Social Finance Extraordinaire

Pictured above: Karim Harji

I had coffee with a very interesting friend, colleague and mentor in Toronto yesterday the day after I arrived from Budapest.

Its always good to catch up with Karim as he is always working on interesting projects to do with social finance and impact investing. His knowledge on the topic, most especially on the emerging social finance marketplace across Canada, is unparalleled considering he started the website SocialFinance.ca back in late 2007/early 2008 to document the beginnings of the social finance movement in the country.

SocialFinance.ca today, with the strong support of SiG, MaRS and other organizations,  is considered to be the resource for learning and understanding trends in social finance, social ventures and impact investing both in Canada and abroad.

Interestingly enough, Karim and I had met back in late 2008 at the Social Finance Forum held at MaRS in Toronto, when together with Michael Lewkowitz, we found ourselves to be the only three people with laptops huddled in the back corner of the main plenary hall live blogging and tweeting the entire proceedings of the conference.

Why were we all huddled in the back corner you ask? We needed access to power outlets for our laptops. You can read the proceedings and watch videos of the SFF 2008 and the Social Enterprise Summit 2008 here.

Karim is currently with Social Capital Partners right now but will soon be entering the world of startup social entrepreneurship when he goes on to build Venture Deli with fellow superstars Norm Tasevski and Assaf Weisz full-time very shortly.

Over the course of our conversation yesterday, we talked a lot about how young people, including many of our peers that we know, are putting themselves out there and taking calculated risks to create opportunities in order to make the world a better place (in a manner of speaking). Within this context, if there is one piece of insight that I walked away with following our conversation, is that it is of utmost importance you define success on your own terms and not by anyone else’s standards.

Only you can determine what the benchmarks of success look like to you, and then work hard in a systematic and focused way to make it happen. Of course you need to make sure that you have some fun along the way while you do so, making sure to surround yourself with some amazing people in the process.

All of this rings true for me given the personal journey that I have been on since July of last year, when I decided to rock the boat and leave Waterloo and Toronto behind. After an amazing year abroad and now that I am back in Canada, comes the hard part of determining what success looks like for me at this point in my life and working through my priorities.

Karim is definitely a person to watch out for in the social finance and impact investing space in the coming years!