The StewardshipCapital Thesis
When three people can orchestrate what once required 30,000, the scaffolding of work-based identity collapses. The question isn't whether to adopt AI but what values to encode.
The Lineage Break
A Fundamental DiscontinuityThe Industrial Revolution converted artisans into wage laborers—a profound transformation of human work and identity. Now we face an even more fundamental shift.
We automate intelligence itself—not tasks, but judgment.
When three people orchestrate what once required 30,000, the entire scaffolding of work-based identity collapses. The systems we've built—career ladders, professional development, retirement planning—all assume that human labor remains the primary input to productive capacity.
McKinsey estimates 15-30 million US workers may face displacement by 2035. But displacement is only half the story.
The Fork in the Road
Concentration vs. DistributionTwo futures diverge before us.
Path A: Concentrated Power. A tiny elite possesses productive capacity while masses subsist on redistribution. This isn't dystopian fiction—it's the default trajectory of current ownership structures.
Path B: Distributed Prosperity. Competitive ventures designed from inception to allocate value broadly—not through afterthought philanthropy, but through fundamental architecture.
Current ownership defaults—concentrated equity, shareholder primacy, extractive value capture—will simply scale into AI-Born architectures unless we deliberately build alternatives.
But alternatives exist. Mondragón cooperatives. Steward-ownership models. Worker ownership structures. Elinor Ostrom's principles for governing the commons.
Stewardship Capital
Architecture, Not CharityWe back founders who understand this fork.
Not charities masquerading as businesses. Not extractive models with corporate social responsibility veneers. Competitive, for-profit ventures designed from day one to distribute gains broadly.
This isn't about charity—it's about architecture. Embedding distribution into reward functions. Encoding stakeholder value into governance structures. Building ownership models that include employees, users, and communities from inception.
Stewardship isn't a constraint on returns—it's a framework for building more resilient, defensible, valuable companies in an age of increasing scrutiny on how technology platforms distribute power.
What We Look For
The Investment CriteriaAI-Born Architecture: Machine Core + Human Cortex. AI handles pattern recognition, optimization, and execution at scale. Humans provide judgment, ethics, creativity, and strategic direction.
Founders Who Ask 'For Whom?': Not just 'how much?' but 'for whom?' Founders who understand that the question of value distribution is as important as value creation.
Ownership Structures Beyond Shareholders: Employee ownership. User ownership. Community ownership. Governance structures that include stakeholders beyond capital providers.
Decade-Scale Time Horizons: Building enduring institutions, not exit vehicles. Patient capital that measures success in decades, not quarters.
Individual & Collective Prosperity
The IntegrationIndividual prosperity is inseparable from collective flourishing.
While our investment portfolio focuses on competitive ventures with embedded stakeholder value, our foundation addresses the broader infrastructure required for prosperity: education, formation, community capacity, and the social fabric that enables individual agency.
You cannot build stewardship-oriented companies without stewardship-capable communities. You cannot encode participatory governance into software without citizens who understand participation. The work is integrated—commercial architecture and social infrastructure, mutually reinforcing.
The question before us is not whether AI will transform society, but whether that transformation will concentrate or distribute prosperity.
Building the Future Together
If you're building a venture that aligns with this thesis—AI-born architecture with embedded stakeholder value—we want to hear from you.