Good Future

Alex Vynokur is the CEO and founder of Betashares, and he’s well placed to help us understand the market impact of the corona-virus, and what we can expect in coming months. Betashares is only ten years old, but it pioneered the use of ETF’s, or exchange traded funds here in Australia. And they have a suite of ethical and sustainable funds that they manage through their own investment committee. A...

Today I’m joined by Ant Moorhouse. He’s a champion problem solver who cut his teeth in the military, before discovering entrepreneurialism. Now, he’s back in Australia where he’s furiously re-tooling his social enterprise, EarthTech, to discover and fund the enterprises that are working on solutions to beat corona virus, and more long-term, to help boost the recovery of the businesses and communit...

Zali Steggall is not your usual politician. She defeated ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott to take office last year, and now she’s shepherding a Climate Change Bill through parliament that has the potential to define Australia’s next century. Her Bill doesn’t define policy or technology, instead it acts as a roadmap. At its core, it has the goal of getting emissions to Net Zero by 2050. She’s garnered...

It's double the impact this week, with two guests; Shuyin Tang and Lee Fitzgerald are from Patamar Capital. Shuyin is a partner at the Venture Capital firm, and Lee is one of the founders. Shuyin is originally from Sydney but she’s now based in Vietnam. While Lee Fitzgerald hails from San Fransisco. Patamar is focussed on improving economic opportunities for low-income communities in Asia, and the...

Eric Savage has spent more than a decade living in India, in Bangalore. In this episode he explained his work at Unitus Capital. An impact investing firm that works to make capital available to a range of businesses, that have a big potential for positive impact. He also described daily life, and the charm of controlled chaos. It renewed my energy to get over to India. According to Eric, India is...

Speaking with Ashara Ekundayo was such a treat that I didn’t want to miss a word. This was one of those conversations where I didn’t even glance at the list of questions I’d prepared. Ashara is a cultural strategist, she’s a committed supporter of the arts and she’s a deep thinker about how we can better value design, creativity, artist communities and ultimately the cultural assets that make a ci...

Today’s episode was recorded at the Impact Investment Summit in Sydney at the end of 2019, where I spoke with Michele Giddens. She’s co-founder of Bridges Capital, she’s based in the UK, and during our conversation she summed up really well how poignant and emotional it was to be here in Sydney, having these conversations about climate change and about investing in sustainability, with fires all a...

Kylie Charlton is well-known in the world of Impact Investing. She has lots of energy and lots of experience and so I took the opportunity to talk to her about risk. Risk, is a key issue, for all investors. It drives decision making, and its central to how they forecast the future. And I wanted to know… how impact investors perceive risk, both in terms of their analysis of potential opportunities,...

Dave Rae is a financial advisor, and he’s a Member of one of the Technical Working Groups at the Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative. Its been great to watch Dave build his financial planning business and he’s helped me understand how his clients feel about sustainable investing, and the key concerns that people come to him with. I think it’s useful to get insights from outside the ‘impact’...

Simon Griffiths is CEO and co-founder of Who-Gives-a-Crap, they make and sell toilet paper, but they’re having an impact that goes well beyond the product we see in bathrooms all over Australia. The company has a clearly defined purpose to bring the miracle of toilets to the 2.3 billion people all over the world who don’t have access to one. Despite the hilarious potential for puns, the toilet pap...

Rosemary Addis, like most of my guests, had some major career shifts in her journey towards impact. Early-on she was a partner at law firm Allens Linklaters. But She would leave the law behind to help develop the impact investing sector. In 2013 she helped to establish the Australian Advisory Board, to the G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce. And part of this process involved helping to build Im...

Antony Bugg-Levine has had a huge influence on the modern iteration of impact investing. He was there at the Belagio Hotel when the term was coined in 2007, he went on to write a seminal text on the subject with Jed Emerson, and he continues his work through the Nonprofit Finance Fund, where they work to make capital available to worthy causes that otherwise wouldn’t have it. Antony speaks quickly...

Deb Nelson looks after clients and community engagement at RSF Social Finance, she’s based in the bay Area, and I was lucky to get a chance to sit down with her during my week in San Francisco. The SOCAP conference is all about people and relationships. And business deals are simply another form of a relationship. It’s a profound concept, because it flips the idea of a negotiation being a battle,...

