Disrupt.
It’s a buzzword a lot of us in tech and investing circles have used for decades. Increasingly, (and especially in my own investing activity) I find myself asking a critical question: To what end do we want disruption to lead?
The answer for me is investing in ventures that disrupt to democratize.
Technology can lead to fantastic innovations. With it, we have the power to question the way the world works, rewrite the rules and build a new future. We’ve seen the ways it’s begun to permeate our lives and the magnitude of investor returns that can accompany successful tech ventures. Unfortunately, all too often, we’ve also seen the way it can consolidate power and leave society more divided and economically concentrated.
Ventures that disrupt to democratize hold the same promise of outsized investor returns, but they aim at creating a better society. These are technologies that:
- Decentralize, shifting from central locations and organizations to more distributed and accessible models
- Decouple products and services from their utility and reconstruct them in new, unbundled models
- Deinstitutionalize by eliminating old-school institutions and no-longer-necessary middlemen and connecting people directly to each other
- Digitize in ways that lower friction and increase immediacy of action.
They are unicorn companies like:
- Ro (valued at $5B), removing the middleman to enable people to get high caliber healthcare without having insurance
- MasterClass (valued at $2.5B) enabling anyone to learn directly from experts
And they’re ventures of all stages like ones I’ve invested in:
- Twiga that is re-imagining supply chains in African agriculture
- ID.me that is creating a way to own and manage our own digital identities
- Pacaso that has pioneered a more accessible model and market for second homeownership.
We can “disrupt to democratize” nearly every arena of society, and I am incredibly optimistic about the ends we can achieve through investment and scale of these kinds of ventures.
But, as I continue investing in and helping ventures like these to create this entirely new future, I’ve also realized that for disruption to truly be more democratic, there is other work that must be done.
More of us need to be participating in and sharing in the immense potential of the digital era. So, in addition to our investing focus, we’re helping make this happen in communities across the nation through two programs: Buildership Workshops and Idea Accelerators.
Today we’re thrilled to add Tulsa, Oklahoma and Oxford, Mississippi to the list of communities joining us and running Idea Accelerators. We are launching these communities through a burgeoning partnership with Heartland Forward.
Anyone with creative or unexpected ideas for solving a problem and a willingness to run a small experiment to test their idea can join us. We make it easy with a no-strings-attached Pebble Grant.
The Idea Accelerators demonstrate to the entire community the power and possibility of small experiments. While we can think big about disruptive technologies, we can also start small. Whether that’s volunteering, learning about a problem you care about, brainstorming some ideas, supporting someone tackling it, or just trying something out. The Idea Accelerator helps to kickstart that energy everywhere it is running.