Why we are building Bondour

The most useful sentence I ever read was not written about me, nor about anyone I knew. It was written by a man in Chicago in 1937 who had spent twenty-five years interviewing five hundred industrialists. The sentence was this: you are the average of the people closest to you. I read it as a teenager, in an edition I found at a second-hand bookshop on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich, and I did not entirely believe it.

I did not believe it because I thought I was the exception. I suspect you do too. The person who reads this sentence and accepts it, at once, has not felt its weight. The sentence is not an encouragement. It is not motivational. It is a description of physics. You are not reading a book: you are standing in a field, and the field has a gradient, and the gradient is decided by the people within a few meters of where you stand.

I did not accept this until I had tried, for several years, to build what I wanted to build by the sheer force of isolated effort. I built four ventures, in parallel, at an age when most of my classmates were still deciding whether to take a gap year. I spoke four languages fluently, and three more with enough competence to navigate a dinner. I rose at 5:45 because I had read that one ought to. None of that altered the gradient.

What altered it, eventually, was sitting at a long table in Zürich with a sixteen-year-old named Paul Mosele, whom I had met twice, and who said something at 21:40 on a Wednesday evening in February that caused me to put down my glass and not pick it up again for several minutes. He said, without irony, that he had been thinking about his five, honestly, for the first time. He said he had decided that his five was insufficient. He said he did not want to blame them for it, but he also did not want to pretend the problem did not exist.

I had been thinking the same thing for two years, and had not dared to say it aloud. The people who love me are honorable. The schools I attended are adequate. The peers I have are pleasant. None of that is the same as the thing I needed, which is a small number of unreasonable people who are serious about what they are doing, and willing to hold me to my own claims.

The reason we are building Bondour is that the thing I needed does not, as far as I can tell, exist for people of my age in any form that is not a venture accelerator, a university, or a paid mastermind. Accelerators solve a different problem. Universities solve a different problem. Masterminds, in their contemporary form, are mostly a way of selling access to a speaker who has already been paid.

What I needed, and what I believe a small number of you need, is an environment. Not a program. Not a curriculum. Not a Slack. An environment. A small circle of young people of broadly comparable ambition, meeting often, in person, in a room that does not trade access for attention, and which is protected by the simple fact of being small and slow to join.

§

“Environment is not scenery. It is the ground against which everything else is measured.”

This is an old idea. Benjamin Franklin did it in Philadelphia in 1727 with twelve tradesmen. Napoleon Hill articulated it as a doctrine in 1937. Berta Zuckerkandl did it in Vienna at the beginning of the last century, in a salon that contained Klimt, Mahler, Schnitzler, and Freud without any of them being announced as guests. The idea is not ours, and we are not pretending otherwise. What is ours is the decision to attempt it for a specific cohort, in a specific city, at a specific and slightly absurd age.

I am eighteen. Paul is sixteen. We have chosen to place ourselves, in perpetuity, at the table we wish had existed when we were fourteen. There are people younger than us who will apply. There are people older than us who will apply. We will read every application, personally, because automating that decision would make the circle less than the sum of its members, and the circle has to be more.

If you are reading this you have probably already known, for some years, that your environment was wrong. This is the part you do not say out loud. I am saying it on your behalf. It is permissible. It is not a betrayal of anyone. A circle deliberately assembled is not a rejection of the one you were given. It is the construction of a second one, carried alongside the first, and used for the specific purpose of motion.

We expect to be told, more than once, that Bondour is exclusive. It is. We expect to be told that the aesthetic is too grave for people our age. That is also correct. We have designed it with gravity because gravity is the effect we are attempting to produce. If the site feels like a startup, we have failed. If it feels like an institution before it is one, we have begun.

So: the question. If you have read this far, ask yourself whether you are the person for whom we built this, or the person who reads about it and moves on. Both are honorable. Only one results in an application. We will read it, within fourteen days, and we will respond. Until then: do not wait. Build.