"Entrepreneurship is the answer to almost every single issue we face today. Where most of the world sees problems and challenges, entrepreneurs see solutions and opportunities.”

DO Takeaways

1. Be unreasonable.
2. There's always a solution.
3. See opportunities, not problems.

The Talk

Year: 2013 California
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Because he believed the worlds biggest problems were out there to be solved, Daniel always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Even at the tender age of eighteen, his conscience was developed enough to be targeting ideas and ingenuity that would have the most impact on issues such as poverty, economy and health.

In his freshman year at the University of Colorado, Daniel promptly dropped his initial choice of maths, finance and econ in favour of philosophy. Why? Because he figured out that while his first choice would teach him what to think, his second would teach him how to think. Aside from that, philosophy also gave him the freedom to set aside time for his number one priority: launching start-ups with a very specific purpose.

“We jumped into these seemingly intractable problems, these three different start-ups. We were trying to have an impact on the world.”

The immediate issue Daniel faced was figuring out where these businesses fit into the market. They didn’t fit with the non-profits, because Daniel believed that profit’s the best driver for ingenuity and innovation. They didn’t fit into the private sector, either, because, although they too strived for profit, their primary ambition was change.

“I felt like the world was bifurcated, I felt like a misfit, and this led to the genesis of the Unreasonable Institute.”

So called from the George Bernard Shaw quote of: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in adapting the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”, Daniel theorized that in a world that is so disproportionately consumed by poverty, the only sane bet was on the people that were out there plotting and implementing change. The unreasonable people.

This company brought together the other misfits of the start-up world, the ones that were looking to solve problems on a global scale with their innovations. To date, The Unreasonable Institute has aided 83 misfits, with purposes that have ranged from the prevention of honour killing in rural Pakistan, the reintegration of Liberian child soldiers to the financing of solar power in the US.

“The common thread is that all of these entrepreneurs are trying to solve what we call BFP’s, which are Big Fucking Problems.”

For their part in the journey, the institute incubates and nurtures ideas, gives the entrepreneurs an ‘unfair advantage’ by aligning them with skills, relationships, mentorship and capital.

“Our job’s really simple, right? Convene the world’s most inspiring and aspiring entrepreneurs, match them with mentors that have already done it, bring in the funders and then create conditions in which creativity and uncommon productions can flourish.”

And it works. Some of the technologies brought to fruition through The Unreasonable Institute have been dubbed the greatest inventions of our time. But as with all quests for impact, Daniel didn’t consider it enough. The world is a big place and too much of it still lives in abject poverty. To get these life changing technologies to those people, Unreasonable was going to have to go on tour.

“Our goal was to take solutions that work, that are already impacting thousands if not millions of lives and take them to new international markets.”

They made a deal with a voyaging ship that commandeered them a wing for their team. In an experiment in transnational entrepreneurship, Unreasonable would select 11 technology companies, travel on a ship with them for 100 days, visiting 14 countries.

“We selected companies that we believed could really change the course of history is they could scale globally.”

Intermittently on board with them would be 20 mentors, like Desmond Tutu and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress, who would each offer advice and instruction. When they reached the shore, they staged host events to optimise the short amount of time they could spend in each country, splitting their visit on land between the imperative contacts and the people that would make up their market.

“We leveraged the absurdity of what we were doing to gather the start-up ecosystem of that country to show up when we arrived at port.”

They travelled the whole breadth of the globe, sailing directly between some of the richest countries in the world and some of the poorest. Along the way, they learnt that at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be them who were going to put a dent in global poverty; it would be the entrepreneurs on the front line who were vibrantly determined to solve their own problems. Thankfully, Unreasonable discovered there was no shortage of innovation. Solutions were breeding everywhere, defiant of means or race, all they needed was empowering.

“I feel like there’s an entrepreneurial renaissance happening around the world, like weeds pushing through concrete. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, they’re everywhere.”

Daniel’s talk is an articulate, passionate outpouring of betterness. While most people mentally cower from these massive issues, Daniel faces them head on with a determination that is both captivating and humbling.

“We believe that empathy builds empires.”