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Venture Years
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Societal Trends & Our Philosophies

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Societal Trends

Travel: International travel is more common than it has been in the past 20 years for many reasons, primarily its easier and more desirable that it has been in the past [
source
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]. Internet companies like Airbnb make it simple to book beautiful lodging, Google Flights make it easier to book travel, and thank you Instagram for giving the world FOMO by showing us beautiful destinations we now NEED to see. Anecdotally, from talking to high schoolers, ALL of them have stated travel as something they would like to do before college.
Covid: Covid showed many individuals that college is not worth the cost if the IRL social experience is not included.
Online Learning: People are learning knowledge on any topic from the best teacher in the world. There will only need to be a few instructors per topic, each with their own style of teaching that works well for different types of students. This style of learning is already reducing the need for students to attend traditional universities. Online education suffers because of loneliness and lack of accountability. Online learning with IRL peer groups helps solve this and will be a new form of education that arises.
Low costs: With automation, AI, and more user friendly tools (ex: no code website builders, out of the box ML models, robots) the cost to build most companies is becoming less. This means each year we will need to invest less money in our fellow’s startups to see similar returns. We are excited to leverage these technologies and build upon these technologies to more efficiently start companies. Once automation takes over many roles, just a small, close-knit team will be required to run huge companies. The relationships between employees will be essential to company success which is why we are focused on creating an environment for deep relationships to naturally form between our fellow.s
Open is the future for top consumer companies: Specifically meaning that anyone can build on the tech, anyone has the opportunity to work on tasks for the company and be paid for it, anyone in the world can suggest new features and anyone can vote on the priority of those features, and anyone in the world can be an owner of the company. We see this happening with the rise of
DAOs
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.
We believe that in the future, the average consumer would choose the company that provides these open features. If a competitor has a differentiating feature that is stealing customers from the open company, the open company would be incentivized to pivot quickly. This is why all of our “new company ideas” that are consumer facing will be open in design. Fellows who found one of these “new company ideas” have a higher chance of being the top company in their market.
Service DAOs who specialize in specific tasks are on the rise. They accept equity as payment. This reduces the difficulty in finding specialized talent and reduces the cost to start startups. Instead of having an in house team to help our startups, we plan to leverage service DAOs if they match our quality requirements.
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Our Philosophies

Time: Given time for exploration, people will find their niche to exploit. 2 month, 6 month, and even 1 year programs do not individuals enough time to thrive. Let’s give them 5 years.
VC Knowledge: Everyone knows how to go to college. Not everyone knows how to get VC funding. If we want to reach all of the talented founders in the world, we need to make getting VC funding as ubiquitous as going to college.
Cofounders: Being able to work well with your cofounder and having your cofounder be equally excited about the idea is essential to a successful startup. The best method to find this cofounder is to experience a lot with them. The longer you can work and live with them, the better. That is why we are having our fellows live IRL with each other so that they can naturally find their cofounder (of course doing everything we can to group them with individuals likely to be a good fit).
Team: The ideal team is a team full of cofounders. Everyone has autonomy, open lines of communication with everyone else on the team, and has expertise essential for the companies growth. Allowing entrepreneurially minded individuals with common interests and diverse skills to live and travel with each other is likely to result in 2 or more individuals bonding and forming a company together.
Age: 1) The average age of a unicorn founder is in the early 30’s [
alitamaseb
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]. This is likely due to the fact that the path to founding a company was not clear or was too risky until that age. 2) An individual’s cognitive abilities start to decline after age 24 [
source
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]. Given 1) and 2), we think that if we can get the risk adverse, cognitively inclined individuals on a path to becoming a founder right after high school, they will be able to create a unicorn during the 5 years of our program. Unicorns most often take between 2 and 5 years to reach their billion dollar valuation [
alitamaseb
⁠
].
Students should be utilized in the workforce. Students could be working on tasks that experienced individuals have created. Currently students are stuck in college working on “play assignments” that have no value to others. Students could better use their time implementing ideas of experts. Similarly, experts should not be spending time implementing. They should spend their time thinking strategically on how to advance society. This is why we are excited about students working for open companies and learning from online material for their education.
Work should be open to all. We believe that most companies (minus weapon manufactures or companies with top secret information) should not deny someone from trying to work on a task they have. The company only needs to pay the person who does the work first and does the work up to their standards. We believe in equal opportunity.
Help the most people with the fewest people. We want to automate our jobs away. This saves us money and time so that we can help more people.
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