There’s an old saying: “The wolf on the hill is not as hungry as the wolf climbing it.”

Those twelve words cut to the core of why startups matter, and why our economy needs more of them now than ever. Big companies sit atop the economic hill. They’re powerful, profitable, and — often — playing a different game entirely. It’s not that they’re lazy or complacent (though many are). Some are at the cutting edge of AI and other technologies. But, often, their innovation is focused on fortifying their position rather than creating new opportunities. They’ve learned that controlling the game board is often more profitable than building new games.

Hunger, on the other hand, drives movement, risk-taking, ingenuity. It’s the startups, the builders still clawing their way up, who take the boldest swings. And it’s those swings that can shake industries, rewrite rules, and change lives.

The Hunger Gap

Startups are fueled by hunger. Not just for profit, but for purpose. For change. For agency. While incumbents manage complexity, drive efficiency and protect turf, builders are out to create something new.

That hunger shows up in four distinct ways:

• Economic Hunger: Many startups are born out of economic necessity or dissatisfaction (example). A layoff. A broken system. A market ignored by incumbents. When traditional career paths fail to deliver economic mobility, when people can’t afford homes on traditional salaries — that’s when the climb begins.
• Cultural Hunger: Builders see broken systems and can’t help but want to fix them. They question norms, challenge defaults, and refuse to wait their turn. This is the deeper restlessness with “how things have always been done” — the refusal to accept that being a cog in someone else’s machine is the only option.
• Personal Hunger: For many people, launching something isn’t a career choice — it’s a calling. A drive to make, to shape, to solve. It’s the urgent need to build rather than just be employed, to create something that didn’t exist before.
• Time Hunger: Perhaps the most powerful advantage of all — startups operate on compressed timelines that force rapid iteration and learning. Every day matters when you have six months of runway. This time pressure becomes a strategic asset: while incumbents debate in quarterly planning cycles, climbers move at the speed of necessity.

This hunger gap is what makes startups not just different, but essential.

The Economy Needs More Climbers

Right now, our economy is overly dependent on the wolves already at the top. Market power has concentrated. Startup formation rates have plodded along and capital has increasingly clumped in a few key places, leaving innovation concentrated in fewer hands

All of this leaves us vulnerable.

There is no question: startup formation drives job creation. It’s not Fortune 500 companies adding positions — they’re optimizing for efficiency, doing more with fewer people through technology and automation. Young firms, especially those in their first five years, create jobs at rates that mature companies simply can’t match.

But startups do more than create jobs:

• They decentralize power. Every new business represents a shift away from concentrated market control toward distributed opportunity. They force incumbents to compete, to innovate, to remember what hunger feels like.
• They absorb shocks. During recessions, corporate layoffs drive talented people into entrepreneurship. These necessity-driven startups often become the foundation of the next economic expansion — think Microsoft, Apple, Airbnb.
• They advance progress. The business models that seem obvious today — subscription software, gig economy platforms, direct-to-consumer brands — were startup innovations that established companies initially dismissed. A lot of breakthrough innovation comes from founders who couldn’t get anyone else to believe in their vision.
• They create the future. We’re at an unprecedented inflection point — technology is shifting us from an industrial economy to a fully digital one. That means every aspect of every industry can be completely reimagined. This isn’t just another business cycle; it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild entire sectors from the ground up. And it’s the hungry wolves climbing the hill who will seize it.

More builders mean a more adaptable, equitable, and dynamic economy — and a better future. One that doesn’t just serve shareholders, but creates opportunity for everyone willing to climb.

Too Many Wolves on the Hill

Today, the slope is steep and the summit is crowded. Capital flows toward proven models and into fewer and fewer hands. Policy often favors scale over innovation. Cultural narratives glorify VC raises, exits and unicorns over early-stage grit.

When you control the entire ecosystem, you aren’t incentivized to create as much value — you can just capture more of what others create. App store fees. Search monopolies. Platform fees that grow every quarter. It’s brilliant business (and good for profits), but it’s not the same as building something the world actually needs.

This isn’t just a market problem — it’s a democratic one. When economic opportunity becomes concentrated in a handful of giant institutions, individual agency diminishes. The American Dream shifts from “build something” to “get hired somewhere.” We become a nation of employees rather than entrepreneurs, dreamers and builders.

