Reflections at 49
I am grateful. So many things in this world have changed, and great change was needed. We faced a pandemic that disproportionately targeted the weak and the sick among us, and humanity around the world rose to the occasion to help the most vulnerable among us. I could not have imagined a more beautiful intention manifested at scale. We lead with love.
Many of us, including myself, lost important loved ones this year. I miss my friends… in every sense. I spent a large portion of this last year in some type of mourning, struggling to accept losses of vibrant lives. The questioning of “why” brought to me a greater degree of inner peace and tranquility, as I learned to be more in balance with the flow of the world around me.
I have slowed down and sped up at the same time. I am not running around in cars and planes to endless speaking engagements and meetings. Instead, I stay at my house most days, caring for my three children and focusing on the things that matter most. The more important things that I focus on, the more important things that I have to do.
This renewed focus on what is important created a Renaissance period in my life. My creativity, passion and projects are all proceeding beautifully. For those in alignment and working on things that matter, I have witnessed many stories of success, starting with my own. The journeys have not always been easy nor direct.
At the end of 2020, my car accelerated into a pole, leaving me unconscious with a severe concussion. It took me nearly two months to recover my full cognitive abilities. During the concussion, I went into a form of autopilot. As I started to regain my frontal lobe consciousness, everything that I was working on during this autopilot period was important and in alignment. I have been on a guided mission ever since.
Over the last decade, the Founder Institute had grown to be one of the largest physical event organizers in the world, and, overnight with the pandemic, we moved everything online. As we moved online, the business grew by up to five times across many metrics. This challenged us to change and to grow simultaneously. We figured out how to do so many new things. It has been one of the most beautiful transformations that I have witnessed. I am proud of the many teams around the world that made this happen so seamlessly.
As the core Founder Institute startup accelerator grew during the pandemic, a new business line grew exponentially. We watched how venture capital excluded opportunities by geography, gender, age and race, so we decided to try and fix it. Our solution is to launch 1,000 new venture capital firms worldwide by 2025 through a new program, called VC Lab. We ask all enrolling general partners to sign an ethical pledge, called the Mensarius Oath. VC Lab has grown by 11x in one year, so we will hit our goal to transform the venture industry faster.
Despite being quite busy with all of these activities, I successfully launched a new role-playing card game, called Save the World. New card designs were finished just in time for my birthday, and I am eager to play with my friends once the pandemic starts to subside, which leads me to another piece of good news. I had the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine right before my birthday. This is just another reminder of how amazing the human response to the pandemic has been.
We are at the beginning of a beautiful period of human activity. I see an enormous new economy unfolding over the next decade that includes healing ourselves and our environment. For generations, human economic activity has been largely destructive to the world around us. So, the global metrics of economic activity are largely metrics of destruction. I tell the following hypothetical to demonstrate this point…
A giant pit mine in Australia pulls ore out of the ground, destroying the natural habitat. The ore is shipped to China on polluting cargo ships. There, the ore is fashioned into steel, burning more fossil fuels, and shipped to the United States. It is then transported by truck to a river, which is damaged and polluted to build a bridge from a suburb to the city. On that bridge, an accountant drives in their car, making an hour-long commute each way every weekday. The accountant travels to a job that they do not like and that is not needed.
How does any of this hypothetical make sense? Yet, stories like these define our existence.
We are starting to create markets, industries and companies that reverse the destruction. We call these “For Progress” companies, and they are part of a new “Regenerative Economy.” In many ways, the pandemic marks the start of this transformation. I see that the Regenerative Economy will grow larger than the traditional destructive economy over the next decade, allowing us to completely reverse the destruction that we have done and that has been done over many generations.
So, in the end, I see this as a beautiful time, and I am grateful to be alive. I am excited to help in small and in large ways wherever I can.