How a passion for Prosperity led me to an exciting new project.
For the last 10,000 years, ever since farming was invented, life as a Homo sapiens has been dreadful. You woke up in the morning and had to spend your next 14 hours plowing the fields, carrying water on your back, constantly worrying that a bad harvest would mean the end for your family. More than 80 percent of farmers subjected to these conditions have shown crippling spinal deformation, and life-threatening harvest failures happened every 5–10 years. Oh, and in addition to that, you’d be blessed to have more than half of your children survive past 5 years old.
With this grim backstory in mind, the main question that’s interested me has always been: what was it that allowed societies to escape subsistence existence? What are the drivers of Prosperity?
After high school, I spent a few months working at an orphanage in New Delhi. From that experience, it became very clear that, contrary to what I’d been told, it’s not a lack of human capital that is holding back a developing country like India. There are plenty of smart people, and the Internet has drastically democratized access to information. Instead, it has something to do with the fundamental fabric of society…
Having gotten a glimpse of what the real world was like, college did not seem relevant anymore. After a few weeks, I dropped out and founded Depict.ai with a 17-year-old friend. The company grew to over 35 employees, raised $20M, and became one of the largest AI companies in the Nordics. Eventually, we brought in an external CEO to keep running it and continued serving as happy advisors and shareholders.
After the startup, I started reading more history and economics to understand the drivers of wealth creation better. The empirical evidence was obvious: if you want growth (i.e., an escape from subsistence existence), you need economic freedom. The pillars of economic freedom were clear: property rights, limited government, rule of law. Looking around the world today, you don’t need a PhD to realize that our current society has forgotten about these drivers of Prosperity, which brought us the wealth we’re experiencing every day.
Seeing the principal-agent problem in politics, and the devastating effects predicted by public choice theory, I became a firm subscriber to the idea of exit rather than reform. Basically, the US Constitution couldn’t have been written and carried out in full in England. The Founders had to exit and create something better from scratch.
However, I failed to find a plausible exit strategy in today’s world, and instead went back to thinking about AI startups, focusing specifically on building “AI employees” that could help with basic white-collar work. We raised $5M, and I spent 9 months getting the O-1 Visa to the US. However, looking around the world, I felt more and more despair about the developments that were occurring.
On my way to the US this summer, I decided to stop by for a few weeks in Próspera (on the island of Roatan in Honduras). I had read about it and found it extremely fascinating: a startup city with high levels of legal autonomy. Some of its key features include:
- Instead of monopolistic government agencies like the FDA, SEC, NRC, FTC, and the HUD dictating policy on a whim, Próspera simply requires businesses in “regulated industries” to be covered by insurance. Insurance providers are incentivized to only underwrite businesses with a decent risk profile, thus creating a natural check.
- Instead of being treated by the governance provider as a “subject,” you are treated as a “customer” to be served. Próspera only makes money if it provides enough value to its customers for people to leave their homes to move out there.
- Instead of the government trying to box you in via wealth taxes, exit taxes, and citizen-based taxation, Próspera explicitly encourages exit from its own system as a way to check its power, by allowing land owners to “fork” Próspera and create their own governance area within Próspera.
But it wasn’t until I was actually here in person—seeing it play out for real, talking to the locals who’d had their lives changed through new job opportunities, and meeting the team—that I fully realized that this was exactly the way we could make a difference in the world via exit.
So, after lots of deliberation, I decided to leave my startup, rescind my US visa, and move down to Próspera, where I now live full-time and serve as VP of Growth.
Living on the ground and seeing the recent explosion of interest around Próspera, I now feel that there is hope for those who strive for a better future. Not only are we recovering the drivers of Prosperity from the past; we’re creating a whole new generation of them.
To learn more about Próspera, visit their website or see Scott Alexander’s article Prospectus On Próspera. For questions about Próspera, you’re welcome to contact Lonis directly on X.
