VIRGANCE

Virgance was a venture-capital-backed studio that tried to industrialize the production of social-enterprise startups. Two of its bets — One Block Off the Grid (1BOG), a residential-solar group-purchasing platform, and Carrotmob, a “buy-cott” mechanism that flipped boycotts into rewards — became modest hits in their respective windows. Most of the others did not.

I ran Operations from 2008 to 2010 — every back-office function, plus the messy work of standing up half a dozen subsidiaries on a shared operational substrate. The studio model itself didn’t survive the post-2010 contraction, but the lessons it taught about what does and does not generalize across mission-driven startups are the substrate underneath everything I do today.

Sealed but not erased. Listed here for lineage.