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The Business of Activism

Founded by Steve Newcomb, an embattled serial entrepreneur who has been involved in building 8 companies, resulting in over $3 billion in market value, and Brent Schulkin, a lifelong activist and filmmaker, Virgance is an incubator that builds and wholly owns social enterprises, preparing them for Tier 1 venture capital investment. We do this by finding people with great ideas and turning them into CEOs of for-profit companies that offer products and services to address humanity's most urgent threats. The founders' winning combination of activism and capitalism allows Virgance to be a successful bridge between social entrepreneurs who want to change the world and Tier 1 venture capitalists who are required to provide a return to their limited partners.

The Century of the Great Retrofit

In the last century we mapped the human genome, we explored the farthest reaches of the known universe, and we wired the world. Despite the incredible progress our society has made, we've never been closer to losing everything. Climate change, hunger, poverty and war are putting humanity at risk. We spent the last 100 years building everything we see today, and in the next 100 years we have to fix it. We are beginning the Century of the Great Retrofit, and we believe that those who realize it and make it happen will be this century's greatest generation.

The opportunity for Virgance is that by confronting these life-threatening problems, we will create an Industry of Change. The market opportunity of this Industry of Change will not be on the scale of the .com boom, but rather the Industrial Revolution. To accomplish these goals, some say that we need a leader like JFK to create an initiative on the size and scale of an Apollo project to address our challenges. But in fact, we believe society needs 500 Apollo projects. We believe the market will require an Apollo Project Factory, and that's what Virgance is.

The Missing Link

Great ideas for how to solve the world's problems are dreamed up everyday, but these Apollo projects won't build themselves. The humanitarians who are best equipped to envision world-changing solutions rarely possess the business savvy to successfully implement and scale their ideas.

The transition from activism to business is largely uncharted, so social entrepreneurs face a unique uphill battle. While many successfully get their projects off the ground, it takes a significant round of capital to scale their ideas. From the perspective of venture capitalists, most social entrepreneurs don't have enough business experience or a proven model to represent a bankable investment opportunity. Despite the hype surrounding social enterprise, the reality is that there is a missing link between social entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Unlikely Bedfellows

Virgance is the missing link. We are a company that endeavors to find ideas and turn them into companies that change the world. With the hearts of activists and the minds of capitalists, we operate like any competitive business, but with the intention of creating broad social change.

Virgance prepares social enterprise startups for Tier 1 investments (that otherwise would be unreachable) by pairing our CEO Steve Newcomb with first time entrepreneurs. We train the leader, build a management team, and bring the company to profitability before we seek venture financing. Virgance brings profitable businesses with solid teams and strong leadership to the doorstep of the leading venture firms in the Valley, who no longer have to sacrifice their investment principles in order to finance humanity's most urgent threats.

The Apollo Project Paradigm

Each company that Virgance builds is carefully chosen and must possess five defining characteristics.

Our companies challenge the status quo and create a massive change to one of today's most urgent threats. We only build companies that address the world's most urgent threats.
Each project involves a large number of people. By involving as many participants as possible we can cause the greatest amount of change.
Third, the method by which our companies cause change is with the carrot, not the stick. The stick is the way of the past, and the future is working with business and government.
Fourth, all Virgance companies are scalable. We tap into the power of the Internet and social networks to build a social platform for change.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, each company sustains and scales itself with a business model on par with any other Tier 1 startup in Silicon Valley. We are accelerating a shift in traditional attitudes, and demonstrating that a for-profit model is often a more efficient way to cause social change. The threats we face are too urgent to address without the expediency of the marketplace. Because Virgance is blazing this trail, social enterprises will be the norm in the near future.

Success Story

The founders of 1BOG had an idea: what if we could increase the adoption rate of solar in San Francisco by grouping homeowners together for a bulk purchase? They got 200 people together and negotiated a great discount with a local installer. Their pilot was successful so they wanted to run more group purchases in San Francisco and in other cities as well. But they were first time entrepreneurs who didn't know how to scale their program. They had a great idea, but didn't have enough experience to attract the capital needed to grow the pilot into a company.