Join Be Green Hub for our first Speaker Series of 2019! Speakers will present strategies and practices for your green company to accelerate its sustainability and innovation.

Timeline:
11:30am – Doors open / networking / lunch*
12:00pm – Presentation begins
*Lunch will be provided by Be Green Hub.

Emergence of B Corps and Benefit Corporations
Companies ranging from Patagonia® to Warby Parker® to Hootsuite® have successfully scaled while adopting triple bottom line business practices. Essentially, these companies have proven that you can be profitable and still be good corporate citizens. Whether you are an investor wanting to learn more about how “B” adopters stack up, or an emerging venture aligned with triple bottom line practices, this talk is for you. This presentation will cover the following:
• The history in a nutshell of shareholder primacy (i.e. profit above all) in corporate law;
• The development of the legal benefit corporation entity and B Corp trade group in response;
• Attitudes of millennials and industry trend towards corporate social responsibility; and,
• Why this matters for our economy.

Kevin Christopher is the founder of Ridgeline Venture Law, Tennessee’s first B Corp® law firm and 2018 Best for the World Honoree. Prior to launching RVL®, Kevin led bioinformatics, bioscience, and biotech development and licensing activities with top secret security clearance at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, steered large scale partnerships in renewable energy and synthetic biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and consulted the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Along the way, Kevin served as a foundational team member or key advisor to startups with algal-based protein production, biomass energy conversion, microbiome editing skincare, and hepatocellular carcinoma diagnostics technologies. Most recently, Kevin served as corporate counsel to a boutique therapeutics company with a novel gyrase inhibit- ing antibiotic platform.