We are often asked, “Why full stack?” Why not focus only on investments, or double down on one area of expertise?
It’s a fair question—and one rooted in the dominant thinking of conventional business strategy: focus on your core competence, build a moat, pursue efficiency, and let markets do the rest. But that logic breaks down when your competition isn’t another firm, but poverty, disease, and climate change.
The business school playbook teaches us what works—based on case studies of what worked for those who were already funded, supported, and celebrated within systems designed to reward what works for them. It’s a self-reinforcing loop. But when markets fail—as they often do for the underserved—you need a new playbook.
Solving complex, systemic problems requires building new systems, not just new products.
That’s why we are building Social Alpha as a full-stack platform. To create a meaningful impact, you must address the problem across its entire value chain: from research to deployment, from innovation to adoption, from capital to policy, and from lab to last mile.
You can’t fix market failures by working within the market alone. You have to stitch together what the market overlooks: patient capital, translational science, demand aggregation, community engagement, policy integration, and risk-sharing mechanisms. You must bridge not just one but multiple valleys of death, each more unpredictable than the last.
Whether you want to:
- enable climate resilience and a net-zero transition,
- raise incomes and reduce the risks and drudgery for smallholder farmers,
- improve health outcomes through screening, diagnostics and primary care,
- or address nutrition and neglected diseases at scale—
—you need a model that doesn’t just fit the system. You need a model that rebuilds it.
That’s what the full-stack approach enables: it creates long-term competitive advantage not against other players, but against the entrenched forces that perpetuate inequality, exclusion, and unsustainability.
And this is not new. Every major wave of innovation begins full-stack. The first automobile didn’t just need an engine—it needed roads, fuel stations, mechanics, and traffic laws. The entire system had to be imagined and triggered. The same is true when you’re building for underserved populations and unmet needs, like climate resilience, smallholder prosperity, or health equity. If the system doesn’t exist, you must build the system.
But that doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. Full stack is not about control—it’s accountability. You don’t look away when critical gaps exist. You take responsibility for solving the problem end-to-end. You identify the missing pieces—labs, policy support, community engagement, patient capital, deployment partners—and either build them or find those who can. If no such partners exist, you don’t walk away. You build the bridge, knowing you’ll hand it over when the time is right. You hold the system accountable to the problem, not for your organisational boundary. You stay with it until the market, the state, or civil society can take over—and then you move on to the next unaddressed gap or missing link.
In that sense, full stack is less a structure and more a posture: a commitment to follow the problem wherever it goes, and to take responsibility for aligning the incentives and actors needed to solve it at scale.
But full stack is not forever. A full-stack platform must also know when to start disaggregating—handing off mature functions to the market, the state, or other ecosystem actors—so that energy and resources can be redirected to the next set of broken, missing, or fragile links in the chain. The goal is not to stay full stack indefinitely, but to remain full stack where it’s needed most.
Because in a world where the problems are systemic, the solutions cannot be siloed. You don’t solve the problem partially—you solve it fully.
That’s why we are full-stack.
– Written by Manoj Kumar, Founder, Social Alpha