Category: Startups
-
An Opinion Piece I. The Governance Paradox at the Lunar Frontier The faint crackle of radio static emanating from the lunar surface may carry more significance for international relations than the text of any treaty currently under negotiation. This is not the hum of a radio telescope or the cosmic echo of primordial radiation. Rather,…
-
This post is whimsical. Not to be confused with telecom engineering standards, but the underlying logic is the same as in our social ecology article. Have fun reading it! Telecom spam filters were supposed to solve a simple problem: stop fraudsters from flooding our phones with garbage calls. Instead, they have produced a surreal outcome:…
-
What a conflict‑windfall certification can achieve, how it differs from ESG, and why proliferation of such schemes is the only way to hold power accountable 0. The Certification Question The war‑windfall and harm‑windfall protocols described in the previous posts are governance tools. But tools left on a workbench change nothing. A fund may adopt a…
-
A scalable, third‑party certification scheme for investors and portfolio companies that neutralise profit from intentional destruction – modelled on Fair Trade, B Corp, and organic certification 0. The Scaling Problem The war‑windfall and harm‑windfall protocols are governance tools for individual funds. But LPs cannot easily verify which funds have adopted them. GPs cannot easily signal…
-
A generic framework for investors who refuse to profit from intentional or grossly negligent destruction – extended beyond armed conflict 0. The Precedent The war‑windfall protocol established a principled trigger: if a portfolio company profits from contracts intended to cause harm or kill during active conflict, the incremental gain is ring‑fenced and neutralised. A standalone…
-
A framework for investors who refuse to profit from armed conflict – with an intent‑based trigger and a sanctions failsafe 1. The Investor’s Dilemma You are a GP. Your fund backed a satellite imaging startup built for flood monitoring. Then a war broke out. The startup’s revenue tripled – partly from humanitarian agencies tracking refugees,…
-
A governance and capital allocation model for dual‑use technology startups 1. Problem Statement: Dual‑Use Inevitability Modern infrastructure technologies are intrinsically dual‑use. A satellite imaging system designed to monitor crop health can locate a tank column. An industrial IoT network built for predictive maintenance can relay coordinates for a precision strike. A cloud platform optimised for…
-
The code is free. The weights are downloadable. You can run Llama 4 on a laptop, fine‑tune Mistral on a single GPU, and spin up a chatbot using nothing but open‑source libraries. And yet, some of the most valuable companies in AI are not the ones building the models. They are the ones building the…
-
Gen Z is drinking significantly less than Millennials or Gen X did at the same age. The decline is not a youthful phase. It is a structural shift in how this generation seeks risk, novelty, and connection. But the drive to lose control has not disappeared. It has moved – from the pub to the…
-
The coffee shop economy runs on low margins, algorithmic control, and the disposability of labour. But beneath the surface of Finland’s demographic crisis and Europe’s sluggish productivity, a quieter revolution is unfolding. It is not about politics. It is about infrastructure. Tokenization – the conversion of rights to an asset, identity, or agreement into a…