The lobby of One World Observatory, the visiting center for the newly built Freedom Tower, has some of the tightest security in New York. Visitors need admission tickets to pass through metal detectors. There are often police dogs, and random searches. But on an overcast Friday last April, it was a frenetic, discombobulated mess as adolescents trading business cards crowded into long lines to get their credentials for the Kairos Society Global Summit.
No one seemed to know who exactly was in charge. I pushed through the crowd to the press table, where a harried volunteer scrolled through an iPad list. Unable to find my name, she handed me a generic badge that permitted me to slip ID-less through security, past the bedrock of the original twin towers, and into an elevator that catapulted me up into the sky.
Sixty seconds later, the doors opened into a room of familiar faces. There was a partner from Greylock, and another from True Ventures. The head of the Lowe’s Innovation Labs was over by the window, as was the guy who works with developers for Amazon’s Alexa. All around, a swell of young people spilled off the elevators. A guy bumped up against me, squinted his eyes at the tag around my neck (which offered no name or affiliation), and shuffled off.
The Kairos Society is best understood as an award-bestowing enthusiasm machine designed to help young entrepreneurs start and build companies. One part festival, one part conference, five parts spectacle, its summit had begun the night before with a private dinner at the Rockefeller Estate attended by both Russell Simmons and Dr. Oz. It would extend through the next day, when one startup would receive a $100,000 “Kairos 50” prize, funded by an outside venture firm. Friday’s program would host a “reverse shark tank” in which people like former Mexican President Vicente Fox would get three minutes on stage to make their best case for what problems these genius youngsters should apply themselves to. Somewhat convinced I’d stumbled onto a taping for the next season of HBO’s Silicon Valley, I asked a West Coast VC why he’d come. “It’s a good chance to rub up against really smart young people, and maybe something will come of it someday,” he said, and then added: “Besides, Ankur invited me.”
Ankur Jain, 27, is the charming and youthful Kairos founder who is genetically predispositioned to start companies. His father, Naveen Jain, started InfoSpace in the late 90s, and currently runs Moon Express, which aims to mine the moon for natural resources. His mother, Anu Jain, cofounded an ecommerce company and is on the board of X Prize. Jain, a lanky guy of medium height dressed in Prada loafers and black designer jeans, flitted back and forth, welcoming his guests, often with warm hugs.
More than half an hour after the event’s original start time, Jain jumped onto the stage to kick things off. He didn’t appear worried that the day’s events were already running late, or that several names were misspelled on the program. He didn’t seem phased that the windows behind him, whose views usually inspire awe, were bricked in a thick fog. The buzz of the crowd dropped a few decibels as he greeted everyone with a joke: “We wanted to bring you to the highest point in the western hemisphere, because the view is spectacular!”
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The Kairos Society trains its efforts on two groups of aspiring founders: the very young, and the fairly young. The first is, by far, the larger group. Selected annually, the Kairos Fellows are college students, as likely to be studying medicine at Brown University as they are engineering at IIT in Delhi. Kairos hosts local events for the fellows throughout the year; for many, it’s the front door to a less prescribed career path building companies, rather than working for them. These fellows are rarely old enough to drink in the United States.
Then there’s the Kairos 50, a group of 50 founders who started their companies before they turned 25 (some are as old as 29). They are selected because Kairos believes they are working on products or services that will change established industries and impact the lives of people outside Silicon Valley. “You see 15 companies in Silicon Valley thinking a problem is we need new doctors offices that are super high tech,” says Jain. “The issue for most people is that you can’t even afford to go to the doctor. Right?” That’s the type of problem he’d prefer to see Kairos 50 companies address.
Much like an accelerator or an incubator, Kairos attempts to jumpstart founders’ careers by supercharging their networks. They’re invited to regional gatherings, introduced to important people, and paraded before the media. A regular at Davos, Jain, who is part of the conference’s Young Global Leaders program, draws on personal relationships with industry and government leaders to help out listees. Alex Fiance, 28, who is a partner alongside Jain and another guy named Ryan Bloomer, checks in with them regularly to see if he can do something—really anything at all—to help them recruit an engineer, or land a new lease for office space, or connect to just the right person in a tough-to-crack industry.
