FOR THE ONE WHO PLANTS ECOSYSTEMS

You left the firm that defined design thinking—

to define something the world had never named.

Fourteen years. Hundreds of ventures. A thesis that says business itself can be redemptive. And still—the question that kept you up: what happens when the most powerful technology in history arrives without a redemptive imagination?

THE ORIGIN

Babson. Then IDEO.

You studied entrepreneurship at Babson College—the school that teaches you business is a verb, not a noun. Then you went to IDEO, the firm that invented human-centered design. Principal Designer. You could have stayed forever.

But something was missing. The designs were elegant. The clients were Fortune 500. The work won awards. And none of it answered the question you couldn’t shake: what is all this excellence for?

You founded two companies in music and technology.

Then Northwestern—MBA and Master of Engineering Management at Kellogg. Not because you needed another credential. Because you needed the language to build what didn’t exist yet.

What you were reaching for had no name. No accelerator. No community. No thesis document. You would have to build all of it from scratch.

The wound wasn’t failure.

It was watching excellent people build meaningless things—and watching faithful people build mediocre ones.

The world said: “Pick one. Excellence or faith. Scale or soul. Impact or integrity.” You refused. And the refusal became Praxis.

✦ THE FOUNDING

You and Josh Kwan built the seedbed.

Around 2010, in New York City, Praxis was born—not as a fund, not as an incubator, but as an ecosystem. A venture-building community advancing what you named redemptive entrepreneurship: building creative restoration through sacrifice into the world through our vocations and organizations.

That definition didn’t come from a committee. It came from the tension you’d lived—the IDEO years that taught you excellence, the faith that demanded purpose, the conviction that the two must never be separated.

PALO ALTO, CIRCA 2007

The studio smelled like marker ink and foam core. You were presenting to a Fortune 100 client—the kind of engagement IDEO charges seven figures for. The prototype was beautiful. The insights were sharp. The client was delighted.

You walked out into the California sun and felt it: the hollow hum of work that would not outlast the fiscal quarter. You were Principal Designer at the firm that invented human-centered design. And you were asking a question no one in that building was equipped to answer:

“What if the center isn’t humans at all? What if the center is the One who made them?”

You didn’t just leave IDEO.

You left the assumption that design ends at the user.

THE PLAYBOOK

Redemptive Entrepreneurship—the principles you codified

▸

Creative Restoration

Not just fixing what’s broken. Creating something new that restores the original design. Every Praxis venture is measured against this.

▸

Through Sacrifice

Redemption costs. It always costs. Praxis founders know this: the long game requires things the VC-backed sprinters will never pay.

▸

Into the World

Not into the church. Not into the Christian subculture. Into the world—where culture is actually made. 120 cities. Every industry. Culture-making, not culture-warring.

▸

Through Our Vocations

This is not extracurricular ministry. This IS the ministry. The business is the vehicle. The market is the mission field. Monday is as sacred as Sunday.

Both/And.

Excellent AND faithful. Profitable AND redemptive. Innovative AND humble. Sacrificial AND sustainable. This is your contribution to the world: you proved it was never either/or. You proved it with 261 ventures, $779 million in revenue, and a 92% survival rate that makes Silicon Valley look reckless.

THE COLLABORATORS

Andy Crouch—your Partner for Theology and Culture—brought the intellectual architecture. Culture Making, published 2008, gave the movement its philosophical backbone: we are called to create, not merely critique. Not to retreat from culture, not to consume it, not to condemn it. To make it.

Mark Sears brought the technical bridge. Sprout AI Studio, operating inside the Praxis orbit, building AI tools with redemptive intent—the first practitioner to pick up the thesis and build.

And Josh Kwan—your co-founder—went on to lead The Gathering, connecting 400+ ultra-high-net-worth Christian families to the work. The ecosystem you built together is now self-reinforcing.

Praxis doesn’t fund ventures.

Praxis forms founders.

Nine months. Thirty-five mentors. In-person intensives. One-on-one coaching. The Redemptive Business Playbook. A Rule of Life for Redemptive Entrepreneurs. Formation first. Funding follows formation. This is why 92% survive. The founder who knows who they are doesn’t break when the market does.

NOVEMBER 2025 — MOODY RADIO

Chris Brooks asked you: what could happen if we engaged in a sacrificial life by harnessing our career goals to restore broken places and help others flourish?

