"It's a similar approach to Ron Conway and Yuri Milner's deal with Y Combinator," Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro told Betabeat this afternoon, on his way to a board meeting. Mr. Shapiro, whose firm has invested in Kickstarter, Simple, TaskRabbit, and Codecademy, was referring to the blanket investment Collaborative Fund just announced--offering $50,000 a piece in all five of the startups to come out of Brooklyn Beta's "Summer Camp," an incubator of sorts.

(Last January, Mr. Milner and Mr. Conway launched the Start Fund to plunk $150,000 into every new Y Combinator startup.)

Brooklyn Beta, which launched in 2010, is a non-profit conference--going on right now!--put on by Fictive Kin, a design-focused product shop in Brooklyn. But the organizers, who target the “work hard and be nice to people” crowd (be still our cold heart), are expanding. For the first time this year, Brooklyn Beta offered a "Summer Camp," a 12-week incubator program where designer-developer teams focus on "making stuff that matters" and then present at this week's conference. The organizers offer $25,000 to each startup for a six percent stake and then reinvest the profit back in Brooklyn Beta.

Collaborative Fund's interest in funding the initiative came about through an investment they made in Creative Morning, a global morning lecture series for creative types. Creative Morning is run out of a coworking space called StudioMates in Dumbo, which is where Mr. Shapiro met FictiveKin partner and Stanford alum Cameron Koczon. The two discussed the importance of design and a shared frustration with "how Silicon Valley has such a heavy emphasis on engineering and placing engineering talent ahead of design talent," Mr. Shapiro told Betabeat. Part of the thinking behind investing in SkillShare and Kickstarter, he added, was looking for design-led startups.

But there's another overlap in the venn diagram between the two organizations: working towards something with a broader impact. "Not from a sacrificial or philanthropic angle, like a soup kitchen," Mr. Shapiro explained, but having people build applications, sites, programs, and services that push the world forward in a way that at a minimum is interesting and new, as opposed to pure entertainment or another photo sharing app."

"Not that I have anything against that!" he was quick to add, "But that's something that we talk a lot about."

In addition to investing, Collaborative Fund has enlisted Ryan Jacoby, the former head of the New York studio of Ideo, the much-lauded design and innovation consultancy that boasts clients like Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi, to mentor the startups.

Mr. Shapiro said he wasn't sure at first how Collaborative Fund could help and contemplated sponsorship. "[Mr. Koczon] asked me to be a mentor, which is sweet, but I'm not adding any value," he said. Collaborative Fund is "the anti-Ron Conway, in a sense--not in a mean-spirited way, but we're sort of slow and deliberate and we don't make that many investments," Mr. Shapiro said, admitting some nervousness to investing in five companies pre-product.

Ultimately, however, he said, "It was really as much a bet on Cameron and his team at FictiveKin and their ability to select good people and bring in good talent. But it actually turns out that I'm pretty excited about the companies and the diversity of the teams and the actual problems that they're trying to solve."

Sadly, Mr. Shapiro, who said he will consider this kind of blanket offer for next year's class, had to fly out to San Francisco for that board meeting, and was missing today's line-up. But you can follow along with the speakers via Twitter under the hashtag #BrooklynBeta.

Here are the five startups from this year's Brooklyn Beta Summer Camp:

Sticker FM - a collaborative video platform allowing people from around the world to track and report in real time how a situation is developing.

Webe.at - a platform to easily follow, collaborate, and stylize calendars, breaking them out of spreadsheet-like boxes to include media rich content.

Farmstand - an app  that uses your location to show you where to buy local produce from farmers, CSAs, co-ops, community gardens, rooftop gardens and local markets.

MakersRow - a curated search platform and learning community that connects manufacturers and makers.

Skillcrush - a community-driven learning platform to help you increase your digital literacy and achieve your goals with technology.

"Right now we have no institutional capital invested in the fund, only exceptional individuals," Mr. Shapiro said in an email. "I believe this allows us to be more agile and aggressive in pursuing our mission.

"This fund is, in a sense, a lean startup; we’re entering into a new market and validating the idea with founders. I want to first prove that we have a brand and investment strategy that is correct and show that we can return significant capital before evaluating the idea of increasing the amount of capital we are investing."

