Interview w/Daniel Epstein & Teju Ravilochan, Co-Founders of The Unreasonable Institute

We had a fun chat with Daniel Epstein and Teju Ravilochan, Co-Founders of The Unreasonable Institute this past weekend. In this video interview, Daniel and Teju share the background story on why they started The Unreasonable Institute to provide training and mentorship for young social entrepreneurs. In this interview, learn about The Unreasonable Institute’s Fellows Program, who they are looking for, how to apply, and more. Applications open November 15th and run for one month. Twenty five high-impact young social entrepreneurs will be selected from around the world to join in an intensive 10-week training program taught by seasoned social entrepreneurs. Learn about the investor’s pitch, The Unreasonable Institute’s pipeline parters, seed capital for young social entrepreneurs in the Fellows program, and more.

The Full Transcript

Katrina: Hi, here I am with Teju and Daniel of The Unreasonable Institute.

Teju: Thanks Katrina. Well, first of all, it’s just a pleasure to be here, we’re really happy to share a little bit about The Unreasonable Institute with you. The Unreasonable Institute is basically an international incubator for early-stage social ventures. We’re focused on young people around who hunger to create systemic social change. And we bring them to Boulder, Colorado for ten weeks where they live under the same roof, undergo rigourous entrepreneurial training, receive mentorship from fifty of the world’s most seasoned social entrepreneurs, and ultimately connect them with the seed capital they need to launch social ventures that are gloablly scalable and that can improve the lives of millions of people.

Daniel: Nice. [laughter]

Katrina: This is an amazing incubator for young social entrepreneurs and I’ve been hearing around the blogosphere that this is being referred to as an MBA crash course for young people who want to make a difference.

What inspired you to start this?

Daniel: I think we were inspired by an obsession, actually – an obsession with the belief that entrepreneurship is the answer to the greatest challenges that we’re facing today. Our entire founding team – we’re a group of young social entrepreneurs. We are the very customers, clients, or constituents that we’re looking to attract to the Institute, and we recognize the shortcomings right now in supporting early-stage social ventures. There’s a lack of extensive incubators. There’s a lack of access to expert mentors. And, and there’s a lack of access to capital and these are all the things that we’re looking to drive into this ecosystem.

Teju: I might add that we’re after unreasonable people. You know, people who create change in the world are often called crazy. And you know, no one is probably crazier than a 20-something who says, “I’m going to put poverty in a museum”, to quote Muhammad Yunus.

Katrina: This is so inspiring. Let me ask you,

how are you attracting seasoned experts to become the mentors for the program?

Daniel: We’ve teamed up with key organizations all around the world, from Ashoka to Endeavor in Chile to NYU University and a number of other award-deeming pipeline partners, which are organizations that believe that this is a very valuable experience.

Teju: We’re bringing to the Institute the brightest, hungriest young people. And these seasoned social entrepreneurs know the struggles that they’ve faced in trying to launch their social ventures, so they’re very excited about the opportunity to help the next generation of young people who are hungry to create that change.

Katrina: Fantastic, fantastic. So let me ask you this,

What are you looking for? How will you determine of all the applicants you receive who will be invited to join you?

Teju: We’re looking at two different categories: one is the idea, and one is the person. So in terms of the idea, we’re looking for ventures that can meet four criteria. One, they have the potential of addressing a social or environmental problem. Two, they can financially self-sustain themselves within a year, meaning they have some kind of internal revenue mechanism for covering their cost of operations – so that three years after they launch they can scale beyond their country of origin. And finally, our fourth criteria is that they reach the needs of at least one million people.

In terms of the person, we’re looking for primarily three characteristics: unreasonablity, impatience, and boldness. So what do I mean by that? By unreasonability, I mean people who have the ability to persist through failure, who are willing to endure scathing scepticism and whatever challenges they face in launching a social enterprise, and are relentlessly determined to solve one of these problems at any cost. We’re also looking for people who feel a strong sense of urgency and who are impatient to create this change – who we can ask, “what is the world’s biggest problem today?” and “what are you doing about it right now?” and they have an answer for us right away.

And then finally, we’re looking for boldness. We’re looking for people who are willing to take risks, who are willing to try models that have never before been implemented, who are willing to think on the scope of millions, and even billions, of people, and risk failure in pursuit of that. And we’re looking for people who really have the entrepreneurial ability, who can make people believe in them, who have rallied the support of at least one team member, who are between the ages of twenty and thirty, though that is not a hard and fast rule.

Daniel: One thing we’re really looking for, and Teju touched on it, are teams. We’re looking for teams for a couple of reasons: one is to show that your idea is at a certain stage in development where you’ve been able to inspire people to come onboard and work on it full-time. Also, we’re looking for teams so that one of the members can come to the Institute, while the other one is back on the ground interacting with the market so that they can test prototypes and proofs of concept while their other team member is at the Institute. We think that this is absolutely critical.

