Our Constitution

Today, I’m able to share a completed first edition of what I’m calling the Western Symbolics Constitution. This document will be our team’s source of clarity and direction regarding our shared mission. The full version will be shared with every new employee before they start and will always be available internally on Notion.

Below are some sections I thought we’re worth sharing.

Forward

I’m writing this document to articulate the philosophy, reasoning, vision, and objectives guiding Western Symbolics. Its primary purpose is to establish clarity—firstly within our team and secondly for our broader community and ecosystem. This our living constitution; while specific approaches may evolve alongside our collective understanding, the foundational values and core intentions outlined here are intended to be timeless.

Language is an imperfect medium for conveying ideas and experiences, so interpretations of our organizational approach will naturally vary. Nevertheless, my hope is that this document provides directional clarity for those who approach it with good intentions. Western Symbolics is my contribution toward these ambitions, yet it represents only a small step within a much larger collective endeavor. Ideally, this constitution will inspire others to lead intentionally and thoughtfully in their own ventures and communities.

What

Western Symbolics is a design, investment, and media studio advancing techno-progressive values and intentional living.

While we are still in our early stages, our vision is currently structured around four core activities:

Professional Services: We offer consulting and design services to help organizations optimize their operations and accelerate innovation in ways that align with our foundational values.

Venture Growth: We launch and invest in ventures designed to challenge outdated systems and disrupt industries. These ventures emphasize long-term sustainability and meaningful societal impact.

Media Production: We create films, white papers, and other forms of media to communicate our techno-optimistic vision, inspire critical thought and dialogue, and foster meaningful transformation. Beyond their external purpose, these creative projects also serve as an outlet for personal expression, allowing us to explore and celebrate the beauty of life.

This model reflects my personal aspirations for a fulfilling life while establishing a workplace that meaningfully contributes to advancing the social contract among all living beings and responsibly stewarding our shared planet.

Our professional services engagements enable us to collaborate across various organizations, gaining deeper insights into the systems we aim to transform and validating innovative ideas with minimal risk. Operating as a studio provides a source of revenue independent from external donations or investments, allowing us to preserve the purity of our vision. Revenue generated from these services directly supports our research and development activities.

In addition to trading our expertise for income, we actively develop assets that disrupt markets and institutions in ways we believe create systemic positive change. These ventures often originate from insights gained through our professional services, eventually becoming independent companies.

Beyond these core activities aimed at generating revenue and impact, we prioritize personal inspiration and intentional living. Films and community spaces are particularly meaningful avenues for this purpose. Film uniquely captures diverse human experiences, making it an ideal medium for creative expression and inspiration. Through our films and other media projects, we strive to articulate clarity around our values, remind ourselves and our community of what truly matters, and appreciate the inherent beauty of life.

Focus

There are so many issues to work on—if we try to tackle all of them at once, we won’t make any progress. I’ve decided for Western Symbolics to focus on three impact domains, where we have specific connections and expertise:

Social & Economic Stability: Reimagining how information flows to empower better decision-making, enhance trust, and foster critical thinking across markets.

Ending Factory Farming & Animal Testing: Transforming how food is produced, ensuring sustainability, ethical practices, and accessibility for all.

Housing & Urban Design: Building cities that foster community, reduce environmental impact, and create economic mobility for everyone.

These impact domains can also be understood simply as information, food & drugs, and urbanism. Information flows are essential to institutional trust and function, and from a market perspective, clients readily pay us to develop data-driven software solutions. Software is our foundational expertise, something I’ve cultivated since I first started coding 18 years ago.

The other two domains represent longer-term systemic changes in areas critical to a fulfilling life: food and place.

Our current industrial food system is unethical toward other life and unsustainable for projected human population growth. I am motivated by the vision of a world where food is ethically and sustainably produced by machines locally, available freely to everyone without causing harm to animals or the planet. Additionally, working to address ethical failures in drug development and accelerate discoveries for new disease treatments is deeply inspiring.

Our built environment shapes our experiences and opportunities profoundly. Our third impact domain focuses on creating dynamic and sustainable housing solutions, reducing the financial burden of housing costs, and ensuring developments integrate harmoniously with local ecologies rather than displacing them.

