Our Connections: To each other and to everything else

By Theodora Lau and Bradley Leimer of Unconventional Ventures 

How does our work within financial services and fintech all fit together? Are why we do what we do, and how we do it, really important in the broader purview? The short answer provides much positive affirmation. Our efforts to make banking better — by making it more inclusive, more cohesive, and more comprehensive — matters a great deal. Each iteration of the model builds upon each other and benefits humanity as it strengthens our communities. The longer answer to how does it all fit together is more convoluted, but perhaps more satisfying in the end.

Everything in life is a series of connected systems, both big and small.

While we all make personal connections during our lifetimes, the truth is that we are all connected in ways often both unseen and unforeseen. Everything we see, everything we feel, everything that will be —  it comes from something created before us.

Our communities are like this too, connected by the individuals, families, and small businesses and business models that have built up our society, our economic systems, our values, and our beliefs — all across the connected expanse of time.

Life has always been much more than any one of us.

Timeless connections

With so many of us struggling for connection, inspiration, and hope, these are three stories we would like to share about how our lives and our planet are more interwoven than we imagine, and why it matters that everything is connected to everything else.

The first comes from the recent documentary Fantastic Fungi, directed by Louie Schwartzberg. This film brings us face-to-face with the smallest of organisms as interconnected creators of our world, and is an immersive journey through time and scale into the earth beneath our feet. For every step on the earth, there are more than 300 miles of mycelium across every spot throughout the globe. This world — which entails so much more than the mushrooms we often find on our plate — is an incomprehensible underground network that demonstrates how even the smallest organisms touch absolutely everything from life to death.

Across this internet-like thread of connectivity, they play an instrumental role in helping organisms communicate and nourish each other. Through the eyes of renowned scientists and mycologists like Paul Stamets, best-selling authors Michael Pollan, Eugenia Bone, Andrew Weil and others, we become aware of the beauty, intelligence, and solutions this fungi kingdom offers us in response to some of our most pressing challenges.

It offers hope for how we can work together in greater harmony.

The second takes us from the forest floor to its canopy. The book The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, is a love story of the forests told through the trees that create these interconnected networks of timeless life. As he documents this moving cycle of life, death, and regeneration, he explains how much humanity can learn (as Walt Whitman did) about the role forests can play in making our world a better place to live.

Much like humans, trees have parents that protect their children, support them as they grow, and share nutrients with those in their community who are struggling. Like our broader communities, trees and forests create ecosystems that mitigate the impact of threats for the entire group.

Wohlleben discusses the science behind the hidden life of trees and their communication occurring through their roots and their compatriots, the ever-present mycelium. When we consume the ideals of the smallest organisms to the largest, the lessons they offer help us think about the ways we develop and sustain interconnected communities where we retain often hidden interdependence.

The third is from the BBC series Connections (and the related book), the late 1970’s television series created by science historian James Burke, which took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events built upon one another to create modern technology. Burke, ever the master storyteller, untangles patterns of interconnecting events, the accidents of time, circumstance, and place that gave rise to these major inventions.

Rejecting the linear view of scientific discovery, the Connections series explores varied technology topics — from the atom bomb, telecommunications, the computer, jet aircraft, and television — as it establishes the need to look at nearly everything in human history as the story of interconnected events that defied conventional connection.

While more modern — and far more human focused — one can only imagine Burke paying homage to the connectivity of forests, fungi, and mycelium, as he describes the modern internet and the connections to each other that we have built through it.

Where the little things matter

When we circle back to how this all fits together, and if what we do matters, we ask you to think about your own community, your own city, your own town, and your own family. Beyond what you do, what connections do we have through the work that we do and through the daily interaction of modern life? What matters most to our broader community as we toil through a new normal of distance learning and pandemic life? How is this all connected and how does it really matter?

In the United States alone, small businesses comprise 99.9 percent of all businesses formed, employing nearly 60 million Americans, and driving 44% of the economic activity, according to the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy.

The vast majority (78.5 percent) represent businesses without employees (representing sole proprietors across every imaginable field). How do we, as an industry focused on the financial needs of everyone, connect the needs of these small businesses to our local communities?

How do we, as contributors to our companies and to our households, connect even the smallest decisions we make to the needs of others that often feel so disconnected? That’s the point of this exercise. To see more than what is there, and to feel a responsibility for the whole — even that which is hidden.

We need connections now more than ever; connections big and small — some elements we are only now beginning to understand or whose interconnectivity requires further exploration.

We need a paradigm shift in our consciousness, to help us redefine genuine connectivity. What will it take for us to realize we are much more than ourselves?

How we define community matters. The roots of our community matters even more.

Will you join us in defining the connections of what is beyond good?

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?” Marie Howe, Singularity

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In this episode of One Vision, Theo and Bradley chat with our good friend, Paul Loberman, a veteran digital banking executive whose time at Abbey Bank, Santander, and HSBC has taught him much about connections. We talk with Paul about the evolution in serving the needs of small businesses, the banking industry post pandemic, and building back better. You can find this episode on iTunes, Spotify, and Google.

We thank you for listening and please consider subscribing.

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Unconventional Ventures helps drive innovation to improve systematic financial wellness. We connect founders to funders, provide mentorship to entrepreneurs, strategic advisory services to a broad set of corporates, and broaden opportunities for diversity within the ecosystem. Our belief is that anyone with great ideas should have a chance to succeed and every voice should be heard. Visit unconventionalventures.com to learn how you can partner with us today.

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