Initiators Guild Part IV: Building in Place
This is Part IV of a series of blogs introducing The Initiators Guild, a new project by INVANTI. We suggest reading Part I Part II, and Part III if you have not already, before reading this post.
An intentional feature of the Initiators Guild is that it is built to be remote — the experience will be almost entirely digital and will be able to accommodate both full-time and part-time participation. We believe we can open up access to a lot more initiators by doing this and are excited by the potential geographic reach we can have.
For some that have followed INVANTI closely though, this seems a bit at odds with the way we have thought about and built our startup studio. An important component of the studio is that it is intentional about place — we think for certain founders, physically being in South Bend is an advantage in translating an overlooked insight into a company.
So what role does place have in the Guild? And how does a remote Guild tie in with a place-based studio?
Why does “place” matter for entrepreneurship?
Before we answer these questions directly, we want to speak briefly on why we think place matters for entrepreneurship in the first place.
Place as an Asset
We think being intentional about place can lead to more successful companies, measured by both financial and impact metrics. As we talked about in Part III, we are specifically interested in overlooked insights that can translate into making the daily lives of the majority of Americans better. We look for these insights in everything from financial health, to housing, to childcare, and more. The thing about overlooked insights, though, is that they are not so easy to find. You’ll be hard pressed to find them in Google searches or surveys, or even the best academic research. Overlooked insights most often live within people’s stories — sometimes so baked into their daily experience that they themselves don’t always see them. But to get access to these stories, which are often deeply personal and painful, you need a core ingredient — trust. Trust is built in many ways, but one powerful mechanism is by physically spending time together. As one influential community leader in South Bend likes to say, “Innovation moves at the speed of trust.”
The communities that are intentional about the sense of place and belonging amongst its members have an incredible asset for entrepreneurship — networks of trust. If we can find the initiators within those communities and enable them, we have a shot at translating these overlooked insights into solutions.
Place as Accountability
The corollary of place as an asset is place as a source of accountability. The trust that enables and unearths insights also demands accountability to the people you serve. This accountability can keep the innovation honest — ensuring that it solves the actual problem, that its business model makes sense, and that it is additive, not extractive. When it becomes likely that you see a current or past customer at the grocery store or walking downtown, you think about your business differently. This does not mean you cannot think about scale and having customers that you cannot see or interact with on a personal level. But at the earliest stages of building a company, where proximity to the people you are serving is vital, this accountability can go a long way in setting the founder and company up for success.
Hurry Home
One of our best examples to date of how place can be so vital to creating impactful companies is the story of Hurry Home, a company that emerged from our first cohort. You can read more about the background of the company in this piece, but here is an excerpt that illustrates the point:
“A success story from Invanti’s first cohort underscores why it’s constructive to leave the tech bubble. Hurry Home, co-founded by Jada McLean and John Gibbons, solves a problem that would baffle most Bay Area investors: how to make it profitable to create mortgages for homes worth less than $80,000. It may seem like a minuscule problem from the viewpoint of someone familiar with the real estate markets in New York or Los Angeles, but roughly 1 in 5 homes nationwide is worth $80,000 or less, especially in rural areas. Banks, which charge fixed fees for mortgage services, often can’t make a profit on these transactions and are loath to take part in these transactions.”
The overlooked insight is clear here, but what is not explicit is the role of the community of South Bend in making this venture possible. Jada and John had access to a lot of people who wanted to see this issue solved and therefore were able to move fast. But they also were able to source great feedback and build accountability. I specifically remember having about 20 people in our office who would be great potential clients for Hurry Home, giving feedback on the application process — people who Jada and John were likely to see around town and hear from in the future. Hurry Home is mostly remote — Jada is full-time in Chicago, John full-time in South Bend. But they are in so many ways “based in South Bend”, not because that is where their team is, but because that is where their first customers are.
How do you square remote and place?
The trend of working remotely is often associated with the sentiment of ‘you can live anywhere!’ While true, you still have to live somewhere. We think this is where the combination of remote work and the role of place in entrepreneurship can intersect in interesting ways.
So many have chosen where to live constrained by having to be in physical proximity to their co-workers. Lots has been written about how remote work will allow you to choose where to live based on your personal life — e.g., being close to family and friends. But what remote work also enables is the ability to choose where to live based on proximity to those you serve. Your team may be virtual, and eventually, you may have customers all over the nation or even world. But what if you saw your first customers on a daily basis? What if you saw them at the park, watched their kids play sports with yours, and understood much more about their daily experience by doing so? Enabling initiators remotely means they get to concentrate more on place, not less. They can build where they are, leverage their networks of trust, and have a deep accountability to those they serve.
This is the power of place that we experience in South Bend, which allows people to plug into the trust and relationships we have built as they establish themselves here. A new aspect of place that excites us with the Guild is that our network of trust in South Bend will now be one of many. While we don’t have deep relationships in other parts of the country, we are building a Guild that does. Enabling initiators to tap into their own communities and start building new solutions will be a key element of the power of the remote guild concept. And sometimes those problems might overlap with issues experienced in South Bend, giving us ways to merge those networks of trust to create even stronger companies.
The Initiators Guild + INVANTI Startup Studio
Building the Initiators Guild allows us to double down on the role of place in entrepreneurship and compliments our Startup Studio in two big ways:
- Firstly, it allows us to work with more people in South Bend — those who work part-time and could not have done our full-time program.
- Secondly, there will be initiators in other parts of the country, working on problems for which locating in South Bend will be an advantage. Our relationships here, plus the invitation for them to become an integral part of our community, will sometimes make sense and we foresee sourcing future founders for our studio from the Initiators Guild.
The scalability of a digital and remote guild enables us and our initiators to be even more intentional about the place they choose to build.
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.
