Hi there, Agent of Impact! Welcome to ImpactAlpha Open, a free sample of top news and views from last week on ImpactAlpha.
✅ Exclusive offer: Take 50% off. Enjoying ImpactAlpha Open? Grab a paid subscription to get real-time, daily access to market-shaping news and action opportunities (take 50% off your first year). Better yet, bring on your whole team.
In this week’s Open:
- Innovative climate insurance
- PluggedIn: Setting up pre-seed founders for success (video)
- Pop Impact: Scoring Common Side Effects
Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price
Must-reads on ImpactAlpha
- Innovations in incentivizing impact. ImpactAlpha’s Jessica Pothering spotted an insurance innovation in California that gives landowners incentives to reduce wildfire risks and explored ways to make concessional capital smarter by targeting them to Africa’s farmers, not asset owners.
- Making asset management great again. In his annual letter, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who always has his finger to the wind, came out as something of an economic populist. Imogen Rose-Smith and Amy Cortese suggest Fink’s share-the-wealth strategy of opening private equity and debt markets to retail investors might also serve to pad BlackRock’s fees. Read their take.
- Proxy Preview 2025: Materiality over politics drives shareholder resilience. This proxy season, shareholders “can reject false narratives, stand firm in our free-market principles, and make good business decisions based on data – not politics,” As You Sow’s Andrew Behar writes. Go deeper.
Agents of Impact
- Homium’s Marcus Martin will replace Tommy Mercein as CEO. Mercein will remain vice chair of the firm’s board. Mike Chu, Homium’s chief technology officer, will become president of the board.
- Mission Driven Finance promoted Thai Thuan Nguyen and Stephen Nunes to managing director, Joseph Pileri to chief legal and compliance officer, Kyla Garrison to vice president of human resources and IT assistance, Quita Liu to fund operations director, Monique DeSimone to investor relations director, and Peter Metz to senior investment analyst.
- Apis & Heritage Capital Partners welcomed Tobi Adewodu, previously with Morgan Stanley, as associate director.
The Week’s Podcasts
🎧 This Week in Impact: Smarter Subsidies
Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor Jessica Pothering. Up this week: Climate insurance in California that incentives landowners to reduce wildfire risks. Plus, making concessional capital smarter by targeting the operating needs of African agriculture businesses and the funds that support them.
- Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple or Spotify.
The Week’s Call
🔌 PluggedIn: How Symphonic Capital is setting up pre-seed founders for success (video)
Sydney Thomas was working for an early stage venture capital firm when she noticed that some of the firm’s portfolio companies from unconventional backgrounds would get “lost in the sauce” when they went to raise follow-on rounds from investors. That led her to launch Symphonic Capital with former entrepreneur and Y Combinator alum Shruti Shah. The pre-seed venture firm invests in founders building solutions for underserved communities. “The thesis was, how are we investing in companies that are closing access gaps around health and wealth for overlooked communities?” Thomas told Sherrell Dorsey on this week’s PluggedIn. “A consistent theme that we saw was that climate intersects with both of these.”
- Read the recap (and watch the video replay).
Pop Impact
Pharmaceutical fallout in Adult Swim’s ‘Common Side Effects’
What if there were a medicine that could heal almost anything?That’s the central question of the animated series “Common Side Effects” from Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Dmitriy Ioselevich scores the show from zero to 15, with up to five points each foraccuracy, entertainment and impact, in his latest Pop Impactreview.
- Read the full review and catch up on all of Dmitriy’s Pop Impact reviews.
Get in the Game
💼 Step up
- Social finance is hiring a director of impact investments in Boston.
- Nuveen seeks a responsible investment strategy analyst/associate in London.
- TriLinc is recruiting a vice president of investments / team lead in Manhattan Beach, CA.
Dozens of job opportunities are available to subscribers each week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
🤝 Meet up
- May 14-15: ImpactPHL’s Total Impact Summit 2025 (Philadelphia)
- June 4-5: 4-5 IMPAQTO’s Latin American Impact Investment Summit (Quito)
- June 23-25: ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit (Seattle)
Subscribe (with 50% off) to access substantial discounts on partner events.
Partner with us. Reach the most influential audience in impact investing. Get in touch.
Get ImpactAlpha for Teams. Save with substantial group discounts. Start here.
