My guest today is Daniel Buchbinder. Daniel is CEO and founder of Alterna Impact, a social ‘business cultivator’ based in Guatemala that launches and supports grass-roots ventures to address social issues. With a background as a serial entrepreneur, Daniel along with his team of 30 staff, work with over 1,000 social ventures across Central America. As such, he brings both the worm’s eye view and the helicopter view of where entrepreneurial change agents for sustainability need the most support.

I spoke to Daniel online from his office in Guatemala.

We talk about him self-identifying as entrepreneurial only with hindsight, about how dissonance between his own values and his corporate employer provided the trigger for launching his first social venture, about how he couldn’t have launched Alterna without first developing deep empathy with his customer base of social entrepreneurs by having been one himself. We also talk about his obsession with innovating the business incubator model to create a ‘business cultivator’ based on a deep understanding of entrepreneurs’ needs, about investors’ obsession with scale and the need to contextualise what it means, and why he is launching an impact fund.

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