Icons Of Impact: This VC Backed Tesla And Pioneered An Entire Impact Genre — interview with Nancy Pfund

his woman is one of my own per­son­al icons.

Long before impact invest­ing was cool, there was Nan­cy Pfund. As a founder of DBL Part­ners, Pfund blazed a trail by bat­ter­ing down his­tor­i­cal­ly male-dom­i­nat­ed finance doors and helped cre­ate a new genre of ven­ture cap­i­tal that could deliv­er alpha returns along­side deep impact. She counts Tes­la, Pan­do­ra, and the Real­Re­al as port­fo­lio com­pa­nies and she’s a big cham­pi­on of the entre­pre­neur espe­cial­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed ones. 

I sat down with Nan­cy on Nan­tuck­et to talk about the tri­umphs of her jour­ney, how the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis hit her hard, why grit mat­ters so much in a founder, and how a diverse sys­tem makes for a stronger invest­ment. 

To read the arti­cle, vis­it Forbes.