Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026

Author: Robert Rubinstein

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The Global Voice of ESG & Impact Investing

Thomas Ng: 500 Blind People Trained, Not One Got Hired

A school in Manila trained 500 blind people to use a computer. Five years of teaching, and not one ended up properly employed. Thomas Ng was a trustee, and he spent three more years walking them into every boardroom he knew. Lots of excitement. Zero result. So in 2008 he started a company to hire them himself, before he had worked out what the company would do.

On TBLI Radical Truth, Robert Rubinstein asks him what that cost. Ten straight years of losses, ten years without drawing a salary, and a promise to his wife about the house. The episode makes three arguments: that the people nobody will employ are an underpriced workforce rather than a charity case, that you cannot be fully honest as a senior person inside a large multinational, and that the corporate career he walked away from is the only reason the second act worked.Thomas Ng spent 25 years at ABB and Rexam plc, starting ABB's first joint ventures in China and finishing as the first Asian country manager in the Philippines. He left at 47. Genashtim, the company he founded in 2008, was fully remote from day one out of necessity, employs 252 people in 39 countries, and has staff turnover of two percent. Its team does the certification analysis behind more than 11,000 B Corps in over 90 countries.

TBLI Connect (Speed Partnerships)

Ninety minutes. Fifteen countries. Nobody selling anything.

TBLI Connect is a room where the only thing on the agenda is the person in front of you. A few minutes, then the system moves you on and there is someone else. No panels, no slides, no queue for the speaker afterwards.

Who turns up: a pension fund CIO, a regenerative farming founder in Kenya, a next-gen family office principal, an ocean plastics campaigner, a first-time fund manager. You could not book that room yourself, and you cannot guess in advance which conversation will be the one you are still thinking about in March.

One condition. Do not come to pitch. The room can tell inside thirty seconds, and in a one to one there is nowhere to hide.

€15. Ninety minutes. Then you get your afternoon back.

Almost everyone who comes once comes back, several times a year, for years. That is the only claim I will make for it.

Friday 25 Sept. 16:00 CEST.
Secure your spot. Space limited

If you have been before, bring one person who has not.

Every investor does diligence on you. Almost nobody does diligence on them.

You hand over financials, cap table, customer list and a year of your life. You get back a website and a partner's LinkedIn profile.

Meanwhile every founder network in Europe already knows which firms take six meetings and never write a cheque, which ones reprice on the last day, which ones go quiet. That knowledge never gets written down, because saying it out loud is expensive when you might need those people next round.

TrustVC is where it gets written down. Anonymous reviews of VC and PE firms, by the founders and fund managers who dealt with them. LPs finally get to see how a firm behaves towards the people it backs, which is not the same thing as its returns.

If you are raising, check the firm first. If you have raised, or tried and failed, leave a review. A few minutes from you saves someone else a quarter.

https://trustvc.org

Reve AI Generated

Where is Jack Mitagstein when we need him?

Audio Version

The true authentic eccentric.

We have solved the character problem. Congratulations to everyone involved.

There used to be people in my life who could not be explained. No category held them, no form had a box for them, nobody could introduce them properly at a dinner party. "This is Jack. He, uh." And then a pause, because the sentence had nowhere to go.

They are gone now, and nothing replaced them. What replaced them is a man with a LinkedIn headline containing the word "ecosystem."

Jack Mitagstein

Jack had no formal education. None. Not "he dropped out of Columbia and it haunts him." Not "he did a year at community college and pivoted." Nothing. No diploma, no certificate, no transcript, no letters after his name, no letters before it either.

He could do anything.

He built alarm systems. Real ones, wired into real buildings, protecting real property, and as far as anyone could tell he had learned this the way a raccoon learns to open a bin, which is to say by opening bins. He started companies. Multiple companies. He did not know what he was doing in any of them, and I want to be precise about this, because today "I don't know what I'm doing" is a humblebrag posted by a founder who knows exactly what he is doing and has three advisors and a term sheet. Jack genuinely did not know. He found out on the way. Sometimes he found out afterwards. Occasionally he never found out, and the company existed anyway, out of politeness.

Today Jack would not get past the application form. There is no field for him. He would fail the background check, the credential check, the culture-fit interview, and the AI screening tool, which would flag him as a data-entry error. Somewhere in a Brooklyn that no longer exists, a man who could build anything is being rejected by a piece of software that cannot build itself.

The airport

My parents had friends, Leon and Regine. European Jews, formal, French-speaking, the kind of people who dressed for an aeroplane.

They needed to get to the airport. Jack offered. Jack always offered. This was his defining feature and his central flaw, and I have never worked out which one it was more of.

He arrived from Brooklyn in a car. I use the word generously. It was a vehicle in the way a hospice patient is a patient: technically, and not for much longer. It had reached the stage of life where the rust was structural. You did not get in so much as get accepted.

Leon and Regine got in, with luggage, in good coats.

And of course, because the universe has a sense of comic timing that no writer can match, the car died. Not near the airport. Not near anything. It simply stopped participating.

