Full of Promise
A vision for redemptive entrepreneurship.
The Entrepreneurial Moment
At Praxis, we believe the future of culture depends largely on the next generation of entrepreneurs. Founders are artists of a unique flavor with the opportunity to paint on a blank organizational canvas to create new works of social and cultural value.
We live at a moment in history when entrepreneurs have disproportionate influence on everything from the social problems we collectively work on to what we consume, practice, believe, and desire. Founders have ascended to the status of heroes and celebrities in our cultural imagination. Technology, advertising, mass manufacturing, capital networks, and the normalization of entrepreneurship have made it far more possible to start and grow a venture that can achieve significant reach and scale. As the economic and social barriers to entry into the entrepreneurial ranks are being lowered, many are imagining their participation in the innovation ecosystem — according to the Kauffman Foundation, 54% of Millennials have started an organization or desire to join a startup.
But for whose benefit will all of this entrepreneurial energy ultimately be deployed? For self? Or for others? The majority of enterprise has been built on a belief that self-interest is the best engine for widespread economic and social flourishing. Yet we are reminded that unmitigated self-interest has profound destructive power on both founder and society; and it is becoming easier to witness these effects as Silicon Valley writes the script for what it means to be a successful founder today. So often, for-profit entrepreneurs and their investors have started with the exit as the mission — pursuing a self-validating moment of success when years of exhausting work pay off with power, prestige, and wealth. As a culture, we lift up the founders who embody these ambitions; we justify our actions and motivations when we emulate them; all while we judge them for their ego and reckless ambition. Perhaps rightly, we celebrate and villainize Steve Jobs in the same breath. We wonder if creative greatness and moral goodness are compatible.
Meanwhile, we’re seeing an explosion of entrepreneurial activity that is even more ambitious for social outcomes than for financial ones. A new generation of founders, investors, and innovators is embracing an explicit cultural agenda — to usher in social and environmental progress. As Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, recently declared on the cover of Forbes, “the most efficient means to spread an idea today is corporate structure.” What’s most interesting in this statement is not the influence of corporate institutions, but the implication that spreading ideas would be among their primary goals. Indeed, for many of today’s most prominent ventures, whether they are structured as businesses, nonprofits, or hybrids, ideas that generate social impact are the mission.
For example, the mission of high-profile venture capital firm Social Capital is “to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems. By harnessing technology to address core human needs, we aim to drive a bottom-up redistribution of power, capital, and opportunity.” Ev Williams (another co-founder of Twitter) launched Obvious Ventures, which he describes like this: “Obvious is a philosophy … [it is] simply the vehicle through which we co-invest in entrepreneurs that share our worldview.”
A financially successful venture is now more likely to be seen a means to a social end, rather than the other way around. In a piece called “Meet the Philosopher-Kings of Silicon Valley,” the Tech Street Journal explains how studying philosophy affected founder/investors Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman:
While such discussions [about philosophy] obviously didn’t lead Thiel and Hoffman directly to their billions, it is reasonable to suggest that it was practice for thinking about the possible implications their own ideas would have on the world. One gets the distinct sense from watching the videos [of Thiel and Hoffman discussing their philosophy backgrounds] that these guys wrap the usual nuts-and-bolts business thinking in a meta layer of thought that asks not merely how to achieve product/market fit, but what would a particular idea mean for the world if brought to fruition? The dollars made are a side-effect of having created something that moves the world in a positive direction.
This new wave of culture shaping through entrepreneurship offers a different kind of temptation for the charismatic founder — not necessarily the promise of wealth but of social regard. Trying to change the world is a heady business, and each cause is pursued and marketed with such fervor that it inevitably takes on a quasi-religious narrative, with its own definition of sin, righteousness, justice, and salvation. We come to regard founders — and they regard themselves — in almost messianic terms.
At Praxis, we believe a distinctly Christian vision for entrepreneurship includes both an appreciative yes and a prophetic no to these trends.
To the more “worldly” narrative that centers on the triumph of a small number of insiders, our response is that we must use our ingenuity, agency, capital, and creative capacity for the sake of others. We affirm the value-creating power of entrepreneurship, the pursuit of excellence in craft, and the virtues of a society that is economically viable — while insisting that the purpose of these things is to serve our neighbor, not ourselves.
