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For Social Enterprises
Ashoka »Ashoka is the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs—men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Since 1981, we have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries.
Dell Social Innovation Competition »
The RGK Center at The University of Texas and Dell are looking for college students worldwide with ingenious ideas to change the world. Dream up a plan that combines creativity and innovation to tackle a pressing social issue, and you can win $50,000 to put your plan into action!
Echoing Green »
To accelerate social change, Echoing Green invests in and supports outstanding emerging social entrepreneurs to launch new organizations that deliver bold, high-impact solutions. Through a two-year fellowship program, we help our network of visionaries develop new solutions to society’s most difficult problems.
Global Giving »
Unlike a traditional foundation, GlobalGiving does not directly offer grants or support. GlobalGiving uses its website to connect individual and institutional donors directly to social, environmental and economic development projects around the world via our "public" website, www.globalgiving.com. Potential donors can browse and select from a wide offering of projects, organized by geography or by themes such as health care, the environment, and education. GlobalGiving markets these projects through a number of channels, including corporations, employee giving campaigns, and direct consumer marketing partnerships. When donors come to GlobalGiving, they can find and fund projects that meet their diverse interests.
Global Social Venture Competition »
The purpose of GSVC is to actively support and promote the creation and growth of successful social ventures around the world. We define a social venture as an enterprise that has both financial and social goals integral to its purpose. Grand Prize: $25,000 2nd Place Prize: $10,000 3rd Place Prize: $5,000
Knight News Challenge »
We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.
Skoll Awards »
The Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship support social entrepreneurs whose work has the potential for large-scale influence on critical challenges of our time: environmental sustainability, health, tolerance and human rights, institutional responsibility, economic and social equity, and peace and security. These issues are at the heart of the foundation’s vision of empowering people to create a peaceful, prosperous, sustainable world.
Stanford BASES Social E-Challenge »
The Social E-Challenge is a business plan competition for entrepreneurial ventures whose primary goal is to effect social and/or environmental change. Participants range from for-profit businesses with a strong sense of social responsibility to nonprofits with sustainable revenue-generation models. The common denominator is that these companies seek to have a positive impact on our society and/or the environment. Social E-Challenge provides participants with $50,000 in final round prizes, as well as the resources and training to launch their startups, which include workshops, mixers, speakers, a mentorship program, and individual feedback from renowned judges.
Whitney M. Young, Jr. Memorial New Venture Competition »
Whitney M. Young, Jr. Memorial Conference is focused on early-stage new ventures. The primary purpose of the New Venture Competition is to provide entrepreneurs of African descent the opportunity to present their ideas for growth companies to an illustrious panel of investors and venture capitalists. The top team will receive $10,000, while the 2nd and 3rd place teams will receive $5,000 and $2,500, respectively.
For Technology Start Ups
BootUp Labs »Bootup Labs is a startup accelerator in Vancouver, BC that helps founders and companies go "from zero to fundable." Bootup Labs recruits and supports promising entrepreneurs and provides mentorship, ongoing support and office space to help define their business and secure venture financing. Our nine-month mentoring and support program is designed to help you get to the next level with your company, and prepare you to receive your first round of funding. Read more about Bootup Labs, or contact us if you're ready to start talking to us about how we can help.
DreamIt Ventures »
The DreamIt Managing Partners have been investing in early stage companies since they sold the companies they started. In the last few years we have become enthusiastic about how quickly and inexpensively great companies can be launched. At the same time we have seen some very talented people with great ideas struggle to pull the pieces together and get over the startup hump. With the help and support of entrepreneurs, technologists, prominent law and accounting firms, angel investor groups and venture capital firms, DreamIt Ventures was born. Our goal at DreamIt is simple: Help great people with great ideas build great companies.
LaunchBox »
LaunchBox Digital is a place for cutting-edge ideas and cutting-edge talent. LaunchBox Digital helps entrepreneurs maximize their chance of success and get through the challenging early days of starting a new business.
