A Cap Table for Your Life

The moment you discover a great idea, the world hands you a powerful tool: the company.

By sharing equity, you can attract collaborators to build with you. By selling equity, you can raise venture capital to fund the work and share your risk. The company aligns incentives around your idea so well that strangers will bet years of their lives – and serious capital – on it.

But the idea is a byproduct of a much longer journey. Most great ideas are discovered after years, sometimes decades, of fruitless, messy exploration. Years spent following curiosities that lead to dead ends. Years honing a craft with nothing to show for it.

We don't have a tool to align incentives for this journey itself. There's no way to give someone a stake in your search. No way to incentivize collaborators before there's a company. No way to share the risk of exploration.

As a result, the most difficult journeys – the kind that lead to profound ideas – never even get started. This hurts us far more than we realize because the cost is invisible: everything that was never attempted.

What if we could align incentives for our explorations in the way that we can for building ideas? What if we could share equity in our future success with others, across everything we may ever discover and work on, to incentivize people to help us on our journey itself?

Let's say we had an instrument that turns your success into a form that resembles a company.

Like a company, you would have shares. Your shareholders would have a proportional claim on the wealth you earn when you sell your stakes in companies (and similar assets with extreme upside potential), across your life.

In the way a founder shares equity in their company, you would be able to share equity with teachers, mentors, collaborators, and anyone who can help you on your journey itself. And this would let you raise venture capital to finance bold exploration and experimentation even before you start a company or work at one.

Of course, this would have to be safe to use.

Shareholding would be scoped strictly to extreme upside. Your shareholders would have a claim on one thing only: the wealth you earn when you sell your stakes in companies and similar assets with extreme upside potential. Your salary would not be touched ¹. Your freelance income, your book royalties, your ordinary earnings would all be out of scope. This would be a claim on your outlier outcomes, not your livelihood.

And it would be a claim, not a loan. If you spend your life exploring and never hit an outlier outcome, you would owe nothing. There would be no debt, no obligation carried forward, no failure state in which you're worse off than if you'd never launched. When you win, your shareholders win. When you don't, you simply don't.

Something interesting happened. We set out to solve a narrow problem: there's no way to align incentives before you have an idea. But the instrument we ended up with isn't scoped to the pre-idea years at all. In fact, it isn't scoped to any idea, any company, any chapter of your life.

It's scoped to you.

By holding a stake in your success in life, your shareholders are incentivized to help you succeed across everything you may ever work on, and even to help you discover the right things to work on.

It takes a village. This would let each of us build and curate a village to help us realize our potential.

What could life look like when we incentivize a strong village to support us?

Imagine Alice.

She's nineteen, from a town you haven't heard of, without much money and she can design. She's not trained, but she has an instinct, a glimpse of potential that's visible in everything she touches.

She applies to a design academy run by a teacher who doesn't charge tuition. The teacher instead invests in her students – paying her students in exchange for equity in their success and an opportunity to train them.

The teacher becomes Alice's first shareholder. Two working designers Alice cold-emailed – who said yes, in part, because saying yes could now mean something – become her second and third.

The teacher's introduction gets Alice her first job, as a junior designer at a fast growing startup. She spends two years there honing her craft and making great friends.

Then she has an itch. Somewhere in her second year at the startup, Alice starts circling a problem space she can't quite name. Not an idea, nothing she could pitch, nothing she could build a company around. Just a pull.

Alice raises a small round on herself – her first real raise – from people who can't say exactly what they're funding, except her. This round includes some of her peers at her company, as well as a few people who have been following her journey online. The capital buys her two years of runway. She quits her job and walks into the wilderness.

She adds to her village as she goes: a researcher whose work keeps appearing in her reading, an operator who spent a decade inside the space she's studying. They hold her shares now, so their doors stay open and actively introduce her to their network whenever she asks.

She runs experiments. Most of them die. She owes no one anything. She keeps going.

The direction she'd committed to turns out to be wrong for her. Her valuation goes stale, reflecting a conviction she no longer holds. All she has is a folder of dead experiments.

A couple of Alice's shareholders have lost conviction too. So she reorganizes her village. With Alice's blessing, they sell their stakes to three new shareholders she chooses – people who believe in where she's actually going. No one is trapped. No one is owed. One of the departing shareholders remains a close friend.

Then she raises again, to finance what is turning out to be a longer journey than she had anticipated. It's slow. It's marked down. People she expected to say yes pass. The teacher – still her shareholder a decade in – stays on and supports her.

Alice keeps going. Somewhere in the wandering, it lands. Alice can finally see a glimpse of a direction toward a powerful idea and the certainty that she's the one who's supposed to go after it.

She starts a company with two cofounders to pursue this idea. Her seed round takes just a week because a decade of shareholders is the diligence. Who knows Alice better than the people who've held equity in her for years.

The company works. And as it grows, the world reprices Alice. The teacher, who's held her shares for a decade, sells a small piece of her stake to a new investor at many multiples of what she paid – before Alice has sold anything, before any exit².

Meanwhile, Alice raises a larger round on herself in order to invest in other people she believes in, who she wants to mentor, guide and open opportunities for. And also to build a team around her – to surface opportunities for her outside of her current company, across everything she might be interested in. She compensates her team with salaries and equity in her success.

