No. 01 · Impact
Good, fundable, and high-impact are three different circles
Something can be good for the world without being high impact. Something can be easy to fund without being good for the world. The work worth doing is narrower than most people think.
In a lot of rooms I’ve been in, from grant panels to investor meetings, people quietly assume that “good,” “fundable” and “important” are roughly the same thing. They aren’t. Treating them as one thing is how well-meaning people spend a decade on work that never matters much, and how sharp people make a lot of money building things that shouldn’t exist.
Three circles
The first circle is work that’s good for the world. It makes someone’s life better, reduces harm, or leaves a place better than it found it. A community garden is in this circle. So is a well-run country hardware store.
The second circle is work that’s relevant at scale. These problems reach enough people, enough places, or enough of the underlying system that solving them changes the shape of things.
The third circle sits off to one side: work that’s easy to fund. It’s the most seductive of the three, because money is the clearest signal most of us ever get. It’s also the least reliable. Capital follows what’s legible, fashionable and fast, and none of those is the same as good or big.
Where impact actually lives
High impact is the overlap of the first two circles: good for the world and relevant at scale. Neither is enough on its own. Good-but-small work is honourable, and the world needs far more of it, but it isn’t high impact, and calling it that does it no favours. Big-but-not-good work is just big.
Fundability is a separate question. Sometimes the overlap is easy to fund, and then you should take the money gratefully. Often it isn’t, at least not at first. The work may be early or unglamorous, or it may sit between the categories that investors and grant programs know how to read.
The job isn’t to chase the money. It’s to find the overlap, then do the patient work of making it legible to the people with money.
Why this matters to me
A lot of my working life has been spent in that translation layer: satellite IoT, EV charging, home energy, and now sovereign space capability. All of these plainly sit in the overlap, but they don’t always look that way on a slide. Done honestly, commercialisation is the craft of explaining why something good and big deserves funding, without bending it into something it isn’t.
That last part takes discipline. It’s tempting to reshape a good idea until it fits the fundable circle and quietly slips out of the other two. I’d rather take longer and keep it whole.
A simple test
Before I commit to something, I ask three separate questions and try not to let the answers bleed into each other:
- Is this good for the world, if it works?
- Does it matter at scale, or only locally?
- Can it be funded? If not, what would make it fundable without changing what it is?
If the first two answers are yes, the third is a problem worth solving. If only the third is yes, I walk away, however good the terms look.