Early-stage investing used to be a closed room. It is opening up, and that changes not only who gets to start them but who gets to fund the next generation of companies.
By Beth A. Brooks, PhD, RN, FACHE
For a long time, the traditional venture capital playbook was built on an implied either/or. Either you could pursue market returns; or you could make a difference. Rarely could you do both. Serious investors were expected to keep the two goals in separate buckets: business in one, philanthropy in the other, regarding impact and financial discipline as mutually exclusive.
Marcia Dawood would know. She chairs the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee, is a venture partner with Mindshift Capital and a member of Golden Seeds, and is a past chair of the Angel Capital Association. Her book, Do Good While Doing Well, makes a simple argument: Angel investing is not only a way to grow money, but a way to put capital behind the change you want to see. And you do not have to be wealthy to do it.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Since 2016, regulatory changes at the SEC have let everyday investors back early-stage companies through equity crowdfunding, in some cases for as little as fifty dollars. Early-stage investing used to be a closed room. But now, it is opening up, and that changes who gets to fund the next generation of companies, not only who gets to start them.
Three Kinds of Founder
It is tempting to treat “doing good” and “doing well” as a single spectrum, with mercenary founders on one end and idealists on the other. Research on founders points to something more useful. In a widely cited study, Emmanuelle Fauchart and Marc Gruber found that founders tend to fall into three types of identities, which shape the companies they build.
Darwinians build for strength and profitability. They take a disciplined, business-school approach, treat competitors as rivals, and trust that the best firms win.
Communitarians build out of and for a community. Authenticity is their core asset, and their ventures revolve around shared passion and the recognition of peers.
Missionaries see their companies as agents of change. They build platforms to advance a cause, often social or environmental, and treat the way they do business as a model for how business should be done.
The point is not to sort people into boxes. Rather, founders imprint their identity onto their firms.
Most founders are a blend. The strongest companies we see are often run by people who carry Darwinian discipline and Missionary purpose at the same time. That combination, not the trade-off between them, is what “doing good while doing well” actually describes.
The Nurse-Founder Identity
This is familiar ground for us, because it describes the nurse-founders we back. Nearly every nurse entrepreneur and inventor we meet has a patient, a family member, or a personal experience behind the company. The motivation is rarely, “I spotted a market.” It is more, “I watched this go wrong, and I could not stop thinking about it.” In the founder-identity language, that is a Missionary or Communitarian core.
For nurse-led healthcare, where the people closest to the problem are usually the ones trying to fix it, doing good while doing well may be less a balancing act than a description of the work itself.
The open question Dawood raises is whether, over the long run, that motivation helps or hurts.
Our view is that it helps, but on two conditions. First, the purpose has to sit on top of real discipline, the Darwinian half of the equation, or the mission never reaches enough patients to matter. Second, the story has to be used well. A founder’s personal stake is not a soft detail to save for the end of a pitch. It is evidence that the founder understands the problem from the inside, which is exactly the signal investors should be paying for. The work is in pairing that story with the numbers, and in measuring impact with the same rigor as financial return.
A Quieter Implication
The takeaway for our own community is this: If early-stage investing is no longer reserved for the wealthy, then nurses, who make up the largest clinical workforce in the country, can sit on the capital side of these companies, not only the founding side. Backing mission-driven healthcare no longer requires a hedge fund. More and more, it requires only the decision to participate.
Dawood was a guest speaker at a recent meeting with our LPs. Her message was clear: Purpose does not excuse weak returns, and strong returns do not excuse ignoring purpose. Rather, when a company is built well, purpose and returns reinforce each other.
At Nurse Capital, we believe that “doing good while doing well” is the most effective lens for impact investing. While traditional impact investing focuses on generating positive social or environmental outcomes alongside financial returns, our approach leverages the deep, frontline clinical insights of nurse-founders. This ensures that our impact is tangible rather than abstract—directly improving patient care and supporting the nursing workforce—while simultaneously driving the scalability required to build durable, high-growth enterprises.
Sources: Marcia Dawood, Do Good While Doing Well: Invest for Change, Reap Financial Rewards, and Increase Your Happiness (2024). Emmanuelle Fauchart and Marc Gruber, “Darwinians, Communitarians, and Missionaries: The Role of Founder Identity in Entrepreneurship,” Academy of Management Journal (2011).
