How Does Our Humanity Shift When Technology Changes the Pillars That Define Our Purpose and Progress?

In 2006, I had a hunch.

Sometime in my lifetime, technology would change enough of the pillars that define how we measure our progress, purpose, value, and identity that we would face an existential reckoning.

Not an abstract philosophical exercise. A lived experience.

How does our humanity shift when the systems we built our lives around no longer need us in the same way?

The answer was definitely elusive in 2006.

So I built a vehicle to explore the question.

I called it Being Human.

When I started my professional career I went toward film first. Not for the glamour. For the reach.

I wanted to bridge perspectives. Create meaningful conversations. At the time, it was a more impactful medium than technology to affect change.

Five companies I founded and hundreds of projects became my education leading back to Being Human instead.

Tunnel. Final Touch. OpenDrives. Tools that helped hundreds of films get made. Sundance films that mainstream studios would never touch — bringing conversations to light that needed having. Studio films that taught me how the media machine actually works.

My thesis about film as a medium to challenge ideas started to pay off. But around 2008, a shift started.

Digital. Technology companies started moving in on the distribution apparatus of an industry that hadn't changed in decades.

GoDigital gave me a front row seat to shifting economics and business models during dramatically changing times. I sat at the table with studio executives when they dismissed Netflix as a laughable joke. Not too much later, those same executives knew they were cooked.

As machine learning started reshaping media, I began traveling to San Francisco every couple weeks. Basements. Meetups. Startups doing fascinating things in the 2010-2013 era of AI.

We were looking at machine learning through two lenses. First, how it was affecting recommendation algorithms and the technology of distribution. Second, how it was equally affecting the production pipeline — virtual production, digital asset management, new methods of capture, new methods of post production. All of these areas have dramatically taken shape over the last decade but those early days were magical.

Steve — now one of the Being Human partners — and I started working closely together during this period.

It was then I knew the shift was getting more imminent. We needed to focus on education. As a society we were not ready. Unfortunately, we still aren't.

Talespin became a decade at the center of how employment and education was changing. Skills. How we learn. The nature of experience. How our minds work. How collaboration and behavior work. Our attempt to deliver meaningful change that is required for the moment we are in. While we never reached hundreds of millions of users ourselves, I have spoken to countless founders that were influenced by our work. It has been inspiring to be able to measure that ripple.

Along the way, I invested in many startups exploring adjacent questions. Different industries. Different products. Same question underneath.

Each venture brought me closer. Each hardened the understanding.

In my last post I talked about 天地人. Heaven, Earth, Person. Timing over place over people.

For eighteen years, the timing wasn't right. The technology could challenge pieces of the question but not the whole thing.

Now it can.

天 (Timing). AI crossed a threshold in 2024. But it was Q4 2025 when it became abundantly clear that we had arrived at this fork in the road. The question I asked in 2006 isn't theoretical anymore. I have had hundreds of conversations about how AI is challenging people's sense of self.

地 (Environment). Today this means both physical and digital environments. I've chosen Singapore as a global base as part of my environment when thinking through this. But more importantly, digital environments now exist to transcend borders, time, and communication challenges. The infrastructure for what we're building didn't exist before. Now it does.

人 (People). Timing and people often have to line up. It is hard. Last year Ram and I went on a walkabout. Talked about what drives us. The philosophical challenges of our time. Those conversations kept leading back to Being Human. The timing lined up. Steve sold his company two years ago and since has been building in this new reality to master the rewritten rules of building great products. The timing lined up. Jaden and I share a brain half the time. Changes at Cornerstone meant he could join our mission. The timing lined up.

And with this base, the timing of so many things in our extended community of colleagues, friends, partners, investors — also started to align. The timing pointed to now.

Being Human has existed since 2006.

But this is Day 0.

Here's where philosophy meets practicality.

AI is fundamentally redrawing the boundaries of what is possible.

