Notes for founders building AI safety and assurance companies, from the people who invest in them.
2026
- Mission lock for early-stage AI startups: from easiest to hardest
A practical ladder of governance structures for pre-seed and seed AI startups: values, the PBC, a founder sentinel share, mission-locked IP licenses, philanthropic capital, a sidecar charity and the perpetual purpose trust.
Esben Kran · 11 min read - So, You Want to Start a Neolab
What we've learned after seeing hundreds of these decks
Griff Bohm · 4 min read - The Designer, The Craftsman, & The Programmer
One of the best books on programming is The Pragmatic Programmer . Its cover features a simple carpenter’s plane on grey background while the book itself is a philosophical and hilarious deep-dive…
Esben Kran · 4 min read - The Staff Held the Line
Anthropic walked away from a $200 million Pentagon contract last week rather than delete five words from its acceptable use policy.
Griff Bohm · 3 min read
2025
- Vibe Coding: Taste Is The Last Frontier
Lisa: “ Vibe coding is Karpathy’s gift to the world. A chance for anyone to create whatever they want to!”
Esben Kran · 3 min read - Raising for the Endgame: An AI Safety Founder’s Primer
Now you’ll just need to do a quick fundraise so you can pay a salary and make an awesome product. From there it should be smooth sailing!
Esben Kran · 3 min read - AGI Security: Rethinking Society's Infrastructure
AGI security is the proactive security-first infrastructure for a world where AI systems can reason, adapt, and act autonomously across digital and physical domains.
Esben Kran · 3 min read - The AI Bubble
Peter Lynch writes in the foreword to his “One Up on Wallstreet” in the year 2000 that internet companies were overvalued, right before the dotcom bubble crashed during 2000 and 2001. He…
Esben Kran · 4 min read
2024
- The concrete risks of AI misdeployment
I often talk about how a mismanaged transition to the AI economy may be a societal-scale risk.
Esben Kran · 2 min read - Sentware
Imagine a malware that is sentient. A virus that isn’t just a malicious program but one that can think and execute new attacks while taking over your system.
Esben Kran · 4 min read - The Expensive Internet hypothesis
There is a chance that the future internet will be more expensive than today’s, simply due to the growing capabilities of AI agents. Specifically, I expect that we’ll end up with what I’ll term…
Esben Kran · 3 min read - Let's make AI agents safe
They are computing systems with a brain designed to orchestrate actions from perception.
Esben Kran · 10 min read