David Barrie

Social Impact, Development and the new Data Economy

Slowly but surely, the status of social impact as a business strategy grows.

In January 2018, Larry Fink of Blackstone issued his famous letter, telling his workforce that "Without a sense of purpose, no company either public or private can achieve its full potential. It will ultimate lose the license to operate from key stakeholders."

In 2017, according to a report by the Global Impact Investing Network, investors committed upwards of $21.1bn to impact investments.

And two weeks ago, the Financial Times reported that sustainable investment group Generation has "quietly gathered almost $20bn in assets and notched up annualised returns in the low teens net of fees".

In urban development, land owners and managers are waking up to social impact. Beyond posturing and market positioning, there's a growing awareness of social innovation, venturing and the value of engaging communities beyond consultation, lobbying and sampling of opinion.

Here's a quick and dirty review of some of the things around that point to the rise, rise and rise of social impact in the development of the built environment. If you have suggestions of your own, please do comment and share them below.

1. There's the increasing prevalence of ideas and policies around accountability and 'social value' in public sector strategies, commissioning and regulation. e.g. the recent consultation by the Mayor of London on Estate Regeneration. 
2. The growing role of the FAANG stocks and of digitalisation in the making of cities that can only place greater emphasis upon user engagement and interaction. cf Facebook and Google's increasing involvement in affordable housing.
3. The emerging direct link between the making of places and startup ‘venturing’. At different scales: DreamIt Ventures work with the owner of the Tampa Bay Lightnings in Tampa Bay, the Mayor of London’s Creative Enterprise Zones and at the most local level, my local investment group in West London: Wild Blue Cohort. In time, will these efforts dovetail with larger development strategies, such as Opportunity Areas?
4. There is constant innovation in public-private partnerships and new combinations of non-profits and socially conscious landowners/developers who are set on growing assets that focus on social impact. e.g. community land trusts, developer igloo Regeneration’s work on custom build and David Adjaye’s Sugar Hill development in Upper Manhattan.
5. Then there is the growing incorporation of social innovation and ‘tactical urbanism’ in urban strategies, sometimes involving organisations who aren't necessarily pre-disposed to the theme, e.g. Transport for London's interest in 'pop-up' development in the booklet ‘Everyone’s Street’, design practice Studio Weave’s work for Hull Capital of Culture and civic entrepreneur Tessy Britton’s Participatory City venture in Barking and Dagenham.

Some of these activities are responses to on-trend anxieties, such as the global race to attract talent and need to improve wellbeing; others, expressions of a new age of delivery of services to the public at a time of austerity, with increasingly reliance upon private finance and arms-length charities.

All express an heightened awareness of the need to be accountable, experiment with ownership and realign relationships between the public and public assets. Some involve 'systems change' or are driven by theories of change.

There is a consensus here around decentralisation of markets and the democratisation of capabilities. What will be exciting is when actions like this, that express a new instinct for social impact, engage with automation, new employment patterns and the new data economy.

David Barrie works in urban regeneration and renewal. He has founded and run several social impact ventures. http://davidbarrie.me

Image: Martina Spagnoli

Go ahead, step on the grass: social impact and the property industry

Popular contempt for the property industry is running high. There’s protest against the joint venture relationship between Haringey Council in London and property developer Lendlease. Uproar over the sleaziness of the Presidents Club charity dinner. Disgust over the bumper bonuses of £110m at housebuilder Persimmon.

Popular contempt for the corporate world runs even higher. #Techlash berates Facebook for 50m breaches of privacy and Apple for its rapidly depleting batteries. Protestors boycott the drilling of oil in search of the ‘Gatwick Gusher’ and BAE Systems’ sponsorship of the arts. President Trump rallies a nation by attacking Amazon’s delivery deal with the United States Postal Service, while Theresa May promises to end “the energy price rip off”.

Much contempt circles around issues of trust. Breaches of trust suggest a capitalism out of control. Poor management is cast as intentional misdemeanour. The scepticism that follows and fills public life seeds a kind of corrosive melancholy. As ever, it’s going to be hard to win back user trust if people don’t feel like they matter.

Corporate social responsibility is fast becoming a key currency of response, with business cast as a force for social impact. Some see ‘social impact’ as a theme with which to shake off the past and connect with key demographics. A simple definition: how organizations' actions affect the surrounding community.

