In the 4th sector spirit of the original Alternativet party from Denmark, we are always interested in new hybrids between the values of civil society, and the “fast company” culture of start-up businesses and entrepreneurship. In terms of our climate and pandemic crisis, all hands on deck required.

In this Epsilon Theory essay from Luis Perez-Breva, Faculty Director of MIT’s Innovation Teams Enterprise, he points towards the next stage of business creation, after COVID and in the midst of our biosphere disruption.

Not “Enterpreneur 1.0’, or “Speculate-ship”, but a “Society of Tinkerers” - Edison-like players with possibility, supported by investment to tackle the core challenges of economy and society.

Extract below:

Most prevalent in the past few decades has been doing a startup — or more accurately Speculate-ship. The goal: found a startup born to be sold — and exit before it exits you.

Speculate-ship is fueled by Lean Startup, Design Thinking, the 24 steps of Disciplined Entrepreneurship, and the Startup Owner’s Manual [these are standard textbooks on start-up culture - ed.]

It’s driven by evocative buzzwords (shown here in italics): have a product or service idea; talk to lots of relevant people to validate it; give the high growth speech; do some inexpensive experimentation about the features of a single would-be product of a single-product startup; and measure success by number of users, not dollars.

If it doesn’t work out, start again with a new idea for a new product. A 2019 series of articles in the Economist magazine provided a litany of reasons for why the unicorn craze that follows Speculate-ship looks more like a scam than anything entrepreneurs should pursue.

Sure, Speculate-ship has worked well for some. But here we are, immersed in at least three deep crises, without any of these “ready-made” solutions to pitch as consumer products.

Back to the question students ask: “How do I find an idea?” It’s not really about “wealth” or “speed” — all approaches could lead to wealth, and speed is tremendously variable. Snap and Tesla Motors both went public about seven years after they were founded — the software startup required five times more investment than the car manufacturer.

The way to choose is to determine how you want to play it out. And that needs serious thinking today. Entrepreneur 1.0 is about building an organization; it means you have to play the game of scale, which means you need to use and invent technology (that’s what technology is actually for: to achieve more).

Speculate-ship is about fundraising for a product, about getting investors; the game you play is one of perception, and for that you’ll need messaging.

But what about the crises we face today? What about the doing good and doing well option? That’s the path I’ve called Tinkerer. It’s only just beginning to reveal itself fully as a possibility now that frivolity and waste can no longer be an option. It can take us out of this vicious cycle of crises. It’s our future.

The people along this path are industrious and learn by doing. Tinkerers learn to home in on problems with intense practical experience, wielding technologies and knowledge of any kind —engineering, sciences, but also liberal arts, finance, whatever — to gain true insight.

It is not about following recipes or doing startups, but solving true problems — the kind we don’t yet know how to solve.

This talent grew in an economy that’s no longer defined by lifestyle jobs, as Sarah Kessler explains in her book Gigged, but could be defined by problems solved. These tinkerers seem able to hold on to the belief they can do well and good even after being told otherwise throughout their schooling. This new talent redefines what it can mean to be one’s own boss.

Tinkering comes first, before an idea gels. That’s how Thomas Edison worked. Tinkering precedes without expending even one iota of energy on developing the perfect pitch for investors or even deciding to start a company. It keeps one from rushing before an idea is really sound.

The tinkering I’m talking about is often predicated on simple yet seemingly incongruous premises.

For example: What if there was a way to align greed with the saving the environment — the greedier you get, the more habitable the planet?

Or: What if we brought back manufacturing, with new, good jobs, by decentralizing factories to outperform the ones that went overseas?

Or: What if we could recycle all the innovation waste and put technologies that were left on the shelf in the hands of anyone who wants to tinker with them?

In fact, these are some of the hunches for new problem-solving organizations we’ve already begun to work on. So many of the enterprises we celebrate today began with touches of lunacy just like these. You can find some stories of these kinds of ideas in my book Innovating and Safi Bahcall’s Loonshots.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade training and guiding people who wanted to be involved in innovating and learning to use any technology (not just apps) to tackle real problems. I’ve witnessed the emergence of a growing number of talented industrious people who long for means to solve —sustainably, and at a profit — the most-challenging real-world problems that matter but that are going largely unaddressed.

These are the new Tinkerers. To tackle the problems traditional approaches to venture finance or philanthropy have put out of reach, these new professionals are in need of a community, instruments, a method, and jobs in which to deploy their talents for problem solving.

This moment calls for exceptional talent and capital ready to embrace a simple principle: there’s more good and money to be made investing in organizations engaged in continually solving problems that matter than there is in splitting hairs over 9 in 10 odds of failure and scheming about who might be left that can be persuaded unicorns exist.

We don’t need more minimally viable products.

We need more maximally viable organizations attacking big problems with a tinkerer’s mindset and a capitalist’s goals.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic and the changed world we will confront when it’s over, I’m feeling an intense urgency to help build that community in which Tinkerer 1.0 people and a new kind of forward-thinking investor can thrive.

More here.

Our second item on this theme is Nathan Schneider’s work on Exit to Community (E2C). This is an option and method for start-up entrepreneurs to take glory and satisfaction from their technology or invention becoming the foundation of a strong, sustained community, than just something they “exit” from and sell to a much bigger company.

E2C overlaps with Luis’ idea of “professionals in need of a community, instruments, a method” (and both overlap with the notion of B-Corps, another ethical business practice).

We profiled E2C over a year ago , but this week they launched their main Exit To Community: a Community Primer pamphlet (download PDF at their site, or from here). They put their challenge somewhat poetically:

What is a startup for? Who are startups for?

The usual answers begin sounding strange the more you think about them. A startup is kind of like a child, some say. Founders pour themselves and their resources and energy into the thing—but then, unlike a child, they sell it off to the highest bidders.

A lot of founders would love to change the world for the better, right? But the usual endgame—the "exit"—for a successful startup is how many of their creations end up getting bought by bigger, old-world companies or going public on the grand-old establishmentarian casino, the stock market.

Why do we even bother?

Exit to Community (E2C) is a strategy in the making. It's a different kind of story, one that connects the founders, workers, users, investors, activists, and friends who have been trying to feel their way toward a better kind of startup.

Its endgame is to be a long-term asset for its community, co-owned and co-governed by those who give it life.

More here.

We also recommend this Schneider article from the excellent futures blog Noema. It dreams up an imaginary company called CoSocial, which seems to combine Reddit and Task Rabbit very successfully, but risks completely alienating its community of users if it wants to expand (by starting to monetise and manipulate them, as a consequence of further investment).

Schneider imagines three other routes they can travel, if the founders want to serve the community their business is now built on: trust buy-out (where the users are supported by funds to take control of the company), federation (spread power among various stakeholders), or tokenisation (shared ownership among users of a platform through digital tokens).

Some fascinating thinking here about the culture of business, in a societal context where a toxic, predatory capitalism is rubbing up against generational values. Something’s gotta give.

If you're a start-up, here's two alternatives to eventually just cashing out: become a Tinkerer, and Exit to Community