Reclaiming Our “Higher Self” With Purpose-driven Technology Brands

I founded Higher Self Ventures in 2019 with a bold mission of “Creating The Future”. This slogan may sound either too banal or too grandiose for its own good, yet we’re all — whether we like it or not — creating the future in every moment that passes, in every action we take, and in every thought we have.

Personally, I’ve been dabbling for years in persistent trends of cultural change and post-materialism — which shines a light on the “how” of my mission.

Metamodernism, in specific, proved to be an integral frame of thinking about our time in history, and what could come next. Metamodern discourse frames a variety of recent cultural advances in art, business, and politics as a creative superposition of modern ideals of progress and postmodern feelings of malaise.

It acknowledges both the ideals of serious scientific progress and of playful metaphysical rebellion (what Albert Camus calls the act of protesting the human condition)— fully devoting itself to an “impossible possibility” of a better future.

This “third” type of modernism also portrays — in its political and anthropological perspectives— an emerging cultural sensibility towards rekindling the human spirit, self-transcendence, and social ecology.

“This would be the metamodern mission: to create a deeply self-reflective modernity; a modernity operating not only upon nature and the environ­ment, but one that reexamines its own perspective, its own choi­ces — if you will — its own soul. Modernity did peer into the soul of individual human beings, under the auspices of psychiatry. But it never developed a full process for look­ing into its own existential foundations and to treat the maladies of civili­zation.” — Hanzi Freinacht, Metamoderna

Being a startup strategist and brand builder at heart, another facet of my mission’s “how” surfaced through the theory of cultural innovation by Ex Harvard Business School professor Douglas Holt.

Holt introduced cultural innovation to the business world as a path for a business’ brand to deeply resonate with customers around culture and emerging ideologies. Around 2018, I wrote the essay “A startup branding thesis on cultural innovation and changing peoples’ minds” on how technology startups can adopt cultural innovation, and move beyond technological innovation for its own sake (aka “building better mousetraps”).

Since Metamodernism was in favor of a more pragmatic kind of idealism, I took Holt’s business theory in my writing and added a metamodern lens of human development, arguing that “your customer’s self-realization journey is your market opportunity” — that a winning startup brand can revolve around accompanying the customer on that journey.

The essay got an amazing response and has been my most read to date. My hypothesis on if technology founders could undertake such an ambitious mission, and investors could accept it as a recipe for large impact, was partly validated to me. It was also, to my surprise, picked up by Metamoderna, the political think-tank founded by the philosopher/alter-ego Hanzi Freinacht, and shared as a case study in “Metamodern marketing”.

The reality is that many startups today masquerade as world-shattering innovations, yet fail miserably in using technology for socio-cultural advancement. French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler captured this tendency well in stating that science and technology are useful when they materialize as “constructed protheses for survival”, yet become hazardous when their effects cross into the subjective realms of culture.

This paradox of progress definitely felt like it needed resolution, and I personally believe that it has already started resolving itself.

A metamodern revival is already in play across fields of study, driven by the emergency for action against global phenomena of social and environmental collapse.

The Metamodern mindset relies heavily on the integration of polarities and asks: can we really bring together modernity and postmodernity, free-market dynamics and a green future, science vs storytelling, economic progress vs lived experience, individuality vs cosmic nature, reality disintegration vs optimism, uncertainty vs guided action, total seriousness vs creative play?

We’re now living in a post-covid and pre-collapse world, and many have come to understand that the soul-less combination of capitalism, scientism, and materialism does not seem to offer us the way forward.

There is a need for a new sense of purpose that reinvigorates the transcendent ideals of romanticism, and enchant the world through embodiment rather than escapism. Neoromanticism, as it was called by Vermeulen & Van den Akker in “Notes on metamodernism” (2017), playfully oscillates between the mundane and the spiritual.

In our technology investing micro world, I am increasingly hearing whispers of initiatives around responsible investing, and ESG (Environmental, social, and governance) measurements, and “tech for good”. The movement has really stepped into the spotlight in 2021 — especially after suffering from a global epidemic that put modernity in a corner and made it rethink all of its deep-seated assumptions.

Day after day I am more proud of having caught this bug early and made personal progress on that front with Higher Self Ventures.

