“What Does It Take To Build A Successful Startup In These Uncertain Times?” (BIZCATALYST)

My new article on BIZCATALYST “What Does it Take to Build a Successful Startup in these Uncertain Times?”

At the outset, we need to grasp the extent to which the world has shifted to a new program over the past few months. Today, we live in a completely different world. It is as if aliens visited us and implanted a new chip into our reality, changing our surrounding conditions, our behaviors, and our ways of thinking.

Still, we are in a transition phase, and likewise, many people continue trying to operate according to the outdated program of our pre-coronavirus world, a program that prioritizes values of self-benefit over benefiting others.

If we understood nature’s evolutionary tendency to guide all of its parts to perfect connection and interdependence, then we would see how today’s changes are for our ultimate benefit: they come to bring us closer to each other, not necessarily physically, but to a more heartfelt closeness.

And when we feel closer to each other, we feel happier, more confident, safer, and healthier.

Therefore, what we need more than anything else today is an environment that can support, encourage and guide our connection, so that we can balance our relationships with our new program of development—conditions that demand increased cooperation and care for each other.

If we fail to upgrade our attitudes to each other in order to match the mutual dependence and responsibility required by today’s new program, then we will feel an increasingly heavier weight on our shoulders the more we plod on from one day to the next.

Nature, by means of the coronavirus, has placed us into new conditions precisely in order to transform us.

Today’s startups thus need to take that into consideration.

If our past startups ended up in a marketplace that pitted them up against each other, now everything needs to change. We will still need to compete, but our competition needs to shift from egoistic, where we try to reap as much of the market for our business as we can, to a competition where we each aim to contribute as much as value as possible to humanity.

And what does “value” mean today? It means caring that everyone’s needs are met, as well as helping everyone genuinely become happy, safe, and healthy via upgrading the quality of human relations.

Therefore, anyone bold enough to initiate a startup in this period should first be equipped with sufficient knowledge and an environment to understand the transition the world is in, and then create tools that help people feel closer to each other.

For instance, there is plenty of room for technology to develop means by which we can feel ourselves together in one room, and even more so, as parts of a single whole where our every breath and contact is sensed by everyone.

In other words, as we head toward the discovery of our tight interdependence, we can develop technologies that help us sense what it means to feel as one with others, and which will thus help guide our fateful transition much more positively and harmoniously.

We thus need startups that authentically fill the human need for connection, which will serve to smoothen our transition from our current degree to greater mutual support and consideration.