 All right. Hello everyone. I've really enjoyed today and I think that there's one thing about bumping into ideas which you deeply resonate with and there's also something about bumping into ideas which you disagree with and both of them really prompt creativity and hopefully you will find something you resonate with and something you disagree with in this. So I've gone with a sort of theme of the art of entrepreneurship and what it means for me and it's worth noting that I guess I have quite a fringe view so this is sort of like a fringe arts view of entrepreneurship and the parallels between the two. So I think that there's, when I think about entrepreneurship and how I see it, there's this big part of it which is about seeing reality, looking at the world really deeply and I think this is quite similar to how artists view the world, that the idea of you look into quite complex systems and you see to the heart of them and artists try to capture that and reflect it and present some truth. Entrepreneurs try to change it but there's something around looking into the world and seeing not how it is but how it could be and seeing the spaces in between and for me that practice and that art of seeing the spaces in between, seeing the possibility is a big part of it. Entrepreneurs fill those spaces with dreams and I think a dream is much more than just an idea. It's more visceral, emotional, experiential. It's something which you find ideas, dreams find you and I think that there's a big part of it which is around seeing what could be and having that could be grab you viscerally and that I've used the phrase before like fish hooks in the brain, this thing which gets in there and it just rattles around and rolls around and it has a life cycle and a part of its own and I'm not much of an artist, well any of an artist really and that for me entrepreneurship is the craft I most identify with but my understanding is that's very similar to the inspiration which moves someone to create and I think this idea of there's something fundamentally human about this process of seeing something, seeing a possibility and being compelled to follow that opportunity. Once you have the dream you refine it and this is a gem cutter polishing a diamond and a lot of it is around cutting away the stuff which is not true so when you hear sculptors talk about making great masterpieces it's like they see the potential of it and they remove everything that isn't a masterpiece and I think as entrepreneurs pursuing ideas a lot of this is around testing our ideas against reality and if you look at all the tools on this tool set like there is a huge raft of tools and practices and processes that we basically use to refine our ideas and make sure that they are true to make sure they're not dreams which have no basis in reality and we sort of try and carve them and shape them and sculpt them and iterate them and whatnot and for me that's when I think about the art of entrepreneurship there is something around the process of inspiration and dreaming but the skill, the practice, the learning it's about how to do this well and efficiently and to get it right because when you get it wrong thing falls apart. Some of the tools of entrepreneurs I think that for me that process and that practice of crafting an idea so much of it is about bouncing it off other people what do you think of this, what inspires you, what lights you up getting more information and that sort of serves lots of purposes but part of it is about shaping the idea to reality and another big part of it is around who else connects with this dream and particularly when you think about building teams for me a huge amount of that is deeply listening to people and understanding their story and their context and what their dream is and how does that fit into this dream or my dream and how can you start to create space for both of them to cohabit together so that you have a dream which is bigger than any one of us and that a lot of that happens over conversation, listening, coffee, talking and so that art of telling stories and listening to stories and putting them together into something that feels like a big part of the craft for me and then it's about taking it to the next level which is about deeply held shared dreams that when you start to talk to one person and two people and three people and build teams together that it's what makes a team magical for me is when there's this sense of a deeply held shared dream and understanding and culture and that that's when it starts to grow beyond one person and the idea of someone who holds everything together tightly to we hold this together and I think that that process and that practice again it's a craft, there are lots of tools and techniques and I've seen a lot of the work of facilitation and holding space in rooms directly applicable to leadership, entrepreneurship in general dreams are pretty expensive to chase and a big part of the entrepreneurship story is around gathering in resources to finance the thing investment and entrepreneur I think is a really an entrepreneurship is a really interesting dynamic I also think that there's I love the thoughts today about value and around a venture producing more value than it consumes and I think that it's really important to remember that especially in the sort of the impact space money has real value it costs about $25 New Zealand for 30 minute cataract surgery to restore someone's sight so if an investor gives you $100,000 they're entrusting you with the equivalent of the vision of 4,000 people and that money has real value which can cause real things and I think that there's part of that dynamic which is sort of worth remembering and I think that that relationship between investors and entrepreneurs is when someone backs you and says I believe you can do what you can say and I believe that your team will achieve what you think you can achieve that's a really sacred relationship there's so much trust in that there's so much of a sense of people believing in you and backing you and there's also a huge amount of pressure and stress and responsibility and I think this is some of that unique pressure to entrepreneurship is when you have when you're holding