SRI360 explores how professional and institutional investors use impact investing and sustainable finance to shape real-world outcomes.
Each episode features an in-depth conversation with a leading investor in public or private equities, public or private debt, venture capital, or real assets.
We focus on the mechanics of investing: how strategies are designed, how capital is allocated, how impact is achieved and measured, and where incentives succeed, or fail, within asset-owner systems.
If you want clear, honest insight into the future of sustainable & responsible investing from the people shaping it, this show is your competitive edge.
$27 billion left sustainable funds in a single quarter last year. Is impact investing being defeated, or purified? One of the people in the room when the field got its name says the money that left was never committed, and the most exciting work now is being done by people who don't write press releases about it.
I'm joined by Antony Bugg-Levine, Managing Director of Bugg-Levine, Inc., co-founder of the Global Impact Investing Network, and author of Investing in America: Expanding Access to Finance to Solve Our Shared Challenges. He ran the Nonprofit Finance Fund for a decade, and as a young man he wrote the last speech Nelson Mandela gave as president.
His argument starts with a loan. He grew up in a politically active family in apartheid Johannesburg and got to Yale only because someone lent him the money — and fair access to financing became the throughline of his career. In 2007, after a back-of-the-envelope calculation convinced him there would never be enough money in philanthropy and government to solve the problems he cared about, he convened the meeting on Lake Como where “impact investing” got its name. He doesn’t remember who said it first, and thinks that’s beautiful.
Nineteen years later, he’s asking harder questions of the field he helped build. He started on “Team Unlock More Money for Impact” and now says he’s been, “if you could call it,” radicalized: mainstream capital has had a generation to move further and faster than it has. He also offers a simple gut check for any impact claim — does the methodology ever speak to someone whose life it claims to improve? The share of the market that fails it, he says, whatever it is, is too high.
In this episode we discuss:
Who left: why the people who dabbled in impact because it was expedient “have found comfort in the ability to retreat without repercussions”
$27 billion out of sustainable funds in one quarter — a verdict on returns, or, as he suspects, a risk management exercise?
Who’s quietly building: why the most exciting work is happening inside large family offices that don’t write press releases
Why, in his words, “returns are objectively measured, risk is not” — and what that does to where capital goes
The gut check that too much of the impact market fails
The FTX bankruptcy sale that put Omidyar, Ford Foundation and Nathan Cummings money into Anthropic equity — for influence, not returns
A $29 million Ford Foundation loan closed in nine days during COVID, and why “you shouldn’t have to have a crisis to work that way”
Why Congress hasn’t moved to dismantle the CDFI Fund, even as it’s targeted for elimination
“Are we really planning to win?” — the math that told him grants would never be enough
How “impact investing” got its name, and why nobody remembers who said it first
Benjamin Franklin’s 1789 will, and the loan-fund idea underneath all of it
Featured guest:
Antony Bugg-Levine, Managing Director, Bugg-Levine, Inc.; Co-Founder, Global Impact Investing Network; Author, Investing in America
His test for any impact claim: does the methodology ever speak to someone whose life it claims to improve? — https://www.bugglevine.com/
The retreat has a profile. The people who dabbled because it was expedient “have found comfort in the ability to retreat without repercussions.” Whether that makes this a purification or a defeat is the question the episode works through.
Maybe not a verdict on returns. $27 billion left sustainable funds in Q4 2025. He suspects it was “a risk management exercise… rather than a profit maximization one” — while noting he hasn’t spoken to the people who made those decisions.
Watch the quiet money. By his count, US billionaires went from about 800 to 1,300 in two years. A lot of the most exciting work is being done by people who don’t write press releases about it.
Risk is a perception. “Returns are objectively measured, risk is not” — which is why capital doesn’t simply follow the numbers.
The gut check. If an impact methodology can be run without ever speaking to the people it claims to help, that’s a red flag. He doesn’t know the share of the market that fails the test — only that it’s too high.
From “Team Unlock” to radicalized. Mainstream capital has had a generation to move further and faster than it has, and he’s become less sanguine about how far it will move on its own.
A governance play, not a return play. Omidyar, Ford and Nathan Cummings bought $5 million of Anthropic equity out of FTX’s bankruptcy, betting on persuasion and influence.
$29 million in nine days. A deal that normally takes nine months. When Ford’s red line came back, all three proposed changes made the loan easier.
Grants were never going to be enough. His 2007 math: not enough in philanthropy and government combined, and roughly $100 trillion sitting in global capital markets.
Franklin’s loan fund. Benjamin Franklin amended his will in 1789 to pay forward the loan that had set him up in business — the same idea, centuries earlier.
