50,000 Jobs by 2022

Editorial

Feb 20

With the coming of the new decade, Upaya Social Ventures also embarked upon a new strategic plan. Every three years, we step back and ask ourselves, how can we do more? How can we do it better? And what is the goal that we hope to achieve?

Goal setting is an art and a science. I firmly believe that there is a sweet spot where the right goals lift our aspirations and compel us to accomplish more than we might have thought possible. The wrong goals, however, either encourage incremental improvement on the status quo or seem so outlandish that no one takes them seriously, including the critical people required for accomplishing them. Operating without goals, of course, is akin to very carefully placing one foot in front of the other without ensuring that the road you’re on is leading anywhere productive.

A year ago, at our January board meeting, we began the process of setting a goal for how many jobs our portfolio companies could create by the end of 2022. Our current strategic plan aimed to reach 15,000 jobs by the end of 2019 and, as ambitious as that had seemed in 2016 when we set it, we felt confident that we would reach 15,000 by the end of 2019. (Spoiler alert: we did!)

In order to shake up our thinking, we asked ourselves what it would take to reach 50,000 jobs by 2022. That wasn’t meant to be a realistic number, just a thought exercise. We talked through the implications and had a nice discussion, and then went about our business of executing against our current strategic plan.

Between January and November, however, that number of 50,000 jobs took hold somewhere in our collective psyche. When we revisited it as team, it didn’t seem out of reach. Hard? Absolutely. It will require a dramatic leap in the number of investments we make, especially in 2020. Our investments will need to represent all of our learnings for where significant job creation is possible for the poor. It will also require trade-offs. In order to reach this ambitious number, Upaya has decided to double down on our current focus in India. While we expect to bring our program model to new geographies eventually, for the next three years we are going to remain focused exclusively in India.

Fortunately, we will be able to harness the experience and energy of two wonderful new team members, Parneet Singh Soni and Suman Bhat-Kincaid. Parneet will be leading our efforts to find the right companies for our investments, while Suman will build the partnerships necessary to fund our expanded work. Our expanded team has an inspiring amount of work cut out for us, but we know that we cannot do this without you.

The Upaya community has been an irreplaceable source of ideas, connections, advice, and of course financial support. We look forward to reaching this ambitious goal of 50,000 jobs hand-in-hand with all of you.

If you’d like to read our strategic plan in detail, please find it here.