Seeking Rational Optimists

Seeking Rational Optimists

We've opened applications for a Fellowship aimed at creating the conditions for individuals to explore transformational ideas that build a future of abundance. You can read more about the thinking behind it below, and find the program details here.

When we restated our thesis in our last post, we laid out our articulation of a shared vision for how a world of abundance will come into being.  We’re all in on the idea that converging breakthroughs in AI, robotics, biology, and materials science unlocks entirely new possibilities to re-platform how we coordinate life on Earth.

Still, we can’t predict the path to a regenerative world with high fidelity. The problems are hard, and many require tools that don’t yet exist.

Yet we remain rational optimists, because we believe in humanity’s capacity for knowledge creation and more specifically, that a few unreasonably curious people will force their seemingly weird but extraordinary ideas into existence. 

We are optimists, not because we’ve run the numbers and the odds look good on paper. We’re rationally optimistic because we’ve seen, through the founders we’ve partnered with, what’s possible when we fan the flames of their unrelenting ambition:

We know PhD students who spend their nights building magical worlds in silicon, designing systems that look like games but turn out to be the fundamental models for understanding our planet.

Teenagers who spend their summer holidays at Genentech, following early threads of molecular machines that might one day assemble our world atom-by-atom.

A hiker, halfway down a trail, who realises the robotics they’ve been building for years could be deployed underwater to restore fragile ecosystems.

It’s these oddly shaped individuals that give us optimism to know that we can build a future of abundance.

At the same time, if you’re serious about building abundance on a finite planet, you eventually have to ask: what kind of system needs to exist to give these outlier humans the space to obsess over their weird, potentially transformative ideas?

Most of our institutions aren’t designed to support that exploration anymore. We aren’t the first to point out that they don’t explore, they narrow. They reward what already makes sense, filtering for polish, outcomes, preexisting hypotheses. This works fine for incremental progress, and it occasionally works for breakthrough ideas.

We know that these people sit in different places. Our job can’t be just to guess which spark will catch, it’s to make sure the fire never stops. To build a system where people can keep trying, even when it looks unreasonable. A regenerative system for exploration, one that gives more than it takes.

That’s why we’re running an experiment of our own. No fixed hypothesis on the return, just a belief that if we want to keep staying warm in the landscape of radically ambitious and unreasonable ideas, we need to invest in the conditions that let those ideas emerge at all.

ReGen exists to fan a flame. The Regenerative Fellowship is our attempt to add fuel to a fire. It’s about increasing the odds that real breakthroughs can happen, especially in the early, unformed, messy stages, before they look like anything at all.

The Fellowship is designed to fund people taking orthogonal bets and exploring the adjacent possible. Because if more exceptional people have room to pursue different kinds of ideas, before those ideas harden into categories, we’ll get better science, companies, and institutions in the long run.

Applications are open now. If you have a question you can’t stop thinking about and a willingness to tread into the unknown, we’d love to speak with you.