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(instrumental music) [JUDY PARK] The GSB's motto is to change lives, change organizations, change the world, and I think that the Impact Fund really helps students to do that. They learn how to become an early-stage mission-oriented investor. They get to meet real founders in the space and real investors and develop and expand their networks. [HEIDI PATEL] Today is a culmination of the year's worth of work looking at hundreds of companies. We're down to our final nine or ten.
We're going to be hearing from the teams, the updates they've made, the diligence that they've done, and we'll be making our decisions later this afternoon. [JUDY PARK] The fund really gives you real-world practicum around how do you source opportunities, how do you evaluate them, and then how do you create the case to the investment committee around what to invest in. [ANDY COEN] We get to learn how to apply the techniques and ideas that we're learning in the classroom in real life and really get to build relationships with these founders, which is a really amazing experience.
[ILYA STREBULAEV] I think that studying and learning how you invest in entrepreneurial companies is very important. And I think that for students to learn on practice how to do it, not through case studies, but by investing actual money in actual startups, is extremely useful. And also, you know what? I'm proud of the way some of them succeed in convincing us, the investment committee, to go forward, while most of them, in fact, do not succeed, and how they take their failure, because their future life will consist of many, many failures and some successes. [LYNDSEY BOUCHERLE] For me, the Impact Fund was 10 years ago, so I've been in impact investing and in impact VC since. And it really was a pivotal piece of that for me.
It was kind of the realization that this was the direction that I wanted to go in my career post-GSB, and really was a formative experience in being able to make that pivot in my career. [ANDY COEN] Ultimately, with impact, you're starting with the end state. You're saying, what is this actually going to look like in terms of how it's going to affect the community? And you're investing in the right people to be able to make that change. [HEIDI PATEL] After 10 years, we've made 25 investments, 22 companies are still going. We've only had two write-offs and one exit so far. That is a pretty incredible track record for any type of pre-seed or seed fund.
The Impact Fund matters enormously. If we can't figure out a way to harness the $450 trillion of investable capital towards finding scalable solutions to our world's most pressing environmental and social problems, we're not going to see the change that we need in this lifetime. [ILYA STREBULAEV] I think that 10 years down the road, what's going to happen is that more and more students who participated in the Impact Fund activities will come back and help by bringing new companies, by mentoring students, by being on the investment committee. [HEIDI PATEL] We have trained over 600 students how to think deeply and critically about the impact potential of young companies. And now these students are taking those learnings and
those perspectives into their career, whether it's as impact investors, impact founders, or even mainstream investors, which you could argue might be the most impactful of all.
