Blog #4

No matter how innovative or passionate a venture is, getting funding is still a challenge. There are more options out there for social ventures than for other ventures, but it is about choosing the best option for your venture. Trying to accumulate funding by going after every option is not the answer, developing a well thought out strategy is a must. This can be done by gaining an understanding of the best funding options for your venture and the funder's perspective. Once there is a solid foundation and understanding established, the best possible path to get funding will be more clearly defined. Some funding options for social innovation ventures are crowdfunding, fundraising, grants and fellowships, foundations for nonprofit ventures, incubators and accelerators. 

According to Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html), getting funding for a venture is the second hardest part of a startup, the first being actually solving a problem and making something that people want. Paul gives survival techniques throughout the raising money process. Some of the techniques he gives are having low expectations, being flexible, to not take rejection personally, and knowing where you stand with VCs. Although all of these techniques are surely useful, the overarching survival technique is to know that raising money is hard. As Paul Graham states it "the biggest danger is surprise. It's that startups will underestimate the difficulty of raising money - that they'll cruise through all the initial steps, but when they turn to raising money they'll find it surprisingly hard, get demoralized, and give up". If this happens, none of the other techniques will be useful because there will no longer be a startup to fund. 

In the article 'The Re-Emerging Art of Funding Innovation' by Gabriel Kasper and Justin Marcoux (https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_re_emerging_art_of_funding_innovation), the difficulty of gaining funding is reaffirmed, but there could be hope. The difficulty of getting funding for a social innovation venture has increased because VCs have become less willing to take risks and are funding ventures that are more tried and true. However, the need for funding truly innovative ventures is reemerging. The wicked problems of the world are not currently being solved, so the solution to those problems could be in a risky and less explored territory, but without funding, these ventures cannot come to fruition and come to a state where they can impact the wicked problems of the world to then gain funding. The knowledge of this fact is giving VCs new insight to reintroduce risk-taking into their processes, this may in turn fund a breakthrough change.