Three lessons
from 81:26
What the experiment cost us to learn, written down so it costs you less.
81:26 Ventures started in the COVID years, from a question and a spare room. The question is Qur’an 81:26. Fa-ayna tadhhaboon. So where are you going?
We researched the problems our communities have, published what we found, and helped the people already in the work. Five years on there is a playbook, a stack of papers and nine ventures. The research outran the building, and the ventures ended up held personally because nothing existed to hold them. So the vehicle changes. The library stays up.
01 · Purpose
“We will be ethical” holds until the first deal that pays well and sits slightly wrong. Then it turns into a conversation about nuance.
So name the line in writing, before the opportunity arrives: who is better off, by how much, how we will know, and what this venture will not do to get there. Put it in the business model canvas, next to revenue and cost. A team looks at the canvas when it decides. It looks at the values page when it hires.
02 · Common work
Nine ventures meant nine sets of formation papers, nine bank accounts, nine cap tables and the same conversation with the same lawyer nine times. Roughly four fifths of the work was identical, and each founder paid for it alone.
The same is true across cities. We know two organizations building debt-free home ownership from scratch, each paying for the same legal package and the same compliance review. Build that part once, review it once, and hand it on. Their years then go on what only they can do: knowing their own street.
03 · Capital
In our experience, private equity in the North American Muslim community is close to untapped and almost entirely unstructured. Deals move through group chats. Diligence is a call to a mutual friend. People who are not accredited put money into projects on personal trust, and some of it disappears with no documents and no recourse.
Nobody is short of energy or information. What is missing is the dull file that says how this was done last time and what went wrong. Structure is the gap.
What it became
CEI, the Center for Empathy & Innovation. Empathy asks whose day a venture changes. Innovation asks whether it can be built. Five years taught us that one without the other fails, so every venture now answers both, backed by a purpose, a playbook and patient capital.
CEI is a Delaware C-Corporation with a public-benefit election in progress, on the model of SRI, MITRE and USC ISI. Same function, different capital structure.