Global Social Venture Competition

GSVC 2011 Judges

2011 GSVC Global Finals Judges

Please see full bios below

- Chris Brookfield, Founder and Managing Director - Elevar Equity
- Brian Cayce, Principal, Gray Ghost Ventures
- Dan Cherian, General Manager, Sustainable Business & Innovation - Nike
- Steve Hahn, Ventures and Business Development - Dow Chemical
- Nancy Kamei - Sector Director - Intel Capital
- Jean-Michel Lecuyer, Director of Social Impact Investments - FranceActive
- Ricardo Levy, entrepreneur and founder - Catalytica, Inc
- Susan MacCormac, Partner - Morrison and Foerster
- Kishore Moorjani, Founder - Credit Asia Capital

2011 GSVC Social Impact Judges

Please see full bios below

- Lakshmi Karan, Director Global Strategy-Riders for Health
- Priya Patil, Social Impact and Evaluation Advisor
- Sara Olsen, Founder and CEO of SVT Group
- John Goldstein, Managing Director of Imprint Capital Advisors
- Ben Thornley, Director of Insight at Pacific Community Ventures
- Megan Rast (Moderator)

 

Chris Brookfield
Founder and Managing Director, Elevar Equity

Chris served as the Director of the Unitus Equity Fund (UEF), a socially responsible investment fund that pioneered equity funding of microfinance institutions and led the establishment of microfinance as a desirable commercial asset class. Based on this success, he co-founded Elevar where he is interested in furthering this groundbreaking work to address new sectors that benefit the poor.

Chris began his career in 1993 by founding a clean-tech company that created natural solutions to heavy metal contamination. A few years later, he co-founded a wireless development company that was backed by Craig McCaw, George Soros and Charles Schwab. He then became a partner at one of the most active venture capital firms in the Seattle area, where he focused on early stage investments in communications, web based marketing and software for mobile devices. Chris left venture capital behind in 2003 to focus on investments with broader and more beneficial human impact. Along the way, he co-founded Cap & Gown, a youth mentoring program, and served on the Advisory Board of American Rivers, a conservation group.

Chris is a Director of GramaVidiyal and Ujjivan. He has also served as a Director or observer on the boards of several companies, including SKS Microfinance, AdRelevance, NetMotion Wireless and SinglePoint. Chris has a degree in Geology from Williams College in Massachusetts, USA.

 

Brian Cayce
Principal, Gray Ghost Ventures

Actively involved in establishing the strategic direction of Gray Ghost’s impact-oriented venture capital investing, Brian currently leads the firm's analysis, evaluation, execution and governance of venture capital investment opportunities. He manages a varied portfolio and has sourced, executed and/or performed governance roles for the following investments: MicroPlace (2006 – eBay); RentBureau (2006 – Experian); paraLife (2006); United Villages (2007); CellBazaar (2007 – Telenor); d.light (2007); SourceTrace (2007); BEAM (2008), Emergence BioEnergy (2008), iSend (2009), Movirtu (2009), mDhil (2009), and PharmaSecure (2009).

In addition to his corporate board service, Brian serves on the boards of local nonprofit organizations, and facilitates a financial management workshop for at-risk homeless families in the Atlanta area.  Brian graduated Summa cum Laude from the University of Georgia’s Honors Program, and earned an MBA in Finance from Georgia State University. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Brian speaks Russian proficiently. Brian resides in Decatur, Georgia, with his forgiving wife, lovely son and daughter, and unruly German Shepherd dog.

 

 

 

Dan Cherian
General Manager, Nike’s Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab

Dan Cherian is the General Manager of Nike’s Sustainable Business & Innovation (SB&I) Lab, a new strategic investing and partnering program enabling and accelerating Nike’s growth through sustainability. The Lab will help Nike’s business units achieve their visionary sustainability goals by procuring external innovation from startups, entrepreneurs, research institutions, non-profits and other corporations. 

Before Nike Inc, Dan worked as a Strategy lead for the Global Operations business unit at Pfizer Inc and before then as a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in New York. Growing up in New Delhi, he earned his degree in Architecture at the SPA, Delhi and then a Masters in City Planning at MIT. He now lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, OR.

