The First RadicL Thought
Establishing Vision and Purpose for the House of RadicL. Looking for pledgers.
I’m Nicolas “Niki” Dolenc. First President at Slush, the world’s most founder-focused event, Former Human Catalyst at Smartly.io global ad-tech company, and Supporter of various entrepreneurial endeavours loosely coupled with the Finnish startup ecosystem. Also, I am a former youth national team basketball player, father to Noa and Vivian, and a loving partner.
This is an extensive plan for what I aim to help create within the next decade.
Manifesto of House of RadicL 😎
"There is nothing more obliquely pervasive than an idea whose time won't go, and there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
The future of work will change. What people will want from work and how they want to do it will change rapidly during the next decade, especially within the domain of intense knowledge work. Suppose you are to build an organization, product, or any venture today. That is ready for what it must look like ten years from now. You need to imagine the future before creating it.
House Of RadicL aims to be the home of radical thinkers, builders, and creators who want to redefine market expectations by imagining the future before creating it. It is a home for those who don't aim to outperform the markets but those who redefine them by being bold enough to radically differ from today's norms while aspiring to create positive change.
This Manifesto acts as a business plan for the House of RadicL. It's obnoxious. It may be doomed to fail upon creation as it does not follow the norms of how one creates new ventures. However, that is the way of the House of RadicL. We redefine market expectations.
"Be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you need help, and brave enough to ask for it." - Ziad K. Abdelnour, Activist, Author, Investment banker
Table of Contents
This text is extensive. Here’s an overview of what follows, categorized according to headings.
Megatrends
What will not change
What is the House of RadicL?
Imagining the future
The teams
Brand & Merchandising - RadicL Wear
Venture Activities - RadicL Ventures
Media House & PR - RadicL Thoughts
Management Consultancy, Sales and Partnerships - RadicL Consulting
Training House & Community - RadicL training
Facilities & Real Estate - House of RadicL
Events & Entertainment - RadicL Entertainment
Platform - RadicL Creations
Legal & Accounting - RadicL Operations
Political Affairs - RadicL Politics
Membership
What does it take to become a member?
Building principles
Operating principles
House Rules
Marching order
Phase one: Starting with what you know
Phase two: Assembling the community
Phase three: Acquiring resources
Phase four: Housing and branding the community
Phase five: Expansion
Ambition
Acknowledgments
Megatrends
The average age of any company is declining
The US S&P 500 is usually analyzed for a trend data point. According to some studies, and what industry you’re looking at or what timeframe you are assessing, you see a declining trend with an average going from almost above the average lifespan (80+ years) of a human to something representing less than half of the time a person spends in working life (roughly 20 years).
There is no reason to assume this trend will slow down as the rate of innovation becomes ever faster. The implication is that more people will be in the workforce longer than any company will exist. The average tenure, especially in tech companies, is relatively short; people change jobs multiple times during their careers, and various industries are seeing an increased trend in people turning to freelance instead of full-time.
The rate of AI development will force knowledge work to become even more "creative" and make code-based solutions accessible to everyone accessing the internet, even those who don't know how to code.
If AI can build any app, the only thing you can do wrong is ask it to do the wrong thing. It becomes increasingly important to be able to imagine the end product or task, as it may independently take unwanted actions or create something you don't want. Iteration is warranted, but it needs additional computational power that adversely affects efficiency and can negatively impact the environment.
Additionally, developers already know this: the best ideas may not come to you while trying to tackle an intellectual problem directly. It may come to you when you do something completely different than facing the problem head-on. When using the abundance of AI tools, how to creatively combine them to complete a task will have significant value in time efficiency when solving the challenges we face at work and in the world.
AI will create an abundance of information and increase the likelihood of misinformation.
It will drive increased demand for human-curated content, and micro-influencers will have increased influence as people will trust people they know. This megatrend is in line with the same bet Substack is making. Additionally, Creating content on social platforms that inherently rewards activity instead of the content's quality has become exponentially more straightforward. There is less need for human intervention in content creation and audience engagement for monetization to happen.
AI can make knowledge transfer and creation increasingly faster. Additionally, AI can automate knowledge work.
