Henry Dauphin – The Refinery

THE FUTURE IS WON.

HI, I AM HENRY.

HI, I AM HENRY.

GROWING RICH BY ENRICHING.

Partnering with remarkable human beings to create ventures that disrupt, elevate the world, and win—absolutely.

GROWING RICH BY ENRICHING.

Partnering with remarkable human beings to create ventures that disrupt, elevate the world, and win—absolutely.

A YOUNG AT HEART, QUANTITATIVE THINKING, SOLUTION FORMULATING, GROWTH MODEL STRUCTURING, STARTUP ENGINEER.

I work with bright, lucid, passionate and principled entrepreneurs who are committed to applying their gifts for disruption with meaning and purpose. These are founders who dare to rethink industries and aim to create the high growth, lucrative, and impactful ventures our societies need and deserve.

I believe that unprecedented fortunes await the sophisticated capitalists, those capable of understanding and helping to mine the immense untapped value that lives around us; capitalists capable of growing rich by enriching.

A YOUNG AT HEART, QUANTITATIVE THINKING, SOLUTION FORMULATING, GROWTH MODEL STRUCTURING, STARTUP ENGINEER.

GIFT

Solutions Modelling
As every other human being, I have been gifted with several special talents. Thankfully, I was able to recognize these gifts at a young age and to persistently commit to nurturing them in hopes that they would see me through in some useful manner.

One of these gifts is my ability to model things very intuitively. I have always been able envision events and situations as the results of structured models causally producing the observed output. This ability helped me easily understand and appreciate value creation processes; starting with identifying opportunities, formulating elegant solutions to capture them, and engineering those solutions in their most efficient output-yielding configurations.

Growing up in Montreal, the son of working class Haitian parents—my father was a taxi driver/factory worker and my mother a nurse—that was often thrust into social environments that were hostile to people who were different, afforded me precious opportunities to hone my gift. I put this gift to use—sometimes in a positive manner, other times in a less positive manner— including skillfully stopping a much older and stronger boy who was a notorious bully, from picking on me through subtle disincentivizing (proper Jedi stuff), to earning fair sums of money from my classmates during boarding school by launching some interesting business ventures.

In a sense, this gift also helped to partially shield me from the weight of a lot of adversity I had to overcome as a child thereby enabling me to always see and chart a way forward; a way for things to be different and better.

Being aware of this gift and taking bold steps to put it to use made for a very interesting journey–and what a ride it has been! But all gifts find true meaning only through the purpose they serve, and through the passions that cultivate that purpose.

PASSION

Ingenuity Harvesting
Since childhood, I have been obsessed with understanding human potential. I would consume every piece of information that could shed light on the nature and limits of human potential; how it is nurtured, amplified, and manifested in its most impactful and everlasting form.

Even then, I understood that the actualized potential we may recognize in some individual is not merely the product of a conscious decision made by that individual to cultivate it, but also, that that actualized potential is the result of something more complex. It is the result of an intricate journey parceled by the right calibration of stimulating variables, encounters, influences, and encouragements. This realization gave me a very different appreciation and understanding of those individuals that society promotes as “natural geniuses”. Whenever I would hear of an immortal like Beethoven, Mozart, John Stuart Mill, Hypatia, Plato, Benjamin Banneker, Marie Currie, Hannibal Barca, or Richard Wagner, I would dive into a study of their lives to identify the existential formula that enabled them to actualize as we are ALL designed and capable of being: profoundly illuminating, immensely powerful, and profitably anchored in that which makes us truly unique.

The best part of this understanding was, and remains, that it encouraged me to attentively engage with so-called “normal” individuals desirous to experience their innate genius. A quiet, unconscious genius, often subtly perceptible through the unique way they look at things–especially problems–and the ways they are able to use their unique potential to generate truly disruptive ideas.

As we each possess tremendously valuable, and often untapped, ingenuity, the process of helping individuals nourish and extract that value always seemed like the height of modern day alchemy to me. In the case of human potential, it is a process that channels one’s potential from the incorporeal to a materialized force, a value creation process that begins an illuminated individual, to a transcendental idea, and then to transformative matter.

