Frequently Asked Questions

How do you support companies after investment?

Eagle has a robust support platform for founders post investment, as outlined in the Eagle Platform page.

The support includes:

Being on the board of directors.

Eagle University training on key entrepreneurial skill sets.

Eagle Venture Lab partners with some portfolio companies launch and has external support available for all.

Eagle Impact Alliance helps companies access non-dilutive (grant) financing.

Pro-Forma helps companies access additional financing rounds.
Check here for further details.

Is Eagle investing based on people's altruism?

We empower people's altruism by investing in Native Impact which eliminates the tension between profit and impact. Learn more about our Native Impact approach.

What are some of the most common objections to investing to solve the world's greatest problems?

People often believe that profiting while solving the world's greatest problems is either (1) Impossible or (2) Unethical.

Why do you focus on B2B SaaS companies?

What is the target return of Eagle IV ?

The target returns for Eagle III are 20% growth per year, net of fees. We also target 3x-5x return of capital over 10 years, which normally equates to 20% growth per year.

When do I get money out of Eagle IV ? How do I get liquidity?

You receive capital when portfolio companies are sold. We expect Eagle III to invest in 15 companies. When one of those companies are sold, we distribute the proceeds to investors. You can expect to start seeing companies sold in year 4 of the fund.

How long can investors expect to be in Eagle IV ?

Eagle Venture Fund III is a 10 year fund with two one-year extensions.

There is continual debate to define ESG & social impact investing. What is your take on this? How does Eagle Ventures define impact investing?

Here is our White Paper on how Eagle defines impact investing.

In short, we define impact as lives transformed. We are especially excited about those business models where the human impact is core to the basic functioning of the business, so as the company scales, the impact scales right alongside.

ESG integration and impact investing require a deep understanding of various industries and sectors. In terms of investing, which areas of impact do you like to look at? Why?

We focus on the following areas of impact:

Combating Human Trafficking

We orchestrate efforts to end human trafficking and protect the vulnerable.

Economic Opportunities

We empower families through education, upskilling, and providing dignified work to help break the cycles of poverty.

Healthcare

We are transforming the healthcare system to bring the necessity of basic healthcare to vulnerable populations.

Energy & Natural Resources

We are confronting pressing energy problems by creating sustainable solutions.

Social impact investing aims to generate both financial returns and positive social or environmental outcomes. How do you monitor or assess the impact and effectiveness of your investments? What metrics or frameworks do you use to measure success?

We are building systems to measure progress toward one million lives transformed. Each company is unique, and we are working toward a dashboard of one metric per company with the most salient impact metric for that company.

Examples include:

Inmates returning to society with healthcare

Patient Sortal

Days of protection from malaria

Livful

People upskilled into software jobs

VeroSkills

Youth mentored

UpFrom

People who learn English

Immerse

From your experience, how can venture capital firms effectively select the “right companies” to invest in, given you want to drive social impact without compromising financial returns?

Select companies whose core business is their impact and help them achieve their mission. This is juxtaposed against the TOMS model of buy-one-give-one. For example, if Patient Sortal grows, more inmates returning to society get healthcare. There is no tension between their mission and their profit. They are locked together because their impact is core to their mission and inherent to their business model and inherent to their business model. We also try to keep an eye on the places where we do need to balance impact and return. For example, excess profits can also be used to hire socially disadvantaged people.

Impact investing often involves navigating complex trade-offs between financial performance vs impact. Can you share an example of a company or investment that successfully balances these considerations and has achieved both financial success and positive social or environmental outcomes?

The key is choosing companies whose business model drives impact every time the machine of their business turns, so that growing the company naturally drives the impact.

For Example: VeroSkills is a company that trains people to become software engineers. They have designed a business model where the companies pay, providing access to low-income populations to training for low or no cost. VeroSkills growing means that more at-risk youth are trained to become software engineers. There is no tension between their impact and their profit. Notably, that was not true when we met VeroSkills though.

When we met VeroSkills, their business model charged students for online courses with live tutors. We went through a business model redesign process as part of our diligence for investment that changed the payors to nonprofit donors and corporations, aligning the business model with the mission of impact. In the old business model, there was a trade-off between profit for the company and the profit for the student. In the new business model, there is no tension because the company searching for talented engineers is paying the bill.

Technology and innovation have the potential to drive significant positive change. How can venture capital investors leverage technology to promote sustainable practices, social impact, and environmental stewardship?

Eagle believes that technology provides a perfect leverage to bring impact into scalable business. Here are examples starting with two questions:

Here’s a technology…
what the most redemptive use of this technology?

An example of this would be diving into virtual reality technology and looking for redemptive uses, like Quinn Taber, the founder of Immerse who was living in a refugee camp in the Middle East and had a passion for virtual reality. He founded a VR company looking for ways to help his friends in the refugee camp. Because he was looking for the most redemptive use of VR for his friends, he landed on teaching English in VR. In that refugee environment, learning English has a positive effect on their ability to earn income.