Mr. Shapiro approached each new investor personally, he said. He and Mr. Heiferman were both investors in Kickstarter and Skillshare; Mr. Gronen was "another new friend after Collaborative set up shop in NYC." Mr. Templeton is also an investor in Collaborative portfolio company Rentcycle.

The 14-month-old fund is still establishing its brand, so the new investors are quite a boon--as is a partnership with Code for America to match fellows with Collaborative portfolio companies.

"The fund focuses on two themes: the increasing importance of values as they relate to the decisions we make about who we work for, what we buy, and how we spend our time; and the shift from an economy based on hyper-consumption to one based on collaborative consumption," Mr. Shapiro said. "These two forces present a significant opportunity for new technologies, products, and services to reinvent how we do business, consume personal goods and services, and transform our daily lives."

Collaborative consumption has accelerated since the fund closed in Thanksgiving 2010, he said, with more people using services such as Airbnb, Kickstarter, and TaskRabbit, and investors have followed suit.

"There is a common ethos among our portfolio: the more financially successful they become, the better it is for the world," Mr. Shapiro said. "They all lean more toward for-profit focused businesses that inherently create social impact versus more philanthropic, yet for-profit businesses. A subtle distinction, but a very big difference."

Collaborative is also heavily focused on good design--no surprise as Mr. Shapiro's resume includes time as president of GOOD Worldwide.

The total fund is undisclosed, but it's less than $10 million. The fund made eight investments in 2011, including Kickstarter, Codecademy, Skillshare and CreativeMornings in New York. Mr. Shapiro expects to make between six and eight investments in 2012.

The fund will continue to have a presence in New York. "There's definitely something special about NYC's startup scene," Mr. Park, who joined Collaborative in the spring, said in an email. "NYC also seems to value a diversity lacking in other startup hubs. I believe this is because of the confluence of several large industries such as fashion, advertising, finance and food. I’m excited to be part of a community that will undoubtedly leave a mark in terms of meaningful cultural and technological change, in a city that is known for its unbounded ambition."

Mr. Miller, hopping to it.

Chad Miller likes to think of running errands for strangers on TaskRabbit as a quasi-religious experience—or at least as close to spiritual as a gay former Southern Baptist from West Texas is likely to find in New York. Mr. Miller is a 38-year-old Columbia graduate who acts, writes and works full-time managing outreach for the university’s Arts Initiative. He signed up for TaskRabbit as his “tertiary job” in September, shortly after the Boston-based startup launched in New York.

“This is going to be incredibly gay as I’m saying it,” Mr. Miller laughed, “but it’s very hakuna matata, Disney-fied—you put it out there and you get a little back. The karma piece is really nice.”

Along with a bumper crop of like-minded companies, such as Zaarly, Fancy Hands and Agent Anything, that have entered the New York market in the past year or so, TaskRabbit offers an updated play on Craigslist for the iPhone-era: buyers post the dirty work they want to get done and nearby “Rabbits” bid on the jobs. Service requests range from the sophisticated—“Motivate me to write a book :)” read a recent TaskRabbit request from Midtown—to the menial. “$50 for a Massage,” a Zaarly user on the West Side posted in November. “General massage,” the ad elaborated, tersely, in the description. For the most part, however, Rabbits are asked to perform domestic drudgery: assembling Ikea furniture tops the list.

It’s easy to see why democratizing the personal assistant might do well in New York, a city largely unburdened by hang-ups about, say, paying $20 to avoid wasting time in a Laundromat, even when one’s budget barely permits it.

In the past three months, Mr. Miller has made a little over $2,000 on the kind of irksome chores overextended urbanites are eager to slough off on someone else, including driving strangers to JFK, waiting in line for hours to save someone’s seat for a Conan taping and lugging furniture to a fourth-floor walk-up. The money’s nice and all, but to hear Mr. Miller tell it, the appeal doesn’t sound far off from “Love thy neighbor.”

“I’m really playing my cards low, but I grew up Southern Baptist,” said Mr. Miller. “I just realized—I’m not one for organized religion personally, but I do very much agree with the sense of community, sense of charity, and volunteerism. Short of working at a soup kitchen, which is something I did a lot when I was at Columbia, this for me is, like, the next best thing! It grounds me back a little bit more to, you know, we’re in a community—everybody needs something done at some point.”

Mr. Miller, ever the theater geek, interrupted his cheery philosophizing to affect a mock sotto voce, “I didn’t mean to sound like, ‘Now I’m St. Sebastian and the martyr for everybody.’”

