Impact investors often talk about a new type of investment: patient capital (a term perhaps coined by Thomas Friedman and widely used by Acumen Fund). As opposed to traditional venture capital, patient capital has longer time horizons before investors start demanding a return. For-profit social
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This is the first post in a weekly series covering each of Fast Forward’s nine tech nonprofits. LinkedIn gives us connections, resources, community and advice. All are at our fingertips. Those are essential parts of the career development process for anyone entering the workforce. But
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Last night, after dinner, Fast Forward had the pleasure to welcome Oliver Hurst-Hiller, Chief Technology Offier of DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose.org is an exemplar tech nonprofit that many startups hope to become. With $330M in donations from 1.7M people, an astounding 60% of American schools have hosted projects
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Josh Nesbit, CEO of Medic Mobile talked at the accelerator on Wednesday. His work on last-mile health care started when he had the audacity to jailbreak a Nokia phone. Medic Mobile started in 2009, making Josh a veteran and leader in the tech nonprofit sector.
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On Wednesday, Scott Roen, Managing Director of Global Digital at BlackRock, advised the Fast Forward cohort on effective use of analytics. Scott suggested using analytics in three ways: Product design : you should validate that you’re creating something people actually want Growth optimization : take
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Yesterday formal programing for the summer accelerator launched. Our cohort of nine startups —focused on a range of issues, from using technology to get food to the hungry to expanding financial access to prioritizing clean energy to power smart devices—gathered at BlackRock in San Francisco.
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Today Benn Stancil, Chief Analyst at Mode (formerly at Yammer, Microsoft and the Carnegie Endowment) gave a talk on data analytics and finding your organization’s growth engine. Rundown of key learnings below but wanted to share the success story he told us about: Benn worked
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We see a lot of tech nonprofit pitches. A lot. In all those pitches we’ve seen five common storylines: Feature storyline: These are all the amazing things this product does! Technology storyline: Here’s the tech problem we solved. Timeline storyline: I started the company in
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We are thrilled to announce the groups that will be joining us for this summer’s accelerator. We had incredible success last year and decided to nearly double this year’s class. We had to get extra selective due to the high volume of applications. And while we
Keep readingTen years ago the startup landscape was very different. There were no accelerators, investor platforms, or founder communities. Since 2005, ecosystem players like Y Combinator and AngelList have changed how startups start. Today, the tech nonprofit landscape looks a lot like it did for startups
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