Team
Cofounders Bennett Thomas (Left) and Justin Smithline (Right)
Combining a long-time finance and sustainability leader with a hands-on, founder-friendly investor
The fund brings together two leaders in their respective fields with their own unique strengths and networks. Justin Smithline is a former technology entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Previously, Justin was a partner at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA), the most active startup accelerator and seed fund in New York City, where he invested in and mentored over 100 companies. Bennett Thomas is a finance and corporate sustainability leader with experience at publicly traded companies across each of the fund’s focus areas. He founded EarthView in 2010, a leading corporate sustainability platform, that has been recognized alongside the largest tech and consumer companies in the world, like Apple and Nike, for its positive environmental and social impact achievements. The pair originally met while investing together at Cornell’s Big Red Venture Fund 20 years ago, where they invested in companies like Pacific Biosciences, the NASDAQ-listed gene sequencing unicorn.
Justin Smithline
General Partner
Justin is a three time startup founder turned early-stage investor. Prior to starting Triple Impact Capital, Justin was a partner at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA), the leading startup accelerator and investment firm in New York City that Crain's recognized as the most active investment firm in New York in 2019. While there, he invested in over 100 companies. To date, ERA portfolio companies have raised more than $1.7 billion in capital and collectively exceed $10 billion in market capitalization, including four unicorns.
Justin loves working with founders to help them take their businesses to the next level. He spent nearly a decade at ERA, the last four years as a full-time General Partner. During that time, Justin worked side-by-side with hundreds of founders, helping them reach critical inflection points in their businesses, including landing new customers, raising subsequent rounds of capital, making key hires and resolving the occasional founder disagreement.
Prior to ERA, Justin cofounded medical device company, Linguaflex, mobile media technology company Instinctiv, and B2B data company, FunnelFire. He also helped lead the private-equity backed carve out and turnaround of Backstage, which is now the category leader in their industry.
He has also been an active angel investor for over 15 years, investing in the earliest stages of category leaders such as Happy Baby (acquired by Danone), White Ops (acquired by Goldman Sachs), Lovevery, Fingerprint.js and unicorn Thirty Madison.
Bennett Thomas
General Partner
Bennett focused the majority of his career at the intersection of finance and sustainability. He got his professional start interning at an environmental engineering firm after his senior year of high school. More recently, prior to cofounding Triple Impact Capital, he founded the EarthView sustainability platform at Hersha Hospitality Trust (NYSE: HT) in 2009, and led the platform for over 10 years. EarthView created $100M+ of portfolio value, reduced carbon emissions by 50%, diverted waste from landfills by 30% and delivered global social impact initiatives in the areas of clean water and hygiene. The EarthView platform led the company to be ranked #1 most sustainable lodging REIT four times and named to Newsweek's list of most responsible companies. He was also selected for the Executive Sustainability Committee at NAREIT, the REIT industry's representative voice, overseeing 70 REITs with $700+ billion of value.
In his finance role at Hersha, he helped raise and refinance $4 billion dollars of debt and equity capital and held responsibilities in strategy, investor relations, portfolio modeling and working with operators to drive results. He is bringing his learnings from being in a high growth institutional environment to the fund and the portfolio.
His previous roles include M&A at a $30 billion healthcare firm, media investment banking, technology consulting and environmental engineering. He earned his B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Virginia Tech and an MBA from Cornell where he was a Park Leadership Fellow.