58: The Essence of Capital: Scaling Impact and Legacy

Guest Bio:
Audrey Selian currently serves as Director of the Artha Initiative associated with Rianta Capital Zurich and is a team member/advisor to the Halloran Philanthropies. She has been active in the impact investing sector since 2006, and is founder of ArthaPlatform.com, an online impact investment platform that is designed to tackle the economics of due diligence around high impact, small scale SMEs/SGBs. 
She has also been a wanna-be techie since 1997. She completed her PhD in technology policy and development and has been thinking about how to intertwine the two ever since. She is passionate about bringing good people together, and proving that investment in good business(es) is one of the keys to best serving the under-served on this planet. 
Audrey has a background in management consulting from PricewaterhouseCoopers, and her entrepreneurial experience includes several years spent in business development, marketing and sales at an NSF-funded software start-up called Wireless Grids Corporation. 

Artha Impact

The Artha Impact team has been working since 2007 as the impact investing arm of Rianta Capital, which is a dedicated advisory to the Singh Family Trust. Through this initiative, they have been running a series of programs designed to invest, catalyze and convene around the promise of supporting meaningful business interventions for impact in India. Today Artha Impact holds a robust portfolio of direct early/growth stage investments and a small handful of impact funds in the country.  Sectors of focus include - but have not been limited to - agriculture, healthcare and livelihoods.

Key Points:

• There is an incredible network of like minded family offices
• Artha Network platform 
  • help coordinate discovery and create more visibility.
  • “The information about who's doing what and where should not be left to chance, because the opportunity costs are just too high in the event that things go wrong, and things don't happen the right way.”
• Partnership with Menterra, one of the oldest social enterprise incubator in India.
• Biosense - last mile health diagnostic service
• Collaborative learning and action is key to solving the last mile challenge
• Telecoms & Beer are succeeding in the last mile - the narrative must change to grease the wheels, otherwise we continue to propagate the same exact mentality that is contributing to hundreds of parallel silos. Something that gets people to see a carrot that changes the behaviour where we’re all competing against each other to develop on SDG X.
• Impact Measurement - we encourage folks that we work with to pick 2 or 3 things that are really tangible and possible to measure
• Taxonomies - we are trying to keep it simple
• Partnerships play a crucial role in due diligence - We had 40% of investors reported in the GIIN survey, express willingness to utilize other investor’s due diligence documentation, and that’s a sea change. 
• Every player has a lot to contribute, technology is amplifying what each and every one of us can do.
• “Federation and King of the Hill strategies, domination strategies aren’t going to work today. There is too much empowerment at the end notes that is propelled by technology.”
• “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

Time Stamp:

[04:22] How do you define sustainable and impact investing?

[06:28] How did Artha started?

[09:38] How the Singh family articulated their values

[10:24] Who is Tom Singh 

[14:42] Impact for Breakfast Chapters, learning network and series

[16:07] Words matter, Chi points

[18:13] How Artha Network impact investme