Cathy Clark has been coming to the SOCAP conference for more than a decade, and as she explains, there were no investors in the early days, it was just entrepreneurs. Since then the event’s certainly expanded, with all sorts of people coming together to share ideas and pitch their wares. Cathy is Faculty Director at the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (know as CASE) at Duke U...

Sasha Dichter is co-founder of 60 Decibels, a company that was spun-out of Acumen a year ago, and which is laser focused on getting better data to inform impact outcomes. Impact measurement has been a core topic of debate for as long as I’ve been investigating the world of impact investing. But the one thing everybody can agree on is that impact measurement is difficult, and my guest today is work...

I had the opportunity to head over to San Francisco for the SOCAP Conference this year. It was a hectic week of talks, and meetings, and seminars. But, I also managed to squeeze in a bunch of interviews with some leading voices in the world of social enterprise and impact investing. First up is Daniel Madhavan. I’m sure a lot of you will know Dan as the Melbourne-based CEO of Impact Investment Gro...

**SPECIAL episode** We've done 32 episodes of the GOOD FUTURE podcast, so I’m doing something a little bit different for you this week. To say thank you for sticking with me, on this journey I wanted to shift the perspective to ask, what is the impact… of podcasting. To do it I’ve reached out to some of Australia’s best voices. First up I was lucky enough to get some time with Jules Lund, he’s the...

Radek Sali is best known for his work at Swisse Vitamins, he was key to the company’s early growth and he would later go on to become the CEO. A few years ago he and his colleagues sold their final stake in the company they had built, and Radek went out on his own, to build a family office that invests in all sorts of ventures, that are all focussed on wellness. And, one of his key investments was...

The digital revolution has made the world a lot smaller. But, we’ve also seen live events like conferences grow more popular than ever. Lindsay Smalling is CEO of the SOCAP conference, that stands for Social Capital Markets. It’s held every year in San Francisco, and its arguably the biggest event focussed on driving New Global Markets at the Intersection of Money + Meaning. The SOCAP conference i...

Simon Holmes a Court is a director at the Smart Energy Council, he’s a senior advisor to the Energy Transition Hub at Melbourne University, and he was also a director of the Hepburn Wind Farm cooperative. It was the story that came from the Hepburn community that brought Simon to my attention. They said no, to the developers who wanted to build wind farms, and instead, they built them themselves!...

Berry Liberman is a passionate advocate for sustainability, she’s co-founder of the Small Giants impact investment firm, she’s the editor-in-chief of Dumbo Feather and, most importantly, she tells it how it is. Berry and her husband Danny Almagor founded Small Giants in 2007 to support a new breed of businesses, that are focussed on empathy and building strong communities. They fund and manage a p...

I had a very special guest on the podcast this week. Paul Brest, has come all the way from Stanford University in California. He was previously the Dean of Stanford Law School, specialising in constitutional law, he then moved over to head up the Hewlett Foundation where he focussed on philanthropy and began to explore whether investors could contribute to social impact. After 12 years there he re...

Andrew Kuper is the founder and CEO of Leapfrog Investments, he’s a pioneering impact investor, and he’s long been a hero of mine. In this episode we go deep on what made his investment approach stand-out from the crowd when so many investors are adopting the impact investing label. He talked about his record breaking fund which has raised one billion Australian dollars (that’s billion, with a B),...

Mark Reading is head of the Atlassian Foundation, he’s the bridge between Atlassian, and the charities they choose to support through their Pledge-1% model. The Foundation is pushing back against the most restrictive norms of the Not-For-Profit sector to drive new projects and funding models in the field of educating disadvantaged youth around the world. I was introduced to Mark by, Adam McCurdie...

Today’s guest is Pablo Berrutti. He’s head of Responsible investment (Asia-Pacific) at Colonial First State Global Asset Management and he’s a passionate advocate for the power of financial markets to change the world. There’s lots of optimism and there’s a really great explanation of ESG investing which is all about considering environmental, social and governance factors when making investment d...