Please start something (company or otherwise) that will make it easy for adults (young and old) to become part of a large, real world social network. One which will help them form good career connections, as well as platonic and romantic relationships. Fraternities create their own unique culture (traditions, handshakes, songs, idioms, etc) to tie people together, so keep that in mind. Please leave hazing out of it too.
Kindly,
Baron
Now, of course, the fraternities can't say that that's why they're exclusive, but yeah, they're exclusive for a reason.
Silicon Valley already does have its version of frats: companies. Alumni networks are the equivalent of a frat; working at Google or Facebook or another big company all have their own culture and opens up a lot of doors when you're job hunting.
At the end of the day, though, it's not a problem tech can solve. It's a people problem.
Ew, no. Work-life balance?
Churches are real-world social networks that are generally easy to join (the degree to which they provide large or strong networls vary considerably, of course.)
There are lots of other examples.
I'm not sure what the opportunity for Silicon Valley is here.
It's actually a thing that I'm a part of!
Check out Vive Church [1], formerly known as C3 Silicon Valley [2]
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/c3-silicon-valley-churc...
-David
(One major issue from the SV side, I think, is that the business models don’t align with the goals. A startup aiming to tackle this problem would probably need to be organized as a cooperative. See “Jungletown” for an example of what happens when community thinking butts up against top-down, profit-driven leadership.)
[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xygykj/my-year-in... [2]: https://www.viceland.com/en_us/show/jungletown
While I don’t want to go into details, the basic idea is to use technology to track and bank reciprocation as well as the problem of in-group identification. I thought it was clever, but it just got added to my ever expanding good idea list :)
Now that I'm done being flippant, there are other things like IVY which purport to be exclusive networks that give you access to events and networks that will help your career and social stature, but at their core any and all of these things will be businesses that will extract as much money as they can from all parts of their client base. Contrast that to a fraternity, which seems much less like a business, at least in the sense that the proprietors are separated from the consumers of the product.
All I'm saying is that SV's motivations in creating something like this may necessarily not provide folks with the same authentic experience that a fraternity would.
A fraternity (and the associated wider friends-of-friends social network) that consists of dozens or even hundreds of people doing favors to each other over the non-frat people, that's still manageable and self-sustainable. However, the world has billions of people. A network of million already is useless, and would leave the market open for another exclusive social club.
I'm only somewhat kidding.
You filter yourself to high value people because they're more likely to be able to afford 10%. You have a sacrifice these people are making, and a reason to help others. If you help some random guy land a job where he's making good money it further your goal of increasing donations to charity.
When frat guys with names like "Baron" claim they have superior social awareness, this is what they mean.
I think Vive Church [1] offers exactly what you're looking for!
-David