What it's like to be frightened by your own courage
If you aim high, you fall low, we learn from childhood. We'd rather not climb that high in the first place, because nothing seems worse than falling down. In a society that declares the grounding of people to be the ideal, one could easily become frightened of one's own courage to dream.
For all those who have heard: capito has made it into the EIC Accelerator. For all those who don't really know what the EIC Accelerator actually is: It is the EU's most highly endowed support program for "groundbreaking innovations with disruptive effects and international scaling potential", writes the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG. For us, this means 1.7 million euros to translate complicated texts into easy-to-understand versions in a matter of seconds and to bring our capito software to market in Europe and the USA in the future.
So much courage, perhaps too much
It didn't even take a minute for the enormous joy at the success to mix with the equally great respect for the challenge, like a well-done marble cake. Will we be able to do it? Will we be able to convince people with our solution? Jump across the pond, get into the ring with tech giants, swim in the big ocean full of sharks and other vermin and pass without being bitten to death? Us? With me as the boss? Oh, so much courage - might that be too much?
Grounding people as an ideal?
"Pride goes before a fall", it echoes from the family books and etiquette books from childhood, "he who aims high falls low", and so on, the repertoire for propagating the grounding of people is large. Not to mention the specific manifestations of these "keep yourself fine, small and quiet" instructions that we girls were allowed to enjoy in our socialisation. They all failed to work for me, I honestly tried. Too pushy, too determined, too driven by my own ideas and will to be able to subordinate myself successfully, the only way left for me is to take the path in the fresh wind of courage. Frightened or not.
More equals more
20 years ago I founded atempo together with Klaus Candussi. capito was one project of several in our basket of ideas. Now capito is aiming high, standing on its own two feet, or to put it less poetically: capito is positioning itself as an independent brand on the international market. A social project has become a digital, highly scalable business model with social impact. A product of which one can truly say: More is more. More understandable language equals more impact. Faster translation equals more impact. More testing work for people with learning difficulties equals more jobs.
The relationship with atempo changes from dependency to connectedness. What connects capito with atempo is the vision of a world where people are not excluded just because they have learning difficulties; are not disabled just because they are different. This cannot be achieved by keeping the ball low.
Those who aim high can fall low and still not fail
So: take a deep breath and let's go. capito has the potential. It is possible that in the not so distant future, many millions of people will be able to understand all the information they need to navigate life and make good decisions. Simply because capito automatically makes this information easier to understand whenever someone needs it.
The idea of actually being able to achieve this big goal together with my team outweighs all the fright about my own courage. That is the incomparably powerful thing about a social impact enterprise: One's own flight of fancy or one's own deep fall are no longer so important in the face of the great opportunity that presents itself. Even if we fall, we know: We have already achieved something that others are already building on. And that fact remains.
