When Funding Fails Impact: Rethinking Capital in Social Enterprises
How do social entrepreneurs and investors truly align on vision, pace, and risk? This panel at the Impact Failure Conclave brought together entrepreneurs like U.S. Mahendar and Dhruv Lakra alongside investors like Vineet Rai and Manoj Kumar for a bold, honest conversation on what goes wrong in the world of social enterprises.
From losing sight of consumer needs to abandoning core values in the pursuit of funding, the discussion unpacked the frequent missteps and blind spots that occur between those who build ideas and those who fund them. Mahendar’s journey with Hatti Kaapi revealed how even a successful business can be born out of a failed model, while Lakra shared lessons on leadership, employee trust, and the pressures of projecting inflated images to secure capital. Investors, too, weren’t spared: Vineet Rai spoke candidly about the disillusionment of early impact investing ideals, and Manoj Kumar offered a call for a radical new vision of risk and patient capital.
This session didn’t just dissect failures, it reframed how we must view money, power, and partnership in building sustainable social change.