While his motivation may swing toward the selfless, interview enough cash-strapped Rabbits (Midtown and Brooklyn are active hubs) and you’ll start to wonder where all these shiny, happy helpers have been hiding—and why they’re so psyched about pocketing under $100 to assemble your MALM bed frame. “Don’t drink the Kool-aid! Is that what you’re feeling talking to everybody?” Mr. Miller laughed again.

Actually, a more archetypal laborer in one of these new-fangled markets might be someone like Ivan Rivera, a 27-year-old CUNY senior who signed up with Agent Anything to supplement his job as head cashier at City Sports. Mr. Rivera, who is paying his own way through a marketing degree, has been enrolled off and on since 2003, finances permitting, and recently had to move back in with his parents in Washington Heights.

“They hate hearing how much money I’m making,” Mr. Rivera said when Betabeat asked whether his friends had also signed up for “missions” with Agent Anything, another similar startup that employs only current college students and operates primarily around New York. (Startups tend to come steeped in their own lingo.) But over the past year, Mr. Rivera estimates that gigs like delivering packages for a specialty chef or handing out fliers for a club have only earned him a little over a thousand dollars. “It’s like money you wouldn’t even think about having,” explained Mr. Rivera. “If I can make at least $30 in one week, at least I know I have a Metrocard.”

The last time the tech world tried to build a convenience economy, the markets were in an upswing. But beloved dot-com-era delivery services such as Kozmo.com or its copycat Urban Fetch were filed as a punch line in the annals of bubble lore for squandering millions on armies of bike messengers to keep keyboard jockeys in the packages of gum, cigarettes and VHS tapes to which they had become accustomed. This time around, investors are once again willing to back these kind of startups, partly because this new strain has figured out a way to leverage economic downers, like nagging unemployment and underemployment, in their favor.

Just as eBay turned your castoffs into cash, these mobile and online marketplaces figure they can turn your unused time into money. For the opportunity, Zaarly takes a 9 percent cut of the transaction. TaskRabbit, which puts its errand-runners through a rigorous week-long vetting process, including a video interview as well as a social security and criminal background check, takes a 15 percent cut.

“Now I’m sure you recall September of ’08 was probably one of the worst economic times,” TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque recounted. “The stock market was crashing, people were being laid off left and right and so it turned out that it was very serendipitous that I had had that idea [for TaskRabbit] earlier that year.”

This May, Ms. Busque, a former IBM software engineer, picked up a $5 million series A round led by Sand Hill venture capital firm Shasta Ventures. Zaarly, which was born into a frothier climate this February, got an even quicker response. Mere weeks after launching at a Startup Weekend conference in Los Angeles, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Arrington and other angel investors plunked down a $1 million seed round, followed by an eye-popping $14.1 series A in October led by the VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with help from newbie investors like clothing impresario Marc Ecko.

“[Zaarly’s] true value is in its ability to remove friction between what we want and what we have,” Mr. Kutcher emailed us, between 140-character plugs for Two and a Half Men. “Bottom line it saves people the most valuable thing in the world ... Time.” (The ellipses are Mr. Kutcher’s.)

“Everybody’s busy,” concurred Fancy Hands founder Ted Roden, a former technologist for The New York Times, whose New York-based startup uses a monthly subscription model to provide virtual personal assistants for tasks like restaurant reservations or “confrontational phone calls” with your cellphone company. “For us it’s outsourcing the stuff you’re doing everyday. It’s the old George Costanza line—‘Busy? Don’t give me busy!’”

Jordan Cooper, a 27-year-old venture partner with Lerer Ventures and founder of the open database Hyperpublic subscribes to Fancy Hands $25-a-month plan. "l ask them to find an esoteric product that was discontinued and send me a link to where I can buy it or I'll ask them to find research a date spot to take someone when I'm in San Francisco that has organic food and is close to my hotel." By email, he described the tasks as, "Things I could do if I wasn't on mobile and had an extra 15 minutes in my day...but that I'd rather someone else do."

With a three-year lead in the market, TaskRabbit, which used to go by the less cuddly moniker RunMyErrand, has arguably done the best job building a culture around its product. Profiles often feature a photo and chatty descriptions of potential tasks. Ms. Busque claims her site gets more than $4 million of economic activity requested monthly from its 2,000 Rabbits. (New York is home to about 500 to 750 of them.) Zaarly, on the other hand, opts for a more anonymous approach, with communication done via little gray message boxes invisible to the public.

