Stephan Erkelens had travelled to the Netherlands to sell coffee. The executive he had come to see opened his office door, looked at his visitor and decided the meeting could wait. His instruction was brief: “come back in ten years.” Erkelens looked too young. An international sales trip had run aground on the apparent age of the salesman.
He remembers being angry, then more determined. Years later, the episode supplies an unusually economical introduction to his work. Today, as co-founder, president and CEO of RevHub, he helps assemble opportunities for other people trying to get a business heard. A closed door is a familiar business metaphor. His came with travel expenses.
Born in Argentina, Erkelens lived in Guatemala before moving to California with his wife and three children in 1996. His working life has crossed commodities, banking, capital markets and nonprofit leadership. The geography changed; the business of connecting people with opportunities kept finding him.
Coffee, before the incubator
Coffee was a family business before it was a route into social enterprise. Erkelens’s grandfather operated a Guatemalan coffee business in the 1930s. By 2013, Erkelens had worked across the industry for more than twenty years, from production and processing to exporting, importing and trading. He understood the product at several points in its journey, including the places where somebody else took over.
Through Axiom Coffee Ventures, he worked with Greg Ubert of Ohio-based Crimson Cup on its Friend2Farmer program. The relationships came with conditions: purchases should benefit the growing community, buyers should make a lasting commitment, transactions should be transparent, and there should be continuing evidence that the money helped. These are specific obligations to carry along with a sack of beans.
Another venture, Growers First Coffee, listed him as CEO. Founded in December 2010, it described a business connecting small-plot growers with consumers through traceability. Its pitch combined the familiar pleasure of knowing where a product comes from with a less decorative concern: whether the producer could build a sustainable livelihood from making it.
That is a useful distinction within his career. Knowledge of a market can be used to negotiate an individual deal. It can also be used to reconsider the arrangement that makes the deal possible. A grower may have something worth buying and still need a reliable route to the person prepared to pay for it.
A company built around introductions
Erkelens co-founded RevHub in 2019. Its early partnership with Impact Hub connected the Orange County organisation to an international network devoted to social enterprise. The ambition extended beyond one county, while the immediate work remained local: bring investors, entrepreneurs, mentors and institutions into useful contact. An incubator has to begin somewhere, and somewhere usually has a postcode.
For Erkelens, Orange County offered foundations, businesses, universities and public institutions with resources to contribute. The practical challenge was persuading those resources to work together around young companies. A founder could bring the problem and a proposed solution; the surrounding community could help supply experience, facilities and introductions.
In March 2021, RevHub launched its first social enterprise cohort with UCI Beall Applied Innovation. The program was built on the university’s Wayfinder incubator and met within its Cove facilities. That gave the partnership an address and an operating framework. The founders were to receive help finding capital, resources and expertise as they developed their ventures.
The university connection matters because it makes collaboration tangible. An incubator’s promise has to turn into a place to meet, someone to consult and a next step that can be completed. The first cohort was one way of giving Erkelens’s larger argument a working timetable.
Different needs, connected support. A schematic of RevHub’s approach, not a guarantee of funding.
By July 2023, RevHub was adding people whose titles made the intention plain. Joe Padilla became advisor navigator, bringing leadership and program-development experience. Jenalyn Santos became community navigator, working on outreach and partnerships. The organisation was assigning staff to the work of helping people find one another.
There is something refreshingly practical about the word navigator. It assumes that a route may exist without being obvious to the person who needs it. Erkelens’s emphasis on access appears here as a staffing decision: put somebody in charge of the connections, then give that person a community to work with.
“Entrepreneurship is not about being Superman.”
Stephan Erkelens
Money with a job to do
RevFund I arrived in June 2022. RevHub designed it to direct catalytic capital toward social enterprise ventures. Public, philanthropic and impact-first money have different purposes and expectations; the challenge is arranging them around a business that is still proving itself. A founder needs to know what the money is meant to make possible, as well as when it may have to come back.