The last industrial revolution was the last time we saw increased productivity in society. With what AI is doing to the world today, we're already seeing radical results in organizations built out of selling knowledge work, such as consultancies, who have witnessed extreme improvements in productivity when using AI to get the job done.
The nature of how we build products, services, and companies is changing.
You'll need to recruit increasingly fewer people to create business value within many industries. Imagine how the gaming industry works—small teams building games that make billions. With the help of AI tools, small groups of people can do the same within SaaS, B2C, Retail, and other digitally native business domains. Small independent multidisciplinary teams are making billions, and revenue distribution in every industry will resemble hockey sticks because there won't necessarily be fewer people in the industry, just more competition with some solutions towering over the rest in revenue. It will pay off to kill new ideas quickly, as it will pay off to build them quickly. Combining this notion with the rate of innovation, single products or services will become obsolete ever quicker. Additionally, the user behavior and how tools are favored will resemble how people prefer games.
Regarding wealth creation, what will matter most is how fast people can move from one idea to the next while identifying whether an idea has value in generating revenue. The previous statement may seem like an oxymoron. Still, it's worth emphasizing as AI will make a lot faster to create.
The burnout Pandemic is taking its toll on the entire field of knowledge work.
We will spend more time caring for our mental and physical health and less time trying to force what we identify as work. A child will always find something to do to keep themselves busy when bored. It would be best if you had time to do nothing so that you can get bored. When you get bored, you start following your inner curiosity. With the help of AI, anyone can genuinely become a jack-of-all-trades, but only through following your interests will one be able to master a chosen profession. This trend could be seen during the COVID-19 pandemic that drove mass resignation, forced the world to question how work gets done, and diminished our social circles. With more time, many started pursuing their inner curiosity, trying to find more meaning and enjoyment from their chosen trade.
The average lifespan is going to increase, and birth rates are declining.
This trend means people must have a longer working life than today to have sustainable economies. For people to want to be in working life longer, they need to find work and projects that provide fulfillment.
Time is becoming the scarcest resource in the modern world.
"If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource." - Peter F. Drucker
Arguably, blockchain and cryptocurrencies have proven you can acquire large amounts of capital in minutes. AI has proven that you can generate insight out of knowledge in minutes.
Hence, time becomes the limitation of the modern person, and creative people will know how to use the tools at their disposal wisely with the time they have.
What will not change
"The only thing that distinguishes man from anything he can make is his ability to pursue an ideology" - Russel A. Ackoff, pioneering system thinker.
Humans are social animals. We crave to belong.
Even when they are radically different, most people are not hermits. Additionally, loneliness is known to be deadlier than any disease. We do not only crave to belong to a family or a community, but we also need it to live healthier lives. Additionally, most people aspire to contribute to something bigger than themselves.
The value of great storytelling will remain.
One of the first skills humans learned to create communities and transfer knowledge was the ability to tell stories. Some stories have existed for several millennia and will continue to do so. It's the most effective way to transfer knowledge from one generation to another at any age and a means to convert people to follow a cause bigger than themselves.
Technology and society will develop faster than humans can evolve.
Humans tend to build things that augment their natural capabilities. We create technologies in our image and sometimes even make things that rewire the abilities we're born with. However, our biological inheritance is not wired to deal with the constant bombardment of information and the environment. We need space to wind down and connect with nature.
Products, organizations, and companies do not build themselves. People build them.
People will build the AI we use to build things in the future. Even when AI can make other AIs, there is still some human intention originally behind it. There will also always be human curation in society, for we do not have to feel helpless against our creations. Additionally, history has shown that even if innovation renders some human labor obsolete, there is always a constant shortage of work in different fields. Hence, there will be a continual demand for reskilling and upskilling and a continuous war on talent regardless of organizational forms. What's more important is that the right people find the right jobs in time to have more fulfilling careers.
The resource and currency we all have is time. However, no one knows how much of it we have.
The wealthiest people in this world cannot buy in an infinite amount of time. You can buy better health services and treatments to overcome illnesses with money, but equally, the communities with the people who live the longest achieve without access to the things money can buy. The only thing that stops you from acquiring infinite amounts of knowledge with which you can create insight to generate wealth is time. Furthermore, many try to leave lasting legacies by building monuments, writing biographies, or leaving their mark on history. In other words, they try to outlive their time on earth by living in the memories of others. However, people can attain this regardless of the wealth they've accumulated.
