Although these three people seem to have little in common aside from the fact that they are all A-list(?) celebrities, they do share a unique thread: they each also happen to be Chief Impact Officers.

In case you missed it, Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, and his wife, Connie, have committed $400 million to Black private equity and venture capital managers.

I need to start out by clarifying what “B Corp” means, as it is often confused with “Benefit Corporation”. In short, the term “B Corp” refers to a third-party certification (by a nonprofit called B Lab), while “Benefit Corporation” refers to a legal incorporating structure similar to an LLC or a C Corp.

There are a variety of ways that companies can give back to the community — from employee volunteer days, donation matching programs, product donations, etc. — and then there is Patagonia, which recently announced it will be donating 100% of its profits (some $100mm per year) to combat climate change and protect land across the globe.

Until recently, I thought that every “[name].org” was in reference to a registered nonprofit or 501(c)3 - similar to how a .edu is used in reference to an educational institution and .gov for a governmental agency.

Diz Petit has been a community activist since she was 16 years old — she always had a desire to do right. Most recently she co-founded LiquiDonate, a for-profit service that matches a retail company’s unsellable items with local nonprofits and schools who need them while saving the company money — Donations as a Service (DaaS), if you will. She’s doing good and doing well (really well) at the same time.

For this post, I wanted to dive deeper into one of my favorite investment + philanthropy collaborations we’ve made at Rise Together, with Flexport. I view Flexport as a “shining star” example of how startups can apply their scalability and core competencies to effect change in a powerful way.

I was lucky enough to score some time with Nisha Kadaba, a social impact leader at PagerDuty (a for-profit business), to learn more about PagerDuty.org’s powerful approach to delivering impact.

Pledge 1% is an organization I only somewhat recently learned about, but is one that I hope many of you reading this newsletter have already heard of. If you haven’t yet — below is a brief overview.

As I started out on my journey building Rise Together Ventures, which pairs venture equity investments with parallel philanthropic capital to drive impact in the for-profit world, I was curious whether there were other firms that had similar goals or structures.

Yup, they sure do — it’s called the Talent x Opportunity (TxO) Fund, and it’s technically a Donor Advised Fund, or “DAF” (which is similar to a Foundation — check out my last Medium post if you don’t know what a DAF is).

Meet the DAF. Short for “Donor Advised Fund.” Donor-advised funds are a unique philanthropic tool that allow donors to establish and fund a charitable account with a sponsoring organization that will be used later to support charitable or impact-focused activities.

A “Philanthropic Mirror” is a pool of philanthropic capital that is allocated alongside an equity investment in a for-profit company collaboratively deployed in support of a strategic impact initiative on behalf of said company.

My career to date has entirely been in the for-profit sector. I started as an investor, spent a lot of time as an operator in fast-moving startups, and after starting my own family I was presented with the opportunity to explore the mysterious world of Family Offices.