From atLarge to DreamLarge on a Road Less Travelled
Sarasota digital entrepreneur Anand Pallegar has a new model for giving back.
For years, the accepted premise about Sarasota was that for bright, creative young people, the region’s good schools and abundant cultural offerings made this a great place to grow up.
And then, to fulfill their potential, they had to leave home.
But 15 years ago, a young man in his 20s executed a remarkably successful reverse migration. At a low point in his short life, he moved here from Detroit, and — with encouragement from some visionary local business leaders — gradually discovered an environment where he could flourish.
His central quest now: “How do we inspire tomorrow’s generation and show them that Sarasota, this community, the Gulf Coast, is an incredibly viable place for who they are, their ideals, their ideas? How do we connect the dots in a way that makes them understand that, and makes them realize that they can do anything they want here, just like what they might see as feasible in Boston, Chicago or New York?”
It’s a question others have asked, but Anand Pallegar has some arresting answers. And the tech entrepreneur who steers AtLarge, a digital communications firm, and Atlas Networks, a cloud-based web support spinoff, has found a characteristically unusual vehicle for the pursuit of good works. He created a philanthropic division known as DreamLarge — not as a foundation or nonprofit, but as a public benefit corporation.
Five years ago, DreamLarge became the impetus behind PINC, an annual daylong intellectual festival to be held again at the Sarasota Opera House this December. This high-energy event, conceived as a “bubble bath for the brain,” has now been joined by other initiatives, ranging in scope from a neighborhood bike-ride-plus-history-tour to elaborate retreats designed to induce young people to define their own ways of forging a sustainable future.
To achieve a lasting marriage between innovation and values that newer generations could relate to, Pallegar went looking for a fresh approach to solving stubborn societal problems.
“This community is rife with nonprofits,” he observes. “There was a belief that we could do it differently; that we should do it differently. With a public benefit corporation, you’re willing to forgo the profit objectives of a traditional corporation in lieu of a public benefit. That gives us the freedom to play in any sandbox that we want to, and bring together partners that we believe should be together.”
Public benefit corporations have only been around since 2010 in the United States, when the state of Maryland approved the first charter. They are legal now in some 36 states, and large companies like Kickstarter, King Arthur Flour and Patagonia have adopted the structure. Whereas traditional corporations are obligated to maximize shareholder value — and are actually precluded from prioritizing other factors like human welfare or environmental protection if this interferes with that obligation — the leaders of benefit corporations can make profits and dividends secondary to the common good
DreamLarge pushes the model even farther, Pallegar says, because profits don’t really come into the picture at all.
“Traditionally, the benefit corporation exists to pay a return to the shareholders, with a publicly stated benefit,” he explains. “But at the end of the day we’re the complete antithesis of that. We’re effectively a benefit corporation on steroids.”
With a corporate charter instead of nonprofit status, he adds, DreamLarge sidesteps a crowded field of folks busily raising funds and courting those with deep pockets.
“We’ll never write the biggest checks; it’s all about where we can make the most meaningful impact,” Pallegar says. “Traditionally as a donor, the philosophy is that I’m going to donate to causes or charities that I think I are meaningful, and then the onus of execution falls within that nonprofit to deliver. And I think in a community like this, it becomes about finding donors; a large part of that effort goes toward sustaining the nonprofit. We just look at the world differently: Let’s self-fund what we believe in.”
A broken soul
Born and reared in England, Pallegar aspired to medical school, had some second thoughts, took a gap year before college and gravitated toward the University of Michigan because a cousin went there. He enrolled in biochemistry but was lured by an “exciting buzz” elsewhere on campus.
“I had never really used a computer before,” he says. “When I came to America it was 1997 and the height of of the dot.com boom was happening. Ann Arbor was kind of this hotbed because of the engineering school there. I ended up learning how to code and to program, then launched a web hosting company and ended up dropping out to pursue it.”
It was a stereotypical tech titan trajectory — until the moment when a horrific traffic accident in Detroit left him, as he describes it, “a broken soul.
“After the surgery I couldn’t speak and couldn’t see properly,” he recalls. “My parents live in Bradenton, so I came down here in 2004 to recover — really to hide; I looked like Shrek.”
Nine months later, he started to explore his default hometown, and slowly began to see beyond the retirement communities and beaches.
“I started to realize there was really a lot more happening here; you just had to dig to find it,” he says. “There was a very active, invested community in terms of the business leadership.”
Pallegar opened a café, as young men will do, but in a back room he and a partner also launched something called the S2 Report, a daily aggregation of local business press releases that was strictly online. It lasted two years.
“It was the nascent days of digital publishing and we couldn’t sell an ad to save our lives,” he says. “Everyone’s doing it now. What it did in that moment in time, for me, was that it illuminated the breadth and depth of opportunity that was happening in our backyard. We saw an opportunity to showcase what was then an emerging tech sector — these companies I’d never heard of that existed here. That was what forged a commitment to launch AtLarge.”
Pallegar sees that commitment as never-ending, evolving for now into the DreamLarge mission to promote its three “pillars” of engagement: climate sustainability, education and inspiration, and community outreach. It’s no accident that all three themes are local, global and forward-looking.
“We’ll be a mid-sized city in the blink of an eye here, whether we like it or not,” he says. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I definitely know that DreamLarge and all of the companies here are going to be a part of it.”
Pallegar believes the success of AtLarge, Atlas and DreamLarge — now with 22 employees in the Rosemary District headquarters and eight in Europe — rests on the support he received from the local business community, including the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce’s Young Professionals Group, Ringling College President Larry Thompson and other mentors.
“I really didn’t know whether this community would embrace a young entrepreneur with different ideas on how to advance the services we were trying to offer,” he says. “I owe a tremendous amount to the companies that really helped me, and believed in us and our ideas. There’s no way I would ever leave this place.”