Dame Sydney Thackray · Vital Ventures

I find the bottlenecks holding the world back — and I build the way through.

Musician Film Producer Civic Tech Builder Venture Studio Chairman Systems Thinker

Radicalized by common sense — anti–band-aid, pro-solution. My work runs across a few verticals, but the center of it is simple: to make the world better in every possible way it can be made better.

Read on

The premise

The most profitable thing you can do is fix what's actually broken.

I keep watching charities and governments lay band-aids over the world's most expensive problems — paying, again and again, to manage something that could simply be solved. I'd rather solve it.

Solve the water crisis and you become the one who provides the water. Band-aid it, and somebody keeps taking people's money for a hundred years, until someone finally builds the real fix. I'm not driven by money — which is exactly why I'll take this on. I'll do it for free.

So at Vital Ventures, we hunt for the bottlenecks behind the world's biggest problems and build solutions that pay for themselves by the only means that count: actually working.

I am anti-band-aid.
I am pro-solution.

The ten-year picture

If this works, the world looks like a matriarchy — and every child in it is taken care of.

Safety. Security. People who love them. An education. Food in their stomach. And every opportunity to become whatever they are capable of becoming.

I take the whole world's hierarchy of needs and I start at the top. Most builders work from the bottom up. I start at flourishing and backtrack — because if a child can't get an education, how can we expect them to become an informed adult, a capable voter, a free person? Every tool Vital Ventures builds traces back to a layer of this.

↓ I start here, at the top

Self-actualization

Every opportunity to achieve their goals.

Vital Venturestools that let anyone learn and create

Esteem

To be educated, capable, and counted.

Vital Ventureseducation tools, built for every learner

Belonging

A family that loves them — or people who do.

Safety

Safety and security, for every child.

Vital Venturesfiscal-transparency tools, so the money meant to protect people actually reaches them

The foundation

Clean water. Food. The basics, for everyone.

the ground we build up from

↳ and work down to the ground

Where this came from

My mother raised me radically.

She's a single mom, and she brought me up studying religion, traveling the world, sitting with gurus and nuns and witches — until I understood that we are all reaching for the same thing and only calling it by different names. We split ourselves up over the words. We shouldn't. We should be pulling in one direction: leaving the world better than we found it. Most people already want that. They just don't have the tools to make it happen.

Somewhere young, in meditation and in prayer, I was shown — thousands of times — that my job is to help as much as I can. I'm not doing it to be good. I'm doing it because I couldn't live with myself if I didn't.

I'm not different from anyone else. I was handed the tools to succeed — and I took the step to use them.

We're all trying to do the same thing.
We just call it different names.

She'll name the thing that was obvious all along — the thing nobody else managed to see. Sydney thinks holistically, with a youthful mind that actually understands the frontier: the technologies, the trends.

JacksonOn working alongside Sydney

My projects

What I'm building — across every vertical.

Vital Ventures

Technology built to solve the world's biggest bottlenecks — starting from the hierarchy of needs and working down.

vitalventure.org

Thackray House

A country house hotel in Callander, Scotland — gardens, fine dining, and a quiet place to think, set in the Trossachs.

thackrayhouse.com

If you felt something

There's a reason you looked me up.

For every problem I take on, I map the number of hands it actually takes to solve it — and then I go find them. If a mission like this resonates with you, that isn't an accident.

Reach out

Whether you build, fund, connect, or simply believe it can be done — there's a place for you in this.