the huge investment potential that resides in breakthrough commercial solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, and as such is one of the original impact investors. Prior to Capricorn, Ion was a Director with Koch Industries, executing a range of acquisitions and investments. Prior to Koch, he was a founder and Chief Executive Officer at Bivio, a software startup in Colorado, and the second employee of Olsen & Associates, a foreign exchange analytics company. Ion was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University and holds a Masters in Physics from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich in Switzerland and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Stanford University.
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Speaker
Andrew Youn co-founded One Acre Fund in 2006. Most of the world’s poor are farmers, and One Acre Fund helps make them more productive. One Acre Fund provides finance, farm input delivery, and training to smallholder farmers in East Africa. One Acre Fund has 9,000 full-time staff who serve 1,600,000+ families per year, plus 2,000,000+ more families through partnerships across 9 African countries. Andrew graduated from Yale, is a former management consultant at Oliver Wyman, and received his MBA from Kellogg School of Management.
