Create life-giving ventures with Return to Flourishing Indicators (RFI) & Regenerative Economics principles
This week, we gather to start a discussion on the 🐘 in the room:
How Might We seed, fund, and grow truly flourishing ventures that are regenerative, rather than extractive.
Many conscious tech products and services (From BCI to AI therapists) need new business models, funding mechanism, and growth support that are different from traditional enterprise Saas era’s infrastructure.
Let’s workshop some possible regenerative venture investment models with the hope to lead to more regenerative, rather than extractive, venture creation.
More Zebras, less Unicorns.
Join us!
Some pre-reading here:
TLDR:
Why ROI Is Not Enough: Measuring the Return on Flourishing in Impact Investing
The Problem: Our Metrics Are Driving the Polycrisis
We are living in a time of polycrisis—a convergence of ecological collapse, economic instability, mental health deterioration, and social fragmentation. While many scramble to address these crises, few acknowledge a critical root cause:
The way we measure success is actively creating and reinforcing the very crises we are trying to solve.
GDP rewards extraction, not well-being. Nations chase economic growth at the expense of human and planetary health. Industrial pollution, deforestation, and exploitative labor practices all contribute positively to GDP, even as they destroy the foundations of long-term prosperity.
Engagement metrics fuel addiction, not fulfillment. The attention economy optimizes for how long people stay hooked, not for whether they are nourished, informed, or flourishing. Social media, gaming, and content platforms profit from addiction, mental distress, and hyperstimulation.
ROI prioritizes short-term profit over systemic health. Businesses and investors measure success in quarterly returns, incentivizing resource depletion, worker burnout, and financial instability instead of sustainable, long-term value creation.
Our measurement systems aren’t just outdated—they are fundamentally misaligned with human and planetary flourishing. They push companies, investors, and entire economies toward extraction and exploitation, rather than regeneration and resilience.
The result? A vicious cycle where the more we “succeed” by these metrics, the worse our crises become.
But there is an opening.
AI Is Breaking Venture Models—It’s Time to Fund Zebra Companies, Not Unicorns
(The rest we will share in the session)
What is Conscious Tech?
"Conscious Tech" has a two-fold meaning:
1. Technology that expands consciousness, on an individual or collective level, towards mindful loving compassion, and flourishing. (e.g. mental health tech, tech for caring, tech for spiritual awakening & wisdom).
2. Technology that are crafted with conscious intent and process and a truly life-centric orientation, minding the complex systemic dynamics that a product and service reside in. (e.g. calm tech, ambient computing, natural gesture interfaces)
What is CTC? We are a multidisciplinary group of innovators from backgrounds such as neuroscience, engineering, brain-computer interface (BCI), human-comuter interaction design (HCI), psychotherapy, arts, plant medicine, somatic healing, and other ancient wisdom practices. We come from academic, industry, and startup contexts and gather weekly in person in San Francisco, and go on excursions to other parts of the world.
Together, we explore shared concerns and curiosities about the impact of a new wave of emerging technologies on human well-being: from AI to next-gen BCI and biosensors, and more. We aim to channel technology's power to heal our connections to Self, Each other, and the Planet.
We advocate for the ethical research, design, and development of well-being-focused products and services - enabled by emerging technology. We also advocate for systems change - positive futures where Technology and Capital support human and planetary flourishing. Not the other way around. We want to contribute to an economy that's regenerative, life-sustaining, and positive-sum, not extractive.
Our 4 pillars of action are:
1. Community Building
2. Translational Research
3. Innovator Support
4. Product Incubation
A deep dive of our values can be found here: https://lu.ma/rcb9yltg
If these resonate, join us!