Social Entrepreneurs

Green business’ go-to guy is going

September 25, 2011

Andrew Shapiro, one of the most prominent sustainability advisers in corporate America, is leaving GreenOrder, the consulting firm he started in 2000.

GreenOrder, which is based in New York, is best known for its work with General Electric on its ecomagination initiative. The firm has also advised such blue-chip companies as General Motors, Hewlett Packard, JP Morgan Chase, along with major utilities and real estate developers.

Shapiro, who is 43 and a Yale Law grad, will stay at GreenOrder until the end of the year, while a replacement is sought. GreenOrder was acquired three years ago by LRN, an ethics and compliance firm led by Dov Seidman, himself a prominent adviser to FORTUNE 500 firms and the author of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything.

Ron Gonen, a founder of RecycleBank, a company that rewards consumers for recycling, has become an adviser to LRN, “to help lead the alignment of GreenOrder Advisory Services with the company as a whole,” according to Seidman. But Gonen told me by email that he will not be taking over at GreenOrder.

In announcing the change to colleagues, Seidman said: “Andrew’s creative and entrepreneurial vision stands at the core of GreenOrder’s advisory role.”

Before saying more, a few disclosures are required. I’ve known and liked Andrew and his colleagues at Green Order for years, and wrote about the company for Fortune.com in 2007. [See Green business' go-to guys] I consulted for LRN for about eight months in 2009, so I know Dov, too; in fact, Andrew introduced us. GO Ventures, an investment firm co-founded by Shapiro, owns a stake in GreenBiz Group, where I’m a senior writer. And my friend and colleague Joel Makower has been a senior strategist with GreenOrder, as well as a small shareholder in the firm. As ecologists like to say, we are all connected. (Cool music–check it out.) [click to continue…]

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Two Degrees: The business of fighting hunger

September 18, 2011

Buy a nutrition bar.

Feed a starving child.

That’s the simple idea behind a startup company called Two Degrees. For every bar the company sells, Two Degrees will through its nonprofit partners give a nutrition pack to a hungry child in Africa or Haiti.

Fighting malnutrition is “why we started the company,” Lauren Walters, the CEO and  co-founder of Two Degrees, told me during a recent visit to Washington. Lauren, who is 60, is a former lawyer, U.S. Senate staff member, consultant and real estate developer. His co-founder Will Hauser, who is 25, is a Harvard grad who spent a year at Goldman Sachs before choosing to go into business for himself. They knew one another  because Will’s father is one of Lauren’s friends.

You can think of Two Degrees as inspired, in part, by TOM’s Shoes, Newman’s Own and Clif Bar. TOM’s is the company that gives away a pair of shoes for every pair it sells. Newman’s sales of salad dressings, popcorn and the like have generated $300 million for charities since 1982. And Clif, of course, made nutrition bars into popular (and guilt free, sort of) snacks. [click to continue…]

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A mycological business that’s growing strong

July 7, 2011

Midway through their final semester at UC Berkeley, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez were getting ready for life in the corporate world. Despite the sluggish economy–this was the spring of 2009–they had attractive jobs lined up, Nikhil as a consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Alex as a banker at Credit Suisse.

So what did they do? They chucked the job offers and began to grow mushrooms out of coffee grounds.

Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora

Two years later, they have no regrets. Their startup, called Back to the Roots, is literally a growth company: It sells mushroom kits that enable people to grow and harvest up to 1 1/2 lbs of gourmet oyster mushrooms in as little as 10 days, out of a cardboard box filled with used coffee grounds. Out of the box thinking, you could call it. [click to continue…]

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B the change you want to see

May 3, 2011

Is shareholder capitalism broken?

Few would argue that it’s working well. Business as usual has us on a path to climate catastrophe. The housing/banking industry collapse threw the world into recession. We’ve seen Fukushima, the BP oil spill, the Massey coal mine deaths. Growing income inequality has become a persistent worry.

The conventional response to all that – indeed, the one that I share – is that smarter (though not more) regulation is needed. But a growing number of business people say the problems go deeper. They say a new kind of corporate legal structure is needed to require companies to operate for the  good of society, not just for their shareholders. These new corporations—they’re called B Corporations—are growing in number, and their structure has been enshrined into law in four states—Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia.

Here’s what B Lab, the nonprofit behind B Corp, says on its website:

Our vision is simple yet ambitious: to create a new sector of the economy which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. This sector will be comprised of a new type of corporation – the B Corporation – that meets rigorous and independent standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.

And in its annual report:

After the latest round of economic and environmental crises, it’s clear we need systemic solutions to the systemic problem that places the interests of shareholders over the interests of workers, community and the environment.

