Living in current times is not easy. Everyday, everyone is buried with events, information, changes. It makes life so much more difficult than the 50s of the last era. Only difficult? Or also more interesting?

Who can tell. I think that the ability to adapt to new circumstances determines how you feel and function in nowadays society.

What worries me is the inequality. In how people can contribute or profit from innovative ideas. Or the pace in which we develop our society, where basic services are on a stand still. Even in The Netherlands, where I live and which is one of the richest countries in the world, you see a growing gap between needs and supply, and between availability and affordability.

It worries me, it worries us at Walnut. We see beautiful things happen, we see a community growing towards a new kind of ecosystem. Blockchain technology is one example of it. It creates an enormous potential of community (crowd) driven initiatives. It also raises a lot of questions. Regulation, misuse, they are all issues. But, is misuse and criminality not of all times?

Use ICO for good reasons

Sure, we need to set a number of ground rules and punish perpetrators hard. But, most of all, we should work and encourage initiatives that provide solutions for long lasting obvious problems that in the traditional way of thinking are not solved

From the thoughts above, the desire arose to found Walnut Ventures. We want to contribute our two cents to society.

Sustainability and kids

The last couple of years we spent our time in childcare. As parents we are confronted with the standstill in education and school systems and the growing gap between the needs of children and the supply. We see the challenges in family life and the impotence in these families to make changes.

Kids will develop the community in an even faster pace than we are experiencing right now. That is great, but it will lead to more inequality if not every child has the same fundament. This foundation is build in the family, which is the cornerstone of society as we say. This makes it extremely important to do as a community to do whatever it takes to provide equal opportunities for families.

These thoughts lead to our mission: Support families in the challenges of nowadays life.

We want to support families in the challenges of nowadays life.​

We like to do so by realising high quality care and education facilities, working together and sharing information so efficiency and synergetic effects lower the costs. In our vision we support the family from family planning to adulthood.

We are calling this project Generations. In theory, when the children grow up, they use our services again for their own families.

I like to think that by realising our Generations project, we contribute to the community by building on the fundaments of future developments. We broaden the future base of progress.

Thinking about this we stumbled on a number of issues: How do you realise this? On wat scale? Will you built things from the ground up or acquire the necessary knowledge and companies? How do you connect all?

We came to the conclusion that the best solution is to acquire companies that offer the necessary services and knowledge. These companies will all have their own cliënt base, turnover and profit. The companies are bought by a fund, for example ‘Generations Fund’. The fund will control and manage and provides the connecting layer to connect all specialisms so families can use them without barriers.

Families pay for this from health insurance, tax facilities and income for the services. But what if a family cannot afford one or more services? We believe we have to facilitate them anyway.

Funding family needs

From these assumptions we started working to realise an investment fund, to make our vision reality. It will start from The Netherlands and if proven successful expand to other European countries.

We calculate a fund size of €100 million. Most of the funds are used to acquire the companies that provide the expertise. Services that can’t be bought can be funded as startups. A small part will be used to built a platform to connect all and make sure that information is shared, secured and given once. Also, we will reserve part of the fund to ensure that everyone can use our facilities.

How should a fund like this work? I have studied a lot of traditional funds. Basically, they run an investment round to collect the requested amounts. They have investment committees to approve of suggested transactions and supply investment updates and (semi) annual supports.

I think it should work differently. I believe a contributor to a fund should have actual data and a vote in investments. That is why we at Walnut work on a fund that allows the contributors to the fund to vote over investment proposals and over contributions to families. Based on the analysis provided.

Fund spendings as well as (financial) performance from the subsidiaries are presented monthly. I believe in this way it works as a community project, not only in funding but also in efforts and knowledge.

I am curious about you thoughts. If this blog opens a discussion, it will give me (us) the opportunity to learn and finetune our plans. So please do see this as an invitation to react.