Seedcamp »
At Seedcamp, we believe Europe has the talent, the role models, and the capital founders need to succeed. We want to provide a catalyst for the next generation of great entrepreneurs and help you take risks, think big, and succeed. Participating in Seedcamp will give you enormous validation and access to a world-class network of advisors to help you with every aspect of your business, plus a direct route to seed and venture capital.
TechStars »
TechStars only accepts about twenty companies each summer (about ten in Boulder, and about ten in Boston). In Boulder last year, 393 companies applied and ten were accepted. Getting in is hard, and it means something special. TechStars fills the startup funding gap by providing just enough capital to get your idea off the ground. Your new company receives up to $18,000 in seed funding.
Y Combinator »
Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company. We invest mostly in software and web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.
What's the point of progress?
I just saw Gandhi the movie last weekend at it reminded me of a quote he once said that "There's more to life than increasing its speed." He was more of a Flintstone. When you think about it, as children we were caught between the Flinstones and Jetsons. Somewhere in the middle of the stone age and the future, we had to to make conscious choice about which way we wanted to go. Was it cooler to have a car that you pedaled or a craft that flies? Was it cooler to eat a huge mammoth rib or a small pill that tasted like one? Was it cooler to have a dinosaur named Dino to lick the dishes or a robotic maid named Rosey to handle the dirty work?
So the 21st century is here and it appears that we've chosen the path of the Jetsons - bigger and faster is better. Despite our "progress" as a world, has anything really changed? Are we any better off within as people because of the technologies without? Where the hell are we rushing to or are we rushing to hell?
I've been rushing my whole life. I came out the womb a month early. I finished college a year early. I finished business school 4 years earlier than average. Now it's time to slow down. As a child I ate Flintstones vitamins. Symbolically, I think there are parts of the Flintstone's lifestyle that are healthy. I'm afraid that the world is going nowhere fast and we need to find a healthy balance between the Flintstones and the Jetsons. Our measurements of progress as individuals (ie income, materials) and a planet (ie economy, GDP) need to be reconsidered. More dollar bills don't mean we're build-ing and speed isn't always the best indicator of quality.
God On Auto-Correct
Problems are simply questions without answers...yet. We tend to have a fantasy image of the world in which everything works out in the end and everyone lives happily ever after. But God's Word is not like Microsoft Word. God doesn’t automatically correct our mistakes as we write history with the ink of our decisions. Think of life more like the typewriters that our parents used. They had to correct mistakes they made for themselves; there was no auto-correct function. They used white-out to start anew.
Because of functions like auto-correct and spell check, some we have been spelling the same words wrong for years. In the same way, because of the false concept of God as someone/thing external that will forgive and clean up after us every time we mess up, we have continued to make poor decisions over and over instead of acknowledging that as a divine expression of The Author, we are co-authors, making us equally responsible for the story being written. It is our responsibility to collectively rewrite our history and forecasted destiny. We have to proof-read the world just like we would proof-read a paper:
1. Read the situation
2. Affirm what’s right
3. Identify what's wrong, and
4. Correct the problems
History is the most collaborative story ever written and we must each ask ourselves:
- Will my contribution be timeless or tiny?
- Will I be a comma that continues a thought or the period that ends one?
- Will I question or exclaim?
- Will I have a structured intro, body, and conclusion? or will I flow freely and poetically?
- Will I continue someone else's story?
- Will my story be worthy enough for someone to continue mine?
- Will I have a conclusion? or will I be open-ended?
- Will I critique what is? or create what isn't?
iPod Shuffling Through Life
The other morning, I was on the subway and I really wanted to hear Lupe Fiasco's "Superstar" song to start my day off on the right foot. Most iPod users would just be able to find the song in seconds on their iPod, but I happen to own an iPod Shuffle, the only iPod without a LCD display. I never found the song, however, in my moment of frustration from not being able to control my play list, I began to realize how much my iPod Shuffle was like life.
