Much has changed since 2008 when Ankur Jain founded the Kairos Society, a diverse community of power players brought together to connect young entrepreneurs with expertise and opportunity. Back then, the Great Recession was in full swing and Jain was just 22 and a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the near decade since, global interest in entrepreneurship has exploded. Meanwhile, the Kairos Society has expanded to 55 countries and helped launch more than 100 companies working toward big solutions such as clean water and mobile healthcare. Its top companies have raised up to $600 million in capital reaching a combined $2.5 billion valuation.
Jain has been busy too, graduating from Wharton’s business school and founding Humin, a technology company acquired last year by Tinder. He’s currently Tinder’s vice president of product.
Jain says those experiences have given him a full and nuanced understanding of entrepreneurship’s role in problem-solving — and refine how he thinks about it. “Kairos is always bridging that gap between these governments, CEOs and these young entrepreneurs,” he says. “But it’s not just about solving impact problems. It’s about identifying where are these fundamental market failures and can we innovate there, since that’s where you’ll really make an impact.”
Kairos held its first major summit since 2013 last week in a three-day gathering that kicked off with helicopter rides from Manhattan to the Rockefeller Estate. The kickoff drew a diverse group ranging from Casey Neistat to former CIA director Mike Hayden to Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels. At the invite-only summit, 250 young entrepreneurs from across the globe networked with big names. In a flip on the Shark Tank script, these innovators got pitched big problems to solve by CEOs and former world leaders such as Vincente Fox, the former president of Mexico, and George Papandreau, the former prime minister of Greece.
We caught up with Jain to talk about what’s changed since he founded the society and how that’s shaped how he thinks about opportunity for entrepreneurs.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How is opportunity evolving?
There’s been this massive shift where capital is going. It’s become very bifurcated. For so many years, the business was “displace the Silicon Valley leader.” So Alta Vista would go after Lycos and Yahoo would go after AltaVista and Google would go after Yahoo.
For the first time, Silicon Valley is now a mature market, so you’ve got these massive incumbents: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. You’re not just going to displace them in a year because you’ve got a scrappy startup. And so what’s happening is that the ability for venture money to fund those kinds of businesses has changed, so you’re seeing all these feature companies get started just with the goal of getting acquired. That doesn’t really drive the world forward.
You can’t just build another Google because competing against an incumbent with so much technology prowess is just not fair. So you look at these old industries that are failing to innovate. There’s massively more capital than even the Valley, very little innovation and massive customer pain points. The more we can try and solve those kinds of issues, there’s a double win. You drive massive…