Whyable was set up in London and Bangalore in 2014. It was conceived to provide technology solutions to the young but burgeoning early stage startup industry. We believed then, as we still do today, that the early stage ecosystem will play a big part in shaping our future.
We called the business Whyable because we knew that business needed to have a good WHY. Inspired by Steve Jobs and Simon Senek’s Golden Circle TED talk: Each business that we formed or worked with needed to have a good answer for WHY it was created and functioning, and we knew that was almost certainly going to involve people, planet and not just profit.
You only need to look at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tesla and others to see the impact the early stage world can have on our world, albeit, to date, with very mixed results. Not one of those companies is the perfect case study for a business promoting genuinely sustainable and just principles. In fact the entrepreneurs at the heads of each of the businesses are emblematic of one of the key issues, financial inequality.
For example, the wealthiest 22 men in the world own more than all the women in Africa, the current climate warming is predicted to be 4 degrees celsius by 2100 and we are losing species at a rate of between 1,000 and 10,000 times faster than would be expected without humans.
There is no doubt, there is something fundamentally problematic with the status quo. We are currently heading towards the total destruction of our ecosystems, a much warmer planet, a two or multi-tiered species, and an unknown in AI and computing which demands immense scrutiny.
Metrics to measure our progress are important, and much of the wonderful world that we live in today is down to quality science and rational thinking. However, we are also strong believers that there needs to be a change in the way that we think, and possibly even an alteration of human consciousness. Left brain, rational thinking has its limitations, and the issues we face are in part due to this relentless pursuit of rationality. Indeed, we are hopeful there are green shoots of hope, it’s not so long ago that humans had a more balanced way of thinking, and were much more in tune with the world that we lived in.
Our experience suggests that this evolved consciousness can begin to be found or refound through meditation, through a wider understanding of yoga, through mindfulness, through exercise, through listening, through trusting, through proximity to nature, through a balanced natural diet. It’s not actually too far away, it’s part of us already.
This change will bring a world whereby people are much more empathetic, much less affected by their own egos and excitingly is a place where serenity can be felt by almost everyone, most of the time. This paradigm will replace competition for collaboration, profit for purpose, and the individual for the collective. It will be a world where human desire for material gains will be replaced by an understanding that our contentment is located internally.
This is the world that we try to practice at Whyable and this is the world that we hope we can help to bring about in as short a time as possible.
