Lenore Champagne Beirne is Founder and Managing Partner at Bright Ventures, a groundbreaking space for transformation in people, companies, and industries with coaching, capital, and community.
Chad talks with Lenore about being at the intersection of all three of those services, providing support for diverse entrepreneurs, and staying intentional about the kind of company and culture they're creating.
Bright Ventures (https://www.brightventures.io/)
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Lenore Champagne Beirne, Founder and Managing Partner at Bright Ventures, a groundbreaking space for transformation in people, companies, and industries with coaching, capital, and community. Lenore, thank you so much for joining me.
LENORE: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Chad.
CHAD: Bright Ventures, I love the three things: coaching, capital, and community. Would you say at the core you are a venture capital firm? Or is it really the intersection of all three of those services?
LENORE: It is truly the intersection of all three of those services. In fact, I started Bright Ventures because of a gap that I saw in the capital markets. But the first thing that we came to market with was coaching. And we learned so much from coaching diverse entrepreneurs and investors, and operators that we saw ways to add value to those groups and ultimately built the accelerator and venture capital fund and a number of other programs.
CHAD: Like most companies, I think what you have is relatively unique. Most companies are a coaching company or a venture capital fund. Do you get pushback, or are there concerns about doing too much?
LENORE: We've heard that question, although I don't know that the same question would be posed, at least in the same way, to a man, especially if it were a White man. But that aside, the reason we get the question is because I personally have led the launch of each new phase of the company. And what has really given our investors and also our partners comfort is that as we've expanded, we've also massively expanded the leadership and the skill set of the Bright Ventures team.
So I would say at our heart, we are a transformation company. We make inclusive innovation possible. We define that as building a future that works for all of us together. We make that possible. And we know that because that's a huge, gnarly, complex, nuanced issue, you have to have a multipronged solution. And so, for us, the combination of individual and systems transformation through coaching, community where we can practice and learn, and capital that actually shifts how businesses can operate is the right set of interventions.
CHAD: So one of the things venture capitalists often give feedback to their clients about is either doing too much or mixing business models. So like, oh, you shouldn't do consulting because what you have is a product company. They are different revenue streams, and different ways of working, and different ways of generating money. How do you balance those different business models that are within your organization?
LENORE: Well, I think, as I mentioned, the business models that we have inside of Bright Ventures are intended to solve the same really big problem in different ways through different angles. So what we have found is that there are a lot of early-