I’m particularly glad to have encountered two inspired founders, Celine Nehme and Chelsea Rowe, whose vision fit perfectly within the cultural innovation space I was exploring.

I’ve been advising Chelsea and Celine on founding their startups Ikigai Journey and Gritwell. In the process, a growing impulse to explore more societal problems (and create that kind of innovation myself) pushed me towards founding Livada. The latter became my own attempt to create a novel product with the potential to promote meaningful and sustainable choices to millions of people’s lives for a better future.

Having now gone through the incubation process of these three ventures, I thought I’d hereby give:

• More detail about the cultural, albeit strategic, thread that coherently ties the three value propositions together — that is reclaiming our “Higher Self”
• Plausible and authentic arguments for early-stage investors in the technology ecosystem to partake in these deeply aspirational explorations into well-being, meaning, and life in general

Dissecting the cultural problems of our age

“Just as you grow into the world, the world grows into you. Not only do you occupy a certain place, but that place in turn occupies you” — Costica Bradatan.

The quote above illustrates the process of ontological design, which assumes the socio-cultural environments we design will eventually design us back.

In the historic quest to mend reality through gritty technology applications and the predatory mindsets of some capitalists, we’ve lost the moral compass and somehow become self-destructive.

Our social and collective imaginary — what the metamodern ex-investment banker Thomas Bjorkman defines in sort as the outer reality humans have designed — is ridden with vices. Look around: you see toxic environments, toxic lifestyles, toxic work cultures…These are all building blocks of a society that suppresses human potentialities and upsets our well-being.

A radical investigation into the impact of our global crises — be it ecological, economic, or social — would point to all these crises deeply distorting our inner psyches, and leaving us with a surreal sense of existential defeat. Ultra-athlete and best-selling author Rich Roll puts it this way: “We’re in an epidemic of people who are so disconnected from their highest self and the best version of who they could be.”

Case in point, the economic crisis is not solely about capitalism as an evil system that generates externalities and job-killing automation. It’s also about the endless rate-race that‘s made our life devoid of truly human pursuits. Due to the worship of money and numbers, we ended up with rampant social inequality. Yet less talked about second-order effects include dehumanizing ourselves, weakening personality structures, and creating an ontological vacuum.

In the same manner, the environmental crisis is not solely about climate change and the “other species” we hurt. We’re deluded to think that only the planet and the animals are suffering, and that we’re the only species that’s not — as if we live outside of our natural habitat. By polluting our environment, we are in fact polluting our own bodies and putting ourselves at risk. The surge in chronic diseases, for example, is a direct causal effect of widespread pollution and toxins.

Moreover, the mental health crisis is not solely about traditional clinical issues like mental disorders and depression. It’s a full-blown meaning crisis, as Toronto University Professor John Vervaeke describes it. By adopting a rational scientific worldview en masse, society developed psychophobia — an aversion to matters of deep psychological considerations. We find that most people feel that the society around them doesn’t reflect their deepest values, and that there’s a largely suppressed yearning for human flourishing.

Trying to describe the interconnection of all these crises, like where they stem from and how they affect our culture is a futile exercise — as other intellectuals point out. The “meta-crisis”, a term coined to encompass the multitude of crises, is growing like a cancer through the networks of our planetary systems and the fields of reality: it’s everywhere — in our psyche, in our nervous system, in our families, in our reality, in the collective consciousness, and in the natural world.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic amplified the meta-crisis and further enhanced people’s sense of disconnect from themselves, each other, and reality. It exceedingly feels like it was great moment of global change, a liminal time between old ways of being and new ones.

During COVID, we finally realized that our social institutions are in no way optimizing for well-being and inner experiences. Instead, their solutions are based on short-term thinking, depthlessness, and endless debt accumulation which just postpones all problems into the future.

Central banks have flooded the markets to keep “financial stability” without laying any foundation for real social change. Vaccines and movement limitations are being touted as a quick fix. Yet, these solutions further engendered a nightmarish reality that strips us further from true meaning. Most people are still sick, lonely, unemployed, and mentally distressed.

