NOTE: This event is cancelled.

Because the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is part of the University of Chicago, and for the safety of our community and visitors, we have decided to follow the University’s guidance regarding large-scale events and are now cancelling this event. The health and safety of everyone in our community is our highest priority and we appreciate your support and understanding during this time. We encourage you to visit the University of Chicago’s informational website (coronavirusupdates.uchicago.edu) on COVID-19 or to send an email to the University’s master COVID-19 email account (coronavirusinfo@uchicago.edu) if you have any specific questions or would like the most up-to-date University information on COVID-19. We encourage you to access those resources, especially as it relates to events, planned travel, and other relevant updates.

Yancey Strickler is a writer and entrepreneur. He is the cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter and author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. He is also the creator of Bentoism, a new tool that expands how we see the world and changes how we make decisions in our personal lives and organizations. Weaving stories from his time at Kickstarter with research from his book, which the Wall Street Journal called a “mix of internal corporate reform and consciousness-raising,” this talk will change the way people and organizations see the world and their futures. 

This Could Be Our Future is about how we created a society so focused on financial profit, and how we change course. The answer isn’t to get rid of money; it’s to expand our concept of value. By assigning rational value to other values besides money–things like community, purpose, and sustainability–we can refocus our energies to build a society that’s generous, fair, and ready for the future. By recalibrating our definition of value, a world of scarcity can become a world of abundance. Hopeful but firmly grounded, full of concrete solutions, and bursting with creativity, Yancey dissects the world we live in and shows us a road map to the world we are capable of making.