After rapidly expanding into a number of cities over the course of a year, Zaarly, which says it processes 1,000 transactions a week, now seems to be finessing its offerings. Listings in New York and around the country still tend toward procuring and selling tangible items, often iPhones, iPads and Kindles. However, both Zaarly and TaskRabbit have bigger designs: selling themselves as engines of micro-job creation.

Over coffee recently in Soho House’s refurbished sixth-floor drawing room, co-founder Eric Koester eagerly discussed how Zaarly’s updated smartphone app could help small businesses. He offered up the example of a landscaper using the app to find a nearby gig that pays less than his normal rate, but still represents income he might not otherwise have access to. “It’s the hottest lead you can get! I want what you have and I’m willing to pay for it,” Mr. Koester enthused. Ms. Busque said her passion is empowering Rabbits to “Be their own bosses. Set their own schedules. Say how much money they want to earn,” noting that top earners can pull in up to $5,000 a month. But since both startups have an average transaction size of about $50, that could easily mean fulfilling up to 100 tasks a month.

At times the rhetoric of empowerment can feel at odds with the fact that, in some cases, “entrepreneurship” amounts to floundering college graduates bidding on a chance to clean your apartment. “I’ve thought about that, too. Like is this a way the 1 percent are outsourcing their lives to the 99 percent?” said Craig Shapiro, founder and CEO of Collaborative Fund, a seed stage firm that likes to back peer-to-peer sharing technology, ideally of the “world-changing” variety, and invested in TaskRabbit’s $5 million round.

The 1 percent, of course, don’t need an app to find others to do their bidding. But in a way these startups are a sleeker version of picking up a day laborer outside Home Depot. As they graduate into non-essential services that means a taste of the pampered life that would otherwise be out of the user’s pay grades. “Certain people have personal chefs, but in my imagination they’re executives and super rich people,” said Bartek Ringwelski, the founder of SkillSlate, another Zaarly-esque market, but with a focus on skills like plasma TV installation or fire breathing (two examples Mr. Ringwelski offered). “On SkillSlate, people don’t want to publish prices on their profiles because they often have a fulltime job where they charge $150 an hour as a personal chef. They’ll do that same exact work for $20 an hour because money is money and there’s not a lot of demand for paying people exorbitant amounts for very skilled things right now. So you can get these incredible values that were previously not available.”

The reality of the convenience economy seems more ingeniously opportunistic than flatly exploitative. “I would say it’s much more evenly split,” said Fancy Hands' Mr. Roden. “The assistants are all the 99 percent and the users are too.”

In fact, in the case of TaskRabbit, Zaarly and the like, a buyer is just as likely to be a seller. Mr. Miller, for example, signed up for TaskRabbit after misinterpreting a message from his partner. “He felt that I really needed to use it to find a TaskRabbit to help me out with my own life,” said Mr. Miller. “But when he sent me the email link, I thought he meant, oh it’s a good way for me to fulfill this other thing that I wanted—you know, the sense of community and getting a little bit of extra income. When we had the conversation, I was like, ‘I went on my first task tonight’ and he goes, ‘You’re a Rabbit?!’”

In some cases, buyers and sellers even live in the same household. Corwin Ip, a 31-year-old IT manager at a prestigious advertising firm, started calling himself a Rabbit four months ago after coming into some unexpected expenses. “I proposed to my fiancée and she said, ‘I want a destination wedding,’” he explained. “All I saw was dollar signs. Like, oh, man, I really gotta go find a second job or something!”

For his first task, Mr. Ip, a former Marine whose day job involves moving infrastructure to the cloud or mobile phone rollouts, ended up assembling Ikea furniture for a young couple on the Lower East Side (“Hipsters? Eh, I don’t want to put a label on that,” he demurred over the phone) before taking the subway back to Forest Hills, Queens. He’s since earned a couple thousand toward his Hawaiian nuptials.

“She’s a Tasker,” said Mr. Ip when Betabeat asked if his fiancée was also a Rabbit. “I told her what I was doing and then she was like, ‘Oh, I can get these things done!‘” he said, adding, “I obviously don’t bid on those.”