Interesting, no? A couple of months ago, I heard Jay Coen Gilbert, a founder of B Lab along with Bart Houlahan and Andrew Kassoy,  talk about B Corp (it stands for Benefit Corp.) at a GreenBiz conference; afterwards, we caught up by phone to talk some more. [click to continue…]

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Kiva: pushing the envelope on “green”

May 1, 2011

You’ve probably heard of Kiva, the peer-to-peer microfinance website. Founded in 2005, Kiva has earned a reputation as an innovative nonprofit: It has enabled loans to be made to about 573,000 low-income entrepreneurs worth more than $210 million in 60 countries. More than 570,000 people, mostly Americans, have done the lending, and the repayment rate is more than 98%. This would be reason enough to cheer.

Not content with the status quo, though, Kiva lately has pushed into new arenas. Last fall, Kiva added “student microloans” to its range of offerings. Last month, Kiva, added a category called “green loans,” permitting businesses and individuals in poor countries to borrow as little as $25 to make their homes or workplaces more energy efficient, to recycle more or to convert to clean energy sources.

Premal Shah

Last week, I talked via Skype with Premal Shah, the 35-year-old president of Kiva about the new initiative. He’s smart and engaging, easy to talk with, and thoughtful about economics, his undergrad major at Stanford. He told me that Kiva, to magnify its impact, he explained, wants to take advantage of the fact that its  lenders are for the most part willing to take risks. People aren’t putting their kids college funds or retirement savings at risk here. So Kiva has the freedom and the opportunity to test new ideas in microcredit.

“The Internet community can come in, take risks, try something that’s unproven,” Premal told me. So Kiva should be constantly exploring the “risk and cost frontiers of microfinance,” pushing the envelope and then hoping that more risk-averse providers of capital, like conventional banks, will follow. [click to continue…]

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Justin’s Nut Butter: a squeeze play!

March 15, 2011

Little things matter.

Like squeeze packs.

I’ve surely tossed away hundreds, maybe thousands, of the little silvery plastic packs of ketchup, Gu and Power Bar gels, but I’d never thought much about the environmental impact of squeeze packs.

Then I was introduced to Justin Gold, the founder and CEO of Justin’s Nut Butter, a small but fast-growing company that sells gourmet, organic peanut, almond and hazelnut butters in 1.15 ounce on-the-go squeeze packs that retail for $0.69 to $0.99. These packs were great for business at the Boulder, Colorado-based company, which now gets about 80% of its revenues from single servings. But squeeze packs are a blight, albeit a small one, on the environment because they are made out of several layers of different materials that are welded together and can’t be recycled or composted.

Most small-company CEOs  would have shrugged their shoulders at this problem and moved on. Not Justin. [click to continue…]

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Why acai? Ask the Sambazon guys

November 23, 2010

Jeremy and Ryan Black, with acai

Sometimes, for an entrepreneur, not knowing what you are getting into is a blessing.

If brothers Jeremy and Ryan Black had known what they were up against back in 2000 when they started Sambazon, a company that makes juices, sorbet and smoothie packs from tiny purple berries that grow in the Amazon forests of Brazil, they might not have bothered.

Few Americans then had heard of acai, or knew how to pronounce it. (It’s ah-sigh-ee.) The little berries from tall skinny palm trees can be harvested only once a year, they must be frozen right away to retain freshness and then shipped to the U.S. It’s a cash business, so importers must pay farmers long before the products are sold. And who, for goodness sakes, would sell them?

Harvesting acai

Nor did Jeremy or Ryan know much about the food business. Jeremy, the older bro, who’s now 37, was a financial planner. Ryan, who’s 35, was pursuing a professional football career as a defensive back, hoping to get to the NFL, after a season in the European football league.

All they knew was one thing. “Acai is amazing,” says Jeremy. And they had an idea that if they could figure out how to turn acai into a real business, they could not only do well for themselves but do some good for farmers in the Amazon. Says Ryan: “If this berry became a household word, it could be a really strong force for sustainability in the Amazon.”

