On today’s episode of McKinsey on Startups, our guest is Dr. Cody Friesen, the founder and CEO of Source Global, a sustainability-focused startup that is working to help solve the planet’s drinking water scarcity issues. The company’s flagship product is the Source Hydropanel, a solar-powered, self-contained piece of technology that turns the plentiful water vapor in the atmosphere into a clean, renewable water supply. Source Global has done both commercial and residential projects in more than 50 countries worldwide, and expects to produce and sell tens of thousands of them this year, growing to a few hundred thousand in 2024. Friesen, an MIT-educated material scientist and professor at Arizona State University, has raised close to $300 million in funding since originally founding Source Global in 2015. The company is a Public Benefit Corporation (or PBC), making it focused on both shareholders and stakeholders broadly defined. Friesen sees no tension between “mission and money,” and hopes to help foster what he calls “conscious capitalism” as he pursues his company’s ambitious goal of making drinking water an unlimited resource.

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On today’s episode of McKinsey on Startups, our guest is Camila Lecaros, the Managing Director of MassChallenge Mexico, a start-up accelerator that is part of a global network with other outposts in Boston, Texas, Israel, and Switzerland. MassChallenge uses a relatively unique model in its work with budding entrepreneurs. It takes no equity in the start-ups it helps get off the ground over an intensive, 3-4 month program; its offering is completely free to the very early stage companies that are chosen after a competitive judging process. Camila has been with MassChallenge Mexico for several years; she started her career in entrepreneurial outreach in Latin America working at local accelerator Endeavor Colombia and then VC firm Nazca Ventures. She has an abiding passion for working with founders just starting to try to turn their ideas and visions into reality; in her more than a decade career doing so, she has seen the region’s ecosystem similarly take flight from a nascent state to a vibrant, burgeoning entrepreneurial environment. As she told me, her greatest professional motivation is that “entrepreneurship is the only way we can create sustainable economic development.”

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On today’s episode of McKinsey on Startups, we talk to Adeyemi Ajao, the cofounder and Managing Partner at Base 10 Partners. The San Francisco-based VC firm focuses on startups bringing automation technology to a variety of sectors in what it calls the Real Economy, including logistics, retail, healthcare, finance, and food. Its investments have included Nubank, Instacart, Figma, and Rappi. While Ade and his co-founder TJ Nahigian take a particular, data-driven approach to choosing their investments, that is far from the most distinctive thing about Ade or Base10. Last year, with the closing of a new $460 million fund, Base10 became the first Black-led venture firm to hit the milestone of having more than $1 billion in assets under management. Ade is half-Nigerian and he grew up in Southern Spain, where he co-founded and eventually sold a company called Tuenti, a social networking site often called the “Spanish Facebook”. He relocated to the West Coast to get his MBA and Stanford, and before co-founding Base10 in 2018, he co-founded and sold another startup, Identified, and was an active investor, helping to launch such successes as Cabify and JobandTalent. Base10 is not formally a diversity-focused investor, but a large share of its investments do happen to be with minority founders, and Ade and the firm spend a lot of time thinking and working to grow the pipeline and increase opportunities in tech for Black and other underrepresented populations. Its Advancement Initiative is a $250 million growth-stage fund that donates 50 percent of returns to HBCUs to fund scholarships for minority students, with several HBCUs also acting as LPs.

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