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Reflection Title: Begin with First Principles and solutions will find you!

Book – Slicing Pie: Funding Your Company Without Funds by Mike Moyer

Reflection:
How does a person, without a lot of personal money, start and a grow a business with no capital from any outside investor…ever?

How do you convince others to contribute to this venture without offering them money or anything else in exchange for the value that they bring to the table to even get a proof of concept going to see if it will work?

How do you make this fair for all involved?

How can scale this model and do this 50 times, 100 times, 1,000 times, 10,000 times?

This was the quandary my Co-founder and I found ourselves in as we tried to figure out how to bring the idea of ClubAny out of our minds and into real life? We had a dream of a place where people could come and invest their time, values, unique skills, missions, and creativity together to produce meaningful work and do it with others that care about the same things that they do. We wanted to keep this environment solely focused on expressing those values and the meaningful work it produced while still providing the ability to sustain and help our contributors thrive in a world where money does matter, no matter how much we try to distance ourselves from it as the end goal.

Basically, we had to figure out a way to break the system, create a new one, and find a way to still co-exist with how the rest of the world works…not an easy task.

To begin our search for answers to these questions, my Co-Founder and I leaned on a concept we learned about in How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist, and went back to the first principles of why anyone launches any new business in the first place? What is really at the core of any business venture? Why launch any venture in the first place? Why would someone be willing to invest so much time, energy, and emotional capital into an idea with no promise of any reward?

After a lot of digging, questioning, reading, discussions, exploring, and trial and error; we finally found our working hypothesis…Meaningful Work and Meaningful relationships. Meaningful work and meaningful relationships is the holy grail of happiness and sustainability. Doing work we love, with people we enjoy doing it with, and how we want it done is everything. That is why you start a business! Not money, not success, not fame or fortune…just the opportunity to get to produce something with people that align to your values is all that really matters.

Once we established this as the origins of how we would begin each venture and bring people together to contribute, we then turned to how we could make this work while still not discounting the 500lb Gorilla in the room of eventually people have to see some fruits from their labor…ie money. To solve this dilemma, we found the book Slicing Pie. Slicing Pie is how we plan to equitably structure each new venture that is launched under the ClubAny umbrella. The more you contribute, the more you make from the fruits of the labor. If it turns out that that a particular project wasn’t an exact alignment with your values, not to worry, we’ll have hundreds of other options to explore or go and create your own new venture.

Look, we aren’t crazy! We understand that even though we might be able to convince a bunch of people to come together to start a company with no money, people still need money to operate in this world. As much as it pains me to say this, money still matters and will always matter (at least in my lifetime). However, in a traditional business, it is the only thing that matters if you take on any outside investment at any point in time. Once you do that, your beautiful idea is no longer yours and money will always sit at the core of your business.

In any ClubAny business, values will ALWAYS sit at the core of what we do and money will always come second. This is the main job of myself and my cofounder to ensure that this is always the case. We must always strive to keep money and growth second to values in how we build and scale this beautiful ecosystem. We’re hoping that Slicing Pie will be play a big role in finding a way to make sure that people can still make plenty enough money as well and thrive in a world where that matters also.

If Slicing Pie isn’t the answer, no worries, we’ll either find another one or conjure up something else from our imaginations. There is always an answer when the work is meaningful, and you care about the people that surround you.

Question: What are the first principles of your beautiful question?