The traditional venture model required massive markets to justify investment. Software needed large teams, long timelines, and expensive customer acquisition. Entire categories of valuable problems — particularly in specialized verticals — were left unsolved because the unit economics didn't work.

AI collapsed those constraints.

Build costs dropped by an order of magnitude for solutions in many areas that do not require hundreds of millions to realize the value of the use case. AI is rapidly enabling talented engineering and product teams to build at an unprecedented pace and quality.

I am not talking about vibe coding. There are several levels up from that.

If you apply agents as team members and manage their output like any other team member, the multiplication factor of that output is exponential. We are shipping production and enterprise grade products in timelines that I only dreamed of prior. If this existed then... one can only imagine the difference it would have made.

Markets once too small to pursue are now highly lucrative, if you own the distribution.

This is not theory. This is what we're doing right now.

The fear is that AI makes humans obsolete. That machines will do everything we do, only better and cheaper.

But that's not what I see.

I see AI creating capacity we've never had. Not because machines replace us. Because machines extend us.

The question isn't whether AI will change what humans do. It will.

The question is whether that change elevates us or diminishes us.

We're building for elevation.

Being Human operates on two tracks.

First, we help organizations modernize — transforming their infrastructure, systems, and operations so they can move at the pace AI demands. Increasing their clarity and agency.

Second, we build AI-native ventures — partnering with domain experts who know the problem deeply, then building products together in weeks, not years. You bring the expertise. We bring the infrastructure. Together we solve hard problems.

Two entry points. Same mission. Elevating human agency through AI.

For our own ventures we are building and investing in three frontiers where AI has the highest leverage to enhance human agency.

Clarity from Chaos. Too much data. Too many options. Too much complexity. We build tools that cut through noise and show you what matters.

Meaning from Noise. Humans make sense of the world through narrative. AI generates chaos as easily as content. We build tools that find common narrative. That bridge differences instead of programmatically driving apart.

Intention to Action. The gap between what a founder envisions and what actually ships. The dilution across layers. We build tools that remove that dilution. Fewer layers means less intention lost.

Agency is the end state. Technology should remove friction to maximize human choice and intent.

We work with organizations navigating AI transformation, domain experts building ventures with us, operators running our portfolio companies, and strategic partners bringing capital or capabilities.

Across these pathways, we're looking for specific types of collaborators.

Incumbent Leaders. Transforming legacy advantages into AI-native assets. You've built distribution over decades. We help you extend that lead before faster competitors erode it.

Domain Experts. Codifying expertise into scalable products. Your knowledge doesn't scale. We turn it into software that reaches thousands without losing nuance.

Visionary Founders. Zero-to-one architects. You see what's possible. We build fast enough to prove it before the window closes.

Structural Innovators. High-friction, high-value problems. Hard problems mean deep moats. We build where others won't.

My journey: five companies founded, hundreds of projects, huge media campus construction projects, many startup investments.

The broader Being Human partnership: nine companies founded, dozens more where our team played critical roles in their startup journeys. We are just getting started as our networks and additional collaborators extend the power of this team exponentially.

We did it the old way. Multiple times. We know what blocked us and what created our successes in scaling companies.

That experience shapes how we build now. Carefully designed velocity. Tight teams. High trust environments where everyone's intentions are aligned from the start.

We have four ventures in launch stages right now.

You can learn more about them at beinghuman.studio. We will be sharing their details as each launches over the coming weeks and months.

The first products ship in a few weeks.

Steady announcements coming. Key partnerships. Product launches. New team members. There is so much cooking.... we are having a blast.

We intend to build in public. In our own way.

Not constantly switched on to socials. Not endless threads. Intentionally sharing with our networks.

Hoping those we care about come on this journey with us. And that we pick up a few more who are intrigued as we explore this fundamental question together, while building some really cool shit.

I have arrived at a point where I can finally dig into exploring the question that has always driven me.

Who knows how the answers will play out.

But we will share that journey with as many as might be interested. To learn from our lessons. To share in our successes.

Game on.