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Expiring vs. Long-Term Knowledge

How much of what you read today will you still care about a year from now?

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Backing the Good Guys

More investors want to back companies doing good in the world.

But what qualifies as “good” varies from one person to the next. Vanguard’s Social Index Fund invests in Wells Fargo, Pepsi, and ConocoPhillips. Probably not most people’s idea of moving society forward.

That’s why we’ve been excited about certified B Corps. A B Corp is a for-profit company that meets a list of objective social, environmental, and transparency criteria, and is publicly held accountable to factoring social benefits into its corporate decision-making.

Three years ago, we partnered with investing platform CircleUp to create a fund that invests in B Corps. To my knowledge, this is the only fund that exclusively backs the B Corp community.

We did this for two reasons:

  • We want to prove that companies with big social missions also make great investments. The core of Collaborative Fund’s mission is a belief that the companies who perform the best over the next generation are companies that do the most good, as they’ll attract the most attention, attract the best employees, and align with long-term customers. Having a B Corp certification gives companies an explicit greenlight to align the interest of all stakeholders, which we see as a competitive advantage in today’s myopic economy.
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Bad Experiences

To understand how we process risk, you have to know the story of Austria’s 40-year-old nuclear power plant that has never produced a single watt of energy.

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The Hardest Part Of Investing Is Saying Yes

Most companies fail. There are an infinite number of reasons why. Spend time contemplating any new business, and you will quickly find what looks like fatal faults.

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Student Loans: Averting a Generational Crisis

Student loans outstanding just passed $1.4 trillion. Starting next year one of the largest cohorts adding to that balance will have been born in the 2000s.

Let that sink in.

Collaborative Fund recently invested in NextGenVest, a company committed to helping Generation Z navigate the complexities of paying for college, particularly in areas where high schools lack adequate college advising and students are left confused and vulnerable.

We invested for two reasons:

  • The anchor student debt puts on young adults entering their careers could be a defining topic of the next several decades.
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The Advantage Of Being A Little Underemployed

To realize how outdated the five-day, 40-hour workweek is, you have to know where it came from.

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23 Books That Changed My Life

Google researchers tried to count how many books have been published. They came up with 129,864,880, or something like 12 trillion words.

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A Simple Guide to the End of the Boom

Few answers to questions have as bad a track record as “What is the economy going to do next?”

That won’t change. Surprises can’t be predicted, by definition, so the gap between predictions and reality will always be wide.

But forecasts are also tripped up by two problems:

  • We’re wooed by complexity and conflate it with added value. As with household products, the more moving parts something has the more likely it is to break.
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Stories vs. Statistics

Air travel plunged after September 11th 2001. Which is understandable. Everyone saw videos of the planes hitting the towers. News stations put the clips on repeat for months. Add to it the consensus that a follow-up attack was a matter of when, not if, and people felt reckless approaching airplanes. Americans flew 7% fewer miles in all of 2002 than they did in the first nine months of 2001.

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Values and Mission Alignment Throughout Our Organization

I first met Lauren Loktev in 2012.

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