I have been producing events for a long time. I have never been this proud of one.
SuperCrowd26 featuring PurposeBuilt100™ ran three days and 27 hours of live television — 41 sessions worth keeping. I’ve spent the week since going back through every transcript, and what keeps hitting me is how little filler there was. Nobody phoned it in. People disagreed on camera. They admitted things founders usually admit only in private.
So instead of a recap, here are my favorite lines.
Start with the one that nearly got the microphone cut.
Steven Sashen of Xero Shoes stood in front of a room full of purpose-driven founders, at an event called SuperCrowd, and said:
“Everyone loves to say success leaves clues. I’m here to tell you success leaves turds — things that are left behind on what looks like a path that you do not want to step in.”
— Steven Sashen, Your Purpose Doesn’t Matter (And Other Heresies) ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
Then he kept going. “This is where Devin may turn off the microphone. So P is your purpose. And I’m just gonna cut right to the chase. Your purpose doesn’t matter.” He closed with: “If any of it was helpful, you clearly misunderstood me.”
I did not turn off the microphone. And the wild thing is that Anne Carlson had already proven his point from the inside.
“‘That’s so cool’ isn’t a line item on the P&L.”
— Anne Carlson, Why We Stopped Leading With Sustainability ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
Anne’s company was honored for being purpose-driven, and she used her time on our stage to explain why she took sustainability out of her lead message. “We began realizing that we’d been answering a question that the customer wasn’t asking.” Her reframe: “This wasn’t sustainability out and health in. It was health first, sustainability always.” And the line I keep quoting to founders: “Sometimes the best way to scale your purpose is to stop asking your purpose to sell the product.”
Honestly, I could have filled this whole post with Anne.
The numbers that stopped the room.
“In a well-functioning economy, 60% of the securities would be going into the 60% of the economy that are small locally owned businesses. In point of fact, it is barely even 1%.”
— Michael H. Shuman, Reimagining Community Capital: The Great Misallocation ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
Michael followed that with a comparison I can’t shake: Nova Scotia’s community investment structure works out “not to $1 million a job, which is what communities in the United States were bidding for Amazon. It works out to $500 per job.”
Matt Venturi did something similar to the IPO market, calculating that roughly “$85 billion of money has been left on the table” — value transferred from issuers to institutions that get to buy at a discount and flip. And Laurie Lane-Zucker asked the question that reframes an entire asset class:
“A dividend requires a shareholder. Who owns the flood that didn’t happen?”
— Laurie Lane-Zucker, The Prevention Dividend: Impact Investing’s Best-Kept Secret ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
His diagnosis of our whole field stung, correctly: “we have spent a decade marketing the best documented returns in the global economy as charity and then expressing surprise that capital didn’t show up.”
The honest ones.
Paul Lovejoy told a live audience how he lost his house to fraud in 2008, and then this:
“I hired an attorney to help me fight it. He stole from us too.”
— Paul Lovejoy, From Devastation to Empowerment: Rebuilding After Fraud ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
What he did with it is the part that matters — “7 years telling one story in daylight, living a different one at 2 AM” — and eventually, “I wanted to be the guy who had it handled. I finally am, just not the way 2008 me ever expected.”
Alyssa Evans described closing a business she loved as “grief with paperwork.” She also warned about how companies lose the plot: “Drift rarely introduces itself as drift. It arrives dressed as growth.”
Mark Horoszowski turned down six figures of revenue and an invitation to Davos on principle, and didn’t pretend it felt good: “I promise you it’s harder to do. It’ll make your life harder in the short term. You won’t make as much money,” and then, “you’re gonna sleep so much better at night.”
The ones that made me laugh.
“I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about securities law. And that is selling securities is illegal. Except when it’s not.”
— Richard Robinette, Crafting Legal Strategies for Impact Success ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
Richard also gave us “pro forma is Latin for BS” and, on DIY legal documents, “operating agreements that are more appropriate for, like, a husband and wife doing an Etsy store than for a million-dollar capital raise.”
Shem Lachhman on his patent firm: “We are licensed at the USPTO, and the best part — I’m not an attorney.”
Gene Eidelman, on a customer who wanted 3D-printed homes for a glamping resort: “I had to put my phone under the conference room table to look up what glamping means.”
The ones I’ll be using for years.
“Capital’s like soil. You can’t grow a redwood in sand.”
— Annarie Lyles, Investing With Intention: Inside Angel Decision-Making ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
“Zero times anything is still zero.”
— Aaron Shafton, Inside the Portals: What Really Drives a Successful Raise — on what a platform can do for a founder who won’t do the work ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
“Startups don’t fail; founders quit.”
— Lisa Curtis, Beyond the Badge: What Founders Learned While Scaling Impact ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
“If you want to measure whether impact investing is really working, don’t just ask how many jobs did it create. Ask who owns something now that they didn’t before. That’s the number that compounds.”
— Pamela Roussos, Who Decides What a Neighborhood Is Worth? ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
“Who knocks on your door and never invites you intentionally to own something in your community? That’s the marriage.”
— Lyneir Richardson, Who Decides Where Impact Capital Goes? ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
“Building homes is about building trust.”
— Gene Eidelman, Building Homes, Building Trust: 3D Printing at Scale ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
And one more, from Julie Ann Meyer, on why founders undersell their own stories: “We’re not always the best judges of what’s interesting about our own lives because we live them. To us, it’s Tuesday. Someone else is listening and thinking, you did what?”
And one from 1787.
Karl Dakin spent his session interviewing Benjamin Franklin. I’ll let the attribution do the explaining.
“An engine may tell us how a thing might be accomplished, but conscience must determine whether it ought to be done.”
— Benjamin Franklin (AI simulation), A Conversation with Benjamin Franklin, Simulated by AI ▶ Watch the full session on SuperCrowd.tv
He also offered this, which I’d put on the wall of every impact fund: “Capital is a servant, not a master, and its worth is measured by the good it enables.”
That’s twenty-odd lines out of 27 hours. I left out hundreds.
Every session is now posted individually, so you can watch any one of these in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. Start with Anne, or with Steven if you want to be provoked.
And thank you to every speaker who gave us this. You made the best content we’ve ever produced.
Every session is free to watch at SuperCrowd.tv — in your browser, on Roku, or on Amazon Fire TV.
Max-Impact Members
(We’re grateful for every one of these community champions who make this work possible.)
Alisa Evans, Mission Enrollment | Brian Christie, Brainsy | Cameron Neil, Lend For Good | Carol Fineagan, Independent Consultant | Eric Coury, Arthia AI | Joey Hayes, thru | John Berlet, CORE Tax Deeds, LLC. | Justin Starbird, The Aebli Group | Ken Steele, Rotarian | Lory Moore, Lory Moore Law | Marcia Brinton, High Desert Gear | Mark Grimes, Networked Enterprise Development | Mike Babbit | Coledger Solutions | Mike Green, Envirosult | Nick Degnan, Unlimit Ventures | Paul Lovejoy, Stakeholder Enterprise | Pearl Wright, Global Changemaker | Scott Thorpe, Philanthropist | Sharon Samjitsingh, Health Care Originals | Add Your Name Here
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