Unreasonable Group's Daniel Epstein on Hong Kong's start-up culture and being his own boss
Brains behind social enterprise start-up accelerator finds 'it's not OK to fail' in Hong Kong, in contrast to the US, and says he sees his role as designing 'solutions for any problem worthy of my attention'
Two days before this interview, entrepreneurship guru Daniel Epstein posted on Twitter: “To better ensure that the press you get is in fact good and accurate, do everything you can to avoid interviews.”
Evidently, the 29-year-old co-founder of Unreasonable Group - a US-based organisation that sets up and incubates new businesses with social or environmental agendas – considers himself well-armed against media mendacity. Then again, someone who started three companies before he left university and is convinced he has the model to solve the world’s biggest problems is not going to be lacking in confidence.
Epstein has flown over from Boulder, in the US state of Colorado, for the launch of the two-month Social Enterprise Summit, an annual event that encourages Hong Kong businesses to play a role in making the world a better place. Over the course of a week, he has given public talks and spoken to senior corporate executives about his “unreasonable” approach.
The Unreasonable Group encourages “a healthy disregard for the impossible”; the name comes from a line in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Epstein says he founded the Unreasonable Institute – the nucleus of the present-day Unreasonable Group – in 2010 with two fellow graduates from the University of Colorado at Boulder with the goal of helping businesses that have solutions for major social and environmental ills become bigger and better.