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Most people know me for the things I've helped build:
- London Interdisciplinary School (2018) "The most radical new university to open in decades" the Times.
We designed it around two key principles: First, the world is becoming more complex and interconnected. Second, specialisation in the workforce is becoming automated, fast. Both of which mean we need more people who can tie ideas together.
Of course at first nobody got it, who needs more generalists? Then just one year after launching covid hit, demonstrating how brittle and interwoved our global system is. Then a year after that, LLMs went mainstream, demonstrating quickly how systems thinkers will be the ones crafting the future.
- onefinestay (2009) was the largest distributed hotel in the world. It was messy and complex to scale to make the tip of the iceberg seem remotely magical. The team was amazing and have gone on to create many more successful companies. We ended up selling for a healthy nine figure sum.
- snaptalent (2007) very early YC batch. I was only 19 and it was long before any exits. What blows my mind is how wonderful that early hacker group of people were and how basically everyone has gone on to do amazing things.
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My focus is self-organisation and distributed coordination.
About 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive today and we’re about to give birth to countless AGI. Traditional hierarchical systems will struggle in the age of AI. Teams will have to flock if they'll have any chance at adapting fast enough. But in my gut, alignment tools still feel like 1600s medicine. With sacred rituals and blindly over perscribing Kanban or blood letting. So my focus is creating the instruments for coordination, rather than selling tinctures.
LIS is an exercise in creating the highest agency humans possible. We think about it this way, are rats or pandas going to survive climate change? So are specialists or interdisciplinarians going to thrive alongside AGI? Taking multiple perspectives is the best route to solving the elephant and the blind men problem. Being able to take a step back or at least walk around a problem is infinitely more useful today rather being able to zoom in on only one aspect of it.
Through LIS, we then did work on getting concrete about problem categorisation. This allowed us to map how each is best understood and so how to create expertise. Experts have historically been one of the guiding organising forces. Unfortunately, neo-liberalism has shown a real failure here, yet wisdom of the populist crowd is clearly not the answer either.
Most recently I’ve been working on using information theory to define measures of complexity. So we can quantitatively define when we can rely on traditional frequentist statistics, p-values or spot when black swans and fat-tails matter more.
Then a second measure for self-organisation and emergence. Truly scaled systems have to be distributed by definition. So understanding how to harness autonomous, self-organised alignment is crucial for both human collaboration and now agentic too.
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I'm currently working on ideas around the great flattening and enabling collaboration at scale.
If you're a founder or researcher working in adjacent spaces like security, truth, metrics, complexity; definitely get in touch.