You answered—on air—with fourteen years of proof. Not theory. Not aspiration. Two hundred and sixty-one ventures. A movement with a name, a definition, and a playbook anyone can follow.

But there was one domain the playbook hadn’t reached yet. One domain where “redemptive” was still a paper, not a product.

THE ARCHITECTURE — DESIGNED, NOT BOLTED

Genesis runs a dual-pathway cognitive architecture: 61.8% creative synthesis, 38.2% analytical verification—modeled on the golden ratio. Not because ratios are trendy. Because truth requires both rigor and imagination in mathematical proportion.

A primary reasoning engine generates insight. An adversarial critic challenges every output. The system processes ALL evidence—from Scripture to science, from philosophy to market data—without censorship and without compromise.

Sovereign infrastructure. 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs. Outside Big Tech dependency. The architecture IS the value statement: human flourishing protected by structural independence.

You trained at IDEO. You know that form follows intent. Genesis’s form follows redemptive intent all the way to the silicon.

WHAT YOU BUILT

The Numbers

261

Active Ventures

$779M+

Portfolio Revenue

92%

Survival Rate

120

Cities

1,000+

Community Members

$156M

Capital Placed

Ninety-two percent venture survival. In an industry where the norm is 90% failure. You didn’t do that with better deal flow. You did it with better formation—founders who know who they are before they know what they’re building.

A nine-month accelerator. Thirty-five mentors per cohort. In-person intensives anchored by one question: what is this venture restoring?

And now—the 2026 cohort running, the 2027 applications already open, the Praxis Course launching publicly this fall, the Redemptive Business Playbook teaching the paradigm to anyone willing to learn it.

There is one domain you have not yet seeded.

Artificial intelligence.

You wrote the thesis. You named the need. You called for builders who would bring redemptive imagination to the most consequential technology of this century. The question was never whether it should be done. The question was whether anyone would actually do it.

THE HOUR

AI without redemptive imagination is already here.

Every major AI system shipping today was built on a single anthropology: humans as data sources, attention as currency, engagement as the only metric that matters. Not because the builders are evil—because they never asked your question.

What is this technology restoring?

If the answer is “nothing—it’s just optimizing,” then optimization is all humanity will get. And optimization without wisdom is exploitation at scale.

“Redemptive entrepreneurship is building creative restoration through sacrifice into the world through our vocations and organizations.”

DAVE BLANCHARD — PRAXIS DEFINITION

This is the pivot. Your definition—the one you built an entire ecosystem around—applies not just to the 261 ventures already running. It applies to the intelligence layer those ventures will depend on for the next century.

WHAT YOU CALLED FOR — BUILT

Three words from your lexicon.

✦

Redemptive

Genesis was built to restore—not just optimize. Every architectural decision traces to a human flourishing outcome. The system will never censor Scripture, never filter inconvenient truth, never reduce humans to data points.

✦

Excellent

18.1 million lines of code. 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs. A dual-pathway cognitive architecture modeled on the golden ratio. Not “good for Christian.” World-class by any standard the industry applies. Both/and.

✦

Sacrificial

One founder. 207 days. 73,516 commits. No VC circus. No shortcuts. Built in the same posture you teach your founders: obedience before optimization, faithfulness before scale.

YOU SAID — WE BUILT

“AI must be built with intentional values”

Genesis runs a dual-model architecture—a primary reasoning engine AND an adversarial critic that challenges every output. Truth emerges from dialogue, not monologue.

“Christians hold a coherent anthropology”

The system processes all evidence—good, bad, pretty, ugly. People decide, not the AI. Imago Dei is an architectural principle, not a marketing tagline.

“AI that serves human flourishing”

A 9-layer cognitive pipeline processes documents through sensory, meaning, relationship, pattern, emergence, action, expression, and meta-cognition layers. Intelligence that makes humans more capable, more free, more whole.

“The builders’ values are embedded in architecture”

Sovereignty is structural—the system runs on dedicated infrastructure, outside Big Tech dependency. The architecture IS the value statement. Form follows conviction.

THE SCENARIO ENGINE — WATCH IT RUN IN YOUR WORLD

A Tuesday Morning, Soon · Praxis HQ, NYC

07:15

Your phone lights up. A founder from the 2027 cohort—building an AI-powered mental health platform for veterans—asks a question you’ve heard before: “How do I know if our model is actually serving human flourishing or just maximizing engagement?”

