Mariana Bozesan, Co-Founder, AQAL Group
I got involved in impact investing in a very natural way. I was born and raised in Communist Romania, and I immigrated to Germany when I was 16 years old. And then, you know, a very successful career started after studying computer science and ended up at Stanford. I climbed up the corporate ladder and became an investor in the early, mid nineties (1995). We had our first liquidity event, actually pre-bubble, in 1998, which of course, catapulted us into financial independence.
So for us it’s not that much about impact investing or connecting the social, environmental, and all the theoretical stuff, for us it’s more integrating who we really are.
We all look for better solutions to change the paradigm. We have seen that traditional philanthropy, along with traditional investing, finances, and economics, have failed, and there are no new solutions. So it is our hope that through what we call “integral investing”, we are on a path to showing how we can transform investing and aggregate the necessary capital to create a better world. So that’s impact investing for us: it’s all love.