Since 2002, I’ve founded and managed many regeneration schemes and ventures dedicated to social impact – through new physical infrastructure such as bridges and playgrounds, the re-use of ‘dead’ spaces as locations for new social enterprise, or formation of new networks of people to generate new risk capital for entrepreneurs at the start of their career.

In the property industry, ‘impact’ is often defined through economic, social and fiscal measures – such as the number of jobs delivered, value that people attach to social spaces, cost savings to the public sector as a result of a particular intervention and other quantifiable things, such as commercial returns, revenues, rates and taxes.

I’d like to add another measure: inclusion.

To score highly on this, what should development plans encourage? Characteristics such as affordability, places to grow food, (off-leash) dog parks, spaces for the necessities of life, such as peace, quiet and breastfeeding, ground floor uses that connect to people upstairs (and make them better off), zoning that enables rich and poor people to share the same space and support one another, investment mechanisms and instruments that enable social change.

What should development plans avoid? Features that undermine inclusivity, that segregate people of different ages, promote sizes of accommodation that exclude poor, non-white households, screen poor neighbourhoods out from maps, stop people loitering, sitting down, walking where they want, ban buskers, people with prams, those who don’t speak the lingo or can spell radicchio.

This is a social impact strategy that seeks to avoid a culture of covenants, conditions and restrictions and to maximise market opportunity. It marks ‘social impact’ as a positive, venturesome thing, away from Godliness, philanthropy or charity – remember that Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company is a ‘social impact’ venture (and sold to Unilever for $300m) as is outdoor sports clothing company Patagonia. At its centre: the lost art of making people feel like they matter. Go ahead, step on the grass.

Picture credit: Alex Gardner

Real Estate, Community and a new Sense of Purpose

The relationship between the property industry and public just now in the UK is at a very low point. The real estate magazine Estates Gazette expressed it delicately the other day as “Property has a public perception problem.”

Protestors take to the streets of North Kensington, London over the tragedy of Grenfell Tower; over the joint-venture partnership between the local Government and a private property development company in Haringey; and in Soho, against the gentrification of the area, or “urban colonialism” as one protestor put it.

In his Budget speech last week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer threatened developers with compulsory purchase of un-developed housing land. At the Labour Party Conference in September, Jeremy Corbyn set down a clear basic principal: “Regeneration under a Labour government will be for the benefit of the local people, not private developers, not property speculators.” And earlier this month, the tide started to turn, as the leader of the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham said that he would take back control of two housing estates earmarked for demolition in the £1bn+ redevelopment of the district of Earls Court, West London.

All of this matters because the public vests in the development industry and its partners the opportunity to deliver the places of the future. The healthiness of the real estate industry’s relationship with customers and stakeholders is central to the morale, mobility and confidence of the economy, and so the productivity of the workforce. And in an age of populism and anti-monopolism, if the development industry doesn’t get its house in order, a new age of regulation and taxation threatens.

For almost twenty years, initiated by Lord Rogers’ vision of ‘Urban Renaissance’, the delivery of equitable, healthy and sustainable cities has been top of the development agenda. At the centre of that initiative was a new contract between developer, Government and the public. Since that time, some 3m new homes have been completed and construction output has run at an average value of £80bn p.a. City centres across the UK have been transformed.  But see today’s protests, listen to the threats of politicians, and it feels as if one party – the public - feels left out in the cold.

In the first instance, the development industry may be blameless. The rise, rise and rise of the Internet has created ‘digital public squares’ that we like to frequent – that we prefer to the built environment – a form of public space shattered into millions of personalised news feeds and full of people offering love, admiration and agreement. Our success at developing cities has turned them into investment opportunities and assets that answer the call of surplus savings and corporate reserves from across the world and are locally agnostic. A key consequence of the financial crisis of 2008 has been public distrust of capital, corporations and the millionaires and billionaires in control of a growing share of the economy - and private property, as far as the public is concerned, is the most basic building block of free-market capitalism.

Yet so much of culture just now is about returning power to the people, decentralising markets, that you’d think the public would not feel so powerless. Entrepreneurs are building networks and platforms on the internet that enable individuals and organisations to transact directly with one another. The democratisation of technology is empowering users and organisations to do things for themselves that they couldn’t do before. Some of the most important innovation in business and commerce is devoted to making data more free, portable, useable and available to the public to provide them with greater control.

