Unreasonably Optimistic

We are traveling with Unreasonable at Sea, an offshoot of the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, CO.  Thirty-one entrepreneurs and a rotating set of mentors are working on 11 companies that have the potential to change the world. 

[More on the Unreasonable Institute here. Their name comes from a quote from George Bernard Shaw, which says all change comes from the unreasonable man.  It’s a good quote, but I’m not sure it makes a good name.  Too much time spent explaining it.]

It’s never been entirely clear to me what UI is doing for these companies.  They are bringing in big names for short stints, rotating them in at every port.  Last week the superstar was Time Magazine’s Hero of the Planet (for 2000), Hunter Lovins.  Now we have two Nike execs and a Microsoft Xbox exec who will hold two hours of career counseling open to the other 800 of us aboard ship.  The founder of UI, an alumnus of Semester at Sea, is with us for the whole voyage.  We’ve been promised a Saudi prince. They have a staff (for 31 entrepreneurs) that’s roughly the size of the SAS staff, (for 650 students) minus our residency life folks.  They are holed up in one of our classrooms, and they periodically emerge to hold “Fireside Chats.” Thursday night we got to listen to the first pitches by the entrepreneurs.

It feels a little like reality TV.  Eleven companies!  One ship!!  Mystery guests!!! Who will prevail?  The pitches were thrown together in 4 hours, which I gather was a design constraint imposed on them.  Or it could just be they had no one to chat with (which matches the lack of an actual fire to sit beside).

Snarkiness aside, this is a remarkably international group of people.  I sat through half a dozen of the pitches and listened to companies with founders and/or projects in Spain, Mali, Tibet, Morocco, India, Botswana, Haiti, Darfur, and Nepal.  The projects ranged from brilliant to impenetrable, and the presentations from clunky to impossible. 

One company has a process for purifying water using plants and has been operating for some time.  Another is building cleaner, more efficient charcoal stoves, which competes with the one building better solar ovens.  There’s a guy who makes hearing aid battery rechargers that work with solar power.  One tinkerer developed an endoscopic device from stuff he had around the house.  Another is using a remote control sailboat to clean up the ocean.  My favorite gee-whiz goes to a company that makes nano-somethings from carbon emissions.  (More polished summaries at the UI site.)  This is pretty cool stuff.

The original request for proposals from UI called for companies that had already generated income, companies with a product to sell.  The UI promise was to develop marketing strategies, find audiences, and hone presentations (as well as provide the trip around the world) in exchange for a piece of the company.  UI came with a (comparatively) huge crew of AV/PR and administrative people to do this, along with the star mentors.

I hope it works.  The products are amazing and the entrepreneurs are brilliant.  In 5 years, I want to be able to say, “I sailed with the people who brought clean water to Mali, who reversed global warming…”   Is that unreasonable to ask?