Nina Gené: Venture Philanthropy, Jasmine Social Investments, Impact Investing

Ben Yeoh Chats

Nina Gené is CEO of Jasmine Social Investments. Nina leads Jasmine’s investment strategy and diligence process, guiding the team to identify and support the next generation of great social entrepreneurs. Jasmine funds high-performing social ventures and outstanding social entrepreneurs who are solving a basic need of the very poor.

Ben and Nina discuss what venture philanthropy means and the Jasmine strategy on philanthropy.

We delve into the investment process that Jasmine uses. How Nina identifies opportunities, the type of qualities Nina looks for in a social entrepreneur and an organisation.

We discuss success investment examples, how we might think of impact investing and how it may differ from grants. We talk about the advantages of being neutral to structure, ie, being able to fund using grants, debt or equity. Whatever suits.

We chat about the influence of venture investing and how entrepreneurs think. How Jasmine shares information and due diligence and what help they give investee companies.

We talk about measuring impact, and the challenges of scaling up.

We mentioned the pros and cons of working in New Zealand, whether Spanish food is under rated and finish on advice Nina has.

Nina on the importance of the ability to scale:

“I'd say that scale is one of the most important criteria that we have because we want to make bets on people that will end up figuring it out and have a survey that will save lives. When this happens, we obviously want this to go to millions and millions of people; so that's kind of the hope and dream of it. The way we define scale we define it as an intervention that can reach up to 1 million people. It doesn't necessarily need to be multi-country. We work with an organization called Luala that are influencing the way that health is provided to a million people in one district in Kenya. That's very important and we support those groups during the R&D phase.

But what we do expect then is to scale the work only when they have that strong evidence on hand, but also the right economics of that impact. We support them through that journey and fund them as long as they show us success every year. That's why having a set of metrics and scorecards and milestones-- We're not sticklers for, "Oh, you said you were going to do ten and you've only done nine. You're out the door." We understand that there are ups and downs and we're very long term funders.”

Transcript is here.

⁠Video with captions is available here.⁠