Projects &
working notes.

I think a lot about intersections. Technology, institutions, the economy, state capacity and other factors are all a kind of combined co-generative engine that produces the future. Systems change is incredibly powerful when done right, and is also notoriously tricky to actually get right.

Of late, I am deeply interested in shaper strategies and “slow variables”: deep tech, new innovation catalysts, tactically positioned institutions responding to major forces like AI-driven transformation. This is really 80% of what Meridian works on. My understanding is forever incomplete, but that is the fun of the game.

Look up the history of the Apollo program, and you would be staggered by the spillover effects it produced. There is a similar paradigm at play with frontier tech: enabler technologies, the kinds of advances that open a field 20 years forward.

Think cheaper compute, programmable biology, abundant energy. One breakthrough, or more often a chain, can ripple far beyond its sector. This is the philosophy underpinning my deep tech research work at LVCN, and also how I choose which programmes & organisations I support.

Knowledge is highly transferrable, paradoxically at high levels of abstraction and at the deep operational level. Venture, policy, startups, research and civic efforts often run on different incentives, timelines and vocabularies. Much of what interests me, though, is about where these different areas meet.

I look for ways to make these overlaps usable, through gatherings, intersectional programmes, and more broadly factoring in different domains into how I think about change.

How do we build the capacity to keep discovering and creating over decades? Better yet, how do we create the sort of institutional machinery that lives on way beyond the original effort?

I concede that I am yet to crack this. Still, this is the ambition. I often work in generations of organisations, effectively iterating project after project. Someday one of these iterations will stand for a decade and beyond.

The world runs on talent. From experience, even a comparatively simple-to-stand-up fellowship can have a major impact on someone’s trajectory through providing a scaffold, support, connection, and more.

To that extent, I work with organisations like Noetic to accelerate future talent, plus also think about education & knowledge of the future, communities and more.

GPT is perhaps the most influential GPT of this decade so far. See what I did there?

General Purpose Technologies are fascinating in their uniqueness. Depending on definition, only ~20–40 have ever existed in all of history. AI is one such technology, with unusually wide ripple effects at that.

I think a lot about how AI will change work, economies, governance, technology, humanity itself. From organisational transformation to figuring out new institutions and harnessing new opportunities, there’s much work to be done.