Adii Pienaar

Yesterday is I was watching the interest and buzz grow for Aboard Entrepreneurship, I realized that a year ago it would've been impossible for me to launch a project like this. This is obviously not an exact science (as I don't have actual evidence to prove this), but if I had launched this project last year, it would've been very optimistic indeed.

After successfully launching Aboard Entrepreneurship yesterday with 10 contributors, we've been blown away by the initial interest in the project. Hundreds of people have signed up to the mailing list and there's a bunch of awesome people who've reached out to us to contribute.

We're up to 16 awesome contributors now and I'd like to just introduce you to them (as the site currently can't hold all of them):

• Alexis Ohanian, ex-founder of Reddit and now works with both Hipmunk & Y Combinator. Alexis is also very much into social entrepreneurship, so this is a massive addition to the project and one we're incredibly excited about! :)
• Andrew Wilkinson, founder at MetaLab. Andrew's been involved in so many online web apps, that it would've been silly from us not ask him to contribute.
• Amy Hoy (Freckle) & Garrett Dimon (Sifter) are two awesome people I met in Vienna at SchnitzelConf last year.
• Lastly we're welcome two South African entrepreneurs, Christine Meintjes (KIKI) & Nic Haralambous (MoTribe), as we felt that it was important for us to highlight the entrepreneurial talent in our home country as well. :)

Expect a couple of updates like this in the next couple of days. :)

Who would you like to see joining Aboard Entrepreneurship?

You can't spend 4 days in Los Angeles (Hollywood to be precise), without taking one of the city tours to see "all of the homes of the stars". What bullshit.

Jeanne & I took one of these trips and proceeded to waste 2 hours of our time seeing the driveaways of the supposed homes of the celebrities. Whoop.

On the trip though, this photo was the best moment and one I'd share here. I absolutely love the tranquility captured in the shot and makes me think back semi-fondly on a shitty tourbus trip... :)

I believe in entrepreneurship and capitalism, in every man and woman's right to create value and awesome products, whilst in turn building businesses on top of that. I also believe that as a part of this freedom and opportunity, entrepreneurs need to give back to the communities on which they've built their success. This is entrepreneurship for social good.

I briefly mentioned this in my 2011 "goals" post and this is one thing that is firmly on my radar for this year. I really want to make a difference, using my various successful businesses as a platform for that. Along this way, I also hope to inspire other, like-minded entrepreneurs to do the same, because a bigger, united team can have a much bigger, collective impact.

For me, it's also about so much more... Worldwide poverty is a massive issue and a problem which our societies have not been able to resolve for centuries. I believe that entrepreneurs - by creating value and new opportunities - can help solve that problem.

Aboard Entrepreneurship

Enter the latest brainchild from Radiiate: Aboard Entrepreneurship.

We're just announcing the launch of this project now and whilst it's very much in its infancy, we're super excited about the momentum that we have already been able to build.

Aboard Entrepreneurship (as the site details) is an upcoming book, which will be a collection of entrepreneurial essays contributed by some of the leading entrepreneurs on the internet. We've already secured contributions from the likes of Matt Mullenweg (Automattic), Anthony Casalena (Squarespace), Collis Ta'eed (Envato), Garry Tan (Posterous) & a couple of others. Not a bad team of contributors there, right?

Where's the social good? All of the contributors have volunteered their time and content for free, which means that once the book is ready, all of the proceeds will go back into empowering and educating new entrepreneurs. We plan to use the proceeds to create bursaries for promising business students, as we believe that this will complete the circle.

Aboard Entrepreneurship does aims to empower, educate & inspire both established entrepreneurs (to build better social businesses) and help educate the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Follow Our Progress

In the next couple of weeks, we'll be announcing a whole bunch of new contributors. Our hope is to get as many as 30 (maybe even 40) contributors to the book and you can expect a couple of big names to be included there.

The project will have a couple of phases. For now, we're hoping to finalize our contributor's list and build some interest in the project with the newsletter list (we hope we can count on your help here). Thereafter we will finalize the content & the design for the book, which will go up on Kickstarter (where we hope to use the initial interest in the project to get it funded). Final phase will be releasing this beast. :)

So head on over to the site & register your interest. A couple of tweets would be pretty awesome as well. :)

I so believe in this mantra, yet to execute & implement that in exactly the way DHH advocates is something which I fear only 37Signals can do. If you're a fan of their business philosophies, you'll know that there are many of those philosophies that just seem unattainable to the Average Joe and their business.