Claire Wang
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Esther Tricoche, Head of Global Partnerships, RippleWorks, San Francisco (37.7° N, 122.4° W)

Esther Tricoche is the head of global partnerships at Rippleworks, where she works to bridge Silicon Valley expertise with social enterprises to tackle social injustices and provide more basic services to people around the world. Esther is a graduate of Rice University with a degree in cognitive science. In our conversation, we discussed Esther’s path to venture philanthropy and impact investing, challenges and misconceptions of the industry, the pressures of interfacing with CEOs and experienced professionals, and her best advice for college students hoping to break into the industry.

Impact investing and venture philanthropy are truly fascinating and relatively new spaces that are difficult to break into. Rippleworks, a philanthropic cryptocurrency fund, is even more interesting: Rippleworks is a nonprofit foundation, whose endowment is not in fiat currency (such as USD) but instead the cryptocurrency XRP, which was created by a Rippleworks cofounder. At Rippleworks, Esther’s typical day involves connecting with impact investors and CEOs from across the world and working with social ventures to grow and expand their social impact.

As a female student, it was insightful to hear about Esther’s experiences as a woman in social entrepreneurship. Unsurprisingly, it’s still an uphill battle for female founders and investors in the space, with certain challenges, such as common gender stereotypes domestically and internationally that mean women have to work harder to be recognized. Nevertheless, Esther continues to make significant impact and pursue her passion for social good and the insular nature of the industry is something that she is working to change.

An important takeaway from my conversation with Esther is that, as students, perhaps the best thing we can do right now as we begin our professional journey is to take advantage of each opportunity to create work products and to develop strong marketable skills. For Esther, one of her first marketable skills was her ability to condense an entire global sector into a single page of literature review that earned her the position at Arnold Ventures, which kicked off her career. That same analytical ability is what brought her to where she is today and earned her national recognition.

Something else that really stood out to me was the role that managers and mentors play in the early stages of your career. For Esther, she feels fortunate to have supportive managers who helped open up life-changing opportunities and helped her build a national platform. These opportunities, combined with dedication and hard work, led her to achieving a spot on “Forbes 30 Under 30 2016: Education” and now her current role at Rippleworks. Choosing the supervisors who believe in you and are willing to foster your professional growth will greatly benefit you in the long run, which may have more impact than higher compensation and job prestige. Learning from her story, it’s vital to choose a job and company based on the leadership.

Highlights from the interview:

What led you to venture philanthropy and impact investing?

The best way to think about the work that I do now is global partnerships at the intersection of impact investment and venture philanthropy.

What led me there in the first place is [when] I started off at Rice, I majored in cognitive science and focused on neuroscience. I was really fascinated with things like memory retention or language processing.  I had a professor at Rice at the time who was focusing on translational research into higher education classrooms, so I wanted to think about how can you best design different classrooms with strong educational outcomes. I was a senior when it started, so I didn’t get to go all that far with it due to graduation, but it really got me started to think about how this level of research or thought process could influence how things were run in the real world. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had spent pretty much the five summers before, during, and after Rice, interning, and worked in a variety of organizations, mostly focused on policy. It was anywhere from city government to nonprofit to working for a Fortune 500 company—helping them to overhaul their human rights policies.

And I put the two together and thought, “Okay, I think I’m a little bit too impatient to follow the research pathway.” If you want to go really far in neuroscience, you have to become a PhD, and for me, I just realized that I would grow impatient working on trying to discover something in the scientific realm because it typically requires years and years and years of research before you come to an end result. So I started to channel that scientific mindset into policy, and that eventually led me to being a part of the founding team for what was, at the time, called the Laura and John Arnold Foundation—and since they’ve changed their name to Arnold Ventures. The concept there was [to] use data-driven policy research to change policy in order to create social change. They’re a philanthropic foundation, and the idea is that instead of primarily supporting simply the growth of nonprofits, they would really focus on the policy conditions to allow an ecosystem where even more solutions could flourish. I came in as a policy analyst, and a few years later I ended up essentially leading our education division, which was our largest body of work at the time. I managed $130 million in grants, worked with nonprofits all across the country—anywhere from community engagement organizations to helping school models to scale—and thinking about all of the teacher and student and family supports that are needed to do that. And that, for me, was the usage of scientific research approach but applying it to something where change happens much faster—in policy.

