Adventure Finance

The venture capital model doesn’t work—at least not for 99% of startups and small businesses. In this 99% are a lot of companies with incredible potential: businesses headed by female founders and those from diverse racial backgrounds, organizations headquartered outside of venture capital hubs, and purpose-driven enterprises that are creating social and environmental impact alongside financial success. Counter to what the press-savvy venture capital world would have you believe, there are a lot of funding options out there for startups and small businesses. Adventure Finance is designed to help you understand some of these options, and walk you through real examples of how other founders and funders have put them to use. In simple, approachable language, the book breaks down the different types of funding options available from revenue-based financing to recoverable grants to redeemable equity to distributed ownership and more. Through a mix of storytelling and research-based frameworks, based on a decade of research and experience in investing in early-stage companies, this book will give you the ability to determine how each of these structures can contribute to your own funding journey. The goal for this book is to shift the conversation about startup funding and help founders and funders widen the spectrum of “mainstream” investment options in order to make the venture financing world more inclusive and purpose-driven. Aunnie Patton Power is a university lecturer on Innovative Finance, Impact Investing and Technology for Impact and an advisor on these topics globally. At the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, she holds the title Associate Fellow as well as Entrepreneur in Residence at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. She is also Adjunct Faculty at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics’ Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship. She also is a founding member of the Dazzle Angels, a female angel investing group. A reformed M&A investment banker, Aunnie began her impact investing career in 2010 with Unitus Capital in Bangalore and has since worked with start-ups, intermediaries, funds, family offices, foundations, corporates, and governments across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Aunnie's work has been published throughout the world, including by the Oxford University Press, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the World Economic Forum, and as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on Coursera and GetSmarter.