 

 

 

Dr. Nancy Kamei
Sector Director, Intel Capital

Dr. Nancy Kamei manages venture capital investments in life sciences and cleantech for Intel Capital including Pacific Biosciences (PACB) and Expression Diagnostics.  In addition, Nancy has invested a substantial portion of her time in the not-for-profit sector.  She currently serves on the Boards of UCSF’s School of Pharmacy and the Japanese American National Museum.  She served as a Trustee and Chair of the Investment Committee for the Marin Community Foundation, an advisor to Stanford University’s Office of Technology Licensing, a Delegate to President Obama’s Summit on Entrepreneurship, and spent countless hours as a hands-on volunteer.

Prior to joining Intel Capital, she was an analyst/portfolio manager at Capital Group Companies responsible for public equity investments in biotechnology, healthcare services, and consumer products.  Prior to Capital, she was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Institutional Venture Partners and a serial entrepreneur, having been on the start-up teams of four successful biotechnology companies including Onyx Pharmaceuticals (ONXX) and Tularik (sold to Amgen/TLRK).  She started her career as a National Pharmaceutical Council Fellow, and then managed a sales territory for Merck & Company.  Nancy holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of California San Francisco. 

 

Steve F. Hahn
Research Fellow, The Dow Chemical Company

Steve joined Dow in 1982 in Central Research in Midland, Michigan and has worked in a variety of business and corporate research function in Midland and in Freeport, Texas prior to being named to his current position in 2007.  As Research Fellow, Steve leads Dow’s effort to identify emerging, strategically aligned chemical and material business opportunities. 

Steve has a B.S. in Chemistry from Michigan Tech and an M.S. in Chemistry from Central Michigan University.  He holds 32 issued U.S. Patents, has 40 publications in refereed journals, 15 conference proceedings, and 6 chapters in text /reference books.  Steve was named a Dow Inventor of the Year in 1990 and 1996, the Distinguished Alumni Lecturer at Michigan in 1996 and 2003, and received the Dow Excellence In Science Award in 1999.  He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota in 2002.  He has represented Dow on Advisory Board for the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Connecticut and the College of Arts and Sciences at Michigan Technological University.  He recieved the American Chemical Society Cooperative Research Award in 2008, and the Council for Chemical Research Collaboration Award in 2010.

 

 

 

 

Jean-Michel Lecuyer
Director, Social Business Investment Team at Franc Active

Since 2003, Jean-Michel Lecuyer has led the Social Business Investment Team in the leading French social business financing organization, France Active, and has served as CEO of SIFA, France Active Investment Company. SIFA is investing (from 10 000 $ up to 1,5 M$) exclusively in companies developing social businesses. In 2010, France Active has invested $40M USD in 880 social businesses. Most of the new and developing social businesses in France are financed by one of the 40 France Active agencies.  Jean-Michel is involved as an external expert in the selection and investment process of ANTROPIA, the social incubator and venture philanthropic fund of French ESSEC Business School. He ‘s also the treasurer of French Social Entrepreneurs Movement.

Jean-Michel is a graduate from the Ecole Polytechnique (1989-1992) and Ecole des Mines de Paris (1992-1994), France

 

 

 

 

 

Ricardo B. Levy
Founder, Catalytica
Ricardo Levy is an executive and entrepreneur whose career spans more than three decades of founding and building successful businesses. Born and raised in South America to a European immigrant family, he completed engineering studies in the United States at Stanford and Princeton before returning to South America to run a family business. In 1969 he sold the business and returned to the United States to complete his Ph.D. at Stanford in the field of catalytic chemistry. In 1974, after a number of years in the petroleum and petrochemical industry, he co-founded his first entrepreneurial venture, Catalytica, a research and development firm serving the pharmaceutical and clean energy industries. The firm’s discoveries resulted in over one hundred patents and led to the formation of three companies, one of which became, under Levy’s leadership, the largest supplier to the pharmaceutical industry in North America.  He currently serves on several public and private corporate boards of directors and is the author of a book “Letters to a Young Entrepreneur” published in March 2010. 

 

 

 

 

Susan MacCormac
Partner, Morrison & Foerster

Susan MacCormac is a partner in the Corporate Group of Morrison & Foerster’s San Francisco office. She serves as co-chair of the Firm’s 550 lawyer Business Department, and co-chair of the Cleantech Group.

