Here’s a problem worth being upfront about: once this trust exists, it’s built to be permanently closed to passive outside investment. But that raises an obvious chicken-and-egg question — something has to fund and build the thing before it exists, since once it does, that door is deliberately shut. Someone has to bootstrap it.
In my case, that means using what I already have rather than waiting for ideal conditions. I don’t have an existing revenue stream I could hand off to seed the EOT. I’m not expecting a grant or outside support to ease that burden — none has materialized, and I’m not counting on one. And I’ve deliberately chosen not to simply gift my personal assets — the building, the equipment — outright to the trust. Instead, I’m making them available to it at zero or low profit once it exists, which keeps the bootstrapping honest without requiring me to give everything away up front.
This constraint isn’t unique to me. Anyone with real skills and tools, but without capital, faces some version of the same problem if they want to build something like this. Open-source and makerspace communities in particular seem like a natural fit — they already know how to pool tools, skills, and volunteer labor toward a shared project. This bootstrap method is one way that kind of collective effort could convert into something permanent, possibly by pooling resources jointly rather than any one person doing it alone the way I am.
There’s a possible forcing function here too, though I want to be careful to flag this as a hypothesis, not a prediction I’m confidently making: as automation-driven unemployment increases, searching for a conventional job may become harder and less rewarding, which could push more people toward building something like this instead of continuing an increasingly fruitless search. I think it’s worth naming, but I don’t want to overstate it as something I know will happen.
One more thing, framed honestly as an open question rather than a claim: I’m not aware of an existing company that combines all of the characteristics I’m building toward here — a perpetual purpose trust, deep automation focus, sortition-based governance, and a genuine retention-first commitment — even though EOT conversions exist, and automation-focused companies exist, separately. I’d genuinely like to know if I’m wrong about that. If something like this already exists, I’d want to learn from it rather than reinvent it.