In the face of time, we are thus all equal, so let's make the most out of it while we're here.
What is the House of RadicL?
"The best way of predicting the future is creating it" - Abraham Lincoln.
It's not about going big or going home. It's about finding a home and going big. House of RadicL aims to be the home for those who aspire to create lasting positive change in the world. It's the home to those radical enough to redefine the market expectation of their trade and their chosen market by providing the platform, the tools, and the network to do it. Whether it's building companies, working on societal projects, politics, art, thought leadership, or being masters in their trade. At best, it combines many things, and they can imagine a future before creating it.
They redefine the norms by constantly becoming better versions of themselves.
"The world is not waiting for more of the same. Often the most innovative ideas come from those who have mastered the rules to such a degree that they can see past them or those who never learned them at all" - Rick Rubin, Music Producer.
The House of RadicL will not try to discriminate membership based on any factors within the spectrum of DEI or a chosen field of craft or domain expertise. To find and solve problems worth addressing, one will need diversity in all its forms, not forgetting that psychological safety needs to be maintained at high levels within the community. There will always be bias. The trick will be to manage it effectively.
Imagining the future
House of Radicl will consist of 10 core teams that act as independent "companies" with their own PnL serving both the House of Radicl community and stakeholders outside the community. Each team's two Co-CEOs adhere to the Building principles, Operational Principles, and House Rules and create their own where it makes sense.
All companies aspire to redefine the market expectations of their respective business domains. Unlike in a traditional LLC setting where you have different functions to handle other parts of the business, this model removes the constraints of the ambition levels of singular product and service level companies, mainly their support functions.
"Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don't want to." - Richard Branson, British business magnate and commercial astronaut.
The setup also allows people to be engaged with the community even if employed or mainly engaged elsewhere due to life situations or interests. For example, even if a community project becomes a company, the founding team may still be community members, even if they invest most of their time in building the company (in whatever capacity).
This model is modular, and with the help of the right technology, it can be a highly integrated community regardless of its size. There is also no reason why other organizations couldn't copy this model.
The teams
The following chapter covers each company's what, why, and how. The "How" is imagined from a perspective of what capabilities and interests already exist, and in what order it makes sense to build things in light of needed resources and what foundation needs to be in place for one company to exist before the other (I cover this under marching order).
Brand & Merchandising - RadicL Wear
"Be a Radical, wear RadicL."
What?
The brand and merchandising team is responsible for the House of Radicl Brand. It is also a clothing brand company. The desired phenomenon is people wearing House of RadicL clothing for the same reason they wear the colors of their favorite sports team, the team they are a part of, or their university. They want to show who they support and who they identify with.
The company is the face of the community.
Why?
The organizations with an inverse trend to the decline in the average lifespan of "regular" LLCs are, on a macro level, e.g., sports teams. Another example is universities. Loyalty towards a team may be transferred from one family member to another, like the school you attend. In either case, the sort of loyalty, more often than not, sticks with you throughout your life if someone creates a strong enough brand around it. Furthermore, universities and sports teams of the highest caliber don't die. You haven't heard anyone say, "All universities/sports teams die. The question is only how fast." Additionally, what you wear can be seen as an extension of self—a statement about your values for those conscious enough about the fact.
You're extrapolating what companies already do with having company swag. Still, you're also creating a way to engage potential community members before they are members. For those who understand what it means to wear something as an extension of self, it allows you to make a statement even if you're not a community member.
How?
Find founders who want to create a generational clothing brand—individuals who imagine creating products made and produced sustainably throughout the supply chain. First, as an online store, products are available for a select few before being brought to mass markets. Scarcity has value even if demand is low when starting. Margins are deficient in quality clothing, and a high price for products should come with significant brand value attained by, but not limited to, what the brand stands for and who goes about wearing certain products.
Venture Activities - RadicL Ventures
"Supporting the Radicals of the Worlds."
What?
