The angel investor on impact - Hampus Jacobsson

Social Innovation Podcast

This conversation discusses how impact business meets the forefront of the development of tech and government. We discuss how business for impact can best be made. And what obstacles it is likely to face along the way.

Hampus is one of the most profiled angel investors / VCs in Sweden, having built TAT, The Amazing Tribe and sold it to Blackberry he and the TAT team turned their attention to building a vibrant startup ecosystem in Malmö, Sweden.

He is passionate about the potential for tech innovation to improve society but be takes issue with the hype around social enterprise and social innovation and he is skeptical about the exceptionalism and political correctness of the movement developing around tech for good.

Business is business and a business venture want to be a business first, before it is social. “You have to understand what kind of animal you are giving life to and be prepared it may not be the animal you intended, you have to make sure you can live with the animal you breed.”

Hampus frowns on the holier than though ethos of social enterprise, in the end its a business and you will have to make a clear decision on what you will give and what you will take for yourself. The movement of social enterprise seems to pretend that it can do without hard choices and that business for good will be win win win by design.

But Hampus is adamant about a positive role for tech in society and its potential to uproot and change failing systems like healthcare. Data, data, data, he believes is the key to success for tech in society. If tech companies can amass data that show a clear case for change and can provide data that informs incremental evolution, it may just convince the bureaucratic old guard to play ball, for example in the public sector