Next Start-Up Humanity
By Ethan Imboden, Head of Venture Design, frog and House of Beautiful Business resident
I was invited to join the House of Beautiful Business, a pop-up community hosted in collaboration with BCG, Siemens and others to prompt conversations about technology and humanity before and during Web Summit in Lisbon. The organizers, including Tim Leberecht (a former fellow frog), invited me to contribute to their opening public event, Next Startup: Humanity, which posed the question, “What if humanity were are startup?”
Given my background and work in venture design, they asked me to consider two questions — What advice do you give to founders? And, what advice would you give to humanity?
I presented the following, and thought I’d share it here as well.
If humanity were a startup, who would be the founders? As it turns out, that’s entirely up to us…
On a growth trajectory like ours, all that comes hereafter will dwarf all that we’ve accomplished so far. This is the nature of the exponential. This means that we, the current and past population of earth, are the source. We are the small, visionary group that is founding it all. It’s happening here, and it’s happening now. This is it, folks.
But this presumes that we are successful, that there is a grand hereafter. And right now, that is highly uncertain. If instead it all ends now — where “now” could even be in this millennium — then we are not the founders. If it ends now, the founders were the few great apes from whom we all descend.
Then who would we be, in this failed startup story? We’d be the late-stage management team that squandered everything because it couldn’t get out of its own way.
I choose hope, and we are choosing action — so I see us as founders. And here is a piece of advice that I give to founders like ourselves:
It stems from the notion of the “world turtle”. This is from the story of the heathen who when asked what the world is supported by as it is suspended in the universe, replied that it rests on the back of a turtle. When asked what the turtle was supported by, he replied simply, “It’s turtles all the way down!”.
But, it’s not a turtle supporting our planet, it’s people. And here’s the advice that I give to founders: it’s people all the way down. Be they colleagues or customers, collaborators or competition, investors or regulators — the root cause of all of our successes and failures is people.
And even in our coming age of smart machines, it will still be people, augmented perhaps, but people nonetheless. It will be people, bringing their curiosity, creativity, experiences, desires, interactions, audacious notions, emotions, serendipity, flaws — their humanity — that will still be at the heart of progress.
So, founder, you better get good at moving people.
As a startup, humanity is in a classic growth stage conundrum. Against all odds, we’ve survived the competition, and have managed to climb onto an exponential hockey stick of growth — cognitive growth, agricultural growth, technological growth, industrial growth, computational growth, longevity growth, population growth… We are clearly the front-runner.
But the front-runner toward what destination? We now realize that along with our “success” come environmental impacts, political instability, human rights violations, a litany of inequalities and more. The world has changed around us — or more accurately, we have altered the world — and we need to change course too. The challenge is that our ability to accelerate has overtaken our ability to steer.
Our pale blue dot needs a bright North Star. To come to collective action, we need first to have a collective purpose — a shared vision of our future. And as a precursor to that, we need to have collective understanding. To come to collective understanding, well, we need more ways of doing this — coming together as we are tonight.
And that’s why I’m here — to offer the pieces and perspectives that I have, and to learn from you, and make connections to what you are bringing.
Thank you for having me.