For many, maintaining the status quo is often more comfortable than taking a risk towards a better future, daring to explore novel spiritual ways of being, and unfolding an ontological shift in reality. For the revolutionaries, the mindset of creating the future, or rather co-create it, is very different:

“Our entire way of being with ourselves and one another, individually neutrally and collectively is now under evolutionary pressure to manifest radical new emergent properties. This, I believe, creates the conditions for tremendous potential, and hope for the evolution of the human spirit.” — Terry Patern, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries

Unfolding and integrating cultural narratives

The Metamodernist insight is that we have to change the basic structures of culture to allow for a worthwhile change in who we are and how we act in the world.

An ontological frame of mind is helpful here because ontology is the field of existence, reality and being. We are contrasting the limiting and alienating character of the modern cultural realm with the unbounded nature of being human, which is the ultimate issue of “being” in modernity.

The version of Metamodernism I’m championing in this essay is this: We should work to materialize purposeful ontological narratives — one that shape disruptions in ontologies — in the form of startup manifestos that resolve contradictions between spirit, society and nature.

“Our present age is one of disintegration of cultural and historical mores, of love and marriage, the family, the inherited religions, and so forth. This disintegration is the reason psychotherapy of all sorts has burgeoned in the twentieth century; people cried for help for their multitudinous problems. Thus, the existential emphasis on different aspects of the world (environment, social world, and subjective world) will, in all likelihood, become increasingly important.” — Danny Wedding, ‎Raymond J. Corsini, 2013

At this moment in time, many spot the opportunity for radical experimentation in subjective matters and new perspectives. Trend hunters, forward-looking entrepreneurs, and capital investors are surely all aware of the increase in practices of new age awakening and mindfulness meditation — people are increasingly adopting compassion, universal love, and self-awakening consciousness.

“For some of this generation are daring to imagine transcendence again. There is a revival of the mythic; sublimity, narrative, depth, meaning, and reorientation are once again being sought out and can be seen within metamodern artforms.” — Brendan Dempsey, [Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth (2014)

I believe, now more than ever, that the brands that will reorient their stakeholders on very personal spiritual journeys, and revitalize their thirst for meaning, will win a huge share in their minds.

As the decay of traditional social institutions carries, people are left with a longing for stronger institutions and movements to replace them in the role of meaning providers.

Purpose-driven brands, in specific, are filling that gap by entering into more “serious” conversations and engaging in cultural innovation. Consumers are indeed turning to the brands they connect with on a daily basis to mirror and protect their values and beliefs.

This is in line with the shift Linda Ceriello describes in her dissertation on “Metamodern Mysticisms”: transcendent/mystical experiences are becoming less about transcending this-worldly existence and more about living an embodied “embodied and immanent” life through products and experiences that form meaning and enrich identity.

The number of “conscious consumers” that make purchase decisions based on a company’s stand on social, political, and environmental issues continues to grow, with various surveys showing 70%+ of millennials are asking for brands to participate in making a positive impact in regards to the planet and to people.

Brands and advertising agencies have always used the cultural energy of social movements to connect to new audiences and promote their products. Over the past year, countless brands rode the wave of COVID, racism, and environmental disasters. Yet only those brands with a history of purpose-driven strategies were praised, while everyone else was called out as opportunistic.

The real transformation will surely not happen if brands simply adopt substance-empty activism. For businesses, this means creating a whole new space of branding that transcends the world of politics and marketing.

Ontological brand narratives have the potential to intersect with massive cultural trends shifting category-specific behaviours. They can help fuel innovation, deliver high-paced customer adoption, and undoubtedly inspire ecosystem partnerships.

Borrowing from Douglas Holt’s book “How Brands Become Icons”, we can even think of such narratives as myths. Novel ways of social organization have always been based on narrativization that propels people into purposeful action through community.

“Humans could not only see what was not there, but they built what was not there. We conspired against the way it is. Through story and myth-making, Humanity found cooperation with one another. They worked together to build empires of pyramids, ocean-liners, and rocket ships” — David Paul Kirkpatrick, chairman of Paramount Pictures and ex Disney Executive.

Narratives can create movements, and movements create change, especially when they spring from suffering or threats growing so wide that people can’t help but act on it. I stand with others who believe that much of our suffering could be traced to mental short circuits and that our minds could be “trained, healed and cultivated so as to relieve much of that suffering”.

I’ll reiterate here what I’ve previously written elsewhere but got more insights into — a successful startup entrepreneur operates as a good fiction writer.