Which gets us to another point, which is really quite simply, that we believe that entrepreneurs do stuff. So we’re looking for entrepreneurs who have done stuff. And if that means you’ve got a prototype to market, you’ve been working on your venture for six months, one year, three years, even if it’s just been two weeks, we want to make certain that you’ve got in on the ground, that you’re relentless about this, that you’re dedicated to it, and that you’re passionate about it.

Katrina:

What are some of the things that applicants who are invited can expect to learn?

Teju: We’re bringing mentors to the Institute, for example, Mark Mathieu, who is the head of global brand marketing at Coca-Cola. We’re bringing Bob Pattillo, who started Gray Ghost Fund, a four hundred million social investment fund, for example, who can teach our Fellows, for example: “how do you reach remote rural customers?” “how do you market to them?”, who can say, “this is how you pitch to investors”.

We’re bringing someone who’s lifted millions of people out of poverty who says “this is how you communicate with people who live in poverty in rural Cambodia”, for example. “These are the kinds of questions you ask, these are the kinds of things you should be looking for when you’re out there on the ground. In addition to that, we’ll be bringing Tom Suttas, for example, who has started nineteen companies of his own, and has rasied over a billion US dollars in funds for those companies. So how do you raise that money? So everything it takes from putting together a team, to pitching to an investor, to marketing, to branding, you know, all those things are things our Fellows will learn from the mentors we bring to the Institute.

Daniel: More practical needed tools are assets. So, we’ll work with them [Fellows] to build websites, free legal consultation throughout the Institute, access to capital to build prototypes over the ten weeks. At the culmination of the Institute, we’ll be having an investor’s pitch fest and conference, where our Fellows will go on-stge in front of two hundred investors and enlightened philanthropists, and be able to say “these are the ideas that are going to change the world in the next generation and the coming years, and invest in them.”

Katrina:

Awesome. And how much does this cost? For someone who wants to attend, how much do they have to pay?

Teju: The cost of attending the Institute is US $6,500 but we don’t, in fact, allow our Fellows to pay it. In fact, what happens is, we’ll get applications and we’ll narrow it down the initial pool of let’s say, a couple hundred, to forty or fifty we hope. We’ll put those forty or fifty entrepreneurs on what what’s called a finalist marketplace, which is a platform inspired by kickstarter.com, where these entrepreneurs can profile their ventures and their ideas to the world.

The world then can come to this marketplace and vote with their dollars on the ideas that they think are the most viable for creating deep social impact. So the first twenty five finalists to raise sixty five hundred dollars through this platform are the ones who become Unreasonable Fellows. This is perhaps one of the best tests of their enterpreneurial ability. Can they go out and get people excited enough about their idea, and get people to believe in them and their idea enough to support them with their dollars?

Daniel: We know the difference between receiving a full-ride scholarship to an organization or to a fellowship, versus having, say a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred people support you like Teju said. With that amount of excitement, ownership, and accountability when you’re attending the Institute and hundreds of people have said, yes you deserve to be here, yes your idea is viable, we believe will truly be incredible.

Recently we realized a slight issue with this model which was that it wasn’t going to be fair for applicants and finalists coming from more impoverished backgrounds. And so, we’re actually staggering the amount of sponsorship you can receive over a fifty day period. So in the first week, anyone in the world can come and sponsor their way to the Institute, but you can’t give more than ten dollars.

The idea behind that is, if you can get six hundred and fifty people to support you in one week and say that you should come to the institute, then you should come to the Institute because that’s absolutely incredible. The second week it will be fifty dollars, the third week it will be a maximum of a hundred, and so on and so forth. And the idea here is to really level the playing ground.

Katrina:

With the staggered voting model that you’ve shared, we can expect applicants from all over the world, right?

Teju & Daniel: Yes, yes you can.
Teju: In fact, Katrina, we already have two hundred fifty people signed up to apply actually, which is really exciting. And they’re from all over the world. You know, we’ve got applicants from sub-Saharan Africa, from Southeast Asia, from Latin America, and from Europe, and of course from North America and the United States. So, we’re really excited by the people signed up to apply because it reflects that there is international interest.

Katrina:

Is there anything you would like to share with everyone, any tips you can give to applicants?

Teju: We want the best entrepreneurs to apply, and to be very honest and transparent with us about what they know, what they don’t know, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, and what they’re looking to do.

Katrina: Thank you so much for your time, and I’m really excited to hear what emerges with The Unreasonable Institute. Thank you so much. It’s always so fun talking with you two.

Teju: It’s been a blast, thank you so much.
Daniel: Thank you too.

Teju Ravilochan & Daniel Epstein – Co-Founders of The Unreasonable Institute:

About: The Unreasonable Institute unites up to 25 high-impact young social entrepreneurs from around the world for an intensive 10-week summer institute, that provides skills training & expert mentorship. Website: www.unreasonableinstitute.org