Building a successful business and making the world a better place may be mutually reinforcing goals.

Philipp Hillenbrand: Giant Ventures backs “purpose-driven founders.” Can companies striving to make the world a better place generate substantial returns?

Tommy Stadlen: By backing technology start-ups that create scalable impact, we believe we can deliver top-tier returns to our investors. These are investors who—like us—seek top-decile financial returns and meaningful impact.

Philipp Hillenbrand: Michael, now that you’ve reached scale with Calm, how do you balance your purpose with the need to create financial returns for shareholders?

Michael Acton Smith: We are driven by our mission to make the world happier and healthier by helping solve the global mental-health crisis. But building a commercially successful business is also extremely important. Without financial success, we wouldn’t be able to attract venture capital and talent nor generate the revenue to reinvest to power our economic flywheel. It’s a powerful mix when the mission and the revenue growth are firing in tandem.

Technologies and businesses addressing the world’s biggest challenges—from decarbonization to biotech—may present significant investment opportunities.

Philipp Hillenbrand: Which emerging technology trends do you think will produce the largest companies and the greatest benefit to society?

Tommy Stadlen: We believe the largest companies of the decade will be built solving the world’s biggest problems. Those companies tend to be generational businesses that provide completely new responses to major global challenges. The decarbonization of the economy is, in my opinion, society’s most urgent challenge. It’s also potentially the investment opportunity of the decade, worth many trillions of dollars. Many of the most talented and ambitious new founders are choosing to work on climate, from scalable carbon-removal technologies and green-energy substitutes to the financial systems that will underpin net-zero markets.

I have never been more confident that technology will help solve the climate crisis. I have witnessed, for example, food scientists in our portfolio companies reduce the cost of growing a burger in a lab from $325,000 to $11 in less than a decade.

Economic Mobility is another of our core investment themes. Fintech, Web3,2 and remote work will combine to fundamentally rebalance the relationship between capital and labor. The first generation of fintech products mostly made life marginally more convenient for relatively affluent consumers.

In the 2020s, fintech has the potential to transform lives in two ways: first, by democratizing access to financial products, from banking to alternative asset classes that were previously the domain of the rich; and second, by offering new ways for individuals and small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) to generate income, wherever they are.

The pandemic collapsed geography: in a remote-first world, start-up founders or web developers in, for example, Karachi suddenly had the same opportunity to reach investors or customers in Palo Alto as did their competitors in San Francisco. And purpose-driven blockchain or crypto projects make it possible for these participants to monetize their skills in new ways.

Michael Acton Smith: I think driverless cars will have a greater impact on society than people might expect because of the many second-order effects that will flow from the rapidly approaching shift—such as the layouts of cities, property prices, the future of work, a dramatic reduction in road accidents, and in-car entertainment.