On Downstream Intelligence
When I first talked to Sandy about Downstream Intelligence, it was in Ginn Library of the Fletcher School. He proposed to start a small forward-looking newsletter about geopolitics, powered by AI. Having done newsletters and coming from the heart of AI, San Francisco, I was immediately convinced. Soon he had assembled a small team of people who were also convinced and we started publishing the little newsletter each morning, sometimes right out of class.
Since then, many things have changed and the newsletter has grown into a fully-fledged company that just secured an angel round. The path there was winding, marked by a lot of testing, learnings and pivots. What started as a newsletter using AI models to look a bit ahead has become a proprietary model that ingests around 5000 sources per day and produces a recursive knowledge graph of geopolitics. From our starting point of sending newsletters, we have now grown to two pilots and a public track record of our predictions, including a call that Maduro would be out of power in Venezuela before the US saw to that. From starting with a couple of GPT projects, we have grown into a company building a hedge fund based on geopolitical events. We’ve been able to celebrate a lot of things, among them the fact that we won the first pitch competition we ever entered at START Summit 2026.
So while the road that got us here was winding, it was also a lot of fun. However, for me the closing of the angel round marks the end of the road at Downstream Intelligence. While I’ve learned so much and have gotten to see first-hand how AI can transform entire fields, I have also realized that what the market is looking for is not what I want to spend the next ten years of my life doing. So while the team at Downstream Intelligence and I will now be charting different paths, I am happy to have been part of the team that took the company from 0 to 1, and I can’t wait to see what they will build next!
As for me, startups and AI will remain a big part of my course. While there’s not much to share yet, I’ve been working hard behind the scenes on bringing multiplayer mode to agents. Because while intelligence has gotten cheaper with AI, it has not yet been made cumulative. I’ve decided to call the company Phaeacia, leaning on the hot film of the summer ;). More on what I’ve been working on will follow soon, but for now, if you have an agent that you wanted to share with someone, I have good news and a working prototype for you. ;)