Since 2011, Kapor Capital has invested exclusively in “impact” startups. While the term has become trendy lately in the venture capital world, and often misused, we’ve always had a very specific definition for what we consider impact to be.
Quite simply, we are committed to closing the gaps of access, opportunity, and outcomes for low- income communities and communities of color in the US. It is our view that all companies have some sort of impact in the world—some positive, some negative—and that it is our responsibility as investors to nurture only those innovations that make our world more equitable.
When we made that shift, we took a bit of a gamble. Other VCs cautioned that investing exclusively for impact would necessarily come at the sacrifice of financial returns, and while we had some anecdotal evidence to the contrary, we were not completely certain ourselves if our model would hold.
To be sure, we’ve never believed that financial returns should be the only measure of our firm’s success. It is our goal to disrupt the very way that businesses are evaluated. If companies were required to calculate their impacts—good jobs with living wages and benefits created or lost, pollutants pumped into the local community, air or water, shoring up or tearing down democracy—we’d see a different kind of Silicon Valley, one that lives up to its promise to change the world for the better.
Today, eight years in to our “impact only” experiment, we are making public our financial returns for the first time. We are pleased to say that our hypothesis has, thus far, been proven.
For the purposes of this report, we are using the two best measurements at this stage of our portfolio