Description

We are back for another great interview in our Entelechy Series  Today we travel to British Colombia Canada where. we chat with Joel Solomon, a venture capitalist, fund manager, author, public speaker, board member, and honoree of a myriad of achievements across Canada and the world.

Joel is the Co-Founding Partner at Renewal Funds- a $240 million mission venture capital firm that  invests in Organics and EnviroTech in Canada and the USA, and is an authority in the current social movement towards revolutionizing capitalism into something different and powerful, towards a clean money revolution., and as a result, he has co-authored of the book: the clean money revolution: Reinventing power, purpose, and capitalism 

A lot of Joel's influences stem from having an artistic mother, an entrepreneurial father, and a family involved in politics that engaged him as he was growing up in the sixties to talk about issues affecting the politics at that time including issues such as the civil rights act, the police riots, the student riots of 1968, the war in Vietnam, Kent State shootings, among others, influenced him to know that what he chose to do with his life in regards to capitalism and interaction with the society around him, would matter how his contribution made a difference.

We spoke to Joel about the impact of having a $250 million venture fund can make in this journey of revolutionizing capitalism and how he has been able to bring the creativity, ingenuity found in entrepreneurship into modern society.

• Renewal Fund works with entrepreneurs who are aligned with the kinds of values that we shared here. These are people who can see the deeper picture of where resources come from, how labor is found, and treated, how waste products are created and disposed of.
• The good news is that the consumer/ the investor, those of us who invest our retirement funds, who do business with banks in order to get a home mortgage, are starting to think and ask more questions, make new demands on going all the way back to the sources, how people are treated, how the planet is treated, how our waste is treated, and caring about future generations. 
• The way we can bring this change is by more of us making choices at an everyday consumer level. Decisions such as  Where we work, what kind of companies we associate ourselves with, those that pay attention to the political systems that we really understand and are much more connected
• Joel says the world is at an inflection point. There is urgency, there is ingenuity there's capacity. We have more skills to do things better with less harm. That is going steadily to increase as a moral and ethical responsibility of most of us as humans and in the systems that we create in order to make life better.
• There's a massive effort underway to clean up our act. Companies are now occupied by people who care about the underlying topics that we're talking about. Not simply making money at the unknown, but large costs to all kinds of other parts of the natural world. And to other humans, this conversation will keep happening.

In summary, Joel wants us, consumers, to ‘read the label at the level of buying something off the supermarket shelf, read the label of your politicians, your elected officials, those who set the regulations and the rules effectively what that means is to find out the history and the sourcing and the practices, You can to make conscious choices between the worst actors and the better actors.  

Other resources mentioned in this episode: 

Joel's Website:  Joel Solomon

LinkedIn: