Location: Paris, France

Constanza is Venturing co- Lead, which means that she designs funds, manages portfolios, and works side-by-side with ventures to help ideas grow. She works on Frontier Tech Futures to think about what is the future of impact-driven work, and what is the role of technology within it. She’s supporting the Oxygen Colab and the Frontier Technologies Discovery Fund to design the method and tools that best support ventures, and bring insights across the portfolio. She works on the ASToN project to support cities to test their incredible digital ideas to improve the lives of citizens.

Her quest at Brink is to prototype exciting fun bold work that flips the world upside down instead of dying in a sea of consensus. She is a designer, starter that’s focused on problem solving and humanity.

Right now, she’s excited about designing, prototyping and testing the ways in which money can be most in service to impactful ventures.

Constanza’s favourite place is between a rock and a hard place. She has spent the last ten years thinking about how to foster ideas and solutions to complex, cross-cutting challenges, such as household energy and sexual and reproductive health, worldwide. She has a Masters in Public Administration, but in reality, she considers herself a master generalist. She thrives on bringing brilliant, diverse people to get things done.

Constanza’s (not-so) secret talent is being unable to sit still. So in her previous life, she moved from peri-urban Dakar (Senegal) to rural Bamyan (Afghanistan). In both places, she worked directly with the women and men who were cooking, lighting and heating (in Afghanistan only) their homes to tackle energy poverty. She worked with users, engineers, and economists to design, test and adapt technologies and business models that worked for their individual needs. In Senegal, this looked like using existing clean cookstoves with an innovative payment plan, while in Afghanistan, they designed a new type of smoke-exhaust pipe that could be produced from locally available materials by local artisans.

Questions Constanza is exploring in their work right now:

• How do we design money (and how we disburse it) so that we’re investing in the ideas and solutions that are building better futures?
• How do we design portfolios in a way that enables us to learn about individual ventures, but also how they come together across the system?
• How do we close portfolios, investments, support well?