What shifted your thinking from conventional business to impact investing?
Seeing a reality that contradicted everything I had been taught. Travelling through Malaysia, I witnessed the scale of rainforest destruction firsthand — and then discovered that the investor behind a major London real estate development was the same palm oil company responsible for it. I had studied business at four universities across Germany and England, and the connection between consumer behaviour, capital flows and environmental destruction had never once been mentioned. That gap changed everything for me.
How do you balance financial return with genuine social and ecological impact?
Two principles guide every decision. First, the positive impact must be structurally embedded in the business model — remove it and the model no longer functions. That eliminates greenwashing by design. Second, founders must be authentically motivated by the problem they are solving, not by the existence of a market. Teams assembled from the outside because a sector looks attractive tend to be the first to abandon the mission when conditions become difficult. Conviction has to be intrinsic.
"The volume of capital flowing toward solutions that might allow this planet to remain habitable remains negligible compared to capital flowing in the opposite direction."
What needs to change for impact investing to fulfil its potential?
It must become mainstream — and it must be honest. The sector is currently dominated by exponential growth logic that is extractive by design and incompatible with natural systems. The volume of capital flowing toward solutions that might allow this planet to remain habitable remains negligible compared to capital flowing in the opposite direction. Alternative structures exist — steward ownership, evergreen funds — but adoption is slow. The time for cautious evaluation has passed. Start now, with conviction, and build from there.
Image Credit: Supplied by Patrick Knodel
