Building a 1,000 Year Company (TOP SECRET)

At DenseLayers, we’re taking on some interesting problems.

The first one, which you are already aware of, is to accelerate frontier sciences.

The second one is to build something that will live for at least a thousand years.

In fact, most of the value of DenseLayers will be realized centuries into the future. All we’re doing as the founders is to stand up a few dominos, kick the first few, and nominate other people to place larger and larger dominos in the front, and continue to pass the baton through generations.

Our mission is to make DenseLayers into a train that travels eternally in the right direction. It’s fine that as mortals, we will never see most of the destinations it visits. Such is life.

In fact, if you join DenseLayers, the stocks aren’t to make us rich, they’re to make our grandchildren richer. The joy of the journey and eternal glory is for us.

 

The challenge.

Now, it has come to my attention that building a thousand year company may not be very easy.

So let’s sit down and figure out what needs to happen for this train to keep rolling for a millennium. 

Let’s start with defining the basic problem here, such that even a 5th grader could understand.

There are many conditions that, if met, would cause an organization to live for 1,000 years.

But there is only one condition that can ensure it:

If the organization dies along the way, it regenerates and continues with its original directive.

The other condition would of course be that it never dies in the first place. We’ll get to that later.

As a systems engineer with a background in failure-tolerance, I prefer to assume that the worst WILL happen, and simply build for the ability to recover.

With that, let’s reframe the challenge:

Do everything we can to increase the odds of regeneration, as well as the odds that the original directive will be followed.

In other words, build a company that can keep showing up and live to fight another day.

This framing gives us a lot more room to play with, and a lot more room for mistakes. We no longer have to rely on a silver bullet for longevity, but rather devise a myriad of fail-safe measures that we can “stack” on top of each other.

It’s a classic engineering problem. You simply design a system for resilience and recovery above all.

As a trained systems engineer, and also a former safety engineer for self-driving trucks (in charge of functional safety and designing fail-safe protocols etc), it’s as if this is what I’ve been preparing my whole life for.

Brainstorm

First, let us look at certain organizations that have already cracked the code on longevity:

Universities

Family-run businesses

Religions

Countries / Kingdoms.

…and so on.

By studying what’s already worked in the past, and combining it with new technology, we can craft a realistic, compelling plan for ourselves.

Here are some examples of features (or bugs) we can build:

1. A clear directive that can be followed for eternity, regardless of how the human species and our culture evolves over time. (“Accelerate frontier scientific research”)
2. Make it so the data/information contained in DenseLayers is incredibly hard to destroy; as long as a single copy remains, it can respawn the entire network. (Blockchains? Distributed database?)
3. We have a system for recruiting people that continues to attract people to the cause. (Content marketing / Books / Referrals)
4. Even if the number of members dwindles to zero, a new individual can join and both get and create value. (YouTube)
5. If the company fails in one country, it still has roots elsewhere. (PirateBay? Yahoo Japan?)
6. The company allows disruptive innovation from within. If someone comes up with a technology that makes the current tools obsolete, the company must pave the way for new methods to be successful. (Eg: 3M, Nintendo)
7. The company’s funds don’t run out — i.e. do not depend on a single source of revenue, always save a portion of income and invest it elsewhere such that the principle remains unharmed and also earns a regular interest. (Universities)
8. There is a robust system for succession. (Nobel Prize committee? University Leaderships? Democracies?)
9. Members need as few resources to join and benefit as possible — even the remotest humans can plug into the scientific network with primitive devices. (Facebook?)
10. …and so on.

 

On the other hand, we can also do things to reduce the risk of death in the first place. In that respect, I have a simple philosophy:

Always offer the best deal that your customers could find in the market.

I often look at the Japanese industry for examples galore. Kawasaki, Toyota, Honda, Nintendo (one of my faves), Sony, Panasonic, and so on.

In the west, you have companies like Disney and Apple.

What I love about the bolded ones above, is that they tried to diversify (not betting the future on a single product), while still being focused on a single purpose.

They were also product-leaders: we keep buying from them mostly because they make really good shit. They even inspire other companies to step up their quality.

An example I love is that Nintendo, after their Game Boy was a massive hit for 11 years, lost dominance to Sony’s Playstation, then made a comeback with the Nintendo DS, and later again made a huge hit with the Nintendo Switch. And this company was founded in the 1880s, with paper card games!

I also like Apple’s example — even though I don’t think much of the new iPhones, the Apple Watch and AirPods (launched after Jobs died) are each multi-billion dollar businesses in their own right. You gotta give the team credit.

I want DenseLayers to similarly keep building amazing tools for scientists and innovators of all ages, forever, and always offer the best wares in the market. The goodest shit, always. If we can build a culture where offering the best products for scholars is more important than anything else, then we should be good to go.

 

***

Here’s a thought I had this afternoon, after a bathroom break while walking back to my desk:

Imagine if (after we’re successful) we plant hundreds of time capsules all over the world, with each capsule containing instructions for how to regenerate DenseLayers (the scientific network), rebuild it to success, and once again plant new time capsules that last a century or two.

We could design the content of the capsule such that it becomes the talk of the town, and also makes a pretty compelling case — enough to inspire one crazy person to take the idea and run with it (which is all we need really).

Anyway — I’ll get back to work now.