Meet OurPangea’s Co-Founder, Ari Franklin

Ari Franklin, the twenty-four year old Co-Founder of OurPangea has developed a successful track record in the face of adversity.

It’s rare when you meet someone for the first time and feel like you’ve known them forever. It’s something you remember and that leaves you feeling good. Ari Franklin, COO and Co-Founder of OurPangea has that gift.

Ari grew up in Oak Park, IL as the oldest of three and the son of a contemporary artist and a humanities center strategist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. When I first met Ari at Oak Park River Forest High School, I was immediately taken in by his warm smile and humble demeanor. I’ve never met anyone who Ari didn’t get along with.

As a senior in high school, Ari was a member of the Varsity Lacrosse team. One day at practice, he took a shot to the throat, but still managed to make it to the post-practice team BBQ. Despite a raspy voice and some pain, Ari tried to shake it off. When he didn’t feel any better the next morning, he saw a doctor. His doctor explained that the point blank shot had fractured Ari’s trachea and Ari easily could have, and probably should have died in his sleep. He had to have emergency surgery to repair the damage.

Several weeks later while recovering from the procedure Ari had a stroke that nearly killed him a second time. Despite these injuries, Ari stayed with his lacrosse team for the rest of the season, assisting them in every way he could.

After graduation, Ari, like so many other Oak Park graduates that year, made the trip down to Champaign, IL to begin his undergraduate studies. At the University of Illinois, Ari excelled as a young advertising major, taking on duties as the Strategic Thinking Leader and, eventually, the Vice President of the University’s team for the National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC). He also became highly involved in his fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, where he was an active volunteer and served as an officer on a number of committees, including time as the Rush and Social Chairman.

Since graduating with a degree in advertising and as a member of the Sigma Alpha Lambda honors society, Ari has managed to stay involved with his fraternity and flourish as a young professional. He served on the board and as Secretary of the Chicago Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi Alumni Association and has developed an impressive resume that has included stints as an intern at DDB, an Assistant Account Manager at McGarrybowen and as a Project Manager at envisionit media, inc.

When Ari recognized the opportunity to build something new and incredible with OurPangea he didn’t hesitate. Believing fully in the OurPangea mission and working hand-in-hand with co-founder and CEO, Noah Simon, his cousin, Ari has continued to bring excellence, dedication and determination to the OurPangea project. Having overcome great odds and two near-death experiences the young entrepreneur has continued to bring an eternal optimism and fighting spirit to everything he does. Both will serve this young, burgeoning social network for years to come.

Noah Simon, Co-Founder of OurPangea Knows That Hard Work and Some Insight Can Go A Long Way

Some people are fine with being products of their environments, but not Co-Founder, CEO and OurPangea’s perennial wiz kid Noah Simon. The Chicago native and Colorado College Alum has discovered that he will never be satisfied until he has completed the project which he knows has the potential to truly make the world a better place.

Over the past few years, Noah has encountered more than his fair share of challenges, motivation and inspiration. When it came to choosing where to go to school, Noah jumped at the opportunity to move to Colorado. He wanted to take the opportunity to escape the familiar and enjoy all of the natural wonders that Colorado had to offer. He wanted his college experience to equip him for all of life’s challenges, so in addition to climbing, skiing and hiking the snow-capped mountains of Colorado Springs, Noah created his own major: leadership.

While Noah knew that the skills he could take away from his studies would offer him invaluable insight into the world of management and business, he also wanted to learn more about himself and self-expression. The curriculum covered business management and organization, social and cognitive psychology and political science, but he also learned from several experiences as a young entrepreneur.

OurPangea is not Noah’s first scrape with the rough and tumble world of small business. The young businessman admits that OurPangea is actually his fifth attempt to start a business, but he feels more motivated and better equipped to succeed than ever before. As a sophomore, Noah started his own student painting business at the same time he tried to launch an earlier version of OurPangea. Although both failed, he still contends that he has no regrets because of the valuable lessons he learned.

Meeting his birth mother for the first time last summer gave Noah a unique perspective that has stayed with him ever since. This perspective, coupled with the hard learned lessons of his earlier business ventures have given Noah the insight and extra motivation he needed to help OurPangea reach its true potential. Noah has devoted himself to studying and understanding the power of creativity and human emotion and believes that both provide the keys to ushering in a whole new age of human interaction.

Noah believes the time has come for a social network that will help its users reach out and learn more about themselves and the world around them. He wants that social network to be about helping communities grow and better equip their citizens for all of the joys and challenges that life has to offer. Most of all, he wants to unlock the true potential of the internet by creating a place for the sharing of knowledge and ideas that can connect people and groups who may have never had the opportunity to meet otherwise. While some believe that it is the uniqueness of every individual that divides the human race, Noah Simon believes that it is that uniqueness that can unite us and, eventually, help us grow and prosper as a people.

A History of Communities

The world around us dominates our attention. The people we are talking to, the groups we are in, and the communities that provide for us define our reality. But what if we were able to travel back in time to the world that was around us? How would that make us feel? What would it make us think?

I just moved to Austin and I’m loving it here. I also just graduated from college and I loved it there too. I am here now and where I am is defining my current reality. What options I have, what places I’ll go, and to a degree what my future looks like. But what if I could go back in time and see what college was like while I was there? What if I could look up old friends by going back to the club we were in while we were both there? It wouldn’t just invoke memories, it would be the memory.

What if I could go farther? What if I could go back and see what my father’s life was like when he was in college? Would he be happy I could find that out? 

How about even farther? What if I could go back and see what life was like in colonial America? In tribal Africa? What if I had access to all of these communities, preserved through time? What would historians learn from these? What would I learn from these? Would I start to see how throughout all of humanity we have always valued the same things? That we have all fought to survive, love, and belong? Can you imagine if that was common knowledge?

Over time this is what OurPangea will do. It will allow us to travel back in time to places we used to be. To old conversations with old friends. And it will allow us to go even further, as far back as we put our history in it. Starting now, we’ll record our history and as much as we can we will fill in what’s happened. And not just our history, but all of history. On OurPangea we’ll be able to see not just our father’s past, but the past of someone on the opposite side of the world’s past.

With OurPangea, the world is a little smaller.

The Why In Community

For the longest time community was all we had. It was vital to survival. Over time we forged civilizations to support us, but our community roots never left, they adapted. Today, in the fast paced modern world a sense of community is as important as ever. We seek it out in the area surrounding us and we seek it out online. When we seek community online and offline we gain a sense of belonging from what we find. If only the two were more closely intertwined. 

What if I could use the Internet to find the communities around me? What if the communities around me were also online?

I can use Google.com if I know exactly what I am looking for, and even then it won’t drum up communities as readily as I’d like.

I can use Facebook.com to get in contact with the people I already know.

I can use Meetup.com to find a few events in my area or any other event site for that matter.

But there is nothing I can use to discover the communities around me and actually participate and feel welcome in them. The Internet remains its own place. There are some forum communities on the Internet but I can’t easily use these to meet new people in my area. The ability to find local communities is missing on the web, and inversely, real life communities don’t use the web to bridge the period of time the people are away.

If we created a place on the web to replicate the communities you’re a part of we’ll create a place where other people can go to find you, and where you can go to find them. We need to do a better job of using the web to create and aid communities. We need OurPangea.