Today, Quinn’s passion for finding the most redemptive use of VR has landed him the “Most Innovative Company in VR” award.

Here’s a problem…
what can technology do to solve this problem?

An example of this is Justin Dillon, founder of FRDM. Justin first made a movie about human trafficking to raise awareness of the problem, then built a simple website called Made in a Free World that millions of people used to understand how their lives touch modern day slavery.

Finally, he became convinced that someone needed to build a software platform to help companies clean out their supply chains of slavery violations.

Today, Justin has wrapped in Software as a Service technology and AI to tech-enable a solution to the problem that many Fortune 500 companies are using.

Both starting questions are deeply redemptive and land in redemptive uses of technology, but they take different routes to get there.

Impact measurement and reporting are essential for transparency and accountability in ESG and social impact investing. What challenges exist in measuring impact effectively, and how can these challenges be addressed to ensure credible and standardized impact reporting?

There are hundreds of impact companies with many impact metrics.

We have invested in Word Wide Generation to help create a solution to the mess. WWG maps all impact taxonomies into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, providing a unified comparison framework. WWG has been engaged by SGX to provide unified reporting for every company on the SGX exchange. We hope that our efforts and WWG’s efforts can help bring a unified voice to the impact investing sector.

All these reports are important measure and standardize impact. We also believe that real fruit should be visible by everyone involved in the company and should as a result deliver stories of lives changed.

What specific criteria do you consider when evaluating potential investment opportunities?

We evaluate 51 criteria that drive high-probability investment opportunities, including:

Value Proposition

The ideal is a distinctive and easy to understand high quality offering that saves 100% of customers time or money, meets a clearly unmet need with a high price point that is clearly cheaper than alternatives in a market that lacks suitable substitutes with large adjacent opportunities, and enjoys network effects where the produce is more valuable to each customer as the use base grows.
Today, Quinn’s passion for finding the most redemptive use of VR has landed him the “Most Innovative Company in VR” award.

Market

The ideal is a distinctive and easy to understand high quality offering that saves 100% of customers time or money, meets a clearly unmet need with a high price point that is cThe ideal Is a large, fast-growing market with low seasonality, low competition, abundant suppliers that are easy to shift between, low regulatory burden, slow technological change, and favorable macro trends.learly cheaper than alternatives in a market that lacks suitable substitutes with large adjacent opportunities, and enjoys network effects where the produce is more valuable to each customer as the use base grows.
Today, Quinn’s passion for finding the most redemptive use of VR has landed him the “Most Innovative Company in VR” award.

Financial

The ideal is a small investment to get to break even quickly, a tight cash cycle between the cost for the offering and when you get paid, low fixed costs, high gross margin, and high return on investment.

Operational

The ideal is strongly defensible intellectual property, high ability to pilot with customers before spending high expenses, short timeframe to develop the full offering, highly repeatable and scalable offering with the ability to use technology to reduce costs, leveraging an abundant labor pool.

Customer

The ideal customer is easy to identify with proper timing to meet their clearly felt need, has low price sensitivity, can be accessed through several sales channels, a low customer acquisition cost, a short sales cycle, a long customer life, high customer lifetime value, high customer switching costs, high ability to cross-sell customers additional offerings, and a deep relationship with the customer.

Team

The ideal team is coachable, has worked together before, are serial entrepreneurs with deep experience in the sector they are building in, and they have all of the core skill sets for being an entrepreneur that we look for.

How do you add value beyond capital to the companies you invest in?

We provide value to our entrepreneurs through the following resources:

Eagle University

We gather our founders monthly to train them on skills like running board meetings, managing sales processes, and recruiting talent to your company.

Eagle Leadership Development

Joe Reed, our head of impact and leadership development, provides one-on-one leadership and spiritual training and resources to our founders to help them lead themselves and their teams into flourishing.

Governance

We often sit on the board of directors for our startups.

Strategy Consulting

We provide the opportunity for quarterly strategy sessions with our portfolio companies with the four general partners.

Coalition Building

The Eagle Impact Alliance is our nonprofit that builds coalitions of for-profit and nonprofit organizations around the causes we invest in. Some of our portfolio companies enjoy deal flow and networking through the coalitions built around the cause they solve.

Venture Building

Eagle has founded ¼ of the companies we have invest in, and our venture studios are actively involved in the management of those companies ongoing.

Our team has significant entrepreneurial experience through dozens of startups. If we see that one of our portfolio companies has an urgent need or slips into a turnaround situation, we try to help out by engaging our large network of skilled professionals or even get hands on by ourselves.

What is your typical timeline for making investment decisions, and what are the key factors that influence your decision-making process?

We often get to know entrepreneurs for a year or more through the impact coalitions that we build around our investment themes. We can meet a new company and go through all three phases of diligence to investment in as little as two months.

The key factors that influence our decision making process are:

Business Model

See 51 Core Principles above.

Financial Model

Is the model sound?