It’s taken the Sambazon guys a decade, but things are looking up these days for their company. The No. 1 producer of organic acai, Sambazon doesn’t disclose sales–they were reported at $25 million in 2008–but the company says it is profitable. It employs about 150 people, half of them based in Brazil. You can find its products not only at smoothie bars and Whole Foods, but at mainstream retailers like Safeway and Giant. And the investors in the privately-held company include savvy food guys like Steve Demos, who founded White Wave and put Silk soy milk on supermarket shelves, and Gary Hirshberg, the CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farms. They also secured investments from Root Capital, a nonprofit social investment fund that’s intended to support sustainable livelihoods in the developing world, and from the EcoEnterprises fund run by The Nature Conservancy. [click to continue…]

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The Internet of parking spaces

November 14, 2010

Have you heard about the “Internet of things”? It’s a relatively new idea to me, although I note that the phrase gets about 2.2 million Google hits (at last count) and it has its own Wikipedia entry and a YouTube clip or two. As best as I can tell, it means that many things–cars, buildings, the electric grid, appliances, smart phones, cash registers–could be equipped with sensors, networked and thus able to communicate with one another and, of course, with the rest of us. To bring the concept down to earth, think of RFID codes on supermarket items that tell grocers when to restock, GPS phones equipped with Urbanspoon software that identifies nearby restaurants, or the work of startups like Historic Futures that help companies trace the origins of everything in their supply chain.

How not to park

Or “smart” parking spaces. Streetline is a San Francisco-based startup that wants to equip parking places with sensors and software so they can to talk to cars and the people who drive them. The company’s service is being pitched as a sustainability play–as a way to reduce traffic congestion, gasoline use and carbon emissions–but its success will more likely depend on whether it helps cities realize more revenue from parking meters, either through more effective enforcement or dynamic pricing of parking.

Still, for anyone who has circled a block endlessly looking for a spot, the idea has appeal.

“You can stand up in a room of 10 people or 1,000 people and ask them if they have had trouble finding a parking place and just about everybody raises their hand,” Zia Yusuf, the chief executive of Streetline, told me when we met recently in San Francisco.

“The carbon impact, the pollution impact, the congestion impact–it’s just been completely ignored,” Zia says.

Zia Yusuf

Streetline has deployed what it calls “ultra low power mesh sensor networks” in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sausalito, CA. What this means is that the company has installed sensors in the ground at parking places which “know” whether a car is parked there, as well as sensors on meters that “know” whether there’s time remaining or not. [click to continue…]

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KaBOOM! What an impact!

August 24, 2010

Darell Hammond of KABOOM!

Fifteen years ago, Darell Hammond, a 24-year-old college dropout who was raised in group home outside of Chicago, had an idea. He wanted to build playgrounds for kids who needed a place to play. He started with a playground in southeast Washington, D.C., raising money from the Home Depot Foundation and others to pay for the job, and assembling a group of volunteers to do the work. Then he built another. And another. Since then, KaBOOM!, the nonprofit that he started  in 1996 (again with help from Home Depot, which remains a supporter to this day), has built 1,800 playgrounds across America, more than anyone. Lately KaBOOM! has done something even more unusual–it upended its business model, and decided to share everything it has learned about play and playgrounds, which happens to be quite a lot, with the rest of the world.

“We decided to open-source our model online,” Darell told me recently, when we met in the group’s playful surroundings–toys are scattered everywhere–on Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington. “We realized we were a drop in the bucket, when compared to the demand.”

I’d run across Darell now and then over the years, but we’d never sat down to talk until then. He’s an impressive guy and, more importantly, he has built an impressive and deep organization. KaBOOM! brought in about $21 million in revenues last year, and it has a staff of about 75 people, including former senior executives from Ben & Jerry’s, U.S. Food Service, and Discovery Communications’ Animal Planet. More important, KABOOM! built 162 playgrounds last year, and mustered 40,880 volunteers to do so.

In every case, people from the neighborhood where the playground is located play get deeply involved in planning and building it. Typically, they spend three months planning and designing the space, involving kids and adults,  before as few as 200 and as many as 1,200 people gather to construct the playground in a single day. “Organized chaos,” Darell calls it. What happens next matters, too: Neighorbood groups often build a second playground, or organize a crime-watch group, or lobby a city for better services. [click to continue…]

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A dramatic story behind a soccer shirt

June 3, 2010

Devoted fans of Ghana will wear this soccer jersey, designed by Puma, when they cheer on their team this month during 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Puma-Ghana-AwayJersey-10-12-1

Fans of Cameroon, meanwhile, will don their team’s green World Cup jersey.

PUM_40085_A_big

Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast

Algeria

Algeria

Puma also sells replicas of the World Cup jerseys for Algeria and the Ivory Coast.

What all these shirts have in common is that they are manufactured  by Impahla Clothing, a supplier to Puma based in South Africa that was started a few years ago by a man named William Hughes.

Surely there will be drama when play begins in the World Cup, but it will have to be exciting to compare with  the drama in the life of William Hughes. He has known first-hand the joy of victory and the agony of the defeat.

Born in Kenya, Hughes, who is now 47, moved at a young age with his family to Zimbabwe. [click to continue…]

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