In pursuit of partnership
Has the glorification of individual success prevented collective progress?
I recently learned that over 300 mental health startups launched in the last two years. It’s a baffling statistic, given the still dire state of mental health access, payment, delivery, stigma and more. Yet there are some 300+ teams chipping away at these issues.
At least these socially-minded entrepreneurs are not spending their time on saucy problems like optimizing pizza delivery with robots and big data.
But it still begs the question: assuming these organizations share the mission of improving mental health, does it really make sense to have 300+ distinct teams chipping away at this problem with distinct operations, offices spaces, and marketing budgets? Or would they be better off working in partnership?
Within healthcare and in my research for nonprofit partnerships at Amino, I was surprised to learn that for every condition, from Crohn’s Disease to cervical cancer, there are multiple reputable national organizations working to support patients and fundraise for cures. Yet they often lack the coordination that is vital to reach more patients or accelerate research.
Take the rare and life-threatening immune disorder Castleman disease, which affects about 5,000 people in the United States each year. Though there were over 400 academic researchers working on the disease, “many seemed unaware of each other and their work” until Castleman patient and physician David Fajgenbaum invited them to a discussion, according to Science Magazine. (Disclosure: David, now the co-founder of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, is a friend from the University of Pennsylvania.) He recounts in the article:
The challenges, Fajgenbaum came to believe, weren’t rooted in science so much as business. “There was no overarching strategy,” he says, no 5-year road map of the kind corporations embrace. He concluded that to tackle Castleman he needed to pursue an MBA, and successfully applied to one of the world’s best programs, at the nearby Wharton School at UPenn.
This problem isn’t limited to healthcare. When it comes to social problems with commercial impact — renewable energy, meatless meat, future of transportation, worker retraining, ethical lending — there are dozens if not hundreds of teams developing solutions. They are often working apart, in silos, or in some cases, in coopetition. They might be building an ecosystem, but ultimately, this cynic would venture to say that most are hoping to be the winner who takes all.
Why do we insist on working in silos?
First and foremost, the incentives are not aligned.
Many of these businesses tackling social problems with commercial impact are venture-backed, or will be. And venture-backed businesses often require a 10x + return on investment. Normally, this means looking for “category kings” with exponential growth potential, and winner-takes-all market opportunities.
Another reason? The lure of becoming a celebrity founder, the lone genius who solved the unsolvable and beat out the masses. Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk. Or name your Nobel Laureate.
Beyond money and ego, there’s friction. Partnership and collaboration requires research, connection, ideation, interest, sparks to fly, incentives to align, timing to be just right. It’s a romantic endeavor, and doing it at scale is not something for which most businesses, nonprofits, or hybrid entities are structured to do well.
What’s the big deal?
It’s never been easier to start a business or launch a product, but it doesn’t mean starting your own is always the most effective use of resources.
Especially when it comes to solving social problems with commercial impact, the risks of not collaborating create inefficiencies at best and existential crises at worst:
- Overhead and operating costs are subsumed by each organization, causing systemic inefficiencies
- The best marketers can outperform the best solutions
- Information becomes a competitive advantage, versus a shared asset
- Without sharing — of ideas, learnings, and budgets — we risk overlooking massive categories of problems
The dark side of technological progress is a winner-takes-all layer-cake economy, where we see even more stratification of income, wealth, and the breakdown of the American Dream.
What next?
This isn’t an argument against business, or against the natural drive toward excellence that stems from a competitive environment. Nor is it an argument for consolidation that can lead to complacency, stagnation, and a whole separate set of inefficiencies.
But I can’t help but think that some problems are better solved in collectives, where information is shared across teams, borders, and business entities.
As a final seed of inspiration, consider the serendipitous nature of collaboration, like the benefits of bringing unlike minds together at a space hackathon, of all places:
Onwards and upwards, hopefully together.
