Category Archives: Force For the Future

Maximizing the Efficiency of the Startup Ecosystem

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This post is a revision of http://maxmarmer.com/2010/02/maximizing-startup-ecosystem-efficiency/ written for emergent fool.

Over the last 3 decades the technology entrepreneurship sector has been the primary sector driving economic growth. The sector initiated the information economy and has given life to thousands of innovative companies, four of which are ten of the biggest companies in the United States, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and IBM. By any metric the sector has been wildly successful, but it’s possible to make the ecosystem even more efficient and realize an even greater number of opportunities.

Currently, projects that succeed are squeezing through a very tight bottle neck, and only the right combination of personality, skill and luck can breakthrough. Better infrastructure widens that bottle neck, so potential impact can be realized at a greater rate.

This post will look at how we can increase efficiency in the entrepreneurship ecosystem, but the significance of this effort may extend beyond the tech sector to the future of the information economy. My post on that topic is here.

Systems Perspective on Entrepreneurship

To increase efficiency further requires looking at the entrepreneurship ecosystem as a system in order to find the holes and the greatest points of leverage. But before we focus on improving the efficiency of system we need to understand the difference between the primary and secondary causes that drive innovation. There is nearly unanimous agreement that the most important players in the startup ecosystem are the founders and CEO’s who start from nothing and go on to create and control billion dollar markets. Society can’t stop glorifying entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Richard Branson. But while they deserve immense praise and adulation the impact they are able to have has more to do with the surrounding innovation ecosystem than their individual ability and vision.

Something new and innovative can only be created and scaled if a confluence of forces come together— market, team, systems that allow you to find your team, capital, advice, cost of production, cost of distribution and culture (whether people are ready for it) etc. Breakthroughs are the result of way more than an individual with insight; they emerge from the last iteration of the system, building on top of existing tools and a huge history of knowledge.

Products and companies do make a huge impact but their success has more to do with the state and incentives of the system than the entrepreneur. It’s not the company that changes the world, it’s the system that creates the right incentives to make the creation of world changing breakthroughs extremely probable.

As the startup ecosystem has been fine tuned it has made the existence of certain products and companies almost inevitable, because the system exerts so much pressure to make opportunities come about once the timing is right. In Apple’s and Microsoft’s case there was immense pressure exerted on bringing about computer hardware and software companies.

If you are looking to bet on an individual company than a great entrepreneur is certainly the centerpiece. But if you want to maximize the innovation of a certain sector then you must look at the system, in this case the startup ecosystem. From the system perspective you just want a need to be filled and you don’t care who fills it. Thus the individual matters less, because there’s enough talent out there that if the incentives are strong enough someone will capitalize. But taking the system perspective far from trivializes the entrepreneur. In fact, talent development, which must have a very humanistic lens to be effective, is a critical part of an efficient startup ecosystem because potential talent needs to be actualized at a high rate.

The startup ecosystem is already extremely effective, just look around at the mark it has already left on the world in only a few decades, but if we want to make the system even more efficient and increase both the quality and quantity of innovative breakthroughs and great companies, we must identify places where friction is reducing the possibility of successful ventures and create solutions to remove this friction.

How The Startup Ecosystem Works Now

If we look at the rise of 3 of Silicon Valley’s fastest growing companies: Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in the context of the startup ecosystem it’s possible to see the existence of a category leader as almost inevitable, and the eventual winner as extremely unlikely. This matters because as long as someone can seize the opportunity and fill the market need, the battle from a macroeconomic perspective has already been won, it’s just a matter of which individual player will earn the spoils and how long they can maintain relevance before a new competitor overtakes them or the market becomes mature and commoditized.

Google, Facebook and Twitter now each dominate a category: Search, Social Networks and Microblogging, but there was plenty of competition and uncertainty at one point (remember Altavista, Yahoo, Myspace and Friendster? With better execution these companies could have also won). Once these categories were identified either consciously or by accident, the startup ecosystem was effective enough to support the formation of many teams, supplying them with capital, services, people, and advisors in hopes of capitalizing on a billion dollar market opportunity. And the team that executed the best won. The individual winner was unpredictable but the system was good enough to make sure someone won. That humans’ evolved a system that can create many competitors and then naturally select the winner based on merit or “fitness” is a tremendous accomplishment for this industry and for the world, and it is what makes tech the most innovative industry on the planet.