About the SRI 360° Podcast:
The SRI 360° Podcast is focused only on sustainable and responsible investing. In each episode, I interview a world-class investor who is an accomplished practitioner from all asset classes. I cover everything from their early personal journeys to how they built and ran their investment strategies, and the challenges they face today. Each episode is a chance to go below the surface with these impressive people and learn useful lessons from professional investors.
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Africa's Risk Premium Is A Myth: What the Default-Rate Data Actually Shows | Andrew Johnstone, Climate Fund Managers (#147)
Episode 147
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 • Duration 01:44:20
Africa carries a risk premium far greater than its actual risk. Fifty years of development-lending and World Bank data show the probability of loss on African infrastructure projects is on par with, or lower than, developed markets. My guest has spent a decade building a fund designed around that mispricing.
Andrew Johnstone is the Co-Founder and CEO of Climate Fund Managers (CFM), a blended-finance platform managing just over $3 billion across renewable energy, water and oceans, green hydrogen, and — most recently — private credit. He was a civil engineer who started out designing roads in KwaZulu-Natal before he ever financed one.
Andrew was born in Johannesburg to British parents who emigrated to South Africa after World War II. His father was a mechanical engineer on the mines, and the family moved to Pietermaritzburg when Andrew was 18 months old. He followed his father into engineering — civil, "just to really break the mold" — earning a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Natal on a bursary from the Natal Roads Department, where he spent his university vacations surveying, setting out roads and fixing graders. After national service as a lieutenant in the South African Air Force and a stretch backpacking, he moved to the UK, completed an MBA in Engineering Management and Finance at City University London, and pivoted from the technical side toward finance. A year in Brazil implementing toll road concessions around Rio de Janeiro followed, then a return to South Africa in 1997 — the year the country won the Rugby World Cup — to work for the construction company Group Five.
In 2000, he joined Macquarie as one of two people building an infrastructure team in South Africa. In partnership with Old Mutual, they took over management of the South African Infrastructure Fund — the first African infrastructure fund, established in 1996 — from Standard Bank. That business became African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM), where Andrew rose to CEO while also serving as Chairman of Macquarie Africa. Over roughly 15 years and seven funds, he watched infrastructure evolve from what he calls "a very boring sector" nobody cared about into an institutional asset class. His lasting lesson from that chapter: institutions matter, and partnerships have a lifespan — you need the skill to curate, manage and eventually unwind them.
Impact Investing’s Bottleneck: It’s Not Capital... Why Isn’t the Money Moving? | Laurie Spengler, Courageous Capital Advisors (#146)
Wednesday, September 9, 2026 • Duration 01:23:57
“Walking away is actually discipline. It's not failure, it's discipline.” — Laurie Spengler
In this episode, I speak with Laurie Spengler, Founder and CEO of Courageous Capital Advisors and Founding Partner of Mondiale Impact, about why capital without capacity fails, the danger of treating patient capital as permanent capital, and the path from establishing legal clinics in homeless shelters in Boston to structuring billion-dollar blended finance vehicles.
Laurie grew up in New Jersey watching her serial-entrepreneur father fix and grow small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the real economy. After studying political science and economics at Stanford and teaching for a year in Taiwan, she attended Harvard Law School. During this time, while volunteering at the homelessness legal clinic in Boston, she represented a homeless Vietnam veteran. On winning the hearing and a Section 8 voucher for housing access for her client, he turned to her and said "So, Laurie, this is great. Where am I going to sleep tonight?". She then realized that legal rights without physical infrastructure were hollow. She and her classmates then successfully petitioned corporate-track graduates to pledge 1% of their future salaries to fund public interest law positions—her first aligned capital stack.
After Harvard, she joined White & Case and was posted to Czechoslovakia just as the Berlin Wall fell. While the market focused on massive sovereign privatizations like the Škoda-Volkswagen deal, she noticed that the SMEs making up the real economy were starved for growth equity.
So she founded the Central European Advisory Group in Prague, a dual legal and corporate finance firm built on the thesis that advice and capital must be integrated. She ran it for more than a decade before selling to her management team. She subsequently became CEO of ShoreBank International—later merged and rebranded as Enclude, which she eventually sold to Palladium—building an FCA-regulated broker-dealer business to intermediate capital globally.
In 2020, she founded Courageous Capital Advisors to act as a specialized transaction intermediary. The model is built around a single leading question: what is the capital solving for? She operates globally across private equity and debt, structuring a $500 million affordable housing credit fund with Symbiotics, raising holding company loan notes for BRAC, and securing common equity for Southern Bancorp. She was also a core architect of the SDG Loan Fund, a radically simple blended structure where a $25 million MacArthur Foundation guarantee unlocked $111 million in first-loss capital from FMO, mobilizing $1 billion from Allianz—a 40:1 mobilization ratio.
