Guest blogger Miles Lasater is founder and COO of Higher One which provides financial services to colleges and students.  As creator of the Yale's annual business plan competition, the Y50k, he was instrumental in ensuring that it has a Social Entrepreneurship category.  He has a hobby as an angel investor in for-profit and non-profit ventures.

By Miles Lasater

I attended the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference on Sunday and felt the excitement of 1000 people who want to change the world.  There was a sense of new possibilities and new ways of solving old problems.

First thing, I met with a board member of One Acre Fund which is an early stage non-profit.  One Acre that improves the poorest farmers lives by enabling them to increase outputs and incomes by 3 or 4 times which creating revenue to drive itself towards financial sustainability.  I first met the founder when his team won the social enterprise category of the Y50k.  Since then, they've secured funding from Draper Richards and Echoing Green.  Being an entrepreneur myself, I can't help but be excited by the thought of scaling an organization that can live on its own without donor funding.

As the day wore on, despite my excitement, I kept wondering - what's really new here?

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