The Long Game: How Impact Venture Founders Turn Setbacks into Strategy | SFi Innovation Lab Founder Interview Series

Starting an impact venture is one thing, keeping it afloat long enough to matter is another.

SFi Innovation Lab brings together founders building practical solutions to environmental and social challenges. In this part of the Founder Interview Series, they share the moments that forced them to rethink how they work: a fundraising round that fell through days before closing, a project that had to be exited, or a business model that could not yet carry the weight of the mission behind it. None of them describe resilience as simply grinding harder or refusing to doubt themselves, it's more about how they operate the morning after something breaks, and what they refuse to compromise, even under pressure.

The Cost of Getting it Wrong

What separates a near‑miss from a slow collapse is often what a founder changes the day after things go wrong.

uHoo, the environmental intelligence company, had a fundraising round days from closing when COVID hit and every investor pulled out overnight, leaving founder Dustin Jefferson S. Onghanseng with one month of cash. In this time of crisis, his team stood with him: instead of laying anyone off, they reduced all salaries by half to buy a second month. In the third month, wildfires broke out across the US and demand for air-quality data spiked. uHoo turned profitable for the next four months, repaid every employee in full, and raised a bridge round on the back of it. "Runway is something you can engineer, not just something you wait out," he says.

Other course corrections are more structural. Marcel Smits, an investor in Droppie, the Dutch store format that pays consumers for handing in recyclables, explained that the model would not scale if the team carried the sorting burden for every customer. The company therefore redesigned its core workflow: sorting responsibility now sits with consumers themselves, built into the product experience and incentives. That shift reshaped everything from store layout and hardware to unit economics (the basic cost-versus-revenue math of each customer transaction).

Anne Yeung of OneChain, which builds blockchain infrastructure to trace and verify recycling data through its ESGLedger platform, learned a similar lesson the hard way. In an early pilot, she pitched a prospective partner the full ESGLedger vision at once – blockchain, spatial data, plastic credits, ESG reporting – and the deal stalled because it felt too big and too risky to implement all at once, even though the partner liked the idea. Since then, she starts every new partnership with one small, concrete piece: only one reporting workflow, one verified data stream, one clear business outcome, and only expands once that initial layer of trust is proven.

When the Mission Meets the Spreadsheet

For founders in the SFi Innovation Lab “impact versus profit” is not an abstract term, but very specific give-and-take design choices: what gets built into the product, what gets cut from version one, and where they draw a hard line on price.

For Rishabh Khanna of Earthbanc, which builds software to finance and verify nature-restoration projects, the turning point was recognising that rigour is not overhead, it is what makes a project fundable.

Rather than treating verification, long-term monitoring and community engagement as costly additions to restoration work, Earthbanc embeds them in its platform from the start. The result is a clear, auditable record of delivery on the ground, giving funders the confidence to invest.

Smits takes the same logic one step earlier in the chain, into how Droppie speaks to investors. His conclusion after years in the impact space is that the order of the story matters: explain how the business makes money before you explain how it makes a difference. If the revenue engine isn’t credible, the impact story has nothing solid to stand on. The mission doesn’t need to be smaller, the model needs to be strong enough to carry it.

What They’d Tell the Next Generation

Asked how to avoid drifting from their own mission, the founders’ answers interestingly converge less on inspiration and more on discipline:

• Define your non‑negotiables early, before capital and big logos enter the picture. Yeung advises writing red lines down before the first cheque or term sheet arrives, then revisiting them whenever an “easier” path appears. For her this means refusing to build infrastructure that makes it easier to pretend to be sustainable than to actually be sustainable.

• Make your mission and your revenue inseparable. Ronald Li, CEO of Urban Spring, the smart water refill station company, talks about anchoring the business's social mission into verified data frameworks and institutional standards. When impact data itself is what drives a client’s financial or regulatory gains, the mission stops being a nice‑to‑have, it becomes the reason the business exists. Li's reasoning is that drift usually starts at a financial bottleneck, when piecemeal compromises to please individual clients creep in. Building impact into the core product, as Urban Spring does with Certified B Corp governance and transparent, real-time tracking, makes the metrics non-negotiable.

• Stay close to the daily work, not just the headlines. Khanna’s advice is to focus on process over outcomes: look for one small win each day, treat failure as information rather than verdict, and let those small wins protect your perseverance over the long haul. Mission drift, he says, often starts when you chase big external markers of success and step away from the work that made you care in the first place.

Capital in Action

Once a business model can genuinely stand on its own, "capital in action" stops being a slogan and becomes something concrete. For Khanna, it's over 28 million trees planted since 2022, "a hillside that wasn't green the season before." For Onghanseng, it's simpler still: "It means people putting their money where their mouth is. Walking the talk, not just talking about it."

If you listen to what they’d tell their Day One selves, a softer thread runs through the harder lessons. Yeung would remind herself she’s allowed to build in her own voice, and that caring deeply about governance and community is a strength, not a flaw, even on the lonely days. Khanna would tell himself to be grateful he began at all, and even more grateful that he kept going when things got hard, because those rough patches are often what prove the work is worth doing.

None of that fits neatly into a KPI. But it is ultimately what carries a founder through the grind. It isn’t certainty, but the willingness to keep showing up. As Onghanseng puts it, with disarming honesty: “It’s a long game. Push.”