Pentasity - Let’s Upskill Humanity!

The real problem we are solving is the fact that the top of the funnel in the designing of educational programs currently contains just as much noise as signal. This problem precludes the ability to optimize learning programs and maximize results for students in the shortest amount of time. 

Most of our competitors, I imagine, will be looking at learning PROGRAMS, whereas we believe the focus should be on PRE-LEARNING, PREPARATION AND MEASURING of student’s current standings so that a more optimized program roadmap can be set up.  We do this through a state of the art assessment platform that will measure current cognitive ability, emotional intelligence, and learning agility. We believe this growth mindset optimization can change lives by allowing people to connect their hopes, dreams, passions, and purpose to their talents, skills, traits, ability, and knowledge in order to live their best lives and optimize their financial futures.

The scale of the problem we have identified above is very large and affects the vast majority of the population, but is particularly acute in Latin America and the Caribbean due to the historically large income inequality, structurally corrupt institutions in many cases, and poor educational outcomes that result from these barriers.  We believe that in Latin America and the Caribbean up to 75% of the population may be affected by these issues. 

As a result of the headwinds above, there is little scope for the proper assessment of large swaths of the population and so we are faced with a classic “garbage in, garbage out” phenomena.  When you add this to the pressures to contribute to family incomes from relatively early ages, we end up with a compounding effect on the misallocation of learning resources that we believe is at the core of the educational outcome problem.  We believe that our solution will fix this at the root of problem because by properly assessing a large percentage of the population from relatively young ages AND CONTINUING TO ASSESS THEM INTO ADULTHOOD, the quality of the data gets progressively larger and allows for a cost-effective and optimized steady state solution.

Our platform is being designed to work with anyone over the age of 18, in order to first understand who they are from the inside out.  By performing the equivalent of an “MRI for the heart and mind,” we are in a position to understand cognitive ability, emotional maturity and bandwidth, leadership and learning agility, personality and behavior optimization (5 dimensions), and the way in which everyone connects to their own humanity and the humanity of others.  By arriving at this baseline, we will then introduce the clients to a potentially life changing resource in the form of a talent advocate, someone who will then learn firsthand about the hopes, dreams, passions, core values of these clients.  By then creating a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, we hope to inspire people to become the best version of themselves. 

Once this decision is made to engage in self-improvement as a path to self-actualization, we believe the stage is set for the learning dynamics to kick in and optimize the learning outcomes as a result by generating the learning program that will allow some or all of the above to be realized in the shortest amount of time.

We believe our solution is the most holistic that has been created so far to attack the very multi-pronged problem of poor learning outcomes from people who haven’t developed the core skills that are necessary for success in the 21st century.  We agree with Alvin Toffler who once said that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn!” 

Therefore the concept of lifelong learning is embedded into our solution, first by starting with the assessment platform outlined in the above answer, and then combining that with a talent advocate that is a human connection that will be there to make sure that the jointly agreed to learning program is maintained and followed, even when the client is feeling as if they are not able to proceed towards success.  In other words, the talent advocate is as much a well-trained Chief Success Officer than anything else.   With a constant give and take between the rich and deep data generated from the assessments and the emotional connection between the clients and the talent advocates, we are confident that this combination platter has a much higher probability of success than the current environment where there is no data to hone in on the best program for self-improvement that can truly identify strengths and challenges from the 5 dimensional prism we have set up on our platform.

We have partnered with the leading assessment providers in the world and connect to them using standard APIs.  Our value-add occurs after the assessments have been taken because we plan on integrating a variety of Artificial Intelligence components into our post-assessment analysis.  We believe that the world of talent management and the software currently available in that area offers a lot of opportunities to customize those available media in a way that allows us to optimize our chances of success in this learning optimization platform that we would develop for the challenge of “learning, unlearning, and relearning.”   We also believe that the world class training that we would provide to our talent advocates in the areas of coaching, negotiation, learning management, talent assessment and optimization and overall mentoring and guidance can have a multiplicatively positive effect on outcomes because of the use of both big (broad sample sets) and thick (deep knowledge within each sampled unit), something that does not exist today.

We believe that the innovation difference between what we are doing and our competitors is substantial for the following reasons:

•  We believe we have resolved the garbage in/garbage out conundrum because our 5 step assessment process delivers both big and thick data, both of which can be used to generate more efficacious learning plans and results in better outcomes over time.

