Our Mission: We help entrepreneurs and innovators building Transformative Tech find feedback, funding, and friends. We believe that the Future of Work, Society, and Tech depends on the state of the human mind. Humanity needs tech that can support mental health, emotional wellbeing, and human flourishing so that the future can be truly human and humane. From mental and emotional health, to happiness, emotional intelligence, and enhancing cognition, we support entrepreneurs and innovators who are building the tech we really need.
Here are just a few reviews from TTA 2018 participants:
“When this opportunity presents itself to you, don’t wait. Apply immediately and prepare for one of the best professional experiences of your life!”
“Thanks for enabling pre-seed/seed entrepreneurs access to this information and resources where it’s needed most.”
“TTA gave us unprecedented access to global thought leaders, investors, founder stories, and led us on a path of discovery about putting our products in a narrative the user will understand.”
“The quality of the speakers was outstanding and the format makes it easy to fit in to a very busy founder schedule.”
“This program has helped me get in front of the right mentors in my field and with invaluable knowledge I am able to be a part of this wonderful community making a difference in this world.”
Learn fast, differentiate, and cover new ground
You create what you are, so evolve always.
Network with investors and experienced entrepreneurs.
Join a robust group of innovators and entrepreneurs
Content – Each year we identify topics, opportunities, and problems unique to Transformative Tech companies and bring in experts, founders, and companies whose experience can help you. We intentionally do not replicate the outstanding general content you can find with YC or other online programs or repeat speakers. You’ll find these resources in our Recommended Content and have the option to dig in for Extra Credit.
Challenges – You can participate in 1 of 4 Challenges: Mental Health, Compassion, Emotional Wellness, or Human Enhancement. Challenge winners will be able to meet with experts, advisors, and investors around starting their Challenge company. We’ll help you find others in the TTA to take on the Challenge with and frameworks to explore it over the 4 weeks together.
Investor Office Hours – Listen in as experienced investors hear TTA participant pitches and give feedback. This is a unique opportunity to learn what really goes on. Apply to pitch your company.
Founder Growth and Development – We believe that you build what you are, and so your continued growth and development is essential. As such we require you participate in growth sessions for you to discover, deepend, or refine your values, beliefs, and motivations.
Greater Founder Participation and Connection – In our second year, we’re going to give you better and easier ways to share your projects and connect with one another. Specifically, we’ll use Challenges, Open Pitching Sessions you can apply to, and Founder/Opportunity Dating Tools so you can find each other to collaborate.
We are the only global program within the tech vectors of human possibility dedicated to advancing your company, skillsets, and personal transformation.
Past speakers at our events have included investors like Bo Shao (who announced his Consciousness Accelerator on our stage), neuroscientists like Dr. Adam Gazzaley (whose company is getting FDA approval for digital medicine to treat attention network brain conditions), business leaders like Ivy Ross (head of hardware for Google), psychologists like Dr. Zoren Josipovic (a leading researcher on consciousness at NYU), and more. Join the Academy, a community that can help you succeed. See our past speakers at www.ttconf.org.
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The short answer is that the TTA exists to accelerate the entire space of transformative technologies with a focus on startup entrepreneurship.
The longer answer is that to do so, we believe we need to galvanize every possible stakeholder, whether they be an entrepreneur, researcher, industry leader, investor, community organizer, or just members of the general public. We then designed a program that would benefit each one in turn -- most obviously business mentorship for the entrepreneurs who are the main catalysts for change, but also the researchers who can find an audience for their ideas and channels for their work, industry leaders looking to innovate and integrate new solutions, investors who can learn and find the densest talent pool for deploying capital, community organizers who can grow their reach, and anyone and everyone who is interested in technology for wellbeing and joy.
You can see the faces of the TTA behind our Team page, but we are experienced executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and academics from all over the world. We are here because we are passionate about helping you succeed.
The Global TT Landscape Report is a work in progress. We will be using the data we collect from TTA and TTC applicants and attendees as well as our own research and putting together a comprehensive report on the state of transformative technologies, globally. Our goal is to be able to display and analyze data on the problems people are tackling, how they’re tackling them, what is going well, and what could be going better for them. We hope to uncover the opportunities for entrepreneurs in the space through answering the questions, what still needs to be built? What is working? What is not? Of course, in the process, we are also looking to build a directory of everyone involved, so that aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators can most quickly identify potential collaborators and partners.
Our mission at TTA is to connect and help the global community of entrepreneurs, innovators, leaders, investors, and community organizers focused on emotional wellbeing. Our goal is to accelerate the sector's development by mentoring entrepreneurs, connecting them to investors and each other, and to complete a global mapping of the state of the industry as well as a who's who of everyone involved. Only by connecting and uniting can we initiate real, sweeping change.
It's always a good time to work on human flourishing. We felt that while physical wellbeing movement its well under way -- not enough had been done to address the emotional aspects. We chose to begin the first cohort this year because we were beginning to see a global movement where humans everywhere were ready to begin the journey to wellness. And we were right. As of the time of this writing, we have applicants from 50 countries around the world representing every single continent! That's one quarter of the world's countries having entrepreneurs and innovators devoting their time and resources to increasing mental health and human joy!
