These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is written by the Hukuju team, formed by Álvaro García, Joaquín Sánchez, Fernando Caballero and Fernando Amenedo.
Some times we think that we can build something that will change the world. But, have we ever thought about building something that will save the world? It seems that every young and enthusiastic entrepreneur, like us, wants to make something that makes him, hopefully, lots of money. And of course, the sooner the better.
How great is to find someone that with the same talent, enthusiasm and dedication tries to build something for the benefit of others. Let’s do some autocritic today.
“By the middle of the century, one in three people on the planet will be living in inadequate, often illegal housing,” says Cameron Sinclair. Cameron is the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity and Open Architecture Network, one of the greatest ideas that we have seen lately. Open Architecture Network was Launched in 2007 and has become one of the worldsʼ largest resource for humanitarian and community led design solutions. It has around 5000 designers that give a damn and over 25,000 projects. The Open Architecture Network is a collaborative database which Architecture for Humanity hopes will make it easy for architects, designers and engineers from around the world to freely share their work, evaluate and modify existing solutions, and collaborate around new approaches. Think of it as the Wikipedia of humanitarian design.
It is very interesting to to face such a great “competitor” (as this one is for us), someone, somewhere is doing something similar to help others. This doesn’t discourage us, and if you find something so molar in your case it shouldn’t. If you thought you had to learn from your competitors, well, you have to learn more from the ones that do the same, but don´t compete directly with you. Look up for three things:
1. Those guys are doing something for free, to help others. they probably have none or few resources. So, check that out, they still might be doing something great.
2. Are we accomplishing something substancial? In the case of Open Architecture Network they were are creating the database that will come from Architecture for Humanity itself. What are we creating? How useful is it.
3. There needs to be an impulse that moves you, something that you might call more “philosophical”. Something that can make you work for hours, days, years, just loosing money and sometimes patience.
There are really great stuff and great people working out there on ideas that can challenge you to aim bigger than you ever thought. Those are the ideas you should be looking for.
