The Impact Billionaires

A wide-ranging, rich & interesting conversation touching upon topics such as Doughnut Economics, the ZEBRA movement and what it takes to create meaningful change.  Yonca Braeckman is the founder & CEO of Impact Shakers, a global impact ecosystem tackling complex societal challenges through inclusive entrepreneurship. She is a mission-driven entrepreneur and investor in underrepresented founders. She helped build the Belgian and European tech startup ecosystems and as a mentor at SXSW, Slush Tokyo, General Assembly, Village Capital, Shapers Impact Capital and startup programs across the globe, she guided many startups on their first steps abroad. She built a new smart city hub in Ghent, Belgium, with an in-house acceleration program called Watt Factory. She serves on the board of different non-profits and is the curator of TEDxGhent and the Techstars Startup Digest Reading List on Impact Entrepreneurship. Most recently she initiated the Horasis Young Visionaries for the Global Vision Community Horasis to add to her mission of lifting diverse social entrepreneurs. Yonca is an absolute powerlady and some might even say she invented the word inclusive entrepreneurship. Kidding of course. She is also one of the 40-under-40, the belgian inititiative to bring together young visionary leaders - and that she is. So without further ado, let's dive into our conversation.

In this Deep Dive episode we look a little closer at something Dave brought up in epsiode 1: The economy of giving. Is it really that irrational to give? We've been living with this "homo economicus rational man model" for most of the 20th century. Time for an upgrade? In this episode the arguments are made, with the concrete examples of open source vs patents that giving is the more impactful way to go. Especially if you expand your view of what the economy is. More on that later. 

Dave Erasmus sold his first business at 21 and has been finding & doing work worth doing ever since - broadening the scope of how we look at things. In this very first episode of the impact billionaires we talk about what it means to have impact, how Dave lets it guide what he does, the economy of giving, the role of technology in all this and many, many more topics. The common thread throughout is Dave's experience & brilliant insights on finding ways that challenge his thinking & the thinking of the people around him in order to challenge the status quo. 

Our purpose with this podcast is twofold. First, we want to explore visions of a better future that fit the criteria of impacting a billion+ people positively in order to expand our way of thinking about current challenges & the world at the scale of impact billionaires. Second, we want to inspire leaders to lead and fight for those visions and provide those willing to lead with all the tools & resources necessary to achieve significant steps towards enabling those visions. In that attempt we will bring on guests who have proven to have the mindset & capabilities to become or already are Impact Billionaires. Together with them we'll explore in depth what it would take to impact a billion lives positively. We'll dive in to what today's biggest challenges are and how one could go about solving those, what tools & resources we have available today that can help with that and why people, just like us, might want to make becoming impact billionaire their goal in life instead of the outdated version a billionaire...