The success of these companies had a lot more to do the size of the market, the timing for when it was ready to be capitalized on and the resources in the startup ecosystem that supported effective scaling than the founders or the idea. The markets they operated in were big enough that inevitably an industry giant would emerge who would be able to use the lucrativeness of the market to generate a runaway positive feedback loop up until saturation, using their momentum to continually take market share and capture the best talent.

This evolutionary competitive process continues even after an industry giant has saturated a market, because there are always new markets emerging. While it would be very hard for Facebook and Google to screw up and concede supremacy in their primary markets, it is probable a new company will beat them in the new markets that they try to extend to that fall outside of their core competencies. (For more on why the market is the most important factor for a startup’s success check out this Marc Andressen’s post).

In summary, once the timing and conditions are ripe there will be enough people trying to tackle the clear billion dollar markets that somebody will get the execution right. The startup ecosystem is that good at providing all the puzzle pieces to make sure this happens!

Future billion dollar companies will ride trends such as the move to the cloud, mobile information, the real-time web, extreme personalization, and new kinds of data enabled by smaller and cheaper sensors.

The Evolving Startup Ecosystem

The tech industry has cracked the nut for how to tackle billion dollar market opportunities, making it better than any other industry at capitalizing on opportunity. But there is still a lot of room for growth. Increasing the effectiveness of the startup ecosystem matters as long as their are markets to be filled. The faster we can fill unmet with greater effectiveness the better off the world will be.

The tech ecosystem is now well tuned to hit the home run in billion dollar markets, but there is a shift happening as people began to realize there’s more opportunity and less risk to be had in aiming for singles and doubles, and hitting them consistently. The home runs of the previous era have created a new playing field and there is now a wealth of opportunities on the long tail with all kinds of business and consumer needs waiting to be met.

As the information economy has developed and become more complex, an increasing number of lucrative niches now make market sense to pursue. Whereas previously the opportunities either weren’t there (you couldn’t have a million dollar facebook app before facebook) or the costs were too high to have certain opportunities make sense (startups needed venture capitalists and VC’s only wanted to play in markets bigger than 100 million). But in recent years startups have become disentangled from their dependence on VC’s as the costs of starting a startup have continued to fall due to cheaper hardware and services moving to the cloud. This is driving a growing seed stage ecology where the primary actors are startup accelerators, angel investors and seed stage venture capitalists.

The focus now is on startups attacking smaller opportunities (though still in the 10′s of millions) with less investment capital. There will be an abundance of lucrative, unserved niches for startups to tackle. This coincides well with a number of trends:

- Science will be injected into the art of running a startup

Structure and methodology will be experimented with to increase the success rate of startups and startups will fail less because of self-destruction and more because of getting beat by competitors. As the overall number of startups in the ecosystem increase over the next few years, many of the startups in big markets will fail due to competitors, but in the huge number of opportunities in smaller markets startups will be more dispersed and there will be few direct competitors. In these markets startups that use a more scientific approach should be able to figure out how to hit the 10-100 million dollar markets with great consistency.

This consistency will enable the funding ecosystem to make sense for these smaller opportunities. When many investments are made in these smaller markets (<500 Million) the venture community’s approach of haphazardly throwing money at many petri dishes won’t work, because the upside potential is capped. Home run hitters can afford to strike out a lot, singles hitters can’t.

Even startups that lose to competitors in niche markets will find it easier to pivot, than pack it in and start from scratch, because the farther down the long tail you go the closer the adjacent verticals.

A fractal tree is a good analogy for why it’s easier to pivot in <100 million niches vs. billion dollar markets, if you consider the thickness of the branch equal to the size of the market. The core branches are very far apart. If your startup is set up to tackle a billion dollar opportunity it’s hard to pivot all the way over to another one, or shift gears and attack a smaller opportunity. But if you follow the analogy and you’re a startup attacking a niche as the tree branches further away from the trunk the twigs become closer together. The larger branches are too far away from each other to pivot from one to the other, but the small branches just require a little back tracking and a slight change in direction.

Creating a startup where the goal is to make something people want will still be a chaotic, iterative process but it’s possible to induce predictability and stability into chaotic systems.

