EXECUTIVE SUMMARY


SUPPORTING THE ENTREPRENEUR


Investor Shabs Rajasekharan believes AAL should be supporting its entrepreneurs and helping them get their products to market


S


habs Rajasekharan of Smarter Futures was at the Forum looking for products with promise and people with a passion for developing their ideas. He found many of those people and some of those products exciting, but what he feels now is that more work needs to go into


getting products to market that older people actually want and, more importantly, will buy. The entrepreneur and social investor was looking to raise capital for


an impact investment fund his company Smarter Futures has set up to support other entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas and a dedication to getting those ideas to market. He was also looking for products that can generate traction and consumer demand and to get those products to market quickly. Rajasekharan approached this task believing that


AAL projects and the solutions they produced face one major problem in achieving this market penetration. “I saw issues in scaling up with a lot of these solutions in this market,” he says. He believed it was not really seed


24 | AAL FORUM 2014


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