Ms. MacCormac has extensive experience representing start-up to late-stage private companies primarily in the Cleantech or Sustainable space. She provides corporate and finance advice in connection with mergers, acquisitions, asset purchases and sales, reorganizations, joint ventures, and equity and debt financings. She regularly advises boards of private and public companies, special committees, and CEOs on corporate governance as it relates to sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility ("CSR") issues and has joined the faculty (teaching on issues of sustainability and corporate governance) at both the Stanford Director’s College and the Northwestern Corporate Counsel Institute. Ms. Mac Cormac also represents nonprofit corporations involved with Sustainability and CSR, providing advice to their boards on fiduciary issues, conflicts of interest, and other corporate matters.

 

 

Kishore Moorjani
Founder and Managing Partner, Credit Asia Capital

Kishore Moorjani is Founder and Managing Partner of Credit Asia Capital – an Asian special situations investment firm he founded in 2006 in partnership with Blackstone Strategic Alliance Fund. Since 1998, he has been an active investor in Asia, leading investments at Colony Capital

and Highbridge Capital Management before establishing Credit Asia Capital. In this time, he hasinvested over $1.5 billion in Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines,Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Kishore was born in India, and schooled in Dubai and Toronto. He started his professional career in Canada working on one of the largest corporate and debt restructurings. In 1995, Kishore moved to Asia to launch the CBRE business in India and subsequently to establish CBRE Investors in Singapore.

He was a founding investor and serves on the investment committee of India's first microfinance fund – The Bellwether Microfinance Fund. He is also an investor and investment committee member of the $90 million India Financial Inclusion Fund. He is passionate about broadening the reach of the impact investing across Asia, among the initiatives he is currently involved with is the launch of Indonesia’s first institutionally established microfinance institution.

 

 

SIA

Lakshmi Karan
Director Global Strategy, Riders for Health

Dr. Lakshmi Karan is Director, Global Strategy, at Riders for Health, a social enterprise that delivers health services to over 10 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Most recently, she was Director of Impact Assessment at the Skoll Foundation where she led program strategy and review of grant investments. Within the social sector, Lakshmi served as a strategy consultant to a variety of organizations including Reebok Human Rights program, Oxfam America and the Alchemy Foundation. In the private sector, she was a management consultant to fortune 500 companies working with senior executives around the world in the finance, health and retail industries. Her expertise was in systems design and knowledge management. Lakshmi grew up in South India, where she completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer science. Subsequently, she earned a master’s and Ph.D. in international relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her doctoral dissertation was in the fields of nonprofit effectiveness and organizational learning. 

 

Priya Patil,
Social Impact and Evaluation Advisor

Dr. Priya Patil is an accomplished social scientist and development professional with deep experience in impact measurement, design for scale, philanthropy and social action. She brings 14 years of experience leading social investment and impact efforts in over 15 emerging economies of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for multilaterals, national governments, private foundations, and think tanks. With a particular focus on health, infrastructure, women and girls, and youth she led efforts in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean developing novel systems to capture medical information from regions where formal tracking of medical information did not previously exist; developed evaluation, impact measurement and management tools and strategies for health and infrastructure portfolios implemented in South and East Asia; and, led the development of a philanthropic marketplace designed to accelerate private funds into disease eradication organizations working across the globe. Additionally Priya led impact assessment efforts of communication and mass media campaigns, and coordinated post-market clinical trials.

Priya currently sits on the advisory board for Tipping Point Community. She has published work in international journals, presented at numerous international conferences and received awards for her work.  Priya was an NIH Fellow and received PhD and masters degrees from Johns Hopkins University, and a bachelors degree from the University of Chicago.

 

 

 

Sara Olsen
Founder and CEO, SVT Group

Where markets can see environmental and social impact and its causes, entrepreneurs have an incentive to compete to have the best impact. On this premise Sara Olsen started SVT Group in 2001 to work with leaders within and across industries to develop tools and methods that enable investors, businesses and nonprofits to measure, manage and communicate their impact as a strategic asset, and to promote the adoption of these approaches as a regular business practice. She coined the phrase "Impact Management" to describe this emerging discipline.