These impact domains represent the focus of our design and software development work. As serious as I am with my values and my work, I don’t want to live seriously. We work so that we can live well, and working intentionally is essential to this pursuit. I love surfing and snowboarding, playing guitar, and going to indie rock concerts with hella reverb. I like hikes with my mom; coffee with my dad. I like making things, cheffing up with friends, and just taking in good vibes.

I like authentic and cool people, who put effort into keeping their egos in check while still being unapologetically themselves. People who do their best to be someone a younger version of themself would look up to, admire, and inspire.

Balance is key. We’re serious about our work because we value ourselves, our friends, our families, and our greater web of life. But because we value life, we’re also here to enjoy it.

Philosophy

The values embedded into our design work and community reflect my personal belief system and life stance. I call these “liberal” and sometimes “secular humanist” values, but what one calls them depends on their social context. There is a bunch of philosophical terminology for how I reasoned to these values, but for the sake of clarity, this is my logic:

1. We are born into the world and experience life as individuals. Our existence is self-justified by the fact that we are here.

2. Each person’s experiences are inherently limited. No single individual or collective can claim absolute authority over the correct way to live, reinforcing the principle that autonomy should be respected.

3. While autonomy is fundamental, conflicts arise when individuals act without considering broader perspectives. Cooperation allows us to achieve more than we could alone while safeguarding individual freedoms.

4. To resolve conflicts and promote mutual flourishing, we enter into a social contract. Governance requires consent, and institutions are only valid if they seek to progressively understand and enhance the well-being of all life.

5. Arbitrary rules cannot be justified, as they disregard the limits of human knowledge. This reality demands a system that embraces tolerance, pluralism, and open dialogue.

6. Society improves through democratic insight, stakeholder participation, and continuous empirical inquiry. Mistakes are inevitable, but progress relies on refining institutions and knowledge over time.

7. Systemic failures—mismanagement, stagnation, or oppressive control—erode the social contract, endangering the very autonomy it was designed to protect.

Stewardship

The final piece of this constitution is a note about its legal structure and ownership. I view markets as a powerful tool, but they are not perfect. The need to assign property is essential to the function of markets, but there is no rational justification for ownership in a control and exploitation sense. Alternatively, ownership moderated by stewardship is a pragmatic approach that places guardrails around the market failures of unchecked capitalism.

I’m wary of consolidations of power—in individuals, companies, masses, governments, and beyond. There can be misguided actions by any actor, particularly large groups of people. I differ somewhat ideologically from many progressives of my generation in my relatively positive view of markets—though I agree on the necessity of institutional structures to check these power concentrations.

In creating an organization, I believe it is the responsibility of those with vision to do their best to contribute to the general welfare of all life. Pointedly, I don’t trust anyone but myself—or someone else who founded an organization I respect—to maintain the integrity of a vision.

Because we operate around startups and the tech industry, a common practice has been giving equity in addition to high compensation financed by outsized funding rounds. We will not engage in those practices at Western Symbolics.

We fund research and development through client projects to develop MVPs organically. This constraint keeps us focused on what’s truly valuable and adds creative discipline. To scale products we build, we remain open to spinning out companies and raising funds, but only once we've validated the market through client projects and funding becomes necessary to scale at our desired pace.

As we grow, I will compensate myself well for the time spent obsessively developing the vision. However, I will not do this until everyone at Western Symbolics is compensated enough to enjoy their lives. I'm committed to creating an organization that provides reliability and stability, alongside fulfillment and long-term social benefit.

Regarding equity, Western Symbolics is a mission-driven studio, making participation in equity models that could derail our mission inappropriate. Western Symbolics will not be sold. I will retain majority ownership, intending only to gradually sell shares to an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) as my involvement decreases. The EOT will legally uphold our vision and values, offering long-term wealth creation for those who build Western Symbolics.

After I pass, I see no value in inheritance of ownership; my posterity will already inherit enough. Innovation studios evolving into employee-owned conglomerates serve as a meaningful check on power, offering stability, ample rewards, and inspiring continual progress.