Your guidebook to the big impact questions
Giant Leap’s Impact Roadmap for Founders 🗺️; big food problems need big systems change 🍜; and the forces shaping life science 🔬.
“People who love to eat are always the best people.”
- Julia Child
Kick start
🍕 “Where do I start?” is a common question for both eating pizza and setting impact goals.
📏 After working with over 40 impact founders in our portfolio and countless others on the big questions of setting, articulating, implementing, measuring and deepening their impact mission, we decided it was probably time to create an Impact Roadmap for Founders.
👣 It's a simple walkthrough of key questions and resources to think through your impact mission. And if you’re an impact founder ready to tell the world about your vision, apply to pitch at our upcoming Impact Pitch Night (before the 13th October); or register to attend the event here.
What we’re thinking about
🌾 Big food problems need big systems change. Humans have developed remarkably nutrition dense food, but we’re struggling with over-nutrition and the environmental cost of food systems. Repping Big Food, Dr. Nigel Hughes, Senior Vice President of R&D at Kellogg’s shared tips on changing systems with Sarah Nolet on the Agtech So What Podcast:
Focus on changing interactions between entities, not the entities themselves.
Systems change happens fastest when all players in the system have skin in the game and can benefit from change.
Systems change requires a LOT of persistence. Need to be prepared for a lot of “yes, but” responses from people in the system.
In encouraging news related to point two, this week saw the launch of a $2.5b coalition of VC, Big Food, and Pharma companies in the US focussed on improving hunger and health outcomes through food.
🧑🏽🔬 Technically life. Life sciences, those related to discoveries in biology and human health, are at a strange inflection point. On one hand, it has never been more expensive to produce new drug discoveries, costing 100x more than the 1950s. On the other, there are signals of a changing game, driven by:
New modalities like CRISPR and mRNA opening virtually unbounded possibilities for research
Potential AI efficiencies powered by immense data output (scientists generate 10,000x more data per experiment than they did a decade ago)
4x growth in VC funding for life sciences over the last four years and expanding the game beyond drug discovery to include applications like producing microbes for food production or eating carbon dioxide
Investor, Jacob Effron, laid out some huge opportunities for technology applications in the space, including data aggregation saving researchers 30-40% of their time and AI to generate new discoveries much faster.
New paths
🧻 Who Gives A Crap is chasing a Director of Media and Digital Marketing
🧠 Seer is seeking a National Clinic Manager
👩🎨 Work180 is looking for a Graphic Designer
💰 Coviu is on the hunt for a Chief Financial Officer
🔥 Also, check out our Giant Leap Fund jobs board for over 80+ available positions or complete our expression of interest form. There’s even more jobs at ethical companies on the global B-Work job board.
Connect with us
🎤 Join us at Impact Pitch Night, our favourite event of the year showcasing the next generation of impact founders. The night will involve pitches from exciting new impact startups and a judging panel of founders and investors including Julia Kay (Co-Founder, Great Wrap), Jeanette Cheah (Co-Founder, HEX), Dave Rae (Advisor, Ethinvest), and Lauren Morrey (Executive Director of Development, Breakthrough Victoria).
🌏 If you miss us in Melbourne, Giant Leap will be attending the Purpose Conference in Sydney on 19th-20th October 2022. Purpose exists to see the business world transformed to be entirely sustainable, responsible, ethical and human. We’re also a sponsor, which means we have a discount code to share with our amazing audience of Small Steppers!! Use the code GiantLeap at checkout for a $50 discount.
📚 Charlie and Adam will be attending Startmate Demo Day in Melbourne and 30x30 Demo Day next Wednesday 12th Oct. See you at the library!
Giant leaps
🚑 A huge congrats to Seer Medical, who received FDA 510(K) clearance for their ambulatory epilepsy monitoring technology, meaning they can launch their pioneering technology globally.
🎙️ Silvia Pfeiffer, Co-Founder of Coviu appeared on the on High Flyers podcast.
💸 Giant Leap has joined the Pledge 1% Movement and Pledges to Donate 1% of revenue to a philanthropic fund managed by the Australian Communities Foundation. We’re joining over 15,000 companies around the world who have pledged 1% of either their product, profit, equity, and/or staff time to whatever charity of their choosing, check it out here.
For the road
🧮 Founders, young and old. The Australian government will introduce HECS style loans to students for startups, which is excellent news for the digitally equipped graduates of education providers like HEX. BUT they’re likely to face competition in a battle for the ages (sorry), as Forbes reports that older founders outperform. More founders = more solutions, so we’re rooting for both!
🔐 We could be $56 billion richer…. if Australia invested in digital skills, cybersecurity and climate tech. That’s the finding of Google’s latest economic report, created in partnership with consultancy AlphaBeta.
💙 It’s cool (and PR smart) to be kind. Purpose-led brands have an edge in securing media says PR expert Odette Barry. She outlines the way in which brands like Outland Denim, Heaps Normal and Who Gives A Crap have woven impact into their brand narrative, and says that if companies want to stand out they should do the same.
👩🏿⚕️ Fixing racist medical devices. An electroencephalogram (EEG) requires attaching electrodes on the head to measure and monitor brainwaves. It’s a key medical tool, but it's not always suitable for those with curly or woven hair, typical for Black people in the US. So two Black scientists teamed up with a hairdresser to invent a solution.
🦾 Prosthetics just got smarter. What do you get when you cross a well-known Australian swimmer with a British bionics company? An implant that remarkably reads electrical signals from the limb to predict what you want it to do.
🛴 Small vehicles are driving the electric revolution. There are 16.4x as many electric two and three wheelers (274.7 million) as electric cars (16.7 million) and already over 42% of all new small vehicle sales are EVs.
💄 How to CEO. Adore Beauty CEO Kate Morris shares her tips for founders on how to lead an organisation. She says that most of the problems she faces are people-related, and that in an ideal world a CEO simply sets the vision and lets their team get on with their jobs.
Ξ The merge happened. Yes, maintaining Ethereum is no longer draining the energy supply equivalent to that of a small country. And, as we mentioned earlier, it now opens the currency up to more impact-related initiatives.
🚲 Marriage failure, appendicitis and boredom… all part of the surprising number of things that people have blamed on bicycles.
😾 And finally: When you love your peeps enough to join the party, but not enough to have fun.