Real Sustainability: Why Protecting the Planet Requires Empowering the Underprivileged

We are headed toward an unsustainable future for this planet; instead of braking before impact, we are standing on the accelerator. We are unlikely to come to grips with climate change and other resource problems unless we also solve income-inequality issues. Now, we are circling the wagons around the rich while leaving the poor, undereducated and underprivileged to fend for themselves in an ever-more hostile world. Instead, we should be funding ways to sufficiently increase resource productivity such that the rich can at least stay rich but the poor can rise enough to see meaningful and continued progress.

So believes J. Stephan Dolezalek, a lawyer and financier who has been helping entrepreneurial technology companies grow to scale for four decades and across four industries:  technology, communications, biotechnology and energy. Dolezalek has acted as a founder, early investor, board member or general counsel to more than a dozen “unicorns” â€" a group of companies now worth more than $200 billion. He is also a board and investment-committee member of Wheatsheaf Investments, the venture investment arm of the Grosvenor Estate in the United Kingdom. Dolezalek has seen money invested in sustainability succeed and fail. He believes the time to get it right is short â€" and that he has an idea for a better way.