#16 Anyone want to buy the Chroma company?

I am ready to get back to aerospace and bleeding edge materials. Would rather have a lump sum than regular cashflows to better cover my upcoming R&D costs.

Prelude

Last summer I was living in Squamish, British Columbia, a world class town for outdoor recreation. British Columbia in general has some the world’s most advanced mountain biking terrain, and Squamish in particular ratchets up a bit from what one can expect in Vancouver. But the trail I was riding on September 24th was not a particularly difficult double black diamond trail. Pleasure Trail is exactly as its name suggests quite a pleasure to ride and on that day I had an absolutely splendid ride for the majority of the trail, but alas, in my adrenaline-induced state of edge, I was caught off-guard and found myself flying over the handlebars off the edge of the trail in a high consequence area where after a full revolution I had not hit the ground, and as I tried to arrest my fail, viewing the semi-vertical terrain that followed, I landed with all my weight on a rock with my right foot, and without any support for my ankle, fully ruptured my Achilles. Perhaps if my foot had been 6 inches back it would have fallen into the slot where my ankle dropped, and I might have had a compound fracture and other injuries.

Crash came out of nowhere… could I have just as easily fallen off Portal in Moab?

I had 6 months of recovery after surgery with extensive rehab to re-learn how to walk (though I was in a boot for the first couple months — was rather miserable and depressing being debilitated for so long and certainly made me more mindful of my mortality), and even after various cocktails of self-administered peptides and anabolic steroids, it still isn’t right. I am told by multiple people it will fully recover and that the full recovery takes about a year so hopefully that turns out to be correct since at the moment I cannot safely boulder anything even moderately high since I don’t feel comfortable taking hard landings on both legs.

Interlude

It was in the early stages of my recovery that I finished coming to accept the reality that bitcoiners are equally foolish to the great many people I despise in venture capital and the traditional finance/fiat world in general; equally contemptible lack of curiosity; equally non-serious individuals for the most part. The world advances despite fiat and lies from tech-illiterate luddites (e.g. Peter Thiel) about a great stagnation (run the numbers: civilizationmetrics.org) — similarly, Bitcoin shall fix things in spite of bitcoiners, not because of them. Bitcoin fixes things via negativa, by forcing those who lack the humility to STFU economically when they have nothing of actual value to contribute by making them poor — but this is a dynamic process that requires iterations and time to make a decent chunk of progress, even after fiat dies (even optical measurement faces speed of light delays). Useful (valuable things are simply an ever-present force of nature that emerges within sincere things within humans, and all that is required for anything to be fixed is the reduction of the great many obstructions introduced over the past 109 years, but I digress. In November, I made the decision to finally shutdown operations on my in-situ futures market SaaS product for stabilizing the destabilizing relational contracts such as labor and supply chains with an automated sweep to X amount USD auto-rebalancing bitcoin (and equities) brokerage on the side (“bitcoin startup”).

Having built the world’s most advanced / strongest structural aerospace parts, helped develop technical solutions to challenges of the uptmost importance to the security of my nation, solved the “pandemic” my planet faced and nearly getting the solution deployed at scale, which would have suppressed much of the tyranny (bitcoin did very little to suppress COVID tyranny all things considered), and then figuring out the nature of non-equilibrium monetary economics through the lens of the properly expanded four-functions of money model, enabling the most expeditious transition, only to be forced to bear witness again to the repeated, pathetic failures of this planet, I realized there was nothing left for me to do. My Kafkaesque environment was akin to a person attempting to communicate with and advance a civilization comprising a herd of goats, a rather silly endeavor. My appreciation for the true nature of fiat deepened, and I was able to shed a few more delusions, for I have this pernicious cognitive bias of overestimating the intelligence and capabilities of others that has repeatedly gotten me into trouble.

Postlude

I had to accept there really was no choice for me, but to retire, and at the start of April, I finally got the all-clear from my surgeon and was able to start going back outside. I started sport climbing and mountain biking, which was nice, but I was rudely interrupted a couple weeks into being retired with the realization that something that had evanescently crossed my mind 6 or 7 years prior, was now likely not only possible, but perhaps inevitable, itself a grand thing that may also hold the key to that which I must have that I had anticipated not beginning work on for another decade.

Getting back into it…

Anyway, I figured something out less than two weeks in and now it’s back to bleeding edge aerospace and defense materials for me. It is somewhat obnoxious that this will certainly interfere with the amount of climbing I can do, but I simply must pursue it, for it is more captivating than the most aesthetic of mountains. Nature abhors a vacuum, and though I think of myself as free, I accept that I am a force of nature so I flow where I must.

In addition to self-funding the initial R&D, I will be obtaining capital from the only source out there actually interested in or capable of understanding advanced technology: federal agencies — primarily, DoD, but also NSF, DOE, and/or NASA. There is something about war that acts as a forcing function for basic competency. I know that route will work, I just hadn’t had anything that made it worth the hassle it is since it can be a bit of a slow grind. I’m also not waiting for them and am self-funding R&D, effectively already starting. Might have a bit of a delay over optimal speed since as I communicate with key suppliers to get everything lined up I will continue climbing and making my way toward the Canadian Rockies for the summer before getting a small industrial space somewhere back in the US.

That being said, I could get going quite a bit faster with more capital, and most of the funding opportunities come with about a 6-month delay (and that’s if I get them the first go-around), so I am now more interested in selling Chroma. If you are interested, feel free to reply directly to this email or forward to anyone you think might be interested.

• Takes up very little time: I have someone else running it who handles web management, social media, logistics, and customer service.

• Consistent revenues with substantial upside given proven markets, superior products, and very little time/capital ever spent on properly marketing.

• Customer base includes a co-founder of a company that peaked at over a trillion dollar market cap, and various professional athletes (non-sponsored).

• Broad range of unique products that are easily scalable to massive quantities: includes Ironforge, D-Light, Sky Portal (all versions), NIR Flashlight, Carbonshade glasses (patented), and (currently unlisted) Chroma glasses with a unique (patented) band-pass filter. (Does not include other consumer hardware products on separate sites such as the AuroraWand, ColdBed pillow, or giant chamber I want to build as those are all very early stage and hard to reasonably value in a way that is likely to work for both of us.)

• Scalable within DTC, and also could be sold enterprise, DoD, or even regulated healthcare channels if you want to go that route with it. Imagine if you could have health insurance companies paying for the Sky Portal as a first line of defense, an Ironforge in lieu of an unnecessary orthopedic surgery, or a D-Light in lieu of monoclonal antibodies and excess days in a hospital. Of course, healthcare is far too communist and scammy of an industry for my taste so I have never looked much into those options, though I imagine it would be extremely lucrative if you can pull it off.

• Includes transition support and up to 1 monthly sparring session with me for up to 90 minutes for the first 18 months. I still like this stuff, I just prefer building things, chatting with engineers, seeing the glimmer in someone’s eye when they realize what we have made possible, feeling the glimmer in my own eye when someone shows me an application I hadn’t considered — I like things that look like this — I do not like consumers.

  

I have two separate teams of technology leaders within the Air Force that are interested in meeting me in person in a couple weeks, among other things. The thing they are interested in meeting with me about is actually not the thing that has me excited enough that I decided to come back to aerospace, so try to extrapolate from that little nugget what sort of magnitude thing it is is that could have possibly gotten me to come back. Just don’t bother trying to ask me what it is. ;)