For the more “enlightened” narrative that emphasizes social and cultural impact, we too celebrate entrepreneurship as a powerful engine for the common good. We pursue shared goals wherever possible; we learn and apply best practices; we innovate and lead. Yet we are cautious of the danger of treating any social or cultural agenda as an ultimate goal.
And we must press the question: What kind of world are we trying to create? What kind of change are we trying to bring about? Do we all believe the same things about personhood, dignity, incarnation, authority, morality, power, limitations, the definition of the good life, and the endgame of history?
The answer will be: sometimes yes, often no.
As Karl Barth puts it:
The Church exists to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to the world’s own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise.
If he is right — and we believe he is — then Christian founders must be distinctive from other entrepreneurial leaders, while operating within the same systems and practices. Like their peers, they are willing to compete in tough markets through excellence and innovation, and will be ambitious for cultural and social impact. Yet they will be marked by a different motive (working for others over self); a reframed personal identity (steward over savior); a new communal identity (creative minority over cultural elite); an uncommon level of risk tolerance (resting in grace over striving); an alternate method (starting with purpose over viability); and a redirected intent (to be cultural pioneers rather than market moguls).
This is a tall order, but our experience working alongside over one hundred ventures through Praxis makes us hopeful. We see first-hand that many entrepreneurs in our day are seizing a unique opportunity to demonstrate a profoundly upside-down gospel through the ventures they start. They are the vanguard of founders living out a cultural counterscript — drawn to venture creation not so much as a means to power, renown, and wealth, but by their desire to leverage the blank canvas of entrepreneurship to renew the spirit of the age in their chosen corner of society. They humbly see their culture-making capacity as a gift from God, and desire to give their lives away for the sake of others.
This beautiful alchemy of similarity and difference, of ambition and generosity, of consistent effort and deep contentment — we call it redemptive entrepreneurship.
Design for Renewal
As confessing Christians we are called to be agents of God’s renewing work in all of life. This is an expression of the shared human vocation we were given in the Garden in Genesis 1 — to bear God’s image in the world through our cultural and communal endeavors as he ushers all things toward restoration at the end of time.
In light of this shared calling of the people of God, we see entrepreneurship as a potent way to love and serve our neighbor; to replace dehumanizing and enslaving trends and narratives with more biblical, humanizing and liberating ones; to create pathways for human dignity and flourishing; to advance virtue and justice in community; and in so doing, to restore the spirit of the age. Entrepreneurship, seen in this way, is one of the most deeply Christian vocations.
The endgame of the redemptive venture is renewal: to bend some aspect of culture, society, or an industry to reflect more of God’s goodness and glory; to see “the kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.” This vision of renewal is hopeful (looking forward to God’s work to “reconcile to himself all things”) rather than nostalgic (looking backward to a time of greater cultural power for the people of God). We are chastened but optimistic in our ambitions, knowing that God empowers our efforts and is in control of their fruits.
The redemptive opportunity for a venture is captured (or missed) when the idea is formed. We are so acculturated to the world’s way of doing things that we need to step upstream and take a hard look at the dominant idea generation process that got us here in the first place.
Generally speaking, entrepreneurs (and corporations) attempt to figure out where the world is going, leveraging those trends for considerable financial gain. Innovation firm IDEO has popularized design thinking, which starts with desirability, derived from a carefully-researched understanding of the end user. Similarly, startup accelerator Y Combinator suggests the best startup advice is simply to “make something people want.”
While this mindset helps ventures focus vital attention on customers, we believe it causes a shortfall of imagination at the concept stage — lulling founders to flow unthinkingly along the cultural currents instead of trying to redirect them. If Christian founders are to “join God in the renewal of all things,” to quote Praxis Scholar Jon Tyson, we need a different technique for idea generation in startups. We would aim beyond desirability (“What do people want?”) to seek after flourishing (“What does the world need?”).
To make this shift, we need a rich understanding of God’s purposes for the world (theology) and what is going on in the world (culture). Only when we have a grasp of what our theology has to say about our chosen cultural domain, and when we have developed a deep sense of the humanizing and dehumanizing cultural patterns within that domain, can we confidently enter the generative and creative realms. This is where we use our entrepreneurial capacities and innovation processes to find ideas and opportunities that might truly be a force for the good we are seeking in the culture. As Dallas Willard wonderfully said:
Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand whether it be a petunia or a nation.