Anyone trying to eke out a career investing in the tech ecosystem knows that there are few things more valuable than the attention and goodwill of A-list entrepreneurs just when they’re getting started. If you had managed to befriend Travis Kalanick and invest $50,000 into an angel round at Uber, you could be a multimillionaire by now—on paper, at least. Airbnb ceded 7 percent of its equity to Y Combinator when Paul Graham accepted the founders in 2012; that stake is currently worth more than a billion dollars.
This is one of the reasons incubators and accelerators have exploded in popularity over the last decade. Exploded, by the way, is completely the right word. There are some 700 accelerators, like Y Combinator and Techstars, in the US alone, according to recent research from the Brookings Institute. Between 2008, when the growth in the number of these groups began to spiral, and 2014, the number of US-based accelerators increased 50 percent each year. In a tech gold rush in which everyone is vying to be Peter Thiel (the guy who made the first investment in Facebook), it’s a prized position be among the business hatchers, who get an early look at—and stake in—startup ideas.
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Yet among some founders, these kinds of groups can get a bad rap for taking advantage of startups without providing much by way of value. Though models vary considerably, most entrepreneurs will give up a stake in their companies in exchange for a short period of office space and the promise of mentorship. There are plenty of also-ran accelerators that take advantage of inexperienced entrepreneurs, gobbling up equity without providing much help.
In contrast, The Kairos Society is a chameleon, able to adopt the most helpful traits of accelerators and incubators and dispense with the rest. Its founders are selected from among the same group of young people who are attracted to the contemporary Gold Rush of the tech industry explosion. To these charges, the Kairos Society is a network builder, cheerleader, problem solver—some of the classic tenets of incubators. But it hasn’t asked for equity. It hasn’t demanded a months-long exclusive commitment. It hasn’t promised real estate. And it definitely would not call itself an incubator. So far, it’s just offered help.
Thus, in an environment where time and attention are the chief constraints, Kairos has managed to win both from many of the most elite young entrepreneurs—the same 20-somethings who become Thiel Fellows and complete Y Combinator. Kairos’s first fellows now include accomplished alumni like Kayvon Beykpour, who sold Periscope to Twitter, or Riley Ennis, a cofounder of Freenome, the liquid biopsy company that just raised $65 million from Andreessen Horowitz. Says Ennis: “What I liked about Kairos was that they had strong relationships with biotech and pharma companies. That industry is very hard to break into.” He adds: “Ankur was so helpful in making connections, teaching, mentoring, pushing you to think bigger, for no gain.”
It was the “no gain” part that started to get to the Kairos team. Yes, they were able to make small investments from time to time. And yes, they received money through corporate sponsorships. But routinely, a lot of these founders were so grateful to Kairos they offered to gift some shares of stock to his team. Kairos surveyed its alumni. “Almost every entrepreneur said they would have given us whatever equity if we’d asked up front,” says Jain.
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So earlier this year, Kairos launched the Kairos Society Venture Fund. Now in addition to naming fellows and Kairos 50 founders, it can go one step further. By making investments of around $250,000, it can take stakes in promising companies. So far, the fund has made five investments. Jain didn’t set out to build an accelerator, but the most helpful aspects of the elite accelerators seem to have composed themselves around him.
Two weeks after the New York event, Jain and I arrange a Skype conversation. It’s 8 a.m. in California, and he is losing his voice. He apologizes for this several times. It’s been a crazy few weeks. He has just given notice at Tinder, where he was a vice president of product. For the past year, Jain has been spending three days each week at Tinder’s Los Angeles digs and two days working in San Francisco, with frequent trips to IAC’s New York office. At the same time, he’s been building the fund for Kairos. Caffeine, he says, is a go-to; he sips from a tea-based energy drink called Steaz.