Papers in the last 30 years by researchers such as McMullen, Lachmann, Shepherd, Shackle explains the following: In traditional equilibrium-based economic models, this claim would sound heretical. Yet in a non-equilibrium economic approach that takes into consideration uncertainty and emergent properties from systems, the entrepreneur’s job is to create opportunities based on their subjective considerations and reconstruct their markets. With a similar description, Village Global VC partner Erik Torenberg calls these founders “reality entrepreneurs”.

“I like to say that “reality is up for grabs,” and though it’s been harder to align on shared truths, we’ve seen many people take advantage of this shift in bootstrapping their own realities. It seems like the move to private membership communities is a sort of scramble to find one’s reality territory in what feels to be a “new normal.” While some would just call this “community building,” what we’re seeing today is not just people aligning around shared values, but instead a shared understanding of the world around them. They’re defecting from the mainstream narrative of reality, which used to bind us together, in exchange for new realities based on voluntary opt in.” — Eric Torenberg, Co-founder & Partner at Village Global VC

Holt’s practical framework for cultural innovation through business and is pretty self-explanatory:

Step 1: Deconstruct the category’s culture.

Step 2: Identify the Achilles’ heel.

Step 3: Mine the cultural vanguard.

Step 4: Create an ideology that challenges the Achilles’ heel.

Step 5: Showcase symbols that dramatize the ideology.

…And that’s how you innovate with narrative!

“Showing up” through entrepreneurship

Faced with crises of such magnitude, some people are already raging in the streets and on social media, but rarely is anyone taking responsibility and attempting to turn things around, through their own doing. The rest? they’ve mostly entered a state of learned helplessness and despair.

It’s been said, however, that “despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails”.

Showing up, in Ken Wilber’s Integral theory, means looking at things that really bother us in the world, deciding that they don’t have to be that way anymore, realizing that them bothering us is part of our guidance, and becoming driven by a desire to serve humanity and the planet through purposeful action.

“Showing Up — is where the fruits of our labor truly begin to ripen, where all of our accumulated knowledge, personal growth, spiritual practice, and shadow work become a limitless source of strength, presence, and wisdom, allowing to us engage the many dimensions and challenges of our world in a far more meaningful and impactful way” — Ken Wilber, founder of Intergal Theory

“Given my unique situation, my capacities, and connections — what can I do?” is a question that every entrepreneur must ask on their journey, and here was my answer: my response to the meta-crisis is to build brands that solve foundational global issues by offer post-materialist perspectives.

I found this unique connection between my own personal experience with suffering, changing cultural signals, and market movements. The search held helped me zoom in on three large problems that are at the center of the socio-cultural crisis, and on which the ventures I’m involved in are focusing.

Gritwell’s problem space: Unhealthy food ingredients, environmental toxins, and stressful lifestyles are all causing harm to our bodies and weakening our immune responses. “Modern chronic symptoms” like fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, muscle pain are often early symptoms of chronic diseases and are driven by unconscious health choices. They remain largely unsolved problems within traditional healthcare because it still follows a “1 symptom = 1 pill” and “specialist” interventions that don’t systemically target the root causes.

Ikigai Journey’s problem space: A modern millennial worker is most likely going through life hyper-individuated, frustrated, lonely, anxious, alienated, and overworked. This Hyperindividual is disconnected from any kind of larger purpose-driven community or idealistic project that offers a reason to get out of bed excited every day. In fact, 70%+ of workers hate their job because it neither offers a connection to the transcendent Self, nor a sense of belonging to something bigger than the ego, and are too afraid to take leaps of faith.

Livada’s problem space: 80% of millennial parents are worried about future child expenses. Under the thrust of social inequality, many young families favor an expensive parenting style that is high involvement and requires spending on fulfilling extracurricular activities, expensive hobbies, and rich educational resources — all in an effort to set up the child for success and achievement in their own lives. Because of rising child costs and the many financial burdens new parents are already faced with, a family lifestyle that fits their values and aspirations appears uncertain and always fleeting.

