John Kohler

John Kohler has been Director of Impact Capital at Santa Clara’s Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship and has also been a mentor to social entrepreneurs at the Global Social Benefit Accelerator. In 2011 he authored a report on impact investing entitled Coordinating Impact Capital: a New Approach to Investing in Small and Growing Businesses, co-authored a chapter on equity investing in New Frontiers of Philanthropy (Oxford Press-2014), and recently published a study on Total Portfolio Activation for Impact (Miller Center-2016). He is now pioneering a new investment vehicle – the Variable Payment Obligation - that presents investors with a ‘structured exit’ alternative to equity. In addition, he is co-founder of Toniic, a syndication network of impact investors. John manages investments through Redleaf Venture Management, a venture capital operating company founded in 1993. John's earlier background includes twenty years of executive level positions at Hewlett Packard, Silicon Graphics, Convergent Technologies and Unisys. He was one of the founding executives at Netscape Communications. John served as a board member at PACT, an NGO based in Washington D.C., and on Pact’s microfinance company in Myanmar. Over the last 15 years, he was a managing member of the UCLA Venture Capital Fund and currently advises ACDI/VOCA’s impact fund and several USAID projects. Other recent advisory roles include the Vatican Impact Investing Conference and Catholic Relief Services.