In a recent post on my personal blog, I shared about my fundraising journey for Fairbridge Park. Since our first close, we have invested in six companies. This is the first in a series of posts where I will provide insight on where we see opportunity today. In the future, I will discuss characteristics of a good investment for the fund, and why we picked the companies we invested in.
Fairbridge Park’s mission is to be the partner of choice for teams that are tackling important socioeconomic problems with effectiveness, profitability, and scale. I developed a passion for this mission at a young age and I now firmly believe that commercial enterprise is the model with the best structure of rigor, incentives, and accountability. When I completed business school 10 years ago, I actively sought a role to partner with purpose-driven teams building “better-for-you” consumer products. My goal was to investigate the business case for purpose-driven investing and to deeply understand company operations. At Fairbridge Park, I am bringing lessons I have learned on how good businesses operate. I am also building on the “better-for-you” thesis by focusing on a narrower set of important problems and by clearly defining and measuring the impact our companies achieve. There are two fundamental inputs driving our thesis:
I believe we are in the early innings of both trends. Technological innovation and its rate of distribution globally are accelerating at breakneck speed. A growing awareness and the severity of socioeconomic challenges is attracting the most brilliant entrepreneurs and capital in search of solutions. We have a unique opportunity to solve pressing problems with a superior model. At Fairbridge Park, we actively pursue partnerships with purpose-driven teams building companies that fall at the intersection of these two trends. We also enjoy partnering with like-minded Limited Partners.