Benjamin Lanin

From pre-start-up (“This is my dream”) to ~$100K in revenue. If they are making more money than that, they’ve already overcome the problems I want to help them solve.

1. Their concept of the business is positive-sum, that is, they see it as making the world a better place. They have extremely ambitious ideas of the good they can do with their business.
2. To bring their vision to fruition is going to be a project that takes many, many years. They need to be able to take a vision for something that will require a 20-year time horizon and break it down into useful actions now.

1. I specify this because they’re still in the “I have to do everything myself” phase, which is incredibly overwhelming.
2. Part of the reason they’ve chosen entrepreneurship is because they’ve concluded that starting a business is the only reasonable means they have of bringing about the change they want to see in the world. This points to critical pain point: this conclusion means that on some level they recognize that government has failed us and can no longer be counted on to make important, positive change. I see this as a non-partisan conclusion, which in and of itself is a second pain point: they find themselves outside our mainstream categories of political affiliation. Regardless of whether they see themselves as more conservative or more progressive, they find themselves not represented by either political party.
3. In part stemming from the daily reality of being a solopreneur (that you are constantly working alone), in part because of their alienation from mainstream categories, and finally because of the reality of daring to hold a really ambitious vision, they feel very alone. This can make taking every step in the business really challenging–the path from where they are to where they dream of going is deeply unclear, and because their heart is so connected to this vision, every step on the path requires profound vulnerability and courage.
4. They recognize that entrepreneurs are by necessity and by definition leaders.

Though our tech centers (Bay Area and Seattle area) and entertainment center (Los Angeles) are in the western US, the power in the United States still primarily resides in the East: DC for political power, NYC for financial power.

They recognize, then, that our centers of political and financial power bias their focus toward the East. Our collective concern is directed more toward the eastern US than the western US. Media reinforces this – to the extent that we still have centralized authorities in media, they tend to be based in the East. (NYTimes is still “the paper of record,” WSJ is the main business “newspaper,” Washington Post covers politics. TV news organizations are mostly based in NY or other areas of the East. Powerful West-based media are platforms rather than the sources themselves – Alphabet, Meta.) Western US concerns are underrepresented in the focus of the main power centers.

Therefore the crisis that is unfolding right now in the Western US – that our water supply is rapidly disappearing – is being comparatively ignored by the power centers of the East.

As pain points go, this last part can’t really be overstated. The metropolitan areas of Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Phoenix/Tucson are likely to become borderline uninhabitable in the next 10-20 years. Estimates of the total population of just these three areas are in the 10-12 million range. We already have a housing crisis. Where are these people going to go?

1. They will be interested in the on-hill embodiment aspect of my offer. (See “offer” section, below.)
2. The pain of the disappearance of snow and snowpack is personal to them – they feel that loss as a loss in their own joy.
3. If they are over the age of the thirty, they have no doubt in the truth of climate change – they have witnessed the climate shift rapidly and radically over the course of their lives. This is important because my own mission with my business will resonate with them (See “vision,” below), and it reinforces their own sense, discussed above, that government has failed, and that our critical issues are going to require leaders running businesses if we seek to begin to solve those issues.