Potential: A Serendipity Engine
People ask what Potential is a lot. It is easier to define a fully-formed business like Redbrain. We do X and we produce Y. What Potential is aiming for, and what it is currently, is something a little more ethereal in the short term, with concrete groundings.
The way I see Potential is as a serendipity engine. It is 3 pronged (with a ton of overlap): investment, introductions & community. I see all of this as a venn diagram with very few siloed areas.
We will continue to have tons of interesting conversations with interesting people. There is no immediate agenda, the thesis is this- keep connecting nice, smart people and things will happen.
We are a social impact office that invests on a 30+ year time horizon.
Investment:
Some of them may end up helping us to set up one of our 17 funds, some of them may end up getting investment from one of the funds. We already have climate.vc and newfinance.vc and two more in the pipeline! We are trying to find conscious leaders who will help make a better future.
Also, if you are looking for investment come and add your deck to Decksender!
Introductions
We have a brilliant network of people from every single walk of life you can imagine. Successful founders, VCs, Angel investors, marketing experts, design gurus…you name it. We don’t just offer this out willy-nilly, we vigorously protect people's time. However, if we feel it is appropriate, we introduce people all the time, usually with no agenda apart from…have an interesting conversation, tell each other about yourselves and see where it goes. This leads to amazing things :)
Community
Our goal is to keep building this community and network. However, it isn’t all about formal introductions. Some people just want community and that is something we are passionate about. Maybe you come already happy with your work, but you just want to meet more interesting or like-minded people- or people that think nothing like you but you can learn from! We want to build villages, people can come and share and feel comfortable even if challenged on ideas, and equally, they are free to wander over to the next village and see what's occurring there :)
When you get fun, kind, motivated, and interesting people all together interesting things happen.
We want a melting pot of people. One idea we are toying around with is this concept of ‘villages’. To have subgroups in the chat focused on different areas, perhaps climate, finance, poverty & hunger, which will allow people to filter in and immediately find an area of interest and people to talk to. Then they are free to hop across these channels. I see it like nodes in a network and they are able to cross-pollinate.
If you are anything like me, you are already thinking all of these things above will feed each other. You’d be correct. Maybe you come for the community and end up meeting someone who gives you an idea for a business, or maybe you meet a co-founder. Perhaps you end up as an angel investor which you never saw yourself as! Maybe you are our next fund manager? I am using maybe a lot, why? Because this is the power of a serendipity engine. We don’t know what is next & neither do you.
Come have a chat, see what happens… :)