To that end, we often meet committed Christian founders who have developed a deep understanding of the demographic, technical, psychological, and economic fundamentals of their venture — yet settle for shallow theological and cultural understanding that dilutes their redemptive potential.
To design for renewal, we start the idea generation process with theological and cultural insight — then develop venture ideas as a creative response.
To jumpstart this shift in mindset and approach, we have found it fruitful to frame the process of design for renewal through themes that integrate theological and cultural insights. Consider the inexhaustible venture opportunities and business models in these scarcely-discussed themes:
The Role of Images in the Re-education of Desire
Virtue-Driven Branding and Identity Formation
Mass Distribution of the Best of Culture
Physical Environments for Flourishing
Reconstituting Cultural Shame as an Expression of Dignity
Experiential Social Enterprise
The Restoration of Civil Discourse
Shared Liturgies and Practices for the Common Good
Co-Creation for Opportunity and Equity
Praxis Mentor Hans Hess was animated by certain of these ideas when he founded Elevation Burger in response to an alarming growth in the populace’s resistance to antibiotics, primarily driven by their rampant use in livestock. Nearly 200,000 people were projected to die by 2025 from their inability to receive antibiotic treatment. The genesis of Elevation Burger was a lament over human suffering (theology), married to insights about cause and effect (culture), brought to life through a sound process of product and brand innovation (entrepreneurship). His grass-fed, organic beef burgers are not only driving a growing business but also have influenced larger players in the food industry to make similar changes, such as Panera.
We might compare and contrast this kind of venture creation to Peter Thiel’s approach in Zero to One. Thiel argues that we have too much talent focused on incremental innovation — ventures that take the world from ‘1 to n’ — and too little focused on radical technological breakthroughs that take us from ‘0 to 1.’ Famously, he says, “We wanted flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.” Yet in a Western society with disproportionate economic and technological resources, perhaps our highest calling isn’t radical technical innovation but radical systemic renewal. As creators in a world that is fallen but still ‘full of promise,’ we can apply a gospel vision throughout the migration from ‘0 to 1 to n’ — injecting compassion, hope, and beauty along every front, whether we are working in genomics, oil & gas, fashion, construction, or media. When our hope rests in the way of Jesus, innovation and disruption return to being servants, rather than masters, of our entrepreneurial vision.
Ten Principles of Designing for Renewal
1. Every venture can be redemptive. Redemptive ventures aren’t limited to any particular sector, scale, structure, faith positioning, or founder personality type. Many of the best examples of redemptive ventures are mature, for-profit businesses with no explicit social model. They’ve identified brokenness in the sphere they occupy and are intentional about restoration.
2. Redemptive ventures each have their own endgame of renewal. Every redemptive venture, whether a consumer tech startup or an education nonprofit, is designed to help move some corner of the world toward flourishing: from indignity to dignity, from isolation to community, from bondage to freedom, from selfishness to generosity, from foolishness to wisdom, from deceit to truth, from anxiety to peace, from consumption to contentment.
3. Redemptive entrepreneurship must start with a different question than most entrepreneurs ask. The first question is not “What will work as a venture?” Instead, it is: “What is good for the world, according to its Creator?” Then the founder can innovate to bring this about in a way that will work. The venture is conceived as a creative response to the gap between what the world is today and what it will be in its restored state.
4. The venture actively pursues a virtuous organizational culture that values people over profits with internal and external stakeholders.
5. The venture conceives its offerings — its products and services — as embodiments of renewal, not solely as solutions to problems or felt needs. Leaders ask: “Are our products and services experienced by the customer in a way that encourages their relational, physical, and spiritual flourishing?”
6. The venture — whether for-profit or nonprofit — has a clearly defined impact model, to ensure that the venture’s near and far effects on people and the environment are net-positive. Leaders ask: “What do our products and services actually accomplish at the personal, social, environmental, or industry level?”
7. The venture focuses not only on how it operates (organization culture), on what it does (offerings), and on its effects (impact model) — but also on what it says about the world (narrative). Leaders understand the prevailing messages in the culture and seek to reinforce these messages (if they accord with a Christian vision) or undermine and re-script them if not.
