Sometime in late autumn last year Daniel Epstein, founder of the Unreasonable Institute, called and told me that he planned to put a bunch of startups on a cruise ship, sail them around the world for 100+ days, visit 20+ countries, get a roster of world-class mentors join the tour and help the participating entrepreneurs build social good companies which change the lives of millions. And so Unreasonable at Sea was born.
Sounds completely crazy? Yes! And yet — totally doable. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Daniel simply piggybacked on Semester at Sea, which solved most of the logistical challenges for him. He had the scaffolding in place… Which allowed him in turn to create one of the most inspired entrepreneurship programs I have ever seen.
Reflecting on this incredible story made me realize that we have most of the scaffolding for whatever we want to do already there.
It’s incredibly easy to start a company these days — be it a tech startup which can set up shop within hours using cloud services and open source software or service businesses which find resources from shared office spaces to Skype for cheap global calls to software suites which can be bought for a small monthly fee and only require a computer with a web browser.
This is the time. It has never been easier. Start something.