Jack got out. Jack ran around the car. This is a genuine memory and it is the purest image of the twentieth century I possess: a man with no formal education, running laps around a dead car, opening the bonnet, closing the bonnet, touching wires, jiggling, muttering, believing, absolutely convinced that the machine could be talked into it.

Inside, Leon was calculating flight times. Regine was calm in the way that women of that generation were calm, which is to say entirely, and terrifyingly.

Leon began to yell. First quietly, then not.

And Jack, sweating, filthy, hands black, out of ideas and out of car, threw his arms up and shouted in Yiddish:

“Voss DOO-en eer VILN meer tsoo DOON?”

What do you want me to do?

Leon did not hesitate. Not for one second. He answered immediately, and he answered in French, because some things you do not say in the language of your grandmother:

"Crevé."

Die.

Why this is the best joke ever constructed

Look at the engineering.

The question came in Yiddish, the language of the shtetl, of the mother, of the kitchen, of complaint. The answer came back in French, the language of the salon, of the diplomat, of good manners. Leon reached across two languages, two continents and two entire histories of suffering to tell a man to drop dead, and he did it with the elegance of someone ordering a fish.

One syllable. Perfect grammar. No malice, exactly. Just instruction.

And here is what tells you everything about the world we have lost: they all remained friends. Nobody filed anything. Nobody was cancelled, coached, or offered a mediated conversation. Leon told Jack to die, Jack kept trying to start the car, and later everybody had dinner.

They caught the flight, incidentally. I am told this involved a stranger, a tow, and Jack being Jack. Details vary depending on who tells it, which is the correct condition for a story of this quality.

The extinction

I have spent thirty-five years in finance, sustainability and impact, and I have met perhaps five people with Jack's disease. The rest are qualified.

Everyone is qualified now. Everyone has the MBA, the certification, the framework, the taxonomy, the disclosure standard, the sixteen-page methodology explaining how they intend to measure the thing they have not done. And nothing gets built. We have replaced people who could do anything with people who can describe everything.

The system has been optimised to eliminate exactly one type of person: the one who says "I'll figure it out" and means it, and is sometimes catastrophically wrong, and occasionally produces something no committee would ever have approved. We removed the downside and we removed the upside with it, because they were the same person. They were always the same person. You cannot keep the man who builds the alarm system and reject the man with the dying car. It is one man.

So now we have safety. Beautiful, credentialed, insured, compliant safety, and a professional class of people who have never once, in their whole lives, run around a broken car in a good suit, believing.

What I actually miss

I miss being surprised by a human being.

I miss the phone ringing and having no idea what was on the other end. I miss people whose next sentence could not be predicted from their previous sentence, or from their job title, or from a language model trained on ten million of their colleagues.

Jack is gone. Leon is gone. Regine is gone. The car, I assume, achieved what Leon requested.

And I am left in a world of enormous professional competence where nobody, in thirty years, has said anything to me as funny as one dead Frenchman's single word on the side of a road in Queens.

If you know someone like Jack, protect them. Do not send them on a training course. Do not ask them for a business plan. And for God's sake, do not let them drive you to the airport.

👉 Follow Robert Rubinstein

TBLI Circle

Hong Kong Expands Sustainable Finance Taxonomy

by ESG News Editorial Team

Phase 2B expands the taxonomy from 25 to 39 economic activities, adding criteria for green and transition finance.
Batteries, low-carbon technologies, aviation, steel and climate adaptation gain clearer pathways for capital allocation.
The consultation runs until 7 October 2026, giving financial institutions and other stakeholders one month to respond.

HKMA opens consultation on expanded framework

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has opened a public consultation on the Phase 2B prototype of the Hong Kong Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance.

The proposal expands the framework’s economic coverage and sharpens its treatment of transition finance. It also introduces a new methodology for assessing climate adaptation activities.

Public comments are due by 7 October 2026.

The taxonomy is designed to help banks, investors and companies identify activities that qualify as green or sustainable. Clear definitions can improve capital allocation, support financial product development and reduce the risk of greenwashing.

For corporate leaders, Phase 2B could influence which projects attract sustainability-linked financing in Hong Kong. It may also shape the evidence lenders and investors expect when assessing transition plans.

Read Full Article

We’re likely to breach 1.5C. What happens next is still in our hands

byTom Pattinson

A new UN report says crossing the Paris climate threshold now looks unavoidable, but how far temperatures rise, how long they stay there and whether they can eventually be brought back down are still shaped by the choices we make now

For almost a decade, keeping global warming below 1.5C has been one of the defining goals of global climate action. Now, for the first time, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has concluded that the world is likely to breach that threshold within the next few years, while also making clear that crossing it does not mean temperatures have to remain there or that further efforts to limit warming become futile.

Published on Wednesday, UNEP’s Limiting Overshoot report describes what it calls an “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway, in which temperatures rise beyond 1.5C before peaking as greenhouse gas emissions fall towards net zero, then begin to decline if humanity succeeds in removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases.

Under the most ambitious scenario examined by UNEP, warming would peak at around 1.8C by the middle of the century. By contrast, policies currently in place would put the world on course for around 2.6C of warming by 2100, according to the report, which underlines why every fraction of a degree avoided continues to reduce the scale of harm.

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