In 2001, Silicon Valley Community Ventures was hailed as a leader in the small but growing field of community development venture capital. During this time we expanded our local Business Advising program to include Business Roundtables, CEO leadership training, job placement assistance, and legal assistance (with partners Fenwick and West and Morrison and Foerster.)
At this young age we’d invested in 20 companies, such as Bay Area mainstays Niman Ranch, Give Something Back, Timbuk2, and Everett and Jones BBQ, and starting providing free advising almost 40 more. We also started doing something that many of our peers weren’t, and many still aren’t: conducting third-party social impact measurement of our investments to ensure that our dollars were actually creating the change we wanted.