Guest Post: Brian Trelstad Responds to Al Hammond

Derek Newberry — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:50:05 -0400

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 Post: Brian Trelstad Responds to Al Hammond