8. A redemptive venture does not necessarily have an explicit faith positioning or set of hiring criteria, but it is certainly one where the Christian understanding of the world is baked into the culture, decisions, and scorekeeping. This kind of venture will invariably be a demonstrated apologetic of the truth of the gospel.
9. The venture itself is a primary ministry. How leaders allocate money inside the business is at least as important as where they distribute it outside the business. Founders are wise to have an active plan for philanthropy and investment outside the venture, and it’s good if a venture funds Christian things (however that term is defined); but it can be a version of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ if the venture solely funds redemptive ministry without being redemptive in itself.
10. Sector excellence is the table stakes of a redemptive venture. Without it, a venture will have low or unsustainable impact. A culture shaped by the gospel makes ample room for grace, for virtue, for balance; yet it leaves very little room for mediocrity.
Tending the Ecosystem
How do we come together as a Christian community to encourage the formation of a whole generation of redemptive entrepreneurs?
If we don’t see as many founders living out this vision as we would like, our natural instinct is to solve first for scale and strength. We tend to diagnose the problem in terms of not having a strong enough pipeline of leaders, and define the solution as getting more high-capacity Christian entrepreneurs to start companies. We stand up talent, mentoring, and capital networks to help leaders navigate the best institutions and pipelines of leader development.
The case might go like this: entrepreneurship is important; the existing ecosystem is unfriendly or unavailable to people of faith; we want to get more Christians represented in this difficult and competitive field; so we will create a faith-friendly ‘shadow ecosystem’ to find, train, connect, support, and fund Christians who can climb the ranks of cultural power through entrepreneurship.
Yet this approach is still insufficient because it so readily devolves into the tribal and worldly culture-wars logic offered in every area of influence from politics to filmmaking: we need to get more of ‘our’ people into a culture-shaping domain so we can secure our representation, influence, and impact.
We need to go deeper and ask: why do we need more Christian founders in the first place? In our view, it’s not to capture cultural or financial influence for the Christian community — it’s because the world deeply needs the kinds of ventures that Christians uniquely can start, and we are compelled by our love of neighbor to start them.
Not because Christians are better people (we aren’t), but because we have the good news of an upside-down gospel from a God who cares about every square inch of creation.
If what Christians believe about the world is True — that God created the world in love and will reconcile all things to himself — then venture by venture and especially over the course of hundreds and thousands of ventures, the Christian community should mobilize to make a unique, positive, and material difference to the world through the practice of entrepreneurship.
Having more and stronger Christian founders should not only be good for Christians, but for everybody. To people outside our faith we can say: Even if you don’t believe as we do, if Christian entrepreneurs are doing their job, the world should be better off. As William Temple put it:
The Church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members.
As expressions of the Church, then, redemptive ventures exist for their customers and neighbors, not their owners; and creating them is more an act of love than of control.
We must acknowledge that even more than scale or strength, the primary opportunity for Christian entrepreneurs is distinctiveness. We need founders who, like Daniel and his colleagues in Babylonian exile, surpass their peers in excellence — and are yet starkly different in vision, motivation, and practices. To accomplish this, even our methods of recruitment and leadership development have to be different.
Because we need a generation of founders with an alternative imagination for the purpose and practice of entrepreneurship under the lordship of Christ, we need pipelines and ecosystems that help faith-driven entrepreneurs succeed in terms of the market, and others that form and reinforce in founders a different vision for what their ventures are for in the first place.
This means we need funders and programs designed to source and propel aspiring founders through the best mainstream universities, training grounds, employers, and networks — even though they run the risk of turning out founders who are too similar to the world around them.
Likewise, we need faith-based incubators, networks, and accelerators; entrepreneurship programs in Christian colleges; and Christian-led companies that apprentice and develop aspiring founders — even though they run the risk of turning out founders who are too subcultural and therefore less competitive and effective.
Over the next decades, might we use our deepening understanding of humanity — theological, cultural, sociological, technical — to create products, services, environments, and systems that truly allow for flourishing? The entrepreneurial endeavor is the frontier of faith and work, as we join God in the renewal of all things — which as James K.A. Smith says, involves “the re-direction and re-orientation of our culture-making capacities.”
This is the hope of the gospel in the field of startups: a generation of entrepreneurs who use the gift of their culture-making capacity to create ventures that are full of the promise of God’s kingdom.
