I read this great article by Erik Torenberg called Life Capital that got me thinking about the idea that there’s a huge investment opportunity that almost nobody is taking advantage of yet.

I've often met people, sometimes just briefly or sometimes for longer stretches, where I just thought they're amazing, but totally unappreciated in what they're doing. For example, an astonishingly good waiter in a dingy Pizza Hut in London. My thought at the time was, "he'd be the best CS agent TransferWise ever had". Or someone like Kaspar working in a Business Intelligence team in Swedbank. He spread his wings so wide once he got into TransferWise. Or my colleague's daughter's football coach, who's so talented at building teams and bringing out potential in people, at age 21. Or my hairdresser, who's so good with people, but can't escape the grind of hairdressing. Or me, perhaps, at 22, doing data entry.

The people that spring to mind, and so many more I've met, have the potential to do incredible things. And, for myself, I'm proud to say that I'm incredibly happy with what I've accomplished. Perhaps me doing mindless data entry was a necessary step in my journey. Einstein worked at the patent office, after all.

I've also coached and mentored lot's of people. For instance, I've taught quite a few people SQL to the level that it becomes their job, and totally changes their career trajectory. I've helped a few people on various teams get through super difficult decisions and tough times.

But I've often wondered if I (or anyone) could help certain types of people accelerate their Personal growth.

Now that I have some experience working alongside venture capitalists like our excellent lead investor fly.vc, I can see how a similar approach could be helpfully applied to people, not just startups.

Seedcamp, another of our investors, has over 1,200+ founders of companies they’ve invested in over the past 10-15 years. Seedcamp has set up a ‘founders forum’ and every new founder has access to the collective intelligence of all other founders. I’ve asked half a dozen business-critical questions over the last couple of years. No matter how obscure or tricky a question I ask, I get six excellent answers in a day.

Imagine if smart, ambitious people had an incredible forum like this to support their career.

Every few months, we have a board meeting routine. There are two key parts. First, we have about 7 hours of 1:1 conversations with each of our key investors and advisors. They've all been there, done that, and these conversations often change our strategy. Second, we carefully think through what we're doing and why, then play it back. We get clear ourselves on what we're doing and why.

Imagine if smart youngsters had this kind of attention on their development, and took the time regularly to cement their learnings.

Our Investors, obviously, have given us some money too. Quite a lot in fact. Enough for us to breath. Enough for us to test and fail, and struggle forward until something works. We know that we can take enormous risks now because we have enough to pay salaries. If we were bootstrapping, we'd have to be far more cautious.

Imagine if smart young ambitious people also felt secure enough (that they won't be out on the street) to take much bigger career risks than they do today.

I can see massive potential if this could be set up:

• More people willing to start a startup or join one before it's a safe bet

• People quitting awful jobs faster. This would degrade bad companies faster, or force them to fix themselves faster. It’s a win for every employee.

• Less burnout. Fewer people would sacrifice their health for a paycheck.

The biggest impact (and biggest potential returns) probably come from people who are unlikely to do well already. For example, if someone is already top of their class, is socially normal/likable and healthy, they're going to do just fine. Investing in them and even mentoring them won't add too much incremental value.

Instead, I'd invest in the oddbods. The people with the strangest CV's you've ever seen. Super talented people working terrible jobs. Brilliant people who are so bored with traditional school that they put in zero effort in it, and scrape by because they put all their effort somewhere else. People with incredible niche hobbies where they put 10x more effort than seems healthy. People who are super smart, but so nervous around others that they can't present their ideas well, and can't possibly pass an interview well. But give them a test assignment and be truly astonished.

A great example of career progression

These are the people who — if helped, mentored, coached, given enough money to breathe — are capable of incredible things. If they don't get help, perhaps 1-in-10 will figure it out anyway, because they're brilliant, but the other 9 will end up achieving far less in life than they could.

These people are all still super risky. Even if this program is totally successful, most will still fail, which will be depressing. This is the same as in traditional VC. But perhaps, if they're surrounded with the right structure, instead of 10% achieving greatness, 20 or 30% will succeed. That'd be incredible not only for them, but for the world.

Taking riskier jobs - 6 years ago I was paid extremely well at Microsoft, but got an offer to join a startup called TransferWise (known as Wise now). I took a big pay cut (and therefore a big risk) by making the leap. Now that we’re hiring, I see first hand how few are willing to take the short-term downside (lower salary), for massive long-term upside (massive career growth and a shot at significant equity).

Taking risk in whatever job they have - At Wise, I made it my mission to do at least one thing every six months that I thought had a good chance of getting me fired (but that was very good for Wise). For instance, I changed how the whole company does quarterly planning, just 3 weeks before the deadline, after consulting 5 of the 800 people affected. Later, I moved from leading a team of 30 analysts & data scientists and joined the people team to lead one of the sub-teams where I had no formal experience. There are many other examples from me and others in Wise. But it's extremely rare. What could make it less rare? Would I have been willing to push even more limits if I was sure I'd be fine financially even if I did get fired?

Training / education - this is the traditional use case. Maybe? It makes sense in the US where education is so expensive. But in Europe, education is generally cheap or free. Living abroad while studying is expensive though, so perhaps supplementing more movement would help. I know some people go to their local university, even though it's worse, simply because it's too expensive to go abroad.

Money - obviously it would take some. But if we think about even seed round VC money, it's not a lot. The max per person might be something like €25-50K. This is nothing in the world of VC. I could easily imagine a world where 20x €25K cheques to individuals pays off better than a typical 1x €500K seed cheque. And there are an unbelievable number of VCs out there. Taavi's talked to probably 100, and we get emails every week. Money can be found for sure if there's a model.

Legal - This kind of thing has to be allowed. The tricky part most likely is around share options which generally can't be pledged. I think the payback couldn't be based only on salary. Simply because it won't be attractive for investors, and it screws up the incentives between investors and individuals.

Governance - Like VC relationships, there would have to be standard easy to understand agreements (like Shareholders agreements) and rituals (like board meetings, monthly updates)

Selection process - there would need to be a healthy and fairly automated deal flow as the tickets are so small.

Marketing - to youngsters will be needed to fill the pipeline and get them excited.

I have no intention of pursuing this right now but I’d be delighted to hear if someone is working on something like it. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com.

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Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash