5 things I have learnt in a decade of social entrepreneurship

Ten years ago I was a naive student, obsessed with where the products I bought came from, writing a blog called Project Provenance. Today I’m the founder and CEO of social enterprise provenance.org, working with customers including Unilever, Pernod Ricard and Cult Beauty, and an active community of over 35,000 brands and shoppers. 

The businesses, partners and citizens we work with share the belief that firstly, we must buy less, but if we must, then the things we buy should be a force for good. We call this “impact-led commerce”.

Along the journey, via other jobs and the majority of a PhD, I’ve learnt some things about starting and running a company, technology and the social and environmental impact behind the products we buy. Seeing as it’s been a decade, I thought I’d write some of them down in the hope that others on a similar journey might find it helpful as we embark on the next decade.

1. Be a Zebra business (and you need less money for your early-stage startup than you think) ??

Every budding entrepreneur seems to think they need investment. At startup events, people talk about funding rounds and try to gauge where you are at with your startup based on how much you’ve raised. We all need money to live, and businesses need money to grow. It took me a while to realise that entrepreneurs are always talking about investment rounds and use them as a metric for success because they are trapped in cycle after cycle of needing to raise. Or die. I don’t think raising investment is necessarily the best method, particularly for an early entity. 

Some of my favourite startups raised surprisingly little capital in the early days. Calm was founded in 2012. In 2016, they broke even at approximately $7m revenue after having only raised small angel investments. When it was time to really grow in June 2018, sure, they raised a $27-million round (at a valuation over $200m). But they did a lot of the important business-building without the pressure of capital raises. 

Jason Calacanis calls them self-sustaining successes “Pegasus” - flying over VCs. I prefer the zebra. Zebras are profitable businesses that solve real, meaningful problems and in the process, repair existing social systems; they include Patagonia, Warby Parker, Zingerman’s, Etsy, Mailchimp, Basecamp, and Kickstarter.

Unicorn vs zebra by Jennifer Brandel, Mara Zepeda, Astrid Scholz & Aniyia Williams

Provenance looks more like a zebra. I wish I had aspired to it earlier. My startup peers talked about unicorns, which made me feel like that’s what a successful tech startup was. Perhaps it is to you, but I think there are better horses out there. 

2. Building a business takes some hacker, some hipster and a lot of hustler ?????♀?

First coined by Rei Inamoto, these three types of people or skill sets, cliche as it sounds, are essential in building an organisation.

Hacker? Software is eating the world. You need to be able to take the tools of tech and create change in the world with something the market needs. It’s useful if a hacker can code. But I think it’s more a mindset of being creative and building things with few resources. There are many tools that can help any founder build a solution with minimal coding skills. Tools include free wiki builders, surveymonkey/typeform, wordpress/shopify, Mighty Networks.. The list is long, and it puzzles me why so many founders run to finder a “coder” when they could be the hacker.

Hipster? I wouldn’t underestimate the role of design and a good sense of style. A good font is more powerful than you think. 

"Almost 50% of your brain is involved in visual processing… 70% of all your sensory receptors are in your eyes" - Merieb, E. N. & Hoehn, K., 2007 

It’s not just about the visuals, it’s also about gaining and retaining attention: the hipster can be your growth hacker. 

Hustler? 

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance” - Steve Jobs. 

There were several times when I felt like giving up on Provenance. Imposter syndrome (which doesn’t seem to go away). Lots of haters and naysayers. “Consumers will never care about the impact of products”, “Why would a business share their supply chain!?”, “Bitcoin is for criminals not business”. (That last one came from a man pretty high up in EY in 2013, who now has a blockchain programme in his remit ??).

If you still deep down believe in the mission and you still have the energy and imagination to see how it might work, just keep going.

3. With blockchain tech and cryptocurrencies, there are new ways to organise and incentivise networks ??

This decade I learnt about blockchains and cryptocurrencies. It’s been seven years since Provenance launched the concept of using blockchain tech for supply chain traceability, five since the publication of our widely-read whitepaper, four years since our widely-shared project in the fishing industry (that inspired a few others) and three years since we went from pilot projects to a software service, growing real business and impact case studies. Last year we realised a multi-stakeholder initiative bringing blockchain to supply chain in a new way - with traceability and verified impact linked trade finance, working with Unilever, Barclays, IDH and many others. We also integrated blockchain-backed proofs into e-commerce so we can trust the impact behind businesses and products anywhere online. 

Presenting the Provenance dApp at Ethereum DevCon1 in 2015

Blockchain tech has taken longer to develop than I anticipated (although, crypto prices grew higher and faster than I thought possible). Big tech (Amazon, Google, Facebook etc), has also only gotten bigger. It’s become ever clearer to me that in the creation of digital products we must strive for decentralised, open, interoperable, privacy-preserving, accessible, secure and sustainable systems. Blockchains still present an exciting solution to re-decentralise the web away from big tech, and bring more democracy and distributed control. It’s got a long way to go, but this decade set some inspiring groundwork. 

