Why I Changed Course From Wall Street to Return Home and Launch B-Lab East Africa
In 2008 I sat in the offices of a big Wall Street firm for a job interview as an investment researcher. This was just as the financial crisis had begun.…
B Lab builds and leverages market infrastructure for enterprise and financial institutions to measure and manage their impact. Today, over 85,000 users in 151 different industries are using our impact management platform—the B Impact Assessment—to enable companies and investors to manage their impact with as much rigor as they manage their profits. The assessment evaluates how a company’s operations and business model impacts workers, community, environment, and customers.
B Corp Certification has gained global credibility, becoming a north star for companies that want to showcase their impact. It doesn’t just prove where companies excel now, it commits them to consider stakeholder impact for the long term by building it into their legal structure. There are over 3,100 thriving B Corps in 71 countries across the globe, helping build an inclusive and regenerative economy that generates a shared and durable prosperity for all.
The private business sector creates wealth for a very few, while externalizing costs to many.
B Lab creates a blueprint for business in the 21st century.
Thanks to the work of Jay Coen Gilbert, Bart Houlahan and Andrew Kassoy, a new legal form, the benefit corporation, makes it possible to balance shareholder value with social benefit.
More than 1,000 corporations have committed to the B Lab path.
B Lab is building and steering a global movement for economic systems change. Our strategies aim to upend the doctrine, incentives, and culture of shareholder primacy and replace it with policies, market behavior, and culture that focus business on meeting human needs, reducing inequality, and responsibly stewarding natural resources.
For-Profit Social Entrepreneurship
B Lab Company has identified a number of drivers of the changes it promotes in business values and practices, including increased resilience, customer and employee satisfaction, access to new sources of capital, and policy actions that may give preference to benefit corporations in different jurisdictions.
Executive Chair, B Lab
Co-Founder, B Lab
Co-Founder & CEO, B Lab
Friends for over 20 years since living together at Stanford, Jay Coen Gilbert, Bart Houlahan, and Andrew Kassoy founded B Lab in 2006 after years of searching for how to be of greatest service to social justice. From their prior business experiences and discussions with leaders of triple-bottom line companies, they came to the idea of using business as a force for good—to address social and environmental issues at scale by creating the framework and market infrastructure necessary to allow businesses to remain mission aligned as they grow and scale.
Prior to B Lab, Jay and Bart were Co-Founder and President of AND1, respectively, a $250 million basketball footwear and apparel business. Andrew, an investor in AND1, spent his career as a private equity investor; which included his involvement as a Partner at MSD Real Estate Capital, a $1 billion real estate fund controlled by MSD Capital and the investment vehicle for the assets of Michael Dell and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Together, Jay, Bart and Andrew bring their extensive personal experience in the private sector to leverage the impact of B Lab and the movement of people using business as a force for good.
In 2008 I sat in the offices of a big Wall Street firm for a job interview as an investment researcher. This was just as the financial crisis had begun.…