The Process: Introduction to Kairos (Ep.1)

Michael Gervais (0:10)

All right, welcome to The Process. This is Michael Gervais, and this is a new audio series where we're gonna learn about the process, what it takes, and what goes into people that are in the thick of it, those that are on the path of mastery. And in this first season of The Process, we're gonna follow Kairos and their CEO, Alex Fiance. And Kairos is a venture capital firm and a global community of fellows, founders and advisors that work together to identify society's most pressing challenges and to build new solutions to address them. And they focus on areas where outdated industries and governments are failing to meet our community's needs.

Over the course of the next six months, we're gonna learn about young entrepreneurs tackling the world's biggest problems, everything from what those problems are, how Kairos identifies the entrepreneurs they believe might be able to solve them, and how they determine which companies to invest in. And then we'll dig into the mindset of these young entrepreneurs. We'll be checking in with Alex and his team every month or so. I'm really excited to learn. I'm excited to do this mini-series with you guys. I'm excited for getting the Finding Mastery tribe involved as well. There'll be more of that to come. And with that, let's jump right into it. And this is the debut episode with Alex Fiance.

Alex, how are you?

I'm looking forward to this because what you've created is something that's new and it's fresh and it's stimulating. And I'm really excited to follow what you're doing. And so before we kind of jump into the weeds, can you give me just a little bit of your background and kind of how you came to being one of the founders of your agency here?

Alex Fiance (1:56)

Yeah, so Kairos is focused on what we call problems worth solving. So we invest in and help build companies tackling what we consider clear unmet consumer needs. So we look at spaces where everyday people are clearly getting squeezed, right, cost of housing, cost of health care, things like job retraining, workforce retraining, student loans, kind of the building block industries that affect people at huge life stages.

So we think those are massive opportunities for entrepreneurs. And if an entrepreneur is successful, it can really change the world for millions of people.

Michael Gervais (2:34)

For the most part, those have been industry or government responsibilities. Okay, how old are you?

Alex Fiance (2:42)

I'm 29

Michael Gervais (2:43)

Okay, so why?

It's a relatively young age. Not that it's like, not that you're green. I'm not saying that.

Alex Fiance (2:50)

Yeah, we started this 10 years ago.

Michael Gervais (2:51)

Right. Okay, so you started this at...

Okay, a lot of questions here.

One is, why? Like, why is this more about a business play? Is this more about a bleeding heart that you want to see people have better opportunity? Is it the combination of the two? But at your age, it seems it's wise beyond cheers in the approach.

Alex Fiance (3:14)

Yeah, I think the goal at a high level is to get the brightest minds from around the world thinking about the biggest problems. These are massive business opportunities. If they're solved or addressed properly, it really can change lives and change industries. For us, the first question was, how do you get the brightest minds to even believe they can solve the biggest problems? How do you show that entrepreneurship is the vehicle?

Timing was perfect for us. We started in 2008 on the heels of the financial crisis when the trendiest job in the world was banking. People would blindly follow this path into universities and then into banking and assume, okay, if I just drop my head and work hard, I'll have that six-figure salary and my life is set. Then all of a sudden, the jobs disappear. People who did everything right through school, whose families helped them get to the best universities or maybe they even got scholarships, they still don't even have the jobs they wanted. For us, we said, why not channel some of this talent and energy to spaces like the future of energy, the future of healthcare, the future of education, billion if not trillion dollar industries that also are clearly starting to break.

If you combine the timing of the financial crisis with just the progression of technology, we were early innings on seeing tech start to enter spaces like logistics, housing, transportation, things that are clearly making a big difference today.

Michael Gervais (4:48)

Okay. Take us back or take me back to what it was like growing up because I want to try to stitch together why this is the mission that you've set out to do and maybe some of the early ecosystem that you grew up in helped shape that.