The Life Investment

Something amazing just happened. For the first time ever, three social entrepreneurs have offered up a portion of their future income for perpetuity in exchange for upfront resources to scale their organizations right now.

The Background: A few months ago, one creative investor started to get excited about the idea of Investing in Superstars. Sometimes, he posited, you run across someone who seems so exceptional that whatever it is they're doing, you want to be a part of it. What if, he thought, instead of waiting till they have some clear specific venture, you enabled them with resources up front and allowed them to achieve their potential earlier? What long term value for the world would that create?

The strategy he came up with to make the financials work was to suggest a sort of "Life Investment" - a few hundred thousands dollars up front in exchange for some small portion (1-5%) of your income for ever, with a "buyout" option of a number of multiples of the original investment.

He threw the idea out online and it sparked an incredible conversation. I picked up the story and wrote a post called "The Most Interesting Model of Startup Investing You've Ever Seen." But then I thought it might be interesting to actually get some people in the driver's seats of their young companies talking about this, and emailed about 50 founder and investor friends.

The conversation exploded and produced an email chain some 200 messages deep. While at first some of the voices were of skepticism, as the chain continued more and more people became incredibly excited about the idea of this "Life Investment." The value of dollars seemed greater now than later, the idea of pursuing passion was enticing, and the momentum shifted.

The Outcome: One of the first people to determine to take the conversation off of the email thread and make it real was Kjerstin Erickson, the founder of FORGE and Social Edge blogger.

Kjerstin's story is much like many successful young social entrepreneurs. She's built an organization to support their entrepreneurial efforts of refugees that has clear processes and structures in place and is creating significant value, but still struggles with the ever present grind of resources for simply sustaining their impact, and because of that, scale is limited.

In a similar situation is Saul Garlick, the founder of ThinkImpact who has build an impressive program for training and supporting next generation social entrepreneurs, but who still has to fight for resources. Jon Gosier, the founder of Appfrica, has struck on a model with huge potential - investing in the talent of Ugandan web developers to build their own companies - but needs resources to move faster.

In the middle of the email thread, Kjerstin announced that, to hell with it, she was going to do this. Maybe not in the exact model, but something that was the same and effectively amounted to "mortgaging her life" in order to get FORGE where it needed to be.

Saul and Jon quickly joined in, and today they've just announced the 'Thrust Fund,' which publicly announces their intentions.

Kjerstin is offering 6% of her annual income for a $600,000 up front investment. Saul and Jon have their own offers: 3% for $300,000. Together, they are hosting a conversation about it on Social Edge as we speak.

This is a pretty remarkable thing. It's a totally different take on a fundamental problem, which is scaling resources for social entrepreneurs. I think it also demonstrates the tenacity and willingness to commit that today's young leaders have.

Check out the Thrust Fund website (coming later today) for more information. I'll be following this story closely.