Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Lewis Hower, Executive Director, University Impact Fund (Part 10)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What are your personal daily challenges?

Lewis: Personally, I’d love to help every organization that came through our door, and every single entrepreneur, and be able to provide them with, if not an introduction, at the very least resources of tools and readings they could use to help make them better.

Knowing that if I say, you know what, it just doesn’t fit with what we’re doing right now, but we can plug them into other opportunities, and they’re going to continue to make their organization as strong as it possibly can be – that’s a good start.

I think one of the other challenges – I don’t know the best way to say it – is the overall, broader market’s understanding or preconception, found in much of the traditional, institutional and financial world, that if the business is a micro-franchise in India or something, labels the business with a social tag, there’s an automatic, knee-jerk reaction that “we must be sacrificing returns somewhere, so this isn’t something that I can do.” While there hasn’t been a huge watershed of examples to prove that statement wrong, I hope there will be more.

So, I guess the challenge is getting people to pause, recognize [that there’s something worth exploring], and say, “You know what, we can view this in a different fashion. It is a different market, but there are clearly strong, scalable business models that exist.” And it’s going to take some creativity early on to figure out how to get these organizations funded.

Irina: Thank you, Lewis. Very insightful.

This segment is part 10 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Lewis Hower, Executive Director, University Impact Fund
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