In 2012, Audrey Desiderato and Ryan Levinson co-founded SunFunder, a pioneering fund management company that made loans to distributed and off-grid solar companies in developing countries. Their journey into entrepreneurship was unique, their partnership happened by chance, and their success was far from preordained. I sat down to interview them for my blog to learn how they met, what challenges they faced, and what advice they would give to someone contemplating the life of a social entrepreneur.
This is Part II in a series of shorter, condensed outtakes from that interview. Part I, published on November 7, 2025, revealed the origin story of SunFunder, what motivated Ryan and Audrey to become co-founders, how luck brought them together at just the right moment, and how chemistry kept them together.
This post will delve into lessons learned about scaling a business in a dynamic market and what advice they would give to other would-be entrepreneurs.
Part II – Seven Lessons Learned on the Path to Profitability: Advice for Would-be Social Entrepreneurs
As I wrote in my previous post, being an entrepreneur requires more than just vision, grit, skill, and luck, it also requires good advice and the ability to learn from others. Someone once said that “experience” is the name we give to what we learn from our mistakes. In this outtake from the interview, Audrey and Ryan summarize their lessons learned for other would-be entrepreneurs. I have distilled their advice down to 7 key takeaways.
Lesson 1: Get a “Kick Ass” Business Partner You Can Trust
In Part I, we revealed how Ryan and Audrey met by chance, but their decision to go into business together, a process that neither took lightly, was based on “chemistry,” which was rooted in shared values, complementary business skills, mutual trust, a sense of humor, and the ability to communicate with each other openly and bluntly as peers. They also recommend a division of labor between the co-founders to manage the twin challenges of operations and fundraising.
Ryan: “The first advice I would give is, get a kick ass business partner, especially because in this field and working in emerging markets, you really need a senior leader, ideally a co-founder, on the ground leading local operations. You also need someone who’s going to be dedicated to fundraising, because you can’t really be successful without getting both right. If one person tries to do both, they’re going to burn out so hard. There’s always going to be one aspect of those two things that is going to fall through the cracks, and you need to be on top of both at all times. This is especially true when most impact investors are based in Europe and North America, and operations are in Africa and Asia.”
Audrey: “I agree with Ryan, you need to have a complementary business partner / co-founder whom you can trust, who allows you to divide and conquer while sharing ownership over the responsibilities. When I met Ryan, I realized there was great complementarity in terms of background, skillsets and how we solve problems.”
Lesson 2: Good Mentors are Essential
A good mentor can be a source of inspiration, a sounding board on difficult decisions, a cheerleader in moments of crisis, and a role model on corporate culture. I asked Ryan and Audrey who their mentors were along their entrepreneurial journey.
Ryan: “I have had several mentors, but two stand out as key, who are very dear friends. One is Barry Neal, former head of Environmental Finance at Wells Fargo who hired me and was my boss. I learned a lot from Barry, which had an enormous impact on SunFunder. He taught me the value of treating every transaction as a relationship and avoiding highly transactional people, with whom you don’t form a trusting relationship. Another thing I learned from Barry was how to treat people with kindness and respect. He has been a huge role model for me.
The other person is Ken Locklin. He was a long-time independent board member of SunFunder and a great mentor because he was someone you could call when things were hard, and he would listen and be supportive. You need great supporters who will always have your back, but also tell you when you’re on the wrong track. He’s someone who has seen a lot in his career both in clean energy and development finance. He brought fresh eyes, relevant perspectives and valuable insights, especially during the acquisition. I was constantly on the phone with Ken.
I’ve never before referred to my father as a mentor, but as the owner of a family business that’s been in our family for generations, I absorbed a lot from him too. He taught me the importance of treating people well and taking care of your team.”
Audrey: “Several people have helped me in important ways. The first was Phil LaRocco of E+Co. I remember having coffee with him when I was deciding whether to quit my job and join Ryan. I was honest and told him I was excited but scared. What made me think little Audrey, aged 29 could do this? I was experiencing imposter syndrome. I remember Phil was very blunt with me in his Brooklyn-accented way and said, ‘none of us old white dudes who’ve been at this for decades have been able to figure this out. We need new blood, new perspectives, so give it your best shot.’ That validation from someone with experience who had done it before gave me the confidence to take the leap. He also taught me how to talk to investors, the buzzwords, what they want to hear, etc. That was also helpful.
