Hope Is Everywhere I Go
Written by Nina Rismal
Ernst Bloch is a highly neglected, 20th century German Marxist philosopher whose magnum opus is a three-volumed ode to hope. In preparing for this post, I discovered a new book on him, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy, which to my knowledge, is also the first ever book on Bloch aimed at a general audience.
What do the worlds of Bloch and start-ups have in common? At first glance - nothing. During my PhD I spent the majority of my time reading in the library. These days, I spend my days on LinkedIn, PowerPoint, or on the move, talking to potential investors, clients, employees and partners. I still occasionally buy books (usually current popular literature on AI and start-up manuals) but I rarely open them once at home.
Bloch wrote many books. His collected works include 16 volumes, the first of which, The Spirit of Utopia, was published in 1918 and the last shortly before his death in 1977. He was a Marxist philosopher which means that, ultimately, his lifework was of a political nature. He championed one of Marx’s most famous statements; that the point of philosophy is not to interpret the world, but to change it. He was passionate about socialist ideals and did his best to implement them in practice in a genuine form in the postwar German Democratic Republic – until he himself became an enemy of the regime and fled to the West.
In contrast, the ambition of start-up founders is traditionally apolitical. In my experience, impact and financial success is what drives founders. We do what we do to make a difference, to leave a trace in this world, while at the same time making a living from it. Sometimes, financial gains are greater than earning subsistence, and in exceptional cases even massive, but these gains are rarely the sole motive for founders. Very often financial success, growth and scaling are, rather than original motivation, a requirement for having a lasting and tangible impact. Clearly, a viral product can produce substantial effect. Whether that effect is for the better or worse of the world is a normative question with which many founders, in the past and currently, have not been expected to engage, hence I call the work of founders apolitical.
At a more fundamental level, however, I dare to argue: Start-up founders share something very important with Bloch: the ultimate goal of creating something new; something truly and lastingly new. For Bloch, the highest type of social progress meant realisation of ‘not-yet’ existent practices and ideas. For the society to change for the better – better for everyone and without any tradeoffs – real newness is necessitated. The same holds for startups. Start-ups that survive are instances of newness, they create experiences that so far have not existed. The novelty is rarely only conceptual, but more often pertains to the execution of an idea. For example, in 2013, a handful of start-ups raised funds for a food delivery business, but it was Doordash that executed them best. We don’t know the exact recipe for their execution strategy, but I bet it featured something new, no matter how minuscule the novel ingredient might have been.
Besides the ‘what’, the ‘how’ is also common to both the Blochian and start-up worlds: how are we going about the creation of the newness? One of my favourite ideas formulated by Bloch is that of ‘docta spes’, which is Latin for ‘educated, rationally-informed hope’. Docta spes is a posture that Bloch advocated for members of a society to adopt in order to achieve progress - more freedom, equality, dignity. It is an emotion that is resolute and firm, yet open and flexible. It is a process in which hope gets more powerful and potent in helping us to achieve desired political targets, in pushing us forward, in persisting and not giving up, by means of learning, by revising what is possible and what is not. Educated hope is the polar opposite of wishful thinking.
Reading this, you are probably looking for a practical example in which this mysterious educated hope is being adopted. Look no further than at the activities of founders. As a founder, you need hope. You need to believe that you will succeed in your mission of building a company. Building a company means building something from nothing, which in turn is only possible if you are strongly optimistic and self-confident. You need to be hopeful about your vision for your company and believe in its realisation. However, and here comes the ‘educated’ qualifier, you should not cling too firmly to the specifics of your vision, the exact problem you are solving, the way you are solving it, with what product or service, in which market, or for which user. The answers to these questions should be continuously revised through learning, primarily through building pilot cases of your idea and through user feedback on them, but also through other news, be it market shifts or everyday observations. Iteration is what this process is called in the start-up world.
A successful founder will know how to filter the constant stream of information, which piece of information to use for revising the vision and which piece to leave aside, and when to persist with the current plan; determined to enact it as it is. A less successful founder will either lose hope, let the loop of feedback and advice tear the vision apart, or end up with a few minority users and an overprotected vision.
Which of the three prototypes of founders I will end up being remains to be seen. For now, I persist in blending the worlds of start-ups and Ernst Bloch to unlock the potential of how to succeed with hope, with a burgeoning idea that one day I could organise a school for founders, based on Blochian methods. Have I convinced you to attend?
Nina Rismal
Nina is a start-up cofounder of Possible Worlds and a scholar of Ernst Bloch. She completed her PhD at Cambridge in the Department of German Studies, following her studies at SOAS and Oxford, and has worked for mission-driven research institutes like the University of California Santa Barbara Centre for Humanities and Social Change in the US and the New Institute in Germany. Nina’s start-up was launched shortly before ChatGPT and is a platform that helps businesses validate their product ideas through simulations, thereby increasing chances of successful product launches.