Be the Climber

The good news? The barriers to starting something new have never been lower in many ways. Cloud computing means you don’t need server farms. AI tools mean you don’t need to hire designers, writers, or developers. A small team can do what used to require dozens of (often highly paid) specialists.

But real barriers remain: healthcare tied to employment, student loans that demand stable income, social expectations that equate security with success. What we need is infrastructure that helps people climb despite these constraints — not just funding, but systems that make the leap less existentially risky.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s this: anyone can climb. You don’t need a big bank balance, a perfect plan, or a co-founder from Stanford. You just need to start.

The economy needs you to be hungry. Not because you have to be, but because you choose to be. Because you have ideas that matter, problems you want to solve, value you want to create that doesn’t exist yet.

Don’t wait for permission — the wolves on the hill didn’t get there by asking if it was okay to climb. Don’t wait until you have it all figured out. The climb itself teaches you what you need to know.

Here’s the truth I’ve learned from 30 years of building: the view from the top isn’t the real prize. The climb itself is the prize — the growth, the learning, the building, the creating. The economy needs more people who understand that being hungry isn’t a problem to solve but a competitive advantage to leverage.

The wolf on the hill is not as hungry as the wolf climbing it.

Which wolf are you?

Start climbing.

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I had planned to write about the 77 million. That’s how many volunteers our nation’s health centers, food banks, homeless shelters, senior centers, childcare centers, blood banks, churches, temples, mosques, and millions of other organizations rely on. That’s how many people are now unable to fulfill much-needed volunteer roles as we all social distance during the COVID-19 crisis. And that’s what motivated Rob Peabody (CEO of VOMO) and me to launch the Be a Neighbor Campaign to help these nonprofits muster the help they need to keep serving their communities.

I planned to share the incredible ways people are “serving in a time of pandemic” — especially those who are doing it virtually, without leaving home, or in ways that stretch our traditional ideas of what volunteering looks like. And I was going to share why research I’ve been working on for the past three years shows that serving and solving actually belong together rather than living in separate spheres of volunteering and entrepreneurship.

I will still write that post because there are so many incredibly heartwarming stories — moments of grace as a friend called them this morning — that can uplift us all. But over the past few days as I wrestled to put pen to paper, I’ve been completely broken.

This crisis is so enormous and overwhelming and frightening, and I want to be able to inspire and bring comfort and hope. But I know, right now, most of us are struggling with what’s right in front of us — staying safe, caring for our families, keeping our jobs, paying our bills. I wept this morning knowing that millions of Americans would not be able to make their mortgage and rent payments today.

Something has been burning in my spirit so I’m just going to share it. I am 100% certain of this (so aptly said first by Martin Luther King Jr.):

The darkest hour of our struggle is the first hour of our victory.

Here’s why. Yes this crisis is unlike anything most of us have experienced or could imagine. It’s a war being fought on multiple fronts, and it feels like we’re losing. But it’s happening at a highly unique moment and context in time, and it’s unfolding in extraordinary ways. If we can understand that, we will see that the midnight of this crisis is bringing the dawn.

The Healthcare Front —

Make no mistake. We have an urgent and immediate healthcare crisis. The worldwide death toll from COVID-19 is rising exponentially and, in the US, we’ve already lost more lives than on 9–11. Healthcare heroes are doing battle against this novel coronavirus in millions of awe-inspiring and heartbreaking ways every single day. Running toward an unseen enemy while the rest of us shelter in place. Working 12-hour shifts without the full gear and equipment they need to stay safe. Putting themselves in harm’s way. Separating from the empathy, hugs and love they usually get from family and friends. Day after day after day.

The battle to find a vaccine is just as urgent. As is the battle to accelerate testing, the battle to slow the spread, the battle to supply the frontlines with protective gear and ventilators, the battle to add more beds and more capacity to care for those who are sick or dying, and the battle to innovate around the Grand Canyon-sized gaps in our infrastructure.

The Economic Front —

COVID-19 may be a virus that infects our bodies, but it’s also wreaking havoc on our economy. The first dominos of financial suffering are already falling as critical and correct public health decisions are driving employees out of offices, businesses to downsize, and spending to diminish. Vox does a spectacular job of showing how this is unfolding right now in nine charts.

Unimaginably, all this pales in comparison to what lurks beneath the economic surface. Small and medium sized companies (most of which have no financial cushion) employ 55% of all employees. Half of them are now on the brink of closing. Some of them (even the high growth startups upon which much job creation relies) are already laying people off. And, if the coronavirus-related decline in venture capital investing in China is any indication, we can expect to see a reduction of $28 billion or more in startup investment in 2020 alone. The global economy will feel these shock waves for at least a decade.

