A Letter, First.

To the founders.

This is not a review. I want to measure this work against a decade, not a quarter, not a fiscal year, not the next round. If you are reading this, I want you on the long end of that with me.

Everything here is early. That is the point.

Where I'm coming from

I'm 27, born in Berlin, still here. Tech was the only thing that ever really held me. In school I went deep on electrical engineering because I loved the logic of it. The math was just the tax you paid to get to the interesting part.

When school ended, the world shut down, and I started building. On Clubhouse I ended up running the largest watch community in Europe, which sounds like a strange thing to say out loud, but it taught me more about people and distribution than any job could have. I collect watches too. The collecting and the pattern recognition feed each other: you learn to see which details carry weight and which are just noise dressed up as signal.

I think in network effects. The lowest common denominator kills you every time. If you design for the right node first, the rest of the graph pulls itself in. Most products fail because they optimize for the average user who was never going to love them anyway.

I've held crypto since 2015. Ten years of carrying a view almost nobody around me shared, and I didn't flinch once. That kind of time does something to you. It teaches you that being early and being wrong look identical until they don't.

A lot of people larp into being a founder now. They come out of consulting, rebrand, and sell the role. That isn't the same thing. A real founder was living the lifestyle before the word existed. Weird sleep, long stretches of isolation, years where the work doesn't look like anything from the outside. The word came after. The life came first. You can usually tell real from fake inside a few minutes, and most real builders can.

Berlin is a distracted city. Even the high performers here struggle to commit to one thing long enough for it to compound. Don't wait for a co-founder to make you feel legitimate. Good people follow motion, not pitches, and any investor worth taking money from already knows that.

The thing I keep seeing, and it took me a while to name it, is AI feudalism. The speed and leverage AI gives you belongs to whoever can afford it. Everyone else is living in a different economy and doesn't know it yet. I watched this split form in real time inside rooms where the top one percent talks openly about it.

Enterprise will absorb AI much slower than the timelines suggest. The hype cycle runs ahead of the org chart, and the org chart always wins in the end. Humans in the loop is what fills that gap, and it's a real operational layer, not a transitional role people romanticize away. AI is quietly moving from IT budgets into OPEX. Once that happens it stops being software and becomes infrastructure. Cost, headcount, and productivity all get rewritten from scratch, and the large companies with real cash flow are the ones that survive the rewrite.

Being a founder is the sharpest position you can hold for the next five to ten years. You get to define new categories before the incumbents understand they need to defend them. Most of what feels new has happened before in a different costume. Facts beat morals, every time.

What we are doing

Berlin treats ambition like something you export. We are building a home for the founders who don't.

The thesis is narrow. The people building the next generation of companies here need a room, a table, and peers who expect them to tell the truth. Not a coworking space. Not a conference.

The seven articles on this site, on conviction, speed, markets, monopoly, capital, longevity, and one more, are the operating assumptions. They are a filter. If you read them and want to talk, talk.

The biggest thing I'm building right now is [city]-based. If you are a founder, use it. It is built around where you live, which is the thing most platforms get wrong. Using it is how you support what we are building here. Same vertical, same commitment.

Why now, and why not later

The advice in 2026 is to wait. Wait for rates. Wait for the model. Wait for a cleaner signal. Waiting is the most expensive thing a founder can do, and the people telling you to wait are not building anything themselves.

Capital is about to flood the market. Not a trickle, not a vibe shift. A wave. When that happens, the people already in motion get carried. The people waiting for the signal become the signal for someone else. Better early and wrong a few times than late and correct once.

What I believe, plainly

Conviction compounds faster than capital. Most markets are smaller than they look. A few are much larger. Monopoly is the goal, not the accusation. Speed tells you what you actually believe. Capital is a tool, not a scoreboard. Longevity comes from refusing, early and often, to do what everyone else is doing.

None of this is original. What is rare is holding ordinary convictions long enough for them to matter.

On gathering

We may gather soon. A dinner has been discussed. No date set. If it happens, it will be small, and it will not be announced online. The gathering is not the point. The work between gatherings is.

On money. Getting money is not the hard part. Most people raise money to have money, and small checks are available to anyone with a pulse and a deck. Smart money is hard. Capital that brings a network, a standard, and a reason for the next person to take your call. That is worth optimizing for, and almost nobody does.

The people worth knowing are the least available. Everyone I know who is good at what they do is working more than they were five years ago, not less. Some are back from retirement doing more than before. The circle of people with both the right judgment and time in the day is shrinking. Access is no longer about money or geography. It is about who has earned a claim on someone's attention.

New gatekeeping networks are forming because of this, whether anyone names them or not. This is built for that.

The goal is not a movement. The goal is a set of people who decided this is the decade they take seriously. The home for that is [city]-based. That is where infounderswetrust lives as a platform, where the roll becomes more than a list, and where founders who sign this find each other by city. Same vertical, different surface. Not a pivot, not a hobby. The next expression of the same thing.

If you are building, tell me what you are building. If you are thinking about building, tell me what is stopping you. If you are neither and want to be near people who are, say so, to yourself first. Friendships might come out of this. Real ones. Relationships that outlast the companies. That is the part I would not trade.

A decade from here

I'm not marking a date on a calendar. The long run is not a promise. It's 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 will come. If a tenth of that happens, it was worth it. If more happens, we got lucky, and I have no pride about luck.

This letter is the beginning. The website is the beginning. The articles are the beginning. You reading this is the beginning. Everything after is execution, and execution is the part I am good at.

Thank you for being early. Early is the only interesting place to be.