Inevitably because of what I do – designing and delivering projects and programmes that enable communities to participate in the world around them and benefit from urban development – I see a solution to this lack of trust in the way in which real estate and the public interact.

The industry sees its most effective engagement of the public through new products – and of course, that’s right, but then there’s ‘community engagement’. This engagement is about growing customer loyalty, winning support for planning permission and sometimes, it is an act of corporate social responsibility – sales and revenue first, expressing or fulfilling a licence to operate second. Public benefit looks like it plays second fiddle to commercialism. It is the housing developers’ advert featuring the City trader that sticks in the public mind, rather than their pioneering and generous collaboration with a charity.

Because the industry aligns ‘the public’ with sales and marketing, what’s done in the name of ‘community’ is often attention-seeking, market-making and responsibility for place-making passes to those whose job it is to articulate, position and promote ‘the offer’ - architects. Community benefit and social impact gets mixed up with narratives of aspiration, rather than relationships, of buying, selling and not social inclusion. This is place-making as a vintage clothing store next to a cha-cha Latino soap stall, next to a pumpkin latte seller, not a place to meet your neighbour, broker new relationships and, as a venture capitalist might put it, create new liquidity.

How might the industry address this and forge a new, more trusting relationship with the public?

Allied to the development and delivery of new, affordable, appealing places to live, work and play there are other things that we can do – and at the grassroots.

First, involve people in the creation of the brief for the design and development of a place, and don’t rely upon the consultation process run by the planning system.

Second, find and promote ways and means by which people can contract with a place in a meaningful economic way: be it enabling them to create and participate in new entrepreneurship and enjoy each other’s company.

Third, don’t think of ‘community engagement’ as entertainment programming or the co-option of dysfunctional outliers into supporters of your real estate scheme, but as a way of capturing opportunists, entrepreneurs, fostering new skills and morale. 

Finally, encourage the industry to create new positions of ‘Director of Community’ in their organisations – a role that reports to the Executive Board, not the marketing department and is a prototype for management roles in the future, such as that today can only be phrased in gobbledygook: the ‘Chief User Experience Officer’.

Like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Paul Polman of Unilever, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Jamie Oliver, industry leaders need to make ‘changing the world’ a positive corporate ethos, not a management problem, and enable senior figures to be purposeful leaders who inspire, elevate and communicate with the public.

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David Barrie is a consultant in urban renewal and real estate projects and programmes. He has founded and delivered several award-winning regeneration schemes in the UK and for-profit and non-profit urban ventures, including The People’s Supermarket, London and early stage venture capital investment network Wild Blue Cohort. http://davidbarrie.me

Community Ventures and Investing in Impact

From a talk I gave in Ljubljana, Slovenia, March 2017, for ‘Hive for Better Investments’, a programme led by Zavod Viva to address the lack of skills and know-how on the demand side of social enterprises in the country. The project is supported by the EU Programme for Employment and Social Innovation

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Public ventures that involve communities are often spoken of in hushed tones, as worthwhile, meaningful acts of ‘engagement’ — democracy at its most holy.

However, beware. Ventures that involve the community and look authentic can be fickle, fake acts of accountability, even self-delusion. As American economist Tyler Cowen said in a recent interview, “Be suspicious when something feels good.” It could be culture creating just another alluring ‘cocoon’.

Since creating and running an architectural competition in 1996 to breathe new life into a dead public place — a project broadcast by the BBC — I have founded or managed some seventeen projects that have sought to involve the public in the design and delivery of the world around them . ‘Little gems’ that deliver transformational change.

Community ventures can create a sense of belonging and uplift the commercial offer and viability of a place. They can bring experiences and moments to places, not just messages. They can extend audiences and users of a place. And they can make a long-term social impact.

But how can community ventures be financed by innovators, activists and social entrepreneurs? And are there certain things that will help the raise?

I’ve raised around £13m to create and deliver community ventures over the last twenty years. They’ve yielded £350m+ in additional follow-on public and private investment, created many new full- and part-time jobs and opened my eyes to the value of community ventures.

Community ventures can create a unique sense of belonging to a place, for residential and commercial tenants alike. Over the last year, I have been advising a real estate landlord in London on creating an architect-designed pavilion that will grow food entrepreneurship. The place will offer opportunities for retail, recreational, educational and other entrepreneurial activity, and develop in time an e-commerce and food delivery platform. If successful, the off- and online platform will create its own marketplace, social as well as economic. 

