Jessica Kim & Dave Blanchard

Our guests are ianacare Co-Founder & CEO (and Praxis Venture Partner) Jessica Kim, and Dave Blanchard, Praxis CEO & Co-Founder.

ianacare Co-Founder & CEO Jessica Kim and Praxis Co-Founder & CEO Dave Blanchard—both serial business entrepreneurs—introduce our latest Praxis Playbook at the 2021 Praxis Academy. The Redemptive Business is the third in our playbook series, following A Rule of Life for Redemptive Entrepreneurs, and The Redemptive Nonprofit.

Jessica and Dave served as faculty for the Redemptive Business course at the nine-week 2021 Praxis Academy. The Redemptive Business playbook is the basis for this course, which Jessica and Dave led for over 200 builders, innovators, and entrepreneurs—from college students to organizational leaders several decades into their career. 

This episode features highlights of their teaching sessions for the Redemptive Business course. They’ll discuss the deep tensions at the heart of late-modern capitalism, and explain why they come down on the side of optimism about the entrepreneurial possibilities of our age. They introduce the two great myths of business—the inevitability of progress and the supremacy of money—and share their thoughts on topics like the proper relationship of love and profit in a business, and how redemptive ventures build brands differently. 

It’s a window into a series of conversations between two visionary leaders (and close friends) that also serves as a great introduction to the mindsets, tensions, practices, and opportunities of redemptive business entrepreneurship.

To learn more:

The Redemptive Business
The Redemptive Nonprofit
The Rule of Life
Praxis resources
Praxis Academy

About The Guests

Jessica Kim is the Co-Founder & CEO of ianacare, which is on a mission to encourage, empower, and equip family caregivers. It is one platform that organizes and mobilizes all the support and social determinants of health. At the age of 19, she started Jessica's Wonders, a baked good company, out of her college dorm room, raised $1M her senior year, and grew it to national distribution. She then worked at Kraft Foods in brand management. In 2008, Jessica launched BabbaCo to invest in the future of parenting through subscription activity boxes. BabbaCo was acquired in 2014 by Barefoot Books, where she served as President for two years before becoming an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at Charles River Ventures. She was honored as Crain's Top 40 under 40, Women in Digital Health Award, and the inaugural EIR at Brown University. She graduated from Brown University and has an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. She lives in Boston with her three children and husband, Peter. She is a caregiver for her dad.

Dave Blanchard is passionate about encouraging Christian-led entrepreneurship that has a positive impact on society. To this end, he co-founded and leads Praxis, which works to motivate, educate, and resource Christians to pursue redemptive entrepreneurship, to renew the spirit of the age. Praxis supports ventures through its accelerator programs that have graduated a global portfolio of over 200 business and nonprofits, while also building Praxis Academy, a learning and resourcing center for redemptive action that has developed 1,000 entrepreneurial leaders. Previously, Dave was a Principal Designer at innovation firm IDEO and founded two companies in music and technology. The author of From Concept to Scale, he's had the privilege of speaking at varied venues including The White House, Harvard, Q, and The Gathering. He has a BA from Babson College, an MBA & MEM from Northwestern, and lives in Manhattan, where he is part of Church of the City.