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The Impact Mafia on the Road
This is a speech I gave last week, in a church in Antwerp, at a We Are Impact Collective event. I opened it by telling a room full of impact investors that I am not a whistleblower. I am a made man. The rest of it is below, more or less as delivered.
I want to be clear about that before anything else, because everything that follows is a confession, not an accusation. I did not infiltrate the Impact Mafia. I catered it. I gave it a name. I sold the tickets, although asset owners expect to come for free. I printed the badges. I moderated the panel. I am the guy who booked the room where nothing happened and then invoiced you for the room.
So when I say the food is not real, understand: I am not outside throwing rocks. I am at the table. Napkin in. Second helping.
The venue was the argument
A church. A room full of impact investors. In a church.
Whoever booked it was bolder than they knew. They put the congregation and the collection plate in the same building, and then they told everyone there would be no photography.
That is not a conference. That is witness protection.
No photos. No social media. Do you understand what was done to that room? Their entire theory of change was switched off at the wall. For most people in that building, an un-photographed good deed is a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to post about it. Somewhere in row four a man was having the first authentic experience of his professional life, and he hated it.
And the city. Antwerp has the port that moves more cocaine than any port in Europe, and a diamond district that has spent a hundred years issuing certificates about where things came from. Laundering and provenance. Same city. Walking distance.
Ladies and gentlemen: the spiritual capital of ESG.
Although I would add one thing, because unexpected venues can trigger unexpected futures. Amsterdam, which loves to see itself as the global capital of Doughnut Economics and sustainability, hosted a Nerd Reich tech bro gathering to discuss building network states that route around democracy, governance and tax. If Amsterdam can go rogue in that direction, a church in Antwerp can go rogue in this one.
Meet the families
Every mafia has families. Ours has five. Before you meet them, hold one number in your head: there is roughly five times more financial wealth in the world than global GDP. Five euros chasing one.
The Foundation family. Old money. Beautiful manners. Endowment the size of Portugal. Gives away the legal minimum with the facial expression of a man donating a kidney. And the endowment is invested in exactly the things the grants are trying to fix. It is the only business model in history where you fund the fire brigade and the arsonist out of the same account, then put them both in the annual report. On facing pages. With a photograph.
The Consultancy family. The Big Four and their nephews. These are the people who will charge you four thousand euros a day to explain that your theory of change needs a theory of change, and then bill you for the workshop where they tell you that.
The Multilateral family. The UN. The development banks. The acronyms with their own acronyms. Enormous, slow, deeply sincere. They have been three years away from unlocking private capital at scale for twenty-five years. That is not a strategy. That is a horizon. It moves when you walk toward it.
The Wealth Management family. The people wealth holders hire to grow the money, avoid the tax and advise on impact. Most do the opposite. They function as a moat. Keep the client comfortable, keep the client uninformed, and above all keep the cash cow away from anything that might reveal the manager is doing a mediocre job for a very good fee.
And the fifth family. The Family Offices. The actual capos.
Never on a panel. Never quoted. Never on stage. Sitting in the third row saying nothing while forty extremely intelligent people spend an entire day performing for them. Some of them were in the church. I could feel it. It is like doing stand-up to a heat source.
Our omertà is very loud
Like every mafia, we have a code of silence. Ours is a work of genius, because we never shut up.
We publish. We post. We convene. We are the loudest silent people on Earth. The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The first rule of Impact Club is that you talk about Impact Club incessantly, at volume, with a lanyard.
The omertà is not about what we say. It is about what we all quietly agree never to measure.
Nobody has ever been asked, on a stage, in public, the only question that matters: how much money actually moved, and to whom?
Ask that at a drinks reception and watch the temperature drop four degrees.
TBLI Circle
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