Josh Mendelsohn is a founder and fund principal at Hattery. A veteran of a number of Silicon Valley companies, Josh’s career has been largely focused on helping startups and nonprofits scale to support growing customer and user bases. Josh enjoys building things that work, whether they be companies or organizations, or stuff that requires superglue.Josh has previously been Director of Business Operations at tunein, a best selling mobile music application. He also led Colligy, an innovative project in which machine learning and linguistic algorithms were used to derive relationships among seemingly disparate news content. Josh started his career with the Federal Government at the Department of the Treasury and Department of Defense. Has been Program Manager at Google for six years and has an A.B. in Government from Harvard University.
Josh’s defintion of Social has to do with “pushing humanity forward”. He believes that technology and invention can do so and change the world. Technology first of all because it helps people interact in a whole new different way; it makes the world a more universal place and when he thinks of what changes the world, it’s how you bring people together. Invention is another key factor for him, because when you invent something new you are helping everybody and you can have political change come from creation. He does not distinguish between companies, charities and social enterprises and believes they all have a potential for social impact. Ultimately Josh says that “Every company should really have a thought of what social means for them and how they are part of this global network of people.”
I do agree that when technology is used to bring people together, change becomes possible. If I think of the great leaders we have had (such as Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela) their leadership and achievements have been all about creating change by uniting people. I often think how difficult it was for them to do so without the opportunities that technology gives us now-a-days as well as the empowerment the internet has given us and the potential that anyone, anywhere in the world, has today, to change the world.