I spent my summer as an analyst at Mercy Corps Ventures where my main responsibility was helping them identify and conduct due diligence on promising emerging market social ventures to grow their portfolio. Mercy Corps Ventures is the impact investing arm of the global NGO, Mercy Corps. They seek to identify startups in emerging markets within the financial, agricultural, youth employment, and logistics and distribution sectors that have the possibility to successful financially as well as socially impactful. My role as an analyst was fundamental to keeping deal flow active during the busy summer months.

Due to the small team size, I was able to jump in and provide key support, particularly with the time intensive activities of sourcing, where I conducted research and had introductory screening calls with entrepreneurs, and due diligence, where I helped do intensive research on various aspects of these businesses and the market. The internship was virtual, and this was actually helpful in some ways as I was able to help manage pipeline across all geographies through the entire investment process.

Evaluating a social venture is difficult because you have to do the full venture diligence process, while also doing a social impact assessment to ensure fit within the firm’s social investment thesis and positive social outcomes as a whole. My own background in social entrepreneurship and international development allowed me to understand the social impact component, but it was what I learned as a Columbia Business School MBA candidate that gave me the skills to do due diligence on these early-stage ventures. Financial statement analysis and financial modeling, in particular, came in handy as we had to assess the startups' growth prospects against their past performance. What I learned in Accounting and Corporate Finance was useful to understand the financial documents the companies would provide us, allowing me to then create my own projections for how I thought the company might perform in the following years. I was also able to better analyze market context, business development strategies, as well as assess a wide variety of business models based on what I learned at CBS.

Pandemic-specific challenges were related to the virtual nature of the internship. Given that it was remote, it made learning and getting up to speed more challenging than it might have been in an in-person setting. While many of the daily tasks were similar, it made it more difficult to get to know the team. There were also ecosystem-level challenges — in that the pandemic created financial stress in a lot of markets and made predicting future success very difficult. This made investors wary of engaging in new deals, while at the same time increasing the number of entrepreneurs who were looking for funding. It shifted the workload to the early stages of the pipeline, while reducing the number of deals that successfully got financed, which made getting equal experience across the entire deal flow process slightly more challenging.

Challenges related to the internship in general were related to my first foray into venture investing. It is an interesting ecosystem in that you have to analyze a variety of business models across many different sectors and geographies. It is impossible to be an expert in all of these situations, so you are forced to learn to think critically in order to come to well-reasoned opinions of a business. You have to learn how to find the most critical factors and risks of any business by asking the right questions to the right people without any prior contextual knowledge, which was challenging to learn.

I am hoping to work in impact investing after I graduate, and this was a really valuable experience to begin to learn about a major segment of the ecosystem. Impact investing is a relatively new industry, and while I have been a social entrepreneur, learning about what it looks like from the financing side was eye-opening. It was also interesting to see just how small the emerging market social venture space appears to be. There are new players coming in every day, but there are only a handful of key firms who have been operating in the space for more than 10 years — and they all seem to be talking and/or operating in the same circles. It made me more passionate about expanding this ecosystem – there are likely many entrepreneurs, startups, and regions that have huge potential (both financial and social), but are currently being overlooked. It was also heartening to see the types of stakeholders and individuals who are beginning to work in the impact investing sector. I had colleagues who had come to the firm from international development, investment banking, agriculture, entrepreneurship, and even policy. This led to really productive, and much more revelatory and comprehensive, discussions and research than would have been possible otherwise.