Luke Burgis

I'm an entrepreneur focused on creating things that truly benefit the human person.

After graduating from NYU and embarking on a (very short-lived) career on Wall Street, I started my first company out of a small apartment in Hollywood when I was 23. Three start-ups later, I realized that no amount of success (at least as it's defined by Silicon Valley) would ever satisfy me. I knew that for sure when someone noted that I was a "Top 25 Entrepreneur Under 25" (according to some publication), and I was actually embarrassed.

Those companies - Healthy Vending/Snack Nation, Boom Boom, FitFuel.com - ranged from food distribution to consumer products to a technology/e-commerce start-up that was valued at over $15mm and eventually merged its distribution operations with Zappos.com. The other two companies are still going strong.

At a certain point, I started thinking about building things that actually built me and the people that I served. I started thinking seriously about my faith, and how to be a different kind of entrepreneur. The result was ActivPrayer (a sports/ fitness/lifestyle education brand), Inscape (an education company) and a long period of discernment about what I wanted to do next, which included going back to school to get degrees in finance and theology.

Today, I'm Entrepreneur in Residence at a university in Washington, D.C., and I'm leading the effort to develop a worldwide cryptocurrency economy for high school and college students in which each college has its own micro-economy (tokens), with a market for valuing the potential of its students and the value of its degree. As you might imagine, only good schools like this idea.

I'm the co-author of the book "Unrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person", and write articles from time to time on things that interest me like Rene Girard (and mimetic theory), antifragility, and other stuff at the sometimes lonely intersection that I stand in.