Liesel Pritzker Simmons is the co-founder and principal of Blue Haven Initiative, one of the first family offices created with impact investing as its mission. She talked with Crain Currency about what inspired her and what she sees as the future of impact investing.
When you started Blue Haven Initiative in 2012, what inspired the focus on impact investing? Back then, you were probably one of the few family offices doing that.
Back in college, I started to become more interested and involved in international development and global markets, and I started to think about what I could do with this wealth in a way that actually sparks change.
What is your process for screening potential companies and sectors?
We screen out coal, but we don't screen out every single fossil-fuel business. We also have a large climate portfolio. And yes, those oil and gas companies are contributing [to climate change], but they are also some of the very largest renewable-energy investors as well. So, it’s complicated. Those companies are going to be part of a climate transition. And divesting from all of that, to me, is kind of like sticking your head in the sand and not being truthful about the way those industries hopefully will transition.
Since you’ve been focusing on impact investing for some time — and it has become much more common in recent years — how have you seen it change in approach and types of investments?
I would say that it's been quite a ride over the years. At the start, institutional investors would look at me or at Blue Haven and sort of assume that we were going to lose money or that we were not going to make as much money — and kind of brushing it off as a fad. Now, pretty much every major financial institution has some type of shop that is focused on this kind of investing or serving clients who want to do this kind of investing. So I think that the field has been legitimized — so much so that we even got a backlash. That's exciting, right?
There are so many cool new technologies to actually get out there in the world. There is a big opportunity in deployment finance or climate infrastructure finance, like charging stations and that kind of thing. Also, if there’s direct air capture, building the actual facility that does it. You don’t really want to use equity off the balance sheet of the company. You’re going to need these developers that start emerging in this space that can help those companies actually build those projects and facilities. Financing for commercial and industrial solar and wind — we’ve done that a thousand times. New investments like battery storage facilities — people don’t quite know what those timelines are, so it’s a little bit riskier.
Are there any sectors that are now trending in impact investing?
This is not an area that Blue Haven focuses on, but I see a lot of interesting funds focusing on areas like biohacking and digital health, where we’re getting better and better data about our own bodies and our own DNA. And the other area I see growing in the impact investing space is hallucinogens and psychedelics.