FastTrack is now Proudly B Corp
FastTrack co-founders, Alexandre Olmedo and Ivan Bernard-Brunel share what this means to them personally.
FastTrack turned ten this year. Our anniversary is marked by another important milestone for the business – gaining #BCorp Certification.
B Corp is a global movement started in 2006 to change business from within. By balancing profit with purpose it seeks to make business a force for good in the world. Patagonia, The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, innocent drinks, The Guardian and WeTransfer are all #BCorp companies, B Lab. And now so is FastTrack.
Accreditation involves the voluntary auditing of our impact in terms of our people, our customers, our communities, our governance and the environment. It’s extremely rigorous and a lot of work for a small company, but it’s important to us and many like us. Why?
The journey to where we are today started a long time before we had even heard of B Corp. When we founded FastTrack we wanted to create a new type of company, founded on greater equity and inclusion for those involved. We’d been operating in the VC, Private Equity and Start Up worlds, and saw how value wasn’t as fairly distributed as it might be. From our first Joint Ventures, we put alignment through shared equity as a driver for business performance.
This is still core to our model, and over the years we’ve explored ways to build on it. We’ve elaborated ways to make employee empowerment and professional development central to team-building in the companies and cultures we establish in Asia Pacific. This emphasis explains why our strongest performance on our first B Corp assessment was for our “workers”, but this is just the start.
B Corp is a journey of continuous improvement, with accreditation encouraging us to ensure our impact expands to all stakeholder groups within the framework. Our new status is really an outward validation of what we’ve been doing since the start, and the encouragement to do it on a bigger scale for more people and greater impact.
As a small company, it’s with our Joint Ventures that we can have the biggest impact, and that’s the next chapter of the FastTrack story. Our focus in our core business as an investor is towards what we call “tech-for-better” companies. In some ways this is an interpretation of the B Corp ethos of continuous improvement across diverse stakeholder groups. Our next Joint Venture may very likely be from the B Corp global community, or on the road to accreditation. The B Corp stamp identifies companies that are prepared to walk the talk in terms of purpose. It’s a great match maker for companies who operate through partnership and want to scale with purpose.
The phrase “Balancing Profit and Purpose” is used a lot when talking about B Corp and Impact Investing more broadly. But the most inspirational companies, like Patagonia – whose visionary leader inspired us with his book Let my People Go Surfing – don’t just balance Purpose and Profit, in a spirit of compromise. They drive Profit FROM Purpose. That’s how business will change from within, and that’s why we want to be part of this paradigm shift.
In just a few years B Corp has grown from a group of inspired activists to savvy, future focused companies. Asia is the new global growth centre. B Corp is also growing as a global movement. We’re really excited to be there at the moment where these two paths align. That’s the road ahead for FastTrack.
Thanks to everyone who helped us get here, from the inspiration of #YvonChouinard #PierreRabhi Thierry PICK to Prisca L. for help gaining our status in Singapore.