It’s been a busy few weeks, with the last 2 weeks spent making field visits to the 2 businesses we’re working with and the launch of our angel investor network coming up quickly next week.
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| Terraced Rice Paddies in Ubud |
One of those businesses is a for-profit social enterprise that focuses on dealing with the tremendous amount of waste that is currently illegally dumped in Ubud (a mountain town popular with tourists) in Bali. Tourism has boomed in Bali over the past years, but the infrastructure and practices to deal with it are lacking, and ingrained business practices make proper disposal of garbage even more complicated. The norm now is for businesses to be paid for their waste by pig farmers who use the organic waste as feed, sell the recyclables, and dump the rest down the nearest ravine. Trying to convince those businesses to switch to paying for proper disposal of their waste is an uphill battle as you can imagine.
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| Illegal Dump in Ubud |
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This 15m high illegal landfill
used to be a river bed... |
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| Scavengers picking through the trash |
My role in the visit was to help our investment partners (a social venture capital firm looking to make early stage investments to build a pipeline of deals) complete their due diligence to decide if they would invest in the company, and to identify specific areas we could address to help the business scale (decided to focus on data management and marketing). We met with their management team, customers, and investors, and had practically every piece of garbage not in a landfill pointed out to us – I think Bali may be ruined for me forever!
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| The business's waste processing facility |
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From left to right: Representative from our
investment partner, COO, CEO, and me |
It was a great learning experience to get insight into both the entrepreneur and investor’s side of things, and to be able to voice the entrepreneur’s viewpoint in conversations that would have otherwise been internal to the investment firm. We spent most of our time bouncing from meeting to meeting, but did manage to fit in some good food, massages, an afternoon at the beach, and drives around the most popular places in Bali – quite the tough life!
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One of our customer meetings was at a
5-star resort with this view - talk about roughing it |
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A nice break from one of our
trash tours... |
More to come on the other part of the trip later…
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