• While the current assessment world is robust today, the big problem is that once the assessment results hit someone’s inbox, the success probability depends ENTIRELY on the client taking affirmative action to engage in a self-study program, something that is difficult with the usually lacking motivation as a first step.  By integrating a mentor, coach, and accountability partner in the form of a talent advocate, we believe we can have transformational improvement in the success of turning assessment into action and action into results.

• Most importantly, we believe that the scalability of this program is substantial because of the fact that every human possesses the same hardware (body), software (mind), and operating system (spirit).  Because our program works to help each of those disparate parts of the human condition, success can be repeatable to others in a relatively short amount of time.  We also believe that the recruitment of talent advocates can be successful because of the rewarding (financially and otherwise) nature of the program in helping make the world a better place.

We believe that the innovative approach above can lead to transformative success.

When we look at what we are doing in a step by step way, we start with the idea that our mission is to improve as many lives as possible, while also creating as many jobs as possible in the talent advocate area.  Our first step is to recruit the talent advocates as they are, by far, the most important part of our process.  To the extent those people are well trained and able to work with a variety of people in their business and personal network, we believe we are able to create a very important network effect and reach a large number of people in a short period of time.  Our assessment platform allows us to create a 3 step process whereby the first step of self-awareness creates the raw data to move into the second step of self-improvement through a variety of channels, especially the combination of big and thick data, in addition to the only human-based motivation, encouragement and accountability platform that will allow clients to create a self-paced and step by step process to move towards the self-actualization that we believe is sorely missing in today’s world

Because our goal is to also improve the financial and material lives of our clients, our final step is to engage in “algorithmic optimization” in order to find employment, business and other opportunities that will allow them to live their best life and connect to their Higher Self.  The cycle plays out again by repeating the process yearly. 

We are currently serving approximately 50 people in an informal way as we have been spending most of our past 18 months in solidifying our strategic partner relationships with the right assessments and the data analysis and integrity parts so that we are able to scale in a meaningful way.  The results we have seen in this “laboratory setting” have been extremely encouraging because we believe our thesis about the hardware, software, and operating system sameness in every human seems to be bearing fruit.  In addition, our choice of assessment partners also is being validated in the results we are seeing in terms of changing people’s understanding of themselves, their abilities, their relationships, and their ability to forge a better path going forward than they achieved in the past.  

 We believe that within one year, we will be able to serve approximately 10,000 to 15,000 clients, depending on how many talent advocates we are able to recruit during this period as we have a target of 100 talent advocates recruited over the next year and each talent advocate serving 100 to 150 individual clients.  Over the next five years we expect that we should be able to achieve 100x growth during that time, such that our ability to serve 1 million to 1.5 million people over that time, we believe, is a reasonable expectation if our success rate in the laboratory continues and we are able to gather momentum from further cooperation with our strategic partner alliances around the region.

Our goals as a company are always the same, which is to impact the maximum number of lives in a positive way.  We firmly believe that all of our other goals are a subset of this overarching corporate, business, and spiritual philosophy.  We are also very confident that our thesis of the optimization of body (hardware), mind (software), and spirit (operating system) is at the leading intellectual edge of trying to solve some of the hardest remaining problems for the human race.  Unfortunately, the global educational and economic system, in general, has been designed as a “dog eat dog” world, where there are many people that get left behind and nobody knows that they are there, ready, willing, and able to advance the cause of human progress, while they build a better life for themselves.

We believe that our assessment platform as a start should allow us to receive so much big and thick data that the educational roadmap has an immediate step function improvement in developing improved outcomes at the bottom of the funnel.  We also believe that our plans to utilize the incredible opportunities that social media presents to tell our story, one success at a time, through our influencer strategy, will allow us to scale at least as rapidly as we talk about in the prior answer, if not at an even more rapid rate; this is because most people are all looking for the same thing, which is to live a healthy, happy and fulfilling life.

Our goals as a company are always the same, which is to impact the maximum number of lives in a positive way.  We firmly believe that all of our other goals are a subset of this overarching corporate, business, and spiritual philosophy.  We are also very confident that our thesis of the optimization of body (hardware), mind (software), and spirit (operating system) is at the leading intellectual edge of trying to solve some of the hardest remaining problems for the human race.  Unfortunately, the global educational and economic system, in general, has been designed as a “dog eat dog” world, where there are many people that get left behind and nobody knows that they are there, ready, willing, and able to advance the cause of human progress, while they build a better life for themselves.