Community ventures can create new participants in the public life of a place. In 2013, I founded a private ‘angel’ investment network in Kensington and Chelsea, West London to uptick entrepreneurship in the area. To date, members have made 18 investments valued at £1.5m. An additional £2m has been raised from public sources to grow the venture. The membership includes many entrepreneurs and professionals under fifty years of age, who were not born or brought up in the area and would not ordinarily participate in local civic life. Private investment in entrepreneurship is the entry point for this new cohort of ‘urban actor’.

Community ventures can uplift the commercial value of a place. In 2010, I co-founded The People’s Supermarket in Camden, North London, a co-operative that operates a membership subscription and an exchange of volunteer-time-for-discount model. Thanks to the current management, the venture still trades today, has created many new jobs and generated additional value, such as recycling food waste through its popular People’s Kitchen. Since the store was opened, the value of the retail offer in Lamb’s Conduit Street has risen steeply, with the arrival of new retailers to the street, such as the fashion chain J Crew Group. The Supermarket has helped turn the street into a destination for indie businesses and customers. 

Community ventures can associate places with moments and experiences, not just marketing messages. In 2007, I co-founded the Middlesbrough Urban Farming project, a venture in which thousands of people in the town grew food in public places, learned how to cook it and then created and shared an epic meal in the town square. Accompanied by an open-air ‘food art’ exhibition, the event was curated by the artist Bob and Roberta Smith. The venture has been repeated every year since. People seem to enjoy learning about healthiness through experience, rather than tuition.

One of the key challenges in creating and growing these ventures is that each and every one is a start-up that needs financing. The social good that they seek adds risk and inefficiency to their offer and makes the creative, flexible finance that all early stage entrepreneurs crave all the more important.

In my experience, there are several ways to finance such social impact ventures, and you’re often obliged to create a blend - through sales revenue, public private partnerships, membership subscription, equity investment, public subsidy, outsourcing and then using new instruments, such as rewards-based crowdfunding.

As with any enterprise, it is essential that the entrepreneur creates a business plan - and certain things will help the financial raise.

• Create a scaled, ‘multi-site’ vision for the venture.
• Set down a consumer-orientated, non-ideological, over-earnest narrative.
• Outline an e-commerce and online content strategy, alongside any physical infrastructure or offline work.
• Show how you will maximise promotion of the venture but minimise ‘net promoter costs’. In other words, follow word of mouth economics.
• Identify who will invest in your venture, picture their return on investment and express outcomes in their language, not yours.
• Express narratives of the new economy, with an emphasis upon entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation and doing more with less 

Of course, as advocated by Ron Johnson, the retail innovator behind the Apple Store, it is important to understand the science, then separate it from the humanity and foster through your venture a comfortable, humane experience, rather than a faceless, cold one.

But in framing and starting up a venture, it doesn’t hurt to be Napoleonic also. Fight for a cause, bring to your venture a new sense of shared destiny, build a new mythology of society through it, and reinforce the vision with the creation of a new way of living, or culture of doing things.

A little overblown? Yes — but so what. 

Social impact entrepreneurs are in the business of making progress. In the words of philosopher Henry David Thoreau: “Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Thanks to Zavod Viva, Anja Serc, Tadeja Bucar, Ursula Butkovic, Sandi Češko and others who facilitated my visit to Slovenia.

Images: #notestostrangers campaign, Browns Fashion, South Molton Street, London, Instagram, and elsewhere — search the tag. It’s a great meme.

David Barrie is a regeneration director, real estate advisor and social entrepreneur. More at LinkedIn, About.me. Email: [email protected]

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Real estate, community and making places for the present

Manhattan Loft Gardens: Image by Skidmore, Owings Merrill LLP - Developer: Manhattan Loft Corporation

In a recent interview, the real estate developer Harry Handelsman said that “the purpose of development is to make community.”

Handelsman is the father of the loft apartment in London, developer of the refurbishment of St Pancras railway station, the Chiltern Firehouse, Hackney Fashion Hub and coming soon, Manhattan Loft Gardens, a 42 storey tower in Statford, London, that will feature three ‘sky gardens’.

