My Ambitions

Posted on September 25, 2012. Filed under: startups, venture capital |

Paul Graham recently wrote: “[a startup] is at first is no more than a declaration of one’s ambitions.”

My ambition is global in scale, but the inverse in culture. On one hand, I am obsessed with the human population as a system. I despise the concept of borders and the segmentation of our population by arbitrary lines on a map. I do not value what is near over what is far away, and I aspire to build a business that directly or indirectly reminds people that we are one. Jack Dorsey recently quoted William Gibson in saying: “the future has already arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. So our job as founders, as entrepreneurs…is to distribute the future that’s already here…and to do so as quickly as possible with the right amount of purpose and right amount of values” In the future I see, there is only one country. It is earth. Language as a barrier is nothing more than an absurdity. Physical distance as a barrier is nothing more than absurdity. I want to pull people into a future where we value a human life and experience equally, independent of our social of physical proximity to it. There are many ways to destroy the distance between people. The most visible leaps in this arena seem to exist in the networked communication between individuals. Whether the telephone, the internet, the Facebook (see how I did that.. ha), or the Twitter…step function changes in the way people communicate are narrowing the chasm between distant individuals, and more profoundly, amending the young individuals’ concept of self as distinct from another, whether that other be local or international. These are beautiful and evolutionarily significant efforts to pull our population into the future. There are, however, many other forms that this progress can take. A product or service that achieves global penetration shows the world common experience, despite our differences. There is something about McDonalds at the end of the earth that reminds us that we are far away, but the same. A beautiful vision that isolates some facet of humanity or human experience, and displays it back to the user or consumer, can speed our acceleration to a single networked system. An airline, or cruise ship operator, that enables us to break through physical deterrents, to interact with the previously separate, again pulls us into the future I see. My ambition is along these lines. There is value in achieving this phenomenon domestically, in showing the farmer in Indiana his sameness to the ballerina in New York City…but my ambition is bigger… it is global.

When I say my ambition is the inverse in culture, I mean it. The inverse of global is local, and the extreme of local is self. Inbetween local and self (so perhaps not the true inverse) is family, and that is how I want to live my days. A family irrationally values its members over all else. It does not recognize someone socially or physically distant as equal. It is an irrational allegiance and loyalty and love and respect for a small and distinct group…it does not scale. At Hyperpublic our culture was family. We were only 10 people when we were acquired by Groupon and I loved spending the majority of my hours with our family. So my ambition is to do the impossible. To build a culture of family into a business that scales globally. Like everything else in my life, in business I admire and envy paradox. And so, in my new startup, which is a tiny little baby, virtually undefined, I endeavor to build this paradox. That’s as far as I’ve gotten (well maybe a little further), but these are my ambitions, clearly stated, and now, at least according to PG, I am a startup.