These problems have been pervasive in my own life. “Often…”, wrote the founder of The Berkeley Well-Being Institute Tchiki Davis, “a powerful purpose can come from powerful pain.” Modern Psychology knows this very well, and none other than Naval, the infamous angel philosopher, has said that “Your real resume is a catalogue of all your suffering”

“Mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is. Where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper powers in ourselves. But where the power to respond succeeds, there comes a new amplification of life & consciousness.” — Joseph Campbell

During my twenties, I had chronic modern symptoms for 2 years because of unhealthy food and a stressful lifestyle in London, and every doctor told me you’ll have to live with it — until I fixed myself and my lifestyle. This is why I joined Gritwell.

I was also suffering psychologically because I couldn’t really answer my persistent existential angst — until I did find my “calling” with Higher Self Ventures. This is why I joined Ikigai Journey.

Then, as my 30s began, I started thinking about marriage and kids — I faced a roadblock when economic insecurity and the long-term uncertainty about being able to provide my future child a great lifestyle hit me in the face. I decided to do something about it and start Livada.

The problems described, I found, don’t just apply to my own life — they are different facets of the meta-crisis that limits access to our Higher Self, and are shared by millions of other people around the world.

Therefore, I came to believe that I can actually use my own experiences to help others in their healing process and reclaim the connection to their highest ideals.

I decided I’d rather participate in building a new future of networked purpose-driven communities, psycho-technologies, meaningful pursuits, and mindful everyday practices.

“At its core, metamodernism is about ambiguity, reconstruction, dialogue, collaboration, and creative paradox. It’s about allowing yourself to be many different people at once. It’s about speaking through the work of everyone who you are sampling from in order to amplify their voice. It’s about being a curator with a unique creative vision. … Explore, combine, collaborate.” — Anne-Laure Le Cunff, an introduction to metamodernism: the cultural philosophy of the digital age

Riding three narratives of the “Higher Self”

Our Higher Self manifests itself in many ways through daily actions and thoughts. It could be experienced as feelings of mind-body well-being, reconnection to our humanity, peace with oneself, and spiritual clarity.

My focus, for the near term, is on the three following narratives that aim for the attainment of one’s highest potential, and ideal lived experience. They are supported by product innovations targeting different points in the system of culture. Let’s put it this way:

• Vitality is what Gritwell — venture #1 — aims to manifest
• Purpose is what Ikigai Journey — venture #2 — aims to manifest
• Family is what Livada — venture #3 — aims to manifest

At Gritwell, we believe that modern chronic symptoms are not as chronic as we thought, rather they are early stages of autoimmunity that can be healed with a new standard of care that combines functional medicine with machine learning science. Rather than letting patients with illnesses they can’t place eventually lose hope, adapt to the pain, and get worse as they age, Gritwell’s approach prevents the destructive path to killer diseases and gives them back their normal life in the process — all by balancing interconnected body systems with themselves and the environment — by changing lifestyle factors, eating the right foods and supplements, managing our gut microbiota, etc.

At Ikigai Journey, we believe that every person has an innate purpose, not some mystical destiny or anything, but a place where the nature of the world and the nature of one’s self intersect. A spiritual transformation requires inner work but is not complete without outer-focused work, and vice versa. We are creating a digital therapeutics app that helps individuals expand their purpose in life towards taking responsibility for solving societal problems and having a clear cause to serve. When a critical mass of human souls begin purely following their highest vocation, thousands of purpose-driven projects will come to fruition and a more beautiful world will manifest rapidly.

At Livada, we believe that every child should have a lifestyle that’s true to their family’s values and aspirations. In this context, family financial planning transforms from an exercise in wealth accumulation towards one in managing money to underwrite healthy child development. We rely on cutting-edge education research to guide parents in investing in enrichment resources, creative hobbies and fulfilling experiences that lead children towards more creativity and achievement in later life. We hope to enable Generation Alpha to thrive by funding nurturing lifestyles at the micro family level, and by funding a world they can thrive in at the macroeconomic level.

While more work needs to be done on the details of the plot, I see these three narratives as deeply metamodern because they engender creative synergies between science (Logos) and transcendence (Eros) — thereby adhering to the non-dual ontology of the metamodern perspective.

To put it in simple marketing copy, we need to go from the social imaginary of “Work a bullshit job, live a toxic lifestyle that will give you chronic diseases, and struggle to provide for your children” to one of “work a meaningful job, keep your body in vital balance, and give your children the best future possible.” We can broadly and simply start there, then get more deep and complex as we go.

