The Start of a Venture

Back in the summer of 2011, I was an Summer Associate at Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte Consulting). At one overtime dinner, I asked my supervisor, Mark, if he could take some time and do a pro bono advisory work for my project in college. It was a small marketing project that aimed to revitalizing Chinese traditional shadow puppet art (see below picture) in Beijing, and he said yes.

Chinese Shadow Puppetry

It was hardly a consulting project but more like a series of brainstorming workshops. But the frameworks he used to direct our thoughts tremendously broadened our horizon, and eventually led to a successful marketing proposal for a shadow puppetry troupe. This was the first time I witnessed the power of private sector toolkits in the context of public or social sector.

Later on, I talked with Mark about the possibility of duplicating what he did for us in a broader community. Surprisingly. he was onboard immediately. I rememer he mentioned the term "social impact" in our conversation, though I had no idea what it was back then. It later became the heart and soul of BetterPartners.

We were inspired by innovators in both private and public sectors, such as McKinsey & Co., Bain Capital, IDEO, International Finance Corporation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, SocialFinance, and Harvard Business School. The vision of BetterPartners has evolved for the past several years. For now, our vision is to incubate impact ventures and leaders to enrich people's lives and impel society's development. We want to utilize our resources, network, knowledge, skillsets from mutiple and diverse business sectors to develop the social impact sector in China. This is our belief that the line between private and public sectors has become blurred, and either side can benefit tremendously from the other side. The key question is how? We try to solve this problem by bridging the gap, not only in organization development but also in people development.

Along with the evolvement of our vision, our brand has also developed from BetterLife+ Group to BetterPartners, a professional services firm in social impact and innovation. And our founders took couples of days to design the first version of our logo.

Logo

Fun part: as part of marketing and communication project, each founder taped a very short video in which each answered the question: Thank big and far, what is your ambition with BetterPatners. And here is my answer.