Photo: Grant Trammell GT-Insta@thenybureau
Today we launch a crowdfunding page for Culture Dock on a site called Start Some Good. That we’re doing so on a website with this name, says a lot. With a platform that facilitates cross-cultural understanding across the globe, we, essentially aim to put a little more good into the world.
About Culture Dock, I’ve had people say to me, ‘It’s one of those ideas you wonder why no one has already gone out and done it’. I’m a 50+ single Mom who created a tech company and slapped a CEO label on myself to get an idea out into the world. So why me? Why now? I have no interest in pretending I’m completely comfortable in the world of tech start-ups. The reasons for ‘The Dock’ come from my experiences in life and in the world and in this, I see its strength.
‘Five Reasons Why’ will be a series of blogs I’m going to write during the run of this campaign. I’ll start with the most obvious reason for creating a dock celebrating global culture and somewhere along the way, I’ll confess to the one I’d rather not admit to.
What I write, will have little to do with technology nor the hustle of being an entrepreneur. I’ve been living that for the past couple of years yet every day, beneath all of that there is a story that got me here. I’ve had to tap into it consistently to ground myself through the bumpy times. An author and journalist at heart, I find the crafting of pitch decks and executive summaries (and don’t even get me started on financial projections) to be somewhat soul destroying. Not losing site of how I got here, is what keeps me and this project going.
Totally History by Jackson Pollock
I once wrote an article for a ‘good news’ website called Tonic. I interviewed Leslie Hawke (yeah, the Mom of the lovely, Ethan Hawke) who during our interview revealed that someone once told her that her resume resembled a Jackson Pollack painting. At 48 she made a life-changing decision to leave an executive position with a tech start-up company in NYC and decided to join the Peace Corp. It was the first time in her life, Hawke said, ‘that things really made sense’ and everything she had done up to that point, served her during her time in the Peace Corp. When her stint was up, she went on to set up her own program, The Alex Fund to help severely disadvantaged children in Romania.
Hawke was just three years younger than I, when she flew off to Bucharest and never looked back. In her story I see similarities, ‘cept I made the journey backward. I started working as a volunteer in South Africa and ended up with a start-up tech company in Toronto; everything I’ve done until now, serves the vision that is Culture Dock and only by not losing sight of this, does my life make much sense at all.
We’ve been in a three week pause with the app as my developer performs a fix on the iPhone version. During this time, I turned my attention toward this crowdfunding campaign. Since we’ve been ‘bootstrapping’ the app, we literally must buy time now, to populate the app and get it ‘investor ready’. Not wanting to start the campaign with a glitchy app, I asked my developer if it would be ready by the 21st. He assured me it would and I prepared the campaign to launch on the 24th. Another delay ensued and the date was pushed to the 27th – April 27th a date etched in my memory but from twenty-three years ago and really where the story of Culture Dock begins.
Hope you stay tuned!
