Entrepreneur of the Year 2024: Keith Ippel and Caroline von Hirschberg are bringing the business community together with Spring

THE KICKOFF: When Caroline von Hirschberg decided to move to Vancouver, she didn’t have a game plan. She just knew what kind of work she wanted to do. And when she googled “impact entrepreneurship,” Spring and its co-founder Keith Ippel popped up.

“When we had [our first] call, I was at the base of a volcano,” recalls von Hirschberg, who previously led a renewable energy-powered light company. “And I think you were at a coffee shop?”

“I was actually walking through Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver,” Ippel clarifies. “It’s beautiful to walk through. You wanted to know about what’s going on in the impact ecosystem in Vancouver, and what started off as a ‘here’s what’s happening in Vancouver’ became a ‘hey, maybe you should join Spring.’”

ACTION PLAN: Spring is a global community of investors and entrepreneurs based in Vancouver. Ippel launched the organization as a business incubator, accelerator and advisory firm in 2014 with the idea  to change the world for the better—at scale.

“The premise,” he says, “was: do you start your own startup, or do you create an organization that can catalyze hundreds and thousands of companies around the world?”

“Essentially, we’re building a world in which every entrepreneur is an impact entrepreneur and every investor an impact investor,” notes von Hirschberg, who joined Spring in 2019 and became co-CEO in 2021.

Spring’s special sauce is helping young, innovative ventures scale and network with the business community, and it provides a range of services and resources to do that. Its flagship program is the Impact Investor Challenge, where founders and investors meet and learn to do due diligence, among other things. Spring educates, prepares and “matchmakes” participants with each other, and it has other iterations of the challenge to support climate and women-led startups.

“We’ve extended that work, so now investors can join a national impact investor network that we call the Spring Collective,” Ippel adds. “And then we launched Spring Impact Capital, which is a $20-million early-stage venture capital fund that allows investors to participate in a fund, but it also allows that fund to invest at a larger scale into [cleantech and healthtech] ventures.”

To date, Spring has helped businesses raise around $50 million, which is a testament to Ippel and von Hirschberg’s vast experience across different industries and companies, global and local.

As von Hirschberg puts it, there’s a yin and yang to their dynamic at Spring: “Keith is definitely vision—10 years out, he can see patterns before other people can. What I love to do is think about how we translate that into three years, one year, and then more of an operational plan for the organization.”

Together, they’ve led Spring through several inflection points, including the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, its business offerings are now more holistic and its support for founders and investors goes deeper than ever before. “We’re actually the only organization in Canada that does both in equal parts with an impact lens,” Ippel insists.

CLOSING STATEMENT: Spring is a certified B-Corp and a member of 1% for the Planet. Last year, it acquired edtech startup Future Capital, marking a new chapter for the organization. “When I joined, we were about six people,” von Hirschberg says, “and over the past few years, we’ve grown to over 30.”

Since 2014, the organization has supported more than 3,000 entrepreneurs and 1,000 impact investors, notes Ippel. It has also helped 500 international entrepreneurs start businesses in Canada through its Impact Startup Visa program.

Q+A

What’s the best leadership advice you’ve ever received?

CvH: Take a breath.

KI: Never ask the same question twice.