Coburn Ventures Podcast

After our intro to assessing brands, we now add a new dimension: values-based branding, that attempt that can hit or miss that aims to tightly tie brand and behavior to value signaling and an offer of being “values-aligned” with a product, service, or company. Why does this seem to be fertile ground, and is it, really? That question is why we brought in Irwin Kula for his perspective on how we belong, believe, and matter has morphed… making these values-based offerings so easily exploitable for companies. How will this play out? Let’s jump in.

Today we start a new series on branding, and especially how to consider the value of brands in assessing the broader corporation and its competitive advantages.  We start with one idea that I want to highlight because I think it's not the standard idea of what a brand is to a corporation: it is that the brand resides in the buyers' mind. It is NOT owned by the corporation and DEFINITELY NOT controlled by the corporation.  So with that, we’ll discuss five different elements of the brand and then some questions and live examples to help with assessment. Let's jump in.

The G is in ESG, which stands for Governance, is often seen as the point of relief for our clients. It’s the part where they tell us: we know we have a lot to learn on Environment and Social, but Governance, we’ve got it. We’ve been doing that really well for a long time. But what if the G in ESG is different from the G of the past 3-4 decades? When we step back, I don’t think anyone would think it surprising that maybe what's expected out of G today is different. Let’s jump in.

One of our goals in this series of ESG podcasts is to take the abstract idea of ESG and bring it to life with concrete examples. There are leaders out there in both the investing world and of course, the business operators, who are defining and iterating on the standards of ESG, and we want to hear more about it. That’s why today we’re speaking with Jasper Van Brakel, CEO of RSF Social Finance. Jasper gets to sit in the middle of business leaders, their stakeholders, and their investors, of which he is often one, and he offers us a view of how a multi-stakeholder, ESG focused investment event or regular quarterly meeting might go down. I hope you enjoy it.

Today we are talking about the history of the money management industry, and how values that were "baked in" in the 1980s when this industry really took off are dictating a lot of what we think is possible and right in the industry, and why the emergence of ESG and ESG related investment philosophies can seem so incongruent. But to do this, to go through unearthing the founding values of an industry, we start in an interesting place, with a discussion about the concept of the commons, and how this thought-provoking piece of political theory applies to our struggles with ESG today. The idea of the commons starts to address all the externalities that investors say are outside of our domain. How long will we be able to draw that line? What do our industry's "founding values", implicit or explicit, have to say about these externalities? The forces all around the industry are changing, so let's take a look at it from these two angles today.

We are in a time in which ESG or multi-stakeholder investing, the real process of it, the real ‘how to” is actively being defined. Its defined by doing it. And though the marketers already have great tag lines out in the market and Regulators are having their say in what they want to highlight,   investors will also create the market by putting their stake in the ground, by having their own process and their own philosophies.  This is why speaking with Jags today is so helpful, so inspiring, and so grounding.  Jags is really a great pioneer: he is so willing to explore what ESG investing really implies for how he does his work. This has led him to incorporate ESG in ways that most of you might not anticipate. He meets with people you may not have ever considered vital to your process. He has a clear understanding of his core beliefs which guide his decision-making.  Notably, Jags is not considered an ESG specialist! He is a portfolio manager.  We’ll discuss so much in this conversation, from core beliefs, to his voting record, to why he doesn't use the term engagement anymore and finally, how all of this comes down to the day-to-day business including communicating his work to clients.  I think it will give you a view into how he does multi-stakeholder in a more holistic sense than many, and hopefully it might spark some ideas that are resonant for your ESG philosophy and process. I hope you enjoy it. 

As investors, we are outsiders, so when we hear from management that the company has an interesting opportunity in a new market or a plan to improve its market share, it can be tempting to think that company can make that strategic move effectively.   But whether or not that company can succeed is largely due to the weakness or the strength of the culture. Because here’s the important part: explicitly or implicitly, many new company goals, even those that are seemingly only product-oriented, actually require changing some part of company culture. So, what do we mean by assessing company culture? In this conversation, we discuss attributes of strong and weak culture and why sometimes, a weak culture could be exactly what you want. I hope you enjoy it.

We’re back with Gavin Ivester, who we got to talk to last month about caring and what companies are asked to do to become a truly modern company. Today, we dive in on Gavin’s most recent thoughts on emerging marketplaces of a very distinct flavor: these communities are springing up organically around the world, and fix themselves around an extremely personalized or customized preference, like flying planes or youth ice hockey. What is going on here? Let’s jump in.

Our thoughts and mental models determine how we see the world, so as change investors, we like to make sure we have a few different ways of seeing. It's one of the neatest things humans can do -- intelligence plus empathy = vast possibilities. We use change frameworks to do this, and today, I suppose we’re introducing a new change framework. I found this one in the work of Robert A. Johnson, so it comes from a mix of psychology and medieval religion, a combination I never thought I’d attend to as an investor, but it helped me think of marketplace changes in a very new way, so I hope you find it useful too.

Today's conversation is our chance to go even further below the surface on one of our 11 Unavoidable Changes: Empowering the End Nodes. JP Rangaswami wrote the piece that grounded this idea, and we are happy to be together today to go deeper on the topic. At about minute 15 there are a few ideas that are so striking to me that I want to call them out for you. The ideas are about engineering interactions in order to increase the data set you have… in order to then be in a position to make better decisions. I hadn’t thought so clearly about the impact empowering the end nodes has: it can add a new layer of intelligence, actively iterating and coursing through the whole enterprise. JP walks us through a few different ways to do this, and we surmise that empowering the end nodes will be one of the competitive advantages of great businesses that can move to “smart” end nodes, rather than the “dumb” end nodes created by more traditional top-down business models. I hope you enjoy it.