- The potential for more collaboration horizontally and vertically across markets to create a more seamless experiences for the customer and more leverage for the startup. (I’ve started exploring this process, naming it the lego model)

- An increased demand for entrepreneurs due to clear ~10 million dollar opportunities just waiting to be tackled. This demand in the ecosystem for entrepreneurs coincides perfectly with changing cultural values about work, which will drive huge increase in the number of people pursuing entrepreneurship. And that in combination with a more entrepreneur friendly ecosystem evolving, will unleash a new golden age of entrepreneurship.

Here are two good posts on the changing seed stage ecology: Dave Mcclure’s presentation on the evolution of the startup ecosystem and Nathaniel Whittemore’s take on the seed stage ecology in the social sector..

New Efficiencies in the Startup Ecosystem

The startup ecosystem is certainly past its infancy, but it is still evolving rapidly and there are many more efficiencies to be unlocked that increase the success of startups further and support the long tail of innovation. Here’s my opinion on where we have opportunities to improve the system:

- Talent development

- Better conversion rate of people with ideas for companies, to entrepreneurs actually starting companies

- Pushing world’s brightest to choose entrepreneurship over other industries (college students starting companies instead of becoming an investment banker. Creating incentives for experienced execs to take risks starting something new instead of languishing in the rungs of the corporate ladder)

- Reducing friction in team formation, and better “deal flow” by interacting with more potential co-founders

- Aggregating startup services and service providers in order to remove distractions and allow startup teams to focus fully on the new innovation they’re trying to create

- Networks becoming more efficient in sharing assets (knowledge, people, code, strategy)

- More fluid and less cumbersome funding rounds, all the way from idea to scalable profitability

- Collaboration amongst startups to attack new verticals and interlink their advances to create networked impact— where success exists behind an activation energy only realizable by coordinated efforts of multiple startups

- Connecting entrepreneurs to the people and information at the time they need to support maximization of potential— time and energy will consistently be put in highest leverage places

- Better filters by injecting personalization and social graph into many tools

- Systems that use psychology and persuasion to nudge people to act in their own long term self interest, mitigating human kind’s insidious propensity for short term thinking

And what I’m personally targeting right now with Founders First: accelerated just in time learning.

Finally, a few projects and trends I think are very important:

Rise of startup accelerators and therefore an emerging market for post-startup accelerators and pre-startup accelerators. (I’m working on the post startup accelerator phase with Founders First. See all the new startup accelerators here and many of the companies here)

Venture Hacks Angel List and Startup List to reduce friction in the funding of startups.

Right Side Capital Management— A new kind of investment fund trying to dramatically increase deal flow to 100-200 investments a year. This will support faster expansion into niches.

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The Connecting Thread: The Innovation Landscape

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One of the primary stitches running across my life cloak:

The primary engine driving economic growth is innovation. And we are in the midst of transitioning to a new innovation landscape as corporations are dying and the startup ecosystem matures. The innovation landscape is the overlapping theme for most of what I’m thinking about and working on. I’m interested in how we can increase collaboration, access more capital, push the interconnectivity and support systems a step further and increase the overall size of the ecosystem by getting more aspiring entrepreneurs across the chasm of commitment.

The innovation landscape is intimately related to what I believe is the world’s biggest problem and the approach we need to solve it. I discuss that in the 5 stages post, linked below.

A few of my frameworks for thinking about the innovation space: (Posts will soon be written for all of these)

Pre-Accelerator. Accelerator. Post Accelerator.

5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey

Startups engaging collaboratively in complex value chains to achieve the scale of corporations, called the Lego Model and described here.

The 4 Pillars of Innovation Landscape: Community, Information, Tools, Capital. Most projects are different proportions of these 4 elements.

The innovation space is incredibly complex requiring a variety of different perspectives and knowledge on a wide array of subjects. This overarching theme connects my many interests: (I find the “I, it, we, its” a helpful organizing framework) I: talent development, psychology, learning, education, mental technologies; It: Personal productivity, food, athletic, health, energy management; We: community, social interaction, culture, collaboration; Its: geopolitics, interconnectedness, foresight, accelerating technological change, startups, behavioral economics, environmental sustainability, systems thinking;

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5 Steps of Entrepreneurial Growth

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I defined 5 steps in the entrepreneurial journey that I think most people go through. The distribution is a pyramid and only a small percentage of people make it through each stage.

