Focus

Truly radical life extension requires digitization of self. Irregardless of the execution environment a person runs in, be it biological, silicon, or another form, someone who has achieved longevity has the ability to manipulate the fundamental representation of themselves. Body preservation is important and profitable, but true longevity is only achieved when you persist despite your body being destroyed.

Achieving digitized longevity will take a few decades. A few critical capabilities and cost structures need to be established before Upload will be available for sale. This is similar to SpaceX’s mars mission begetting a launch business for earth orbit and internet and AI satellites: these ventures fund the key capabilities and cost reductions that are required before you can sell mars colonization, like rapidly reusable rockets.

In order to sell upload, you need a high throughput brain interface and the ability to store and execute massive neural networks. There are a few ventures an Upload provider will sell before it’s stated mission: Telepathy for communication and control, Merge for digital extension and cognition, and Synthetic Reality for perception & experience.

Despite Neuralink, Merge, and Science, the space is still massively underfunded and under focused. My mission is to change that, starting with myself, and perhaps you.

If you could go back to the year 2000 and build a business to colonize mars, what business would you build? Would you make a traditional launch provider like ULA? Would you build satellites? How about robots, since we’ll need those on Mars? No, you’d build something that looks like SpaceX. Sure, those other businesses have value, but whether your mission is to build a mars colony or to radically extend life, you must be laser focused on building the truly core things that are needed. Aging, cancer and organ replacement, for example, are valuable and someone should build them. But these things are not on the critical path to effective immortality. As a steward of the mission: as a rule of thumb, anything you choose to do must accelerate the timeline to Upload. If something doesn’t, it’s a distraction and needs to be deleted. Let someone else do it.

Fortunately, many of the core blockers to Upload are being derisked right now and producing massive tailwinds. Companies like Neuralink are proving the safety and efficacy of invasive BCIs, and blazing the trail for the regulatory process for BCI companies. Running digital minds will require immense compute and specialized neural networks. In the long tail, the AI buildout drives down the price of compute by orders of magnitude. And AIs and simulations accelerate research and development timelines, enabling a new entrant to deliver massive value faster and more efficiently than ever.

Today is the best time there has ever been to build a business with the mission of living forever and that’s what I am doing. If you also plan on living effectively forever, ask yourself which business is more important in the long tail, the one that humanity’s digital future runs on or a medical provider like cancer or replacement? You have a chance today to get in early and be a key player in one of these spaces. When you’re looking back 100 years from now, will you have missed the main train?