Does Impact Cost You Anything? 4 Funds Answer With Real Numbers, Not Theory (#145)
Wednesday, September 2, 2026 • Duration 01:05:20
Four investors. One hard question: does impact actually pay, and how do you prove it?
This is a compilation episode of SRI360, pulling together four conversations that answer that question from four seats at the table — growth equity, private equity sustainability, infrastructure, and the policy world trying to move trillions. None treats impact simply as a discount you accept for doing good. Across four very different perspectives, they make the case that impact and financial success can — and increasingly must — work together.
Maya Chorengel of TPG’s Rise Fund only invests where impact and financial return are “collinear” — where the two rise together — and screens every deal for a 20%+ gross IRR and a measurable impact floor, using a formal equation built by TPG’s in-house team. Cornelia Gomez of General Atlantic reduces the whole sustainability question to three value-creation levers — revenue, cost, and exit — and can name a company’s three “hot potatoes” in ten minutes. Anish Majmudar of M&G runs a real-assets impact fund with roughly $750 million committed across 100-plus projects, built on the argument that infrastructure is where impact and cash flow line up most naturally. And Kieron Boyle of the Impact Investing Institute works the other end — trying to pull the trillions sitting in mainstream capital markets and family offices into the field.
Taken together, they map how impact investing actually underwrites, measures, and defends itself — at a moment when the whole category is under political fire.
In this episode we discuss:
“Collinearity”: why the best impact deals are the ones where returns and impact rise together
How to underwrite impact with an actual equation — and a 20%+ IRR floor
The three levers that link sustainability to value: revenue, cost, and exit
How to spot the three sustainability risks that actually move valuation — fast
Why infrastructure is where impact and cash flow align most cleanly
Pulling the trillions in mainstream and family-office capital into impact
Why the whole category is contested — and what the ESG backlash gets wrong
Featured guests:
In 2021 This Sounded Like Activism — Then Fossil Fuels Lost a Decade: The Stranded-Asset Call, Five Years On | Ron Gonen, Closed Loop Partners (#144)
Wednesday, August 26, 2026 • Duration 40:09
In the autumn of 2021, Ron Gonen sat across from me and made a call that sounded like activism: fossil fuel assets were already stranded, the smart money was gone, and anyone divesting that year was a decade too late. He said it during the best year energy stocks had had in a decade. For eighteen months, he looked flat wrong.
He wasn’t. This is a re-release, and before the interview I score the thesis against what actually happened. In 2024 the S&P’s fossil fuel components returned 5.7% against 25% for the index; the sector has underperformed in seven of the last ten years and shrunk from 30% of the index in 1980 to about 3% today. The regulation he predicted arrived: seven states now have packaging producer-responsibility laws, up from two. And the single national recycling company he said the US needed — which did not exist when we spoke — he built a year later. It’s Circular Services, now the largest privately held recycler in the US, with close to a billion dollars behind it from Brookfield, Microsoft, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Starbucks and Unilever.
Ron Gonen is the Founder and CEO of Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm and innovation center built entirely around the circular economy. He founded and ran RecycleBank, served as New York City’s Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling and Sustainability, and wrote The Waste-Free World. In this conversation he lays out why the linear “extract, use, landfill” economy is a subsidised anomaly, why he thinks circular investing carries a clear financial edge rather than a moral discount, and how he underwrites it — value investing, price-to-value discipline, and a corporate LP base that tells him where the market is going before it gets there.
The one part he under-called was the politics — and that’s the live risk. Federal policy went the other way, every gain came from the states, and the fight he once compared to a bug bite is now a 17-state lawsuit. He was right on the assets, the regulation, and the infrastructure. The open question is whether the politics catches up.
In this episode we discuss:
Why he called fossil fuel assets “stranded” in the middle of their best year — and how that call has aged
The financial case that circular and sustainable portfolios beat the market, not lag it
Base of the Pyramid to Pension Fund: What Four Emerging-Market Funds Actually Returned | BlueOrchard · BII · IIX · EPIC World (#143)
From a $200 microloan in Peru to a bond sold almost exclusively to pension funds in Singapore: four emerging-market funds, one question almost no one answers in public — what actually returned?
Impact investing has a disclosure problem. The frameworks multiplied. AUM keeps growing. But deal-level outcomes — loss rates, exits, the defaults that didn't happen — almost never get discussed openly. In this compilation episode, they do.