(1) No Desire —intrinsic motivation suppressed (usually by the school system) (2) Desire to make an impact and be entrepreneurial, but uncertainty about how to channel that desire (3) Possess an idea for a project but lack the knowledge and ability to know how to begin (4) A prototype has been built but need help gaining traction (5) The project has succeeded on a small scale but needs support going mainstream.

I believe the world’s biggest problem is not one of the many challenges we face such as global warming or extreme poverty, but rather that we have too few people engaged in working on solutions. The root of this problem stems from the ineffectiveness of the world’s institutions to support people in finding their passions, and their inability to help people align their work with these passions. Entrepreneurship in its broadest sense can give people the intrinsic motivation to solve these problems. And the way to solve the world’s biggest problem is to support a greater percentage of the population through each of these 5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey.

Founders First, my current focus right now, is trying to support groups 4 and 5. In hindsight, I can see that what I’ve been working on has evolved through solving problems in each of these stages.

1- Technology Club — One major goal was to find exciting people, projects and companies and integrate into my uninspiring education

2- Youth Action Research Network — Bring together all the people inspired to do something more and actually start doing

3- Force For the Future stage 1 – targeting college students with ideas who are having trouble making waves

4, 5 – Force For the Future stage 2: Founders First — targeting founders who are alumni of start accelerators

I’m confident that the best way to approach solving the problem of liquidity through the 5 stages, is to start from stage 5 and work backwards.

It is actually the most doable, because by the time people are there, they are very motivated. And the ecosystem for people in that stage is the most developed, because enough people in this stage have been able to create profitable or impactful organizations.

Tackling the other stages is much more complicated, and requires a lot more infrastructure. To affect stages 1-3 where most of the world’s population resides, we requires resolving political conflicts, alleviating poverty, overhauling institutions, and overcoming pressures from peers, family and other lower level Maslovian needs. And while it’s important for work to be done there, I don’t think we can create any lasting change until the higher stages are more organized and developed, otherwise we’ll just have people temporarily reaching new levels and then falling back down to tell all their peers that it isn’t possible and isn’t worth trying.

I have a philosophy called the T Model - A framework for learning, work, personal growth and non-linear career progression that describes evolving through these stages from an individual’s perspective.

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The Lego Model

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Original post can be found here.

Picture 1

There are two types of organizations that are driving a majority of our economic growth: the startup and the large corporation.

On one hand, we have startups, which are where the innovation is happening and on the other hand, we have corporations, which have the advantages of scale and abundant resources. We need a new kind of organizational structure that can bridge the gap, combining the strengths they each possess.

I’ve come up with a model that explains how startups can gain the advantages of scale and have access to greater resources while staying agile and preserving their penchant for innovation. This model is called the lego model.

In this model you can think of a startup like a rectangular block and a large corporation like a tower. Startups can create a tower by collaborating with other startups. When enough startups are seamlessly working together they have created a tower that is functionally equivalent to the towers of corporations that can take advantage of the efficiencies at scale. But the tower startups create is not a single indivisible entity, it’s more like a tower made of lego pieces. And that has a lot of advantages the indivisible tower doesn’t. It is more resilient, more flexible, more modular and can quickly be assembled and disassembled. This process incorporates principles from both evolution and nature selection. It enables unlimited experimentation and also fast replication for the stuff that works. (This is good that it mirrors nature, because we know nature works, because it created us). The modularity also gives much greater control over optimization, because it’s much easier to isolate and test particular variables. Best practices can easily move across the ecosystem because as things get increasingly quantized, they are easier to replicate. If one lego piece is shown to be particularly versatile or adaptive it can be plugged into many existing towers. If a particular lego piece is poorly constructed and not doing its job very well, there are plenty of pieces waiting in the wings that can replace this ineffective lego piece. That provides great resiliency because while you’re still only as strong as your weakest link, the chain isn’t fixed anymore.

Towers only have to live as long as they are still creating increasing value for the customer. As the vertical the tower is operating in begins becoming saturated, essential pieces can shift their focus from growth, to becoming as lean as possible— doing the same job with many fewer employees and much greater efficiency. The pieces that are no longer essential  as the vertical matures can leave while still highly profitable, and move into an area where they are still adaptive or regroup and plan to start from scratch with the resources they’ve gained.