We believe that our assessment platform as a start should allow us to receive so much big and thick data that the educational roadmap has an immediate step function improvement in developing improved outcomes at the bottom of the funnel.  We also believe that our plans to utilize the incredible opportunities that social media presents to tell our story, one success at a time, through our influencer strategy, will allow us to scale at least as rapidly as we talk about in the prior answer, if not at an even more rapid rate; this is because most people are all looking for the same thing, which is to live a healthy, happy and fulfilling life.

As a result of the aforementioned bootstrapping mentality over the past year or even 18 months of our project, we have developed an “all of the above” mentality that we believe will hold us in good stead going forward as we attack our financing needs over the next 1 to 5 years.

Our most important tactic is to get the “cash register ringing” as we are highly confident we have developed a baseline product and service that will meet with market acceptance in the form of discounted pre-sales and social media participation based on our success with our laboratory cases thus far.  Our market research suggests that our value proposition on our assessment platform is far superior to what currently exists by a factor of 2 to 4, in other words, we are offering a 50 to 75% discount per unit of information than currently exists today, in addition to having the most comprehensive platform architecture all in one place. 

With regard to the cultural, data and privacy (legal) barriers, we have a culturally diverse team of people who we will bring into the project from Latin countries that should help us significantly in bridging these cultural divides; our legal, data, and privacy strategy is to partner with strategic partners who will be responsible for housing the majority of the data we may be using and to leverage their experience and expertise in helping us navigate those issues satisfactorily.

This question does not apply 

We are very excited about the potential for our platform and service to expand to Latin America as the market opportunity is measured in billions of dollars while our ability to have a positive human impact is equally large.  This is because the basic education system in Latin America is fairly good already at the primary and high school levels (is this true Gigi) and many Latin Americans are already well educated from a basic knowledge and cognitive standpoint.  The problem in Latin America is that people are not able to use their inherent talents and abilities in a way that optimizes their “life and income opportunities” and our “algorithmic optimization” that results by combining what we think is the world’s best assessment platform with the world’s best motivation, encouragement, and guidance platform (in the form of our human talent advocates) should generate the transformative impact we hope to achieve over time.

Our approach in penetrating the Latin market is the same we will use everywhere, which is to positively impact enough lives that the “organic marketing” that results, when added to our social media and traditional marketing ideas, should allow us to reach our user goals listed above over the next 1 to 5 years.   We also believe that our search for the talent advocates themselves should generate a large swath of potential clients because any candidates that are not hired as talent advocates become candidates to become clients so we have a bifurcated strategy to achieve market penetration.

This question does not apply 

We are currently 5 people that work in various degrees of time commitment but what we have done is create a mission driven culture that we believe can become a core part of who we are as a company.  In addition, these 5 individuals have been very instrumental in creating a core set of values that we have made a part of our business model insofar as we work from a position that by making our core values a part of our business model, the financial and business success will come as an organic part of this process.

As mentioned above, we believe that the most important part of the makeup of our team is the fact that it has been organically created with the mission accomplishment as the primary motivation for all the members of the team.  In addition, we have very carefully curated a balanced approach to our team by incorporating a “Superteams” component to our assessment data analysis and interpretation.  This means that we have incorporated into our algorithm a “diversity and inclusion” matrix that goes far beyond what most people include in that category as we are looking for “diversity of thought” in addition to some of the other categories such as gender, race, etc.  We actually believe the maximum diversity and inclusion comes from this diversity of thought quality, with the other important categories also given consideration in our team’s makeup. 

In terms of skills, our team possesses skills such as business strategy, finance and accounting, business administration, social media marketing, graphic design, programming and coding, in addition to a general knowledge and awareness of their strengths and challenges due to their access to our state of the art assessment platform.

Most importantly, our team possesses a “rainbow coalition” mindset as we have members whose backgrounds include Americans, Germans, and Colombians, in addition to a balance between men and women as we believe gender equity is a goal that will not transform Latin America but also the world as women are given equal access to educational attainment and, most importantly, access to capital.

We are very proud of the strategic partnership arrangements we have developed over the past 2 years and these partnerships currently number around 10.  The majority of these partnerships include some of the world’s best assessment platforms in the areas of Cognition, Personality and Behavior, Emotional Bandwidth/Maturity, Leadership and Learning Agility, and what we call The Human Connection, which is how people engage in self-care and their ability to understand our shared humanity.  We have developed partnerships with these assessment providers that allows us to leverage their many dozens of years of experience in data and privacy, while at the same time having the most valid and reliable assessments on the market today.  In addition, we have been able to negotiate favorable pricing such that our value proposition to the marketplace is a 50 to 75% reduction in the cost per unit of data available on our platform.

