Risk & Failure

Interesting article on risk and the appetite for it (or not) in the Harvard Business Review. Sir Ronald Cohen argues that the social or impact investing is where the VC market was 35 years ago and that ultimately we will see a consolidation and standardisation of the ways in which this type of investment is done.

Certainly the efforts to raise alternative funds continues apace although I can't help but think that, in many cases, some of these efforts are simply re-packaging existing funds.

At VPF we have had some success along the VC model but by using unrestricted grant funding as the initial seed investment followed by the availability of genuine investment once a business model has been proven and it is a case of scaling that model.

Perhaps the issue is not one of accepting risk but of the right people making the choices using the years of experience  of objective and subjective decision-making?