Rapid Startup

A new online incubator is going to change the rules of power in early-stage-investments’ game

What if you can create your startup today!. You validate profitability and impact wise the social enterprise idea you want to create, you find co-founders, you create a team and secure the needed resources, you launch your fully functional prototype in a span of few weeks.

Is this possible? Long answer is: YES.

The idea very simple. It is about entrepreneurial projects. Normally, in the investment world the early stage projects attract certain types of investment. Mainly incubators would host such projects for a certain % of equity. Venture Capital (VC) entities also get interested in early stage startups for a blessing piece of stake. Problem is that entrepreneurs need to compromise a lot of their thoughts and dreams in order to be “accepted” by investors. This shift in focus from the product-customer to the investor is disastrous. Because it is an old model of thinking and a very outdated school of management. I will explain why.

Investors tend to be themselves and do recruit people who are normally risk averse. They want to make sure their investment choices are right. On the other hand, entrepreneurs, and mainly in the digital era and space, and more precisely when it comes to projects with social and environmental dimensions are innovators and creative.

Now the old dominant model of thinking since the 1980s we were taught is that the two halves of our brains have two different and separated functions and they both operate sequentially and linearly.

That is wrong. 20 years later we discovered it is not the case. We do not do the analysis and calculations then hand the results to the creative, ask them to get into the room and brainstorm. It does not work this way by assuming we provided the creative team with -ALL- the information they need to create. In fact, we just omitted the world of possibilities and substituted it with an information sheet restricted by our pragmatic and risk-averse attitude.

On the other hand, creative alone can not work. Because creative people have that strong tendency to break boundaries. You can not break all boundaries. Otherwise why do not start with the creative team payrolls, no more salaries this month? does that work? No.

This is why people work in teams. But this is not how it works when it comes to investments. Why? because investors think they are the most powerful player in the game. They mandate their conditions. Why? Again, an old-model of thinking not only mainstreamed culturally by the two halves of the brain model, but also by the industrial revolution means of production and distribution that many of us are still stuck to. The old model of thinking about the value creation & chain (chain, what an ugly word).

In the past, products needed huge investments to create factories, production facilities and distribution channels. Then later on, mass production brought with it mass communication which required shooting one thousand bullets to get a bird. Why? because personification was not possible before social networking and online marketing.

All of this -production, distribution and marketing functions- required huge investments. Well not anymore with the digital products. In the digital products era, you do not need those huge investments. The factory is the domain host, the distribution is the channels, and the communication take place there all the way long. Many touch points and many customer journeys and many storytelling experiences. It is very personalized which means it is highly efficient. We do not throw balloons in the air and hope someone will realize them, get interested and then, catch them and follow!!

Yes, it is true that with these lower walls to climb, it becomes also easier for many entities to enter. competition is much easier. And this is why the main resource at stake became the human brain and information. This also explains why creating data products/ platforms make a lot of money ! This is why many decided to invest in this instead of read estate or other classical risk-free (almost) businesses.

So that is a contextual explanation why the power of investor became lesser. It also explain the uprising of other types of powers. The coders and the digital marketeers.

We talk all the time about data mining and the age of information and the fourth revolution. All this show the power of data, which is mainly texts, images, audios, and videos as raw material. In brief the power of brain creations. The power of this material when extracted by expert humans -and we are not taking about data scientists or neurologists only here- brings huge rewards. This age of data requires language experts for the marketing and communication function -content creation and community influence, engagement and impact- and language experts for the production -programming languages and Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks.. etc.-. Those are the ones in demand today. We can not keep treating them as sub-ordinates. We can not let the old rules of the game limit the variety of possibilities societies aspire to re-invent themselves. And those language experts (text. visual. symbolic, non, silence, etc.) need to be partners rather than employees.

With all the talks we are making everyday about circular economy, sustainability, ecology, global warming, fair trade, three bottom lines (profit, planet, people) we need to change the models of creating enterprises in the first place. We need to think now only on how to create, manage, maintain complex systems but also how to put many complex systems in harmony and synergy together. This is very possible and bellow is a solution.

We need a new model of investment in startups. Mainly in the seed phase. A model which encourages creativity and innovative solutions rather than limiting and collapsing them. Here is a platform for that. A platform to help people create socially and environmentally conscious and profitable enterprises rapidly without the need for too much time, too many papers and too much bureaucracy and excessive control of power.

We are democratizing startingups.

Here is this amazingly helpful platform. A platform where mainly five types of people would love to join because they will create the best teams ever and create rapid experiments and render MVPs with social and environmental dimensions to the market:

1- Entrepreneurs with creative viable and profitable ideas that enjoy socio-environmental dimensions.

2- Coders, programmers and IT experts.

3- Digital communicators & marketeers

4- Experts in other domains but with platform business focus (HR, stakeholder analysts, etc).

5- Investors.

More on my next article & thanks for taking the time to read this.