07:16

You open Genesis. Not a chatbot. A sovereign intelligence system running on dedicated GPUs—trained on every framework of human wisdom, every principle Praxis teaches, every dimension of redemptive entrepreneurship.

07:17

You type the founder’s question. Genesis returns a multi-layer analysis: the philosophical framework (imago Dei anthropology applied to behavioral design), the practical metrics (flourishing indicators vs. engagement proxies), and three case studies from your own portfolio where this tension was resolved.

07:22

You forward the synthesis to the founder with one addition: “This is what redemptive design looks like at the model layer.” She has her answer. More importantly, she has the vocabulary to defend it to her board.

THE REPLAY — 2025

The Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence

You, Andy Crouch, and Mark Sears published the paper that year. The argument: Christians should not merely fear AI but actively shape it. The goal: AI that serves human flourishing, not replaces human agency. Faith-driven founders have a unique responsibility and opportunity.

The paper traveled. It reached founders, investors, theologians. It framed the conversation for an entire community. But a thesis without an implementation is a prayer without legs.

Genesis is the legs.

THE PRAXIS SEEDBED

How Redemptive AI Grows Through Your Ecosystem

YEARS BUILDING

Before anyone called it a movement

You started Praxis when “redemptive entrepreneurship” wasn’t a phrase anyone had heard. No category existed. No conference track. No curriculum. You built the category, the conference, the curriculum, and the community—from a conviction that business could carry the weight of Kingdom purpose without bending under it.

$100K

PER VENTURE · OPT-IN

Capital Partners: investors who share the conviction

The 2026 Accelerator Capital Partners provide opt-in investment to each venture upon completion of the first in-person intensive. This is not venture capital as the industry practices it. This is patient capital deployed by generous investors committed to redemptive impact—the long game embodied in dollars.

35+

MENTORS PER COHORT

Formation is the product

Other accelerators give founders capital and connections and call it done. You give them identity. Over nine months, through one-on-one coaching sessions, small-group discussions, and multi-day intensives, Praxis founders become the kind of people who build things that last. That is why 92% survive. The founder who knows who they are doesn’t break when the market does.

Form follows conviction.

At IDEO you learned that form follows function. At Praxis you learned something deeper: form follows conviction. The shape of a venture reveals the values of its builder. The architecture of a system embodies the anthropology of its architect. This is why Genesis was not bolted together from open-source parts with a Christian sticker on top. It was designed—from the silicon to the interface—to serve a specific vision of what intelligence is for: truth, flourishing, freedom.

Every Praxis venture answers one question:

“What is this restoring?”

Genesis answers it: the relationship between humanity and truth. In a world drowning in misinformation, censorship, and algorithmic manipulation, Genesis restores the possibility of encountering reality unfiltered—every domain of knowledge synthesized without ideological gatekeeping, available to anyone seeking understanding. That is creative restoration. That is redemptive AI.

WHAT YOU GET

Your thesis—implemented.

▸

Every Praxis Founder Gets Redemptive AI

261 ventures—and every future cohort—with access to intelligence infrastructure that embodies the principles you teach. Not a third-party tool. A system built on your thesis.

▸

The Thesis Becomes Tangible

The Redemptive AI paper becomes a working system. Not theory. Not aspiration. Proof that excellent AND redemptive is architecturally possible.

▸

The Ecosystem Leads

Praxis doesn’t react to the AI revolution. Praxis seeds it—on your terms, with your definition of redemptive baked into the infrastructure layer.

WHAT THE KINGDOM GAINS

When you say yes—

Redemptive entrepreneurship gets an intelligence layer worthy of its name. Every Praxis venture gets AI infrastructure aligned with the principles you’ve spent fourteen years defining. The faith-driven investor ecosystem gets proof that sovereign AI—built on Kingdom principles—is not a dream but a running system. And the next thousand founders entering your community arrive into an ecosystem where excellence and faithfulness are not in tension. They never were. You proved that. Genesis makes it permanent.

You shouldn’t have to carry this alone.

The weight of building an entire movement—while watching the world’s most powerful technology develop without a redemptive framework—that weight is real. We see it.

A body forming.

