Initiators Guild Part III: Working on Overlooked Insights
This is Part III of a series of blogs introducing The Initiators Guild, a new project by INVANTI. We suggest reading Part I and Part II, if you have not already, before reading this post. Other posts in the Introducing the Initiators Guild series: Part I, Part II, Part IV
On the Initiators Guild website, you will see a quote about the impact that drives me on the About page.
“I can’t stand when bad assumptions about problems get in the way of thinking creatively about new solutions. I love betting on people to prove those assumptions wrong.”
This frustration probably comes partly from my personality, but it is also informed by my training as an engineer. You are taught in school that to solve any problem in engineering you must first, understand what problem you are solving and then second, state the assumptions you will need to make to solve it.
This rough framework underpins a lot of what we have tried to do with INVANTI, and translates over to the Initiators Guild as well. But it doesn’t just define our process, it also informs the types of problems that we are excited and driven to solve.
Where are the bad assumptions?
As I was writing a draft of this post, this tweet came across my feed.
With no disrespect to Slack or other technology companies, this is a pretty good illustration of our interest in problems, technology, and entrepreneurship. We are most fascinated by the issues that (1) impact the daily lives of most people in the US and (2) are most often overlooked or quickly dismissed as “social”, and therefore the responsibility of government or non-profits.
To be honest, we have had a really hard time explaining what we mean when we say “impact”. This is partly due to there being no standard definition (everyone struggles with this), but also because there are many different types of impact that matter to different people.
We have come up with a framework, and think it’s the best description yet of the problems we want to work on and the companies we want to create. The first dimension of our framework is unabashedly co-opted from our good friends at the Financial Health Network. They have abstracted three key elements to financial health, and after spending some time thinking about it, we believe that they apply to many other areas of daily life as well.
The three dimensions are:
- Managing the Day-to-Day — Do people have the ability to meet their daily needs?
- Building Resilience — Do people have the ability to weather shocks?
- Taking Advantage of Opportunity — Do people have the ability to act when opportunity presents itself?
The second dimension of our framework applies these three elements to different areas of daily life in the United States. We try to center ourselves on “kitchen table” issues — the things you can imagine individuals, couples, parents, and friends worrying about and discussing on any given day at the kitchen table.
- Financial Health
- Small Business Ownership
- Employment
- Housing
- Transportation
- Childcare
- Physical & Mental Health
- etc…
We think some of the best “bad assumptions” primed for disruption through applying technology and new business models lie at the intersection of these two dimensions. And the best part about solving these types of problems is that they have the key ingredients for an impact company — problems that are both intense at an individual level and widely experienced. The intensity means that potential customers are motivated to seek out new and better solutions and the pervasiveness of the problems means that there are a lot of those potential customers out there.
Here are just a few examples of the types of issues we think lie at these intersections (note that this is not an exhaustive list of what we are interested in — just a taste of how our framework allows us to think through potential problems to solve):
Aligning Impact & Profit
We are humble in understanding that topics like housing, employment, transportation, and the others listed above are not going to be solved by just one company, or even by entrepreneurship in general. Entrepreneurship is a tool in the box, accompanied by equally important government policy and non-profit programming. However, we think entrepreneurship is being under leveraged, and there are a lot of elements of these issues that could be solved through for-profit business models. Not only that, but doing so frees up time and resources for policymakers and non-profits to concentrate on the people and issues that really need non-market-based solutions.
The exciting part from an entrepreneurship perspective is that these issues reflect big opportunities to build great companies. Companies who provide better or cheaper solutions will have loyal customer bases because of how essential these issues are to daily life. These are also issues that touch a large majority of the population — meaning the businesses that solve them have room for growth and scale. And lastly, using a company to solve them keeps you accountable to your customers and users — your business model will depend on it.
That being said, to actually solve these issues in a sustainable way we have to think deeply about aligning the impact of the business with the profit of the business. From day one, building the right incentives for the business model, such that creating more impact inherently means creating more profit, is a design challenge that the founder has a responsibility to address. Thinking through, “What is the impact that would be created?”, “How would I measure that impact?”, and “How would I design a business model that incentivizes making more of that impact?” is difficult, but ultimately leads to better, more customer-centric, durable businesses.
As one of our mentors says, “All businesses create impact, the questions are, ‘what kind?’, and ‘are you paying attention to it?’”
If you or someone you know is passionate about working on important problems and has a track record of initiating things, reach out — we would love to see you apply to the Initiators Guild.