other people's dreams and you've taken resources with this idea of hey I think that thing is going to work it's a really it's a it's a lot of people are really feeling like the big problem is hitting together and I think there's pressure in that space but there's also like there's something really beautiful there so the archetypal image of a venture there's a lot of our understanding about entrepreneurship and business has emerged from that merchant traders sort of era where you get people together you launch out the idea of you know as ship and harbor is safe but that's not what ships were built for and I think there's something around entrepreneurship like I've done a bunch of sailing and when I talk to sailors there's that call of the ocean that if you're not out there and in it and don't know where you're going to end up life loses something and there's that call of the unknown, the adventure, the risk and whatnot which feels very similar to me about the call of a venture it's that you know you can always play it safe and do something small but dreaming of something big and having a shot of it there's an excitement in that and I think that that analogy of sort of leaving the harbor and being underway, being under sail feels like it captures some of the story for me and I really want to, that phrase about ventures producing more value than they consume that was the simplest, most elegant way I've seen of explaining that so love it going to use it forever and I think that the idea that a venture it's something magical like it it takes in a really simple base things, performs magic on them and they are more valuable and I think if you ever seen a percussionist pick up like some tins and some pots and some sticks and make something amazing there's, you can do amazing things with small inputs when you apply skill and when you imply the right sort of circumstances so I think that that idea of a venture being something special where you take in things and you make them more for people whether it's houses or music or whatnot that that's, there's something in that which is again really delightful and also there's the reality of ventures failing and I think this is like you hear a lot about celebrating failure and if that's that sort of part of me thinks that's just crazy I think there's something about celebrating surviving and they're celebrating people and the process and realizing that a lot of people who take a run at big things it's not going to work out how they hoped that the dreams just don't work, sometimes storms come along, sometimes you didn't say help properly, whatever it is there's that real visceral possibility of you're going to fail and things won't work out and I think that adds in this really this context and dynamic to entrepreneurship and for me ultimately this sort of coalesces into this idea of I guess the this is what I found googling for the cycle of life it was this art piece about someone talking about the you know the coming and going the rhythms of life and when I think about that impulse about creating something and a venture there is a there's something in that which feels profoundly human to me that same human humanity which creates a piece of art or dreams for the future of your children or whatever it is and I think that there's something in this whole story of entrepreneurship which is profoundly about life and evolution like you incrementally try something sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but as a whole our systems move forward, our culture improves our technology, everything gets better it evolves much like life it evolves and I think that that process of iterations and evolution is a process in itself and you can see living systems apply it but you can see a huge amount of it in our work as entrepreneurs so I guess that's the for me that's when I tried to think about what does the essence of entrepreneurship mean to me that sort of that story is where I went so now I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the learning where's the edge of my learning in my practice of entrepreneurship and yeah this is it for me one of the big things I've seen especially for entrepreneurs caring about impact and sort of wider social change I think that there's something around I believe I'll have as much impact if not more by actively sharing the most valuable bits of my research and learning with other people the idea of we're applying a scientific method to launching ventures the data and the learnings that we get from that scientific method it's just like scientific research that if you don't publish it it doesn't contribute to the whole body and if you look at how the constant improvements in open source software has affected engineering that I think that the actively resourcing and making it a priority to proactively share what we're learning as entrepreneurs it's really like when you're in it it's really hard to say oh time to blog time to do more things that feels like just one more I'm not asking an already busy schedule but personally I'm starting to see the importance of that and you hear little stories about you talk with someone and they hear a little bit about what you do and they take it and they jam on it and they take it in directions you never would there's a value in that and I think there's a deep value in it's not about sharing our stories and telling the stamina to pitch again but what's the edge of your learning and I would love to take a little piece of everyone here's experience and knowledge and synthesize that that would level me up so much and I think when you think about the whole wider ecosystems we are plugged into if we consciously resource sharing our learnings with each other whether it's talks or whether it's blogging more or whatnot I think it would have a measurable impact on our collective success I also think there's something there's there's a deep culture like humans understand stuff through stories we have a huge amount of our brains which is wide around social things so the stories we relate to the most are about individuals and when you look at the you know the hero's story and whatnot that sense about you are destined to do this there is a prophecy you are the one you have