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a respectable $9 a pound. “He grew way more than we could ever eat ourselves,” says Kaison. Negotiating prices, driving from store to store, and reaping the profits – this was Kaison’s idea of weekend fun. He says, “That’s when I realized that it was surprisingly easy to sell products and to make money in a way that was different from how people always told me I could.”

Seizing opportunity and doing things differently are the lynchpins of classic entrepreneurship. They are equally important to social enterprise – a trendy term for a phenomenon that is anything but new. What do founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale, urban planner Frederick Law Olmstead, and conservationist John Muir have in common? They were all social entrepreneurs who approached urgent and overlooked societal problems in bold and unexpected ways. A traditional entrepreneur disrupts business as usual to grow wealth; a social entrepreneur finds new ways of improving people’s lives and the environment – while also striving toward financial sustainability. Whereas a typical nonprofit might be at the mercy of philanthropic or government funding, a successful social enterprise ideally supports itself because its product or service is both socially beneficial and economically viable.

But creating a business whose profits positively correlate with the amount of good it does is far from simple. That’s why Kaison recently co-founded Impact Without

THE(ENTREPRENEUR)

Kaison Tanabe ’09 helps socially-focused startups grow their impact and their bottom line

Picture this: A 16-year-old kid lugs a lumpy duffel bag into a Japanese supermarket on a crisp Saturday afternoon, flopping it onto the counter. The cashier looks puzzled. The kid looks confident. He’s been digging up the delicate, ginger-flavored buds of the Japanese herb myoga in his backyard since 8 am. The 50-plus pounds of young flower buds settling in his bag are fresh and tender, still covered in dirt. Pickled, tempura fried, or thinly sliced, myoga is a prized Japanese seasonal delicacy.

As a teenager, Kaison Tanabe ’09 sold homegrown myoga, planted by his father, to DC grocers and restaurants for

For a long time, Kaison felt that he had a responsibility to make as much money as possible now so that he could have an impact later. He never thought he might be able to do both at once. In his senior year at Williams College, he was looking at jobs in consulting and finance and considering applying to architecture school.

Then a friend told him about an open call for the New York City Next Idea business plan competition. Kaison had never written a business plan. He’d taken math, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy…but business? Not a single course. Always up for a challenge,

A Bias Toward Action Borders (IWOB), a San Diego-based incubator that works to accelerate the growth of social enterprises by building an ecosystem of support.

IWOB is not Kaison’s first venture; in fact, at the tender age of 27, he might justly be described as a serial entrepreneur. Kaison is also the founder of the data visualization firm CereusData and co-founder of EntoBento, a company that makes dog treats out of sustainable, nutritious cricket powder. (Still actively involved in EntoBento, Kaison spoke to The Term by phone from SuperZoo, a national conference for pet retailers.)

“I have a bias toward action,” notes Kaison, who grew up mowing lawns, raking leaves, and shoveling snow in Potomac, Maryland. He reflects, “We can sit around and think about solutions for hours, days, weeks, months. But sometimes the quickest way to develop a solution – the best solution – is to test it out and learn from that experience.”

Being a part of IWOB put Kaison at the center of a bustling testing ground, convening innovators working on similar problems and applying the principles of good business to their socially-conscious goals. “I’ve always been pretty restless,” he says. “I think Impact Without Borders is a way for me to focus all that energy into creating things that I believe in.”

Impact Meets Income

by Johanna Droubay

photo: Rob Andrew Photography

The Potomac Term 3 33 2 Fall 2017

Kaison’s liberal arts education from Potomac and Williams has served him well in the social enterprise world – a field he’d never heard of until he was practically immersed in it. Perhaps that’s because a liberal arts education nurtures empathy by exposing students to diverse disciplines and perspectives and highlighting human interconnectedness. One of the fundamental ideas underlying IWOB’s business curriculum is human-centered design thinking, a concept that begins with empathizing with customers and seeing things from their perspective. What are these people’s experiences and problems? What is their worldview? Kaison realized that he didn’t need a business degree to put himself in other people’s shoes, to critically analyze their problems and come up with possible solutions.

At Potomac, Kaison was influenced and inspired in many areas. He remembers, “My eighth grade science teacher, Mr. Peery, made us learn a Marianne Williamson poem about how our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.” He also recalls the way Mr. Peery physicalized the abstract concept of integrity, comparing it to a lump of clay about the size of a beach ball: “He told us, ‘You all have an integrity ball that’s about this big. Every time you do something that lacks integrity, a little piece of it gets taken away and it never comes back. Your job is to make sure your ball stays as big as it can, and I’m going to keep you accountable.’ I still think about that.”

