An unsolicited confession of intellectual convergence

I. How this started

I need to tell you about something that happened on a Monday in March 2026, on a plane from Phoenix to Paris, somewhere over the Atlantic, on my way back to Turin, when I should have been sleeping.

I was reading a post by Jamie Burke, "Decomposing The Firm — Starting With Mine". The founder of Outlier Ventures explained how he had taken a hundred-person venture firm down to ten humans orchestrating a system, by applying his own Post-Web thesis to his own company: knowledge graphs, skills as downloadable primitives, processes exposed as interfaces. All of it released openly, free to use.

I read it twice. Then I opened a blank document and did not close it until we began the descent into Charles de Gaulle.

This is the story of what came out of that document. To tell it properly I have to go back about nine years.

II. Further back than you think

I first crossed paths with Jamie in 2016 or 2017. I was Head of Data and AI at Smart Dubai Government, and we brought in Outlier Ventures to help us prepare a report on the disruption to come: the collision of blockchain and AI we could already see forming. My team in Dubai, his in London, a series of video calls about what institutional disruption would look like when those two forces converged. We never met in person. The ideas were clear enough through a screen.

That report is almost a decade old now, and the world it described is arriving.

We went separate ways. He built Outlier Ventures into one of the most respected Web3 programmes in Europe: hundreds of portfolio companies, due diligence on tens of thousands of startups, a decade of pattern recognition at the frontier of decentralised infrastructure. I built other things. We did not stay in touch, but I kept an eye on what he published, the way you watch someone whose thinking once shaped yours.

In early 2026 I had been publishing a weekly series for fourteen weeks: the sovereignty thesis, the Nexi, the Harvest Model©, the ventures one by one. I was writing for an audience that did not quite exist yet, trusting the ideas to find the people they needed to find. Then Jamie shared one of my posts, publicly.

I want to be measured about what that means. A share means someone thought something was worth passing on, and nothing more. But it meant something specific to me: someone I had worked with a decade earlier, who had spent the years since building exactly the judgement you need to tell a serious thesis from noise, had seen the work and thought it worth amplifying.

So I read everything he had published. And I realised that while I had been building the sovereignty thesis from the side of human rights, he had been building the Post-Web thesis from the side of technological inevitability. Two people who once worked on the same report spent ten years building toward the same future from opposite directions, without comparing notes.

III. The overlap

"The same shift from different angles" sounds vague, so here it is precisely.

His diagnosis: the web, document-centric, browser-mediated and funded by advertising, is structurally terminal. Agents are replacing human browsing; the attention economy breaks when the user is a machine; every institution will be decomposed into machine-readable primitives, and the only question is whether that happens on sovereign or extractive terms.

Mine: surveillance capitalism is structurally exhausted. The attention economy has run out of attention and the trust economy has run out of trust. AI, blockchain and a change in human consciousness are converging at once, as banking, printing and humanism did in Florence, and the infrastructure for what comes next has to be built before the window closes.

Same diagnosis, different vocabulary. Both arrive at sovereign infrastructure, built now, or an agent economy born into the old extraction.

The prescriptions converge too. He describes a Post-Web stack in layers; I had built seven Nexi as a progressive sovereignty stack. He names two paths for building Post-Web systems, decompose existing institutions or constitute new ones from first principles; I had built the Harvest Model©: fund real builders, extract the infrastructure they prove, deploy it as public protocol, a third path that answers the bootstrapping problem both of his face. He names privacy, sovereignty and cryptographic proof as non-negotiable constraints; I had built all three into every Nexus without naming them, because they seemed too obvious to label. He describes the move from the attention economy to the intention economy; I describe the move from extraction to sovereignty. He named the mechanism, and I named the destination.

This goes well beyond "we both like decentralisation". It is a structural isomorphism: two independent lines of work arriving at the same architecture from opposite starting points.

IV. The line that broke it open

What kept me awake over the Atlantic was that he was no longer theorising. He was showing receipts: a firm run as hybrid human-agent workflows, skills encoded as files any model could load, knowledge graphs built from a decade of due diligence, all released openly.

And one line: the initiator as power user, never as gatekeeper. Advantage comes from being most deeply embedded in the substrate, and owning it adds nothing.

That is the Harvest Model©, exactly. Fund builders, extract infrastructure, be the most sophisticated user of the open protocol you helped make. He arrived at the same operating principle from a completely different direction, without knowing ours existed.

By the time we landed, the blank document had become a research brief for my AI agent: read both theses completely, find every structural alignment and every gap, and tell me what each framework has that the other lacks.

V. What came back

The analysis came back at four and a half thousand words. The findings that mattered fit in a paragraph each.

The Nexi read as an implementation path for the Post-Web. His thesis describes what the infrastructure must do; the Nexi describe how to build it, in sequence, layer by layer, the way TCP/IP was built.

The Harvest Model© is a missing third path. Decomposing and constituting both need users before infrastructure, or infrastructure before users. Funding the users first, the ventures, and extracting what they prove sidesteps that, because the infrastructure arrives already validated.

His funding primitive and our design were derived independently and match. Capital gated on milestones, and a strict separation between the productive and the speculative function of a coordination instrument: we had reached the same principles from our own side. When two people derive the same mechanism independently, it is usually because the mechanism is right.

Each framework had something to give the other. From his side: design for agents first, generative surfaces, machine-readable endpoints as the second front door of every service, the language of the intention economy. From ours: the Harvest Model©, consciousness as the third force, an ethical sequence for sovereignty, and formal verification as the trust layer.

The two frameworks do more than agree. They complete each other. The long document that came out of that week, the Sovereignty Stack, says so in its last section; it was published on 26 March 2026.

VI. The open-letter part

Jamie, if you ever read this, here is what I want you to know.

I am not writing for validation. The thesis was built before I dove into yours, and the work is real. I am writing because we were on the same video calls almost a decade ago, my team in Dubai and yours in London, working on a report about a future that had not arrived; then we spent ten years building toward it from opposite directions, you from the investment side and me from the infrastructure side, without comparing notes. And now the notes match.

That does not happen by accident. It happens when the underlying structure is real.

We are not competitors. You fund Post-Web systems; I build Post-Web infrastructure. You have the portfolio intelligence and the pattern recognition; I have the protocol architecture and the Harvest Model©. The fit is almost suspicious. Then again, perhaps it was always there, since those calls between Dubai and London.

This is the public, accountable version of picking up where we left off a decade ago, except that now we both have the receipts.

Consider it delivered.