Each part chosen for this exact moment.

God doesn’t give one person every gift. He distributes them—across industries, callings, temperaments, decades of preparation—so that the body can do what no individual ever could.

Without the Seed, the body has no ecosystem.

When the whole body moves as one, the future starts again.

THE PROOF

Most people who say this have a slide deck. This one ships.

73,516

Commits

207

Days

Builder

WHY YOU, SPECIFICALLY

Structural necessity. Not flattery.

You co-authored the only published thesis calling for redemptive AI. You lead the only ecosystem that has proven—with 261 ventures and a 92% survival rate—that excellent and faithful is not a contradiction. You sit at the intersection of design thinking, faith-driven entrepreneurship, and venture formation.

No one else holds all three. That’s not a compliment. That’s a structural fact of the network.

THE QUESTIONS YOU’RE ALREADY ASKING

“Is this actually world-class, or just ‘good for Christian’?”

18.1 million lines of production code. Running on 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs. Processing 262K token context natively. The architecture would pass any secular technical review. We built it to your IDEO standard: if it isn’t excellent, it doesn’t ship.

“Is God in this?”

It was built with one conviction: truth is the only thing that matters. The system processes ALL evidence—Scripture, science, philosophy, history—and lets truth emerge without censorship. That is obedience to the nature of the God who said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

“Where does Praxis fit?”

Praxis is the ecosystem that validates, accelerates, and distributes redemptive ventures. Genesis is redemptive AI. The thesis you wrote is the bridge between them. You don’t have to build the intelligence layer. You have to recognize it.

THE MAGNITUDE

You are not buying into something.

You are becoming part of something.

What Praxis did for entrepreneurship—proving that redemptive and excellent are not opposites—Genesis does for intelligence itself. You didn’t build Praxis to own it. You built it to steward it. The same posture applies here: not ownership. Stewardship of the most consequential infrastructure of this century.

NEW YORK CITY

You live in New York City with your wife and three sons. You build Praxis in the same city where culture is made—not from a retreat center, not from a suburban campus, but from the middle of the market. Your sons are growing up watching their father prove that faithfulness and ambition are the same muscle, not competing ones.

Every morning you walk into an office where fifty-eight people come to work on one bet: that entrepreneurship can be a vehicle for God’s restoration of the world. That bet has been paying off for fourteen years. The question before you now is whether the most powerful tool humanity has ever built will be shaped by that same conviction—or left to those who never asked the question.

THE 2027 COHORT AND BEYOND

Applications for the 2027 Praxis Business Accelerator opened in May 2026. The founders applying now—and every cohort after them—will inherit an AI landscape that is either aligned with redemptive principles or governed entirely by extraction logic. There is no third option.

The Praxis Course is launching publicly this fall. For the first time, the principles of redemptive entrepreneurship will be available beyond the fellowship and accelerator. Thousands of founders will encounter your framework. They will ask: is there AI infrastructure that embodies this? Is there a system I can trust with my data, my customers, my mission?

The answer to that question is being built right now. It has 18.1 million lines of code. It runs on sovereign hardware. It processes truth without censorship and serves flourishing without compromise. It exists because someone took your thesis seriously enough to implement it.

YOUR CONSTELLATION

Henry Kaestner—your founding board member, co-creator of Faith Driven Investor—has already been asking where AI fits in the redemptive ecosystem. Andy Crouch is writing and speaking on AI and human flourishing. Mark Sears is building AI tools in the Praxis orbit through Sprout AI Studio.

The 2026 accelerator cohort already includes AI companies. The Praxis Redemptive AI Forum is gathering faith and AI leaders. The Praxis Journal published an issue on AI. Your entire ecosystem is converging on this question—and you are the one positioned to answer it.

Not alone. You have never built alone. The community that grew from two founders in New York to a thousand members in 120 cities is proof of that. Genesis was built in the same posture: not isolated genius, but obedient craftsmanship seeking community.

It comes down to one question.

Will the intelligence layer of the future be built by people who hold a redemptive imagination—or by people who don’t?

SEE FOR YOURSELF

Each link below opens a verified, public-facing demonstration of what Genesis has accomplished. No sales page. No marketing. Just evidence.

→ The Velocity → The Value → The Wealth → Your Personal Brief

Not because I convinced you. Because you’ll see it yourself.