For modelling the way in giving back, across everything she touches
Katrina Razon is a woman who wears many hats, and one with many interests too. Her portfolio includes jobs as a producer, art director, DJ, activist, yoga instructor, and she’s also an experienced diver and surfer—heck, she’s even climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. But her involvement in sustainability is why she’s a Green Warrior: she’s a venture capitalist who believes in driving investments and money towards social good.
Today, she runs KSR Ventures, a company she says she started “by pure accident”, after cashing out good one time and then learning to invest after. She’s become quite an active investor, who seeks out key inflexion points in outstanding net positive companies that are working to solve economic, social, and environmental challenges in innovative ways. Katrina believes that investors have a duty to lead our planet toward more sustainable futures, which is why she’s one of the Philippines’ first prominent investors to directly invest in impact and social enterprises.
She believes her work in the Philippines is important. “The social impact space is not so competitive at the moment because people don’t realise it can deliver top returns. The old-school mentality is, if it’s socially good it’s not going to make money. People don’t realise you can be net positive and have a great bottom line.” If that doesn’t tell you anything, let her investment portfolio speak for itself: she’s invested in Edukasyon.ph (connecting students to educational opportunities), Future Fresh (growing post-organic produce affordably without competing with local farmers) and NXTLVL Water (providing clean water solutions to coastal communities).
But it’s not just her work in the world of finance that’s sustainable, it’s her work in the event world too. Her work as a DJ and festival and event manager opened her eyes to the detrimental impact of the festivals and concerts on the environment. She met Pete Phornprapha (another Green Warrior) rather serendipitously, and after connecting over music and environmental issues, Katrina became a business partner and co-producer of Wonderfruit, one of the world’s few sustainable music festivals. On how they set Wonderfruit apart, Katrina said: “We saw that the music festival market was very crowded with event producers who were big-name driven, lineup-driven. We learned that the only way to survive in this competitive industry was to be experience-driven and values-driven.”
She’s aligned with Pete in saying that Wonderfruit isn’t explicitly a sustainability-focused festival—sustainability is part of it, naturally. This is to say that people don’t come for sustainability, but for the festival. It’s because of this that it’s such a wonderful opportunity to change people’s minds. Katrina carries her philosophy in doing good for her community and the environment through to all of her events. In fact, she’s the creative director of CC:Concepts, an events company, and uses her role to embed sustainability in the events that she’s involved in. As her partner in the company says: “From music and culture to sustainability and education, each of the fields she is active in has a deeper ethical motivation that drives her passion, which reflects her insatiable desire to keep on learning in-depth in order to know how to give back properly.”