An Introduction to OurPangea Part 4 of 4

How Can OurPangea Impact Your Life?

More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness…do not despair… you the people have the power to create happiness, to make this life a wonderful adventure.  Let us use that power to unite.  Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and age a security.

-The Great Dictator, 1940

While OurPangea might have begun for all of us as blind ambition and a desire to make the way we use the Internet better, it has changed into something more significant for myself, Noah, Rick, and our entire team.

In an environment where the idea of a Facebook collapse sounds more than hypothetical and we seem to be closing in on the next great iteration of online change, this might sound counter-intuitive:  OurPangea is not about Facebook.  It is not about Google+, Pinterest or online advertising.  OurPangea is not even only about online networking.  It’s about using the tools we have to improve the world.

OurPangea is about bringing everyone together in one place where we can comfortably and easily share our unique opinions, perspectives and ideas and see how that influences our communities.  It’s about facilitating introductions for powerful collaboration.

I can understand if everything we’ve written sounds naïve and deluded. But this is something I have come to personally believe in strongly and if you’ve met me I hope you agree.   From a more personal perspective, moving around so often isn’t easy.  It’s hard to establish an identify in a new place and even harder when you’re couch-surfing without a home base. There are many times I thought to myself how much easier it would all be if I had a place like OurPangea to understand the people and environment around me without having to literally walk around the city.  It would have made meeting people, finding activities to get involved in, and staying connected to my friends back home quick and painless.

One of the most inspiring speeches I have ever heard was delivered in The Great Dictator.  It inspired me to realize that our dream of unity is not a new one. 70 years ago there were people who believed it.  We are still striving to realize it, and now we have the Internet to focus that dream.  We finally have this great and powerful machine that we can build OurPangea on to create an environment where we can all collaborate and discover why we are important to each other, we finally have the power to realize this dream.

For us it’s no longer a company mission constrained to a company, it is a personal mission.  And we believe in all of us together.

A Project and A Mission. A Personal Perspective On OurPangea

The two ways I look at OurPangea are as a project and a mission. As a project this is the most invigorating venture I could have taken on. And at 23 why not aim big? Every aspect of this company has to be designed and then built. When I was a kid I played with Legos more than I should have because I liked building things I designed. Now, I have a chance to build a company and I intend to make the most of it. The second, and quite frankly, more intriguing drive comes from what OurPangea represents as a mission. If you have a chance to build a company, why not build it to do something good?

Building the company is fun, but that’s my selfish motivation. What really pushes me is what this company might do. All aspects of this company have been designed around the sole purpose of creating a new medium to understand the world. The idea is that we all can benefit from being able to better understand the world around us. After graduating college I’ve lived in two cities over the past year. I’ve had a chance to appreciate how unknown the world around us is. When we’re in school there is a bubble community you have automatic access to. When we’re alone in the world, the game is quite different. It takes work to find friends you want to keep around, the people who are interested in doing the things you like to do, or even finding a last minute event on a Saturday. And the most basic limitation, you don’t really know where to start. These are all familiar issues we encounter and OurPangea is designed to solve them; once we do that, this only gets more interesting.

It’s one thing to not know what’s going on around you or who’s there, it’s another thing to realize how difficult it is to understand what it all means. What does living in Colorado Springs mean? What is the world like as a community member there? Is it any different than living in Austin? Chicago? You bet it is. It’s the diversity of culture, something we all experience on one level or another and it’s something that has been nearly imperceptible for the longest time. This lack of understanding is the fundamental issue OurPangea will solve.

For each of us using OurPangea we’ll benefit from getting to know the world around us, not just the world we’re familiar with. We’ll be able to join in and really connect with people we may never have met, and when we do we’ll feel like we’re a part of something. As we use the site, as we explore the different cities we’ll start to see what living in one place means to us, and to the people living there. We’ll start to understand what culture means and what it is. We’ll be able to see how similar our life is to everyone else’s, but also how different. And in the end, when everyone starts to see there is more to life than just themselves, we’ll have laid the foundation humanity needs to unite.

So it’s not just a lofty goal, it’s a lofty goal we can work towards. In the end, as much as I like building a company, what’s more important is building this idea. I want OurPangea to be the monument that reminds us how human we all are. I want to see how our similarities untie us, and then realize it’s the differences that make us special.