Investment strategy
How to defeat Moloch: an investment strategy
We are building the League to fund and coordinate businesses that make cooperation economically viable and preserve pluralism. These are our selection criteria and the principles governing our order of investment.
Published
Moloch describes systems where individually sensible choices reinforce a harmful shared outcome. Our investment strategy targets the incentives behind those choices. We prioritize businesses that make a better shared outcome practical, can sustain themselves economically, and enable other useful enterprises.
Our launcher partnership connects capital, talent, and shared standards. The strategy is to assemble complementary ventures whose combined effect exceeds what each can achieve independently.
Current stage. We are developing the funding program. Capital commitments and deal terms remain to be established.
What pluralism requires
People must be able to participate, disagree, correct mistakes, and pursue alternatives. A founder does not need to share every League position. A customer does not need to join our movement.
We assess whether a venture makes those choices practical: whether a worker can challenge a bad record, a community can influence infrastructure it depends on, or a small operator can afford to switch providers. Revenue and adoption count alongside the agency gained by people with less bargaining power.
Five conditions for investment
- Change a harmful incentive. Identify the decision someone faces, why the current choice makes sense for them, and how the venture changes it. Waiting for others, costly exit, and rewards for breaking ranks require different interventions.
- Establish an economic engine. Identify who pays, why they pay, and whether revenue grows with the public benefit. Where ongoing subsidy is necessary, identify a credible funding path.
- Increase practical agency. Specify who gains useful choices, who absorbs new costs, and which rights or avenues of appeal need protection.
- Demonstrate the League’s contribution. Name the financing gap, missing capability, overlooked founder, or coordination task we can help resolve. Suitable capital already available elsewhere weakens the case for ours.
- Make power accountable. Identify what the venture can control if it succeeds, the abuses that control could enable, and mechanisms capable of preventing or remedying them.
An early seed can enter investigation with unanswered questions. Investment requires answers credible enough for the capital, people, and dependencies at stake.
Criteria for comparing opportunities
We distinguish importance, readiness, and confidence in the evidence. A crucial problem may need research or a founder. A modest venture may be ready now and make several more important ones possible.
| Criterion | Question |
|---|---|
| Systemic effect | Which incentive, rule, or dependency changes, and how much of the underlying problem does it address? |
| What it enables | Which identified ventures become feasible, cheaper, or safer because this exists? |
| Urgency | What becomes irreversibly worse, or which opportunity disappears, if we wait? |
| Distribution | Who gains, who bears the risk, and do people with fewer resources gain practical agency? |
| Economic alignment | Does earning more mean delivering more benefit? Where can that relationship break? |
| League contribution | What can our involvement make happen that otherwise will not happen sufficiently soon? |
| Execution | Are there credible founders, willing buyers, workable technology, and a path to adoption? |
| Cost of proof | How much money and time are needed to test the next consequential assumption? |
| Learning value | Will the experiment resolve uncertainty relevant to other investments, including if it fails? |
| Accountability | Will obligations and remedies remain usable through growth and changes of ownership, while preserving commercial viability? |
Every assessment needs evidence, stated uncertainty, and a reason it could change. Rankings must be tested against plausible changes in assumptions, including whose benefit counts and how much risk they carry.
Order investments by urgency and dependencies
We organize opportunities as a map of dependencies with a ranked set of next investments. The default sequence is:
- Act on closing windows. Prioritize irreversible harm and time-sensitive openings. Urgency changes timing; qualification still applies. Record the deadline, supporting evidence, independent confirmation, and any prerequisite being deferred.
- Remove shared bottlenecks. Fund capabilities several identified ventures need: verification, aggregated purchasing, financing, or essential infrastructure. Require credible users before financing a general platform.
- Prove viable businesses. Use limited experiments to establish customer demand, operating cost, and the shared benefit. Fund growth as the evidence supports it.
- Build complementary groups of ventures. Connect businesses whose outputs become one another’s inputs, customers, or reductions in risk. Preserve outside trading relationships so one failure does not disable the portfolio.
- Replicate with local authority. Adapt proven mechanisms through local founders and institutions. Choose ownership, licensing, franchise, or cooperative arrangements to fit the place and business.
- Make the gains durable. Establish standards, governance, financing, and institutional adoption that allow benefits to survive an individual company or the League.
These activities overlap. We also reserve room for experiments that challenge the main thesis and reduce dependence on a single assumed future.
Hypothetical example: watershed restoration. Upstream landholders can improve downstream water quality, but the parties distrust the measurements and payment promises. The investment sequence could begin with a local measurement operator and willing buyer, then payment coordination, then restoration businesses able to finance crews and equipment against demonstrated demand.
Initial terms would protect access to records and independent checks, and define when dependence on a single operator activates stronger access and continuity obligations. Follow-on funding would require compliance. High measurement costs, absent demand, or harm displaced elsewhere would stop or change the sequence.
Accountability and commercial viability
Patents, proprietary technology, operational authority, and scale can be necessary to build an effective business. We require accountability mechanisms that constrain abuses while preserving the venture’s ability to operate, compete, and grow.
For each material source of power, funding terms must specify:
- Obligations: what the company owes people who depend on it.
- Triggers and evidence: what activates an obligation or establishes a breach, and who can verify it.
- Enforcement: who has the rights, independence, and resources to act.
- Remedies: how harm is corrected and affected people regain usable choices.
- Succession: how obligations bind future owners and who can authorize changes.
Requirements must be proportionate to the venture’s stage. Stronger obligations tied to growth or dependence are agreed before those milestones occur. Enforceability and the practical cost of using remedies must be assessed in each jurisdiction.
The League’s investment returns create a conflict with enforcement. Material obligations require an independent enforcing party with no stake in those returns, specified funding, and protection against retaliatory removal or defunding. The League must disclose conflicts, explain selection decisions, and accept challenges to its own conduct.
Before the first investment, we will test accountability terms with a founder, prospective co-investor, and candidate enforcer. They must agree on who pays, what survives a sale, and whether the business remains viable. Failure to agree requires revising the terms, funding instrument, or venture before committing capital.
Global coverage and local execution
Our search spans energy, food, water, housing, health, education, finance, information, governance, security, ecosystems, and scientific progress. Within each, we examine harmful incentives and local conditions: income, language, institutions, infrastructure, ecology, and conflict exposure.
Local founders, operators, cooperatives, researchers, and affected communities must help define opportunities and retain meaningful authority over execution. Informal markets and public or cooperative buyers belong alongside conventional enterprise customers.
Initial funding will concentrate in a few sectors and jurisdictions where capable partners and enforceable remedies are available. The global map grows from sourced cases and reveals gaps in coverage. Completing a worldwide survey is not a prerequisite to the first investment.
From evaluation to a funding decision
Each seed needs a short record: the problem, affected people, incentive to change, product, payer, founder or local partners, prerequisites, opportunities enabled, accountability terms, and the smallest useful experiment with its budget, duration, and stopping conditions.
The next action is explicit: investigate, incubate, fund, partner, monitor, or reject. We select the funding instrument according to the economics and stage of the work: equity, a grant, loan, guarantee, or purchase commitment. Some proposals require an institutional partner with authority the League does not have.
We reject opportunities where the League adds no identifiable value, the benefit depends on harm we cannot credibly prevent or remedy, or a bounded investigation finds no credible path to revenue or subsidy. Investigations have budgets, deadlines, and decision thresholds. Extensions require new evidence.
We prioritize the next investment by how much it improves people’s ability to solve the problems after it, accounting for the power it creates and the people who can challenge that power.
Bring a case to the League: name the people making the decision, what keeps them stuck, and what needs to happen first.