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Guest blogger Brian Trelstad is the Chief Investment Officer of Acumen Fund. Before joining Acumen Fund, Brian spent four years at McKinsey as a consultant in the healthcare and non-profit practices and as an editor of the McKinsey Quarterly. Prior to McKinsey, he worked as a case writer at Stanford University's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and was the lead environmental staffer for President Clinton's AmeriCorps program.

In this post, Trelstad responds to Allen Hammond's series on taking Base of the Pyramid models to scale. This week, NextBillion.net will publish responses from a number of BoP experts and practitioners, followed by a concluding post from Hammond.

By Brian Trelstad

Al Hammond's enthusiasm for the bigger picture is refreshing. His transformative sector strategies are a bit of a departure from the norm for someone like me, who spends most of his time evaluating individual investments and, as a result, often loses the forest for the trees. I am surprised, however, to hear that this topic doesn't keep Jacqueline up at night, as the entire Acumen Fund team is constantly thinking about how to take businesses - even those serving upwards of a million people - to the next level of scale.

Our strategy is to find great models like Medicine Shoppe or Water Health International and build them into profitable companies that are providing critical goods and services to the poor at scale (defined as 1 million plus customers). It's also critical for us to share the lessons and insights gleaned from the investing/management experience with the private capital markets and public sector to help shape the next generation of investment strategy and public policy.

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Guest blogger Blair Miller is a Manager of Business Development at Acumen Fund. She has lived and worked in Senegal, South Korea, India, and El Salvador. Her pursuit of a literature degree the University of Virginia opened her mind to the importance of social change and her MBA from Michigan gave her the practical skills to make that change a reality.

By Blair Miller

As I walked into Desmond Tutu Center in New York on Thursday night, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the social networking event hosted by Good Capital. Good Capital is an investment fund aiming to accelerate the flows of capital to social enterprises, and they successfully convened an incredible group of colleagues, investors, and friends.

Just to give you a sense of the event, my first conversation was with two women from Scojo Foundation, an Acumen Fund investee that reduces poverty and generates opportunity through the sale of affordable reading glasses. I then had the pleasure of talking with Tim Freundlich, a partner at Good Capital, who - among other things - told me of the upcoming conference they are hosting in San Francisco in October. This was followed by a conversation on community building with Jed Emerson, one of the leading thinkers on Blended Value and also an Acumen Fund and Good Capital Advisor.

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