Transforming VC with Maslow’s Hierarchy
I started my life as a economist and international relations major researching solutions for the common person in the US Congress for Oregon during the 2008 financial collapse.
I learned the intricate nature of credit markets. I learned that the value of any system is the trust humans put into it. I started to think that if language is the autobiography of man, then economics must be the biography. To be honest, humanity wasn’t writing good stories anymore.
I heard the cries of people who had put 100% of their trust in their pensions to invest their money into funds that would give them a healthy return. They believed that they would be set for life, having put in money year after year, while getting healthy returns with compounding interest. When systemic risk overcame the web of investments, it fell apart, and most lost their entire net worth. The markets, and self confidence, took a long time to recover. We saw that economics is a fiction, at best.
In stepped Bitcoin, a technological and currency innovation that would test the world and be proven correct. I went to work at Coinbase, and then ChangeTip, instead of getting an economics PhD or continuing towards working at the central banks. Then, came blockchain applications. After that, we had a number of years while world economies plummeted, balanced, and responded to crises during which cryptographers worked away like monks and nuns on technology that has the capacity to allow us to organize and build to save ourselves and our planet. Everything was seemingly quiet. Then, the value of bitcoin exploded.
Now, we reach 2017 and ICOs are unfolding new possibilities. Being a part of this technology landscape as an economist, venture capitalist, technologist and tech booster for nearly a decade has taught me how to navigate. I know how to test and use technologies to understand what ICOs to invest in and nurture. I live to marry the ecological and environmental world with technology so that we can find a healthy, strong path forward for everyone. I do this work as a VC and community organizer.
Basically, technology needs to follow the stack up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. VCs and regenerative economists need to focus ourselves this way so we can influence the next generation of promising technologists. We need to direct our energies as investors up this stack gradually. While value exchange is very important, it’s even more important to work to build decentralized technological applications in healthcare, ecology, permaculture, energy markets, and every other area of human life as we know it. Right now, a lot of our work is piecemeal based on what enterprise solutions we can sell. I predict that if we look and work with the bottom of the pyramid, that the flow upwards towards the pyramid will serve all of our needs, including our enterprise partners. This organizing of our efforts is imperative.
Right now, I am working with decentralized technologies, philanthropists, other vcs, engineers, machine learning, and cryptographers to build the technological stack into the Sustainable Development Goals. We are bringing blockchain, moving beyond blockchain with open source decentralized technology like Ceptr.org. We are bringing decentralized renewable energy, the media world stage, and decentralized currencies, and ICOs to communities like Standing Rock, as an example. We are building regenerative economies.
Stay tuned for more specific projects as they flow from us.
The future is here and it is our job to ensure that it is evenly distributed.
Move fast, sustain things.
With love,
Munpriya