a lightning bolt in your forehead or whatnot is a really common narrative in so much of our cultural stories about heroes and individuals and it's a completely false one that no one who's achieved anything was really selected by some preordained council they just stood up and said I'm gonna try and do something but I think that that cultural narrative it's really important to be aware of I also think that again even when you take that away and you just celebrate people who start things because about we understand data through individual stories those stories will be about individuals and I think this is where and again that sort of makes sense that's how humans remember stuff but I think that gives us an intuitive assumption about how the world works because I don't believe I think that culturally we over emphasize founders and individuals a whole bunch and that the way stuff really happens is a whole bunch of people swarm on it and I think that it's one thing I'm starting to think about a lot more is how to de-emphasize individuals in this work I love the idea of individualism I think we should celebrate it and definitely not throw things out from there but celebrate it in the context of lots of individuals working together and creating a space for everyone to have their individual story that is a powerful story that directly impacts their values and their contribution so for me I've done a lot of work like it took me about four years to move from the first dreamer of Inspiral and the solo person holding everything together to fully step back into I'm just one person amongst a collective of peers I didn't really have any role models for that it was really I'm sure people have done it before but I didn't know their stories I knew lots of stories of a heroic hero founders and or individual founders and I could rattle them off the top of my head like how many celebrity CEO startups can you name right now and how much of their data and their stories do you know how much of those stories impact the pressure you feel in your work and absolutely to talk about Vaughn said about this works hard so I think consciously thinking about that and realizing we have cultural like individual human biases towards individual stories and we need to focus on reinforcing collective stories a bit more I also think like where's Dave Dave's comment about we've got ideas about how we'd like to see finance work or startups work but the reality is the world works this way and good luck and I think that for me there's this idea that our economic system is really broken the majority of mature companies on our planet do not create value they steal it they're subsidized by society they have artificial monopolies and that our idea of business which has been massively successful in innovation and creating things is based on this idea of stealing from society that's what successful businesses do and I think we really need to and if you saw that intersection of the pie charts which was like here's this investable venture right here that minute window if you try and scale that down to here's an investable venture which actually generates value more value than it produces rather than evolving into something which will steal value much smaller window so I think as entrepreneurs when we look at launching businesses and creating businesses and designing businesses having this idea of are we paying something of true value are we a real venture or are we just a pirate anyone know what this graph is maybe wish you invested in it early on that's a log scale on the other side that's the human population over 10,000 years and so there's this context of our collective evolution in the sort of 10,000 year window this is what the human population is doing it's just it's still going up and I think that when you look at the economic systems that have evolved even the ones over the last 200 years they've evolved in this context of that last bit of that curve where there's just massive growth and they've also evolved in this context of what would you say commercializing everything they could get their hands on because when you look at the the fundamental model of our companies is that if you're flatlining revenues you're losing you won't be investing like if you have a down-round like that's that idea of growth but who loved growth? There was a really great one, John and I think that idea of growth it's so embedded into entrepreneurship startups like if you launch a startup that doesn't grow well it's going to be you forever and I think that growth is really natural and healthy for small things and it's really unhealthy and damaging for mature things and if you think about how individuals and biological things grow is that there's this maturation and we don't have that with our ventures and the entire economic system is built on things never dying until just at the very end when everyone runs away like rats fleeing a ship and so I think that that's an important context to have when we think about ventures and entrepreneurship because so much of the traditional stories you build something and you sell it and you'll sell it eventually into a public traded entity who will always try and grow it until the very end when it'll be collapse and fall into something else and it will eat as much of the world it can so one of the ideas that I've been playing with for a while and this is going to be quite a long experiment I think when you think about the life cycles of companies is this idea of capped returns that I think one of the reasons why companies have to always grow is because every time someone puts money into it whether they're traded or in a financing round or what not they're looking for it to keep growing on it so that the last round of investors is always going to push for growth because that's you know you want to return on your investment you've given someone 4,000 people's eyesight you want that to come back so you can give people sight and I think that that alone applied at scale would solve a fundamental thing of capitalism and how business works and it's also if you think about how hard it would be to convince investors to put money into your business with an idea of as soon as you put money in here's a cap on