The Venture team invests in ideas within the community and outside of it, adhering to the House of Radicl's principles of supporting statements that redefine market expectations and ensuring synergy between community and investment targets to create compounding effects.
The company will be the backbone of the community.
Why?
Some ideas need capital alongside community members' time to realize the concept. It's also a way to engage Radicals with the community before they consider joining, and it's a way for existing community members to deploy their skills in projects they find interesting. Additionally, deploying capital into new projects people want to invest their time in gives the money a higher chance to create wealth alongside positive impact.
How?
The community will form a small team of 4 to 6 individuals that make the investment decisions for the community. The Venture team will rely on the larger community to source knowledge, support operations, and connect people with the right problem at the right time.
The Venture Fund will be the fourth company to be built by the community as soon as the media company assembles the community and the first training has been held for the community to start engaging with the same rules. I will raise funding with the help of the media company from the members so they can deploy their capital where they spend their time.
Media House & PR - RadicL Thoughts
"Finding and Spreading Radical Thoughts."
What?
The Media House aims to amplify the community's voice and help community members tell their stories. Additionally, they aim to find the Radicls changing the world outside the community, giving them a voice, providing podcast production services, and producing its content through chosen media outlets. The media house also handles any PR-related activities of the House of RadicL.
Why?
The best builders need more time to codify their knowledge but rarely find the time to do it. Their knowledge can spread faster when someone supports the thinkers, builders, and creators in documenting their knowledge. The difference between academia and the school of life is that you must codify everything in academia. Still, you must learn to train your intuition to apply your knowledge in the proper context at the right time.
Additionally, the importance of personal brands in working life is increasing because people change jobs more often. There is a need for a function that supports creating those brands and facilitating the voices of Radicals. Furthermore, a forever-existing problem will be the suitable studies and science to reach the right people at the right time.
The company will be the voice of the community.
How?
Among the first two companies, I aim to be the initiator of. Start with a Substack, as it allows for founding member functionality, supports book release, and has built-in referral functionality, making growth hacking easier. Finding individuals to interview also makes finding radical voices and potential members easier. Additionally, writer referrals help find more voices to enlist to the House of RadicL.
Writing and discussions also give me the most energy, and it's at a level where people could start paying for it.
Management Consultancy, Sales and Partnerships - RadicL Consulting
"Creating radical change"
What?
The Management Consultancy is an internal business coaching unit that provides the same services to external stakeholders. It also handles all Sales and Partnership activities for the House of RadicL, collaborating with the other teams to package their service offerings and deals.
The company will be the brains of the community.
Why?
Even if teams can develop and deploy new ideas by self-organized means, there may be a need for the teams and companies to find external help to solve (at the very least) interpersonal challenges the companies may face. Additionally, the community may source ideas and projects from outside the community, so an entity is needed to handle the practicalities of such arrangements. Furthermore, there may be a desire for brands and tools to create partnerships with the community for community members to use tools or to work on projects together. Finally, there may be an interest for other companies to understand and apply the knowledge the community has in their context so they can also create the exact positive change within the field of knowledge-intensive work.
How?
The Consultancy is the second of the first two companies created. It starts with creating a partner network that provides modern solutions for employee lifecycle management, with a specific first niche of improving individuals' and teams' leadership capacity and performance. As people build communities, products, and companies, they don't make themselves. It's also the domain expertise I have.
The partner tool network will extend by adding members to this team who can deploy the same approach for sales, marketing, and product development tools. After that, the next challenge will be directly competing within the management consulting space.
Training House & Community - RadicL training
"Become a Radical. Participate in RadicL training."
What?
The training house provides training to community members and provides the same training pieces to external stakeholders. The list of different activities includes, but is not limited to:
Human skills training
Facilitation
Asking, receiving, and delivering feedback
Bias training
Active listening
Conflict resolution
Public speaking and storytelling
Making contracts
AI - Basics.
…
Business skills training
Basics in project financing
Making contracts
Scaling products
Market research
Marketing 101
…
Life skills training
Happiness
Mental Health
Nutrition
Finding purpose
….
It is also responsible for community building and engagement activities. Emphasize providing new members a stellar onboarding experience and enabling existing community members to engage with others.
The company will be the heart of the community.
