The Case for Funding “Society Upgrade Entrepreneurs”
If you’re willing and able to devote years of your life to reducing the "cost of flourishing" for people in your community, you should be able to get enough funding to pursue this mission full-time.
Hey friends,
Another Substack post. Another new concept to share with you:
The “Society Upgrade Entrepreneur.”
This is a type of person who is fully dedicated to spending years doing whatever it takes to discovering and instituting “society upgrades”—legal, technological, etc—that permanently reduce the “cost of flourishing” for members of their local community.
I define the cost of flourishing as the dollar cost that a member of your community typically needs to spend to flourish as a human. People differ in their definitions of what it means to flourish, but the Harvard Flourishing Program assesses 1) happiness and life satisfaction, 2) mental and physical health, 3) meaning and purpose, 4) character and virtue, 5) close social relationships, and 6) financial and material stability.
A society upgrade entrepreneur is distinct from a social entrepreneur, who primarily focuses on creating one innovative business venture that drives profit and social impact through their enterprise. In contrast, a society upgrade entrepreneur is relentlessly committed to reducing the cost of flourishing for their local community members by whatever means necessary, which could include but won’t be limited to creating a social enterprise, with a keen focus on leveraging foundational technologies to achieve cost efficiencies.
On their mission to catalyze a society upgrade, a society upgrade entrepreneur may take on a multitude of roles and initiatives. This could include helping establish social enterprises, educating the public, advocating for and facilitating the passage of beneficial policies, promoting the development and adoption of open-source software that serves the local community, building cross-sector sociopolitical coalitions, and more.
The ultimate goal of a society upgrade entrepreneur is not to find a single, sustainable business model but rather to create permanent reductions in cost of flourishing—reductions that can persist independently of any entrepreneur or any specific social enterprise in the long run.
One society upgrade nearly every American community needs? A drastic increase in housing affordability
To make the concept of society upgrades more concrete, consider the major cost centers for those living on low or medium incomes: housing, healthcare, education, food, and transportation, which have all ballooned in costs (inflation adjusted) in the past half century.
Now, let’s hone in on just U.S. housing affordability:
Nationwide, half of all renters now spend more than 30% of their paycheck on rent and utilities… The study notes an even more alarming additional statistic: The number of “severely cost-burdened households”—the group even more neck-deep in it, whose rents consume more than 50% of their annual income—rose to 12.1 million.
Imagine if, through years of thoughtful planning and effective execution of a well-crafted, adaptable strategy, you were able to significantly increase access to affordable, comfortable housing—whether for renting, owning, or a combination of both—for the people in your community. If you could achieve this in a manner that minimizes unintended consequences and creates a self-sustaining system that doesn't rely on your constant involvement, you would be celebrated as a true champion of your community and a beacon of hope for humanity as a whole.
You would have helped saw off the chains of modern serfdom that is becoming systemically pervasive today!
Why society upgrades don’t happen often
This hypothetical housing affordability outcome sounds nice, but there’s two key issues that make it hard for this outcome in housing or another wicked problem domain to transpire:
Who is funding people who can bring about these outcomes? There is nowhere to go today!
Traditional private investment looks for quick returns and lacks long-term, broad societal mandates, which isn't a fit for these complex problems often referred to as wicked problems. If the main source of your funding comes from a company that expects you to weave in a product of theirs into the solution, your mission of finding the best possible solution for the problem is already tainted.
“Social entrepreneurship” fellowships that provide $50-100k grants lack comfort with ambiguity. Skoll, Echoing Green, and Ashoka appreciate the wickedness of societal problems, but require people to have founded a company/non-profit already—which self selects for people who have already presumed a solution to a problem.
Even if funding is covered, it takes a rare type of person to effectively carry out society upgrades.
Building on this second point, the most effective society upgrade entrepreneur must…
Really love care about people—since this is a truly people-oriented role
Be deeply entrepreneurial—with a whatever it takes mentality
Be able to build diverse, win-win-win coalitions across private, public, and civil sectors
Believe in the ability of certain applications of technology to elevate society
Believe that the “layers” that comprise society (the “society stack”) can be changed and lead to radical improvements in quality of life for everyday people
Have deep love and ties with at least one real world community/jurisdiction (e.g. Chicago)
Be well versed and well connected in at least one frontier tech field, ideally multiple
Be willing to work full time for many years to embark on a public interest mission of 1) apprenticing with a wicked problem, 2) exploring the solution landscape to identify “society upgrade(s)”, and 3) bringing a society upgrade to reality
To give an example of what kind of person it would take to make quality housing more affordable in, say, Washington, D.C., we’d want to support someone with…
Deep knowledge and experience in real estate
Strong relationships with construction companies
Deep understanding of zoning and economic policies
Strong relationships with local D.C. ward community leaders and elected officials
Openness regarding and literacy in how frontier technologies could reduce living costs and improve community outcomes (ex: can hemp or bamboo be foundational for far cheaper yet still sturdy building materials?)