how much you're ever going to get out of your ceiling on it right now and that's the sort of dynamic I'm playing with in current businesses that I'm working in so whenever founders put energy into it they know the total cap of what they'll get out that investors know what they'll get out of it and that you manage this cap like you would another part of your business so you say you know as a business we will never pay out more than 50 million or whatever the number is and that when that point happens that's the business buying itself back and now all of it surplus goes to a social mission where entrepreneurs should get a good return for their money entrepreneurs should get a good return for their risk and skills and value and I think that you can give people great returns in this context of eventually capping the total returns from a business and so this idea is something which I'm definitely exploring I'm playing with and what not but it's also quite a contentious one and one that goes against the direct grain of pretty much all the financial forces in our current system so interesting idea though I think ultimately it's about companies which will age with dignity because if you look at the life cycle of a start-up it's years if you're in your 15th year as a start-up you might be doing it really right or you're most likely doing it wrong the life cycle of companies is decades normally some of them get a few centuries in them but they're the anomaly and I think that we do not design our companies to die we design them to grow forever and if we design our companies to eventually die with dignity where they've paid out good returns for investors and entrepreneurs and had a great run at things and contributed to the evolution before something else coming and taking their place really different system to what we've got now another experiment I've been doing is around self-set salaries and so again this is just a simple thing of go around all the staff in the company what do you think you should be paid getting them to have a sort of public and facilitated process around talking about and then ultimately having a thing where they set their own salary and don't have to ask someone's permission if that's okay so the one sort of safeguard in that is that there's a remuneration team and they basically say when you go through that to this process did you know this market data you might be up or you might be down did you know what everyone else is doing in their salaries giving people that information to make the decision but ultimately that team does not approve the salaries people set their own salaries the safeguard to this is again in the context of a self-managed team is the conflict resolution process so if you're doing something crazy with a website and I don't like it there's a process where I can say hey I don't like what you're doing and if that doesn't work out then it's mediated and it keeps going we reuse that process for hey I think you're paying yourself too much what do you think about dropping it and it's not the managers or the founders who have that conversation with the company and again this is again in the more fringe side of things but a lot of my work is around exploring the possibilities of decentralized organizing and I think that the idea of I love that idea around hierarchies and around get them right and then move beyond them I love that idea around the complexities of different work that it is really different like managing different time scales is a different kind of thing but I think it's important to be a manager in celebrating or talking about employees as future entrepreneurs who haven't got there yet or talking about entrepreneurs as future investors who just haven't made enough money because I think there are also fundamental differences to different types of work and that some people might never want to aspire towards philanthropy and that having useful ways to apply your gifts and skills while still making an impact is and for me this is like the extreme sports of where my learning is at the moment playing with salaries and like setting your own and pulling away all the levers of controlling that that's really hard and it requires a deep cultural connection between the sort of staff and but I think there's a something like I've tried lots of things to build engagement in teams and ownership and deep connection with businesses this thing has probably had the fastest and deepest response of whoa you mean I don't have to ask permission for my salary for new people like a lot of people the culture you need to have to hold that process well is a really valuable culture in its own right so I'll end with a story from probably my favorite book of the last few years which was reinventing organizations by Frederick Lelew and there's like I most all the stuff I do I pretty much just copy from places like that salary stuff that's just Morningstar that's just SEMCO lots of people have done that before and this that book has got probably the most densest amount of things I've wanted to copy in it and it did prompt the salary one reading it there as well and the story is along the lines of when you look at penguins walking on land they're waddling they're not that great at it they sort of look awkward and clumsy and that you sort of wonder how they don't get eaten and how they survive and so on and then when you look at penguins in the ocean completely different story and I think that there's this idea of potential that we sort of we get used to what's normal like we look at like when I I started Dev Academy recently which is a programming bootcamp and when I was over in San Francisco I saw students who'd been learning for nine weeks solid building stuff that took me a good couple of years to build stuff of the same quality that what I had is my intuitive understanding of how long it takes to learn something was blown apart based off this sort of facilitated process when you look at the Romans they used to have lead piping for their water so all the villas lead pipes and so everyone got lead poisoning and that what they considered to be the normal consequence of aging was lead poisoning and I think when we think about what normal is whether it's the