Thanks to Amber Ghaddar for introducing Bridget Greenwood to GenieShares! Bridget runs The Bigger Pie promoting and highlighting the role of women in emerging tech, especially DLT/blockchain and crypto, where currently only 10% of roles are held by women.

Bridget told me about several of the key needs of female entrepreneurs and challenged me on whether and how GenieShares can help #womeninblockchain and #womenintech. I believe that we already provide these benefits, and would love to ask community members to comment on how we can improve the value of being a Genie for women (and for men too, highlighting if there are areas of different need).

Facilitated networking
Entrepreneurship can be lonely. GenieShares collects a group of people who have one thing in common - that they've agreed to share some of their success beyond their existing network. This common commitment is a form of "pay it forward" which is a characteristic of all GenieShares Genies and mentors, so collaboration and help among members of the community is common and increasing.

Traditionally, according to research by Ronald S Burt, women have suffered networking disadvantages as their networks "shape" reveal a higher level of closure and a lower level of brokerage than men. GenieShares is explicitly designed to increase both brokerage and closure for participating entrepreneurs.

Personally, my greatest pleasure from the growth of GenieShares so far has been seeing so many people I admire finding that they can collaborate and help each other out along the way! Part of my role is to help entrepreneurs ensure they're getting the most from the networking opportunities that they can create through GenieShares (see below).

Access to elite mentors
Over the last few months we've expanded the GenieShares community to welcome aboard an increasingly varied group of mentors. Many have expertise in specialist fields like law and tech, and others are business development and strategy experts. We're incredibly fortunate to have this growing mentor group, and I find that mentors are especially motivated to help entrepreneurs who have taken the GenieShares pledge to help others gain from growth - so recruiting top level mentors is a big part of our plans going into 2021!

Investor days
Access to capital is skewed on grounds of gender with less than 5% of early stage equity investment going to women-led businesses. There are already some investors among the mentors of GenieShares and we will continue to invite more investors to join the community. We are also talking to various investors about the benefit to them and their portfolio of investing in companies that are actively engaged in their communities, pointing to the dramatic sales growth (10x) in the first year following Peter Kelly 's trailblazing pledge.

Mastermind groups with peers
As the GenieShares network grows we will be able to do more in this direction. We already have specialist mentors who can and do convene ad hoc groups, and I will be pleased to work with anyone who would like to create mastermind or special interest groups to address particular issues.

Introductory coaching with me
I'm always keen to engage directly with new Genies and to help them form a plan for how to gain the most from their pledge. I will happily pledge a one-to-one session with each Genie to talk through how to use the pledge in marketing and business development, investor relations and in network development with other stakeholders including regulators and policymakers.

Having studied effective networking for over 10 years and having build and sold a fintech business I'm delighted to share what help I can, and also to make suggestions and introductions to other members of the community to make new Genies, mentors, sponsors and friends welcome here!

Amber Ghaddar is the first Genie to spread her magic beyond the UK, and we need help to find the best way to find her next shareholder.

Please share your thoughts and creative suggestions about how Amber's search for her new co-owner can to the most to highlight the challenges of reconstruction in Beirut, and invite into this discussion anyone and everyone who you would like to be involved!

Following the GenieShares meetup call this afternoon, this space is for healthcare innovation discussions. Please join  Kiran Bhagotra   Amber Ghaddar and  Marquesa Finch if you are involved in healthcare innovation, procurement, regulation etc. May be of interest  Antony Thompson   David Mclean   Sean The EQ Commando   Asim Amin . 

Get a personal video message from Michael James Scott

Michael James Scott is on Hidols and you can get a personalised video message from them and a range of other famous celebrities. Great gifts as birthday greetings.

https://www.hidols.com/h/michael-james-scott

Michael James Scott plays the Genie in Disney's Aladdin on Broadway and in the West End - and thanks to mentor @ Paul Novelle he is also available for cameo roles via Hidols.

So we need to produce two short (ideally 3 sentences or less) scripts to ask Michael to perform for us to use as calls-to-action for

It's time to get creative! Please share your thoughts in comments here and ask your most creative friends to offer theirs too. Likes will count as votes and the most successful will be awarded a suitable prize!

GenieShares is built on some insights from research done by Peter Tufano, the Dean of Saïd Business School in Oxford. When he was a professor at Harvard Business School in the 2000s, he wrote a paper on Prize Linked Savings which you can find at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1120382

I've written about this and other influences including Thomas Piketty and Larry Fink at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sharing-magic-ownership-ben-brabyn/

GenieShares can use the same halo effects that Tufano describes at work in prize-linked-savings to amplify the reach of their gift and increase the sociodemographic breadth of interest in investing and equity as prize-linked-savings increase the breadth of appeal of saving.

I think it's also interesting to compare the story of the unknown warrior who represented the lost sons, husbands and brothers of a generation and whose identity was deliberately kept unknown so that each and every bereaved family in a grieving nation could imagine that he was their loved one.

With millions of pounds worth of shares pledged through GenieShares there is real potential to change people's lives. But what ways would you encourage entrepreneurs to share their shares? We're looking for a wide range of views, ideas, recommendations - and nominations, so please share your ideas and invite your friends to do so too. What do you think Piers Birmingham Elizabeth Barber Matthew Honeyman Dan Hofton Anders Mahesan Charlotte Chou ? 

In these early days of the GenieShares community, the role of "mentor" is still to be shaped, so I'm delighted that we've got some wonderful people aboard who are going to set the path and tone ahead!

Please do make yourselves at home here and there will shortly be an opportunity to create a profile page to set out your stall. I'm also looking forward to introducing  Nee-Joo Teh to discuss how GenieShares mentors can engage with the Knowledge Transfer Network and beyond. But in the meantime please do start to spread some magic among the genies already here, and among each other as mentors, sharing your expertise as far as you can!

Asif Faruque   Ravinol Chambers   Stephen Roberts   David Schluter   Ben Bradshaw   Tom McCallum   Ollie   Adrian Wong   Tram Anh Nguyen   Huy Nguyen Trieu  

When I read  Ravinol Chambers ' article at https://www.beinspiredfilms.co.uk/ideas/3-reasons-why-its-time-to-move-beyond-the-hero-in-storytelling it resonated for me as it helps us avoid the danger of being patronising and perpetuating a them-and-us story about entrepreneurs and citizens.

By presenting the warts-and-all risk-taking and vulnerability of the entrepreneurial experience and showing that success is sought with ambition but not certainty, and above all by inviting people to share their views about how equity should be distributed (see and comment at https://community.genieshares.com/c/finding-a-genie) we can mitigate the risk of presenting an exclusive caste.

I've already enjoyed discussing this with Matt Jonns David Schluter Charles Radclyffe Tom McCallum Peter Kelly   Jos Henson Gric  among others - please keep this debate live as we cannot be complacent about it.

New community member and entrepreneur  Matt Jonns joined the weekly call this week and heard from  Charles Radclyffe and  Jos Henson Grič on their motivations for becoming genies. As founder of Ucreate, Matt is potentially a development partner for anyone needing tech development assistance. And he might become a genie himself...

Jiahui Li   Kiran Bhagotra   Adam Grainger   Sean The EQ Commando   David Mclean  do you have any brief comments on your experience on being genies that might help Matt figure out if this is magic or madness?