Introducing Long Term Impact
We are excited to announce the launch of Long Term Impact, an edtech seed investment fund seeking founders who are committed to building sustainable high-impact businesses with a long-term mindset.
Who Are We?
Daniel Jhin Yoo and Justin Su founded Goalbook, an edtech company whose mission is to empower educators to transform instruction so that ALL students succeed. Over the past ten years, Goalbook has steadily grown to a team of 60 employees serving over 600 public school districts across the US. We and our team accomplished this while raising less than $1M in outside investment.
Jason Young is excited to join Daniel and Justin in helping launch Long Term Impact. Jason is a serial entrepreneur who has spent most of his career in the edtech space. Like most entrepreneurs, he is passionate about creating products and solutions that help people to achieve their full potential. He also enjoys helping other founders to scale their businesses and achieve greater success.
Why start Long Term Impact now?
The edtech funding landscape has changed a lot since Goalbook was founded in 2011. The broader edtech funding community has moved toward later-stage, high-growth companies that are tackling large markets and opportunities. An unfortunate consequence of this is that if we had tried to start Goalbook today, we likely would not attract investors. We feel proud and privileged that Goalbook has been able to impact teachers’ and students’ lives for the better, despite not having been an attractive financial investment when we started.
We believe that there are many other products and services that have the potential to make a positive impact but may not have the support necessary to build a sustainable and growing business for the long term. We are especially concerned that the current funding paradigm may not work for edtech companies and founders that fall into the following categories, as Goalbook did:
Early stage
Slow to moderate growth
Large impact but small market
Revenue through school and district sales
Under-represented founders, including women and people of color
How is Long Term Impact different?
Our true north is impact. The most important thing to us is the difference that you are making in the US public school system. We are open to achieving a smaller financial return on investment if it means we can help you achieve sustainable long-term impact.
We can be fully supportive of founders and their aspirations and priorities. We have no Limited Partners, i.e. external investors. This means that we have no outside pressure to achieve a financial return on investment. We are here to support your vision for your organization and its impact rather than pushing you toward the path that will yield the greatest financial payout.
We believe that high growth does not necessarily equal high impact. Unlike many investors, we do not need to see the potential for millions of users or billion dollar valuations in order to invest. We would be excited and honored to support a company that never grows to be a unicorn, but that is an exemplary organization that the public school system can depend on as a long-term partner.
Your sustainability is important to us. We want your company to be around ten years from now so that you can continue to pursue its vision and values. We believe that one important way founders can achieve this is to prioritize becoming financially stable rather than focusing on all-out growth or the next fundraise. In service of these efforts, we use a revenue-based financing model. This means that we invest for a modest amount of equity. Over time, our portfolio companies pay back the investment using a small percentage of their revenue.
We are entrepreneurs too, and we are here to help. We are currently running a successful education company, and we have experienced and overcome many of the early challenges in working with the school system that you are likely to face. Additionally, we will leverage the expertise of Goalbook’s staff in operations, sales, and engineering to provide targeted coaching as needed.
We will communicate transparently, whether it is a yes or a no decision. We know how hard fundraising can be. We value you and your vision and do not want to waste your time. We will let you know in a direct manner if we think your company is not a good fit. If not, that does not mean your company cannot be successful. It simply means for our specific criteria and what we are looking for, it is not the best fit or the timing is not right.
What drives us to start Long Term Impact?
We have been privileged to build a growing company at Goalbook that impacts teachers’ and students’ lives for the better. There is no doubt that we and our team have worked hard to create a successful enterprise. We also recognize that luck, timing, and other factors outside of our control played a major part. We were fortunate to find investors who supported our vision and who were willing to take a risk on us.
At Goalbook, we have something we call our Guiding Business Principle, which states that we should not maximize revenue at the expense of impact. Rather, Goalbook should continuously strive for balanced and responsible growth along three dimensions:
Revenue and profitability
Instructional impact for our customers
Overall experience for our team
The Guiding Business Principle was created because we believe that many education companies focus too much on maximizing revenue, which can compromise impact or challenge their ability to create positive working environments for their employees. We firmly believe that we can and must strike a balance among continuous improvement in all three dimensions.
For us, Long Term Impact is a way that Goalbook can help support a wider breadth of instructional impact beyond what Goalbook can accomplish on its own. We know that there are many challenges and opportunities in education to help teachers and students and Goalbook cannot work on them all. We want to give back by reinvesting in our education system by supporting entrepreneurs who share our values of instructional impact and equity and our Guiding Business Principle while living and expressing them in their own unique ways.
We also hope that through Long Term Impact, we will contribute to a new paradigm for edtech funding. There will be many more high-impact founders and organizations than we will be able to support through this fund. We would love to have more edtech funders think like we do – we do not want to be the only ones taking this approach.
Contact us for more info
If you are an entrepreneur building an edtech company or a funder who is interested in partnering, we would love to hear from you. Reach out to Jason Young at jason@longtermimpact.fund