financial system whether it's how we organize teams whether it's how we practice entrepreneurship I suspect that there is a huge amount of that which is just artificial limitations on what's possible and that by sort of pushing beyond and embracing different ways of working we can achieve far more than we think we can and that's sort of that's my sense around the decentralized organization and network based organization model that it feels like there's a possibility therefore like a 10x in increasing efficiency and performance and that when we look at trying to actually compete in a very competitive commercially driven marketplace when you're starting to try and weave in these ideas of creating true value and impact we need every edge we can get cool so that's me Thanks Joshua that was awesome I just just a real quick comment because I think this has resonated with a lot of people here and I just wanted to add that where I think that you're really masterful is asking the right questions and Joshua and I was the chair of organization we had two and a half thousand young people which is big in New Zealand Joshua was a trustee and we decided that it was time for this venture to die that it was reached its maturity and was no longer needed it was a discussion it was a difficult conversation to have and the reason that we got through it is by Josh asking the right questions of the two and a half thousand young people that this could affect and together we conceptually we held hands and we laid the venture to rest so you're a master at doing this and practice as well and thanks for that made my job a lot easier Thank you We've talked about cap returns but it just strikes me in hearing you frame it this way like right now we have these milestones of either exit or IPO and both of which often conjure a lot of uncomfortable feelings for entrepreneurs but because they're the socially rewarded milestones and celebrated and almost like if this kind of you know cap return limit was the new badge of honor because basically you got to the graduation into social impact for good Absolutely and that idea I first bumped into that in the impact investment community who were looking at doing deals in economies where there was no IPO or on businesses where there was no trade sale and so coffee growers in Africa and lots of different things like that was where I first bumped into that sort of cap return thing It's like if you could give it a word like graduation or like yeah I took my company to harvest in eight years like some metaphor where you could say instead of like and then I had my big exit you know I love that idea of a new meme for entrepreneurs That was brilliant Joshua and don't take this the wrong way but the first half seemed kind of boring and I realize now that's because the second half was so provocative and you had to sort of prove to everybody that you're actually an entrepreneur because you're about to say I've been a capitalist I've made a living that way it's been very good to me and a few years ago just as you said I realized I was running into these kind of CSRs corporate social responsibility departments in a number of companies and I thought to myself eventually if they actually made the recommendation they ought to be making they would recommend that the company be disbanded that's what they should be doing and I just caught a new positive vision where by organizations, big companies companies of all sizes use Lumeo to together collaborate that they indeed should shut the company down and disband it Kenny I just wanted to offer another model raised up the ante a little bit too we had a company at Bioneers last year who's a board member of Bioneers who's chief foreign lines from the Urquois Six Nations in the States and they formed a joint venture with the Swedish government they actually refused to take any capital from the US because they thought it was so corrupted for what that's worth and what they're going to do with a large point it's an urban vertical green house that's extremely sophisticated they're actually committing future profits to the seventh generation so there's a different level of it's the Urquois law of the seed that if you observe this natural law of death and regeneration that life will be everlasting and so it puts everything in a different time frame it's very different from a quarterly report nice cool, I like that further reflections I think I heard you talk about this the first time maybe a year ago or so and it stuck in my head I'm putting the pieces together now but the capped returns thing could fit really well with that monopolistic mindset that companies have to have to grow if you could put that together and have a showcase have an example of that that would be the star that could inspire a lot of people to try again so I think that having one example that we can do I'm personally really interested in this that would be really exciting to put together as a project and take the mindset of doing something like this and just say this is what we're going to do day one that's part of the mission and get around eventual investors that all think it's really cool and just kick it off and try it I think that would be really cool and so I know that what are they called Tonic T-O-N-I-I-C Global Network of Impact Investors I know they've put together deals like that it was one of their case studies and the way it would get traction is someone going and doing something really big with it like build an Uber with that sort of model and everyone will notice it and pay attention and if you can't build an Uber with that sort of thing then you need to look at the reasons for it try again but I do think that that's a cool go for it, good luck I hope someone does question up here I don't have a question I just have a reflection just want to really appreciate and acknowledge the spacious way that you communicate your vision, your ideas and what you're up to to me it really reflects that natural inherent intelligence of the land and the organic nature of self-organization and I really appreciate that about you and I think you're a real model to a lot of the entrepreneurs here and around the world so thank you for being on the path bro so finally just