My journey from there to where I am now really also came down to impatience. In the policy sector, you can see wide-scale change when policies change, but those policies can also be rolled back. I really wanted to shift to think more about a market approach, bottoms-up where markets are driven by meeting the demands of the end users. And so, still in education, I shifted from primarily focusing on education nonprofits to focusing on education technology companies.

I ended up moving from Houston to San Francisco to work at a venture philanthropy fund that essentially helped to start the entire concept of venture philanthropy, which is a mix of high-risk but deep support from venture capital alongside a focus on impact from the philanthropy sector. The idea is use philanthropic dollars to help support earlier-stage solutions. There, I focused on how to make the education technology market deeply meet the needs of students, teachers, and families, especially when it came to particular content areas or particular learner types that disproportionately represent underserved students.

After that point, I realized I could never leave the world of education, but also there were a few other social impact areas that were deeply meaningful to me and I really wanted to be a part of creating more change in them. And so, in 2018, I joined the world’s largest philanthropic cryptocurrency fund. Now I’m based in Silicon Valley, and I work with scaling social ventures all around the world. My organization is structured as a nonprofit foundation, but we work with hundreds of investors and ventures who operate in 60 countries across education and healthcare, financial inclusion and economic empowerment, and human rights, amongst other issues.

Do you think there are any misconceptions about your job or field?

There are so many misconceptions, especially because the field of impact investment is still so new. Venture philanthropy has been around, at this point, for roughly 20 years. Impact investing, as a term, was coined about 10 years ago. And so I think often a misconception is trying to understand how organizations can both pursue impact and profit, especially on the for-profit social enterprise side. I think it’s a common misperception that if an organization is a for-profit company that they are not primarily also focused on impact or meeting the needs of underserved populations. People see them as diametrically opposite, and in this sector, they absolutely go hand in hand.

Can I ask you about your experiences as a female in this space? What kinds of challenges do you face?

I think the challenges in the field are probably similar to challenges that are unfortunately still persistent in the workplace for women. So I’d say it’s things like having to work a little bit harder to be recognized in, say, conversations with people who may not know you personally. I think that from an investment perspective there are a lot of stories of women who are founders who go to pitch to investors about their ideas, and the investors won’t really understand the ideas or have preconceived notions about the entrepreneurs themselves because the investors are still overwhelmingly male. There are stories after stories of now incredibly successful female founders, who in some cases have products that are aimed toward the general public or in some cases, an audience of women whose ideas aren’t heard or seen in large part because of the dramatic difference in the richness of diversity in the general population versus the demographics of who is typically on the investor side of the table.

Since you mentioned recognition, I really want to ask about your Forbes 30 Under 30: Education—congratulations! What do you think contributed most to your success?

If I am completely honest, it’s having amazing bosses who turned into mentors who believed in me, who opened up opportunities that I never would have been able to open on my own. I can think of a few—two in particular—at the first fund that I was at, who were just game-changing to my career and continue to be amazing mentors years later. I think I had the unique opportunity to have such a strong national platform, and also had the sense of responsibility of using that platform to really create change…

[That recognition] was during the last year of my 20s, so I felt like I just snuck in at 29. But it’s been really rewarding to get to know other people across the world, across all of the Forbes 30 Under 30 categories. Last year I actually served as a judge to select last year’s round of Education 30 Under 30s to pay it forward and help to identify even more game-changing leaders.

How did your college years prepare you for your career?

I really appreciated how much Rice focuses on research in almost every facet…this concept of being involved in research early on really resonated with me, and it created this mindset in me of digging deep—what we call due diligence in the investment space. And that same mindset is what made me able to thrive in my career in the very beginning, when I came in as a policy analyst, and later was able to lead a body of work. And, honestly, I credit it for what made me a successful investor on the venture philanthropist side, and it now really drives how I pick the companies that I’m going to help grow in scale around the world.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most in your current position?

