A few things I've been making

An investing course, travel guides, and a shoutout to an edtech creator

Aug 28, 2022

I’ve been using this newsletter to share essays lately. But a lot of my writing isn’t in the form of essays or blog posts. It’s writing to build products and companies.

Writing is a superpower when building or running something – from a seed of a business to a charity or social movement.

It’s the fast lane to clear thinking. That leads to intentionality of action. Because in the early days especially, there will never be enough time to do everything. Writing creates internal alignment on what is most important.

At my last company I used writing to explore new initiatives, and to bring the team together behind narratives about who we were. I did things like:

Pen a manifesto on the future of healthcare, that sat next to vision and values, and was shared with every person we hired.
Write memos for and against major decisions, and start management meetings with time for silent reading so that everyone could reflect on them.
After annual strategic reviews, I would write short narratives about where we would be as a team months or a year down the line. If that story about what our team was thinking and proud of in the not-so-distant future sounded right, our strategy was on the right track.

This past year I’ve been consulting with other people’s early stage initiatives and businesses (and taking a few steps to build something new of my own). I like what I’m working on. But I’ve LOVED seeing how other people coordinate and communicate with their teams. While good writing is a superpower for teams, a lack of a writing in remote teams is a recipe for a lot of communication overhead, repetition and rushed requests.

I spend most of my time in build mode these days, and I’m using writing to build these projects internally and in public, from twitter threads to team wikis.

Here’s something important and something fun I’ve been working on lately.

A CBC on Investing in Healthcare

One project I have been spending a lot of time on this year is the African Healthcare Funders Forum. Like our name implies, we are building this to drive more investment into African healthcare enterprises.

Big mandate.

Here’s a bold quote from one of my partners Mark Cheng summing up the mission:

“And we hear from all sides that beyond simply matching deals to funders, we need to innovate and reinvent the entire system of funding and scaling healthcare innovation.”

We kickoff this fall with a 3-month Cohort based Course (CBC), and evolve from there into a community of entrepreneurs and funders sharing deals and insights.

I’m co-developing the healthcare curriculum, five live, 90-minute sessions reframing how we think about healthcare challenges and opportunities.

Drawing inspiration from Write of Passage, I’m going to be talking about my favourite healthcare problems and making my sessions fast paced and highly interactive.

Tapping the 12 Favourite Problems framework to build this course has been creatively liberating.

It let’s me reframe a problem as something bad, or depressing, to something to wonder about.

My friend Nneka and I started to write down the things we wondered about when it came to the future of healthcare.

Here’s an example of the result:

Problem Mindset: Last Mile Distribution is a challenge in Africa.
Favourite Problem Reframe: What does healthcare look like for people who can’t or don’t want to urbanise?

This reframe is invigorating to our team, and to the other entrepreneurs we talk to.

I’m deep in course design mode for the next six weeks, writing about the future of healthcare, drafting breakout room prompts, and working with amazing guest speakers on their presentations.

Check it out: The African Healthcare Funders Forum

30 Second Travel Guides

I’ve toyed with making something in the travel tech space because:

I do all the travel planning in my relationship and it takes me forever.
It takes me forever because most food/ dining/ attraction recommendations are so broken (thanks Adam Zielinski for spelling out why).

In the meantime, I’m posting fast travel guides every Sunday on Twitter. It’s been a fun way to revisit the 40 countries I’ve visited in the past 20 years, and through short writing, I’m thinking about the anatomy of a travel recommendation.

Melissa Menke @melissa_menke

This weekend's 30 second travel guide: Watamu You can't not have a good time at this coastal paradise in Kenya, but my hidden gems are: •Amici Miei for Italian food and wine. Sit outside. It's going to feel like you are lost until you arrive.

This week I’m inspired by

Nikhil Gumbhir writes about edtech and entrepreneurship. This month, he’s giving out $30 billion in ideas on the future of EdTech.

Nikhil Gumbhir 🚢 @nikhilgumbhir

Here's the 2nd billion dollar EdTech opportunity. With accelerating pace of change & access to opportunities, careers are going to be more about who you want to become as compared to what you do. The skills passport can become the ticket to career mobility in the 21st century.

I love this build in public approach to showing how an industry he knows well could evolve. Now it’s up to us to invest in an optimistic and creative future of education. I’d love to do something similar for Neighborhood Vitals!

My Current Office

An outdoor office is like training wheels for writing. I’m enjoying my long mornings in Ireland writing at this desk, paired with long walks and pub lunches.

Have a great week and thanks for reading. Reply and let me know what you are building <3

Melissa

The Vital Neighborhood

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