By sharing equity in her success with the right people, and adapting as necessary, Alice was likely able to grow much more than if she had walked alone.

What exactly is this instrument? Like a company, this would be a legal instrument at its core – an agreement between individuals and their shareholders. Let's call this instrument the "Personal Token" for now.

When you launch your personal token, it would have an initial number of shares. Like companies, you would allocate equity in your personal token in rounds (pre-seed, seed, etc.).

But while the Personal Token resembles a Company, it wraps something far more personal – a life. So it needs properties no company has.

The Personal Token must be safe, you must be in control, and it must help you grow.

Safety

• Your shareholders have no control or influence over your life. Shareholding is an economic claim, not ownership.
• The claim is scoped strictly to upside. Your income is untouchable, and if you never hit an outlier outcome, you owe nothing.
• You can carve out a floor: wealth that is entirely yours before any shareholder claim applies.

Control

• You don't need anyone's permission to launch.
• Your cap table is curated and liquidity is permissioned. You decide who can hold your shares.
• You can buy back shares from misaligned or toxic shareholders.

Growth

• You can reinvest your upside into yourself rather than distribute it (like any growing company).
• You earn royalties whenever a shareholder profits from selling your shares.

Read the full specification.

The personal token puts a lot of power in the hands of the person sharing their success. I think that's a good thing. We learned this lesson with companies: investors once routinely forced their strategies on founders, and even forced founders out of the companies they started. As founders won greater control, companies did much better for everyone involved, including investors. More power to creators is better for both the creators and their shareholders.

That said, the instrument must also make sense for shareholders. Else, we can't build our village.

How would a personal token shareholder profit?

Let's say you invest in Alice in their seed round as one of their first shareholders. As Alice grows – as she shares her work and ideas, garners a greater following, makes progress, and generally demonstrates greater potential to the world – the world will value her more greatly. In other words, as Alice's valuation increases, you can sell your shares of Alice at a profit.

But this requires you to be able to sell your shares. Companies have an established path toward liquidity. Companies advance through stages of liquidity – pre-seed, seed, A, B, C, etc. – all the way to an IPO. Through these stages, it becomes progressively easier for shareholders to sell their shares in the company.

What is the path to liquidity for a personal token? Why would a person want to enable liquidity for their shares?

To answer these questions, we have to understand the nature of the person who would want to share their success with others. The ideal candidate to launch their personal token is someone who is ambitious, curious, and long-term oriented. They would want to play long-term games with long-term people.

Such people would want to enable their shareholders to win. The more they create success for their shareholders, and the better they treat their shareholders, the more (and better) shareholders they will be able to attract over the course of their life. This same principle applies to startup founders as well. Those who want to build long and fruitful careers will care deeply about their reputation.

Creating liquidity will be an important factor in building a strong reputation. Someone who keeps rejecting secondary sales without good reason, who abuses their power and makes life difficult for their shareholders, will find it difficult to attract future support and retain what they have.

I don't expect liquidity for personal tokens to follow the same stages as it does for companies. I can't yet imagine a complete IPO style free trading for personal token shares ³ , but I do expect people to create liquidity pools to enable more seamless trading of their shares over time. By using programmatic rules and AI, people could create curated, nuanced liquidity pools that are aligned with who they want to incentivize to help them succeed.

What about if a person raises money on lies and runs away with it? That would be fraud and shareholders would litigate. This is one of the reasons why the personal token must be a compliant, legally grounded instrument. We need the help of courts to deal with fraud in the way they do for companies.

Outside of outright fraud, the market can handle it. People who operate their personal token in unskillful ways will find that the demand for their shares will fall. They will find it more and more difficult to attract collaborators and build a strong village that will enable them to realize their potential.

Investing in people will come with risk. The power law will exist for people as it does for companies. In many cases, investors will need to write off their investments and move on just as they do with companies.

How would a person be valued?

Like a company, a personal token has a valuation: the price per share times the number of shares outstanding. A person's valuation reflects their potential to create value. The greater someone's potential, the greater the gap between their valuation and their current net worth.

Alice at nineteen, with nothing to her name, already carried a real valuation because her valuation priced the decades ahead of her.

Valuations update when shares are transacted, which means they can drift from reality. This happens with startups too. Many dead startups still carry the valuation from their last round even though everyone knows they're worthless. The best startups are wildly undervalued for the same reason: their last round doesn't reflect their recent rise in potential.

There are serious concerns we'll need to address.

Shareholder pressure – the kind that pushes founders to grow at all costs – could now exert itself at the level of life itself, not just a company. I've seen investor pressure damage a founder's mental health. With personal tokens, that pressure could follow a person across everything they ever do.

Valuations for people may breed a high-pressure culture of competition among peers. And there will be second-order consequences that we can't predict.

While the personal token is creator-first by design, it isn't enough. We'll need the right culture, expectations, and early adopters. And I think we'll need to launch personal tokens within a trusted, vetted network so that the possibility of being kicked out will further deter harmful actions. It will take a village to bring this idea to life.

I'm currently working toward launching myself so that I can build my village.

If you want to launch yourself / help me launch / have feedback, let's chat!