What we don’t want are companies trying to milk past innovations for all they are worth, through monopolies and legal manuerving. This is terrible for customers because it closes down the space and prevents further innovation. It’s terrible for companies too, because as soon as they stop innovating, a death knell has been sounded, and they are now fighting an uphill batter that will only get steeper. All utters have a limited amount of milk.

Why do large companies stop innovating? There are many reasons, a few are because: they become too large and innovation requires being flexible. The people in the organization age and become tired and complacent. It’s easier and more certain to incrementally improve existing products and services than venture into the uncertain waters of innovation.

What we want to have happen is to have successful organizations in a mature market release both their financial and human resources back into the ecosystem to begin creating more innovative lego pieces that will eventually be formed into more lego towers that serve new verticals.

But why can’t startups form these lego towers currently? Because currently they are just rectangular blocks without the knobs and holes. If the pieces are just flat rectangular blocks, the structure is more akin to a disjointed Jenga tower, which certainly isn’t adaptable or sustainable.

If theory is to be taken seriously, what does it mean practically for how we should be organizing startups?

In order to start building lego-like structures startups need to have greater interconnectivity and more standardization for interoperability. To achieve either requires a more mature startup ecosystem which will need to evolve to encompass many new things including: more transparency, more portable data, a more collaborative culture that focuses more on creating value than capturing it (meaning share more and worry less about protecting IP or being ripped off); a tighter community with more fluid relationships between first time entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial veterans and mentors. Startups also need better information including: roadmaps, templates, and organized, actionable guides. And the ecosystem needs more startups for startups—companies creating tools designed specifically to help other startups grow their businesses. We want to be one of them.

As these tools develop and the ecosystem matures achieving lego like startups will begin becoming feasible, but the culture must evolve in parallel, too.

What we’re trying to look at and understand is what the innovation landscape might look like in the future, I think the lego model is a step in the right direction. Let us know what you think. We’ll be sharing more implications of the lego model and complimentary ideas that could shape the innovation landscape.

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Force For the Future: Real World University

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“Visioning” From the Force For the Future Blog:

We believe the larger long term direction we’re heading towards is becoming the liaison for “Real World University”, the best learning environment of all, where passion, learning and work are all fluid and intimately related. Making an impact and creating value in the workplace is increasingly dependent on leadership, initiative, and working effectively with small teams of innovative people tackling big goals. Corporate America is not doing a good job of allowing creativity and innovation to flourish in the workplace and by and large the university system is doing no better, squandering the potential, ambition and talent of many motivated young people that the world desperately needs to make it through this pivotal period in our history. The pace of change continues to increase and now we finally have the power to create the world of equal opportunity, abundant wealth, endless creativity and boundless possibility that humanity has always desired, but we also face bigger existential threats than ever before, which are also accelerating exponentially.

We need more people working on the big problems of our day instead of opting for dispassionate pay-the-bills work or the allure of fast money from financial optimization. Our school system churns out highly dependent, disengaged citizens, in search of a paycheck instead of a purpose. Failing to realize that the only form of sustainable wealth creation is when your passion becomes your work.

There are simply not enough people working on the big problems of our era and our survival depends on unleashing the talent of the next generation of young leaders.

Force For the Future aims to create the learning institution of the 21st century. We won’t just tell people that they have to find their passion we will show them how. We will connect them with all the resources and people they need to go from a mindless sleepwalk through life to a passionate undertaking of the issues they care about and everything in between. We will assess exactly where a person is on the motivational scale and provide them with the resources to just take the next step. We believe the best way to have happier more fulfilled people who impact others on a large scale is to allow them to take ideas for a better world, refine them, prototype them and scale them. Investment in startup companies represent .02% of our GDP yet they represent 17.8% of our output, and yet over 75% do not succeed. That is a major force for good in the world.

We think too many people overestimate what they need to get started. They don’t three degrees and a lengthy resume before they can began working on realizing their visions for improving the world around them; they just need initiative, a little help and a little luck.

Our model basically boils down to really well connected unschooling with abundant resources. It’s based on the idea that you will contribute the most by putting your time and energy into the things you are really passionate about. And it aims to strike the optimal balance between being completely off on your own, where it’s easy to get lost and being part of a large system where you’re always told what to do.

