Sustainable Future Goals – our first report

A year has passed since Balderton adopted our Sustainable Future Goals.

More than simply a framework, our SFGs are an OKR (Objective & Key Result) tree that maps across Balderton along three axes: our internal operations, our investment decision making, and the Balderton portfolio.These OKRs are organised within our ten SFGs, which were modelled after and inspired by the UN SDGs. More details about our SFGs can be found here.The reason we opted to use an OKR tree as our impact framework for ESG was to ensure that as we embarked upon our ESG journey at Balderton, we prioritised a bias to action.
ESG efforts can sometimes become exercises in marketing. By holding ourselves accountable to specific actions we hope to challenge that convention. A clear rubric also means we can grade ourselves objectively along the way.

This is our first report card.

We hope that by being open and transparent about both our accomplishments and our challenges we inspire others to take a similarly candid approach.Alongside the global efforts related to fighting COVID-19 what the last year has taught us is that our behaviour can and has changed profoundly. As societal and business norms shifted we also began to make dramatic changes to our individual preferences. Any big societal change begins with individual actors, be they people, firms or industries. Once we overcome COVID-19 we will continue to be confronted with the challenges of climate change, gender equality, inequality and unequal access to the basic tools required to compete in tomorrow’s economy.Many of our portfolio companies are already tackling these issues, either with the products and services they build or through how they are choosing to build their companies. We are excited to tell some of their stories, at companies like Infarm, Zego, Vestiaire Collective and Wagestream.It is far too early for the dust to settle on our COVID chapter but once it does the question will be whether or not we can fundamentally change our behaviour not just to avoid the urgent crisis of a global pandemic but also to build a more sustainable and fairer world for the next generation.We believe we have made solid progress on our own journey in the first year of our SFGs, but much work remains to be done.We look forward to reporting back to you again in a year’s time. In the meantime please don’t hesitate to reach out to any of us or provide feedback.

2021 SFG Report

A review of our progress this year against our OKRs.