Spotlight Series: Interview with Laina Greene, Angels of Impact Founder
“The world of humanity is possessed of two wings: the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly.” — Baha’i writings
These are words that Laina lives by and in this interview, she shares with us the challenges she has encountered and how she came to found Angels of Impact and invest in women of colour and their enterprises.
Introduce yourself and your current role or startup.
I am Laina Raveendran Greene, and I am CEO of Angels of Impact.
Where are you from? What is your background?
I am a Singaporean citizen, of parents who were themselves immigrants from Kerala who came to Singapore in the late 1950s looking for better opportunities and to start a family. They both worked as humble civil servants and always emphasized education as a key to success. With their support, I studied hard and managed to access scholarships and even part-time work, so I was fortunate to have opportunities to live, study and work overseas. I have worked and traveled to over 45 countries and lived in four, which makes me feel more like a Global Citizen.
I started my own tech company in Singapore in 1996, which I sold in 2006. After selling that business, I started investing in female-led startups. However, the more I learnt about social entrepreneurship, the more I felt inclined to focus on women-led community-based enterprises. With the help of other entrepreneurs looking to pay it forward, I started Angels of Impact to support and fund marginalized women-led, community-based enterprises that help end poverty through sustainable businesses.
Who are your biggest inspirations?
When I was younger, Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa inspired me to live a life of service. However, I still always saw poor people as charity cases, ie that poverty was inevitable and all I could do was charity work to help them. I then came across the Baha’i Faith that taught me that humanity has a choice and that with unity, poverty can be eradicated and that peace is inevitable. We can end many global social and environmental problems if we work together as one united global family. Not surprisingly, when I read the book by Prof Mohd Yunus “Creating a World Without Poverty” it resonated with me. He called us to put poverty into museums. He reminds us that when our grandchildren see these horrible images of poverty, they will ask us how we could bear to live and see people living in inhumane conditions and what we did to end it. He called for investing in women-led social businesses. This was the push I needed to actually put what I learnt from the Baha’i writings into action.
What lessons have you learnt as a female leader/founder/entrepreneur?
I have learnt that when starting a business, one should ensure that your solution is something the market needs and wants, and be clear IF addressing that need is something that means a lot to you. Why this is important because when times get hard, it will help you persevere despite all odds since it has a deeper meaning for you. If you care about social impact as well, be also clear on what this impact is and how you intend to measure it. Be careful about who and where you take investors from. Ensure that the investor’s values are aligned with yours and share strongly the impact you are trying to make. This will help ensure that you have a champion in your corner who can help open doors to help you succeed, rather than someone who spends time trying to rework your business and even force you to compromise your values and impact.
What are some of the challenges, biases or barriers you have encountered thus far?
I have found racial and gender unconscious biases made it harder to raise funds even when my business was profitable and I had stellar customers. Even something as simple as accounts receivable financing against purchase orders from multinational companies was not accessible to me — the cost of capital for me as a woman of color was expensive.
Today, as a woman of colour funding and supporting other women of colour, I still find myself overlooked as a finance professional when trying to raise funding. I have seen an expatriate woman without lived or regional experience funded to start a new organisation to compete with the work I did, even though the funder knew our organisation existed. Thankfully research and data are now calling out these biases and hopefully, things will get easier. My way around these biases is to work harder in building a trusted network of people who believe in my competency and my vision; that’s how I weather these biases.
These challenges are the reason why Angels of Impact focuses on funding marginalized women and indigenous-led entrepreneurs and we continue to strive despite the odds. Every time someone steps up to support our vision it helps us not give up hope for change.
How do you motivate and lead your team?
When people share a common mission and shared values, the team leads itself. All we need are the right tools and means to share information and I also work to lead by example. At Angels of Impact, we go through a rigorous screening process before hiring someone even as a volunteer to understand the mission, passion, and values of each team member so that the moment they join the organization, they are able to work in sync. At Angels of Impact, we make sure to connect and support each other, even outside of work, finding ways to help each other succeed in all areas of our lives.
What is the greatest risk you have undertaken?
Investing in women-led businesses without credit scores, collateral, or high revenues can be seen as high-risk investments by most people. I like to invest in women who have taken our capacity-building programs and proven that they are passionate and can be trusted to pay it forward — a type of “character-based lending”, which has proven to be actually low risk as our portfolio has shown.
Any final words of wisdom?
Ensure you begin with the end in mind. Once you are clear about why you are doing and who you are doing it for, then you will persevere even when things get tough. Most of all, when you focus on service, it will bring you joy when you know you have made an impact.
The key is to never give up and never lose faith in yourself and God. There often will be times when you do, but take a pause and start again. Write your own story and don’t change yourself to suit others. If you live your life to make the world better for all, you can’t go wrong. Based on the words of Marianne Williamson, when you shine, you give permission to others to shine too.
Describe yourself in three words:
Mission-driven
Feminist
Servant of humanity
