Written by Tommaso Giambelli - Founder & Head of Strategy Heirdom Capital
The COVID crisis has shown the consequences of where underrating the major threats for our generations leads to.
I’m not writing this article in a “green-peace-screaming-dude” kind of way, but I have to admit that taking a minute to think about it makes me kind of anxious. I have been growing up in a sustainability oriented household as my dad has been passionate about it since my early memories.
In my early twenties I’m now realizing how this challenge is for my generation to solve, and that there must be a reason why the practice of “sacrificing the future for present pleasures” is still active worldwide.
I suspect that the reason why sustainability oriented startups and projects fail to gain traction is because they fail to recognize and align to the substrate of incentive structure that lays at the core of every business decision. Therefore, those are like seeds being planted in infertile soils.
This is, indeed, step one:
recognising the current business incentive structures in order to leverage the core incentives to turn the switch from “sacrificing the future for present profits” to “profit both today and tomorrow”. I also believe that a sustainable solution needs to be applicable virtually everywhere, and does not have to be limited by the infrastructure available to a specific market or geography. NB: I’m not saying not to adapt, I’m saying that “shipping toilets in areas where there is an absence of running water” is fundamentally not clever. (It would surprise you how many “solutions” like this one have been deployed over the years).
Hence this is step two: Recognising the already-available assets that can be leveraged in order to adapt the incentive framework we recognised earlier. You probably already know where we’re heading toward. Art and Culture.
Those are literally present everywhere and they can’t be stripped out of a human being.
So this is the third one: Build a framework, on art, that matches steps one and two. This is what we do at Heirdom Capital.
We leverage UN Sustainability practices to give birth to a new generation of Art Funds.
We basically connect the dots through our Market Network between the Art Market, Investment industry and Sustainability world. This, to issue art-related securities while generating liquidity and transparency in a market that (if healthy) could generate indiscriminate jobs, helping achieve the 8th SDG while yielding major profits to every player. (Hope you caught the “DIY” irony.)
We’ll be at the Collision Conference this June, hope to see you there and have a chat. Otherwise you can find me via LinkedIn - Tommaso Giambelli.
