Fostering socially conscious businesses
Conscious Venture Lab founder wants to have an influence on capitalism
Investor Jeffrey L. Cherry believes the best companies are about more than the bottom line.
The erstwhile architect helped build a consulting business and hedge fund based on the idea that companies focused on satisfying a wide range of stakeholders perform better. Now he’s turned his focus to startups to foster the concept’s spread.
The Mount Vernon resident’s Conscious Venture Lab runs boot camps for socially conscious businesses all over the country. A related Conscious Venture Fund, managed by his New York investment firm The Porter Group, also invests in select companies, providing up to $50,000 and a four-month training program in the principles of conscious capitalism. “What I really wanted to do is have an influence on the way that capitalism was being practiced, and I didn’t think we could do that as effectively as I wanted to do it from the hedge fund platform,” he said. “We’re essentially trying to create a different type of accelerator and a different type of venture capitalism.”
Cherry, a New York native and former Catholic University defensive back, was lured to Maryland in 2013 to run Conscious Venture Lab as part of an accelerator in Howard County. This summer, he pledged to bring the program to West Baltimore as part of a broader push dubbed “Innovation Village.”
He’s also raising money for the fund to invest in the next cohort of five to 10 companies, which he said could be open to applicants early next year.
Part of the appeal of Baltimore was going to a place where other investors were not, he said.
“We know there are billion-dollar ideas hiding all over the place,” he said. “There are smart people everywhere. There’s just not equal opportunity everywhere.”
Cherry started his career as an architect, trying to create places that helped his clients perform better. But he realized pretty quickly that a building could only do so much.
With former teammates, he turned to IT and management consulting, creating LLD Inc., which saw that its most successful clients were focused on questions like making employees, suppliers and customers happy — not just shareholders. They sold in 2006 and Cherry later helped launch Concinnity Advisors, a New York firm that invests based on that premise.
“If you start operating from a more myopic, shareholder mindset, we don’t believe that’s a recipe for performance,” he said.
Cherry pointed to Starbucks, Patagonia, Southwest Airlines and Whole Foods as examples of major companies that practice in that way. His Conscious Venture investments have included Maryland’s Hungry Harvest and Shea Radiance.
In an age of high-profile corporate scandals, such as Enron and the subprime loan crisis, Cherry said the idea that good companies are also good investments has started to make inroads, though he acknowledged there’s still a way to go.
“Status quo is hard to change,” he said. “There’s still a group of business people that really believe that the purpose of business is to make money for shareholders. We believe that’s an outcome of business, not the purpose.”
Jeffrey L. Cherry
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