Jain will tell you that he had a remarkably privileged childhood that prepared him well for his current job. He grew up in Redmond, Washington, the son of Indian immigrants, watching his father navigate Web 1.0. His father’s career had ups and downs, but as a child, Jain absorbed his work ethic and his assuredness that nothing was beyond his can. Because of his dad’s business, Jain grew up around powerful people. He considers Admiral Bill Owens, who was a close friend of his dad, a mentor. When Jain was 10, a general he’d met through Owens brought him out for a two-night sleepover on the USS Carl Vinson. (“We’re not Christian, but he was basically my godfather,” he tells me.)
Some teenagers get summer jobs at Starbucks, or intern at a local business. At 17, Jain spent the summer before college in Hong Kong working for Owens, who was then running a large private equity group. Jain shadowed Owens as he hammered out strategies for bringing large Chinese companies to the US. “I remember one of the crazy stories,” Jain says. “This was 2007 and we did a trip to Seoul, South Korea. That morning we had breakfast with the chairman of LG. This is pre-iPhone. He came to breakfast with this phone. Do you remember the LG Prada?” says Jain, describing an early touchscreen smartphone then available in South Korea. “And I remember a month later, Jobs came up and announced the first ever touch screen phone, the iPhone.” By then, Jain had returned to the States for school.
Jain began his first year at the University of Pennsylvania just as the financial crisis was decimating opportunities for his classmates. This was before entrepreneurship was cool. No one celebrated dropouts. Peter Thiel hadn’t even thought of the Thiel Fellowship. Being an entrepreneur, according to Jain, meant you couldn’t get a job in banking or consulting.
His father had forbid him from starting a business, because he wanted his son to complete an education. (Jain calls this his “good Indian dad” move.) Instead, Jain joined with two classmates to start a nonprofit. He called it Kairos, which translated to “the right moment.” Says Jain: “It was like this was the perfect time for us to go try something.” Very quickly, Jain began recruiting for Kairos on other college campuses. He’d visit friends and ask around to see who was interested in entrepreneurship.
To rally excitement for Kairos early on, Jain decided to host an event. Thanks to a hook-up from Owens, he staged it on the imposing and dramatic Intrepid aircraft carrier in New York. As soon as the date was set, he and his friends began inviting CEOs, government officials, and anyone important-sounding for whom they could dig up contact information. They announced there would be 500 college-age entrepreneurs who were “poised to solve the world’s biggest problems.”
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Evidently, it was quite a draw, because people began to return his emails and calls. The former CEO of Boeing, Phil Condit agreed to come. Former President Bill Clinton couldn’t attend, but sent a video. Then, a few weeks before the event, Jain got a call from the Chinese Embassy saying a group of students from the top eight Chinese universities were going to be in town. Could they come, too? In a 2009 CNN interview, a very young Jain smiled broadly at the anchor, explaining to a national TV audience that entrepreneurship offered a note of optimism against the bleak economic backdrop.
By the time Jain finished Penn in 2011, the Kairos Society had matured into a multi-chapter fellowship program. But for Jain, the program was never the point. It wasn’t the company Jain planned to someday build. It wasn’t his Facebook. It was just a very cool organization. So in 2012, Jain and his cofounders hired Fiance, an understated University of Southern California graduate one of them had met on a cruise, as a director for Kairos. Then, Jain moved on.
For many years, Jain did other things. At 22, he started a networking app called Humin, landing a number of celebrity backers like Richard Branson and will.i.am for his service that helped people keep track of their contacts. When it didn’t take off, he launched a second product, “Knock Knock,” intended to help you introduce yourself to people around you. In the launch video, Branson, will.i.am and Sophia Bush knock on their phones to connect to each other. It won some favorable press coverage but, unfortunately, few users.
In 2016, Jain sold Humin to Tinder. The company recruited Jain to help it develop another use for its online profiles beyond, well, dating. Tinder was a mature product that had by then weathered management changes and a sexual harassment lawsuit, and growth had slowed. Jain’s goal was to build a friends version of Tinder that would attract people to the app for a different reason than simply swiping right. But that, too, failed to take off.
