About
CEI is the Center for Empathy & Innovation. The name is the thesis: a venture needs both, asked of it at the same time.
Empathy &
Innovation
Empathy asks whose day a venture changes, and whether that person was in the room when it was designed. Innovation asks whether it can be built, shipped and paid for.
Each question fails on its own. With empathy alone, nothing ships. With innovation alone, the cost lands on someone nobody asked. So every venture we build or back answers both, and stands on three things: a purpose, a playbook and patient capital.
Purpose, Playbook,
Patient Capital
Should it exist?
Who is better off, by how much, and how we will know. Then the boundary: what this venture will not do to get there. The line belongs in the business model canvas, next to revenue and cost.
Can it be built?
Short cycles, each ending in a decision to pivot or persevere, with the people it affects in the room. The method exists to take risk, cost, drama and waste out of the stretch where ventures usually burn.
On whose clock?
Private equity, structured without interest or leverage. It suits a venture that will never return a hundred times over, and will still be standing, still locally owned, in twenty years.
Structure
SRI, MITRE and USC's Information Sciences Institute did this kind of work for decades. They convened the people a problem touched, built the proof, and handed it on. All three are nonprofits.
We kept the function and changed the capital structure. CEI is a Delaware C-Corporation with a public-benefit election in progress. That lets us hold equity in what we build, buy buildings, and carry a program to its first paying customer without waiting on a grant.
Each chapter is designed to own its ground. One company holds the land, another runs the programs and pays rent.
Stanford Research Institute
Engelbart's lab built the first computer mouse there. When the first two machines on the internet spoke to each other, SRI was one of them.
MITRE
Spun out of MIT Lincoln Laboratory by the engineers behind the SAGE air-defense system. It still runs research centers no single company would fund alone.
Information Sciences Institute
Paul Mockapetris built the Domain Name System there, and Jon Postel ran the address registry out of it for a quarter of a century.
Where this came from
81:26 Ventures began in the COVID years. We researched the problems our communities have, published what we found, and helped the people already in the work. The research outran the building. CEI is what came out of it.
Write the line down first
“We will be ethical” lasts until the first good deal that sits slightly wrong. The line holds only if it is written next to revenue and cost, before the opportunity arrives.
Build the common work once
Nine ventures meant nine sets of formation papers, nine cap tables and the same lawyer nine times. Shared once, that cost falls for every venture after the first.
The capital is there. The paper is not.
Investors in our community close deals in group chats, on trust. Some lose what they put in. Structure is the gap.
Chapters
A chapter is a permanent address in a place, led by people from that place. Both sites are identified.
United States
Headquarters in the Washington, D.C. region
Federal program offices, national labs and research universities sit close enough together that the people a problem touches can be in one room on a Tuesday.
Build with us
Bangladesh
Dhaka, and the first campus outside the United States
Operators, financiers, clinicians, regulators and suppliers all work within a short radius of Dhaka, so building with people in the room is a matter of scheduling.
Read the proposal