The latest iteration of the convenience economy follows an industry trend toward financially incentivized peer-to-peer cooperation—a feel-good niche of the free market that folks like Mr. Shapiro like to call “collaborative consumption.” For example, where 2003 brought us Couchsurfing, an online platform to connect travelers with an available couch, 2008 brought us Airbnb, a chance to get paid for lending out said couch. “People making money is always a good business model,” said SkillShare co-founder Mike Karnjanaprakorn, whose New York-based startup helps professionals hold one-time classes within their area of expertise. Like Airbnb, SkillShare is also backed by Collaborative Fund.

On SkillSlate (yes, we know, it’s hard to keep them straight) Mr. Ringwelski said he noticed popular services shifting from “needs” like a plumber to fix a leaky roof to “wants,” like a personal chef. “I think where the industry is going is almost like a trade of skills.” Mr. Ip, for example, quickly traded-up for carpentry tasks that exercised skills he couldn’t otherwise utilize. “I don’t think Ikea furniture assembly is building something,” he said, bluntly.

The idea of “hyper-sharing” with a network of our peers, as Mr. Karnjanaprakorn put it, rings a little lofty when we considered a comment from Fancy Hands founder Mr. Koden about the “scavenger hunt” of trying to find gigs that fit the schedule of one’s day job. But it does explain why no one we spoke to seemed to feel awkward about giving up a New Yorker’s cloak of anonymity to enter stranger’s apartment and roll up their sleeves.

We introduced ourselves to MaKenzie Morrissey, a 27-year-old recent transplant from Oklahoma who was manning the coat check at a startup fund-raiser the other week and wearing a TaskRabbit T-shirt. “I’m a Rabbit,” she said, by way of introduction. On the phone later, Ms. Morrissey, a petite former bar manager who plans on applying for medical school next year, estimated that she’s probably made around $600 over the course of 30 to 35 tasks. She makes the most on cleaning tasks, but enjoys working events, where she says, “I’ve met a lot of writers and actors and things like that—or bloggers,” who work as fellow Rabbits. She has also rubbed elbows higher-up the masthead with Bon Appetit editor-in-chief Adam Rapaport.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it? I think so, I didn’t sign any clause,” Ms. Morrissey hesitated over the phone. “It was for a small dinner party. He had auctioned himself to make dinner for people at his son’s school. So I worked the dinner party while he had cooked for everybody. They were nice people.”

“I’ve actually thought about it a lot—I use TaskRabbit a lot. Why do these people do this?” said Mr. Karnjanaprakorn. “Because they really don’t make that much money. They really just like helping people. There’s nothing else I can think of.” He mentioned a friend who tasked a Rabbit to deliver him cupcakes and sing to him on his birthday. “She took a picture and sent it to the person who bought it [for me]. I was like, I don’t think anyone would have done that if they genuinely don’t care.”

But it doesn’t mean that everyone understands their remunerative hobby. “I wouldn’t want to tell people at work,” said Mr. Ip about his hours spent as a Rabbit. “It’s just a little weird to say, ‘Yeah, well, this what I do outside of work.’ I told one person and the first thing he said was, ‘Why? Why are you doing this?’ So I try to keep the two lives separate.”

He added, “Most people who work only one job say, ‘I do one job and when I get home I’m tired and I don’t want to do anything else.’”

ntiku@observer.com

Fun fact: Mr. Shapiro turned 34 last week.

Craig Shapiro, former president of GOOD magazine and current CEO of the socially-conscious Collaborative Fund, has a place to leave his shoes in New York now. Collaborative is invested in multiple start-ups in the city, including Kickstarter, BankSimple, and SkillShare, and its New York connection is getting stronger--SkillShare founder Mike Karnjanaprakorn recently announced he'd been brought on as a venture adviser. Collaborative is on the verge of hiring its second New York employee, a junior scout sort of position, which Mr. Shapiro says he'll announce in about two weeks.

There's some history there, too--Mr. Shapiro learned much of what he knows about start-up investing from Josh Kushner of Thrive Capital. He also invested in New York-based Give Real (alongside early Facebook investor Eduardo Saverin) which attempted peer-to-peer ecommerce on social platforms; it flopped, much to Mr. Shapiro's dismay.

"I really loved that idea," he said wistfully over tea at an open-air cafe on Prince St., where Betabeat met with him yesterday morning, where he riffed, at our request, on design, investing and changing the world.

