An invitation to meaningful and necessary change is not an invitation to ease, elegance or glamor.
Organizers of last week’s Katapult Future Fest in Amsterdam invited hundreds of Agents of Impact to “Enter the Metamorphosis,” where the “structures of the old world dissolve and the blueprint of a new regenerative society” emerges. The three-day convening made visible and palpable the tensions and contradictions that come with any transformation. Between community and industry. Inclusion and exclusion. Conceptual and tangible. Humans and machines. People and planet.
Also: LPs and GPs. Fair Capital Partners’ Jasper Snoek, in a discussion about common causes of tension between LPs and GPs, called for a recognition of complementary skills, experience and knowledge.
“We need one another dearly,” he said.
At odds
Some of the contradictions on display were by design, and some not, at the gathering just outside of Amsterdam in the green artistic village of Ruigoord. The haven for creatives is in an industrial area owned by the Port of Amsterdam and populated with towering wind turbines.
Oslo-based Katapult Ocean and Twist designed the convening as a “fusion of SOCAP, Burning Man and Singularity University,” so impact investors and social entrepreneurs could gather to work toward a future that is “regenerative, diverse, creative and radically collaborative.”
In practice, wealthy communities in the Global North were overrepresented among participants. The “Solutions Stage,” where social entrepreneurs described real work on the ground, was located away from the big-picture, thematic discussions in the gathering’s main space. Visions of the post-capitalist, regenerative, nurturing global economy met calls for European self-sufficiency and self-defense.
Asked to make sense of such contradictions, one participant offered, “Do they need to make sense?”
Esoteric investing
Conversations at KFF succeeded in challenging conventional norms and narratives. A discussion on “Esoteric Investing” engaged LPs and fund managers on how judgment, values, trust and intuition show up in their investment strategies.
“Many investors feel that existing systems don’t fully capture what they are optimizing for,” shared Adela Villanueva of The Impact Office, a community of European family offices. “My biggest takeaway was how many people were relieved to have this conversation openly.”
Johannes Weber of Netherlands-based Ananda Impact Ventures challenged LPs and GPs to look inward at their personal relationship to money to forge better relationships with each other.
Being human
The convening emphasized human connection to each other and to nature over humans’ relationship to, well, AI.
“Everyone talks about AI, but I think the more interesting question is, what is the future of being human?” said Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs. “If you’ve got a portfolio focused on AI and you don’t have a portfolio focused on the future of being human, I think your portfolio is self-terminating. It’s a dead portfolio.”
British economist Kate Raworth, author of “Doughnut Economics,” led a high-energy, circus-style performance to help the audience visualize an economic system that discards “growth at all costs” to align with natural cycles and resources.
Herland Cerveaux of South Africa-based OceanHub Africa emphasized local culture, history, wisdom and lore in Africa’s blue economy with an animated narration of “the soul’s journey” by a Zulu historian and healer (very much worth a watch).
There was a dedicated space for films about climate change, water systems, happiness, incarceration and Indigenous healing.