Why?
In training sessions, it's easy to bring together people from different backgrounds who wouldn't otherwise engage (not because they don't want to, but because of interests their paths do not otherwise naturally cross). It's a way to ensure psychological safety in the community while educating members to be more efficient community members. Most of the skills mentioned above are fully transferable through learning sessions. Still, most universities and schools need more training on these critical skills in knowledge work. Hence, there is a large market for educating adults on these skills, and companies spend a lot of money and time upskilling their workforce within subjects called "human skills." Furthermore, these trainings provide frameworks and understanding of how to operate within the community.
How?
We are hiring (or acquiring, depending on initial financing models) a company with two individuals at first who can put together a curriculum based on existing service providers, with an ambition to build a standalone platform for sustaining online learning content. Participants need a self-study platform even if the core business is to deploy in-person training sessions.
At first, the company will aspire for a 60/40 rate of engagement of facilitation within the community and outside of it. 60% of training deployed with clients outside the community and 40% within the community. This split creates a sustainable foundation and engages potential community members in activity before they become members.
It's the third company I aim to initiate with the fund.
Facilities & Real Estate - House of RadicL
"The home for radicals"
What?
The Facilities and real estate team operate as you'd imagine any co-working space's operations would, in addition to supporting the brand team in possible store locations. House of RadicL is a virtual community, and this co-working space will be the physical "home" space for community members.
It is not a place that can house teams and companies bigger than 12 people. The idea also serves a particular purpose to accommodate ideas that only need fewer people than the space can provide.
Additionally, House of RadicL will aim to acquire site locations near nature for people to connect with nature and have co-working centers in the heart of tech hubs.
The company will be the skin of the community.
Why?
Even if the community aims to be able to operate virtually, the community will need a physical space to work out of and converge. There is always some demand and different reasons for people to meet in person.
How?
The House of RadicL co-working space will be the fifth company deployed once the community has enough resources to hire real estate scouts to find the perfect location and enough prominence to deploy capital to run a physical venue.
Events & Entertainment - RadicL Entertainment
"Experience the radical. Creating Radical Experiences"
What?
Events and entertainment work with the training and community team to engage the community. It also acts as a relational entity towards the entertainment business, attracting industry professionals to the community. Additionally, it provides event business services to external stakeholders.
It will also grow into providing services to the entertainment industry as the media house offers relevant services for entertainment industry operators.
The company will be the soul of the community.
Why?
As with sports teams whose fans converge around games, events help bring people and communities together, leveraging the value of loosely coupled networks to form meaningful connections. Providing events to external stakeholders also allows for lower engagement thresholds with community members.
The entertainment industry strongly influences popular culture and people's world perspective. Additionally, it values creativity over all else, bringing the humane into humanity, something any professional will need to be closer to in an increasingly automated world.
How?
First, it brings event production services to community-affiliated companies; second, it creates its line of events that serve community needs and external stakeholders; and third, it serves community-only event needs. The priority will force a more sustainable PnL and push the community to breed self-organized events for internal needs.
The company can be run self-sufficiently with little initial induced capital by finding a team and freelancers willing to create something in this space or operate under the House of RadicL umbrella. Buying a company in the event space will over-emphasize the business unit, but buying companies and creating partnerships with existing entertainment industry organizations is warranted further down the line.
Platform - RadicL Creations
"Creating radical solutions."
What?
The platform team organizes and facilitates the building of teams around potential product ideas and maintains the tools critical to community operations.
If the community needs a Slack environment, the ambition level is to build an open-source tool that serves the community's needs better than Slack, which is something outside stakeholders would be willing to pay to create.
The company will be in the hands of the community.
Why?
For community members to have an internal outlet platform that speeds up idea launching whenever individuals have time creates compound effects when members can deploy the community accumulated knowledge into new projects.
A particular set of tools for running communities does not exist. With a "House full of radical community members," they will like to imagine a better way of doing things than what living or the used tools can. The radical operations team will set up a dedicated team to facilitate this urge and maintain the created solutions.
How?
We are assembling a team to create one of the first tools. Alternatively, the operations team can recruit a suitable unit subscribing to the RadicL vision of creating a viable solution to act as part of the House of RadicL umbrella.
