Benjamin Franklin Meets the Blockchain

The plain truth is that we have got to stop selling weapons of war to random civilians. The Plain View In 1727, 21-year-old Benjamin Franklin invited, as he put it, “my most ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement.” He dubbed his new club the Junto, after the Spanish word for “join.” On Friday evenings Franklin and the dozen Junto members would meet in a Philadelphia tavern to discuss topics of morals, politics, or national philosophy, conducting debates “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth … without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” Almost 300 years later, I Zoomed into a study group inspired by Franklin’s colloquies. Sober long views like these might be the defining characteristic of South Park Commons, an ambitious incubator program that, for seven years, has been running this ongoing seminar and many others like it, including fireside chats with tech luminaries, panel discussions, and demo days. In 2015, after taking a breather, Sanghvi recognized a void in the high-octane startup world—a safe haven for talented tech entrepreneurs to acquire deeper knowledge and domain expertise as they contemplated their next company. They looked to the Junto alehouse sessions as one of their models, as well as Franklin’s admonition that “great haste makes waste.” Other incubators take founders from zero to 60 in no time.