Hello Neetal. Great to have you here. Why don't you briefly introduce yourself to us? What do you do? 

My name is Neetal Parekh, and I am the founder and CEO of Innov8Social, which has tools, content, and programs to make social entrepreneurship more accessible and actionable. I love the space of social impact and I the idea of empowering and encouraging people to get involved. Originally, I studied law and am licensed to practice in Washington. My path has been a little unconventional.

 

You obviously saw a need in starting this business. Do you see that there's something that's fundamentally misunderstood or a skill that a lot of people lack that you want to build?

Social entrepreneurship is basically using business to create social impact, i.e. business for good. I think this is something that many people are interested in but it is a different paradigm than what many are used to. It is different from the single bottom line goals that we traditionally focus on in business. With this shift in thinking, there’s a whole ecosystem that is emerging around legal structures, business models, impact measurement. People are trying to catch up to all of those different variables. I think that's where the need is, to bring people to the table, to be speaking a common language about social enterprise. And then, we really have a chance to be innovative in the field and reach new milestones. I see my work as helping build the ecosystem and develop the right leadership within it. 

 

“With the U.N. and their agencies, (…) you have to have what I call ‘institutional patience’”

 

Related to your special background in law, I know there are new legal forms of companies and things you can do and in order to have both profit and social impact. Can you briefly point out some of these constructs that exist?
The legal side is really what brought me into the social enterprise. If you look at the current corporate law, the case law tends to favor focusing on maximizing shareholder wealth. That does not only always match social impact goals because you might be creating waste or other externalities in the process of pursuing a strong bottom line. I started Innov8Social as a blog in 2011 and was following the California legislation to pass two legal structures: One was the 'benefit corporation' and one is what is now called the 'social purpose corporation'. The benefit corporation takes the idea of shareholders and expanded it to stakeholders, who include the shareholders and also the community and environment, aside from pursuing the profit. The focus of benefit corporations is to maximize stakeholder return, which includes profit but also factors in social impact. Similarly, social purpose corporations in California also seek to benefit a particular social purpose that they identify in their charters. 

Now the company’s leadership might be less worried that the shareholders will sew them, it adds a layer of protection. California was the sixth state to institutionalize it, now more than 36 states and jurisdictions have some sort of benefit corporation. These new options are also shifting the paradigms of the new ecosystem. 

Going a little bit into your pathway: when did you decide to study law and what was your driver?
I was in undergrad and I started out in the life sciences but grew interested in international law. I moved around a lot growing up, my family is from India, and this international focus was the lens through which I kind of saw the world. 
So I started law school and in the first summer, I studied abroad in Geneva and Strasbourg, international human rights law, learning about the incredible history of the Red Cross and other things. Throughout this, I gained a sense that with the U.N. and their agencies, it takes a long time for things to happen and you have to have what I call ‘institutional patience’. It shifted my view. I came back to law school and finished my degree but I knew at that point that I would have a non-conventional path in law. A couple years after finishing my degree I had a chance to move to the Bay Area. Here, people are working on ideas and moving fast, people are not afraid to say ‘how can we work on an idea that might change an entire industry?’ or ‘how can we change this and make this better?’ There’s no need to wait for a signal. Social entrepreneurship combines the buoyancy of entrepreneurship and the focus of social impact. Lastly, the development of the new legal structures and the link to law was my validation that I might have to take a leap of faith and jump into this space.

 

“It takes a decade to become an overnight success. A lot of it is simply the amount of time that you have been in a space.”   

 

I should also mention you're an expert in social media marketing. You are also quite well networked, you have 4,000-5,000 LinkedIn followers, 30,000 followers on Facebook. This step of going to a new place and then building your network is hard to a lot of people. What are some strategies that you can share with us to go from overwhelm to action?
There is never just one thing that happens when you see people that are super successful. There's a saying: ‘It takes a decade to become an overnight success.’ So a lot of it is simply the amount of time that you have been in a space.  
I come professionally from a space of creating content and building audience through social media social media and have learned a lot about how it works. First of all, if you are trying to build a name in a certain space, you are hopefully passionate about it. A lot of things can start with content. Ask yourself: What do you love to create and that you would enjoy producing, which you can replicate and create over time. It might be a podcast, interview or a series of blogs, or postings through Instagram or Snapchat. What you'll see over time is that you can link those pieces of content in creative ways. Those are shared so whenever someone links to one, they can find all the others. You can personalize recommendations to say if you like this article, maybe you'll like these other articles. The nice thing about content is that it has a long shelf life. So it's really up to you as a content creator and curator to create value. Also don’t forget about common sense search engine optimization, focusing on what the keywords are that you are optimizing for in your work. It helps to be relatively specific, for instance rather than a female interviewing entrepreneurs, be a female who interviews seed-stage entrepreneurs together with other female founders.