Philipp Mueller, who at the time of recording was CEO of BlueOrchard, runs the world's largest microfinance fund - $2.4 billion deployed through a single-intermediary model across emerging and frontier markets, with 110 staff across Lima, Nairobi, Tbilisi, and Singapore. Nick O'Donohoe spent seven years as CEO of British International Investment, where a 2% return target became a 5% actual return — in an environment where almost every African country went through major macroeconomic or political turmoil during his tenure. Robert Kraybill, CIO and Managing Director at Impact Investment Exchange, built the Women's Livelihood Bond, six issuances, $228 million raised, listed on the Singapore Exchange, with the sixth bond sold almost exclusively to pension funds. And Jyotsna Krishnan, CEO and Co-Founder of EPIC World, has spent her career mapping the 70% of India's population that remains nearly invisible to global allocators and building the data infrastructure that makes it investable.
One argument connects all four: the risk is mispriced. And the evidence is now there to prove it.
Featured guests:
Philipp Mueller, CEO, BlueOrchard (at time of recording), CEO of Blue Earth Capital AG (Present)
Nick O'Donohoe, Former CEO, British International Investment
Robert Kraybill, CIO and Managing Director, Impact Investment Exchange
Jyotsna Krishnan, CEO and Co-Founder, EPIC World
Listen Next: In Case You Missed It: Must-Hear Conversations Shaping Impact in 2026 (#129)" Link is
The $120 Trillion Repricing: 4 Investors on the Carbon Bubble, Stranded Assets & Real Returns | (#142)
Episode 142
Thursday, August 6, 2026 • Duration 01:00:25
Four investors. Four asset classes. One question: where does real money actually go to work on climate?
In this compilation episode, I revisit conversations with four investors who put real money to work in the physical economy, across greenhouses, Indian agrifood, forests, and the fossil fuel reserves sitting on public markets. They approach climate from very different asset classes, and the contrast is the point.
Dave Chen of Equilibrium Capital treats farming as infrastructure — building and operating some of the largest high-tech greenhouses in North America, and buying technology only once it hits the cost curve. Mark Kahn of Omnivore, India’s pioneering agrifood VC, argues that mitigation is sexy and adaptation is gritty, and that a country about to become too hot to farm has no choice but to fund the gritty one. Radha Kuppalli Former MD, Impact & Advocacy at New Forests explains how a forest became two assets at once — timber and carbon — and how you underwrite a biological asset you cannot harvest for thirty years. And Mark Campanale, who coined the term “unburnable carbon,” lays out the thesis that halved the reserve life of the global oil and gas sector: the market is carrying far more fossil fuel than it can ever burn.
Together they map how capital is repricing land, forests, food, and fossil reserves — and where the returns are hiding in each.
In this episode we discuss:
Why one investor treats greenhouses like data centers — build, operate, and manage technology obsolescence
“Distributed abundance”: unhooking where food is grown from climate and geography
Why climate adaptation, not mitigation, is the urgent thesis for India’s smallholder economy
How a forest generates two revenue streams — timber and California carbon credits — at once
Underwriting a 30-year biological asset you can leave “on the shelf” to grow
The “unburnable carbon” thesis, and why $120 trillion of reserves back $7–8 trillion of market cap
Stranded assets: why building new fossil supply guarantees write-downs
Featured guests:
A 1% Loss Rate “Unheard Of” in Frontier Markets: How Local-Currency Lending Rewrites African Credit Risk | Clemens Calice, Cygnum Capital (#141)
A local-currency bond fund put roughly $600 million to work across some of the credit markets the world rates as riskiest — and lost about 1% of it, over 11 years.
That record belongs to Clemens Calice, who walked out of Goldman Sachs in 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, with two colleagues and no business plan. What he built became Cygnum Capital — today a $1.5 billion platform across seven funds spanning local-currency debt, renewable energy, agriculture, and early-stage venture.
Clemens makes the case that the barrier to institutional capital in Africa was never risk-return — it's deal size, compliance burden across 54 fragmented jurisdictions, and the absence of intermediary infrastructure. He explains why local-currency lending, co-investment with domestic pension funds and insurers, and patient first-mover capital are the mechanisms that actually move a market from unbankable to bankable. Today that platform runs around 150 to 160 individual investments across the continent.
If you work in frontier market investing, climate finance, or blended finance structuring, this is a practitioner's case for what “honest,” evidence-led impact investing looks like on the ground — including where Clemens thinks the industry still overstates its own case.
China Makes 70% of the World's Vitamins: The Fermentation Edge Hiding in Idle Factories | Matilda Ho, Bits x Bites (#140)
Episode 140
Thursday, July 23, 2026 • Duration 01:41:22
Matilda Ho was banned from the kitchen for the first 25 years of her life. Her mother’s rule was simple: cooking is what you do when you fail at school. She now runs China’s first food tech venture fund.
