Launching Impact Sprints: the accountability & community you need to Get Impact Done
There are so many projects languishing on the side of startup operators’ desks. Important-but-perhaps-not-urgent projects. Projects that aren’t being pushed by investors and whose success may be hard to measure. I’m thinking of the hiring manager who wants to make their interview process fair and equitable; the recruiter who wants to build relationships to new talent sources ahead of a hiring spree; the designer concerned about making a website ADA-compliant. They can envision their desired outcome but haven’t yet gotten founder buy-in, or haven’t had the time plan or execute on the project. They think that after this busy period they’ll have more time to work on it, forgetting that “the busy period” at startups is relentless.
From our own experiences, and many conversations with founders, operators and investors, Michael Lewkowitz and I came to an interesting place (where we found each other): 1/folks want to do things right and build DEI, sustainability, and ESG into their startup from the beginning, 2/ they may have a sense of where to start, but 3/ it’s not clear how urgent any of this is. The result: whatever isn’t on fire just gets pushed to the end of the to-do list. That’s how you get to all-male engineering teams and all-white sales teams. That’s how tech debt and diversity debt pile up — and it’s a lot harder to fix when your engineering team is 100 people than when it’s 10. Many of these projects are preventative, and their value to founders, operators and investors is often clearest when it’s too late.
Preventing this awful hindsight is what Impact Sprints are for. We’re here to help you pick a project, carve out dedicated time, identify and mobilize the necessary resources, set deadlines, and Get It Done — all with a community of peers.
The Impact Sprint will help you break down your project into manageable, measurable, trackable chunks so you can focus and execute. And we’ll be there to celebrate with you when it’s done. We’ll even provide a certificate to prove you made real, measurable progress and moved your company towards better outcomes.
If you’re a founder, operator, and/or investor at an early-stage startup (Seed to Series B, more or less), and have been itching to work on your DEI strategy, communicating to your customers how your product helps them reduce their environmental impact, making sure your company can retain your key staff, or any project that comes with this niggling “I need to work on this before it’s too late!” feeling, now is the time.
Find our more about what you can expect, early-bird pricing, and how to apply here. The next cohort starts in September.