In Mr. Dewey’s Bible as Literature course in his senior year, Kaison saw how a text could open up to reveal a whole world. He says, “I realized then how the consistent practice of curiosity can enrich our understanding of other people and cultures.”

Kaison’s wrestling coaches were also influential, helping him harness his extraordinary energy and put it

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Kaison and his friend pulled an all-nighter, submitted their proposal, and placed in the top 20 among thousands of entries. This relative success gave them the confidence to enter their college’s business plan competition. This time, they placed second.

Their plan focused on connecting small and mid-sized food producers in the local community directly with retailers and restaurants. Skipping over the wholesale middleman would create more revenue for farmers and a more humane, local, environmentally sustainable supply chain.

“I actually didn’t know what a social enterprise was until the end of the competition,” says Kaison. “People were saying, ‘Oh, you guys are a social enterprise.’ I hadn’t realized that this was

a thing and that there were others like us who were also trying to solve social problems using a business model.”

In a 2013 article published in Forbes, Richard McGill Murphy and Denielle Sachs of McKinsey & Company contend that the rise of social enterprise has coincided with a decline in Americans’ faith in the free market system and in government. They write, “Social ventures that create new value chains while generating profit in pursuit of social goals are a direct challenge to Milton Friedman’s dictum that the social purpose of a business is to generate profit for its shareholders. With public cynicism about business at record levels, we may well see more organizations following their lead.”

After college, Kaison continued to explore food systems and tried to refine and implement the model he had developed during his senior year. This took him to Boston, where he became part of a thriving community of social entrepreneurs. He recalls, “That’s when I decided, ‘This is what I want to do. These are the people I believe in and want to see more of in the world. These are the people I want to see succeed.’ I was so humbled by their passion, their brilliance, their determination, and the alignment of their passions with their values.”

He quickly learned that he had a lot to learn, and that the best way to do that was by listening, collaborating, and becoming part of the tribe. “The people in the social entrepreneurship space call themselves a tribe,” Kaison told students conducting oral history interviews earlier this year at the University of San Diego. “There are groups and communities where people have their values aligned, are invested in one another’s success, and can give you resources that are unavailable in other communities.”

But when he moved to San Diego to explore ways of improving food systems there, Kaison found a social enterprise community that was not nearly as developed as the one in Boston. He and several others saw a need, a way of adding value, and IMPACT San Diego (later broadened and renamed Impact Without Borders) was born. IWOB’s co-founders include Kaison, Bong Hwan Kim, James Halliday, Zuleyma Bebell, and Rodrigo Guevara.

Through workshops, speaker series, and five-day labs that accelerate early-stage ideas, IWOB has so far influenced more than two dozen socially focused companies. Kaison observes, “The strength of our program comes from our ability to bring together people who might otherwise be too busy to meet, and to bring in mentors who would otherwise be difficult to reach.”

The Do-Good Tribe

to positive use. Kaison describes his teenage self as a rule breaker and says that he needed the focus of sports and the mentorship of Coaches Lee, Bissell, and Snyder to keep him in line. “Coach Snyder would meet me at 6 am to give me two-a-day workouts,” he recalls. “All of my coaches believed in me in a way that gave me the confidence to succeed.” Kaison’s hard work and his coaches’ devotion led him to become a two-time state finalist.

Kaison emphasizes that he could not have achieved any of his goals without the exceptional support of his parents. He says, “They woke up early to take me to practices, tournaments, and everything else that would help support my dreams. They were there at every event I participated in and always encouraged me to do my best. Both my mother and my father were excellent role models for my brother and me, and they always put our interests first. I’m

grateful for all that they did for me and all that they taught me.” 

Looking ahead, Kaison and the IWOB team are trying to scale and grow their business, which is currently grant-funded, in a financially

sustainable way. Matching impact with revenue is their greatest challenge so far, and like many startups, they frankly aren’t sure yet how best to monetize their innovative concept. They are exploring ways to bring design thinking to larger organizations, building out a consulting line whose profits could support IWOB’s free workshops and networking for startups.

For those who might itch to animate an idea but can’t imagine leaping into the uncertainties inherent in launching a business, Kaison has the following advice: “Find a community. Read Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. Watch Stanford’s free video lecture series ‘How to Start a Startup’ by Sam Altman. And, most importantly, work at a startup.” He concludes, “Startups always need people who are resourceful and passionate about learning. I think there’s no better way to learn than through experience.”

“I didn’t realize that it was possible to do something good for the world and also be able to have any kind of financial comfort. I thought that was only for the for-profit sector.”

Enterprise and Empathy

Kaison (front row, second from left) with a class of eager social entrepeneurs at an IWOB workshop.

photo: Rob Andrew Photography