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Articles by Allie Burns
Realizing the promise and avoiding the perils of AI in impact finance
Artificial intelligence will permeate every aspect of finance. The tools can analyze investment decisions, identifying opportunities and risks. AI will become more efficient and consistent than people are at underwriting against a credit policy. It could replace whole departments that focus on analysis. Some larger banks already provide credit lines without applications, based on AI analysis of spending patterns and income.
Supporting Financial Health Startups: Four Lessons for Impact Investors, Foundations and Governments
As the global fintech venture capital market grows rapidly – topping $50 billion in the first half of 2021 alone – social-minded investors have shown growing interest in technology’s potential to democratize access to financial services in emerging markets and other parts of the world where inequality is rampant.
Women led start-ups always struggled for money. Covid made it worse
Can start-up accelerators – organizations that are set up to help entrepreneurs grow and raise funding – help close this gap? Recent research shows that, in fact, they seem to be playing an unintended role in growing it. There’s an urgent opportunity for accelerators to not only be aware of this impact, but to be more intentional about how they support female founders and reverse this trend. The gender financing gap is one of the most high-profile and persistent problems in entrepreneurship.
Funding for female-led start-ups: are accelerators widening the gender gap?
• The finance gap for women-led tech entrepreneurs is proving hard to shift. • Start-up accelerators only help women-led entreprises raise debt, not equity. • Beyond gender representation in accelerators, more intensive bias-training may be needed. The devastating economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic is amplifying existing inequalities, which may be felt for years to come. Entrepreneurship is no exception.
Three acts of Congress that can revive entrepreneurship in America
We’re in an entrepreneurship downswing. Congress needs to act. Lil Roberts is the CEO of Fort Lauderdale-based fintech startup Xendoo, an online bookkeeping and accounting platform for small businesses with fewer than 20 employees. Xendoo has experienced first hand how the pandemic has affected not only the small business community, but also startups. There’s a popular conception that recessions encourage entrepreneurship. They create a pool of accessible labor and new market needs.
Startup investing has a race problem. Here’s why Black-owned tech hubs are key to closing the racial wealth gap
The Inclusive Innovation Incubator (In3) sits on the edge of Howard University in Washington, D.C. It’s a coworking space and incubator for Black and under-resourced founders, in a city struggling with a deep racial wealth gap. Yet, like so many Black-owned innovation spaces hubs around the country, it’s struggling to raise the funds to just keep the doors open. Startup investing has a race problem. Black entrepreneurs receive less than 1% of venture capital dollars in the United States.
Accelerators are moving online. That could be good news for inclusive entrepreneur support
Startup accelerators are by their very nature exclusive. Programs begin with a selective application process; with few startups accepted, most will get rejected. Demand is usually higher than supply. What if it didn’t have to be that way? In 2018 Y-Combinator, which has a lower acceptance rate than Harvard, accidentally accepted 15,000 entrepreneurs to their “Startup School”. They ended up reformatting their programming into a massive open online course.
Breaking down barriers for fintechs focused on refugees
Lessons on closing the “Pioneer Gap” for African Fintech Companies East Africa has led the world in the rapid expansion of financial inclusion over the past decade. In 2007, Safaricom launched the mobile money platform M-PESA; by 2009, 40% of Kenya’s adult population was using the service to save and send funds to their friends or to the local grocery store. Today, that number is at 75% — an astronomical pace of progress for an emerging market economy.
Accelerators are making the funding gap worse for female founders
By Allie Burns and Shruti Chandrasekhar3 minute Read What if we told you that a widely used intervention to help startups raise financing–accelerators–is actually making the gender financing gap worse? The data is commonly cited. Female-founded companies receive far less venture capital than their male counterparts. In emerging markets, startups with a woman on their leadership team receive only 11% of total seed financing and only 5% of later-stage financing.
Beyond Equity: Impact investors can rethink how we invest, not just what we invest in
Allie Burns, Village Capital CEO ImpactAlpha, February 21 – At Village Capital, we talk a lot about investor blind spots. In the world of impact investing, I’d argue that one of the biggest blind spots sits at the earliest stage of companies’ growth. Early-stage businesses make a lot of sense for impact investors. Seed, pre-seed and Series A companies are at the frontier of innovation.
Startup investors should consider revenue share when equity is a bad fit
Allie Burns is managing director of Village Capital, and co-author of a recent report, "Capital Evolving: Alternative Investment Strategies to Drive Inclusive Innovation." There is plenty of blame to go around for tech’s monoculture of thought and ideas: VC firms stacked with Ivy League-educated white male partners; a reluctance by investors to seed businesses outside a few major cities on the U.S. coasts; investors’ obsession with a narrow set of capital structures.
Is this the year of “Winners Take All”? – Village Capital – Medium
Is this the year of “Winners Take All”? Village Capital’s 2018 in review If you had to sum up the dominant narrative of this head-spinning year in one phrase, “Winners take all” may just be it. From Anand Giridharadas’ criticisms of “change agents” in his book “Winners Take All”, to economists’ warnings about “winner-take-all urbanism”, people are rightfully challenging power structures that allow the already-powerful to make decisions about our collective future. The good news: it’s working.
Reclaiming the American Dream: A conversation with author Ben Hecht
At a time when deep divisions headline the national discourse on equality issues, a new book titled Reclaiming the American Dream: Proven Solutions for Creating Economic Opportunity for All frames real-world examples to illustrate America’s evolution toward including everyone in its promise of opportunity.
The 18 people, places and policies reviving entrepreneurship and the American Dream
This winter Village Capital teamed up with ImpactAlpha for an 18-part series, The New Revivalists, profiling the people and organizations building inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems. The New Revivalists are policy wonks, hometown heroes, and civic leaders; academics, bankers, and forward-thinking venture capitalists. They span the story of entrepreneurship in the United States, from the storefronts of the Big Easy to the mountains of Telluride.
Want to integrate business value and social value? Look to entrepreneurs
In January, Larry Fink, the chair and CEO of multi-trillion-dollar asset manager BlackRock, issued an ultimatum to corporate executives: if they want to receive investment from BlackRock, their businesses must have a social purpose. Fink argued that a company’s decisions should benefit all the company’s stakeholders, including their employees, their customers and the communities in which they operate.
This VC said out loud what many others only hint at: white men get preferential treatment
One interesting part of this VC’s statement is that he argues that white men of a certain age make for the best investments. That may be what he found when he crunched his numbers. But it’s a dubious accomplishment when you consider that VC as an asset class underperforms?—?and it’s also worth noting that the numbers aren’t all that convincing?—?plenty of data shows that diverse teams outperform. Fortunately, there are people thinking about how to get past this conundrum.
Village Capital in 2017: Betting big on ideas in blind spots
“Clarence Bethea doesn’t have the standard background for a tech entrepreneur.” That was the first line of a recent profile on our portfolio company Upsie, and a good tagline for the types of investments we try to make at Village Capital: entrepreneurs who might otherwise be overlooked by traditional early-stage investors.
Expanding Our Global Collaboration with PayPal
In 2017–18, we’ll continue our work with PayPal, running FinTech investment-readiness programs in the US, Latin America, India and for the first time — sub-Saharan Africa For the past three years, we’ve collaborated with PayPal to support entrepreneurs around the world that are working on improving financial health. Today, I’m thrilled to announce that we’re continuing and expanding that collaboration and we’re kicking off our 2017–2018 schedule with a summer program for American entrepreneurs.
New Types of Impact Investment Models Promising to Take the Field Forward
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