Short-term thinking dominates our world. The quarterly performance of a company, the daily performance of a stock, the hourly performance of a meme coin. Folks approach their careers in two-year chunks and the projects they work on in two-week sprints.
Yet the companies and individuals we most admire are those with long time horizons. Maybe that's what the best of what founder mode means: building for the long-term. SpaceX caught a reusable booster rocket in its 22nd year!
Like many in “Silicon Valley,” I am motivated by an abundance mindset. Growth is good. I see the world as a positive sum game, one where we can choose to create a better future. Where we have the agency to build and create a better world: clean energy so cheap it's not worth metering, increasing lifespans, the reduction and elimination of poverty, plentiful food and clean water, material prosperity, and much more. Optimistic, yes, and proudly techno-utopian. After all, look at the material abundance of our lives — and the global median life — today compared to a hundred years ago, let alone two hundred.
We are all invested in the future being more prosperous than the present. The stability of our government, the Social Security trust fund, and our society depends on growth and improvement (and likely less government spending). Every 401(k) and IRA retirement account is a claim on future prosperity and wealth. Investments in the stock market don't magically go up. They have gone up 7% a year on average for the last 80 years because our society's production and output have improved.
It might not be intuitive, but this is why I started a life insurer. They are among the only companies required to think in those long time spans rather than those few who can choose to because of their leadership by charismatic founder-CEOs.
Life insurers must plan for the deep future. They measure their promises in decades. This is the critical service they provide their users: pooling together life's risks through long-term pledges. Helping your family after you die — that's life insurance (mortality risk). Preparing you and your family if you live — that's an annuity (longevity risk).
That means life insurers must grow their balance sheets prudently and steadily. They hold a considerable percentage of the world's real estate, infrastructure, and long-term mortgages, mixing their obligation to be thoughtful with their ability to invest with longer time horizons than almost anyone else.
But a well-functioning life insurer should both invest its balance sheet carefully and take significant long-term positions to invest in the prosperity of the society in which it operates. None of the incumbents act that way. Instead of financing the future, they capture the upside of the past. They are grounded in seeing their balance sheets as merely a passive pile of money to grow rather than an opportunity and obligation to drive our world toward growth and prosperity. We're on a mission to change that.
At Meanwhile, we are starting in a niche as the world's first Bitcoin life insurer. Our ultimate vision to serve a billion policyholders in managing life’s risk. We see Bitcoin, stablecoins, and other digital money as the best policyholder experience to get there. I’ll write much more about that in the future.
Our success depends on a prosperous future. If our company grows and our world stagnates, we will fail—not just as a startup but as a country and a world.
Our vision is to manage the resources entrusted to us by policyholders while also having a vision for our unique long-term role in society. To build a better future. To invest in prosperity and abundance. To make the long-term bets that no one else wants to. To help scale the dreamers.
Meanwhile will invest both our balance sheet and our creative energy in enterprises that advance human prosperity. Our investments will focus not just on capturing existing value but on creating new possibilities. As we scale, we're committed to making the long-term investments that others won't consider—funding nuclear power plants through decades-long purchase agreements, providing expansion capital for space manufacturing, or financing large-scale carbon capture facilities. Closer to home, we'll support companies developing quantum-resistant financial security systems, fund critical blockchain infrastructure, and finance the next generation of autonomous software maintenance platforms. The goal wouldn't be to take on the early venture risks of these bets but to be the exact type of capital that invests in scaling abundance, particularly when it has paybacks of 10, 20, or 30 years. Without that, there wouldn't be the material societal growth needed to meet our obligations.
What good is the future if it's built for the past?