Wednesday, January 23, 2013

How to live in a world of your own design?

I just finished watching the PandoMonthly Fireside Chat with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky right now and I enjoyed his stories about his time at RISD and "building a world of his own design."  I agree that entrepreneurs and innovators can start with a simple concept of how they want to change the world on a major scale.  So what is an example of how I might live in a world of my own design?

My current entrepreneurial project revolves around injecting trust into society.  While I'm not going to go into all the details in this forum, the basic idea is to make it impossible for people to lie about where and when they went to school and what they studied there.  This has nothing to do with valuing a degree or comparing individual performance (i.e. GPA).  It has to do with the fact that the group of people that claim to have graduated with a particular degree is often larger than the group of people that actually did complete that particular degree.  This difference represents false claims, and reducing this number to zero would represent a positive iteration of the world in which I live.

At this point, let's take a step back and analyze this from the perspective of a social enterprise.  A traditional business generally needs to create value for its employees and its customers.  Tim O'Reilly, a favorite famous person of mine, alludes here to a third output of creating value for "others whom you may never even meet." It is this tenant that is the driving force behind the third bottom line of social enterprises, regardless of whether this empathy for unknown people is important to the founder or to the consumer.  For example sending a free pair of shoes or glasses to someone in need is a moral good for the entrepreneur and the consumer, and it falls under the category of charity.  Charity is a moral action, and many consumers purchase goods without knowing the tertiary value that is being provided by a triple bottom line business.

O'Reilly "urges companies to create more value than they capture" and I am curious as to how I might measure the value created on my mission to inject trust into society.  Maybe TOMS Shoes can provide shoes and glasses for everyone in need, but they are definitely making a great impact that they can measure how many pairs are delivered.

My goal is more abstract in that I am trying to remove the ability to lie about one particular thing from all society.  Will it be measured by the decrease in the number of people that are caught with inaccurate education histories? Or by a greater acceptance of people who have unfinished degrees or no degree at all?
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