A group of men sit in a circle, heads bowed, praying for each other. Sunlight streams in through a skylight in the ceiling. Religious rock music wafts softly in the background.
This is not the scene at a local church.
It’s a new meetup, Praying for Startups, taking place at the Eureka Building, a co-working space in Irvine.
Joseph Haecker started the meetup as an alternative to Placentia-based Convene and the Christian Business Men’s Connection. Convene is a group of Christian CEOs and business owners that offers one-on-one coaching and a day of working on strategic challenges and opportunities, with fees ranging from $395 to $1,395. The Christian Business Men’s Connection bills itself as a venue for business executives to connect, maintain their faith and view their business lives through the lens of the Bible.
Haecker said he tried out both, but neither resonated with him.
Genesis of Meetup
Haecker has a startup himself, as founder and chief executive of Dezignwall Inc., which provides a social platform for trades, including architecture and commercial design, to share photos of their projects and for companies interested in buying or selling commercial design services. He works out of the Eureka building and said he’s grateful it provides a free space for his meetup. As he began to attend events throughout the OC startup ecosystem and listen to various panelists, he said he felt like everyone made the process of starting a company sound easy.
“So everyone (else) must be thinking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’” he said. “So we’re all walking around doing a lot of guesswork.”
He and Grant Van Cleve, a global entrepreneur with experience in venture capital and private equity who’s the president of the OC chapter of Tech Coast Angels, started talking one day and discovered they are both Christians, as were other people they were talking to that day.
“We all said, ‘What can we do?’” Haecker said. “You can’t play the religion card when you’re pitching, so there’s no real opportunity to talk about your truth.”
Van Cleve said there’s a growing trend of mixing religion and business in the form of more chaplains at corporations. Organizations such as Wake Forest, N.C.-based Corporate Chaplains of America and Plano, Texas-based Marketplace Chaplains provide corporate chaplains. Marketplace Chaplains is seeing 30% growth nationally; informal estimates in OC appear to indicate an even higher rate, said Ron Henry, an executive with the company.
“As societal, family, job and financial pressures increase and people are more disconnected than ever before, companies in California are turning to our personalized and proactive employee care service to provide a confidential resource for improving the emotional, spiritual and well-being of their work force,” Henry said via email.
Van Cleve echoed that sentiment and said faith takes on even more meaning for those who start their own companies.
“Faith is deeply linked to risk,” he said. “So I think entrepreneurs are heroes for their courageous quest to bring something out of nothing. They are taking steps of faith daily. … I think the startup world should resonate with the concept of faith in general. And also recognize their need to partner in order to make it happen—‘horizontal’ links to one another, and (a) ‘vertical’ link to God, who wired us and created the world for our exploration.”
Haecker said he believes more businesspeople should think about the question of how to bring God into the workplace.
“I don’t think enough people focus on this question,” he said. “I don’t want to force it, but I think if we had more discussions on it, (people) would figure out how to do it in a suitable manner.”
Open to All
Haecker held the first meetup in mid-June. More than 20 people showed up. The group conducts its sessions with no fees or charges, and is open to all faiths. It now has more than 100 members, he said.
Praying for Startups is for anyone of any religion affiliated with a startup, whether it’s the founder, the founder’s spouse or an employee.
At each event, the attendees break into small groups. Each person says what they would like a prayer for and the rest of the group prays for them individually. They also pray for their own needs, the needs of their startups and give thanks for the blessings they’ve experienced.
“It gives us a chance to let our guard down and hear other people in our situation and know we’re not alone,” Haecker said. “There’s no posturing.”
Members of the meetup also can send out prayer requests online, he said.
Haecker said he doesn’t have any expectations for the group, other than to provide networking and support, albeit “with your eyes closed” in prayer.
Dony Ang, founder of La Habra-based Radical Labs Inc., recently received an answered prayer, he said. He spent months developing an app, Neo, which uses artificial intelligence technology that helps Shopify customers buy products from messaging systems, such as those offered by Facebook and Telegram. He submitted it to Apple’s app store. The approval process can take months, he said. He then went to one of the meetups, where Van Cleve said a prayer for the app to be approved quickly and smoothly. It was approved the following week, Ang said.
“Praise the Lord,” he said.