I’m joined by Matilda Ho, Founder and Managing Director of Bits x Bites — a $100 million fund vintaged in October 2020, 15 companies backed, Series A and B, and a board seat as a condition of every check. Her LPs are sovereign funds from Singapore, the Middle East and China, agrifood strategics, and family offices.
Her argument is that the food system cannot be fixed at the checkout. She spent five years at BCG and IDEO advising food companies, and one project — working out how likely a Chinese meat processor was to have another scandal — turned up roughly half a million food safety incidents a year. She built an online grocery to fix it one shopper at a time, then concluded that would take longer than her lifetime. The leverage was upstream.
What she found upstream is a manufacturing advantage most investors outside China have not priced. Seventy percent of the world’s vitamins, two-thirds of its amino acids and more than 80% of its stevia are already made there — much of it in brownfield plants with fermentation tanks sitting idle. Where European biotech founders cannot fund scale-up, she can buy it cheap.
She is equally blunt about what does not work. Beyond Burger’s peas travel from Canada to Suzhou to California, and the margin never survives the trip. China already has tofu — clean, plant-based and 2,000 years old. So she funds certainty over moonshots: functional ingredients, animal health, matcha. And in a market where government money is now the largest source of innovation capital, her first exit was a stake sold to a provincial government vehicle.
In this episode we discuss:
Why the food system cannot be fixed at the checkout, and what changes upstream
Half a million food safety incidents a year — the consulting project that exposed them
Biomanufacturing as China’s unpriced edge: overcapacity, brownfield sites and idle fermentation tanks
Why alternative meat fails on unit economics in a country that already has tofu
Too Big for Venture, Too Small for PE: Inside the ‘Missing Middle’ Where the Alpha Hides | Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Investments (#139)
Episode 139
Wednesday, July 15, 2026 • Duration 01:27:07
Sanjeev Krishnan spent thirty years arriving at one conclusion: the clean economy's binding constraint isn't technology, it's capital structure. He watched brilliant technologies, brilliant people and brilliant visions get broken on the wheel of misaligned capital — not because the science failed, but because the financing never fit what they were trying to build.
That gap is the heart of this episode of SRI360. His core belief is simple: the thing holding back the clean economy is not technology. It is capital structure. Get the financing right, and the building can follow.
I’m joined by Sanjeev Krishnan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of S2G Investments, a nearly $3 billion platform across eight funds, investing at the seams of food, energy, and ocean systems. S2G has backed more than 120 companies. Sanjeev has spent his whole career on one question: how do you change an economic system using markets?
Sanjeev was born in Bangalore in pre-liberalization India and moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, at age nine — his first time ever on a plane. He studied development economics, transferred to the London School of Economics, and joined JPMorgan just in time to watch the dot-com boom collapse from the inside. His team in Europe went from 120 people to 15. He was one of the 15 who kept their job.
What came next taught him how capital really works in the physical world: building mobile networks across Africa, cutting the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% at the World Bank’s IFC, and five hard years inside “clean tech 1.0,” watching good companies fail for reasons that had nothing to do with their technology. In 2014, he co-founded S2G with Lukas Walton.
Today Sanjeev invests at the seams — the gaps between asset classes and between sectors that most investors overlook. In this conversation we cover why capital structure is the real constraint, how he thinks about the wave of AI and energy demand, and why he is betting on the oceans, the part of the planet we have barely measured.
In this episode we discuss:
Why capital structure, not technology, is what really holds back the clean economy
By 2015, at the peak of the platform's success and about to launch fund number eight, he concluded the model wasn't winning. Demand for infrastructure was outstripping delivery, and the deficiency wasn't money, intent or opportunity — it was the method. Project finance assumes risk can be defined, parameterised and allocated at a fixed moment in time. In practice, on a toll road in Nigeria, the list is never complete, the parameters never hold, and the risks keep changing. He had presided over projects that took eight years to reach financial close. So he resigned, told his wife he never wanted to be a fund manager or a CEO again — and roughly 18 months later, through Climate Policy Initiative's Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, co-founded CFM as a joint venture between the Dutch development bank FMO and Sanlam InfraWorks of South Africa's Sanlam Group.
Much of our conversation is about the architecture that came out of that "petri dish." CFM's whole-of-life model splits a project's life into three funds — development, construction and operations — each with capital comfortable at that stage of risk. The static thing is the project; the money moves in and out. Construction is financed with equity because it is faster, and the cost of that equity is brought down by blending at the fund level: a 20% first-loss tranche, a 40% commercial tranche, and a 40% senior tranche, distributed by waterfall rather than pro rata. The project company sees one check of 100. Climate Investor One has developed more than 70 projects, built 16, refinanced seven or eight, and completed three exits.
