Patri Friedman

COLD PITCHES FOR CHARTER CITIES ONLY - I do not invest in random tech, FinTech, AI, network states, etc. I'm the guy who's spent 20 years saying the world needs startup countries to get innovation & customer-focus in the governance industry. After all, innovation requires trying new things, which is almost impossible in governance. And monopoly providers like today's countries have little incentive to serve their customer-citizens well. That's why startup cities, territories, and eventually countries are the answer. In the early 2000s I created this theory, and looked to ocean cities as the answer, writing a book on seasteading and then (with funding from Peter Thiel) starting the non-profit Seasteading Institute in 2008. When the Honduran ZEDE program started in 2011, I pivoted to charter cities on land, as it seemed much more tractable. I started the first modern co in the space, Future Cities Development, and then in 2017 began developing the first investment fund for the space, Pronomos Capital. Other work I'm proud of includes starting intentional communities in 2000 & 2005, coding for 10 years at Google (from 2004), writing the first breakeven AI poker bot (2005, w/ Adam Bliss & Mike Maurer), founding the Ephemerisle festival (15y: 2009-present), and proposing a decentralized network of open-source nodes validating cryptocurrency transactions by majority vote in 2002 in a paper read by absolutely no one. If we haven't directly interacted, please follow me here or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/patrissimo) rather than sending a request.