The order in which the community creates the tools is relevant, and there is already a tool out there that serves the initial needs of the community. If so, I can deploy the virtual community with the help of the instrument. However, when it comes to the platform team itself, a problem the community has should be chosen when assembling the team that will run this entity within the community.
I will lay the ideas for the tools in mind in separate documents.
Legal & Accounting - RadicL Operations
"Running radical operations"
What?
Serves the accounting and legal needs of the different entities, as well as having customers outside the community. It will also act as the operational team of the community. The service providers resemble traditional accounting firms and legal firms. However, the goal is also to find solutions worth solving within this space to create tools with the help of the platform team to speed up the pace for which the whole community operates. The faster this team can work, the quicker the community "can run."
Suppose the training team is the heart and sets the pace for new members by pumping "new blood" into the community. In that case, the operations team sets the pace for which it moves forward and provides the foundation on which it stands.
The company is the legs of the community.
Why?
The community operates within the legal requirements of LLCs. Without this expertise within the community's core, it may collapse because of a misguided foundation. There is room to innovate the structures, but likely warranted when there is support from the RadicL Politics team.
How?
Recruit entrepreneurs within the legal and accounting space with interest and experience running companies, as much as they have domain expertise.
Political Affairs - RadicL Politics
"Being radically different, by aspiring to be anti-political."
What?
The aim is not to be political but to be aware of the political landscape in operating regions and facilitate discussions instead of driving them. At best, RadicL Politics achieves the impossible of being seen as a neutral player in politics, providing discussions where there otherwise would be none—being in the same room with the right people and at the right time to create positive change.
The company will be the eyes and ears of the community.
Why?
When the community aims to create sustainable positive change, the community needs to influence policies for more favorable environments. The community will need an outlet to influence decisions before officials present them publicly.
How?
This company will be the last on the priority list for implementation. Influence comes with successfully creating positive change. To start here would be slower than the pace at which House of RadicL aims to operate. The House also needs to prove it can outlive most political mandates.
When getting started, 2-4 dedicated community members who are the most skilled and interested in politics will work full-time to create networks within the political landscape within the regions the House of RadicL chooses to operate in.
Membership
The veins of the community. Allowing the “blood” (members) to flow into the community.
When the community has grown to its full potential, membership will, but is not limited to, include the following:
Free but mandatory participation in skills training.
Ability to participate in House events.
Access to the community platform (communication and social profiles)
Opportunity to engage in product initiatives (Platform team).
Opportunity to engage with investment opportunities (LP and operations activities through the Investment team)
Services provided by the community teams and product initiatives at a discount (Facilitated by the Partnership team)
Opportunity to get a share of the income generated by the collective community knowledge (when it's possible)
Be alleged for support from a radical moai, a pool of money one can use to distribute to members experiencing unexpected personal hardship and in need of assistance.
What does it take to become a member?
The blood of the community
The different companies will provide different ways of engaging with the community. You can buy and wear RadicL wear. You can subscribe to RadicL Thoughts. You can purchase and participate in RadicL training. You can visit the Co-working space. You can seek investment. You can seek legal advice. You can buy accounting services. You can use, contribute, and buy RadicL Creations. You can participate in RadicL Events and engage with RadicL Entertainment.
Those who engage with RadicL services and products can be considered members. At first, I need to attract and select members singularly. Once we've formed the community, those who want to join it must meet and familiarize themselves with at least three discussions with three different community members on separate occasions. Then, you can apply if the three are willing to endorse you.
A committee selects members after review and discussion with the member.
House of RadicL is for those who;
Can imagine a future and proven to create something they have imagined.
Who has the ambition to redefine market expectations of their craft, domain, or the world at large
Can articulate how they previously approached problems or done things according to the House's operating principles.
Have demonstrated and can articulate how they've pursued their intrinsic motivations
Have built, can effectively utilize, or actively contribute to human networks
Within the human body analogy, this translates into "Blood type." If you're the wrong blood type, it might kill the whole community. Acknowledging some people may be "type O" fit for any House, but everyone has a blood type. It's neither good nor bad, but everybody needs the right blood type.
