In the world of online marketplaces and platforms, system design is the equivalent of “location, location, location” in the real estate world. In order to move the proverbial needle, you need other platforms and other networks to align with yours.

Too many platform builders approach their work in the uber-competitive, land-grab spirit of Silicon Valley, and then invoke the collaborative spirit of our industry to essentially convert your network into my commodity. It just won’t work.

Launches that announce themselves as “The first marketplace…” to connect impact capital with deal flow, are simply exhausting. It’s sad to know that they are actually not the first, sadder still to know they won’t be the last.

At any given time, there are roughly 150 such impact investing platforms.

We pay respects to our brothers and sisters at Enable Impact, ImpactUs and Mission Markets, among the many others — who had an admirable go at building the plumbing of the global impact investment ecosystem.

Our simple point is that buying the nuts, bolts, and pipes to hook up an entire sanitation system to their houses alone, under their own banners, was never likely to work… and this is not because they were ‘too early to market’ or lacked the money to put more effort on sales and marketing, as FastCompany concludes.

Our remedy, which we have been promoting in the name of social data liquidity at SOCAP since 2015, is to break the silos and connect the pipelines using machine learning, APIs, and distributed ledgers.

We conclude our requiem on a hopeful note: that American philanthropists will step back and more responsibly accept their role in these implosions.

Read the full article on impact investing platforms by Astrid Scholz at ImpactAlpha