We also get into the debt-for-nature swap around the Galápagos Islands, where CFM bought Ecuadorian bonds trading at distressed yields — the market wanted 19%, CFM only needed 10% — and split the difference between fiscal relief for the government and conservation funding that expanded the marine protected area by 50%, mobilising $90 million of commercial capital into a conservation outcome. And we discuss the GAIA Climate Loan Fund, CFM's move into private credit for sovereign and sub-sovereign borrowers alongside MUFG, FinDev Canada and the Green Climate Fund, designed to lend in local currency, over longer tenors, without the sovereign counter-guarantee that multilateral lenders typically require.
Andrew is direct about what the industry gets wrong. He argues the real constraint in Africa is absorption rate, not asset performance — and he challenges the premise that credit enhancement is meant to make the future less risky: "Tomorrow isn't less risky than today. It never will be." He says he has yet to sit in an investment or credit committee that asks whether it is taking enough risk.
I also put the hardest question to him directly: if these deals can't happen without public money sitting in first loss, in what sense are the returns commercial — and why the private equity fee structure on top? His answer is that the blend absorbs risk rather than enhancing returns, that the waterfall means there is no scenario in which the manager earns carry while public capital loses money, and that CFM and its shareholders are collectively among the largest investors in their own funds.
What stayed with me is his candour about scale. CFM manages just over $3 billion, against a global climate funding requirement he puts at $5 trillion a year. "Yes, it's an interesting and funky model," he says, "but three billion doesn't really cut it." The answer, he believes, lies in standardisation — because with standardisation comes replication, and with replication comes scale.
00:32:55 First loss: shock absorbers for risky territory
00:35:45 CFM today: from renewables to Gaia private credit
00:42:08 135 people, four hubs, $3B AUM
00:43:52 Pace, impact and profit
00:45:54 The whole-of-life model: three funds, three houses
00:51:41 20/40/40: how the capital stack pays out
00:56:25 Why $3B isn't enough: turning 3 into 30
00:58:28 What makes a project bankable, and what kills it
01:01:35 Africa's risk premium vs. the real risk
01:04:33 Are emerging market default rates really lower?
01:06:08 The OECD's "cottage industry" verdict
01:07:45 Why blended finance hasn't standardized
01:09:43 Adaptation and the Galapagos debt-for-nature swap
01:13:33 Gaia: lending to cities and governments
01:18:19 The exit problem and bridge to bond
01:23:03 Shrinking aid budgets and the return of infrastructure
01:25:40 The fee question: are these returns really commercial?
01:31:18 Who takes the risk, who gets the carry?
01:34:01 The next ten years: heat, energy, water
01:36:03 The weapon is money
01:36:34 Rapid fire: the missing cost of carbon
01:38:15 What he wishes he'd known in 2015
01:39:20 The Thailand project that should have died sooner
01:40:22 The investment that beat expectations
01:41:19 Where to start a climate finance career
01:41:54 Wrap-up
01:42:17 Where to find Andrew and CFM
01:43:16 Outro
Much of our conversation is about why the impact industry is trapped by its own mechanisms. She argues that the industry's focus on deal-by-deal binary decisions blinds allocators to opportunities, and that evaluating risk, volatility, and thematic intersections at the portfolio level could fundamentally expand capital flows.
She is clear-eyed about what does not work. When capital terms are dictated purely by allocators, misalignment is inevitable. She refuses to shoehorn a deal into a mismatched structure, treating the willingness to walk away as a necessary discipline. But when aligned correctly, the upside surprises: she points to the exit of Fenix to ENGIE, creating a liquidity event for every single employee, from the security guards to the C-suite.
We also get into her governance work with Mondiale Impact. She argues that factoring in long-term ecological and social shifts is not a concession or an ESG liability, but a strict fiduciary duty of care for corporate boards navigating a changing world.
What stayed with me is her realism about what it takes to actually move the needle. Thirty years after realizing the gap between a legal right and a physical resource at Rosie’s Place, she admits the macro funding gap remains wide open. To close it, she argues, we can no longer rely on the "pull" of the marketplace—we need the "push" of institutional leadership shifting the mandate from whether to allocate for impact, to how.
Listen to the full conversation.
