The thesis
Why we started with housing
The question we get asked is “why housing?” It's the right question asked backwards. The assumption inside it is that housing is the business and everything else is expansion. It isn't.
Affordable housing is where three things collide that exist nowhere else together: a person who has to prove who they are and what they earn, an operator legally required to verify it, and a public program paying for the outcome. Solve that intersection and you have built identity, eligibility, and coordination infrastructure. That infrastructure is the product. Housing is where you earn the right to build it.
Five bets, not equally strong
A vision you can't disagree with isn't a thesis, it's a mood. Here is what we believe, ranked by how much weight each claim can actually bear — including the one that was our weakest.
The safety net is structurally broken, not underfunded.
More money into the current architecture buys more of the same friction. The failure is coordination. This one requires no correct guess about the future — it is observable today, and it is why the first product is fundable on its own.
Displacement outpaces job creation.
Goldman Sachs estimates roughly a quarter of US work hours are exposed to automation; McKinsey projects up to 29.5% of hours automated by 2030. We hold the direction with confidence and the timeline loosely.
AI compresses the cost of goods and services faster than expected.
The open question was never whether productivity gains arrive. It is who captures the surplus when they do.
Guaranteed income becomes necessary — and needs an implementation layer.
We used to say inevitable. Inevitability is a prediction about politics, and it asks you to share our optimism about legislatures. Necessity is a prediction about economics, and it survives disagreement about the politics entirely.
Collective ownership of AI-era productivity is the endgame.
This was the haziest thing we believed until we found the precedent. Since 1982 the Alaska Permanent Fund has paid every resident an annual dividend from returns on a collectively owned resource. Not a welfare program — a return on something the public owns. If AI-era productivity is the new resource, that is the mechanism with the longest running start.
The arc
Each step is a real business. Each step builds the next one's rails. To be plain about it: steps three and four are not the plan we're executing — they are the reason step one is architected as a verification system rather than a housing CRM.
- 01· we are here
Certification
Apply once for affordable housing. Identity, income, and documents verified a single time.
- 02
Multi-benefit enrollment
The same verified record screens and enrolls for health coverage, food assistance, childcare, and more.
- 03
Guaranteed income pilots
Programs that already exist need eligibility, enrollment, and distribution. This is the rail they run on.
- 04
Dividend distribution
If a fund at national scale happens, it has to verify residency and pay tens of millions of people. Same system.
Cascadia first — starting with the hardest part of it
Most companies pick the easiest market to win and then discover the hard ones are a different product. We're inverting that. Oregon is the hardest compliance environment we could choose, which means every state after it is a simplification: Oregon, then Washington, then California.
The moat isn't the software — anyone can build a document workflow. What compounds is absorbed compliance knowledge, agency relationships, and the thousand edge cases you only learn by surviving an audit in the strictest jurisdiction in the country.
Where we actually are
Pre-discovery. The research is done and the thesis is written, but we have not yet run the customer interviews that would turn any of this from hypothesis into evidence. That work — applicants first, then property managers, then housing authority administrators — is what happens next, and we'd rather say so than claim a validation we haven't earned.
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