In this Episode
You’ll learn about Sabrina’s personal journey from a STEM background to impact investing, a path shaped by her experiences in Teach for America and at Oxford. She details her core philosophy that economic systems must be fixed to allow communities to thrive and that those with lived experience are best equipped to solve complex problems. You’ll get an inside look at Spring Point Partners’ “whole toolkit” approach, which combines grants and flexible, risk-tolerant investments to advance social justice, and learn how the firm navigates the tension between social impact and financial returns. Finally, she shares her candid perspective on AI, noting her concerns about its effect on startup defensibility and the mentorship pipeline, and provides actionable advice for General Partners on managing long LP timelines.
Key Quotes
“Talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not.”
“People who have the lived experience are going to be the best people to solve that problem.”
“I think I always understood at an innate level the power that financial access, inclusion, or education really provides.”
“Your impact should match your return profile.”
“I like to operate with the idea that honesty is kindness.”
About Spring Point Partners
Spring Point Partners is a social impact organization based in Philadelphia dedicated to fostering community-driven change and advancing social justice. The firm takes a collaborative approach by investing in transformative leaders and solutions, using grant-making, impact investing, and organizational development to support its partners. Guided by a commitment to equity, Spring Point focuses on key areas including leadership, economic justice, youth development, and animal welfare.
What led you to the intersection of “doing good” and impact investing?
I grew up in Oklahoma City, and I think that really shaped my worldview. Oklahoma’s economy is pretty one-note; it’s really focused on one major industry, which is energy, oil and gas. That has a lot of pros and cons for the state; it’s kind of a boom-and-bust economy.
When I went to undergrad at Oklahoma State, I was a STEM major. I always actually thought I was going to be in STEM, but through that degree program, I started to notice all these trends about my home state around the lack of educational access, in particular for people of color and for women in STEM fields.
I became really passionate about “How do we shift this? How do we fix this? How do we get more representation in science and in industries that I think are going to be really high-paying jobs in the future?” That led me to TFA (Teach for America) and then long-term into business school and the work that I do now.
At the end of the day, money is a power and a tool. How do we better leverage and flow these capital systems to make sure that we’re maximizing value for the most people?
What did your time with Teach for America (TFA) teach you?
I taught high school science; biology, chemistry, and physics. Teach for America really opened my eyes in a lot of ways, both to the difficulties and complexities of education, but also to the fact that this is a system that fundamentally needs a lot of shifts and changes.
As a 22-year-old with a lot of hubris, I thought: “If we have better access to education, we can fix so many things.” I still firmly believe that, but I quickly realized that we need to fix economic systems around our communities if we really want students to survive and thrive.
In terms of professional skill sets, I gained so many. High schoolers are wonderful, really harsh people. Being heckled for years by 16-year-olds in front of them every single day really gives you a lot of confidence to get up on the stage or to do podcast interviews, knowing that it’s going to be a slightly friendlier audience.
I also learned so much about stakeholder engagement and how to meet people where they are. With our work at Spring Point, we sit at the intersection of so many different tables. We’re meeting with GPs, we’re meeting with other LPs, we’re meeting with folks who maybe have an impact mandate, and people who couldn’t care less but want to see outsized returns. I learned a lot about adaptability and how to tailor messages through that work.
What gave you the vision that long-term sustainability is also about the economics behind it?
I think it actually started a lot earlier than even my TFA experience. My mom has been in commercial banking my entire life, and she was a really big role model for me. I grew up in a very finance-forward household. I didn’t realize that it was abnormal that I had a fake checkbook that I was balancing while growing up.
I think I always understood at an innate level the power that financial access, inclusion, or education really provides.
I started to look at economic opportunities, economic growth, and economic mobility. I quickly realized that money needs to be different. When I take off the impact lenses, the way money flows is capital-inefficient. That creates instability in our economy; we see booms and busts constantly happening. Are there ways that we can create better systems and processes to make financial markets a little bit more stable?
When I left educational work, I questioned what my role was: “What is authentic for me?” At the same time, I was consulting with a lot of educational and tech startups and I realized I like startups, “there’s some interesting stuff happening here.”
That led me to the path of business school.
How did getting your MBA at Oxford shape your trajectory, and where did you land afterward?
I chose that program specifically and intentionally. I wanted to go abroad. I had spent the majority of my life in the middle of the country. I wanted to expand my worldview and I wanted to understand global systems and global markets. Oxford was a great program for that, and they also had an interesting investment program for career pivoters like myself.
It was fantastic. There’s a difference when you go to grad school and you’re actively taking yourself away from earning a salary. I said to myself: “Okay, we need to maximize the return on this investment.”
For the Oxford MBA, you sit in the Saïd Business School, but you get access to the broader Oxford University. Oxford and Cambridge are set up like Harry Potter, where you have your program but then you have your college or your house. I was sitting at dinner with people who are researching subatomic particles and, as a science nerd, I was really excited to get to have those conversations. We had people from 64 countries in my program, so I gained a global perspective that challenged my worldview in a productive and healthy way.
