Sandbox

After building up the Sandbox community from scratch over the past three years and after our Global Summit in Lisbon that showed the deep family-feeling among Sandboxers, we feel that the time has come to take the next leap and turn Sandbox into an organization that will continue providing value to our members over the long-term in a sustainable way. We wanted to share our plans for the future of Sandbox in 2012 and beyond. Not every detail in these new plans has been decided, but we wanted to keep all of you, members and friends of Sandbox, in the loop early on in the process.Our key initiatives going forward will unfold in the following 4 areas:

1. Focus on incubation and funding. Sandbox exists to accelerate exceptional young innovators. We want to build up strong competencies in running incubation programs within Sandbox and provide tangible acceleration services to our members, such as access to mentors, training and capital. So far, incubation within Sandbox has been done on a peer-to-peer level and our objective is to formalize this process and accelerate our members by leveraging the power of the community. With members in 23 countries around the world and in sectors ranging from architecture to high tech, we feel we can incubate our members in a powerful way, especially combined with access to capital through a formalized funding vehicle.

2. Growth. Having built a great basis, we want to expand the reach of Sandbox and accelerate our growth without losing trust or quality of the community. Our goal is to double the number of hubs until 2013/4 and reach 40 to 80 members per hub.

3. A financing round. To execute on our plans, we are seeking new financing from existing and new impact-focused investors into Sandbox.

4. Consolidate operations in Zurich and reinforce the role of the Board. To strengthen our focus on the new initiatives laid out above, we have decided to consolidate our operations in Zurich. Chris Busch in London and Fabian Pfortmueller in New York will take on the key strategic roles on the new Board of Directors. Entrusting their remaining operational tasks to the Zurich team, they will represent the interest of all founders and the community at large on the new Board (consisting of 2 co-founders and 3 trusted advisors). Antoine Verdon, after his role as CEO and after working for Sandbox full-time for 4 years, has chosen to pursue a new challenge.

What will change for Sandboxers:
- As we develop our new initiatives, we hope Sandbox will become more and more valuable to our members in terms of their personal development and for the advancement of their projects and businesses
- You will be able to meet Sandboxers in many new hubs around the world

What will not change:
- Sandbox will stay what it is – a trusted global family of amazing young people
- We will continue running local and regional events so that Sandboxers can continue coming together frequently

Questions that we haven’t answered yet:
- We have not yet decided how our focus on incubation and funding for Sandboxers will exactly look like. Over the next months, we plan to invest a lot of time to better understand what the community needs, and how we can best provide it

What happens next:
- We will start fundraising and hope to have closed our financing until mid 2012
- The consolidation in Zurich will be complete until end of March and new positions will be filled
- Throughout this process, we’ll make sure to update you on what is going on on a regular basis

We are very very excited to take Sandbox to the next level together with our members and supporters. Get in touch and let us know if you would like to talk about any of these points by contacting Nico Luchsinger (nico.luchsinger@sandbox-network.com) or Nadia Laurinci (nadia.laurinci@sandbox-network.com).

Trackbacks

1. Who the Hell is Sandbox? Oh, Just the Innovators of Your Tomorrow. – TechOrange Global says:

   February 2, 2012 at 5:13 AM

   [...] the group’s website, the Sandbox co-founders addressed the changes, stating “the time has come to… turn Sandbox into an organization that will continue [...]