Handelsman sits apart from many in the housing sector in the UK in that he builds one-offs, mixes living with entertainment, invests in high quality architecture and creates an unique sense of place.

For Handelsman, development is yes, a way to make money, but more importantly it is a companion at arms to the expression of a larger creative personality — one who owns works of art by James Turrell and Sarah Lucas, studied the Talmud when young, and speaks avidly of how garden squares in cities can counter lifeless “septic places”.

Manhattan Loft Gardens: Image by Skidmore, Owings Merrill LLP - Developer: Manhattan Loft Corporation

When Handelsman talks ‘community’, what’s unusual is that he’s tuned into individual idiosyncrasy  — he speaks often of the generous space that lofts offer to residents “to make their own”. He wants to promote interaction between people in public life but seems to seek it less through framed spaces and stages, and more through vistas for people to move through: squares for residents to walk — and maybe let their dog do the leading — and lobbies, hotels and cafes to move through to get to where they live. He wants people “to go into a place that is super-animated”, as he puts it. 

Just now, I’m advising several real estate developers in the UK and abroad on developing ways to engage and involve existing and future residents and tenants in the places that they’re making. I am neither an architect nor urban designer but have worked with many property developers, local authorities, social housing companies and public agencies on developing communities, creating new social ventures, finding and founding ways in which people can belong to and benefit from the places in which they live.

Inscape Meditation Studio, New York. Founder: Khajak Keledjian — Ph: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine 

In recent times, I’ve become a bit of a junkie for sanctuary in cities, for places and experiences that act as havens or a refuge for people, combining consumerism and convenience or that sit alongside these two values.

I want to mine the fact that urbanites are diverse but share common passions, pain points, expectations and a hunger for the new.

If places can help bring an end to boredom and loneliness, much like Netflix’s commercial strategy, great.

If word of mouth, rather than marketing, can be the distributor, perfect, since promoter costs in the making of places can be high, with little commensurate effect on lifetime customer value.

And if we can create places that enable people to be free to choose their own lives and identity, even better, since life tends to work better if people are in control their own lives and experiences are acquired and accumulated naturally, much like stories that seamlessly arc into people’s lives.

Inscape Meditation Studio, New York. Founder: Khajak Keledjian — Ph: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine 

I met Harry Handelsman last week and what is interesting is that sanctuary seems for him less about removing people from everyday life, and more about providing them with busy experiences that compound the value of those moments when all is more quiet.

Handelsman doesn’t seem particularly interested in anticipating or forcing interaction between people — for example, through co-working space, residents associations, mutual endeavour. He is looking to give people simply a place to sit, eat, and work — but a special place at that — interleaved with travellers (at St Pancras), over-nighters (Chiltern Firehouse), hotel guests and dog-walkers (Manhattan Loft Gardens).

Yes, these are places that cater to rich people. Yes, these are places that are Instagrammable. And yes, Handelsman is obviously not captive to the same constraints as publicly-listed housebuilders, or funds obliged to sell apartments off-plan to punters in The Peninsula Hong Kong. 

Manhattan Loft Gardens: Image by Skidmore, Owings Merrill LLP - Developer: Manhattan Loft Corporation

But for all of the exclusivity and idiosyncrasy of the product, Handelsman’s ethic expresses certain values and holds insight that I think is useful to everyone involved in making places and looking to support people and their well-being through urban development. 

It costs a lot to buy or rent a property in cities now and there can be value in providing a diversity and depth of experience to people — and not just the binary option of either cheap-as-chips economy or fiddly added features.

While more and more storytelling is being told through recording on mobile phones, in a vertical, rather than horizontal format, new densities, global investment and other factors are conspiring to make vertical living and community a necessity in the future — which makes Manhattan Loft Gardens at 95, 280 and 400 feet up such an inspired idea.

Handelsman feels like he’s striving towards an utopia that isn’t removed from humanity. His message: utopia and peace need not be found in another time or place. They can be found here, now and living in the present.

David Barrie is a regeneration director and advisor. More at LinkedIn. Manhattan Loft Corporation is not the developer of the Inscape Meditation Studio, New York.

 

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Brexit, Elitism and our Urban Communities

At a real estate event that I attended this week on creative workspaces, property developers focused upon ‘the creative classes’, ‘millennials’, the value of collaborative work-spaces and their well-designed bike racks.