Collaborative's investment philosophy is pretty simple, he said. The fund--which launched at the end of 2010 with $6 million, but has raised an undisclosed amount more--focuses on companies that encourage collaborative consumption in a way that aligns social benefit with profitability. So far, that hasn't been easy.

“I do find it challenging to find start-ups that are working on world-changing ideas," he said. "And a world-changing idea doesn’t need to be solving global poverty. It can be something very simple. But I do think that first-world problems, like not being able to find a parking space--it actually may be a good business opportunity, but it's not something that I’m really interested in.”

He's especially interested in food, education and transportation, he told Betabeat.

Which big-name start-ups would you invest in if you could? we asked. Would you invest in Tumblr? (He had mentioned Tumblr as an example of a love-mark sort of brand.)

"I'd invest in Tumblr, because of the ease of use and simplicity of design. Instapaper. I think what Marco has done is so cool and I’ve met him and he seems like just a great entrepreneur. He understands how to build products and I think it's one of the more usable things that’s been built in the past couple years. Drudge Report! He’s so disruptive to the news space and what he’s been able to pull off, I’m like, holy cow. I would love an opportunity to invest in that.

"I would love an opportunity to invest in DonorsChoose, but it’s a nonprofit so there isn’t a clear path as to how I’d make money on that investment," he added.

Wait, back up, we said. You'd invest in the Drudge Report? Is it because you want to redesign it?

"The design in some ways is charming to me. It brings me back to like when I first started consuming web content, like animated GIFs and big fonts and a hodgepodge of somebody who had just learned html. I’d be afraid if we redesigned it, that it would lose some of that charm. I don’t know. It's so functional that it's hard to argue with."

Same with Craigslist, he added.

But as far as companies he is invested in, he's very bullish on Brooklyn-based BankSimple, which is attempting to disrupt consumer banking with a single bank card that works in any ATM and an online-only interface.

"In the four years that I’ve been investing, I've never seen a product with more anticipation than BankSimple," he said. "There’s so much pent-up interest and curiosity, it's crazy. I field more questions about what they’re up to than virtually any other company that I’ve ever even worked for or invested in...

“I love the idea of using transparency as a weapon to compete with. They're just like, 'we’re going to make this dead simple from a user experience perspective, and our fees are going to be totally transparent. We’re not going to nickel and dime, we’re not going to have hidden fees, we're going to out-compete Citibank and Chase by creating a more consumer friendly experience,'" he said.

But it's tough, being disruptive. (Maybe this is why people make apps to track open parking spaces and unused frequent flier miles?) BankSimple has had challenges coming to market, he said, which is frustrating. The launch, which was supposed to happen in the spring, is delayed, and the start-up's lead engineer recently quit.

There's another start-up that's struggling to get off the ground; or rather, out of Mr. Shapiro's head. "It's a secret," he said. "But I'll tell you. It's on the record but it's totally secret."

We had the feeling this was one idea Mr. Shapiro would be happy to have stolen by someone with the time to build it. The idea: A universal reputation score that factors in scores from services like Kiva, Airbnb and eBay--like a Klout score, but for trustworthiness. And in Mr. Shapiro's imagining, this score would include good deeds as well. Recycling, for example.

We were just talking about this with another VC, Betabeat exclaimed.

"Really? That's great!" he said. "You and I should work on it!"

Disclosure.

"My time is split between helping portfolio companies out, like giving them advice on the product, and also being the ears and eyes in New York City," Mr. Karnjanaprakorn told Betabeat, although he'll still be spending the vast share of his time on his company. Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley is also an advisor to the fund.

Collaborative Fund is also seeking an "apprentice" in the city, a junior employee who can help Mr. Shapiro--currently the fund's only full-time employee--with everything from administrative duties to due diligence.

Collaborative Fund invests in start-ups that encourage resource-sharing instead of consumption or seek to fundamentally improve quality of life, which Mr. Shapiro believes will become increasingly important in the decisions we make how and what to consume. The fund is invested in Skillshare, Kickstarter and BankSimple, among others.

Collaborative Fund is looking for creative entrepreneurs who are changing the world, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn said. "There are companies in the world that are for-profit, especially in the tech start-up space, that also have a social mission," he said--but he's not aware of any investment groups in the city that do the same. Alexis Ohanian--a Kiva fellow--comes close with his self-described "uncorporation" Breadpig.