That led me to post-MBA. I ended up working at Plan International. I had a dual mandate. I was setting up an in-depth pilot in Kenya where we were running an accelerator and incubator and doing direct venture-style investing. Then I also acted as an international consultant across the federation. We had an endowment we were setting up in Europe, a debt bond facility in India, and we were doing direct social entrepreneurship work in Southeast Asia as well as Latin America. It was an interesting experience to get to try different financial tools in different geographies.
Was there any pattern recognition from working across those different regions?
The biggest takeaway I had is that people who have the lived experience are going to be the best people to solve that problem. If you’re an entrepreneur and you have experienced that pain point, you’re going to have the grit and the tenacity as well as the actual experience to be able to solve that problem.
It is so hard to launch a company, so when I see founders or GPs that are “bandwagoning” onto something they know is an industry trend, my assumption is they’re not going to have the grit or the tenacity, and honestly, the insights to do it best. They’re not going to hit product-market fit quickly enough.
I think that rings true in any geography that I’ve worked in, and I definitely see it here in the United States, especially as we’re seeing this proliferation of new technology as AI hits.
How did that global footprint shift into your current work at Spring Point Partners?
It’s been an absolute joy. Spring Point has been set up for flexibility, learning, and to develop systems and structures in order for markets to survive and flourish. It’s been the privilege of my career to work with so many thoughtful, wonderful, amazing people, both on our direct side and on our fund manager side.
Everything seems so linear and perfect, but I also want to flag for people who are maybe going through career switches that there are a lot of vulnerable moments that go into that. When you’re on the other side, you see: “I went to business school and I’ve got the job I always wanted to have.” But there were a lot of nights at home where you question: “Can I do this? Am I good enough? Do I have the right skill sets?”
I don’t know if there’s a perfect script other than continuously believing in and betting on yourself. You have to do the hard work. Don’t shy away from it. For example: I needed to learn accounting. Continue to bet on yourself, figure out what your strengths are, figure out what your deficits are, and continue to grind.
Tell us more about Spring Point Partners
Spring Point was founded in 2017. We’re a Philadelphia-based social justice organization. We do grants and investments. We have a really robust grants side of the house and that sits alongside and complements our investment strategy.
Our core mandate is around economic justice and creating future growth markets that are more stable and altering perceived risk. We have a lot of tools at our disposal to do that. What I love about the way we are set up is we have a whole toolkit. For a lot of folks, they only have a hammer and if you have a hammer, the only problems you can solve are related to nails. When you have a screwdriver and a saw, there are so many other things that you can do.
We’re really focused on how we use this flexibility, this agility, this risk-tolerant capital to create a more inclusive economy.
What programs do you have in place for emerging managers?
This is something we’ve done a lot in collaboration with a bunch of other LPs as well as our GPs. Obviously, we have our core investment strategy where we mostly act as a limited partner across various asset classes, and then we have a pretty robust directs portfolio.
We also offer potential grants. We’ve offered grants for research and development for new fund structures to be developed. Innovative financial structures that we see as “ecosystem building” plays that actually allow for the market to be more efficient.
We also have done recoverable grants for smaller businesses that can’t access traditional bank lending. For example, if they don’t have the collateral.
Then, we are constantly thinking about technical assistance and building out that support offering around both GPs and LPs: how do we better upskill and educate and create community between both parties?
Our investment thesis is looking for ways to create economic opportunity and economic justice. We have an employee ownership strategy that looks at how we can challenge who owns parts of companies. Most of our checks out the door right now are focused on our emerging manager program, where we’re looking at ways that we can help to back some of the best and brightest in their asset class. That strategy is sector- and asset-class-agnostic, but I would say it’s heavily weighted in early-stage venture.
How do you incorporate your vision and values into investment decisions?
This is, I think, one of the biggest tensions in impact investing. The way I like to say it, and the way we think about it here is: Your impact should match your return profile.
For instance, for our emerging manager program, if those aren’t top performers, if you are not a top-decile fund, then the impact strategy actually doesn’t work. For those funds, I want to see you returning at the same rate as, if not higher than, your peers. I want to see the best in your vintage. We hold you accountable to that.
I want a shrewd steward of capital who’s the best and brightest in their asset class.
We don’t require our fund managers to be impact-focused. I’m looking for people whose judgment I can trust, who will outperform and who will operate in a way that I feel like is values-aligned to our ethos here.
Now, if we’re giving a recoverable grant to a small business, that’s a very different return profile. I’ve priced in what we call the “impact premium” into that return profile. It’s never a situation where we feel like there’s tension in the return expectations, financial or impact. We just are making sure that they’re in alignment.
What other assets do you invest in, and how do you think about balancing the venture category?
It’s a tough market right now, and I really feel for GPs that are in pursuit of the ever-elusive liquidity and DPI.