The committee should review;
If a prior engagement has happened
The individual meets the right "blood type."
I can see how the member adds something to the community and how the new member can benefit from the community.
They are coachable and show an aptitude for using themselves as their benchmark.
The committee needs to find the right sponsor within the community to support the potential new member in integration.
Building principles
Build Open Source.
Work 4 hours/day, Play the rest, or rest to play.
Work in pairs. No one should be a bottleneck. (Inspiration is the twin model in job sharing and "swim buddies" in Navy Seals)
When building teams, think in units of four. No group should be more significant than twelve.
For any project or business that needs more than 12 people, the platform team will spin them out. It requires significant detachment from the community in legal terms.
Choose one metric that aligns with business value and growth. That means it measures impact.
Optimize time to impact. (Impact here doesn't limit itself to ESG factors; impact refers to the positive change the project/team/organization aims to achieve.)
Use control metrics to form balance: Customer value metric, Financial metric, and Team health metric.
Make decisions through advice and values. Best thinking should always win.
Information becomes knowledge only when shared. Knowledge becomes insight when discussed.
Computers become helpful when you have the right question. Challenge the question, not the answer.
Practice opt-in transparency on all business intelligence (Think, at the very least, metrics, financials, and meeting notes).
In business and if needed, prioritize 1. efforts that give humanity more time on earth (environment), 2. that give humans more time to walk this earth (health), 3. and things that make life worth living (joy). In general, all businesses and public services should strive to give people more time to focus on their priorities.
In life and if needed, prioritize Health, Family, and Time with your People.
Operating principles
These are the first iterations to communicate some base for the community created as the community evolves, and so will the values.
Learn, Execute, Teach. Do these in this order. (a principle for valuing drive constant learning)
Be radically inclusive. (a focus on driving engagement within the community)
Ask for help when help is needed. (a principle to drive collaboration)
Do the right thing regardless of the consequences. (a guide on how to break things, if need be)
Connect the right people with the right problem. (a code for finding the right fit)
Respect time over money. (Prioritizing the one thing everyone has)
House Rules
The following rules create a baseline for behavior and expectations. The operations team can provide input from the community when needed;
There is Zero tolerance for racism, sexism, or discrimination.
Making a mistake is human. Making the same mistake twice demonstrates a need for more learning. Making the same mistake three times is consequential.
You cannot participate in house activities without being trained in the following (list is refined and revised with experiences from delivery):
Facilitation
Asking, receiving, and delivering feedback
Bias training
Active listening
Conflict resolution
AI - Basics.
You cannot participate in building or being part of community companies without being trained in the following (the list is refined and revised with experiences from delivery):
Basics in project financing
Making contracts
Scaling products
Market research
Marketing 101
If you're part of a team, you operate through contracts. Contracts are documents everyone has that describe:
Your responsibilities
To whom have you promised to deliver what by when?
Your tasklist
To what team do you belong at any given time, and who is your pair?
Marching order
The following chapter is a rough draft of how to do things. It takes at least one year for one person to create any of the entities. Additionally, it only makes sense to build some things simultaneously. I'm happy if these notions prove false and the community can create them faster.
Phase one: Starting with what you know
Starting with what I know, upskilling leadership and learning capabilities of the organizations through a chosen partner network of service providers within the domain that provides solutions to employee lifecycle management.
Additionally, finding stories from Radicals in the modern world, leading up to the end of phase one, publishing a book accumulating learnings and thoughts on art, love, life, and leadership in a world embedded with AI.
One and two are things the world needs. I love, I'm good at, as well as I can get compensated for. They will set the foundation for the media house and the Consultancy.
Phase two: Assembling the community
It is setting up the entity that manages the group of companies, gathering memberships, and deploying the community on a virtual platform.
I will recruit the members for the Training Company and Events company, as well as recruit the foundation for the radical operations. First, I will set up the team within the group entity as a core team. Then it will spin out to its own company.
Phase three: Acquiring resources
At this point, a core team drives the new initiatives. The core team will set up the fund in phase three, and the community will assemble the platform team. At this point, the community should be ready to start building on ideas and need funds. The core team will also appoint a dedicated team of two to raise the funds to set up the Radical Moai.
