Michael "Luni" Libes and his Blueprints for Building Accelerators and Funds for Social Good

The Impact Investing Podcast

This Podcast is sponsored by Maine Startup and Create Week. This years conference is June 20th to 26th in Portand, ME and is going to be amazing! This year’s conference is focused on design and innovation. They’re bringing in some of the best minds to discuss and teach how entrepreneurs can use the skills that accompany great design and design thinking to help build better companies, products and solutions to the world's most pressing problems? Panels will cover topics ranging from a mixture of Biotech, Agricultural tech and innovation and environmental technology to health-care, disruption of the insurance industry, industrial 3D design and lessons from failed startups.

Keynote speakers so far for this year include Mike Perlis (president and CEO of Forbes Media), Heather Stephenson (Head of Brand Strategy at Super) and Peter Roper (Head of Mobile Brand Strategy at Google).

Last years conference drew over 4000 attendees and had 215 volunteers contributing over 10,000 hours. Check out Mainestartupandcreateweek.com for more information. If you want to volunteer, attend or think you know a good speaker for the topics at this years conference, let them know.

Enter Michael “Luni” Libes

Michael Luni Libes is one of the most brilliant early stage impact investors. He’s also been known to play ahead of the curve (tablets and smartphones) and see the trends and revolutions coming, albeit sometimes he gets there too early. He also sees things differently and has been at the forefront of early and seed stage impact focused support and investing and for years. He’s a serial tech entrepreneur turned impact investor and ecosystem builder.

His company, Fledge, is an innovative model for all forms of accelerator and incubator programs, and are one with a model that allow companies to continue to receive support from the accelerator once their cohort graduates. Fledge’s innovative for-profit investment thesis allows companies to focus on the most important metric to their success - getting customers - while using a small portion of their revenues to gradually buy back equity from its investors. This models provides investors with a 4x return on their investment, and makes the ROI comparable to tech investing.

With the launch of Aviary, Luni has now built three major required pieces of a startup ecosystem. A pre-accelerator, an incubator/accelerator program, and now a seed stage impact investing fund. In this episode, Luni will give you the blueprint for how you can join him and start building an impact focused startup support ecosystem in your city.

Admittedly Michael “Luni” Libes is one of the biggest reasons for my entry into the field of impact investing. He was an early influence when I first got involved in the space back in Seattle, and was one of the people that gave me the opportunity to start learning and developing my understanding of impact investing and conducting due diligence on social good startups. It is because of all of these reasons that I am so excited to bring you this episode and share with you a glimpse into how seed stage impact investors see the world of social enterprise and startups.

Aviary.vc

Fledge.co

Spring.is

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Michael Libes: ttps://www.linkedin.com/in/lunarmobiscuit

www.lunarmobiscuit.com