A Letter, First.
To the founders.
You have already read the seven articles. This letter exists because a manifesto without an author is just a posture, and the articles deliberately leave the question of who and from where unanswered. I want to answer it here, in the time it takes to drink a coffee. This is not a pitch and not a mission statement. It is a located position in the world, offered so the articles you just read feel like they came from a person.
Where I come from
I am 27, born in Berlin, still here. I had a technical school track and loved the parts that were pure logic: digital circuits, transistors, logic gates. The heavy math underneath it I had no patience for. It stopped pointing at anything real and started pointing at itself. I think in network effects almost reflexively, which is both useful and a bias I watch for. I own a lot of internet domains, not as a collection but as a map of how I think: each one a hypothesis about where attention and value will eventually meet. Identity for me starts from a different place than it does for most people. I see a lot of things differently and I know this because I have spent enough time around enough people to have the comparison. Many roads lead to Rome but I do not try to walk all of them. What I have learned, and keep learning, is that being alert is its own skill: not every opportunity that appears needs to be taken, and knowing the difference is the only thing that separates compounding from noise.
On crypto
I have been in crypto since 2015, which is early enough to mean something specific. Ethereum was launching, the first smart contract primitives were being sketched out, and the people around it were a particular type: ideologically driven, technically serious, described as crazy by almost everyone outside the room. The origin matters, because crypto was a cypherpunk project before it was anything else, built on the premise that cryptographic systems could replace institutional trust, and that premise is still the only part of it I find genuinely interesting. What got built from that ideology then got used and misused in every direction, dark markets, speculation, scams, meme coins, the whole carnival, which is what always happens to neutral uncensorable infrastructure. That is a feature with a cost, not a flaw, and the people who cannot hold both thoughts at once tend to either worship the space or dismiss it, both of which are lazy positions. Consumer crypto, the number-go-up culture, is genuinely toxic and I will not defend it. Infrastructure crypto is a different object. The recent US move to regulate dollar stablecoins under the GENIUS Act, explicitly as a mechanism to extend dollar reach through private rails rather than a central bank digital currency, is the clearest signal yet that the infrastructure thesis was correct even if the timeline was humiliating. The next real chapter is not another speculation cycle. It is agentic AI systems needing neutral programmable ledgers to transact on, and quantum computing sitting on the horizon as a variable that will force the cryptography itself to evolve. I did not stop betting on it. I stopped treating it as a sole position and stopped pretending it is a clean environment. Most people do not stay a decade in something like this. I did. It deserves a longer conversation than this letter.
Tempus fugit
I collect mechanical watches. Time is something I find genuinely intimate, and horology, the science and craft of timekeeping, has always held me for reasons that go beyond collecting. There is a version of historic amnesia that plays out every time someone points at a Rolex (a perfectly nice watch, genuinely, though firmly at the entry point of the discipline) and says their quartz keeps better time, or holds up their phone and says it tells the time just as well. They are right on both counts. The quartz wins on accuracy. The phone wins on convenience. Neither of them has understood what they are looking at. What I find extraordinary is what it required of human intelligence to achieve any of this without a computer: the perpetual calendar that accounts for leap years through nothing but gears, the tourbillon that compensates for gravity through pure mechanical logic, the chronograph that measures fractions of a second through springs and levers. Each one a different argument about which dimension of time is worth making visible, solved entirely inside the skull before a single part was made. That is the thing. Not the accuracy. The proof of what human minds could do before they had machines to help them think. A fine mechanical watch was also, for most of history, something only a very small number of people could own — an object of genuine rarity that required generations of craft to produce. That history is part of what you hold when you hold one. Tempus fugit is probably the principle I return to most, not as decoration but as a way of operating.
On Clubhouse
When the world shut down I went to Clubhouse and ended up building what became the largest watch community in Europe, which sounds like a strange thing to say out loud. I worked with watch brands, met a wide range of people, and watched something form that I did not expect: a group that cohered around watches but was really about identity, about the difference between things that carry meaning and things that perform it. Once the network existed I connected the threads: watches, crypto, buyers who were already in the room. I built a marketplace where you could buy watches with crypto, which was not a pivot but a natural extension of the network effects already in motion, turning a community into customers. I have always had a high urgency for that kind of connection, the point where identity and distribution meet. The smallest detail either earns its place or it does not, and you can tell which within seconds. That habit of sorting signal from costume is the one skill I have carried into everything since.
Spending that much time inside the watch world and the ultra-luxury industry adjacent to it also taught me something about money that I would not have learned otherwise. Capital is not the problem. Capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any alternative ever proposed. But money as a primary organising principle for a life is a different thing, and I watched it happen to people around me, clients, brands, collectors, people who started with genuine taste and ended with a performance of it. Luxury can consume you. Status purchased at scale tends to hollow out the thing it was supposed to signal. I did not go that way, but I watched enough people go that way to understand exactly how it happens and how quietly it starts.
The baseline
The clearest fact of the present is that technology moves faster than the institutions built to govern it, and the interval between those two things is where everything that matters gets built. Whoever writes the substrate sets the defaults for how billions of people live, work, transact, and think, and they set them long before any parliament has named the category. The distinction between creating value and extracting it is the real question of the present, and the mistake most people make is thinking it can be resolved by committee. It cannot. Direction is a founder output. The people who act inside the interval define it. The people who convene about it arrive after the fact and call it regulation.
The mechanism underneath is compounding, and it is less forgiving than most people model it. In information economies the leader does not merely stay ahead: each unit of optimisation lowers the cost of the next, so the distance grows on a curve, not a line, and within a small number of cycles the gap becomes structural rather than personal. The floor of participation is rising because intelligence delivered as a service is becoming bare-minimum infrastructure. The ceiling is rising faster, because the people who operate these systems with intent are defining the categories the rest of the economy will be priced inside. Incumbents recognise a category only once it is already defended, and the current cycle moves faster than that observation was built to account for. In Founders We Trust is a response to that scarcity, not a slogan.
Why founding
Zoom out and the pattern holds everywhere. Intelligence delivered as a service is becoming bare-minimum infrastructure the way electricity became in the twentieth century. Once that happens, the line separating a functional life from a marginal one is not income. It is comprehension. The permanent underclass of the next two decades will be defined by who can operate these systems with intent and who cannot. That is a harder problem than poverty, because it does not announce itself as one. Founding a company is the sharpest position available inside this shift. Not because founders are morally superior, but because founders define categories before incumbents know the categories need defending. Everyone downstream is reacting.
What the articles are for
The seven articles are the operating assumptions I use to decide which categories are worth defining and who I want to define them with. They are a filter. If you read them and recognized your own thinking, that recognition is the point. This project exists to find the small number of people who see the same things from different vantage points and want to be in the same room.
The largest thing I am building right now is [city]-based. Tools for founders who take the baseline argument seriously and want leverage inside the shift rather than commentary about it. It is built around where you actually live, which is the variable most platforms treat as metadata and get wrong. The work speaks louder than a paragraph about the work, so I will leave it there.
A decade from here
I am not marking a date on a calendar. The long run is not a promise. It is how I already operate, and how the people I want around this table already operate. What I want is a set of companies that could not have been built anywhere else, started by people who met through this, backed by patient money, stubborn enough to outlast the cycles that are coming. If a tenth of that happens, it was worth it. If more happens, we got lucky, and I have no pride about luck.
If any of this resonated, write back. We do dinners in Berlin for the same reason: small, signatories only, not announced. The gathering is not the point. The work between gatherings is. Thank you for being early. Early is the only interesting place to be.