Renewal’s long time friend and Renewal2 investor, Josh Mailman featured in Fast Company.

Doughnuts to Dollars: How a Business Scion's Son Went From Burning Man to Angel Investing
Fast Company
By Lisa Katayama
Dec 3, 2010

In 1981, a score of well-to-do twentysomethings congregated in Estes Park, Colorado for a new-age pow-wow on how to use their inherited wealth toward social good. They called themselves the Doughnuts. The gathering was organized by Joshua Mailman, son of famed New York philanthropist and investor Joseph L. Mailman. "We were part of the generation of people interested in meditation, Buddhism, Shamanism, rainbow gatherings, and Burning Man," he tells Fast Company. "It was a mystical, non-western way of looking at the world."

Today, Mailman has moved beyond the Doughnuts to become a veteran angel investor and philanthropist through three organizations he founded: the Threshold Foundation, the Social Venture Network, and Serious Change.

Josh's father, Joseph Mailman, never finished college; instead, at the age of 18, he and his brother founded a knife and razor company after selling razors door to door, and later turned that into one of the first North American conglomerates, the Mailman Corporation. Josh is keeping his family's entrepreneurial legacy alive through his own work and through an endowment to Columbia University's School of Public Health, which is named after his father.

Josh's eye for success was innate and started at an early age--like his dad's. In 1983, two years after the Doughnuts meeting, Mailman made a grant to a young man named Samuel Kaymen, who had the idea to create a company that would bring economic benefit to farmers in New England. Kaymen started making yogurt with a couple of cows in the neighborhood, and that was the beginning of Stoneyfield Farms, the biggest organic yogurt brand in the United States.

"I love finding businesses that can address social problem and make money, thereby having the ability to more easily scale than groups dependent on the largess of the rich," he says.

In 1987, he and fellow philanthropist Wayne Silby founded Social Venture Network, a coalition of business leaders who gather at two annual conferences and other informal settings to talk about best practices in building a socially and environmentally sustainable world. SVN has spawned other similar and successful ventures specializing in investments for social good, including Investors' Circle and Net Impact.

Read the full article online.