Experience is the key to transformation

I learned some time ago that the only way you can change your mindset is by having an experience that upgrades your story. You can read book after book and see movie after movie but a real-life experience is what rewires your brain.

If you want to transform yourself and therefore, the world, you need to get into relationships with others, have a new experience, reflect on what you learned and upgrade your story about what's possible.

I have spent much of my life designing experiences to help myself and others transform in order to see myself and the world differently.

When I saw the systemic issues that underlie the fact that 2.2% of venture capital goes to women, .32% of you are a latinx and .0006% if you are a black woman*, I knew that it was not just a race and gender issue but a power and systems design issue that was connected to a LOT of other things. 

You can’t just add women and stir, you have to redefine almost everything to solve the fact that 51% of the population gets 2.2% of the capital. There are so many things to unravel, so many mindsets to untangle to get us to a new world.

Here’s how we started with SheEO.

Trust Level 1: "I"

In the SheEO experience, the first thing you do is gift your capital with no expectation of financial return. It is designed this way with purpose and intention, like everything at SheEO.

In our society, we’ve gotten used to the fact that people with money have power over those who need the money. Just think about the last time you saw Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank.

In SheEO.World, just because you have money doesn’t put you above someone who doesn’t. We know, especially at this time, that another form of capital we all need--imagination capital to solve major challenges we are facing - is critical to our survival.

When you are concerned with getting your money back, you treat people differently and often feel like you can control things. We need to disrupt this way of using power over someone because the old rules of control keep the world the way it is. What might happen if we trusted the person with the innovative idea that excites us and we all got out of the way, until they asked for help? We might have a whole new breakthrough on how to do business, or hire people, or organize structures, or ….

In SheEO.World you gift your money without knowing where it’s going - another experience of letting go and trusting. You agree to have your money aggregated with hundreds of others and you trust the process.

Trust level 2: "WE"

In our design you also trust that the Ventures who apply will have great ideas and excite you. We have a very simple 10 question application form. We have criteria for applying: revenue generating ($50k-$2M), majority woman-owned, woman-led, working on the World’s To Do List. Ventures apply online. You don’t see who applies before you activate. You have to trust the process. 

You also trust that the other Activators who vote will vote the way you want think they should. This was a big one when we got started. “What can someone who’s not in business know about picking companies?” I heard many times. Uhm, have you seen what experts pick in the world? We spend billions of dollars on things that are #gapwidening (inequality building) and extractive. With the onset of crowdsourced decision-marking and creation we have learned that collective intelligence outperforms "experts" over and over again.

We trust the intuition of hundreds of women to pick Ventures that are meaningful, game-changing ideas. Given the chance to select anything, it’s been our experience that people always pick significant, powerful ideas that are focused on making the world a better place for all.

When the ventures are selected by the collective community of Activators we bring them all together to disperse the money amongst themselves. That’s correct. The recipients of the funding are the one’s determining who gets what. They have two principles; you can’t give it all to one and you can’t divide it evenly. This process is a huge transformational experience. Ventures go from being the recipients of funding decided by some authority to being the ones responsible for the collective decision of where the money goes. It’s a challenge of personal and collective cooperation that rewires the brain, over 48 hours. It levels up their leadership, has them take responsibility for themselves and the whole and builds very strong bonds in the cohort. Here’s an account of the experience

Trust Level 3: "IT"

We then enter into a much bigger trust experiment. We trust that Ventures will lead on their own terms to create milestones and to ask for support when they need it. We trust that Activators will show up and respond in a timely manner. We don’t match Ventures with “experts” who know the space because we are looking for new models and new mindset and new solutions and sometimes (not always) experts think they know how things should be done and exert too much influence on a new Venture to follow what people have always done. We trust that the Ventures will pay back the loan over a five year period. Our whole model is based on the money paying forward in a perpetual fund.

We also trust Activators who are keen to be co-creating this model to get what they need. Looking to meet others in the community, self-organize an event, set up a call, create a group? Activators are go-getters, go-givers and learn-it-alls. They reach out to one another and jump in. If they have ideas or feedback or want to help a Venture they reach out. Activators are called Activators because they activate all that they have, on their own terms; expertise, network connections, influence, buying power as customers, emotional support, word of mouth marketing, etc. They can participate to the degree that they want from super-engaged in all aspects to simply gifting their capital and anywhere in between.

In order to create a new world we all need to transform ourselves first. It’s inner work.

The SheEO.World experience is an experiment in activating a new you, a new way of being in relationship with one another and a new way of organizing our capital so it goes where it's needed most. 

Join us and activate yourself at www.SheEO.World

* https://www.kaporcapital.com/the-venture-capital-world-has-a-problem-with-women-of-color