The path Force For the Future is advocating isn’t anything new, in fact it is a well trodden road by most of the world’s successful people. The rules of success aren’t that hard, and there’s no need to reinvent them. We don’t need new rules we just need more people to use them to create their own success stories. Impact begins with a burning desire to accomplish something, followed by 100% faith that you will achieve it no matter what, leading to definite plans of actions about how to achieve it, and continued persistence through failed plans which give you the feedback to make a better plan until you find one that works. By pursuing this process you naturally gather other necessary ingredients along the way like co-founders, mentors, and funding.

Why do only a select few discover and utilize the basic rules of achievement while it is a fruitless struggle for others?

It’s a mix of personality type, hospitable formative environments, and seizing lucky opportunities when they present themselves.

But we want to open this incredibly fulfilling path to more people and show that a career driven by passion and impact is very possible. We believe that the role of the learning institutions in the 21st century is to enable everyone to invest a majority of their energy in their passions and improve the lives of other in the process.

To create this environment Force For the Future hardly needs to build anything new. We are just going to assemble all the information, resources, and opportunities already out there and make it easier for you to navigate the ecosystem like many successful people have done before.

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My Speech at The World Future Society

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Over the weekend I spoke at the World Future Society on a panel entitled “Youth Can Change the World”. I talked about how every young person can make an impact but that we need to change how we think about education in order to open up that possibility for more people.

The most difficult part of this process was getting this down to about 12 minutes in length. In the brainstorming phase I wrote over 8,500 words and organizing and cutting ideas was a big challenge, but I am pleased with the final result.

I enjoyed writing and giving the speech and hope to do more in the coming months and years. I will be iteratively adding and improving both the content and the slides of the presentation.

Here are my slides and the transcript of the speech. The video recording of the speech is now posted here.

Youth Changing the World: By Making Education More Entrepreneurial

Youth Changing the World By Making Education More Entrepreneurial

I’m here to tell you that every young person can change the world, and that our future depends on a collective attempt to do so.

Over the course of the last few years I’ve been deeply interested in the meaning of success in the 21st century at both an individual and societal level, focusing primarily on the role the educational system plays now and the role it should play in the future. I will describe a few changes the 21st century demands, a few of the failures of the current system and finally I’ll tell you a little bit about the startup organization I’m founding to implement these ideas about how to lower the barrier to entry for young people who want to make a difference in the world.

We are at a critical juncture for humanity. The world is facing some tremendous challenges: Radical Climate Change, looming water crisis, global pandemics, and billions desperately trying to rise out of poverty putting increasing strain on our depleting resources. These are big existential threats.

But this is also an extraordinary time because in this hyper-connected, technologically advanced world we also have more opportunity and more power to create the kind of future we want than ever before. Thinking about these problems is daunting, but if we are to find solutions it will come from unleashing the ingenuity of the next generation of young leaders.

We’ve got a generation of young people itching to get more involved and make a difference. A year ago, the Obama campaign harnessed that energy beautifully. We continue to get excited when we hear an inspirational speech or a call to action, and we exhibit unparalleled optimism about changing the world, but that enthusiasm begins to fade when we are forced to return to a school system that is outdated, constraining and depressing. There are so many dire problems to work on that there is no place for apathy yet many are trapped by it. Apathy is the result of an irrelevant educational system closing us out from the things we really care about.

Many young people are longing for something more meaningful in their education and work, and giving us a chance to engage with the big issues of our time could be the difference between resigning to dispassionate ‘pay the bills’ work and an insatiable entrepreneurial drive to improve humanity.

Why doesn’t our education system nurture the innovative spirit and leadership traits necessary for changemaking in the 21st century? Because it is a legacy of the industrial era that was designed to stamp these traits out.

The educational system was designed to train factory workers. And changes since have been incremental and on top of the same fundamentally outdated system. We are still all force fed the same handful of subjects that have been taught for years. And to succeed in the system requires obeying authority and coloring within the lines. Now, the system basically churns out intellectual factory workers, who are expected to be the cogs of large organizations, producing the same product for their lifetime in the work world. Today’s young people are great at analyzing narrow disciplines and writing 5 paragraph essays, yet we know little about ourselves and how to use our strengths to make an impact.

And so instead of having a large crop of these leaders needed for succeeding in the 21st century, we have students who hate school and think that’s what learning is. So they disengage and begin living weekend to weekend.

