I chose the title of this post as an homage to my technical past… anyone who has ever learned a new computer code language has, at least once, written a program that does nothing more than create a pop-up window with the words, “Hello World!” inside. While it may seem small, at the time it provides an immense amount of satisfaction! I felt that introducing our organization using something nerdy would be a great way to set the tone.
Thank you for visiting Ipsum Valorem and thank you for reading our blog. We will post regular entries here as well as on our various social media sites. Allow me to introduce myself as well as introduce our nonprofit organization. My name is Phil and I am one of the founders of Ipsum Valorem. I am an engineer by trade and I chose to start this company after spending about 20 years working in the aerospace industry. Most of my career was spent designing, testing, certifying, and delivering products which were intended to drive maximum shareholder value. On the day I decided to start Ipsum Valorem I realized that I wanted to do more with my life and my engineering skills than just build products for large corporations. I wanted to impact the world in a positive way and I wanted to do it outside the traditional bounds of the drive for corporate profit.
I had an idea and I had a passion but I didn’t have direction until I read an article about something called Venture Philanthropy – which is a hybrid between traditional venture capital financing and traditional nonprofit efforts. For whatever reason it clicked in my mind that I should start a nonprofit organization geared towards engineering and science, specifically something that allowed me to use engineering in a way that drives value for society, not just value for the company. The easiest way to explain my thought process is the idea that the intrinsic value of a product is more than just the profitability it brings in the open market… if the world needs a better mousetrap then the goal should be to build a better mousetrap, not build a mousetrap that will drive the highest possible revenue. This idea has become the foundation for what Ipsum Valorem stands for. We want to do things that help the world, regardless of whether we can sell them for a profit. As are example, one of the currently planned initiatives is to develop educational apps for kids and offer them for free with no ads or in-app purchases. We don’t mean to say that there aren’t already great educational apps available, and as part of this service we will offer a free review service for existing apps, but our goal is to create value so if we see opportunity to teach kids about math, engineering, science, or anything else, we will certainly want to make the effort.
We specifically chose nonprofit status so we could offer these things without worrying about monetary value… but we still need a way to fund our organization so hopefully people will see benefit in our products and services and be willing to make a donation. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, but the effort is what is important in our eyes… helping people is the goal.
I doubt that I have answered all questions or properly expressed the gravity of the idea we are trying to implement so there will be many more posts to come. For now I just want to say hi and thank you for coming to our site. If you have questions please don’t hesitate to reach out and please follow-us on social media to keep up to date with the latest news.
Thanks!
Phil