I really appreciate that the ethos here is really long-term. We’ve been set up for that, we were budgeted for that, which is such a gift. The best way to win is to have steady deployment. So we’re not pulling back. We want to continue to double down in this space. We’re continuing to actively deploy in venture and emerging managers. These are going to be some of the best vintages that we’re going to see. Pricing discipline has come back, founders are being really cash efficient. If you can be patient in this moment.
In terms of our broader assets, we have quite a bit in real assets for a few of our different strategies: We have some water, some farmland, some forestry, as well as later-stage growth equity and some debt.
On the LP side, we look at our portfolio and ask: “How do you balance some of these things out? How do you allow for a potentially higher-risk, higher-return asset class to be balanced out by some of these others?”
How are you looking at AI and your investment exposure to that category?
I have so much angst, good and bad, about AI. I read about it, I get excited, and then I read about it again, and I get terrified. There’s just so much hype, and it’s so hard right now to know what is real, what is not.
I’m a huge history dork, so I’ve also been looking at some of the quotes whenever we go through these big technological advances. In the past economists have said: “Well, now that we have electricity, no one’s ever going to have to work again.” It’s about knowing and acknowledging that this is revolutionary. What is real and what is not real?
When I put on my investor hat, how do you even create anything that’s defensible right now? With the level of development and shift and change, defensible moats are really challenging. I really feel for founders, I really feel for GPs. It’s complicated.
I think some of the initial buzz is starting to wear down around things that I don’t think were actually super value-add, but were really cool. I think we’re starting to see, potentially, an over-leveraging of technology in ways that are pushing people to more in-person interaction. I heard somebody say that a year and a half ago and I thought, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s true.” Now I am considering, “Yeah, that’s actually true.”
How do you see AI impacting talent and the future workforce?
Internally, I would say we’re not a super technology-first adopter. We are leveraging it for things such as reporting, internal processes or automations but nothing too crazy yet. I do see and hear some of the stuff our fund managers are doing and it is so exciting and so fascinating.
But for talent, I get really worried.
For folks that are more established, for senior, mid-career, senior leadership, it’s awesome. You can get so much done. But so much of that is to the detriment of young professionals or interns. I worry about the lack of internships or mentorship opportunities because it’s a lot easier to tell a chatbot how to do “X” versus managing somebody who’s in their first job out of college. I worry about that on-ramp and the potential gap that it’s going to cause us in five to ten years.
What skills should young professionals focus on in the age of AI?
Make sure you don’t outsource your critical thinking. I can’t imagine going to college with this at my fingertips. That would have been so tempting. Every time you’re thinking or problem-solving or putting yourself through the gauntlet that is education, you’re forging new neural pathways and your brain is getting better and more efficient. Do the hard work. It’s going to be really tempting to have ChatGPT write your essay, but make sure you’re not shortchanging yourself.
Make sure you’re pushing yourself on the social side of things. There is going to be a world where a lot of the “quant of finance” will be quicker and easier for ChatGPT to adopt than some of the interpersonal relationship and trust-building pieces that can only happen human-to-human.
Any final perspective or advice you want to leave people with?
I would ask, especially for all the GPs and LPs: How are you making sure that you’re operating in ways that use the most people-centered approach and with the most grace and transparency and candor?
In this moment when we’re going through a crazy market cycle, how do we stay grounded in respect and communication with each other? How do we keep people at the center of financial markets when it’s easy to look at numbers? We must think through to the people behind them.
What’s your advice for GPs on managing LP timelines and communication?
I really have a lot of empathy for the GPs right now. It’s a really tough market. The biggest thing is: Be okay with LP timelines. They’re longer than yours. LP timelines are six months, at a minimum.
I know right now it’s crunch time. It’s the end of the year, and bombarding or trying to get too much time on LPs’ calendars can be detrimental. Respect that some of the conversations you’re having right now probably will not come to fruition until Q1 or Q2.
This is tough because it’s LP-dependent. For me, I love touching base when something material has happened, one way or the other. If there was a specific milestone I asked you to hit, hit it before we talk again. Because we’ve all sat on those Zooms where nothing material has changed since our last conversation.
This is also something for both LPs and GPs to think about: “How do we create better communication and alignment around whether people are actually interested or not interested?”
I like to operate with the idea that honesty is kindness.
Is there an example of a GP that you feel really got it right?
Anyone that we’ve invested in.
The ones that are doing it really well are finding ways to leverage their co-investor network as well as their LPs that they might have relationships with already. The more you can get people talking about you when you’re not in the room, the better.
One of my first screens that I do, if I’m looking at a manager, is back-channeling with my GPs. They’re my most trusted advisors in the space. I learn so much from them.
Then, give yourself the time to build the relationship. It does take a while. You’re selling trust. It takes a while. We’re hoping when we cut a check, we will be with you for multiple funds. That’s a multi-decade relationship. I ask myself: “Is this somebody I want to be in business with for 20-plus years?”
How can folks get in touch with you?
I’m on LinkedIn and I actually do check it, so feel free to ping me there. I am doing many of the Emerging Manager LPGP conferences. I will be at Raise, Grosvenor, EMC, so all of the above. I would love to see you there.
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