There are a few things that are true today that make me want to do this:
1. It's clear that we are accelerating towards an intelligent-abundance world
2. There is $650B in dry powder in venture capital today, waiting to be invested. The era of software is behind us, the era of AI, robotics, biotech, space, neuro-tech (+ any deep tech) is where most of this will be invested.
3. Today, most YC companies consist of people building AI wrappers and agents for specific industries. They are getting funded, but it's unclear whether they will win given the cost of entry is going down (it's getting easier and cheaper to build software).
Where are the Andurils, the Palantirs and the PayPals of the future?
Anduril was started in 2017, when no one wanted to touch defense tech.
Palantir was started back in 2003, when silicon valley and the government cooperating together was unheard of.
PayPal was started in 1999 when payments over the internet were slow and clunky. There weren't many competitors.
If you want to build a monopoly, you really have to build in a space where there isn't any competition, and you need to build with intent to win from the start. That means a data moat, a hardware moat, or sometimes just speed/execution.
This is what I'm doing:
1. Putting together a discord group of the most ambitious builders living in North America
2. We will do a deep dive every month in a domain: whether that's energy, climate, biology, neuro, AI, etc. We will be learning as much as we can about that area and we will share our learnings. Whoever is interested in building a startup in that space, can then form a team with someone in the discord and meet IRL and go from there. The goal is for the discord group to eventually die, as people go on to start companies.
3. We will approach this from an "anti-VC" perspective. We are going to build where there's no competition, we are going to do M&A, we are going to explore debt-funding, we are going to actually talk to customers.
4. Every idea will have to pass Peter Thiel's "7 Questions"
I'm calling this group "Future Monopolies"
Our eventual goal is for all of our subgroups to form companies, move to SF, and get into Ycombinator or get venture funding for their idea.
This is the best time to build, but no one is building hard things with intent to become a dominant player, and that's what this group will be about.
I'm going to close the invites to the group after 20 people join, so we're keeping this discord pretty tight at first.
The discord: https://discord.gg/ymzPEn2W
layer8•2h ago