The Meridian Compendium

Ah, 2026. Time sure flies.

Sometimes I wish I had one of those control rooms from Cold War era action movies. Seems just about the only way to keep up with everything going on these days. I’m not even sure which has more headlines right now, tech or geopolitics.

I suspect this year will be even busier.

When I first came up with Meridian, it was a natural outgrowth of a question that has been nagging me for ages: how do you really achieve change at scale?

It’s a deceptively simple questions. Because what we call progress is really one of the largest, most complex systems in the entire world.

I’ve written about it before, but think about it for a moment. How does change happen? How does any company, from Apple to Nvidia to startups like OpenAI or ElevenLabs, come into existence? What are the prerequisites?

Let’s say you, for some reason known only to yourself, decide to develop a new kind of laptop for digital nomads. Lighter, more powerful, more durable.

For that to happen, you need:

1. The necessary scientific advancements in chip miniaturisation.
2. That science to be converted into new CPU designs.
3. Someone has to set up a new fab & production lines to make it available. As well as dozens of other pieces of technology your new laptop needs.

Your company isn’t even in the picture yet. To continue:

1. You need to pull together a team across engineering, sales, marketing, R&D, and all the other talent a startup of this kind needs.
2. You need risk capital.
3. You yourself have to learn how to run an innovative company.
4. You’ll need some sort of lab, tech partners, etc.

And a lot more. All of this before even considering incorporation, all the tools you need to run payroll & handle banking, a workspace, etc etc.

In practice, of course, you don’t need to even think about half of these things in most cases. The difficulty mostly rests on forming an actually effective org (Your startup). The rest is already in play — unless you’re lacking some fundamental capacity, and that is the innovation you’re interested in.

The point is that what we call progress is really a kind of super-system comprised of the modern scientific community, networks of R&D labs, country- and city-level startup ecosystems, policy, talent, and who knows what else. Literally hundreds of thousands of organisations make it all possible, each adding some new element to the world.

No one ever sees the entire machine. I’m not even sure how long it would take to map the thing. It’s a sort of colossal lattice. The thing is, though, that changes in that lattice can have massive implications for actual, practical change — the sort that gets you cheaper power for your flat or cuts your medical bills.

Concretely: if you want to solve a problem, start a company. If you want to speed up progress itself, tinker with the lattice. A new accelerator or program can fund emerging science in cellular biology, unlocking entire verticals for biotech startups. Changes in national innovation policy can attract more founders to a country, thereby boosting the network effects of its capital. An influential accelerator can help a hundred new startups get off the ground.

After much reflection, I fundamentally think the distinction lies in the level of agency, or direct influence. If you deeply care about creating something specific, solving a particular problem — build a whole organisation around it. You have more or less complete control over what sort of solution emerges, how and how fast — accounting, of course, for what can get you funded, what you can realistically build, etc.

Alternatively, if you’re willing to give up some degree of agency in problem selection and instead just want to see more innovation — look at the meta-layer. Work in policy, go into VC, start a hacker house. In short, change the playing field so that more innovation happens.

Well, I happen to be interested in acceleration.

Bending the arc on innovation as a whole can be absurdly powerful. A 1% change in rates of startups created over 25 years gets you a ≈25.5% deviation. That’s 25 additional companies in an ecosystem of 100.

Directional control is a bit different: you can nudge a specific bottleneck. Say, technical talent, or VC money flowing into climate tech.

Combine the two, and you can meaningfully change outcomes across entire geographies or verticals. You can come rather close to, just maybe, changing the world in your own, small way.

And that is what I mean by acceleration.

It’s a tricky subject. In practice, for someone to succeed with such a goal, you have to 1) possess enough operator skill be able to build an effective organisation, and 2) understand innovation ecosystems well enough to deploy your org in the right place with the right model to actually shift outcomes.

No-1, I’m handling in other areas of my career.

Meridian exists to solve No-2.

Suffice to say, I’m going to have a lot to do in 2026.

The Compendium

Meridian is really structured around questions, or exploration threads.

- Which technological directions are key over the next 10 yers?

- Which “accelerator“ models work the best, and in which cases?

- What makes successful ecosystems actually successful?

- Can that be replicated?

Even though there are so many accelerators, no one seems to have any structural sense of what exists and what works. At least that has been my impression.

I want to change that.

Coming from the London ecosystem, we have dozens of entrepreneurship hubs of various flavours. I’m building one myself. But how do you build the right programs? How do you actually effectively support founders? How do you structure your org to have the highest impact?

I want to answer all of that, too.

The Meridian Compendium is a long collection of questions that I will be writing about throughout 2026. However long it takes me to sort all of this out.

This loosely includes:

1. The Toolkit: what does acceleration encompass, exactly? From ARPA-style orgs like ARIA to UNDP, from YC to SouthParkCommons, from hacker houses to fellowships. What works, what do we need more of, and where?
2. The Compass: what are we solving for? What are the technological directions which are going to have the highest long-term effects? What is impactful? What is actually going to get us over the line towards something like proto-abundance?
3. Ecosystems & Clusters: how does the System of Progress looks today? What makes great ecosystems like SF or London successful? What makes specific clusters effective? Can we expand on those, replicate it, or figure out how to transplant the logic without falling into the usual “let’s build another Valley of X“ approach?

And, extending from the above:

1. Horizons: imagining new models, from literal founder-cities at university campuses to interdisciplinary fellowships. Most probably won’t quite work. Some, I invite others to take a shot at. Others, I will try to build myself.
2. Journals about everything else.

My goal is for the V1 Compendium to resemble a Map of Progress of sorts. Try to capture what the lattice looks like today, which nodes are already effectively covered, where the major bottlenecks are, and how those could be addressed.

In short, I want to build a diagram of sorts, or at least a logic on which such maps could later be drawn up. My hope is that others will be able to use this Compendium to figure out which programs, accelerators & hubs to start in their own ecosystems and verticals.

And, one day, I intend to construct an innovation foundation that could use all of this to accelerate innovation like nothing before it. Might take a decade or two, but, well, I have the time.

Yeah. This is going to be a busy 2026.

I have been chipping away at this project for over 3 years. For a while, I lacked even the language to talk about any of this, or enough conceptual understanding to know where to look. Honestly, I thought I was a bit crazy — just build something, why are you looking at things so high-level? Well, I have my reasons. I think there is something I will find in all of this. I think that, just maybe, I could go beyond solving individual problems and nudge the whole machine. Perhaps a grand coalition of hundreds could, one day.

I cannot wait to know what the results of that would be.