Ms. Olsen is a co-founder of the Global Social Venture Competition and a blogger at www.socialedge.org/blogs/svt-on-impact. She became committed to systemic solutions to poverty after living and working in the Mississippi Delta, where she awoke to the third world within the United States. A Dartmouth graduate who holds MBA and MASW degrees from UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, Sara considers her most valuable education to come from teaching public high school in Mississippi, helping start a social enterprise at Shorebank Corporation in inner-city Chicago, co-founding the GSVC, and her relationships with people.       

 

 

 

John Goldstein
Managing Director of Imprint Capital Advisors

Mr. Goldstein co-founded Imprint Capital Advisors in June 2007. Imprint Capital is an impact investment firm that develops, builds and manages mission investing programs and portfolios for foundations, families and financial institutions.  Imprint has invested over $140 MM over the last 3 years across mission areas and asset classes.  Previously, Mr. Goldstein was a co-founder of Medley Capital Management (MCM), a private investment firm that invests in corporate and asset-based financing opportunities globally. Prior to forming MCM, Mr. Goldstein served as Senior Managing Director of Medley Global Advisors, a leading independent policy intelligence firm for the world's largest financial institutions that was sold to private equity firms in December of 2005. During that time, Mr. Goldstein co-founded and served as the Executive Director of the Medley Institute, where he worked with a variety of development actors globally as a board member, senior advisor or team member, including Global Giving, Distributed Capital, the International Interfaith Investment Group (3iG), Keystone/Access, the Sustainable Food Lab, Synergos/Generon/Monitor's Social Capital Market Accelerator, Aquaya, Triple Bottom Line Institute, the Global Exchange for Social Investment, and the United Nations Capital Development Fund. Additionally, in that capacity, Mr. Goldstein has been a presenter at a range of conferences and events in the U.S. and Europe. Prior to that, Mr. Goldstein was a management consultant in the strategy practice of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), working with senior executives around the world in a number of industries on issues such as brand strategy, "buyer values" market research, global M&A, scenario planning, and new product development. Mr. Goldstein was an honors graduate of Yale University where he was awarded the Richter Fellowship and the Townsend Prize.

 

Ben Thornley
Director - InSight, Pacific Community Ventures

Ben Thornley is the Director of InSight – the thought leadership practice in high-impact investing at Pacific Community Ventures (PCV). PCV is a leading San Francisco-based CDFI and growth equity manager deploying $60 million in three funds targeting quality job creation in low-income California communities.

Ben is responsible for PCV’s policy research and non-financial performance evaluation initiatives, advising prominent institutions in the United States including the California Public Employees Retirement System, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The California Endowment. In 2010, InSight assessed the social impact of over $1.2 billion of private equity investments by 40 individual money managers. More information is at http://www.pacificcommunityventures.org/insight.

Prior to joining PCV, Ben worked for a decade advancing the role of financial services in economic development. This included as editorial director and New York correspondent for a leading Australian business publication, as a policy associate with the United Nations Association of the U.S.A., responsible for coordinating Wall Street’s formal participation in the UN’s Financing for Development conference, and as an investment director in the Australian Consulate-General, New York, charged with positioning Australia as a regional financial services center.

Ben sits on the governing standards committee of the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards, is the board president of Centerforce, an agency supporting families and communities impacted by incarceration, and holds a Masters of Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley.

 

Megan Rast (Moderator)

Megan Rast is a second year MBA at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, with a focus on sustainability, corporate social responsibility and impact investing.  While at Haas, she recommended organizational impact measurement for Rubicon Programs, corporate citizenship strategy for Southwest Airlines, and impact investment fund strategy for Mission Markets.  She spent last summer at eBay as an Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps Fellow, building double-bottom line strategy forrenewable energy investment projects and energy efficiency initiatives.  She led impact assessment research for the GSVC committee in 2010 and placed second at Regionals for the 2011 Venture Capital Investment Competition.  In addition, she co-authored a guidebook on social media strategy for corporate social responsibility initiatives and consulted a non-profit on strategic social media engagement.  Prior to Haas, she worked at Abt Associates Inc. in environmental public policy consulting and earned a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College.  In her spare time she enjoys adding stamps to her passport, tasting wine, and being personal assistant to a professional poker player.