The Long View: Marie Ekeland on Regenerative Investment and Systemic Change
Marie Ekeland, Founder & CEO of the 2050 fund explains how alignment and an open-ended approach are key to building a mould-breaking investment model focused on ‘a fertile future’.
When you're investing, you're not predicting the future: you're shaping the future. Because you put energy in one direction and not the other, there's way more chance society is going to go in that direction. The question after that is, what is the future that you want to be helping to come? As a financier you're used to thinking in terms of the past. You make decisions based on what has worked: usually the definition is, what has gained the most money.
In a world where you want to think about a fertile future, which is our goal, optimising only for money is not going to work. So you say, can I put environmental and social data in there to make my decisions? [But] we don't have them. The only thing we can do is to look at the future and say, what is the world we want to live in, and what are the problems that are making us not go there? And understanding through science what are the solutions that have the most probability to bring us where we want to be. Usually when you're solving huge problems, you're actually funding great businesses – which is the way 2050 was built: starting by the future.
Our purpose is to invest to shape a fertile future. We have five essentials: we want everyone to eat enough, eat healthily; we want everyone to be able to live and produce in a sustainable manner; we want to be able to take care of mental and physical health on a daily basis; we want everyone to be able to contribute to that by making the education and cultural model change in the way that we can understand what's going on and act upon it; and we want to put trust back into the economy and society by having a new risk financial model allowing long-term to happen; and media/AI allowing democracy to function. It is holistic.
We ensure the companies that we fund are aligning their business interests together with society and planet on top of the mission or the purpose they have set themselves.
We started [with] climate change. But we ensure the companies that we fund are aligning their business interests together with society and planet on top of the mission or the purpose they have set themselves. We don't talk about impact, we talk about alignment. It's actually a French word, and it has three significant meanings: the first one is you stand upright – are you aligned with your own purpose as a person? The second meaning [is] the line of interest that goes from the team to the company, as a moral person, then to its ecosystem – like the stakeholders – to society and the planet. The last piece is the lineage: future generations. So you have time in there. It's not about just aligning your interest once in time. Everything changes. You need to set up the right governance to make decisions that are maintaining the alignment in time.
So this is what we apply to the venture model. To align people in our company as a venture capital firm, we need to have everyone incentivised on triple performance: on financial performance, but also on social and environmental performance. The second thing is to avoid potential misalignments. The management fee system can misalign, because you are aligned with your general partners but not with the team [or] LPs [limited partners]. The way we work is really cost-based, and we have a board that is composed of our stakeholders that is voting on our management fees. So we are fully aligned as a person and as a team.
The second thing is that the sustainable transformation is all about a value-chain shift. You need your suppliers to change, you need your customers to change the way they're using your product. You need to have an ecosystemic understanding of where to invest. And you need not to invest only in SAS B2B companies, but also in new types of materials, in clean infrastructure and circular economy.
If you want these value chains to shift, you need to tackle the systemic blockers. We need to finance the research, share good practice, to change regulation. So we have dedicated budget to do that, and we expect zero return out of it, apart from the fact that we believe it’s going to help our portfolio companies. We start by funding science that is making us good investors, understanding the problems and funding the solutions. The third part is about robustness. This is where the holistic investment strategy of always understanding what the impact on the other topics are, and therefore diminishing risk.
We have a huge time problem in venture capitalism whenever we have a 10-year closed fund: it's imposing your timeframe to all the companies you fund. And if we want sustainable transformation, we need more time for companies, but we still need to have some liquidity in shorter term returns for investors.
The last piece is time. We have a huge time problem in venture capitalism whenever we have a 10-year closed fund: it's imposing your timeframe to all the companies you fund. And if we want sustainable transformation, we need more time for companies, but we still need to have some liquidity in shorter term returns for investors. So we've changed the model of the fund to do that, and eventually to ensure alignment in time. I had 100% of the company. I gave everything away to a perpetual purpose trust, like the Patagonia founder.