Today, this process happens too infrequently which helps to explain many of the events we witness and experience around us. The social implications of such an inefficient development of human capital on the growth and improvement of our societies, and our ability to solve their most pressing issues, are obvious: our best innovators are out there in abundant supply but are not enabled to innovate and contribute in the full measure of their excellence.

Facilitating the material expression of their ingenuity is the most productive, advanced, and intelligent form of wealth creation, economic modeling, and community building. It is an imperative of the most sophisticated form of capitalism.

Finding ways to narrow the large divide between most of our societies’ abundant reserves of ingenuity and the means to materialize it, is my all-consuming obsession. Lending my gifts to help promising yet overlooked innovators/founders build transformative ventures has helped me understand and live my purpose.

PURPOSE

Sophisticated Capitalism
A little over a decade ago, I set out to study all I could about startup engineering. I sought to gain an expert level of understanding as to how our most gifted innovators, regardless of point of origin, could find a pathway to share—and profit from—the fruits of their ingenious labor.

To rapidly gain expertise on this complex matter, I initially opted to gain proximity to, and learn from, industry leading startup participants—innovation platform operators, noted startup investments participants, celebrity business actors, and business development academics—to discover how they had solved this challenge. The objective was to gain inspiration from the work they had conducted on creating platforms designed to identify the best, even if non-traditional, innovators within our communities and help them deliver their disruptive ventures to market. I was truly disappointed to find that not a single one could provide inspiration on this issue.

Additionally, I was somewhat surprised that for some of the most successful venture capitalists—those seemingly most incentivized to conduct successful founder prospecting—an understanding of the tremendous potential and lucrative ingenuity residing in all individuals was not part of their construct of reality. This was despite many of these individuals being lauded as the most intelligent, imaginative, and efficient wealth creating agents of business.

Truthfully, the more I surveyed these individuals, studied their models, read their books, listened to their interviews, analyzed their investment strategies, identified the patterns behind their successes and failures, etc., the more I got the impression that they were not interested nor believed in prospecting for brilliant insights amongst the common people. There was a perceptible dose of misguided elitism in their thesis. Basically, the premise was often that the majority of people were just too un-redeemable and unremarkable; destined to find value primarily as consumers—they join a long list of celebrated economic theorists in this belief for that matter. This mode of thinking suggests that we should not be too concerned about common people’s actualization and what becomes of them.

Beyond being shortsighted, such an appreciation—or dis-appreciation—of people is simply unintelligent, not least because our shared reality is that we each exist as an integral node of a single network. Simply put, whatever happens to them, happens to the network, and invariably happens to each of us. Therefore, un-actualized potential diminishes and costs us all.

As a consequence, I set out on a decade-long expedition that exposed me to more than 50 cities around the world—studying, working, and brainstorming with thousands of innovation actors, and testing and learning from their best and worst practices, in order to shape my understanding of this issue.

Interestingly enough, it was often the unusual suspects from around the world that had solved pieces of the problem. These people intuitively believed that the human capital in their communities could yield promising returns, engineer sustainable economic development, and be the key to prosperous societies.

Completely self-financed, the trajectory of this learning process was simple: continue as long as necessary to crack the model, while supporting my efforts by successfully monetizing my expanding knowledge and solutions library—through mandates with startups, investors, and other startup participants.

The tools and methodologies I have developed over the years, using advanced quantitative startup processes–enable great humans, regardless of their origins, to tap into their innate genius and use it to create impact-ventures.

The disruptive and expanding founder-centric innovation platform I am building creates wealth by leveraging the most valuable, abundant, and yet under utilized resources found at our disposal: human ingenuity.

As a sophisticated capitalist, I am an ardent believer in the capacity of entrepreneurship to elevate our world. Productive capitalism can be the single most powerful agent of positive change in the world. By empowering great entrepreneurs to deliver ingenious, elegant, and lucrative solutions to important problems, we can make things better while delivering the healthiest return on resources.