1BOG gets VC funding
Nearly 2 years ago, we set out to see if we could create a mission driven company that could attract the investment of the the Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture capital companies. Our hope - that if we could prove that it's possible, that we might inspire an army of mission driven entrepreneurs to follow our lead.
We are very proud to announce that New Enterprise Associates, one the largest and most respected Venture Capital companies in the Silicon Valley has invested $5 million in Virgance's solr group buying company, 1BOG. We hope that this news helps to solidfy the proof that startups can use the power and principles of capitalism to build mission-driven companies.
To read more, click here.
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Hello friends of Virgance, my name is Tibet, I'm an engineer here but have also been managing the early stages of our next big project, Lend Me Some Sugar. We believe LMSS is going to create huge amounts of positive social and environmental change and I'm excited to say that we can finally reveal some more details about it. This post comes a little late given that LMSS had its coming out party at the Sustainable Brands conference in June and has since been broadcast to the world via Facebook and Twitter, but nevertheless it deserves a blog post of its own.
In short, Lend Me Some Sugar is a new way to convert the massive advertising budgets of big brands into funding for world changing projects. The basic idea is that we will run American Idol style competitions where the contestants are social entrepreneurs instead of singers. Each contest will have a theme (environment, education, poverty...) and the contestants will be competing for a large cash prize (we're talking millions here) to fund their idea within that theme. The contests will be run online, utilizing the power of social networks to reach millions of people who will vote for their favorite idea each week. At the end of the week one contestant will be eliminated until the last idea standing takes home the dough.
Where will the money come from you ask? That's the best part. Each Lend Me Some Sugar contest will be funded by sponsorship from a big brand. For example, a soda company, lets call them Cola-Mola, might want to sponsor a clean water competition. We would work with them to pick 16 highly qualified contestants who have great ideas for supplying the world with clean drinking water and then launch the contest co-branded under their name as well Lend Me Some Sugar's. For the brands it is a great opportunity to run a highly engaging social media marketing campaign that associates their company with doing good, but for us it is a huge, untapped pool of money for creating social and environment change.
We are currently in the process of pitching Lend Me Some Sugar to a number of brands that have expressed genuine interest in sponsoring a contest. In the meantime, we need to demonstrate that we will be able to reach a large audience when Lend is launched. With this in mind we are trying to get 500,000 fans of our Facebook page to prove that people are excited about this idea. If anyone out there has other creative ideas for spreading the LMSS love please let us know, especially if you want to write about it on your blog.
