Here's something from the deep, dark past that might offer us something of a lesson: The entrepreneur and an visionary Thomas W. Dyott went from polishing boots to mixing his own bootblack to manufacturing elixirs, to owning the largest patent medicine businessman in the United States. He needed bottles and so he bought a bottle factory that soon employed 400. In 1836 he launched The Manual Labor Bank which was a brilliant tactic to build community around a new currency with a specific focus.

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If we can look at Dyott's efforts and what they were supposed to achieve for the community and not what actually happened: the Panic of 1837, Dyott's desperate manipulations, his celebrity trial and prison sentence for “defrauding the community” - if we can get past all that - I think there's some valuable lessons to "mine" from this example. Both pitfalls and successes.