Phase four: Housing and branding the community
The most capital-intensive companies are the Co-working and clothing companies. As business units, they need the most capital. For the community to raise the necessary amounts, some success out of initially raised capital needs to be realized.
Phase five: Expansion
When the endeavor reaches this point, it must find its place in society and expand. Once there is a regional community with all facets of the whole community, one can start thinking of regions to enter and with which companies services it would be best.
Ambition
"The time is now on everything. Took my heart away from money. I ain't interested in fame. I pray that will never change. Ambition is priceless, it's something that is in your veins. I put that on my name" - Wale, Rap artist.
Ultimately, the legacy that I hope the community will have is that it presented a different way of organizing people around knowledge work, provided a series of solutions the world needed, and bred a new generation of leaders fit to create the future we need.
The egoistic reason for creating it is that I haven't indeed found a "home" for myself professionally, so why not just build one? Secondly, as everyone does, I'm trying to do right by the child in me, who had highly educated middle-class parents who suffered from bad management during their professional careers and gave up on their dreams so that they could provide me with a happy and safe childhood. For that, I'm forever grateful. I may not be able to save my parents, but I can make the best out of the privileges given to me. I can create something that provides more fulfilling opportunities for the radicals who are constantly able to redefine market expectations.
I prefer comparing something other than existing organizations when creating something new. However, to give some mental models to lean on, House of Radical is an organization that can launch new endeavors as fast as Rocket Internet launched new e-commerce sites and provides education for the future workforce the way Hyper Island does. It will hopefully expand beyond just capitalistic endeavors. It will also serve social causes; all ideas do not have to originate within the community.
This company will be the world's first House of RadicL.
Acknowledgments
The plan is obnoxious. Publishing it without any validation of generated revenue or if it is possible to work as intended is foolish. However, as an architect of thought and someone who tries to create meaning when there is none, documenting this makes it easier to approach the ordeal.
As the plan is highly complex, breaking it down to a metaphor of "A human body and some of its parts" helps make it easier to understand. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and within the community, none makes sense to exist without the other. Ultimately, if we can realize it as such, a whole will exist to create the change, not just half the change the world needs.
I'm modeling The House of RadicL after learning in the event industry, my experience in sports teams, my experience building Slush, and spending years engaging with the Finnish startup ecosystem. Analyzing what works and what doesn't work, I was in the discussions when community leaders made decisions, and outside of those discussions, I watched things from the side as they unfolded.
Additionally, I've spent time reading business books- my primary source of inspiration whenever I try to create something myself—continuously asking why I should think this way and in what context to apply the learnings. Where does it work, and where doesn't it work?
Learning from Slush was that if Slush was the product (an event), I was the head of that product. At the time, I needed to see past the field of play (the event industry) and try to create something within the same domain instead of looking past the field of play, and I didn't. At Smartly, I failed because I was more committed to the company's mission than I was committed to the people within the company. After Smartly, I did not relentlessly pursue my ikigai. I spent more time helping others at the cost of my financial and mental health. I let people use my time for personal gains, some of whom did not deserve it, with little in return.
I've aspired to create something of my own but only changed from doing so once I've imagined something that I believe can do more good than harm in this world and is a whole that provides enough interest for a lifetime. I know one is never to create anything alone, and ultimately, the House of RadicL will belong to the community much more than it will ever belong to me.
Finally, One may wonder where I aspire to reside if we can create the full vision for the House of RadicL. Every endeavor will first need a catalyst and can serve as such. Nonetheless, I hope to be the solar plexus, the third chakra, the source of confidence and warrior spirit the community may or may not have. The organ that senses something is wrong before the brain can analyze the signals is the center of the sympathetic nervous system.
Without the Solar plexus, the whole may become a senseless beast that acts without feeling any pain. Remember that tyranny is a privilege, unrestrained.
P.s. For anyone wondering why RadicL is missing and "I," it's because I have dyslexia, a severe impediment for anyone who does much writing. However, I believe that anyone's most significant weakness can be their greatest strength, our impediments being the very reason one becomes the ones who others label as the radicals that redefine market expectations as it forces us to see the world differently and survive regardless of the norms society has.