Portable Sovereignty, New Sovereigns and Founders for the Next 100 Years

In podcast form

Last week we had a chance to sit down with Harriet from Basis and discuss quite a bit of our worldview and alpha seeking process. (Full podcast below)

We expanded on some of our ideas around sovereignty, what it is today and how it is migrating towards new sovereign subjects. Sovereign power over a set of decisions and actions is as downstream of cost curves as anything else. Bring the design and manufacturing cost of a drone down to a few hundred dollars, make currency issuance and fiscal control a function of energy and self-executing protocols, make anyone with a MinION sequencer, a Bento Lab unit and a Mac Mini understand their own genome; and suddenly you will have to look for new subjects, from individuals to private companies, wielding power that used to require state/large-org-level type of technological coordination.

The decentralization of the real world we started discussing a few years ago is now becoming an unstoppable process of continuous redistribution of sovereignty across subjects, accelerated by intelligence on meter.

Portable sovereignty snippet:

Off the back of our terror for where Europe is in the AI race, we also discussed the founder archetype that the world needs today. If there was ever a time where vc-savvy founders could play the seed-A-B-C game by following a playbook and make some life-changing money by catering to the VCs’ current-thing taste, that time is no more. The scale of the challenges we’re facing today requires an ambition and sense of urgency that leaves no space to moral ambiguity. We’re in the game of building the technology infrastructure of our civilizations.

We need to solve, today, problems for the next 100 years. It takes decades and had to be done yesterday. The magnitude of the solutions we’ll have to put in place requires action on a proportionate scale and timeframe. You can (could) exit a productivity app for good money in a few years. You can do the same with a simple AI wapper.

But you’re not going to deploy millions of robots, build new institutions, get people jabbed against cancer by following the same playbook. We’re operating at civilizational scale, and the type of founder who is going to make it here is the one who thinks of their life in perfect adherence with that mission. Someone who dreads the world where what they’re building doesn’t exist. Civilization is not a sum of nice-to-haves, CRMs and calendar apps. It’s built out of radical answers to unavoidable questions.

Full podcast:

A few more things we’ve read last week:

• Retatrutide is going to be the best-selling drug of all time.

• The great man fallacy and why vibe investing in founders is not the job. The framing of the problem matters. Believing it doesn’t, is a shortcut to not think hard enough.

• The data layer tax for robot learning - excellent piece to think about the layers of the robotic data stack, and the bottlenecks that can slow us down.

• A glimpse into what Europeans can expect for wealth, inheritance, and exit taxes.

• China’s Real Estate Market has erased all gains from the last 20 years.