My Story

Gerald Duran, CanaGlobal Founder and Managing Partner, tells the story of how he and his partners re-imagined the venture studio, access to capital, and equipping a new breed of faith driven founders, at scale.

 


 

A New Wineskin

I could sense a new season coming. I had already spent three decades building multiple tech ventures, and then leading a venture studio, I knew God had something brewing. In my spare time I had funded and launched a national ministry helping the workforce discover faith and purpose.

I got busy authoring a couple of books. But I could sense there was still more to come. 

And then in 2015 I read a prophetic letter in a Christian magazine written to an anonymous entrepreneur. It was a call to bring faith and freedom unapologetically into the entrepreneur ecosystem. I knew it was written to me.

I answered the call.

New wine. New wineskin. 

I've always had a love-hate relationship with venture capital. 

Venture capitalists like to think they get to choose the winners and the losers. Too often there's a pungent air of elitism in the VC community.

So I thought we could re-imagine what a venture studio could be. We could connect the dots between faith, calling, revenue performance, profit and investor readiness.

Let God choose the winners and losers, not man. 

So we launched the world's first faith-driven venture studio.

How would we reach the 582M entrepreneurs worldwide?

The great commission is to disciple people and nations. Look, we know founders have problems. 90% who venture up the entrepreneurial mountain will fail. Let's help them co-create with God and succeed. 

We launched our entrepreneur school.

We teach what "B" School doesn't. 

We teach everything we've learned in the studio about building a business, God's way.

And we made it all free.

... and then we re-imagined how investors and founders could gather. 

We call it Church for Entrepreneurs.

Studio. School. Church?

 

If you see the church as a place to go, perhaps it doesn’t make sense to be combined with an entrepreneurial ecosystem. But we see the church as Jesus described it, an Ekklesia, a people empowered to disciple nations.

- Cities are built by entrepreneurs.
- Industries are built by entrepreneurs.
- Economies are built by entrepreneurs.
- And America was built by entrepreneurs.

So we gather weekly on zoom. We connect the dots between faith, calling, rev-ops and investor readiness.

We have Church.

So that's our story.

 

Investors co-creating with entrepreneurs, driven by faith, purpose, freedom and the Kingdom of God are best positioned to build industries and disciple nations. We believe the most powerful force on planet earth is the Ekklesia, God’s instrument for global transformation.

(2016) In our early days we just started by doing. We realized there wasn't a community for entrepreneurs and investors to gather, grow, learn and co-create. So partnered with God to build one.

CanaGlobal is part of a massive people movement started by Jesus Christ to transform the seven marketplace mountains of societal influence: faith, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business — with the Kingdom of God.

 

Because when millions of entrepreneurs are driven by faith, purpose, freedom and the Kingdom of God … they change the world.