In December that year, RevHub announced its first $1 million fundraising milestone. The announcement also recognised Julie Cranston’s role in its fundraising and RevFund efforts. It is an important detail in a story about a chief executive who spends much of his time advocating cooperation. The fund had people doing the unglamorous work of making it a fund.
Erkelens’s own explanation of the model starts with experience in nonprofit leadership. He saw organisations accomplish useful work while facing limits on how far they could expand. Applying a commercial model to coffee gave him another way to think about preserving a mission while generating revenue. RevHub carried that question into other industries.
In April 2024, he reported that RevHub had incubated thirty impact startups and invested in eight. Those figures describe different activities. Helping a venture prepare for investment and choosing to invest in it are separate decisions. The distinction keeps the story grounded in what an incubator and a fund actually do.
RevHub results reported by Erkelens in April 2024. Historical figures, not a live portfolio count.
Measurement became part of the arrangement too. In January 2023, RevHub announced a partnership with ImpactableX for impact measurement and valuation. A company promising a social or environmental benefit needs a way to examine that promise. Alongside the financial questions sit questions about outcomes, evidence and whether the business is doing what it was established to do.
For an organisation bringing together several kinds of money, a shared way to discuss results has obvious value. Founders and funders may agree on a mission while approaching it with different expectations. Measurement gives them something more specific to discuss than mutual enthusiasm.
A light switch and a larger climate effort
Consider FlickPower. RevHub announced an investment in the venture in November 2022, after it completed an incubation cohort. Its product, Flick, used colour-coded signals to help electricity customers adjust their behaviour according to prices, carbon emissions or the availability of renewable energy. A large environmental question had been brought down to something a person could notice on a wall.
The business linked the timing of energy use with customer decisions. As utilities introduced rates that varied by time of day, a signal could help people respond. It is a concrete example of the territory Erkelens works in: a product seeking customers while addressing an environmental problem. The mission has to survive contact with ordinary household habits.
The climate work widened through the Climate Action Business Incubator, known as CABI, developed with Sustain SoCal and UCI Beall Applied Innovation. By October 2023, its reported funding had reached $2 million. RevHub contributed $200,000, alongside an initial $1 million university grant and $800,000 from other sources. Several institutions had to bring something to the table.
CABI sought to support ten to twenty startups working on environmental problems. Erkelens described an interest in businesses helping people adapt and become more resilient. His role was becoming increasingly concerned with the conditions around a venture: which partners could help it develop, what expertise it required and how early support could make progress possible.
The network leaves the county
In 2024, Erkelens and fellow RevHub co-founder Tim Shaw attended the Sorenson Impact Summit in Utah. The gathering brought discussions of finance, inclusion and environmental sustainability into the same setting. Their account paid particular attention to the gap between impact investment and debt financing, another reminder that a worthy project and an appropriate source of money do not automatically find each other.
His regional connections also include the Alliance for SoCal Innovation’s Partner Leadership Council. The council connects organisations across Southern California and supports collaboration around economic development. It is another setting in which the work is partly about knowing who else is working on an adjacent problem, and when it might be useful to compare notes.
By November 2025, Erkelens was making a broader policy argument. In a guest essay about California’s Jobs First Blueprint, he called for better coordination between capital, talent and policy. He pointed to Canada’s social finance framework as something California could learn from, with local adaptation. His emphasis remained on helping ideas progress beyond a promising pilot.
That argument carries the same concern through a larger geography. A business can stall between stages of support. A relationship can bridge the gap, provided the organisations involved have made the effort to coordinate. Erkelens called for experimentation and persistence, acknowledging that a model would need to fit the place where people were trying to use it.
The young coffee salesman at the Dutch office door could hardly have requested a more literal lesson in access. His later career has involved building arrangements in which access receives deliberate attention: a buyer relationship, a university cohort, a navigator, a fund. Each has a different job. Together, they show what he has chosen to spend his experience on: making the next useful meeting more likely to happen.