Jen van der Meer is a business model designer and financial architect. Through Reason Street, she works with health, climate, and civic organizations – and the investors funding them – on outcomes-based financing, blended finance, and capital stack design.

She brings 25+ years of experience as a founder with exits in social data and health tech, an executive leader at Frog and Organic, an equity analyst at the Netscape IPO, a development finance researcher at the Japan Development Bank, and, earlier, a laboratory assistant at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. She’s been inside the funding structures that many organizations depend on and understands both their logic and their limitations.

Her current focus is helping organizations understand where they stand, see what’s possible, and decide where to build as they negotiate their next stage of funding or find paths to self-sustaining growth. She works across nonprofits, for-profits, funds, individual investors, cooperatives, and purpose-driven ventures on the problems that arise when structure meets strategy. For nonprofits, this means approaching capital from a position of clarity rather than dependency. For for-profits, it means a strategy set by your organization and the customers and communities you serve, not just by capital. For investors, it means readiness to invest capital in systemic outcomes.

At Parsons School of Design at The New School, she co-directs the Transdisciplinary Design MFA, a program focused on narratives and practices for systems change, and serves as the co-chair of the ACIR, Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility. She teaches sustainable business models and contribution design, a practice focused on whether economic activity maintains or degrades the conditions for life to persist. She is Research and Practice Lead at FEST (Financing Ecosystems for Systemic Transformation), where leading systems practitioners, investors, and field-builders are designing new ways to fund systems change work that falls between traditional philanthropy and investment.

Jen earned an MBA from HEC Paris and a BA in Comparative Religion from Trinity College.

View Jen’s popular no-nonsense explainer libraries: Business Model Library Capital Library

And Substack on Contribution Design.

See Jen speak:

Coherence Across Scales Series: FEST Community Meeting

Beyond Business Model Frames Boundaryless Podcast

Business Design with Reason Street founder & CEO Jennifer van der Meer on product design podcast CallmeJZ

NYU, Business Models, and Entrepreneurship on Channel 5 NYC Fox News

Seeking Design Leaders at SVA’s Products of Design

Two Kinds of Startups at Strata Ignite

And reach Jen here: LinkedIn