The Community Front —

This pandemic is much more than charts and figures for families all over the world who are losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills. Most families don’t have enough saved to cover even minor emergencies, let alone go for months without work; and, for most people, healthcare was already a significant source of economic stress. Millions will miss their mortgage or rent payments today and the downward financial spiral will near the point of no return.

Families and communities, already at the epicenter of a flywheel of brokenness in our country, will bear the brunt of this global health and economic crisis.

Over the past decade, a few “superstar” cities captured the economic spoils and attracted the lion’s share of jobs, capital, companies and talent. Now, they’re dense hotspots for the coronavirus. The rest of our cities will add yet another crisis to their continuing struggle to recover from the Great Recession, the housing crisis, and globalization. They’re already grappling with the impact of automation and the shift to the digital economy. They’re struggling to jumpstart job creation, deal with declining economic mobility, shore up fractured social safety nets, stem the opioid crisis, confront loneliness and suicide epidemics and grapple with rising “deaths of despair.” All while dealing with deeply divided citizens who don’t trust the government, elected officials or each other.

Winners and Losers —

We are already a broken, harshly divided nation with a sharp differential between the winners and losers. This crisis is shining a harsh light on exactly how unequal we are. Before the pandemic, 44% of our nation’s workers were low-income wage earners. They’re disproportionately black and Hispanic and they were already barely making ends meet. Now, a tidal wave of layoffs and furloughs are hitting, and our workforce and safety net programs are ill-equipped for job losses of this magnitude.

Many who are still working — in grocery stores, warehouses, and other essential areas — are faced with a horrible daily tradeoff between getting sick or economic ruin. Everywhere you look, the pandemic is magnifying America’s class divide:

“The rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy.”

All of this puts us squarely in a place that assures this crisis will shift from being a global pandemic to something much bigger. And, as Walter Scheidel put it in his book The Great Leveler: “From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality…and inequality never dies peacefully.” His research shows that, throughout history, there are four ways inequality has been leveled: major wars, revolutions, state collapses, and catastrophic plagues.

This is one of those moments. The Big Shock. The time historians will look back on and write about as disrupting the established order in ways so enormous that society is forever altered.

The Big Shock —

The institutions we count on to govern, deliver healthcare and provide some semblance of economic security are showing their cracks. We’ve become accustomed to having big governments and big organizations in the captain’s seat, charting the course and telling us what to do so we get to safety. Now we’re seeing instructions that don’t come, guidance that isn’t clear, officials who contradict themselves and each other and, in some cases, information that is flat-out wrong. From the sidelines we see the generals in chaos — both of their own making and in being at the mercy of others’ decisions — and a lot of us are starting to realize that the sidelines might not be where we belong.

As we turn to the nonprofits near our homes, the churches, synagogues and mosques we attend, and millions of other community organizations, we’re finding incredible, dedicated, passionate people there who are, very often, operating with both hands tied behind their backs. The need is multiplying, but they’re underfunded and understaffed, and each of them is tending their own shrinking walled garden of services, donors, and volunteers. Many haven’t yet been able to peer over their garden walls to find ways to serve or solve the waves of need that are coming.

At the same time, the pandemic is forcing us and technology is enabling us to embrace ideas we may have never otherwise imagined or tried. Where we once thought our jobs required us to be together in an office, many of us are now figuring out how to get them done with Zoom calls. Where school used to mean classrooms, it now means computers and Internet connections and a whole lot of creativity and collaboration between parents and teachers. Where once online voting was a distant thought, now states are gearing up to make it happen. Where we once thought our big institutions were infallibly able to handle large scale crises, we’re all now sewing masks for doctors, crowdsourcing ideas to solve hospital supply chain challenges, meeting and caring for the elderly. We are now stepping in to help our neighbors in areas we used to rely on distant government agencies or nonprofits to take care of.

The establishment is faltering and networks are rising to stand in the gap. In seeing just how interconnected we are — both in how furiously this virus is spreading and in how we are easily able to mobilize to meet the crises in its wake — we’re seeing our shared humanity rather than just our own individual prosperity.

“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)

That tiny light of hope in this pandemic is the power of new possibilities.