With an iPod Shuffle, you never know what song is next. You may find the song you're looking for and you may not. Oftentimes, while you're looking for one song, you end up bobbing your head or even two-stepping to other ones along the way. What's even crazier is that the song you end up really feeling and listening to over and over again isn't the one you originally set out to hear.
Like all of the other iPods, we want to be in control of our lives. We want to determine our own play list and are willing to pay extra costs to be DJ and have that security and certainty. Our desire to control costs us by cutting off possibilities that we never imagined. In the same way that songs somehow find us when we let go and just shuffle at random, opportunities somehow pop up when we release our lives to the Divine Judge (DJ). There is no DJ more in tune with our hearts and the Universe than the Divine Judge.
Life is random like a play list, but after a while, it starts to know what we like and play more of that type of music. Give thanks for the original song I was looking for because the pursuit of it led me to all of the other great ones.
The iPod Shuffling Through Life Play List
- Just For Today by India Arie
- Who Cares by Gnarls Barkley
- In The End by Linkin Park
- + YOUR SONGS HERE +
Spiritual Software
I worship my computer
as if it's my god
even though my inner software
is better than Microsoft's
I never turn it off
therefore it's omnipresent
it lights my room in darkness
so it's luminescent
H.P. is my Higher Power
also got an Apple like Eve
I'm caught up in this rat race
and the mouse won't leave
I don't idolize it
but there are a few icons
I've been monitoring through my windows
and keeping my eyes on
I kneel down to my computer
8 hours a day
Muslims pray 5 times
but I will put that to shame
I'm crawling for my domain
on the world wide web
I'm closer to my computer
than this girl I met
I'm a g-mail
if 'g' stands for god
searching for a g-girl
on online dating spots
I pray to it for jobs
even though I'm scared of Monsters
this spiritual plane flies anywhere
from coral reefs to concerts
"Seek ye first the kingdom"
so I typed it into Google
but the search results were empty
I would've at least thought that you knew
instead for my search engine
I search within
no matter how much
it gigahertz to dig
I've made some hard drives forward
but sometimes I just back it up
exploring my mental office
the files aren't stacking up
I give it my ideas
hoping it'll make them live
even if I ram them in
some end up recycled binned
My PC and I've been clicking
but it's not my type
I know my Power Point resides
deep down inside
there is life in my Word
and my Outlook is positive
but in order to Excel
I need change my technology
“Remind yourself, nobody build like you, you design yourself” – Jay-Z
Over time and because of Moore’s Law, technology has grown exponentially. We celebrate how easier life has become as a result, but we fail to recognize the accompanying difficulties. The pervasiveness of ATM machines is just one example of how technology is eliminating jobs traditionally done by human. Even surgery is being done by machines! This is great for businesses because they are able to cut costs and thus earn more profits. This is bad for human beings who don’t have people skills or thinking skills that a computer can’t replicate. Today’s average college graduate is ahead of the computer curve, but will that be the case tomorrow?
How will you differentiate yourself? Whereas our parents only had to compete against each other, in this globalized world, we are competing against computers and millions of hard-working highly intelligent people all over the world. The game has officially changed. An academic degree is not enough to differentiate ourselves, especially considering that we are taught from out-dated text as opposed to the future trends. When you study, study to the trend.
We have to identify those 1-3 things that we want to be the top 100 in the world at and weave them together to strategically position ourselves for the future. The person who will survive in this era is the hustler, the person with the entrepreneurial mindset who creates opportunities for themselves using what they have. The 3 rules of hustlin’ are as follows:
1. A hustler knows the game (future industry trends, leaders, latest news, etc)
2. A hustler knows themself (goals, needs, strengths, weaknesses, etc)
3. A hustler knows their resources (friends, networks, finances, etc)
Are you a hustlin’?
Live purposefully!
Inspired by: Thomas Freidman & Jay-Z
Addition Reading: Tough Choices (http://www.skillscommission.org/executive.htm)
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