And we should not forget that in the midst of narratives, reason and numbers still matter — and I’ll get to that next.

That being said, the scrutiny on if a business can really carry a cultural or ontological narrative came back positive: A review of American Economist Tyler Cowen’s recent book “Big Business” explains the author’s approach as an “impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society”. Tyler depicts a business in the new economy, instead, as a “mini-subculture within civil society, with its own unique philosophy, relationships and memetic structure.”

Tiago Forte echoes Cowen in saying that “every successful company has become a meaning-making machine”. Douglas Holt gives another pointer here: Iconic brands address acute contradictions in society.

“By tapping into a collective desire or anxiety, iconic brands develop a status that transcends functional benefits. They challenge people, either directly or subtly, to reconsider accepted thinking and behavior.” — Douglas Holt

Moreover, Ogilvy’s Big Ideal branding framework promotes the intersection between a tension point in society and how the brand authentically believes the world could be better. Adopting firm stances, taking bold risks, breaking previous assumptions, and having contrarian insights all create this needed tension. No one explains this better than Seth Godin who writes about the tension of how it might turn out: “the tension of possibility, the tension of change, and the tension of maybe…”

These narratives would not be just historical retelling of “what has happened”. They are stories of the past and frames we look through to catch a glimpse of a better future, and put the customers right and center in a Hero’s Journey of their own.

And if our brands tell a powerful story, then so must our products too.

Marshall McLuhan, riffing off ontological design theory, explains that the tools we create can end up creating us.

A purpose-driven brand infuses values and beliefs into the product, and so its narrative is written into the code. This is where reflective design comes in, which emphasizes that designers and engineers need to “reflect on the unconscious ways in which technology shapes our socio-cultural actions” (Sengers, Boehner, David, and Kaye). It uses cultural analysis as a starting point for design, by highlighting new cultural choices that haven’t been envisioned by the user before.

“Design is a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. Design is both the underlying matrix of order and the tool that creates it.” — Victor Papanek

Matters of purpose, family and vitality exist at both the individual and collective levels. Since actions in the world promote beliefs and beliefs inform action, work needs to be done both with innovative products that promote well-being choices and with mind-changing branding. Otherwise, we will be only applying band-aids without hitting the roots, or else only shaping ideologies with no consequential accomplishments — which is sadly what has been happening for a long time in our fight against climate change.

Calling on change in the Venture Capital industry

It should be very clear by now for VCs: “Business as usual” won’t work anymore. “Culture and capitalism are collapsing into one another and beginning to share the same logic”, Frederic Jameson pronounced way back in 1984 — and this trend has only intensified since then.

In his latest book, popular author Simon Sinek also announced that the drums of change in capitalism are beating. After years of pushing companies to start with “WHY”, he’s now telling us that the “WHY” should in fact be a “just cause”. The strategy of business this time onwards is to improve lives; every other business decision should be galvanized by that overarching, and just, purpose.

“The public expectations of your company have never been greater… Every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential.” — Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock Inc, the largest PE investor in the world, 2018

Larry Fink’s letter, from which the quote above is taken from, was a catalyst for socially responsible investing. Luckily, the 2020 pandemic has added more fuel to the SRI trend. A new generation of conscious capitalists are already on the hunt for sustainable assets.

The 2020 European state of tech by Atomico and Dealroom.co states that $20Billion of capital invested in purpose-driven tech companies in the past 5 years. The share of purpose-driven investment out of total European Venture Capital money has double between 2016 and 2020 to reach 17%.

The venture capital ecosystem has already started to marry startups with this purpose-driven mentality. Around 20% of venture capital invested in Europe went towards sustainable goals involving human well-being — such as poverty, behavioural health, education, justice, decent work, and sustainable cities. Going forward, a growing number of investors are starting to understand that category disruption and truly sustainable value is best created with cultural innovation.

“Category transformations are usually prefigured by ideas and practices worked out at the margins. When cracks form in a category’s culture, a cultural vanguard often appears before big companies show up. Innovators study the vanguard closely, and even participate in it, to find a strategic direction for their challenger ideology and the symbols required to bring it to life.”

