It’s Time for a Revival in Business & Beyond: SVN Conference June 2026
By Josh Knauer
Social Venture Network
In 1991, I was a twenty-something at Carnegie Mellon with a conviction I couldn’t fully articulate and a dial-up modem. I had this stubborn belief that the internet could connect people who cared about the environment in ways that had never been possible before, that information shared across a network could actually move people to act. So, I built EnviroLink, one of the earliest online platforms dedicated to environmental and social causes. We were figuring it out as we went, running on passion and very little else.
By 1999, I was deep into building Green Marketplace, one of the first online marketplaces for environmentally and socially responsible products. I was young, I was learning fast, and I was hungry for people who understood what I was trying to do without requiring a long explanation. That year, I found SVN.
The Social Venture Network had been founded twelve years earlier, in 1987, by a handful of leaders who believed that profit and purpose weren’t opposites. That’s how you run a company, who you hire, how you treat your supply chain and your community, all of it mattered, not just ethically but as a legitimate business model. By the time I walked in as a young entrepreneur, SVN was already a community with real depth. And it changed the course of my work in ways I am still grateful for.
Some of my earliest mentors came from those SVN rooms. People who had been at this longer than I had, who had made the mistakes I was about to make, who gave me their time and their candor without asking for anything in return. They didn’t treat me like someone with potential. They treated me like a peer, which at that stage of building a company is exactly what you need and almost never get. Business partnerships were formed there. Investors showed up who believed in what I was building before I had much proof to show them. Those relationships didn’t come from a pitch competition or a networking happy hour. They came from sitting in honest conversation with people who shared a set of values and were willing to act on them, including by backing a young entrepreneur who was still figuring it out. I sold Green Marketplace to Gaiam in 2002, and I can draw a direct line from that outcome to the people I met in SVN.
SVN’s broader legacy is remarkable if you stop to look at it. From the conversations that happened inside this community, entire movements were born. B Lab, which gave the world the B Corp certification and changed how businesses understand accountability. Business for Social Responsibility, Net Impact, BALLE, Investors’ Circle, Conscious Capitalism, Social Enterprise Alliance – these organizations shaped how industries think about their responsibility to people and the planet. They didn’t come from think tanks or policy papers. They came from people sitting across from each other in honest conversation, asking hard questions, and then going out and building the answers.
After Green Marketplace, I went on to build other companies, including Rhiza, a data analytics firm I eventually sold to Nielsen in 2017. Through all of it, the questions that mattered most to me didn’t change much. How do you keep the mission intact as a company scales? How do you hold your values when the market is pushing hard in the other direction? How do you find the investors, partners, and collaborators who are actually aligned with what you’re building? SVN was the community I kept coming back to with those questions. And eventually, I joined its board.
Twice now, SVN members have voted to put me there. I don’t take that lightly.
From the inside, what I can tell you is that SVN has never been afraid of an honest reckoning. This is an organization that has had periods of real momentum and periods of genuine searching. Remarkable successes and painful mistakes. There is something in SVN’s willingness to say that out loud, to name the complexity of its own journey, that I find more trustworthy, not less. It is the same quality I look for in the founders and leaders I advise through JumpScale, and in the farmers and ecosystem stewards I work alongside at ReSeed. Honesty about where you are is the only real starting point for where you’re going.
And where SVN is going right now matters.
The principles that felt radical in 1987, stakeholder value, regenerative business practice, using business as a genuine force for good, feel urgent in a way that takes your breath away if you sit with it. At the same time, a lot of the people doing this work are tired. Not burnt out in the ordinary sense, but weary in a particular way that comes from doing hard work in a headwind for a long time, sometimes wondering whether the ground is actually shifting or whether it just feels that way. Add to that the radical shifts in political and economic conditions that have impacted our businesses, our neighbors, and our families. That exhaustion is real, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A revival, the old-fashioned kind, is where you go when you need to be reminded why it matters and find out that the people around you haven’t given up either.
That is what we are building in Santa Fe this June. Now is the time to come together, build strong connections, learn from each other, and do business together.
The SVN Global Gathering is June 17 through 19 at the Santa Fe Railyard, a 50-acre transformation of an industrial site into a nationally celebrated demonstration that sustainable design, cultural preservation, and economic vitality can do more than coexist. The setting matters. Spending three days there will feel like an act of alignment before the first conversation begins.
New Mexico brings something else worth naming. The entrepreneurs, investors, and community leaders rooted in the deep Indigenous, Hispanic, and creative cultures of this region are not our hosts. They are fellow participants, their voices and businesses woven into the program alongside leaders joining from across the country and around the world.
SVN has always understood that the real work happens between sessions, in small circles where no performance is required, across a meal, in a conversation that starts with a hard question and ends with the beginning of a partnership. The Gathering is designed to create those conditions: peer conversations, sessions on the questions this community needs to wrestle with together, dedicated space to move capital and form partnerships, and real time to reconnect with people who understand what you’re building and why. I have been in rooms like this with SVN members for more than twenty-five years. What happens in them is different from what happens at other gatherings. That’s why I keep coming back.
One more thing I want to say, because I’m proud of this decision: we made this gathering radically affordable. Registration starts at $500 for members. Most business conferences have quietly priced themselves into an exclusivity that undermines the values they claim to hold. We went the other direction. The best version of this gathering happens when any leader who would benefit from being in this community can actually show up.
If you are building a business that tries to do right by people and the planet, this community exists for you. If you have been at this work for decades and you are tired in the particular way this work makes you tired, it exists especially for you. And if you are earlier in your journey, the way I was in 1999, looking for people who understand what you’re trying to build and will help you build it, this is where you find them.
I have been doing this work for more than thirty years. The belief that brought me to it hasn’t changed. SVN is where I go to remember I’m not alone in it.
The SVN Global Gathering is June 17-19 in Santa Fe. Registration is open at svn.org/gathering-2026. I’ll be there. I hope you will be too.
Article by Josh Knauer has spent 30 years founding companies at the intersection of technology, sustainability, and social impact, including two acquired by publicly traded firms. He is a co-founder of ReSeed, a co-founder and general partner at JumpScale, an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, an entrepreneur-in-residence for Columbia University Ventures/NYSERDA, and a former advisor to President Obama on science and technology. He serves on the board of the Social Venture Network. Learn more at KnauerNever.com and register for the SVN Global Gathering at svn.org/gathering-2026.
