Building funding fit for purpose
Esme Verity studied history at university, then started a string of businesses of her own. About 15 years ago, in an ecosystem that felt built purely for commercial gain, she found no language, and no support, for what she was trying to build: something that balanced profit and purpose.
She went on to work inside VC-backed businesses that set out to be impactful, and watched the venture model get imposed on them regardless: the same growth targets, the same return expectations, until the impact got lost and the workplaces themselves turned unhealthy.
"I was feeling like, am I insane? Is the world insane?" she says. "Something doesn't quite fit."
Then a friend sent her the Zebras Unite manifesto: zebras fix what unicorns break. It gave her, and a lot of people feeling the same thing, a simple way to name what they'd been struggling to articulate: businesses that balance profit and purpose, and choose community over competition.
The gap that stayed with her was practical. You could call yourself a zebra and still find no support built for you. She founded Considered Capital to fill it, five years ago now.
"The answer to a dark moment isn't to look away from it," she wrote. "It's to look more carefully at what's actually happening in the field."
Its main vehicle became the Alt Funding School, a seven-week programme that has helped hundreds of founders worldwide raise mission-aligned funding: grants, impact loans, revenue-based finance, community shares. She built it for founders who were told most often that the door is closed. In 2023, all-women-founded companies raised $3.2 billion from VCs; all-male-founded companies raised $114 billion.
She recently ran the school for the last time in this form. Next, she will embed it further with funders, intermediaries and the wider ecosystems founders move through. It's the same instinct behind her work as Head of Learning at the Innovative Finance Initiative, where she is now working on the other side of the table, focused on the capital design work so that more funding options are available for purpose-led founders.
At a recent sold-out IFI training day, sixty practitioners took part in a full day of sessions on making funding fit for purpose, including a workshop from Yoak's own Patrick Andrews and Erica Neve, working through a live case of a founder navigating steward ownership. What struck Esme most, she reflected afterwards, was watching the room sit with the difficulty of it, instead of reaching for tidy answers.
"The answer to a dark moment isn't to look away from it," she wrote. "It's to look more carefully at what's actually happening in the field." Her approach is nicely captured in Considered Capital’s newsletters, which end the same way each time: "We're building this with you, not just for you."