Hey there, I’m Chase Dumont.
I’ve spent a lifetime with a restless heart, wandering from one place to another and even one identity to another. I’ve been deep in the music world, and high in the business world. I’ve ran with hardcore partiers and traveled the world with Indiana Jones-types. I’ve lived life like James Bond at times and sat at home wasting my life away watching movies and playing video games at others, and I’ve launched a number of start up businesses – some of them successful, some of them not.
What I’m doing with this website is building something special. Something unique that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world right now. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while but was never fully conscious of, but now I know what it is.
I present you this excerpt from a post one an employee of mine shared with me:
“Earlier this year when I went back to my home village, my parents told me that a girl in the village had gone mad. Why? She went to college, where she studied English for four years, and the best job she could get was to peel shrimps with coworkers, who finished middle school and were at least four years younger than her.”
That’s from an article entitled “Confessions of a Chinese Graduate” and reading it finally made it click.
There are so many people in the world with talent, with ability, with raw natural skill who would make such incredible fits somewhere… except they don’t know where. And the company, or friend, or partner, or school, or whatever they’re looking for doesn’t know where they are either.
And so, a business in California shuts down because it wasn’t able to find a motivated employee who spoke both Chinese and English and knew the Chinese market and could help it negotiate with its suppliers in Hangzhou. And a girl in rural China goes mad because she has nowhere to work after years of dreaming and straining and striving but a job where she spends 8 to 10 hours a day peeling the shells off shrimp.
What if there was a place she could go to find someone looking for her?
What if there was a place that company could go to find someone looking for a place like it?
What if a brilliant but poor student in Africa could get in touch with a university in the UK and show them what he’s got?
And what if a university in search of hidden talent could get in touch with an unknown genius in Africa and bring him into the fold?
What if a shy, lonely girl from Spain who longed to meet a truly romantic man could meet a shy, lonely man from Canada who longed for someone to romance?
And what if a shy, lonely man from Canada who longed for someone to be truly romantic with could meet a shy, lonely girl from Spain who longed for someone to romance her?
This is that place. The intersection of people, events, and life. You needn’t head forever West, as I have done – you can just come here, and make magic things happen.
Chase Dumont, 2011