As ever, the sales pitch was that these places express the power of ‘we’ and are havens for creativity, co-design and co-everything for a new post-industrial, post-work, well-being-centered generation.

Post-Brexit, will this form of workspace start to feel like a form of gated community, an over-curated place capable of generating an address but not a genuine sense of belonging?

In the Brexit vote, densely populated urban areas in the UK with a lot of young people, such as Hackney and Islington in London, voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union.

Areas where more residents had higher education skewed sharply to Remain, while areas where a more had no formal qualifications were slightly more likely to vote Leave.

The vote expressed divisions and victory for Leave articulated a cosmopolitanism that many within the UK don’t like, or want.

Put another way, swathes of fellow citizens are just not in step with cultures of rolled-up jeans, Tumblr times — or multiculturalism.

So will creative, educated communities in our cities now start to notice an elitism, feel uncomfortable about it and change their ways and habits?

Will global elites in our cities now get down and dirty with the rest? 

Taste and fashion err towards more inclusion and localism? 

Will the politically-corect ‘right-on’ tag that has long besmirched the idea of inclusion now disappear? 

And what might all this mean to the kinds of places that we support, create and grow for ourselves, and that in so many ways are a reflection of our hopes, dreams and self-identity?

It feels as if the new moral and economic climate — and an associated ‘tech drain’ that will play through the Telecommunications, Media and Technology market — will mean that place-making will be forced to open up to a new, more diverse set of users.

Landlords will have to worry more about the challenges presented by less free movement of labour, such as a low levels of productivity and skills, and decrease in external finance for enterprise, such as for corporate R & D.

The connected-ness between ‘creative communities’, elites and the places that they inhabit with other communities will need to change. 

To my mind, it is entrepreneurialism, intergenerational relations, and grassroots localism that will hold the clue.

David Barrie is a creative advisor to real estate companies, social entrepreneur and Founder/CEO of Wild Blue Cohort.

Images: Francis Alÿs: From ‘Seven Walks’, 8 September 20 November 2005 — an Artangel Commission.

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Wild Blue Cohort: Investing in Entrepreneurs Close to Home

A recent review in the New York Times drew attention to how eminent neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga has shifted his ideas on the brain, from ‘left/right thinking’ to ‘multiple minds’, from ‘national planning’ to ‘local gossip’.

For those interested in growing prosperity, such a shift in thinking has relevance and meaning, however esoteric the source.

We have just come to the end of our second year of operating Wild Blue Cohort, a business angel investment network in central London, England  and the value of the local to us is clear – and by the way, it’s nothing to do with the whispers, butterfly touches or backward bigotry of the hill village!

Since Spring 2014, we have grown a new network of over forty private individuals who are interested in investing in entrepreneurs and enterprise linked to the local economy.

The barriers to entry and success of enterprise in London are high. Many people believe that the vitality of their neighbourhood is inextricably linked to the quality and incidence of local entrepreneurship. In their ranks are individuals with immense experience of creating and managing successful enterprise, and some have an appetite for private investment. Centred on West London in particular, Wild Blue meets the needs of one with the skill and intent of the other.

Since we started Wild Blue, over 600 companies have approached the investor network for finance – and roughly one third have been enterprises with a local link. Members have made eleven investments to date, valued at just under £700,000. Two of those investments have followed on from investments by well-known venture capital firms, who have followed on from our members’ initial interest. Wild Blue has invested between £10,000 – £225,000 in companies ~ two deals syndicates of eight and six individuals.

The quality, resonance and traction of what Wild Blue is doing is reinforced by co-investment by external organisations. To start up, we benefitted greatly from £150,000 in grant finance from the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and Westway Trust. We have since ‘circled’ a further, far larger sum to support the delivery of a new co-working space in Holland Park, which will be managed and delivered in partnership with The Collective property company.

Historically, the entrepreneurial economy of West London has centred almost exclusively upon food, fashion, personal services, the media and high-end creative industries. Investments to date by members of Wild Blue have expanded that portfolio: into on-demand services for senior care and legal advice to SMEs, mobile consumer and B2B software applications, food subscription services and a website offering food recipes.

Of course, global and national economic phenomena provide a key framework for all of this: be it the decreasing number of companies joining the public markets, low interest rates, tax incentives for investment in enterprise or innovation strategy.