We haven’t yet reached the peak of this crisis. For most of us, the darkest moments are yet to come. But we can and will get through this if we do it together. Small moments of grace are where we will find hope. To make it through the midnight. And for the dawn of a future where every one of us is noticed and loved, where common good matters, and where flourishing truly becomes possible.

In just a few days we will turn the calendar on 2019. Heading into not only a new year but a new decade we took a moment to reflect on the journey of the 1776 Seed Fund.

At the beginning of this decade, I was traveling the world meeting smart entrepreneurial thinkers and doers in places not traditionally thought of as hot beds of innovations. In each new country and within each city, I was met with incredible, wide-ranging, transformative and unexpected ideas. Thousands of founders stood on stages, sat in meeting rooms or found me in the hallway to not only pitch their ideas but to share their visions for making the world a better place. Their passion was clear, but most of them faced the same major challenge: access to capital. So many fantastic ideas were being overlooked because of the cities where they emerged or because the markets they were disrupting were not on the radar of most venture investors. In this shared need, we saw an opportunity.

In 2014, we set out to start a venture fund that would democratize seed funding for entrepreneurs around the globe who were solving problems in complex, highly regulated markets. Since then, we invested in dozens of companies in eight countries, helping teams to

• better diagnose and treat cancer
• boost educational access and outcomes from elementary school through post-graduate
• secure safe transportation options for thousands of children in foster care
• implement transformational energy solutions on oil rigs, in apartment buildings, and on corporate campuses
• change the way cities approach and manage public transportation
• rethink agricultural supply chains and farming practices
• improve the care and health of expectant mothers and their babies

All the while, bringing thousands of jobs to cities around the world. For many of these companies, 1776 was one of the earliest sources of funding, allowing the founding teams to continue their work tackling some of the world’s most challenging problems.

For example, we were one of the earliest investors in Twiga Foods. Twiga had a small team and a big vision to change agricultural supply chains in Africa where citizens spend approximately 73% of their earnings on food and more than 30% of produce is disposed of due to poor harvesting practices. Now Twiga is closing out 2019 having secured a $30M Series B led by Goldman Sachs, the largest amount of money ever raised by a Nairobi-based company, and is entering a period of growth and expansion led by former Coca-Cola executive Peter Njonjo.

Similarly, in 2015 we invested in an early round for Guild Education whose founder, Rachel Carlson, saw the enormous potential to expand education opportunities to millions of working adults by offering education as a corporate benefit. In November, Guild became the first company in our portfolio to reach a $1 billion post-money valuation. Guild closed a $157M Series D, more than double the total amount of money it had raised to date and became one of the few female-led startups to reach unicorn valuation status this year. They are now powering critical workforce training programs for companies like Walmart and Disney.

HopSkipDrive was another company where we were a very early investor. In January, HopSkipDrive will debut in its 13th city, Las Vegas. In addition to the consumer-facing service, the company has secured a contract with one of Las Vegas’ largest school districts for transportation of homeless and foster youth. HopSkipDrive’s impact on the success of foster youth who have access to stable transportation recently was highlighted in The Chronicle for Social Change. The Chronicle tracked the LA County Schools’ pilot program using HopSkipDrive and highlighted the more than $4,000 per student savings when using the company’s services as well as its flexibility and scalability. LA County intends to pass its learnings on to other counties.

We celebrate the successes of these, and many other, companies in our portfolio that are continuing the march toward growth. We also celebrate the handful of portfolio companies that reached the end of their runway earlier than hoped. The work of building and scaling a new company is incredibly difficult in any circumstances and perhaps even more so in regulated, emerging or complex markets. These founders and teams took on enormous challenges with creativity and drive, and I know they will continue to do amazing work in other ways.

We also celebrate the investors and partners that joined with us in the 1776 Seed Fund. In 2014, they saw what we saw — enormous markets crying for innovation yet under-targeted by entrepreneurs and overlooked by venture investors — a frontier ripe for entrepreneurial ideas and financial returns. Not impact investing. Smart investing.

As we stand near the beginning of a new year and a fresh decade, I am even more convinced of the potential financial returns and powerful impact entrepreneurship can have when it is aimed at solving problems that matter to our families, our communities, and our future. In coffee shops, coworking spaces, basements and home offices, the next wave of ideas that will transform the world are being talked about, sketched out, and experimented with right now. I look forward to continuing to uncover those ideas and backing the teams who are working to bring them to life.