I was well aware that I had never managed teams in Africa before. We grew the team slowly, but my best mentors, without meaning to be, were my first two hires, Baraka Megiroo and Joshua Kabugo. I was honest with them and said, yes, you report to me, but we’re building this together, so tell me what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. They were so honest with me, which was really helpful.
Ken Locklin was also a mentor and was always happy to get on the phone. He taught me that it’s not just about the business decision, it’s about the importance of articulating criteria for the decision and using those to bring your team on board with it.”
Lesson 3 – Bring on Board Mission-Aligned Shareholders
Fund management start-ups are constantly running on dual “capital raising” treadmills, one to raise equity capital to give the fund management business runway, the other to raise debt capital for deployment. Having the right shareholders, who are mission-aligned and can offer fresh capital support along the way, can be a significant advantage for the first treadmill, especially in moments of stress.
Ryan: “We had no choice but to raise both types of capital simultaneously. It was definitely a hard slog. Raising equity capital was very challenging. We didn’t do a ‘friends and family’ round. We started with a $500k angel / seed round, which these days I guess would be referred to as a “pre-seed” round. It took half a year to get the first $90,000 from five angel investors, which allowed us to start paying our four-person team modest salaries for just a few months. We were continuously raising money. It took another 8-9 months to close the rest of that first round, with over a dozen angel investors. It was like herding cats, but also many of them were really interesting, former entrepreneurs and impact investors themselves, some coming from the clean energy space, and they were incredibly supportive. They were the kind of investor you would want in your capitalization table that made things easier for us. Many supported us over and over again.
There were stressful moments throughout the journey, like having to raise new equity when we were running out of cash. Fortunately, we had a great investor base, and a few key investors supported us over and again (Schneider Electric and Better Ventures, for example). It was always a positive to be real about who we were and what drove us. We might have tried to break out and raise institutional capital from mainstream investors that maybe had an interest in this space, but that weren’t impact or mission-driven investors. In the end, the only investors that worked with us were the ones driven by the mission.”
Audrey: “Fundraising is a monster of a task and Ryan was really focused on this. This highlights the importance of having a co-founder who is complementary that you can trust where you can say, ok, you handle fundraising, and I’ll handle deployment and the Africa operations.”
Lesson 4 – Invest in Relationships, Not Transactions. Be Transparent.
Taking the advice of his mentor to heart, Ryan says developing relationships became an integral part of the SunFunder business culture, as well as being transparent with investors, especially when things went wrong. These aspects of their business culture were important for building trust and retaining repeat investors.
Ryan: “One of the biggest lessons learned in fundraising was being transparent with investors. We tried to live by that, and we knew (being investors ourselves) that you don’t want to hear about something going wrong from the market or when it’s too late. If we saw a problem emerging, like a default in our loan portfolio, we would often give key investors a heads up and tell them the steps we were taking to deal with it. That built trust, and trust was as important, if not more so, than our track record.
People say every start-up has several ‘holy sh*t, we’re going to die’ moments. The most intense was managing our flagship Beyond the Grid Fund (“BTG”), which had worse-than-expected portfolio quality issues, but because of the blended finance structure, the senior investors were fully repaid. Those investors believed in us and continued to back us because we were able to communicate through the mistakes and how we learned from them. If those investors hadn’t stepped up to back our successor fund, the Solar Energy Transformation Fund (“SET”), we wouldn’t have survived as a company. Closing the SET fund was a major milestone that gave us a new lease on life. It not only allowed us to take all the lessons learned from BTG and prove that we can do better, it enabled us to become financially sustainable for the first time.
I would advise anyone contemplating starting up a fund management business to be intentional and thoughtful about lessons learned and communicating them openly, not just with investors, but to team members and stakeholders as well. It’s so hard to get everything right. You’re not going to. It’s really important to be transparent. It can benefit you in many ways, especially in building trust with investors. Be open and transparent from the start about things you’re not getting right, not just about things you’re doing well.”
