Introduction

What if we were building solutions that we knew worked rather than spending months or even years planning and simply hoping for the best? What kinds of problems could we solve? How many lives could we change? As the director of an investment fund focused on startups with social impact, I think about these kinds of questions all the time.

In 2011, the epilogue to Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup suggested that an ultimate outcome of lean startup practice would be the creation of “new institutions with a long-term mission to build sustainable value and change the world for the better.” The idea was to make new businesses that would build a better world.

Of course, the world is full of groups that already have that mission: nonprofits, ...

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