Our Values
Committed. Integrity. Respect. Love. We hire and fire by them, engage and disengage by them, meet every challenge and have our fun grounded in them. Values are easy on a wall; ours show when they cost us something.
#itsaboutenjoyinglife
Life lived differently
Business and pleasure, held as mutually inclusive. That is the whole of it.
Berlin · Amsterdam · Sydney
How it began
A club that chose each other
The Initiative formed in Berlin in the early 1990s: a small circle of private equity investors and serial business owners who chose each other. It ran informally for over two decades before it was formalised under agreement in 2014. Today it works from Berlin, Amsterdam and Sydney.
We invite opportunities to collaborate with, and invest in, select businesses across Europe, North America, MENA, Australia and New Zealand. A few members and trusted partners are scattered around the globe, using local knowledge to find opportunity in a broader market and leading the work, boots on the ground, wherever the Initiative becomes involved.
Get to know us
Our values at a glance
We work with only a small number of businesses at a time, and only those who share our values. Hedonist Entrepreneurs know their purpose. They follow it without apology, and lift others ready to do the same.
We believe
Know why you are in business, and root that reason in something larger than your bank balance, and you draw to you the people who help you build all you set out to.
Unconventional
We are unconventional, and a long way from mainstream anything. We have no desire to work with average. Everything we do is built to filter out anyone unable, or unwilling, to think differently.
Structured & sound
Beneath the pleasure, discipline. Clear structures and sound principles hold the work, so the businesses we work with can create and expand on their own talent, guided commercially by decades of experience.
A business for good
A business for good is still a business, not a charity. Taking and keeping money is both permitted and essential. The 6Ps™ (passion, pleasure, purpose, people, planet, profits) still result in profits!
Why love?
Love is the most powerful thing a business has. Love what you do; love who you serve; be loved by them. Very little stays out of reach of a business that loves and is loved.
Intercourse
How we talk to each other: open, honest, unguarded. We resist the urge to load meaning onto what happens, and take it plainly, as the outward sign of what is really going on underneath.
Our focus
To hold personal pleasure, fulfilment and happiness together with the hard pursuit of commercial results, as a business for good. Not one at the cost of the other. Both, at once.
The mindset
Where pleasure, passion, and purpose turn a profit
Passion ignites. Pleasure sustains. Purpose directs. Honoured together, the inner three produce what cannot be bought: happiness and fulfilment, the H at the centre. That inner state expresses outward, through people, planet, and profits.
Ready to explore life
What's your next BIG thing?
When you are ready to explore a new way of being in business (and) life, or maybe you have been looking for a group of people who actually get your way of being, reach out and let's talk.