Monastery ↔ Marketplace

An unconference to explore entrepreneurship for a richer human inner world

Why?

• The future belongs to how deeply we can be human. As technology races ahead—mimicking, replacing, and reshaping us—our true advantage will come from being rooted in the inner world, creating and living from depth and authenticity.
• Entrepreneurship has been a force for change. Over the past two decades, it has inspired creators to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges—from driving consumption to advancing conservation. In doing so, it has created jobs, amplified unheard voices, and unlocked vast creative energy.
• Today’s challenge is the fractured human experience. Mental health, disconnection, and emptiness are on the rise. The opportunity now is for brilliant minds—from tech and beyond—to direct their energy toward healing and enriching the human inner world.

What?

We asked a simple question: What happens if those of us who care deeply about this problem bring our skills, experiences, and perspectives together—for a day of sharing, ideating, and sowing the seeds of a movement that builds ventures for a richer human inner world?

How?

By building a bridge between the monastery and the marketplace—bringing together the vulnerability of a healing space with the creative drive of an unconference. A space where we reflect & connect before we create.

Topics

• Can technology serve the inner world—and can the inner world, in turn, inspire new technologies?
• Does wellness, longevity, and wearable health tech need an ecosystem and playbook of its own?
• Do altered states of consciousness accelerate healing—and if so, can entrepreneurship help scale it?
• Travel plays a powerful role in transformation—can we design products and cultures that truly harness its potential?
• How do we build an ethical ecosystem for self-realisation and actualisation, while still living within the matrix?
• Sacred spaces—can conscious cities, intentional communities, and third-space movements become incubation and acceleration hubs for this shift?
• All these and many more.

Who?

Artists, founders, seekers, healers, yogis, misfits, BTDT wanderers—anyone who cares enough to imagine a richer human inner world.

Where: Berlin (venue to be announced)

When: 25 Oct 2025

Fee: Pay as you wish

Register here: https://tally.so/r/wvoMPA

Host: Shashi Gopinath, Sacred Startups

Shashi has spent the last two decades immersed in entrepreneurship—building communities, shaping ecosystems, launching change movements, and contributing to policy and think tanks across Bangalore, Lisbon, Berlin, and San Francisco. But after years at the frontlines of startups and hustle culture, burnout caught up with him. That collapse revealed the darker side of entrepreneurship—the toll it takes on founders and society alike—and sparked a deeper inquiry: Could entrepreneurship itself be reimagined as the tool to heal this problem?

This inquiry grew into Sacred Startups: a three-year global research journey through ancient wisdom traditions, neuroscience, and modern innovation. The realizations from this work revealed the possibility of a new kind of ecosystem—one designed to nurture and preserve human consciousness.

Bringing this question and inspiration to Berlin as an unconference is a homecoming—the city where the journey first took shape, whose edge, energy, and “why not?” spirit continue to inspire. Now it comes full circle, as a gathering for those who believe entrepreneurship can not only change the world, but also heal it.

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