Marc Blumenthal

Marc has a background in commercial and social entrepreneurship, technology innovation and education. He participated in his first commercial startup, the American Book Club, as a freshman and sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. With his earnings, he traveled throughout Asia his junior year where he witnessed extreme poverty. It left a lasting impression on him.

After graduation, with sponsorship from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, he participated in his first social venture, the Learning Guild, He engaged over 2 million students and faculty in experiential learning, utilizing technology and performance art.

He then engaged in a series of deep technology startups including: the MIT Plasma Fusion Lab on the placement of a plasma fusion reactor; the Ex-Team Physician of the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox on a medical device company and the Chief Communication Scientist for the Voyage II satellite (the farthest manmade probe from planet Earth) on a satellite communications company.

While pursuing these startups, he conducted extensive research on the “Poverty reduction industry” and volunteered for two years for Mohamed Yunis and his Micro Credit initiative. Marc realized that microcredit left it up to the entrepreneur to come up with their own business idea. Since the borrower is “limited in their imagination to what they see around them”, they tend to get microcredit loans for similar low-tech enterprises like a retail stand, a farm animal or a sewing machine.

So he began working on the "flip side" of microcredit, pioneering a new poverty reduction paradigm called micro franchising. This business model bundled a prepackaged technologically innovative social venture that could cut costs and improve social impact outcomes with a microcredit loan. In 2001, he was asked to present his social franchise model at both the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in New Delhi, India.

Marc started the Social Ventures Foundation in 2018 with a mission to facilitate the development and scaling of social franchise solutions to poverty reduction challenges. Marc firmly believes that one needs to deal with the cause of poverty and not the effects, He is often quoted as saying: "if you want to 'save the children', you need to get their parents jobs".

Marc also believes that the primary cause of poverty is linked to two issues: the lack of capital investment at the base of the pyramid due to risk and the lack of a scaling model that can rapidly scale things that work. After 5 years, roughly 84% of franchises are still in business vs, less than 50% of commercial startups. Social franchising mitigates investor risk and rapidly scales things that work by utilizing the franchise model to create jobs to deliver affordable social impact for low-income communities.