Antler and The Real Strive to Make a Difference
For about ten weeks straight, deep in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I watched brilliant minds colliding, creating, energizing each other in an amazing environment defined by speaking your mind fully because everyone is listening. This brilliant setting was setup by Antler, a startup incubator that gives one a real chance to shine in a unique, unabridged framework of collaboration and full-impact creativity.
Most days of our mature lives we tend to gravitate around not-only like-minded people, but people that have the same underlying interest in the activities we engage in and the conversations we participate in. We end up with folks that do not bother us much, and shy away from controversy, leaning towards comfort and slowing down.
Nothing wrong with a comfortable life. We all long for peace. But inner peace doesn’t preclude a life of creativity. Paradoxically enough, I feel that the Antler experience made me realize that a fast and furiously positive experience has a strong peaceful element, deeply lodged inside the conviction that by being truly myself, I can create fully while not allowing any room for grudge or disrespect — there is just no time or space for it. I am more likely now to show up whole, and I have the Antler community to thank for this.
From a startup incubator logistics perspective, Antler aims at the core, in the space where ideas have not yet had the chance to materialize into a product. The impact of ideas, spit out in scary fast sprints that encompass any subject imaginable over a few weeks, seeds real chances for ideas to crystalize and take shape in the form of finding the best co-founders to work with, with potentially amazing products to build.
Not to say that the experience was easy, on the contrary. I walked out drained and exhausted many days but noticing that I was walking straight and sure. I had doubts, deep doubts, about anything I could imagine day in day out. “What’s an old man doing thinking that he can just start a company out of the blue? All these so much younger lads are brilliant, what am I doing?”
‘PhD in what, you too?’ ‘You were in how many startups?’ ‘Ah, you were in the armed forces, and can build IoT hardware like no one else, wow.’ ‘You want to power the Earth from space with solar panels? Do you have a creativity limit?’ ‘You make biodegradable clothes already, get out!’ ‘We can trick our brains into being in an efficient state of flow more often, it’s actually been done already; holly molly.’ ‘Is that a hydrogen-powered, zero emissions scooter you just built? What can’t you do?’ ‘We are going to reinvent how people get hired. Can I be your guinea pig?’
And me all over again: “Man, I feel stupid. Orrr, maybe I should enjoy being in the presence of this many smart and gutsy people that really want to make something happen that makes a difference. Good, keep moving.”
It was shocking to realize how many smart people were in the room; almost one hundred vivid minds looking for a partner to tag up with and start a business. Pretty amazing and quite unique.
For sure one comes out of Antler understanding at a much deeper level whom they do not want to work with, or what issues are farther than their deeper passions than they thought. Yes, there is pain, and raw pain, just like life gives us pain while we are not looking for it but have thresholds to step over, lessons to learn. It is surprising sometimes what a gift not hiding can be, potentially ending up working with or looking for people and ideas that you never thought you’d embrace. Pretty cool.
Maybe I am biased. Maybe I sat through too many meetings over the years where good ideas were struck down for no good reason besides one’s fear of losing one’s job or influence. Maybe I dealt with too many people, bosses or not, who didn’t show up, literally or figuratively, thus triggering a team’s demise and eventual breakdown into insignificance. Maybe I just wanted to see if I can do better than the ones I despised over the years, to my detriment nonetheless.
But maybe I needed an open space to show up and tell my story and express my passion for genuine creativity. Antler was it, a real forum with true listeners and doers of all walks of life.
I highly recommend joining Antler for a spot in one of their cohorts around the world. We are meant to experience. The light but fair framework of go show up — we want to see the real you setting, brilliantly laid out by Antler is one of the best social environments to make a solid step to know one self and its projection onto others — the two factors that may be the most important determinants of success in a startup endeavor. Go embrace it, it will be an experience that you will remember for a long time. Not to mention that the chances you will come out as a founder of a brilliant startup are pretty good, too.
Radu Popescu
Founder, AptPace, Ltd. — https://aptpace.com/