Succeeding in the 21st century requires flipping a number of educational practices on their head.

Instead of filling our heads with knowledge for 15 years, we should want to do something first, of tangible value to real world, and then learn the skills necessary to do it. Learning skills on an as needed basis fosters deeper understanding and greater motivation because it furthers a goal you care about. This also answers the ubiquitous question heard from students, “Why am I learning this?”

Instead of trying to optimize for the perfect balance of curriculum focus instead on what excites you and gets you really pumped up. The person who focuses on the pursuits that motivate and energize them will almost always be more successful than the person who tries to optimize for the best composition of knowledge, before even beginning to take action.

Focusing only on what excites you might make it seem like learning basic fundamentals would be avoided. Quite the contrary, as long as it furthers the bottom line: impact. As the great philosopher Frederich Nietzsche said, “He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.”

Instead of jumping into a standardized one size fits all education. You should cycle between divergent and convergent stages. In the divergent stage you’re being endlessly playful, trying to figure out what interests you. You do things like watch a few TED Talks, read a good book, watch a short documentary, prototype projects, talk with professionals in the field and share experiences with peers also on the journey of self discovery. By cycling between stages of exploration and focus you are certain to find topics that excite you and beckon you to dive deeper.

John Seely Brown former head of Xerox Parc has a quote I love that supports this approach, “Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … and once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world… you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

And if there is one thing a young person should achieve, it should be a passion for lifelong learning. Because any amount of learning you do in school pales in comparison to learning you’ll do throughout your life.

After you have found your passion act on it. The people who become most successful aren’t brilliant savants leagues ahead of their peers at 5 years old. Their secret lies in showing leadership and initiative at an early age, which opens up more opportunities and puts them on an accelerated path.

Everyone has a desire to matter, so when young people find their passion it will often be channeled towards making an impact. So by pursuing learning in roughly in this way we will have young people who are motivated lifelong learners who can contribute meaningfully to world.

A concept embodying the type of young person who approaches learning the way I just described is that of life entrepreneurship. It’s the idea that you seek out opportunities where you can make an impact and create a life uniquely suited to your strengths.  Life entrepreneurship is much broader than just starting businesses, it’s about consistently taking the initiative to improve your surroundings and advance your goals.

Entrepreneurship is also very flexible. We don’t remember most of what we we’re taught anyway, but you can always take the experience of making things happen with you. And come to any situation knowing you can find the problems and inefficiencies and solve them.

Entrepreneurial ventures also create an incredible amount of innovation and wealth out of almost nothing. At TED this year Juan Enriquez jolted us with an incredible fact: Investment in Startup companies represents .02% of US GDP but it represents 17.8% of US GDP output.  And that stat doesn’t even acknowledge burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship.

And now Introducing my startup Force For the Future… Force For the Future will bottle up this process, get more young people on this entrepreneurial path and accelerate the learning curve and impact by providing them with foresight, skills, connections and a support network of peers, mentors and organizations.

Basically this model boils down to unschooling but plus the resources of an institution like Harvard/Stanford.

It’s the idea that you will contribute the most by putting your time and energy into the things you are really passionate about. And aims to strike the optimal balance between being completely off on your own, where it’s easy to get lost and being part of a large system where you’re always told what to do.

Most fields in the 21st century are headed in a direction of decentralization and education is no different. Many of the pieces of 21st century learning landscape already exist, so one of Force For the Future’s primary functions will be acting as a liaison so that so a young person with desire can navigate through this entrepreneurial ecosystem and accelerate the process of turning an idea into a reality.

So much of achieving impact is about being connected with the right people. Force For the Future will connect you with the mentors who can make a big impact with a little time investment. We’ll connect you with the entrepreneurial veterans only a few years older who can dispel the illusion that making a big impact is not a dream but an achievable reality. And we’ll connect you with peers who are at a similar place on the rollercoaster ride that is life entrepreneurship.

If more young people get on a path to solving big problems, not only will we have happier, more fulfilled people, but we’ll have innovators who can lead us out of these economic and environmental crises and totally reinvent the world we live in…

I want to leave you with one final thought.

Margaret Mead once said,” Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

What if it wasn’t just a small few who managed to escape the system and dared to change the world but we provided learning environments that allowed all young people partake in the creation of a world worth living in.

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