Audrey: “We learned the importance of transparency in communications and developing a relationship based on trust, especially with the early, first-mover investors who became repeat investors. Having other investors see that confidence based on their track record and experience goes a long way. We launched the BTG fund about 3 years after the off-grid solar sector had launched. From the investor perspective, BTG was perceived as the worst it could get, and now the SET fund will benefit from all those lessons learned. Nobody had true expertise in the sector, which was still figuring itself out.”
Lesson 5 – Hire Mission-Aligned Staff, Build Team Culture
From Part I, we learned that Audrey’s motivation to become an entrepreneur stemmed from a desire to start a company that would bring together bright, passionate people from diverse backgrounds. Being forward-leaning about being a mission-driven company proved important for attracting and retaining talent.
Audrey: “I have informal advisory chats with entrepreneurs, and we end up talking non-stop about hiring, firing, recruiting, and retaining talent. That is really the most difficult aspect of running a company, particularly in the African context. It is the most important thing to get right, and it was a big part of my job. You can’t justify a full-time HR manager if you have less than 40 persons.
A big lesson learned for me was hiring based on character. Obviously, people had to have the base technical skills, but we were always willing to gamble a bit if we felt the person was solid character-wise, fully mission-aligned, curious, wanted to learn, and asked questions. Working in financial services, you have to hire based on character. You can get wowed by the CVs of people that have done amazing things, but I think character is so, so important. Character is not just about integrity. Hire and invest in people who are self-aware, resilient, intellectually curious, who want to learn, have courage, and a low ego. They contribute to the team and to the mission, and not just serve themselves.
Part of the joy of being a small company is your relationship with your colleagues. The hardest thing about selling the company was not being able to drive the culture. As a founder who’s passionate about culture, that was really hard to let go of. It was one of the things I loved so much about my entrepreneurial journey: being able to build and shape that culture from the top, not just through whom I’m hiring, but also how we plan goals, how we treat each other, emulating what you want to see from the team.
In the end, it’s all about the team. People would join us for the mission and stay for the team.”
Ryan: “I’m proud of the team and special team culture that we built and how passionate and motivated they were. Whenever we did surveys, the number one thing that staff loved most about working there was the team. That was what held it all together.
Competition for loans and team members became fierce at times. We weren’t able to offer the highest salaries, but our brand and our team made it possible to attract other talented people in the industry who wanted to work for us.
We would only hire people deeply aligned with the mission. That was a prerequisite and the first question we asked. The first question on a job interview was, ‘why do you want to work for SunFunder?’ I really wanted to hear their passion for what we were doing.
Looking back at the people who didn’t work out in retrospect, you could see they were here for the wrong reasons. My mentor Barry told me that his number one criteria for hiring a new employee was intellectual curiosity. Do they have the right personality and mindset to learn, grow and develop those core skills needed and be someone who can adapt?
It takes quite an operation to execute on million-dollar loans in a totally nascent sector in Sub-Saharan Africa successfully. We hired some incredible people. As we became more secure, stable and prominent as an organization, our brand enabled us to up the talent. It was a great team. They were the smartest, coolest, funniest, most interesting group of people that I’ve been around in my life. And they were passionately aligned with our mission.
But we didn’t always get it right. We had some challenges with a few people where things got difficult. Those were probably the most stressful moments for me. One person can have an oversized role in harming the team culture. One person with an inflated ego, can be very influential and change the whole team vibe. It is the kind of thing you can lose sleep over for months.”
Lesson 6 – Pivot, Iterate, Accept There Will Be Tradeoffs. Stay True to Your Mission
As an innovative financing company, SunFunder pivoted many times in its business strategy, which required making risk-return tradeoffs to remain profitable. But it always stayed focused on addressing energy poverty through renewable energy in developing countries.
Audrey: “In terms of sacrifices at SunFunder, we were always about being innovative, pioneering first-movers, and being transformative with our investments. But to become profitable, you have to scale, and it is harder to do that with small-ticket loans, or with taking more risk. I’m not just referring to smaller, earlier-stage companies or supporting local companies, but we did some pretty risky loans, for example, bridge loans to buy companies time to raise equity. Some of these companies are leaders in the sector today, but who knows if they’d still be around had we not made those loans. Some of the smaller companies we used to finance have told us we wouldn’t be here today were it not for SunFunder. Some of them ended up being acquired by bigger players to enter new markets. So, looking back at our journey, I do feel like we were having more catalytic impact when we were taking more risk.”
