Impact

My definition of impact has evolved over time. In college, I believed impact meant social impact, driven by my social entrepreneurship work with Enactus, and my inner quest for equality. In investment banking after college, this definition of impact strengthened – as I helped mining conglomerates get bigger and richer, I felt the urge to ‘do better’ with my business skills. I found ‘impact investing’. I thought it the mecca: using my finance/ business skills to invest in impact-oriented startups. The free market capitalist and socially ‘left’ sides of me could finally meet. But, what counted as an impact investment? Uber has created millions of jobs in India, while several impact startups struggled to scale. Back then, I defined impact as the founder’s impact ‘intentionality’. Comparing Uber to an agri-tech impact startup was unfair – some problems perhaps needed an impact-oriented mindset to create impact. I believed this was especially true in education. As I spent time doing education investing and policy work, I was more convinced that education in India *needed* an impact lens. Startups could succeed and create impact, but the distribution of impact mattered too – what was the socio-economic status of kids benefiting from ed-tech startups?

But, impact in public systems is slow. Education is slower because it doesn’t create immediate electoral wins, since learning outcomes take time to change. The book Zero to One convinced me that startups were the fastest agents of change. I founded a consumer social startup to discover and share learning-oriented content. Through this process, I realized impact for me meant two things: 1) education equality 2) free and equal access to information. If there was free media reporting all important information (free speech), if everyone could access it equally (free-er social media), and if everyone was educated enough to make an informed decision (education) based on that information, that was impact. They may make a decision I disagree with, but they had everything they needed.

To further ‘equal access to information’, I thought about who decides what information gets amplified – editors/ publishers like the NYT and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. I got into crypto because of its promise to decentralize decision making on what information gets distributed and amplified. My belief in the near-term practicality of such a solution has since gone down, due to selection bias and technical challenges.

In business school, I finally nurtured my love for politics, policy and journalism. I took classes on the First Amendment and business models in investigative journalism. I want to support journalism that brings truth closer to more people. How do I do this at an ecosystem level? I could work on the business team at a news outlet.. but my gut tells me it won’t be as fulfilling.

So, where do I go from here? How do I now define impact? I believe my purpose always was, and will stay the same. The impact – my road to getting there – has yet again evolved. This time, I’ll try the indirect route – doing something else for work, and using the capital I accumulate over time – to drive the impact I want to see. It’s still true that some problems need an impact lens – free speech, investigative journalism, education equality. I want to support non-profits, advocacy work, impact-oriented startups in these spaces. But, I question if I’m taking the easy way out – it’s easy being the richer virtue-signalling outsider, giving $$, than being the 23-year old me doing the impact work myself. Knowing that I’ve tried the direct route for several years gives me comfort in trying the indirect route. To be clear, I’m not doing my job to give away $$ – I’m doing my job *for me* – for the intellectual satisfaction, for the status, for the quality of life it affords me. But I haven’t lost sight of the impact I want to create – I’m trying to take a longer-term, more forgiving approach. Bill Gates changed health outcomes for the world, with his $$. I hope I can do the same for free speech, investigative journalism, and education, with whatever resources I have. Beyond $$, I know that one day I will find my way to a more ‘direct’ route again.