Audio Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro 00:02:20 Welcome & meet Laurie Spengler 00:02:28 Rosie's Place and the right to housing 00:05:28 The 1% pledge at Harvard Law 00:08:00 Growing up with a real-economy entrepreneur 00:10:03 When the values became conscious 00:10:51 Weekly calls with Dad: "How's your cash?" 00:11:49 Why Stanford 00:12:55 White & Case and post-Wall Czechoslovakia 00:15:40 The overlooked small and mid-sized businesses 00:17:16 A pencil and an idea: founding the Prague firm 00:19:01 Selling the firm to her own team 00:20:47 ShoreBank International and Enclude 00:23:01 Capital plus capacity becomes the rule 00:24:25 When the money shows up but capacity doesn't 00:27:01 Palladium acquires Enclude 00:28:49 Founding Courageous Capital and Mundial Impact 00:32:26 Courageous Capital today 00:36:35 Building a team per deal 00:36:55 What are we solving for? 00:39:11 What the industry misses by only hearing the buy side 00:40:52 Walking away is discipline 00:42:16 Aligned capital doesn't have to be blended 00:44:22 The SDG Loan Fund: $25M unlocks $1B 00:46:16 Radical simplicity 00:48:19 Portfolio-level thinking over deal-by-deal 00:51:37 Sophistication, or how institutions are wired? 00:52:33 Financial inclusion: access vs. usage 00:55:23 Digital lending and seeing the end of the chain 00:57:25 Gender lens investing 00:59:35 Fishing in a new pond 01:01:08 Governance as a business imperative 01:02:51 The liability objection 01:04:30 Carbon without community 01:07:21 Coal jobs and the Just Transition 01:09:01 Knocking on doors during the pandemic 01:10:27 "I am afraid" 01:11:32 The biggest obstacle: leadership 01:13:19 Plumbing vs. leadership 01:15:16 The three As 01:16:13 Rapid fire 01:20:52 Has the gap closed? 01:22:19 Where to find Laurie 01:22:54 Outro
Stranded means stranded. Ron called fossil fuel assets impaired in 2021, with the divestment window already a decade closed. By 2024 the S&P’s fossil components returned 5.7% against 25% for the index.
The moral discount is a myth. He argues circular, stakeholder-aligned portfolios outperform — a fund built on the “greediest” companies would never have screened out Enron, WorldCom, or Tyco.
The linear economy is subsidised, not natural. Extraction and landfill dominate only because they’re propped up; the fossil fuel industry that makes plastic takes roughly $20 billion a year in US subsidies.
Value investing, applied to circularity. Every fund runs a strict price-to-value discipline. On the venture side the hard screen is a sub-$10 million post-money valuation, then whether the tech can become a business, then the team.
The corporate LP base is the edge. Closed Loop’s LPs include some of the largest CPG companies, and they signal where supply chains are heading — turning an “idealistic” thesis into a realistic one.
Redirect the subsidies. His biggest structural idea: move $100 billion over five years from fossil fuel subsidies into circular and renewable industries. As reallocation, not new spending, he argues it costs taxpayers nothing.
The politics is the unhedged risk. Every recent gain came from the states, not federal policy, and incumbent resistance has escalated from a “bug bite” to a 17-state lawsuit — the one variable no investor controls.
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Key Takeaways:
Four practitioners discuss deal-level performance data, loss rates, exits, and recovery rates - in markets most institutions walk straight past, making the case that the risk is systematically mispriced.
How the world's largest microfinance fund deploys $2.4 billion through a single-intermediary model - one trusted local institution between the fund and the end borrower and why avoiding government-linked institutions is central to that discipline.
How BII turned a 2% return target into a 5% actual return across seven years of African macro turmoil, and how the PSI Impact Score gave investment officers and committees a shared framework to evaluate impact rigorously.
How the Women's Livelihood Bond grew from an $8.5 million first issuance to a $100 million sixth bond sold almost exclusively to pension funds, listed on the Singapore Exchange, backed by a 90/10 senior/first-loss structure and a partial Sida guarantee, and now underpinned by the Orange Bond Principles designed to open the gender lens investing market to other issuers.
Why 70% of India's population remains nearly invisible to global allocators and why COVID, household resilience data, and EPIC World's distribution infrastructure make the case that the risk perception is wrong and the opportunity is larger than the capital flowing into it suggests.
Here's what you're in for: 00:00 – Intro: Impact Investing's Disclosure Problem
02:20 – Philipp Mueller, Blue Orchard: The World's Largest Microfinance Fund
02:29 – What Microfinance Is — and Why It Isn't a Donation
04:24 – Ticket Sizes, Markets & How Loan Sizes Vary by Geography
07:17 – Getting Capital from Investor to Base-of-the-Pyramid Borrower
• A platform running around 150 to 160 individual investments across the continent — a scale most institutional investors don't associate with Africa-focused funds.
• A local-currency bond fund with $600M deployed over 11 years and a ~1% cumulative loss rate — in markets rated extremely weak from a credit perspective.
• Why the real barrier to African institutional capital is deal size and compliance burden across 54 jurisdictions, not risk-return.
• How the 20/20/60 blended-finance capital stack actually works, deal by deal.
• Why Clemens rejects the term “impact investor” in favor of “responsible investor,” and what “honest impact investing” means in practice.