before we wrap this up because you're such a master of asking the right questions I thought it'd be kind of fun if you had a question for us you could direct it to anyone in particular if you want to be really evil or just the general group I don't want to be evil but maybe before that and to give me thinking time maybe I can hear Dave's question thanks I just wanted to echo everyone's appreciation of your talk it was really great really well thought out and really well delivered and the idea of Cap returns as an investor I find really interesting but I'd also like to find a way of capping my losses because the issue with Cap returns is that one of the reasons that I like to take punts on really young companies with really crazy ideas because I know I'm going to lose quite a few of them but maybe one or two of them are actually going to be big so Cap returns overall or whatever but just for the record when I asked my question earlier on in the day it wasn't oh this is the way the rest of the world works good luck my real question was and this is a question I'd like to throw out to the crowd and hopefully you'll support this is how do we work together as a society to build experiments where we can test out these hypotheses for different ways of doing things in a controlled environment in a way where we can limit the damage not only to ourselves but also to the subjects of our experiments the companies that we were working with their customers and so on and I think that's really the key to breaking the paradigm is building a whole bunch of little experiments and trying to figure out a way to scale those into a way that's actually going to compete with the monopoly rents system that does control so much of the world absolutely and sorry for paraphrasing around that I think I've heard a few people like this idea of building bridges and I think that the Kiwi Connect team you can see the remarkable job they've done of just connecting a whole bunch of people from different places and bringing them together and that idea of bridge builders and really good ones I had a friend who does a lot with sort of like Parki Haa understanding of the treaty and running facilitation around that and he had the experience of his understanding of everything and the reflection I heard there was that no one had ever explained that explained this system in a way to him which was understandable or appropriate or worked for his sort of way of communicating and that it was always from a very antagonistic here's this and you're directly forming opposition around it and I think that particularly when it comes to trying to transform an economic system or whatnot then there's no way you can do that with most of the world opposing you you have to be able to figure out what's the way to get people on board what's the story and the language and the process that includes people and I think that art of inclusiveness and working together is what's required to get like deep healing in sort of our systems really hard work and I think the final part would be one of my favourite metaphors for this type of environment and I guess collaboration in general is basically like jazz improvisation you have your instrument everyone else has theirs listen you find spaces you leave spaces there's that idea of knowing what's your bit what's your part when are you up when someone else up and I think that in terms of the investment stuff like I'm a bootstrapper I bootstrap social enterprises I know nothing about raising investment rounds everyone in here has got so much more knowledge around that and that the people who are going to take forward cap returns if it's a thing are going to be not me and other people got a hand up over here but can we get it from a completely different angle and I've been listening to what everybody's being saying today I've seen lots of really dumb deployments of capital in the world you know I've seen for example eight fibre optic backbone networks built around the UK going to exactly the same places when one would have been perfectly adequate so there goes seven times money which has been completely wasted Matthew brought up the example of 25 new ATS systems being built I wonder if the problem isn't sometimes a dumb deployment of capital and so therefore ideas which are great don't get off the ground because people aren't thinking about things in a holistic manner and whether or not your capped returns model might actually make people think a bit more hard about where they are putting their money and the reasons that they're putting it there it's just more an observation more than anything else but I don't know whether anyone sort of had any thoughts about it or come across any instances the immediate thing that comes up for me around that is how does stuff get put into the commons like the reason why eight companies built fibre optics things was each one owned it and they made money off owning it whereas if the fibre optic was held place which lots of people could use and the people who built it were incentivized and paid and so on you could imagine a different structure doing things there and I think this idea about that once a company's reached the harvest or it's paid itself off that the fruits of it sort of live in the commons and are sort of accessible to all I think is a useful thing but exploring that idea of what does common ownership look like and what's in its appropriate use because this idea of public and private of cultural baggage around different things that haven't haven't worked and that exploring where what the appropriate level is would be really interesting and I guess to finish with Rebecca's request about if I had a question it would basically be along the lines of if that analogy is of a big jazz brand of musicians what's your instrument and when's your part and that how do people know what it is that you do and how you play and will know the spaces that you're looking for and that signalling system so that because when it's six people on stage you can look and you can hear and you can feel it and it's quite manageable 100 people distributed all around the place how do I know what your instrument is and what spaces you're looking for on vice versa cool thank you Joshua