Each Sunday, members of this community gather over brunch to tell stories, inspire action, & grow together. This Sunday, we spent two hours talking about the timeless opportunity of “the frontier.”
Frontiers promise a better future that doesn't yet exist.
Throughout history, frontiers have attracted young explorers by promising them a mix of riches, autonomy, & self-actualization. Often dangerous & desolate, frontiers are rarely places to get rich quick, despite loads of marketing material to the contrary.
But frontiers can yield great fortunes. And they often create heroes & heroines who achieve superhuman feats in the face of hardship. Who inspire others through their determination, resilience, & resourcefulness.
There are still physical frontiers: space & the Arctic, for instance.
But there are equally important non-physical frontiers. The most important of these for me is female entrepreneurship.
Frontiers tend to sell settlers with glamorous marketing that often contradicts reality. But over time, that marketing attracts pioneers. And somehow, those pioneers get a foothold in the desolate terrain. And sometimes, that foothold grows into a thriving city.
I'm from Texas, one of the harshest frontiers of all time. Boiling summers, aird soil & constant warfare were just some of the deterrents to those early settlers. Here's how biographer Robert Caro describes the Texas frontier in 1840:
While the Hill Country may have seemed a place of free range and free grass, in fact nothing was free. Success—or even survival—in so hard a land demanded a price that was hard to pay. It required an end to illusions, to dreams … for in a land so merciless, the faintest romantic tinge to a view of life might result not just in hardship but in doom.
But settlers settled there anyway. And guess what stands in the Hill Country now: Austin, one of the most prosperous cities in the US. It may take centuries, but eventually, frontier determination pays off.
If you want to have Sunday brunch discussions like this one, join our Discord server.
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EVENTS
📍 22 June | Female Founder’s Breakfast | 8.00-9.30 | https://shorturl.at/aceNX
📍 21 June | Civic Tech Meetup | 18.00-20.00 | https://shorturl.at/doqM2
FOUNDER AWARD
Last week, Sting celebrated its 20th year at Demo Day where more than 50 investors voted on their favorite pitch. This week’s #FounderAward goes to the winners of that election: Teenie Fung & Beatrice Baltscheffsky from Hypertype.
Hypertype is an AI-powered engine that gathers relevant information from a company's email & document history to auto-generate email replies. The former #1 product on Product Hunt, Hypertype recently closed a $1.2m pre-seed round from investors that include Luminar Ventures, alongside angels like Siddharth Khullar, and Peggy Poon, according to Crunchbase.
Congratulations to the entire Hypertype team.
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Submit corrections, feedback, or ideas for this update to me, Vincent Weir.
Thanks for your accountability and help, Hamed Mohammadpour.