But also there is a psychological dimension to it all. The swelling ranks of the anti-establishment, rise of online social media and popularity of multi-platform lifestyle brands speak to an increasing need for people to find common cause and belong.

Yes, our Wild Blue network is growing because of the outstanding quality of entrepreneurs out there that we find, or find us. But also we emphasise the involvement of members in due diligence and screening of businesses, their further mentoring and the local link and logic of companies. This offers members the prospect of an exciting, profitable personal investment that also supports the world in which they live and work.

David Barrie is founder and CEO of Wild Blue Cohort. His ‘fellow traveller’ is Investment Director Deepali Nangia. If you would like to become a more of Wild Blue or raise finance from the network, write to us: [email protected] or [email protected].

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Wild Blue Cohort: Interview with CEO David Barrie in FinSMEs

 

The network of angel investors that I founded and started operating in 2014 is soon to announce its tenth investment. You'll find out more on Wild Blue Cohort at our new website here.

 

Thanks to online venture capital and private equity journal FINSMES for publishing this interview on Wild Blue, how it operates and what members look for in an investment opportunity. 

As a syndicate of “angels” based in London, Wild Blue Cohort focuses on investing in early stage food, fintech, B2B and B2C enterprise, media, real estate, healthcare and education companies led by experienced managers and targeting big market opportunities. Serial entrepreneur and investor, David Barrie, the Founder and CEO of WBC, answered our questions about himself, the firm, its investment strategy and much more.

FinSMEs: Hi David, first, can you tell us a bit more about you?
David: I have founded and delivered several ventures that have been credited with raising £500m+ of new investment through public-private partnerships. These ventures include projects in the U.K., Russia, Eastern Europe and Canada; progressive enterprises such as The People’s Supermarket, London. My background is in media production. I have produced and directed television for 20yrs+, after working as a producer of financial programmes at the BBC and a research analyst in mergers and acquisitions for a major consulting firm.

FinSMEs: You have an Investment Director at Wild Blue Cohort – tell us more about her.
David: Deepali Nangia is Investment Director at Wild Blue. She started her career as an analyst on Wall Street and then spent several years in the investment divisions of GE and MMC (now Stonepoint Capital) focusing on financial services and financial tech. In these roles, she evaluated many “balance sheet”, outsourcing and technology plays; followed by ops roles at corporates in New York, London, Hong Kong and India.

FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Wild Blue Cohort. Why did you come up with the idea of creating it?
David: Entrepreneurs need finance. Investors want fast growth prospects and some like to be close to the companies that they invest in, especially if they have a role in its management. West London is full of immense commercial and corporate talent and expertise and many residents are private investors. What’s more, many people who live in West London would like to see a more vital, entrepreneurial, diverse local economy. A locally based angel investment network seemed to address all of these needs.

FinSMEs: How does it work?
David: We promote opportunities to our members after direct contact from entrepreneurs or deal partners, such as accelerators, incubators, investment firms and our members. Wild Blue promote enterprises to members through quarterly pitching events and off-cycle. Members carry out their own due diligence. Members invest either alone or in syndicate.

FinSMEs: Which is the investment strategy?
David: Our members are excited by companies led by outstanding individuals and with robust plans to scale up and grow. Wild Blue members tend to seek opportunities that require up to £1m in equity finance at reasonable valuations, with priority given to enterprises eligible for EIS or SEIS tax relief. Companies are screened for several indicators, with priority given to growth and quality of management but also the value of future growth to the local West London economy. We are sector-agnostic but members have very extensive experience in early stage and fast growth businesses and have expertise in food, fintech, B2B and B2C enterprise, media, real estate, healthcare and education.

FinSMEs: Personally speaking, what do (and what don’t) you like to see in startup founders?
David: Investment Director Deepali Nangia and me like to see leaders, honest and direct people, hard working and collaborative traits and of course track record – important but not essential. Differentiation and a long-term vision are important. I like the investor Saul Klein’s view that an inspirational entrepreneur is the one who can describe what the view looks like behind them, after a 20yr journey to success.

