Profit and Social Responsibility in Mission-Driven Startups with Mike Ma

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach once again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and we've got a special guest today who we'll introduce in a moment.
So for many founders, the pressure to grow can feel overwhelming. They're asked to move fast, raise capital, win customers, hire teams, build products, prove that the market is ready. But for mission-driven founders, there is an added responsibility building companies that not only generate value, but also addressed real human and societal challenges. And today, we're exploring profit and social responsibility in mission-driven startups. And we're going to talk about venture capital, founder coaching, hopefully some economic mobility, health care, climate, all these things, and what it takes to scale companies that are both commercially strong and socially meaningful. Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:15)
I'm very excited about our guest today. I'm looking forward to speaking with Mike Ma. He's the managing partner and head coach at Sidecut Ventures. Mike invests in and coaches early stage mission driven founders tackling challenges in economic mobility, health care, climate and education. He describes these founders as coachable superheroes and Sidecut Ventures is built around a coach first, capital second model.
Mike brings experience from Fortune 500 companies, including Bank of America and Vanguard, as well as venture backed leadership experience companies such as Betterment and Own Up. He has also served in venture and accelerator leadership roles, including launching FinTech and FinTech initiatives programs. Beyond investing, Mike is also an adaptive snow, snow sports instructor and former member of PSIAASI.
Hope I did that justice. That was good.

**Mike Ma** (2:18)
Well done.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:19)
He is a national adaptive team where he trained instructors to teach people all abilities, how to ski and snowboard. So Mike, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast. After the show, I have to tell you a little ski accidents I want. So I want people you train to help me out. Anyway, great to have you on the show today.

**Mike Ma** (2:38)
It's an honor to be here. I'm so excited for our chat. And we'll make sure you finish your next ski episode upright.
I'm excited to be here, guys. Thanks for having me on.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:52)
So Mike, today we're talking about how to balance kind of profit and social responsibility. So in your work with mission-driven founders, how do you help them hold both of those priorities kind of at the same time?

**Mike Ma** (3:05)
You know, well, one, it is nice being an investor. So like we screen for it, right? We do it from the jump. So if you go on Sidecut's site, you'll ask, we ask all the, and you go to the Pitch Us section, you'll find all the questions that most VCs ask. But we do ask two weird ones. And the first one is, and we read them, we actually read them organically, not AI. The first one is, tell me about the best coach or teacher you ever had and why. And the second one, and we phrase it this way very intentionally. Describe in your own words what evil you're fighting. And so I have the luxury of somebody's burden of selecting for it from the jump. And if you don't have a good answer for them, then I'm probably not interested. So that is sort of the first thing that we get to look at. And then the second thing is like we work with you.
Words are one thing. We work with you before we invest. So it's nice to have a nice mission and talk, but we really are interested if you can walk the walk. And we self-select for that upfront. We tell people we're not a fast check.
We're not going to do something quick. We won't invest. We won't break our thesis for anybody. And we just put it up front. It's one of the, having been a founder and now on the capital side, it is one of the nice things about it that hopefully if they get through our front door, they know what the house they're trying to knock into is. But I think it's different if you're in the world without that constraint. It, I'm not going to lie.
It's much tougher to do both of them.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:59)
Now you talk about investing in coachable superheroes. I love that by the way.

**Mike Ma** (5:04)
Thank you.

**Tullio Siragusa** (5:06)
What makes a founder both mission-driven and coachable? What are the telltale sign that they're both?