FAITH TECH

STEPHEN KIESLING has a virtual dialogue with venture capitalists bent on buying the stairways to heaven.

- STEPHEN KIESLING

WE RECEIVED A VIDEO from a venture capital group raising both awareness and money for what’s called Faith Tech. The video raised more than a few questions about the rapidly changing business of faith. Here are some excerpts:

[Video transcript] Hey, everybody, my name’s Grant Demeter. I’m an investor at the Yard Ventures, which is a Harvard Network Empowered VC fund and part of the Alumni Ventures family of funds. And today I’m gonna be taking you through a deep dive on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s called Faith Tech....

…Many people, when I brought this up, have asked the question of whether this is really an investible space. And I would give kind of a trite answer, which is that religion has been the stickiest and most retentive human institution of all time. Thus, probably the most fundable startup ever…

There are some market studies which define it as a trillion-dollar market based on affiliations to charities or organizations like Chick-fil-A, which have some kind of religious lean to them. But I define it quite conservatively, I think, as a $130 billion market in the US in terms of annual turnover…

Hmm. If Jesus had just had more cash, he could have done… what? Or if the Buddha had been born with less funding, would he still have become enlightened? Is there a right relationship between VC funding and starting a religion? What would it be?