We are proud to announce that Steven Luna now joins our team at Impact Hub Stockholm with a mission to drive structural change and bridge the gender gap for female founders in investment.
Who is Steven Luna?
Steven Luna is an impact investor and advisor to impact startups. To date, he has advised 20+ impact ventures and invested over €6 million. Originally from the United States, Steven has lived in the Netherlands for the last three years. You would never guess that his first line of work was actually in the film industry. His love for films led him to represent writers and directors in Hollywood. He was an assistant for Oscar-nominated producers and later on, a Creative Executive – sourcing materials for story development. He likens it to product development in other industries.
After the global financial crisis, and with an MBA under his wing, Steven became involved with Thunderbird Emerging Laboratories and consulted companies based in South America, Asia, and Africa. His involvement stretched to fundraising efforts to bring women from Afghanistan to Thunderbird School of Global Management to learn business development in order to improve their local conditions back home. It was a consulting gig in West Africa which he says first sparked his interest in enabling sustainable business models beyond philanthropy. He moved to Amsterdam to combine people, planet, and profit at Pmywymic– Europe’s first venture fund for businesses with a triple bottom line. He invested in female-founded companies and recently decided to move with his partner to Stockholm.
We are proud to announce that Steven Luna now joins our team at Impact Hub Stockholm to develop programs and to create a deal structure to support our organization. Steven envisions the first program to support female entrepreneurs in two stages. The first step is to have the difficult conversation with VCs to design a model to address unconscious biases and others within the investing world. The long-term goal is to teach female founder participants how to view the world through the lens of an investor so that when they exit the program, they become entrepreneurs-turned-investors so they will be the ones in power to drive structural change. We want to give female entrepreneurs the tools to successfully navigate a flawed system while campaigning to change it and to ultimately prepare them to be the investors to drive structural change.
“Impact for most places is a buzz word. But for Impact Hub, it actually lives, breathes and believes in impact. It’s important for me because it goes with my purpose. After working with impact investing companies, I really do believe in the model that you can still hold social and environmental issues at your business core while still making money. They’re not mutually exclusive. Impact hub is really proving that these models do work to drive impact and profitability. What I’m doing now is bridging different worlds together -bringing investing and startup support together and moving into a market that is overlooked. There are a lot of initiatives and a lot of support for female founders to bring them into entrepreneurial roles. However, the step beyond that is, I don’t want to say lacking, but is rather thin. The support is not currently focused on getting female entrepreneurs to series A and series B with institutional investors. We want to address that gender gap.” – Steven Luna, Program Manager at Impact Hub Stockholm
If you want to contribute, please reach out to Steven at [email protected].
“To solve this mission, everyone needs to be at the table. Not just one side. Not just one sex. But everyone.” – Steven Luna
Impact Hub Stockholm recently partnered with Invest Stockholm to create a more diversified startup scene. As partners, we have committed to combining our efforts to increase entrepreneurship in the outer parts of Stockholm, as well as to take steps to encourage more women to start their own businesses.
Author
Cathy Xiao Chen is the Head of Operations at Impact Hub Stockholm. With a passion for supporting social impact, she advises and connects changemakers with collaborators to maximise impact.
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