Ryan: “We were really good at staying true to our mission, always. We pivoted in our business strategy, but our north star was using innovative finance to address climate change and energy poverty in emerging markets. In the early days, we were doing smaller loans ($50,000-$200,000) to local entrepreneurs in Africa, and it made sense because we had less capital to deploy, but also because the industry was smaller and less mature.
Once we got bigger and were raising larger amounts of money, as a for-profit company, it was not economically viable for us to make $100,000 loans anymore, or even $750,000 loans unless they led to follow-on investments. That was a shame because there was still a funding gap for smaller, earlier-stage entrepreneurs. That was a sacrifice we didn’t feel great about. But there is still a strong, legitimate case to be made for multi-million dollar loans when you’re funding distributed clean energy in Sub-Saharan Africa, helping millions of people gain access to clean energy.
We learned a lot from some early mistakes in terms of how we structured loans. We also expanded our strategy (sector and geography). It’s important to adjust and evolve your strategy, but not your mission and values. Our mission was never about focusing exclusively on off-grid solar in Africa. It was always about pioneering scale with distributed clean energy in emerging markets. We pivoted on how we raised debt funding, starting with crowdfunding and moving to private debt placements, then regulated debt funds. We also expanded our loan portfolio strategy within the sector to new segments like cellphone tower solarization, mini-grids, and agri-solar. Part of the vision was building a little track record in a new segment and then taking it further within the guardrails given by investors. Eventually, those niche segments become part of the core strategy.”
Lesson 7 – Practice Good Self-care
What advice would they give to entrepreneurs to deal with the stress of running a business?
Audrey: “I would say first, figuring out how to switch off your brain is important. Recreational use of some things can be helpful, but also yoga Nidra, or just going out in your garden. I made it a goal not to work on weekends. Sometimes, obviously, you have to, but I would work like mad Monday through Friday to be able to switch off on weekends.
During the most stressful start-up days in Arusha, I would sometimes just hide my phone on weekends and not look at it.
Second, learning about and understanding the mind-body connection and “breath work” is important. I’m not great at exercise, but looking after your body, and just breathing, is completely a lifesaver for me.
The third thing is humor. There were times when we were in a real sh*tty situation and Ryan and I were on the phone and one of us would just make a joke and laugh it out, and that just feels better.”
Ryan: “It’s easy when you’re starting a company and doing something important to take yourself too seriously. It’s important not to.”
Audrey: “Another thing I did was in my social circles, I would avoid people who worked in our field. I made friends with people working in completely different sectors, and would hang out with creative people. That was so helpful.”
Ryan: “I did the same thing when I moved to DC. It would have been easy to network within our industry and make friends that way, and I regret it, because I know there are many cool people in our space. I focused more on building a community around music. People in my band didn’t know much about what I did for a living except that I had to travel a lot. It was not anything we ever talked about. It’s sometimes nice having friends where you don’t talk about work when you’re together.”
Audrey: “Sometimes, as entrepreneurs, we define ourselves by what we do. So, when things aren’t going well at work, you feel like you’re a failure. But if you are hanging out and creating friendships and bonds with people who are just enjoying who you are and don’t really care about what you do, that makes you a more resilient person. When there’s sh*t going on at work, that doesn’t mean Audrey is sh*t. I think that’s a mental burden that many entrepreneurs feel. When something is failing in their work life, that means they’re a failure in life. That’s just not true. It is important to look at your life more holistically and not define your worth by the work that you do. It should just be based on who you are.”
This concludes Part II, which summarizes Ryan and Audrey’s 7 lessons learned about scaling a business in a dynamic market and what advice they would give to other would-be entrepreneurs. Part III will provide their observations about the evolution of the market and their predictions for what comes next. Stay tuned.
Full disclosure: the company I work for invested in several funds managed by SunFunder, and I got to know Audrey and Ryan through those transactions. I normally don’t blog about my work, but felt comfortable doing so because their company was sold to Mirova three years ago, and both of them have since left the company. I’ve avoided discussing those transactions on purpose and have chosen to focus the blog instead on their entrepreneurial journey.
It’s great that someone gets to tell this story. Thank you so much, Anthony Randazzo.