FinSMEs: Who is in the portfolio?
David: Wild Blue members have invested in eight firms to date.
Plentific – which provides online support for property transactions;
HomeTouch – an on-demand market place for hiring carers started by a doctor trained at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital;
Loyal zoo – an app for keeping your various loyalty points in one place;
Simplycook – which provides its customers with restaurant-quality recipes and ingredients;
Seeing – a crowd-sourced video content website started by a graduate of Chelsea School of Art;
Great British Chefs – a popular website offering recipe inspiration, expert-cooking guides and the latest chef and restaurant news;
Lexoo – an online marketplace for legal advice, and
Trint – a workflow software company. 

FinSMEs: Is London becoming startup friendly?
David: The culture of business in London is very startup friendly but the ‘barriers’ to entry are high. It is very expensive to base your business in London and hire local talent. The motivation of many members of Wild Blue Cohort is to use local money to support local enterprise. Also we are planning to launch towards the end of 2016/early 2017 an unique co-working space that will try to make it easier and more affordable to start and grow a business in West London.

FinSMEs: Personally, which tech trend do you follow?
David: I follow all tech trends – a junkie for TechCrunch, Crunchbase and many newsletters.

FinSMEs

23/05/2016

Real estate and the rise of new entrepreneurial communities in our cities

As ‘super gentrification’ advances in London, people worry increasingly about the loss of neighbourhood and vitality of community.

‘Don’t-rock-the-boat urbanism’ is in part to blame: minimalist marble slabs to sit on, featureless expanses of manicured grass, parades of shops selling the same thing, bans on skateboarding and smoking, and musak not birdsong.

This landscape Fit for Beige follows on from globalisation, the rise of luxury shopping, a cult of well-being and lack of diversity of housing provision.

Its architecture looks nice and chic off-plan in a hotel presentation and it is friendly on the balance sheet too, promising lower maintenance costs and outsourcing human interaction and incident to smartphones.

Problem is that the arrival of ‘Bland-ville’ expresses and induces a loss of community and increasingly consigns public life to the pages of Facebook.

To turn it around, real estate developers, urban planners and innovators have tended to turn to enabling things that bring instant brightness and empathy to a place: food events, play space, art objects, independent and pop-up retail.

Such ‘interventions’ are great – and I’ve created a few. But what is more sustainable, ambitious, and can actually change the climate and destiny of a place is to support and develop communities, relationships and markets – and that demands a more strategic response.

Two weeks ago, Trilogy Property announced a partnership with venture capital company Blenheim Chalcot to buy a property in Manchester and create a new “collaborative community of innovative businesses.”

Developer Cathedral Group (now u+i) has entered into partnership with Brunel University and others and turned a section of a former record factory in Hayes, Middlesex, into The Central Research Laboratory - a ‘lab space’ for design-led hardware companies.

A forty-strong network of angel investors in West London that I founded and manage is now entering into partnership with The Collective property company to create a new investor/entrepreneur co-working space in Holland Park.

Strategies for effective urban development often involve canvassing, co-opting and engaging with local opinion. These new ventures demand engagement of a different order.

They seek to build new cities within a city. They birth new communities of entrepreneurs and commerce through partnership. They involve people other than the unusual suspects - be they firms in property technology, small-scale manufacturers or private investors. Their ‘media’ is entrepreneurship, supporting, nurturing and seeking profit, and they spawn Happy Hours, dance parties, rooftop yoga, food halls and many other forms of co-locating enterprise.

The super-gentrification of our cities looks anti-social in comparison. Traditional consultation starts to look like it is about winning minds not market share. Pop-up animation looks like entertainment and brand marketing, rather than a pre-condition for transformative change.

In his new book The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision for the Future, Steve Case, the co-founder of America Online, argues for three waves of modern technological change. The First Wave was the arrival of the Internet. The Second: using it for search and social networking. In the future, entrepreneurs will use tech to create the ‘Third Wave’ and transform major “real world” sectors like health, education, transportation, energy, and food. Iconic entrepreneurs will be born from partnerships, firms of different sizes, networks created by innovators and new communities.

Diverse experiences in cities are becoming harder to find. Blandness is taking over. To counter it will require transformative change, and some of that will be delivered by real estate making new, unusual partnerships and through them, inventing new, unusual communities.

David Barrie is director of DBMP, a consultancy in urban renewal, and founder/CEO of angel investor network Wild Blue Cohort.

Image: Wall art, Centro Historico Cartagena De Indias, Colombia. Ph: Sandrine Merle.

 

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Image: La Strategia del Ragno, Bertolucci, 1970.