In addition, we have also developed partnerships with technology, media, and marketing firms that should allow us to hit the ground running once our assessment platform is completely built out, in addition to other business, legal, accounting and administrative partners that will allow us to scale our operations quickly.

Our business model can be described by the following equation:

Self-awareness plus Self-improvement = Self-actualization + Algorithmic Optimization

We have discussed these above categories in earlier parts of our this application, but here we will describe the value proposition for each.

Our self-awareness and assessment platform, we believe, is the world’s first one stop shopping offering that allows all the 5 dimensions of our “MRI for the soul” to be available at an extremely affordable price.  Due to our wonderful relationships with our assessment partners, we will be able to offer varying packages at about an average 50% discount to current offerings that are available only on an a la carte basis, while also allowing us a roadmap to profitability due to the volume discounts at increasing levels of assessment purchases.

Our talent advocates form another revenue stream as they will help people engage in the self-improvement and learning processes that will lead to better business and job opportunities for people in Latin America.  Here again, we will be able to offer much better pricing for currently comparable services due to our strategic partnerships and concomitant volume discounts.

Finally, in terms of the placement markets, we have an innovative and creative new financing scheme for these services where companies will pay us for each year that employees stay, creating a true partnership between ourselves and our partner employers, hopefully leading to happier workers, managers, and shareholders.  We consider this approach the “Talent Moneyball” approach to placement services.

One of the benefits of having successfully navigated a bootstrapped financing path to get to where we are today is the fact that we have had to compensate for our lack of resources heretofore with increased creativity and resourcefulness.  As a result, we have developed a multi-pronged approach to financial sustainability that includes an “all of the above” mentality.  In addition, because we have a “mission driven culture” we have found people to work with us who are willing to make immediate sacrifices, in the form of lower compensation, and are patient for the rewards to materialize over these next few years.

Most importantly, we have already developed a game plan to raise investment capital from outside sources including “mission driven investors”, grants where applicable, and, most importantly, have developed a viable strategy to “get the cash register ringing” through the actual sale of products and services.  We have developed a business model that has a layered approach to selling our products and services that includes social media, traditional media, and old fashioned knocking on doors through a more “guerrilla marketing” approach that we are confident will achieve success within 3 to 6 months and we firmly believe that this “revenues first” thinking will hold us in good stead as we believe that sales of product and services are the best form of capital raising.

One important side note is that our bootstrapping past has made us very disciplined on EXPENDITURES as another important and positive factor towards sustainable profitability.

We are very excited to be applying for the TPrize Challenge as there are a number of positives that come from this process, win or lose.  We have been able to crystallize our thinking as a result of going through this process and it has brought our team further together as we are seeing a tangible way for our products and services to make an immediate positive impact should we win one of the prizes.

From a tangible standpoint, winning the money will help us somewhat towards the budget we have set above, but the biggest benefit will accrue on the intangible side as we believe our credibility with investors will go up markedly should we win this challenge contest, something that we believe will make a big difference to our future success.  We live in a world where many investors are so busy and time constrained that the smallest of differences between one applicant for venture capital and the next can make the difference between success and failure.  In this regard, having the feather in our cap of winning this challenge could make a meaningful difference to our future. 

Finally, some of the relational aspects of winning the challenge including mentorship, incubation and acceleration, funding sources, and connection with experts will also have a meaningful impact on our future success and so we would be excited to avail ourselves of all those resources should we will this challenge.

This question does not apply 

One of the reasons we have preferred a bootstrapped financing approach up to this point is that we believe it is more important to stick to our values and “mission integrity” than it is to accept the wrong sort of investors into our cap table.  Unfortunately, the venture capital world is rife with situations where the mission is compromised for immediate profits and/or monetization for investors through early sales, etc. and we have been very wary of that situation for us as an early stage company.  As a result, we have developed a criteria of the qualities we are looking for in investment partners and believe winning this challenge will allow us to meet those sorts of partner organizations.  Some of the names of the organizations we love to get an introduction to as a result of winning this challenge include:

Social Capital – venture capital firm run by Chamath Palihapatiya

Richard Branson

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

DBL Partners

More generally, we believe the future of venture capital is sustainable and impact investing where shareholder returns are not the only criteria to measure the success of a company.  We believe that there are essentially 5 major stakeholders including shareholders, workers, the community in which companies operate, humanity in general, and the physical environment/nature and it is our hope that we will have a chance to meet organizations that share our values and beliefs that by looking at the world through that 5 dimensional lens that we create optimized partnerships.