Marigold Capital is an Impact Investment Strategy & Execution Firm based in Toronto, with a focus on gender, diversity and inclusion investments. In this episode Jonathan Hera, Managing Partner, highlights gender lens investing, using a unique approach of investing in a cluster of companies to drive collective impact.



Investing in solving for underlying problems, market failures and ways of building community, that’s something that we also need to do. so if we continue on the theme of investing in femetech and female reproduction and sexual health, there are many players of companies in this space, and in theory you can invest in them all and not solve problem. There are many problems not just THE problem. If we start thinking about how to build an ecosystem and how people can work together in partnerships to build a more coherent strengthened supply chain, value chain and share resources among each other, all of these sorts of things start to build community, a market and an industry rather than individual competitionJonathan hera, managing partner







Transcript of Interview with Jonathan Hera



Jenelle:Hello. Thank you for speaking with us today, Jonathan.



Jonathan Hera:Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here talking with you.



Jenelle:Today we have with us Jonathan Hera, Managing Partner of Marigold Capital and you can learn more about Marigold Capital at marigold-capital.com. So, Jonathan, can you tell us a little bit about your organization, its mission, and your role?



Jonathan Hera:Yeah, absolutely. So, at Marigold capital, we’re based in Toronto, Canada. We have been around for about three years or so, and we’ve been advising, consulting foundations, high net worth individuals, nonprofit organizations, government about impact investing. But more specifically how to devise a thesis based strategy, how to do industry analysis, how to develop a portfolio, how to run diligence opportunities in the impact investing space generally, and then more specifically in gender lens or social equity lens approaches. So, how do we embed different ways of looking at things, managing things, writing things with these gender and social equity lenses. More recently, that’s a three year timeline, we’ve been doing that since we’ve begun three years ago and more recently we’ve started to develop our own fund and we’re actually in fundraising mode right now and that’s an interesting time to be fundraising. I’ll talk to you a little bit about that later.



Jonathan Hera:I’m the managing partner of the firm. I have a general partner, Abigail Slater who works with me. It’s a small shop. We’ve been able to work with some incredible people, who are doing other things related to our work in the social equity space, the diversity and inclusion space, investees, which I’m happy to tell you about later and other organizations who are also investing in things and people that we’re interested in. But our overall goal is to demystify the impact investing in gender lens investing opportunities to put a spotlight on the fact that many people are overlooked because of where they come from or what they look like. They run business models that are a little bit different than the things that are usually funded and they’re offering products and services that are targeting markets, consumers that are often being underrepresented, overlooked, undervalued and there is a wealth of opportunity from a social economic perspective as well as just from a business financial perspective. These are some of the threads that we leave together here at miracle.



Jenelle:And this is something you’ve been at fo...