A lot of research, a lot of analysis. So there’s often a lot of intrigue around the world of investment in general, and I would say, by association, philanthropy and impact investing. What it comes down to is really recognizing patterns so that you can make quick decisions. So, tons of pattern recognition…looking at company after company after company after company. And then I would say, beyond that, it’s being able to really dig in and understand the stories behind the stories. It really requires you to be a good investigator, to be able to go from first meeting a CEO to being able to deeply understand the business as is, and the challenges that CEOs are facing as they’re growing and scaling.

Can you tell me a little bit about your typical day?

I spend the majority of my time chatting with impact investors and chatting with CEOs. So, to give context, in the last week, I’ve chatted with a handful of African CEOs, chatted with an organization based here in the US that’s focused on behavioral health for youth, and a few others in Southeast Asia and Latin America focused on financial products for the global poor. I spend time on these calls assessing organizations and their business models, getting to know those CEOs and understanding their motivations for starting the businesses that they have. I also dive into some of the financials behind companies, their growth metrics, understand their top roadblocks to growth and strategies that they’re implementing (or help they need) to address those challenges. Then I’d say a lot of my time is also spent internally within my team. There is a strong sense of working together across the organization. We have a lot of outside impact in the world, but as a team we’re roughly 15 people, we’re really small.

Is it ever intimidating to talk to all these CEOs and impact investors?

I’ll be honest—once upon a time it was. And I think, in large part, the equation in my head was—these people have more years of experience than I do. They know their businesses inside and out, and in many cases, especially in this role, I might not be a subject matter expert…I spent most of the first decade of my career solely focused on education, and now I’m working across other sectors. But what I realized is, at the end of the day, it comes down to skill in pattern recognition, right? You don’t have to know everything about the world. You do have to know enough to be able to have a meaningful conversation about it, and I would say the things that are similar across any one of these companies are the fundamentals of business. It’s typically the same five or six types of challenges that might take on very different flavors that CEOs around the world have—technology, human capital, sales, marketing, product, et cetera. If I can give advice to my younger self or give advice to people who are graduating now, the content of what you know is less important. It’s the way that you can organize information and understand patterns that really is going to get you from point A to point B.

Do you have any more advice you’d like to share?

I do. One is general advice and the second is industry specific. I would say, in general, if I could go back to my just graduated former self, what I would say is focus on a marketable skill—find ways that you can add value to things that you’re really interested in as a way to gain experience with that marketable skill that you have. Mine just so happened to be research and due diligence. Because again, I think the content becomes less important over time. It’s really about flexing that muscle on those skills that allow you to dig deep, understand patterns, and apply context to whatever content you’re facing.

And then, specific to the impact investing/venture philanthropy/venture capital sector, I would say, if you’re really interested in the space, it’s a small industry and it’s tough to break into. I would start with really understanding the fundamentals of business and gain experience in finance, which is really important in this space. If you think about giving money to organizations, you really have to understand the financial situation of the organization and be able to make assessments on their business models and execution. Another way that people enter the space (and this was really the route that I took) is developing deep expertise about a particular content area. And you know, for so long that was education for me, and I was able to parlay that across many more sectors.

I’ve been listening a lot to this one podcast called How I Built This, and I’ve realized how valuable having specifics is. And I think the most difficult thing is landing that first job in an area that you’re really interested in. I mentioned having interned for five summers. The one thing that I felt set me up for success the most was using those internships as a way to generally gain experience and learn on the job, because everybody is far more willing to explain things to a bright-eyed intern, who they can tell is ambitious and really wants to learn.

The last intern role that I did was really focused on a large research project, and as a part of that role, I created a work product. It was an overview of an entire global sector, how each of the key players addressed human rights alongside key frameworks and therefore what the organization should improve to be better at how they operated globally. And all of this research ended up boiling down to one simple overview page. A year or two after I started working at Arnold Ventures, my boss admitted to me that she was so impressed by that one-page work product where I was able to boil things down into a simple form, and that that was a huge reason behind why she hired me. So, I would say as much as possible, to differentiate yourself, think about a portfolio of work products that you can show to demonstrate your marketable skills. And in mine, I could show how I could do strong due diligence and boil an entire summer of research down to actionable insights and suggestions about how a company should operate in a global market. I think that will not only help students in their first job, but it will also help throughout careers in a world where workers are increasingly busier. Situations are always complex, and there is real power in communicating simply and clearly.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.