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Joining the chorus

THE MANDATE TO ACT RESPONSIBLY ALSO PERMEATES others’ comments. At
an Ashoka event, Alan Webber, former managing editor of the Harvard
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Business Review and co-founder of Fast Company – and himself an entrepre-
neur – quips:

There are an enormously large number of startups that are replicat-

ing things that already exist. And so we kind of have the Department of
Redundancy Department, where it’s exciting because it’s my idea, but I
didn’t really check the landscape and there are already x number of peo-
ple already doing this, which you wouldn’t do if you were really doing a
business plan.

His co-panelist, Katherine Fulton of the Monitor Institute, adds to this, com-
paring the world today to that of a decade or two ago, noting how it should
be so much easier now not to forge ahead with something redundant: “In 24
hours now or 48 hours, anybody with a computer and some curiosity and
some smarts can figure out at least [the beginnings of who’s doing what]. And
that’s huge.”
The reasons not to start something when you can join are least of all to save
yourself the difficulty or embarrassment of failing to get much done. The real
reasons – the responsible reasons – are to better serve a cause.
Parag Gupta, whose Waste Ventures bolsters waste pickers’ livelihood and
dignity, claims that he never would have started this venture if he could have
joined someone else. He warns of fragmenting the field: splitting it into many
small pieces that are less effective than fewer organizations with better support
and more muscle:

The worst thing is to go off and you start something very similar to what
someone else is doing. Ostensibly, you’ve hurt the field more than you’ve
helped the field because you’ve now divided the philanthropic dollars, or
social investment dollars, in a way that doesn’t need to be divided.

Martin Fisher’s work at KickStart, lifting subsistence African farmers out of pov-
erty for decades, has won him all sorts of accolades. He confirms Parag’s warning,
despairing that, with so many new social entrepreneurs, he’s still “… competing
for the same limited money, which is getting spread very thin, and the truth is
that donors and impact investors aren’t particularly good at picking winners.”
Kevin Starr, who views philanthropic funding from the investor’s side of
the table, points to the huge waste that results from every social enterprise
going its own way: “There’s a huge R&D [research and development] burden,
which people don’t quite understand. The burden of R&D and sometimes
unwitting experimentation is tremendous.”

Necessary and unwelcome

MARK HECKER OF REACH INCORPORATED has revolutionized tutoring in
underprivileged schools and thought carefully about building an effective social
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enterprise. He, too, dissuades potential social entrepreneurs from starting ven-
tures for the wrong reasons:

What bothers me is the fact that it’s become such a cool thing to be a social
entrepreneur. My advice would be that it’s not. Becoming a social entre-
preneur should never drive what you’re doing. Feeling an intense need to
fix an injustice of some sort should be what drives you.

That intense need should push you to join someone else’s efforts, though few
try to:

If you’ve really found that thing that you’re passionate about and it needs
to be fixed and you feel like you can fix it, the most important step in
the process is to actually do a scan to see if anyone else is doing the work
already. And I think it gets skipped by everyone.

Mark offers as an example someone who sought him out for help in starting a
new organization to support teachers:

I talked with a guy very recently who’s interested in starting basically a

teacher residency program. His reasoning to start it was because he did
Teach for America and felt like his first year was wasted. And he was really
taken aback by the fact that I said, ‘All right, so what you want to do is
go work for Teach for America and get them to pilot a program where,
if someone’s willing to make commitment of a third year, then you offer
this support to them in year one. That’s what you’re trying to do: you’re
not trying to start a new organization.’ I think on some levels he was kind
of offended that he thought he had this [completely new] idea, and really
he had this idea for tweaking what was being done.

Some social entrepreneur support organizations, however, know the impor-

tance of reviewing the ecosystem. Echoing Green has provided seed funding of
$36 million over nearly 30 years to more than 600 social entrepreneurs. Some
of them have gone on to make a very big mark, including the founders of
Teach for America, City Year, and SKS Microfinance. As part of the applica-
tion for funding from Echoing Green, applicants fill in an Innovation Matrix,
a tool that Echoing Green fellows interviewed for this book found extremely
useful despite its straightforward nature. Applicants fill in a template in which
they describe three to five organizations most like their own. For each, they
describe the similarities; and then they describe the differences, including ways
that they think their organization is either better or fills an unmet need. The
template is just two pages long.
MARK HEEDED HIS OWN ADVICE, looking to see if he could embed his idea in
an existing organization. His idea was viewed favorably, but he couldn’t find
an organization that would invite him to join it.
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I think actually intrapreneurship [acting entrepreneurially within an exist-
ing organization] is a much more valuable skill than entrepreneurship. See
whether you think you’d have the ability to go work for [a suitable host
organization] and influence the work that they’re doing. I had some early
discussions with some of the other organizations in D.C. telling them
about my idea – organizations where I thought there were some similari-
ties. And I had some senior level people say, ‘I really like the idea and in
our younger years we would have liked that. But you’re not going to get
the support you need here.’

MARK SUMS UP much of this chapter, citing the organizational and personal
pitfalls of becoming a social entrepreneur:

It’s a lot less sexy to say, ‘I had this great idea, but it turned out with a little
research that someone else was already doing it, so I’m interested in going
to work for that organization.’ That’s a lot less sexy but it’s also … really
important. You might be the person that helps that organization get much
better. That’s really valuable. But it’s not as hip these days to go about it
that way.
If I didn’t need to do this [venture on my own] I would be happy not
to.

He adds further:

When the process … of becoming a social entrepreneur has nothing to do

with passion for a cause – it has only to do with passion for being a social
entrepreneur – that is misguided.

Misguided by disrespecting those you purport to serve. And misguided, as

well, by potentially diverting resources from organizations that are far more
deserving.