Unreasonable Institute Takes Flight

After more than a year of planning, countless trips to get the buy-in of partners, and an application process through which a set of global entrepreneurs raised all the money they would need to participate, the Unreasonable Institute has finally taken off.

When I first heard about the program, it wasn't yet called the Unreasonable Institute, but the essential goals were the same. Daniel, Teju, Vlad, and Tyler and the rest of their team wanted to build a program for social innovators that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best incubation programs offered for techie and for-profit founders.

The plan was to take a page from Boulder co-tenant TechStars and build the institute around mentorship relationships between young entrepreneurs and experts in various aspects of fundraising, global development, and social entrepreneurship. Step one, then, was getting mentors on board. Could they get enough people excited to make the whole experience attractive for potential fellows? Check.

Programs like TechStars and Y-Combinator aren't just about valuable mentorship, however, they're about accessing real resources. Those other programs push people towards a "Demo Day" where they invited communities of follow on investors. While Unreasonable planned on some sort of similar event, they also recognized that the density of social angel investors just isn't the same. With that in mind, a new challenge was whether they could find some source of external capital to support their fellows after the Institute ends? Check check.

Most of all, they needed a great set of fellows to support and learn from one another. Ambitiously, they wanted them to come from all over the world. But how to make that work financially? They didn't want pure scholarships, feeling that "free money" could create a sense of entitlement, and they needed to cover their own costs of running the program. The idea they came up with was to have Institute finalists raise the money from their networks to get them to the program. It would be a test of entrepreneurial mettle as well as a way to make the money work. But could they really expect developing world entrepreneurs to be able to raise $6,500? Check check check.

This post is somewhat gushing for a reason. People have been talking about doing a full social innovation incubator for sometime, complete with months of support, in depth mentorship and funding opportunities, and these guys were the first to really go all in on that vision.

I'm proud of them because they've actually made it happen, and with their energy have created an entire community of people around them who want to help these ventures, and moreover what to help build the Institute into an Institution that can continue to grow a new field of innovators.

Way to lay your chips on the table and make it happen, Unreasonables.

Photo credit: Matthew Simantov