Recently, Revolution, my investment firm, launched the new Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a $150 million fund that will make investments in startups outside of Silicon Valley. The fund is an extension of our nearly four-year-old Rise of the Rest initiative, an effort to highlight (33 to date) entrepreneurial ecosystems outside of coastal tech corridors.

In an interview with the New York Times announcing the new seed fund, I made it clear that I was a fan of impact investing. I said I believed that the Rise of the Rest would have a positive impact, even though it was not structured as an impact fund.

So we care very much about impact. Given that, why don’t we call the Rise of the Rest Seed fund an impact fund? The answer is that our work at the Case Foundation has led to, among other deliverables, the creation of a Short Guide to Impact Investing. In it, we proposed the following criteria for impact investing: intentionality, measurement, and transparency.

We said having intentionality was necessary, but not sufficient, to be considered an impact fund. You need to go further, laying out specific impact goals, and then measuring and reporting on them.

Read the full article by Steve Case about impact investing fromImpactAlpha