The gap between rich and poor is growing in America. But it’s not just wealth that separates us. It’s the opportunity gap between those who are thriving and those left behind.
This gap affects all of us, no matter which side of it we’re on. The concentration of wealth and opportunity leads to poorer health outcomes and increased social problems. It causes widespread economic and political instability. Ultimately, everyone loses when the gap widens.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dc04634e8b3ad2e02482fcb/1632351767332-X5CZRE5TOFEG83HE829F/Screen+Shot+2021-09-22+at+6.25.44+PM.png?format=1500w
It’s tempting to think entrepreneurship is how we close this gap—if we just get more people starting more businesses, creating more jobs. But entrepreneurship as we know it is failing America. Entrepreneurial activity is in a decades-long decline (apart from a possible rebound driven by necessity during the pandemic.)
Even if entrepreneurship were the cure, becoming an entrepreneur is increasingly out of reach for most, precisely because of the opportunity gap. While the digital revolution has made it easier to start a business, it’s also riskier to do so when it means quitting your job, not taking a salary, missing student loan payments, or going without health insurance. Options for funding your startup are scarce, especially if you’re a woman or a person of color—or if you’re one of the 99% of startups that will never raise a penny of venture capital.
So if entrepreneurship alone cannot close the opportunity gap, what can? Buildership™.
Buildership™ is how we democratize opportunity and revitalize the American economy for all of us.
Buildership™—not just entrepreneurship—is the key to the future.
In the broadest sense, entrepreneurship is a means of creating. It’s a way of bringing your ideas to life. The problem is not a lack of ideas—they’re everywhere! The problem is that traditional approaches to entrepreneurship narrow the path your idea can follow. Those that are “investment ready” take up all the oxygen, while the rest struggle for life. This kind of entrepreneurship leaves far too many good ideas on the cutting room floor (while backing more than a few bad ones).
We need a better path to test and sort ideas, before we bring them to market. We need to lower the barriers to entry and the cost of failure. Most people don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs precisely because the stakes are too high—so their ideas never come to life.
But while not everyone is an entrepreneur in the narrow sense, everyone can be a Builder.
Buildership™ offers a path for identifying problems and experimenting your way to solutions by conducting small, low-risk tests to see whether your ideas can work. Buildership™ resists the urge to prematurely sort ideas into “scalable” and “everything else,” allowing the process of experimentation to tell us what form (if any) an idea should take.
Buildership™ is not a replacement for entrepreneurship. Buildership™ is entrepreneurship, expanded. It widens the aperture, making room for more than just one narrow idea of what entrepreneurship can be.
Builders create small things and big things, for-profit things and non-profit things. Builders create unicorn companies and small businesses and everything in between. Builders solve challenges in their communities, create fun projects, and bring all sorts of ideas to life. By lowering the barriers to entry and reducing the cost of failure, Buildership™ allows us to test more ideas from a wider, more diverse group of people—thus closing the opportunity gap.
Buildership™ means better entrepreneurship, more innovation, expanded opportunity, and greater equity. There are at least four benefits to creating a Buildership™ economy.
Entrepreneurship puts funding first. Buildership™ puts ideas first.
Most entrepreneurship prioritizes funding. Many incubators and accelerators spend more time teaching you how to raise startup capital than helping you hone your ideas.
Buildership™ starts with ideas. It doesn’t assume every idea is a viable business-in-waiting, or even that every idea is good! But it does believe ideas are worth testing, and that almost any idea can be tested through small, low-cost experiments.
Instead of expecting entrepreneurs to raise millions in seed funding before they even know if their idea works, we can give Builders a small amount of pre-seed capital—as little as a few thousand dollars—to test their idea first. Experimentation can identify the best pathways for their ideas—and jettison bad ones before investing too much into them.
Buildership™ distributes opportunity more widely (and more equitably) than entrepreneurship.
A disproportionate share of entrepreneurial resources, including most venture capital, is confined to just five US cities.
There’s no reason it should be this way in a digital world. Geography matters less than ever, as we learned during the Covid-19 pandemic, when thousands of businesses continued operating while their employees worked from home.
Buildership™ expands the playing field, connecting people in small- and medium-sized communities to resources once inaccessible outside a few big hubs: capital, customers, mentorships. Businesses of the future will be geography-agnostic. Buildership™ is already there.
But expanding the playing field is about more than geography. It’s about reaching people who’ve been locked out of traditional forms of entrepreneurship. At a cohort of Builders in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 70 percent of those who applied were Black women. By distributing opportunity more widely, Buildership™ can address longstanding inequities in a way that entrepreneurship alone cannot.
Buildership™ harnesses digital technology to innovate faster and cheaper.
The old model for launching a venture required months, even years. Conducting market research, writing a business plan, pitching investors—often before even testing your idea.
The digital world opens up entirely new pathways for success, though we have to ensure access to the right digital tools and the chance to learn them. We can combine rapid experimentation (testing ideas in days or weeks) with tools that allow us to put winning solutions into action faster than ever—without requiring would-be entrepreneurs to risk a fortune to do so. What may have taken weeks or months before can now be done in hours or days. Ideas that might have reached only a handful of people can now reach millions.
For example, a Builder in Tulsa wanted to launch a membership network for young Black professionals, so they would be motivated to stay in the community instead of looking for opportunity elsewhere. She could have spent months trying to raise money for a new venture that would have required marketing, staffing, and expensive events right up front. Instead, she started by launching a Slack group where Black professionals can get to know each other, share resources and ideas, and organize meetups. This low-cost, digital-first experiment validated her idea faster and more compellingly than the old model could have.
Buildership™ creates a world where everyone can thrive.
We are at a fork in the road.
We can allow the opportunity gap to continue widening between those who are thriving and those left behind. We can allow a handful of larger-than-life unicorns to shape the digital future for us as they extract value from our communities, rather than truly adding to them.
Or we can harness the power of democratizing technology to close the gap. To unleash a torrent of ideas—solutions to all kinds of problems—from every community.
The digital world is upon us. Every industry, every business, every corner of society is being transformed. Buildership™ can leverage the possibility this moment holds to close another gap many of us feel right now: the hope gap.
Most of us do not see ourselves as entrepreneurs.
“I’m not Elon Musk.”
“I’m no Steve Jobs.”
Yet most of us have ideas that, if tested, could help solve real-world problems. The hope gap exists when people don’t believe they have the agency to put their ideas into action. Or to put it another way, the hope gap is the difference between saying, “Someone should do something about that,” and saying, “I can do something about that.”
Buildership™ can close this gap too. From the smallest project to the biggest, boldest idea—we can all be Builders.