Founders are a core component of the change engine that needs to exist if we are to build a world of increased wellbeing. And to effect change on a global level, we will need as many entrepreneurs as possible, which is why we created the TTA. In addition, we have devoted a portion of the program to self-discovery and personal development, which we believe will help founders with the inevitable difficult decisions they will have to make. We believe this portion of the program is invaluable for everyone -- but especially for founders working on transformative technologies. We want to help them in their own personal transformation.
We want to see a world where exponentially technologies are used to increase humanity's wellbeing. The more the entrepreneurial, investment, media communities as well as greater public gets involved, the more chance we will have of building a measurably happier, joyous and well society.
It is completely free. Free to apply, and free to attend, should you be admitted! We will never ask you for any payment, for anything!
NO. The program is completely free, and we do not charge for anything, in any form.
We know! We can’t believe it either! We were lucky to get the financial support of a few key sponsors (you can see them on the bottom of our homepage), but mostly, we depend on the goodwill and volunteer support of our network of leaders and experts. You have them to thank for this amazing opportunity!
The Entrepreneur Track is the most rigorous and intended for founders or founding teams who are already working on a project full time and have launched a prototype in the Transformative Technology area. Entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to participate in mentors open office hours. In addition, select Entrepreneur Track participants will have the opportunity to get live feedback during Investor Office Hours. Finally, the best performing teams will be invited to pitch at the Transformative Technology Conference (TTC) in Palo Alto, California, Nov. 9-10, 2018.
The Innovator Track is for folks who have not yet started or are still very early in their entrepreneurial journey. There are some teams who are not yet full time, and others who are full time but still pre-prototype.
No official mentorship will be offered by the TTA for the Innovator or Leader Tracks. However, we will create opportunities for everyone to meet each other virtually through our community. All speaker sessions are open to everyone regardless of Track. The Personal Development Program is required for all participants.
We totally understand! Most of you are here to build a business and use TT to impact the world, and that takes a lot of time! We have designed the program so that everything is specific to transformative technologies, so we think you should find everything directly relevant. Aside from attending the required sessions for your track, there is minimal outside “work.” Everyone has a weekly assignment, but it is designed to take you about 10-20 minutes to complete.
The speakers are industry - leading entrepreneurs, investors, and scientists. They will either talk about their personal journey, their learnings, best practices or latest research. Sessions will be split into presentation / interview mode and audience Q&A mode. If you are unable to join live, you can send the TTA team your questions in advance. We will announcing final speakers in the next few weeks!
The mentors are volunteers and a mixture of entrepreneurs, investors, and product or operations leaders. All of them have prior mentoring experience.
The Personal Development Program (PDP) is developed especially for the TTA by Evolution, a premier leadership coaching and advisory partnership for startup executives worldwide. Evolution is one of our main sponsors and we jumped at the opportunity to work with them to bring high-quality personal development to the TTA community. We firmly believe that “you build what you are,” and especially in the field of transformative technology, a personal transformation is just the beginning. As far as we know, we are unique in having this part of the curriculum be featured so prominently!
Only participants who complete all of the assignments and attend the minimum number of sessions will be awarded a Certificate of Completion from TTA.
All participants will need to attend at least one speaker session per week, as well as complete the Personal Development Program. You may attend live or watch the recordings. In addition, all Entrepreneur Track participants will also be required to attend the weekly investor office hour as well as group mentorship sessions. Group mentorship sessions must be attended live. No absences will be tolerated, although in the case of teams, not everyone has to attend each session. Investor office hours may be watched afterwards instead of attended live, unless you are one of the teams chosen to present.
Unfortunately, full English proficiency is required for the Entrepreneur Track since a core component is the weekly synchronous group mentoring session. For the other tracks, you should still have a good listening comprehension of English, as we will not be able to provide translation services.
Yes! As of early July, we already have applicants from over 50 countries and 250 cities. We are looking to create a truly global community and everyone is invited to participate!
The time for group mentorship will be unique to each group. We ask everyone be as flexible as possible, given the difficulties of arranging a mutually agreeable time for a group of people!. The time zone of the speaker sessions and investor office hours will take place in a time convenient for the speaker or investor. If you cannot join live, no problem! We will be recording everything and it will be available for you to watch online.
Yes, we are aiming for a good chunk of Q&A time with each speaker. If you are joining live, you are invited to ask questions. If you are unable to join live, you may submit questions in advance to the TTA team and we will try to get as many answered as possible. The only constraint is time!
It is up to each speaker individually if they are open to being contacted one-on-one. Many of them are extremely busy and may not have the bandwidth to do so. We only guarantee their availability during the session that they are signed up for.
No worries! We know how exciting it is to finally know there’s a community for everyone in the space. We will be creating opportunities for you to get to know each other. There will be an official Slack channel and other tools to facilitate communication.
The TTA team has an Admissions Committee. Each application is carefully reviewed and a majority of votes needed for each decision.
You are always free to e-mail us with your questions or concerns, and we are happy to review your application for any errors that you feel we have made.