Meanwhile, Fiance continued to evolve the processes for selecting both fellows and Kairos 50 founders. Like everything else that happens at Kairos, the selection processes are rather chaotic. Kairos Fellows—college students who are engineers, scientists, and designers—are nominated by peers and Kairos alumni at universities around the world. To source them, Fiance relies on “peer ambassadors”—unpaid volunteers in several global hubs—and places heavy emphasis on emerging markets such as Hong Kong or the ITs in India.
Candidates for the Kairos 50 usually arrive through referral, and are then invited to apply. Fiance says he received more than 1,000 applications last year. Along with the Kairos partners, a selection committee of industry leaders chooses the final 50. But the whole thing can feel haphazard. One Thiel Fellow told me about being heavily recruited to apply on the promise that he was shoe-in, and then being rejected with no explanation.
Very little is required of Kairos 50 fellows once they are selected. Usually, they’ve had a final screening call in which Fiance makes sure he understands what they’re trying to accomplish. They’re invited to regional events, which happen somewhat regularly. And every few years—or maybe more often in the future—they’re invited to attend the big bash that is the Kairos Society Global Summit.
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Jain never stepped back from Kairos entirely. While Fiance, who is more reserved but no less optimistic than his partner, has interfaced with the fellows and founders, Jain has remained the fellowship program’s most ebullient ambassador, able to rub elbows with the Davos set and comfortable connecting the global elite with ambitious 19-year-olds or savvy Kairos 50 founders. Last year, Jain was even named a Davos Young Global Leader, enabling him to attend the conference free of charge for five years and advise prime ministers and CEOs on the perspectives of the young people in the program he helps steward.
By last year, Jain realized his biggest opportunity was right in front of him. As it turned out, this skill Jain has always taken for granted—his ability to warm up to anyone and warm anyone up immediately—is actually his most important.
A month after the summit, Jain returns to New York. I meet him where he is staying at the Standard Hotel in Manhattan’s posh meatpacking district, just beneath the Highline, and we plop down on red velvet chairs in the cocktail lounge. He has just come from spending a good chunk of the afternoon consulting with a legacy entertainment company on new business opportunities. He’ll also spend time with a Kairos portfolio company that is trying to build retirement savings tools.
As Jain tells me about the brilliant online tool to help his peers put money away, I am reminded of a story he told me earlier. Owens once told him there would be 50,000 people in every generation who shape the world as we know it. Apparently, Jain explains, it’s an idea that military leaders often talked about. It stuck with him. He’d always thought he knew who the shapers of his generation would be. “I had this belief that for this next generation, entrepreneurs had more ability to shape and change the world than political leaders, corporate people, et cetera,” he says.
Jain knows he is among that 50,000. He knows it as certainly as he knew at 10 that not every kid got to visit an aircraft carrier in the middle of an ocean. Maybe Humin didn’t work out. Maybe Tinder didn’t work out. But entrepreneurship is more than a successful startup. It’s a worldview, a way of taking on the world, with zero fear of failure. And when your father is a billionaire and Richard Branson returns your calls, what is there to be afraid of?
His opportunity with Kairos, as informal as it began, is to shape the future for others, and in so doing, to bend it slightly to his will. He has brilliantly orchestrated a system in which he can be entirely himself—an affable guy creating a benevolent network that helps founders get their footing. But there’s an alternate purpose, too. If Kairos works—if talent attracts more talent and the most talented among them invite Kairos Venture Fund to invest—it may make him as rich as all the other early founders, without having to do the up front equity grab, or any kind of grab at all.
We talk through his investment philosophy one more time until we’re both late for our next appointments. I leave him in the lobby.
Five minutes later, I’m on my phone walking quickly East to catch the subway when I see Jain in front of me. Somehow in the time that I’ve covered two blocks, he has managed to skip ahead of me. I put the phone down as we pass, and ask him: “How’d you do that?”
“I have no idea!” he says, and he means it.