I think we have seen the potential for different systems to enable a new way to organise ourselves, with Decentralised Autonomous Organisations DAOs (see DAOstack or MakerDAO) - organisations governed by rules encoded as a computer program on a blockchain - and projects like Colony challenging today’s corporate structures. The emerging new business and governance models could enable network collaboration at a whole new scale, efficiency and equality. 

Bitcoin grew up this decade and has been advanced by evangelists (like Andreas Antonopoulos), new innovation (Lightning Labs), distribution (Kraken). Other decentralised networks followed. I have been close to Ethereum (grown by the foundation and through the work of the now Parity team). Attending many meetups and the collaborations I have worked on in the Ethereum community have been a highlight for my last decade. The innovation happening in the blockchain space from Zcash, to Alice, to Polkadot, to Bitpesa, has made me see the future of how we organise as humans in a whole new light. 

“Blockchains are a new invention that allows meritorious participants in an open network to govern without a ruler and without money.” - Naval Ravikant

I think this step-change invention is not to be underestimated, which is why I have spent so much of this decade exploring it, and sharing ideas at events from WIRED to simply over coffee.

4. A social enterprise can be a prototype for the world you want to live in ??

When transitioning Provenance from a project to a business, I thought a lot about how the business could impact the world and the market. When you have 2 employees and 2 freelancers and are squatting in a friend of a friend’s office, the impact you are striving for feels somewhat external to your day to day operations. However, no matter how small or early-stage your business is, how you select and treat your team and those that interact with you, is the lifeblood of the organisation and important tangible impact. 

"A company becomes the people it hires not the plan it makes." - Vinod Khosla

When you just have an idea on a piece of paper and an embarrassing prototype, it feels like it’s a miracle anyone would want to work with you. But the people you pick make a huge difference. Just because your idea sounds crazy to 80% of people, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be fussy about whom you work with. I have become better at hiring. My advice is to believe in yourself from day one, don't rush into hiring, but wait until you've found the right person that shares your values, surround yourself with people you're happy to see every day.

Once you have a team, no matter what size, enable your working environment to be great. Operate your company like you think the world should be. Procure ethically, recycle, buy green energy and servers, treat your staff well with fair hours and pay, collaborate and make coming to work fun and energising. No matter how little you have. You’ll likely have little for a long time.

5. We must and can all act on the social and environmental challenges of our time ??

Finally, my last and most important lesson. We are running out of time to stop the damage we are doing to the planet. I used to be embarrassed about talking about this with many of my friends, for fear of making people feel bad or that it would make me seem all worthy when I felt I am far from doing enough myself.

Now I am not embarrassed. When up to 30% of greenhouse gases generation is our food system and 4% (92 million tons) of waste is generated every year by the fashion industry - it’s easy to see that it’s all our problem to solve and not talking about it is ridiculous.  

It’s important as individuals that we do our utmost to consume less. The impact of buying nothing far outweighs making a more ethical purchase. However, we must eat and we do buy products. And 85% of the impact of those products is in their supply chain. 

I am lucky to have visited supply chains all over the world this decade, this is a fishing community in North Sulawesi, Indonesia

But what can you do? You can lobby. You can march. You can radically change your own impact. This isn’t just about the products you buy, it’s also where your money is invested, where you work. You can influence others.

Green and blacks organic chocolate is owned by Mondelez... Fresh Cosmetics is owned by LVMH... Arket belongs to H&M... Yeo Valley Dairies is Arla... Naked Juice belongs to Pepsico

I believe that buying is voting. And today we don’t have the information, often don’t have the means, regulation doesn’t stop us and it’s all pretty complex. But I believe in the power of the web and in networks, and the data is there, we just aren’t acting on it at scale. 

“Brands are the most valuable thing, a space in someone’s mind” - John Hegarty. 

Brands emerged as a simple means to trust. We have become accustomed to trusting brands, but often, we should not. I started Provenance to try to bring genuinely trustworthy information to the point of sale for products. I knew the impact differences from one product to another (or buying vs not) were significant – but, wow, I didn’t realise the problems behind our things were as big as they are. 

I believe in access to information to make informed decisions. We should all be able to put our money where our principles are. That is what I am striving to enable in the next decade. 

Join me on the movement to drive impact-led commerce, where products compete on positive impact. 

Reach out on twitter @ProvenanceHQ or @jessibaker. 

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Provenance is a software company and consultancy working with great brands to enable product supply chain and impact transparency. We bring the story behind a product from its creation to the shopper. Enabling impact-led commerce - the future of brand trust.