When It Comes to Venture Capital, the Good Guys are Finishing First
Yesterday, our Chief Financial Officer, Alice Neuhauser, sat down with The Business Journals to discuss the role of Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) standards in choosing the right startups to invest in. As she notes, an increasing number of investors and consumers concerned with the ethical impact of companies has made the need for businesses to adopt ESG standards, and ethical policies more broadly, non-negotiable.
As anyone reading this email should know by now, 2021 was a record-breaking year for Venture Capital investments. What you may not know, however, is what kinds of companies benefited the most—and a closer look reveals that deals with companies prioritizing ESG are on the rise.
For us at Seismic, ethical impact isn’t an afterthought—it’s at the core of our selection process. Nowadays, ethics are not in conflict with performance, as once thought, but closely entangled with it. With a growing number of investors and consumers wanting to make a positive impact on the world, ethics can now serve to predict a company’s long-term sustainability. That’s why, when we choose startups that we think have the potential to “make it big,” we look at how they address such issues as climate change, waste management, and employment equity.
(For our own part, we’re requiring all our companies to pay their interns, and letting our companies’ employees set aside part of their bonuses tax-free to go toward student loan payments. To learn more about this, read what our CEO had to say here.)
This news comes at the heels of Alice’s feature in Invested Wallet, in which she offered some great advice to anyone seeking to invest in startups. One big tip from us: investing in Seismic’s entire portfolio of carefully vetted startups, as we build it, will get you over the time, resource, and wealth hurdles that make it difficult to know if you’re really picking the most high-potential investments.
To learn more about how we identify and nurture innovative startups to ensure they reach their full potential, please visit our offering page. There, you can also find a link to our newly created YouTube channel, as well as our SEC-qualified Offering Circular.