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In this episode of THE IMPACT PITCH, Lee Schneider interviews a VC, Kelly O’Connell, managing partner of the 360 Venture Collective, and a founder, Fernanda Carapinha, founder and CEO of WE Intelligence and creator of Founderverse®
Why do 90% of startups fail? Not because founders can't succeed-but because they lack the intelligence, systems, and infrastructure to scale effectively.
Fernanda Carapinha believes that the 90% startup failure rate is not evidence that most entrepreneurs can't succeed. Rather, it's evidence that most founders are building without the intelligence, systems, and infrastructure needed to scale effectively.
Drawing from a unique background spanning psychology, behavioral intelligence, AI, and more than fifteen years as a senior executive in Hollywood, she is building technology designed to improve decision-making, execution, and outcomes for founders and the capital allocators who support them.
Through WE Intelligence and its flagship platform, Founderverse®, Fernanda is working to address one of the largest inefficiencies in the innovation economy: helping founders identify and mitigate execution gaps before they become critical, while helping capital allocators cut through overwhelming deal-flow noise to gain deeper insight into founder readiness, execution capability, and growth potential.
Today we'll explore why she believes the future advantage is no longer access to knowledge—it's the ability to transform knowledge into action.
Then, Lee interviews Kelly O'Connell, managing partner of 360 Venture Collective, about what venture capital actually looks for in founders. Kelly explains why they don't chase unicorns-instead, they back founders deeply committed to solving meaningful problems, and why impact and business performance aren't two separate conversations.
You'll learn:
Why assessing the founder matters more than evaluating the idea
How to transform knowledge into action through better systems
Why founders pitch features when investors want to hear about outcomes
How to integrate impact and sustainability into your business model
What makes a founder investable in a rapidly changing ecosystem
Perfect for founders, investors, and anyone building solutions that matter.
Why do 90% of startups fail? Not because founders can't succeed-but because they lack the intelligence, systems, and infrastructure to scale effectively.
Fernanda Carapinha believes that the 90% startup failure rate is not evidence that most entrepreneurs can't succeed. Rather, it's evidence that most founders are building without the intelligence, systems, and infrastructure needed to scale effectively.
Drawing from a unique background spanning psychology, behavioral intelligence, AI, and more than fifteen years as a senior executive in Hollywood, she is building technology designed to improve decision-making, execution, and outcomes for founders and the capital allocators who support them.
Through WE Intelligence and its flagship platform, Founderverse®, Fernanda is working to address one of the largest inefficiencies in the innovation economy: helping founders identify and mitigate execution gaps before they become critical, while helping capital allocators cut through overwhelming deal-flow noise to gain deeper insight into founder readiness, execution capability, and growth potential.
Today we'll explore why she believes the future advantage is no longer access to knowledge—it's the ability to transform knowledge into action.
Then, Lee interviews Kelly O'Connell, managing partner of 360 Venture Collective, about what venture capital actually looks for in founders. Kelly explains why they don't chase unicorns-instead, they back founders deeply committed to solving meaningful problems, and why impact and business performance aren't two separate conversations.
You'll learn:
Why assessing the founder matters more than evaluating the idea
How to transform knowledge into action through better systems
Why founders pitch features when investors want to hear about outcomes
How to integrate impact and sustainability into your business model
What makes a founder investable in a rapidly changing ecosystem
Perfect for founders, investors, and anyone building solutions that matter.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (01:24) - Introduce Fernanda Carapinha
- (19:36) - Introduce Kelly O'Connell
- (36:32) - Lessons Learned
- (38:10) - Host Closing
Creators and Guests
What is The Impact Pitch: How Tech Founders Tell Stories that Attract Capital?
THE IMPACT PITCH supports the founder/funder ecosystem by connecting startups, funders, and incubators who all have the common goal of creating social impact companies that thrive. It shines a light on startups that are in their early-stage funding rounds or that are underrepresented.
Scientists and tech founders sometimes struggle to translate their technical innovations into compelling business narratives. In the Impact Pitch, you’ll hear from a founder, an investor, or sometimes both, about how they worked to shape their pitch, the challenges, the reboots, and the successes as well. Each episode will include a lessons-learned teardown of the startups discussed, and will offer feedback on what worked with the pitch and what didn’t.
The podcast features three different categories of guest.
We feature tech founders, often scientists or academics, making the transition into entrepreneurship. They can be in their early-stage funding round.
We showcase investors, both angels and VCs, who focus on impact investing to address the world’s most challenging problems.
We feature impact incubators who offer support and education to impact-focused tech founders.
The podcast is hosted and produced by Lee Schneider, a veteran storyteller for hire for film and TV, novelist, and author of The Angel Playbook. He is an adjunct assistant professor teaching a popular media-making and storytelling class for USC’s School of Architecture, and he is the facilitator of the Storyline Sessions, a series of masterclasses for startup founders who want to improve their storytelling skills to win more funding.