• The Copperbelt Energy bond: from 178% oversubscribed on its first tranche to 238% on its second.
• Why gas is, in his view, sometimes a necessity for grid stability — and where he draws the line.
Here's what you're in for:
00:00 – Cold Open — Leaving Goldman in 2009: Starting a Firm with No Business Plan
02:56 – Lion's Head: Origins, Name & the South African Connection
06:23 – Emerging Markets as the Only Skill & the Tanzania Farm Detour
10:54 – 200 Chickens in Nairobi: Understanding the Smallholder Farmer
16:03 – Growing Up in Vienna, ETH Zurich & Into Banking by Accident
19:12 – Asian Crisis, INSEAD, New York & Goldman Sachs
Fixing food at the checkout does not scale. Matilda built an online farmers market and learned that people only change how they eat after a life event — a birth, a diagnosis. A movement, she says, but not a viable business model. The leverage sits upstream in the supply chain.
The supply chain is the problem. In China a vegetable passes through roughly seven hands before it reaches a table. A third of food rots on the farm, another third in transit, and the rest is wasted in fridges and warehouses.
China’s arithmetic is brutal. Around 20% of the world’s population and under 7% of its arable land, feeding 1.4 billion people. More than 85% of soybeans are imported, mostly to feed chickens and pigs.
Biomanufacturing is China’s quiet edge. Europe’s biotech founders struggle to fund scale-up. China has the opposite problem — overcapacity, brownfield sites and idle fermentation tanks, plus the plant managers who know how to run them. 70% of global vitamins, two-thirds of amino acids and over 80% of stevia are already produced there.
Cost is king and taste is king. Beyond Burger’s peas grow in Canada, get processed in Suzhou, then travel to California for final formulation. The gross margin never works. And as she puts it, China already has tofu — clean, plant-based, cheap, and 2,000 years old.
Government money is now the largest source of innovation capital in China. Local governments run fund-of-fund structures and back specialized GPs rather than investing directly. Her own first exit was selling a stake to a provincial government vehicle at Series B, in year five of the fund.
In China, DPI matters more than IRR. IRR can be manipulated; cash returned to LPs cannot. Most domestic funds have only a five-year life, which forces short-term decisions. Her USD fund has ten to twelve years.
Back wartime CEOs, not peacetime ones. Growing revenue tenfold when money was free is not a replicable track record. She looks for humility, grit, and founders who keep going when 99% of the signals say stop.
Software alone does not work in agriculture. Farmers will not pay for something invisible. Her Beijing crop-model company had to bundle seeds and inputs with the software; two-thirds of its revenue now comes from selling the inputs.
Drones changed the economics for smallholders. A tenth of the chemical input, up to half the water saved, and profits up around 30% on cash crops — plus a whole new job class of drone operators. Most growth is now outside China, in North America, Brazil and Argentina.
Agrifood is under-invested. It accounts for less than 5% of total venture funding. Her ambition is that generalist fund managers eventually treat it as a sector worth a seat.
Capital structure is the constraint, not technology. Across thirty years, Sanjeev watched good companies with real products fail because the money backing them was shaped wrong for what they were building.
The missing middle is where good companies get stranded. A business with real revenue and real profits can still be too capital-intensive for venture and too small for private equity control. Venture wants a power law. These companies just grow steadily. So nobody funds them. In May, S2G closed a billion-dollar fund built for exactly this gap.
Fit-for-purpose capital means matching the money to the reality. US biotech built a system that can take an unproven, clinical-stage company public and attract hundreds of millions. Climate has never built its equivalent. That, Sanjeev argues, is the real gap.
Every great transition needed a financial invention first. The joint stock company made oceanic trade possible. Bond syndicates built the railroads. The venture partnership funded the microchip. In each case someone built the financial container before the future arrived.
Impact does not have to be concessionary. At the IFC, his team helped cut the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% — from $2.50 a vial — while margins stayed above 60–70%. Cheaper, faster, better, and profitable at the same time.
Invest at the seams. The best opportunities sit between asset classes and between sectors, where a typical energy investor would dismiss it and a food investor would call it something else — so nobody underwrites it.
Climate is a 10,000-year economic megatrend, not a moral crusade. Humans take useful energy and turn it into useful materials — fire, agriculture, fossil fuels. And the next chapter will still be extractive: it needs copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium.
Busts are where the returns are made. You learn more in the bust cycles than the boom cycles. Markets overshoot both ways, and the companies that survive get forced into product-market fit and a real P&L.
The oceans are the least measured part of the planet. We know more about space. Sanjeev co-founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 to close a data gap between 6 and 200 meters — data that matters for weather, offshore wind, insurance, and defense.
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