So we now have a stakeholder governance that is ensuring that we do stay aligned. We call it regenerative because we are funding what we call these ecosystem assets, the research and development, the advocacy piece through the LPs. Through our carried interest we build this open-ended fund that is giving annual liquidity back to our investors after five years. So they can be patient, but we can support our portfolio companies all the way through their needs, invest and build our position in time, and reduce it in time. It's not the classic: we go in and then we wait, and then we sell everything.
The last piece is stakeholder governance. We actually built five different colleges that correspond to different stakeholders around our 2050 ecosystem: people from the team and the founders of 2050, but also entrepreneurs we backed, investors that support us and what we call experts, which [represent] nature and society. For example, we have Rashid Sumaila [Professor of Oceans & Fisheries Economics, the University of British Columbia, a Tyler Prize-winner], to ensure that we stay aligned all along our own value chain.
It's hard to manage so many competing interests. How do you do it?
We have very different people who are not used to talking together. It takes time to build a common language and trust. And for that it's important everyone speaks.
How do you manage to bring people back into consensus?
It was really important there were no independent board members. They all have business with 2050 on one side or the other, because they want us as partners and they want the 2050 mission to be achieved.
What led you to this innovative way of investing?
I was never very traditional. I was the only woman in the room for 15 years – I started at JP Morgan on Wall Street. When I came back to Paris, the French VC scene was really copycatting Silicon Valley, so I started with a blank page: what is a good investor? The first thing is, someone who can bring value to a founder. I'm a mathematician and a computer scientist. My skill is to model problems and initiate solutions. It's a very helpful skill because you align energies of people. If you model the problem to solving what is the true tension, people are not into, “I want to be right”, they're into, “How do we solve this problem?”
I realised that the biggest problems that we were facing were systemic: like the lack of digital talent in Europe; of growth capital in Europe; the digital single market being too complex. This is when I decided to create France Digital, [connecting] VCs and entrepreneurs. It proved to be super successful, because it's not about only the outside not working, it's because we're not tying strengths together, sharing best practice, building connections. [But] I realised that the problems we were tackling as an industry were not the biggest ones, and would not make the most of this sustainable transformation of the economy.
How is it different from the traditional models?
We do not receive any deal flow. We go out and choose people. We started working on climate change by co-writing a course around all the environmental challenges with University Paris Dauphine: understanding the carbon cycle, the biology behind biodiversity laws, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] scenarios, what it actually means for, the different geographies, but also the different economies, the history of energy, social sciences... And from that we derived an investment strategy. It's in creative commons, it's fully available for everyone. It's a course that is now compulsory for all first-year students there. So it's deploying knowledge to have a catalytic impact. It's about changing the cultural models, and to change what good looks like in society.
What is the Foundation, and why is it necessary in this set-up?
It's about how you support the companies that you invest in in a better way. What are the new best practices in terms of governance, environmental and social impact? So we're founding partners of the Stockholm Resilience Centre Foundation, implementing their planetary boundaries indicators, beta-testing them into our own companies and feeding back.
It's often reported that there's a trade-off in returns between purpose-related or ESG instruments and real business. Is that wrong?
If you're part of an ecosystem that is thriving and it's nurturing every different actor so that actor can give back to the ecosystem, you have a win-win. So the reason for me is that finance was built on math and not on biology.
Finance has been built on math. If you take financial performance on one side, impact on the other, you have to choose. In nature, there's no such thing. If you're part of an ecosystem that is thriving and it's nurturing every different actor so that actor can give back to the ecosystem, you have a win-win. So the reason for me is that finance was built on math and not on biology. This is why we talk about alignment and not impact, because impact in everyone's head is a discount to performance. [With] alignment, you see the win-win models.
What advice would you give on how to incorporate purpose and impact into strategies?
It's about clarity on what is the purpose. If you have clarity, you can take these decisions about short term versus long term. It's about how you implement it, this alignment methodology, how does that purpose trickle down into the whole organisation? Governance, everyone thinks it's about the board, but it's about how decisions are made at all levels.
Marie Ekeland was in conversation with the Director of The Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation Rupert Younger at the 3rd edition of the Purpose Day, which was organized by the HEC Sustainability and Organizations Institute Purpose Center in partnership with the Centre for Corporate Reputation, at the Hôtel de l'Industrie, Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris on February 11th, 2025.