I have worked in two different organizations in the past summer. The first one was with Accion Venture Lab, which is a leading impact investor focused on early-stage for-profit social venture around the globe that leverages technology for financial inclusion. My second internship was with Accion’s portfolio company called Lidya, which operates in emerging markets and helps SMEs access to financing for working capital and accelerate their growths.

At Accion Venture Lab, I was fully involved in the daily key decision making and activities of the investment team. My responsibilities include screening incoming applications/cold emails from entrepreneurs seeking funding, suggest promising startups to the team, leading due diligence, and conducting deep dive research to identify the investment trends and opportunities. These activities fit squarely with Accion’s mission to backup promising social ventures around the world, and facilitate the inflow of traditional venture capital into organizations that are both financially and socially promising.

At Lidya, as one of its first members in Poland, I was given important responsibilities to define its entry strategy into the Central European region, and also worked with lawyers to set up specific requirements for the incorporation and product development. Successfully launching a new business in Poland will be crucial for Lidya’s future global expansion to other European countries.

First of all, I deepened my data analysis knowledge from my core classes in MBA. These skills have helped me greatly as an investor, especially during due diligence processes. For example, I was leading the due diligence process of evaluating an alternative lending startup, which uses untraditional data such as utility bills, purchase history, mobile phone information etc. to determine the credit worthiness of a borrower, and to lend to people who traditionally have no or limited access to affordable financing. By using the metrics such as AUC/ROC that I learned from business analytics class, I was able to assess the accuracy and performance of their evaluation model, and lead to better investment decisions.

Similarly, the financial modeling skill I’ve acquired from my classes such as corporate finance and accounting has significantly helped my work at Lidya. During the fundraising effort, I was working with the accounting partner PwC to build a financial forecast model that correctly captures the growth of Lidya. With the skills I’ve learnt I was able to quickly find out the errors in the model and ensured the quality of the financial model.

As someone who has been passionate about impact investing but had no prior experiences of working at a venture capital or something of this kind, the initial weeks at Accion Venture Lab was challenging to me. For example, I was not familiar with how to tell a good story in my investment memo write-up and in my presentation to the team on behalf of the selected startups. Also I was not sure what would be the best criteria to look at when assessing an early-stage startup. My team had helped me a lot during this process and made a great effort to get me up to the speed. In my first investment memo write-up, my colleagues spent a good amount of time to go through all the details and gave me very concrete constructive feedback. After four rounds of feedback and revision, the final version has come out as a very strong story, and I’ve also learned a great deal of how to write a quality investment memorandum.

The challenges I faced in Poland when working with Lidya were completely different. As someone who’d never been to the region, had no idea about the local market and no local network, initially I struggled in finding the most effective ways to add value to the startup. After proactively discussing with the co-founder, I set up the priorities of leveraging my unique skills and background. For example, I added value by using my data analysis skills and working with legal and accounting partners in incorporation processes and financial projection. Also, through building connections with Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Poland, I organized some productive meetings that led to acquiring initial local customers for Lidya.

My main takeaways after experiencing both the impact investor and entrepreneur sides:

• I deepened my understanding in impact investing. I learnt how to evaluate a company not only based on its mission and social impact, but also by a set of rigid criteria such as market size, financial capability and scalability. I also learnt about the exciting trends around the globe of social entrepreneurship. Obtaining both financial and socially impactful goals have been proven to be viable by many startups in many emerging markets (e.g. many of Accion’s portfolio companies have successfully scaled up to Series C level or even larger). I’ve become much more optimistic about the impact investing prospect and believe that in near term there’ll be more commercial venture capital joining this arena too.
• I have also gained valuable insights in establishing a business from scratch – from how to build a team, to the detailed work of defining all the product specs, to how to design a corporate structure from a long-term standpoint, to how to identify and work with legel/HR/accounting and other partners when entering a new market. I understood the efforts and resilience needed in order to build a lasting and impactful enterprise.
• These experiences helped me clearly think through my career goal post graduation. I realized the blind spots that most of the world’s capital have ignored to see. I want to back up the ventures who can truly change people’s lives, especially the underserved communities. I want to connect capital across continents to the places where it’s most needed and can make the most impact. I want to help these ventures scale up and demonstrate to the world that a company doesn’t have to sacrifice its profit for impact.