912: What It’s Like to Invest in Social Entrepreneurs With Alden Zecha, We Scale Impact [Main T4C Episode]

Alden Zecha is a founding partner at We Scale Impact, a consulting firm that focuses on supporting early stage social enterprise clients. He is also Managing Director for an angel investment group, Sidecar Angels. Over the course of his career he has raised over $50 million in capital for a variety of ventures. Even though Alden majored in Chemical Engineering at Princeton University, he has worked in many fields including healthcare, consulting, and operations in luxury travel and even a skin-care distribution company. Lastly, Alden is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.  WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS EPISODE: What a social enterprise is (3:33) How the coronavirus and current economic recession will affect social enterprises? (6:00) What percentage of social enterprises are self funded versus those that are funded by angel investors? (12:40) What advice would he give to someone who wants to work in a social enterprise? (15:02) How he learned from his first failed enterprise and used that experience to build a better one (27:12) How Alden struggled and persevered through challenging times (31:33) What his best advice would be to his college self (37:18) If you want to learn how to break into social entrepreneurship check out Alden’s Espresso Shots interview T4C episode #519