The founder who went upstream
Ten years ago, Emma Shaw co-founded Library of Things, a circular economy business that lets people borrow drills, carpet cleaners and the like instead of buying them. To protect its mission as it grew, the co-founders structured its ownership and governance so that directors, not shareholders, held the decisive say: a kind of stewardship, arrived at before she had a name for it.
That structure protected the mission and allowed it to raise enough capital (£1.2m) to build the sharing infrastructure that makes London the world's first sharing city, with 23 sharing libraries across the city. However, it made expanding further hard, as most impact investors weren't open to working with the asset-locked steward-ownership structure.
"I just found it very exhausting," she says. "It felt like going into the investment finance system and being told no everywhere."
"I studied plant sciences before Library of Things," she says. "The VC model reminds me of a monoculture: throw enough fertiliser on baby crops and they grow fast, like rocket fuel, then fall over. You need a diversity of businesses. Force them all down the same path and you'll get one in a hundred surviving."
"I studied plant sciences before Library of Things," she says. "The VC model reminds me of a monoculture: throw enough fertiliser on baby crops and they grow fast, like rocket fuel, then fall over. You need a diversity of businesses. Force them all down the same path and you'll get one in a hundred surviving."
Five years in, despite the business's turnover tripling after the pandemic, she had a wake-up call. It wasn't her own fundraising that needed to change, but the system itself. Yet she couldn't make that case credibly while she was still the one asking for money. "If you're telling a funder the way they're working isn't good, and then, oh by the way, we're raising money. You don't have integrity with that."
So she transitioned to a stewarding role with Library of Things and went looking further upstream, going to the sources of the capital itself. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, newly recommitted to its Quaker founder's original mission of tackling the root causes of inequality (land, assets and wealth), was one of the wealth holders she found.
She joined JRF as a consultant for two years, helping it to commit its endowment to full mission alignment and designing what became the Transforming Wealth Lab. The Lab is a £10 million, five-year commitment to field-building among people experimenting with alternative ownership, capital and governance.
"In five years," she says, "I want a capability for transformative investment established in the UK, so a wealth holder looking to move money can actually find a pipeline of regenerative organisations to receive it. In ten years, I want capital to actually be flowing differently."