Desire to network in the housing innovation startup space, full of entrepreneurs hacking on how to create homes cheaper, whether through prefab, 3D printing, or other methods
Strong communication skills, with track record of being able to use online communication tools to coordinate with collaborators and supporters online
Urgency yet patience, since the mission of permanently upgrading the housing situation in D.C. will take many years
If there is enough funding (that does not bias their exploration and coalition building to a specific solution), this systems upgrade entrepreneur would be able to dedicate their full time to…
Live in D.C., so they can be immersed in the problem
Conduct a deep systems analysis of the housing situation in D.C., which would involve interviewing dozens of stakeholders
Construct and execute on a robust, evolving strategy for how to bring the upgrade to reality
Explore the solution space with the help of diverse technologists, policymakers, social entrepreneurs, and more
Design and coordinate multi-stakeholder collab-athons and hackathons to prototype solutions
Keep the community of supporters engaged and informed
Report learnings, incrementally every week but also in detailed reports for the public
Build solutions (e.g. technologies, policies, companies etc) and/or advise/partner with those who want to build solutions based on their insights. (There’s usually no silver bullet entity that can address a wicked problem, after all!)
Long story short, for housing affordability or really any domain that affects virtually all people of a community, it takes passionate, multidisciplinary, collaborative, tech-savvy people working diligently over many years to shepherd a society upgrade into reality.
Working part-time on upgrade missions is simply not an option.
How can we increase the number of society upgrade entrepreneurs in America?
Assuming we have figured out how to even find people qualified and committed enough to become effective society upgrade entrepreneurs (which is not trivial at all), we are still missing platforms that make it easy to fund them.
Humanity needs a scalable, sustainable system that allows more people to fund the right people who are willing and able to help level up society, permanently.
These people need a lot of funding to leave jobs or turn away other others and instead work full-time on these pressing issues, without the broken incentives of working on behalf of a corporation or the constraints of elected “public service” positions.
I know I’m not alone in dreaming of the ability to work as a free agent, supported by hundreds, if not thousands, of independent funders who, even if they do want credit and to be on the record of supporting society upgrades, are willing to give recurring funding with no strings attached.
When you have many funders, you have no one master dictating your moves. But at the same time, because any existing individual funder can stop their “subscription” and new funders can start their subscriptions if they get inspired by your journey, you’ll stay motivated to keep performing.
If we keep failing to fund these people’s champions, innovation focused individuals will continue defaulting to building and contributing to companies building individualistic “solutions” for the well-off, while life gets even more unaffordable for the vast majority of people.
It’s time for us to think big and fund accordingly. I’m working on building this funding infrastructure—leveraging the latest innovations in programmable money mechanisms in the crypto space.
Message me on X or reply to this post if you’d like to collaborate.
Big shoutout to a mentor of mine, Daniela Papi Thornton, for inspiring me to think deeply about how systems change-focused leaders need to first spend ample time “apprenticing with a problem” before jumping into solution mode. I wouldn’t be here without her. Also, thank you to Jessamyn Shams-Lau for coining the term in the first place. And to Lauren Serota, Graven Prest, Carl Cervone (who wrote a piece in a similar spirit), and other gems of friends for reviewing multiple iterations of this piece.
One great quote from Professor Thornton:
"Almost every entrepreneurship course and accelerator program ends in some sort of pitch day. Where the students need to pitch their world-changing solution. [...] We're spending more time teaching [students] how to perfect their sales pitch than we are trying to teach them to understand the problem they claim to be trying to solve. And the judges of those contest often know more about business scaling then they do about the impact and social change."
Powerful piece, Gary. I think that many people with entrepreneurial qualities only see one path that's valued by society -- starting a startup. This is an alternative path, with potential for much higher impact. These kinds of builders should be funded!
Great piece Gary! I can’t wait to see what Society Upgrade Entrepreneurs contribute to society