Source Institute is an education skunkworks led by Salim Virani, involving outside collaborators for different projects.

It is in hiatus, preparing to shift from in-person to online education.

Salim Virani

Sal is an entrepreneur that fell into education. He founded Leancamp, a 30-city community that shaped the Lean Startup methodology, and Founder Centric, which developed startup education for UCL, Oxford, Seedcamp, Techstars, Unilever, Microsoft, and other top-tier programs.

In ancient history, after leaving his job as Digital Director for a major marketing agency, Sal founded 3 technology companies in SaaS, e-commerce and IT outsourcing.

Past Collaborators

Boyana Mecheva managed operations and finances for most projects, including The Sources, The Royal Academy Of Engineering programs, and Village Accelerator.

Bart Doorneweert co-led Source Camps, ran various agritech unconferences and facilitated for some of the Royal Academy programs. Bart's co-authored with Sal at Peer Learning Is.

Eric Halsey, Teodor Mechev and Jonathan Doornenbal were, respectively, the writer, video editor and camera op for The Sources, and, joining the interview team that traveled to Kenya and Ghana.

Lino Velev was on the faciltation team for Leaders In Innovation until 2016, when he bought the operation and continued it independently. He uses Source material for this program, under license until March 2020.

Nemanja Cerovac ran Source Summits in Belgrade, and joined the facilitation team for events in London, Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana.

Other facilitators include Josh Liu, George Dita, Robin Balser and Robbert Van Geldrop.

Africa's Largest Tech Entrepreneurship Course

Taking technology to market in Africa requires African known-how, so we started The Sources. We found 60+ African entrepreneurs with unique successes, and asked others to help interview. The topics that mattered were far from business school, like building rural distribution networks or networking in modern tribal cultures.

Leaders In Innovation Fellowship*

Each year, the LIF program picks hundreds of engineers, from Colombia to Egypt to China to Thailand, and helps them commercialise their inventions. Peer learning acheive got consistently high results across the range of cultures and countries supported. It also outperformed lectures and coaching, both in applied knowledge and in commercial relationships made.

* In 2016, after 3 years of delivering LIF, we sold our operations in this project to Lino Velev's company, Far Star, which operates it using Source material under license until March 2020.

Small changes with big results

We've introduced peer learning to global networks, like City AI and Lean Startup Summit, immediately doubling satisfaction scores and seeing our formats syndicated. We also zoomed into to local challenges, like enabling Roma teenagers in Bulgaria to support each other to develop their own coding skills. Over 10 years, we've run several hundred unconferences, from 30 to 800 people, on four continents.