How investing in people can form a thesis of maximizing financial returns

Financial rewards often come to those who bring a product or service that can solve a problem better, cheaper or faster than an incumbent. The productivity gains that contribute to that sort of solution often amount to reducing the amount of human labor involved.

This might sound counter to people-forward investment strategies like the early-stage mantra to invest in a company’s founding team, rather than that company’s business plan. Others think there are even more lucrative investment opportunities being ignored because they sound too people centric.

Look at The Community Fund, a new investment vehicle focused on community-driven companies — meaning those with products and services based around a group of people, like memberships. In a different way, look at Right to Start, a campaign to lower the barriers to entrepreneurship — with an eye toward the economic gains that can create.

Ask the founders of these efforts, Lolita Taub and Victor Hwang, respectively, and you’ll find that neither see their work as an act of charity. That people are at the center of their efforts is not do-goodery but rather a thesis on financial returns.

To explore what “investing in people” really means, Technical.ly spoke to Taub and Wang for this week’s episode of Off the Sidelines, an investor education podcast. The podcast is produced by us at Technical.ly and sponsored by Project Entrepreneur, a program by UBS. Project Entrepreneur is on a mission to change the status quo for female founders and accelerate their growth through increasing access to capital and building ecosystems to advance women entrepreneurs. It works to improve the enabling environments for female founders and advance inclusive capital, including diversifying the pipeline of investors and supporters.

The ultimate goal of all these efforts is for more people to become entrepreneurs and investors from more varied backgrounds, filling gaps in existing markets, supporting their communities and creating economic opportunities across the board.

Check out the episode to hear exactly how people reward entrepreneurs and investors when you invest in them, and subscribe to learn more with Off the Sidelines.

We have more episodes coming up this season with conversations from notable figures throughout the investing world, so be sure to subscribe and keep up to date with all our episodes.

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