We can now argue that economics as a whole is letting go of rugged individualism and probability-based decision-making in favor of a behavioural, narrative driven, and systemic approach — and that it’s just a matter of time until we start using the insights of positive psychology to nudge consumer choices for better communal and planetary outcomes.

This doesn’t come without the challenge of measuring spiritual fulfillment and integrating agreed-upon psychometrics into ESG investing. After all, subjective lived experiences are just that — subjective and volatile. Perhaps I can offer a glimpse into issues of measurement in later posts. For now, I can say that the three startups are planning to work on strong data science models to support vitality, purpose, and child-parent relationships.

Investors, partners, future employees, I’m inviting you to hop on this journey towards revitalizing universally broken psyches. To reverse the meta-crisis we’re living through requires conscious transformation across the social imaginary.

I believe there are two main questions that investors should ask if they are hesitating to delve into the worlds of sustainability and social impact:

• What is the most important problem in the world that we can fund, if not the socio-cultural crisis that exists at the backdrop of an ecological and economic crisis, and impacts the deepest layers of humanity?
• What is an appropriate social impact or ESG strategy we can execute, if not devoting yourselves to alleviate needless human suffering, and help nurture the epitome of human consciousness in an interconnected ecological system?

There is no need to dig deep to find examples of the success of many valuable brands who took the purpose-driven approach, especially those driving a social agenda, from large companies like Patagonia, Nike, Tesla, AirBnB and Whole Foods to emerging tech startups like Calm, Talkspace, Viome, Modern Health, Mindstrong, LyraHealth, Omada, Cera etc.

“Airbnb is a provocative brand. And the reason it’s provocative is because we believe in humanity and we’re putting that humanity and truth into the soul of our marketing.” — Jonathan Mildenhall, CMO of AirBnB

The Airbnb brand promoted a belief that humans belong anywhere and everywhere, and was controversial in that it broke down psychological taboos. Many investors back then, as we’ve heard, objected to the fanatic idea of replacing hotel stays with living in other people’s homes, and hence lost on the huge upside AirBnB gained.

A technology investor may additionally ask here, can a purpose-driven startup ever become a top-of-mind, defensible, and high-growth business? Three things come to mind:

• “Brand values are the last battleground for differentiation in the startup world”, writes Namrata Patel from AirBnB and Minted. Brands that deal with culture-wide transformation are far more defensible in the long run because they are creating their own authority, and their own valuable equity. Long-lasting relationships grounded in a common purpose, and built around a collective sense of brand belonging, will be the flywheel of growth.
• There are no limitations in TAM when you’re targeting the deepest human elements. Shaping new beliefs helps unlock new demand, ie expand the market, by converting strangers to believers using the elements of psychological and emotional appeal. As I explained before, no sector analysis report will capture that kind of shift inside consumers’ minds and predict this TAM for you. You are in charge of this narrative and of inspiring people to adopt a new way of life.
• When you’re riding your own brand narrative, you’re essentially in your own category “playing field”. Competitors/incumbents either avoid you when or face organizational trouble in letting go of from their current worldview to play in new categories. As famous investor Peter Thiel explains, the best kind of startups come about through a unique insight that is not yet widely agreed upon, or contrarian. He calls asking about this insight: “the secret question”

With those three elements of brand differentiation, market size, and defensibility, the opportunities for high returns mixed with social impact in the venture industry surely exists. One of the key objectives is to make money of course, but parallel objectives should be to foster healthier and more “whole” individuals, and to participate in creating more developed societies that make the socio-economic system people are embedded in.

The way I see it, VCs are the main agents of change in our society because they decide which kinds of innovations live on and which die. They take foolishly large bets, look for opportunity in uncertainty, and are perfect candidates for solving the looming meta-crisis.

And since VCs seek high growth the most, I personally believe that a low-growth world is a telltale symptom of a lack of playful imagination, not a lack of technological innovation. Startup culture already expects to tell a beautiful story about the future and sell expectations of future value.

So why not invest in sustainable well-being and higher fulfillment? Then and only then will our world undergo revolutionary ontological change, so far-reaching in character that humanity will transform its social imaginary again — yet this time building one that fits our very human ideals.

I’m barreling ahead with these ventures and hoping to start making some angel investments soon in the space. If you’re interested to support and work with me on this, don’t hesitate to get in touch at jamousjad@gmail.com