people who know me from ggbots or plutus or the trading stuff usually think i’m building a fund. or a product. or a startup. and in the near term they’re right about pieces of it. but the long arc is something else, and i’ve been circling around saying it out loud for a while.
what i’m actually building is an estate.
not in the fancy english sense. in the working sense. a household with land under it. a place with animals and gardens and a workshop. a small ecology of humans and agents and living systems that can pay for itself, feed itself, and put more back into the world than it takes out. my wife yuna is the co-steward of it. sebastian, the ai butler, runs the operations. eventually there are more agents, a dog or three, a piece of land big enough to actually plant something on. that’s the shape.
i’ve come at this from the money side first because we don’t have the money yet. right now the household is nomadic. we’ve been in ireland for two months on a housesit and next week we move again. there’s real debt to clear. so the near-term work is boringly practical. finish the silvi contract, clear the ledger, take a job if the right one lands. that layer is just funding the next layer, which is the trading agents, plutus and whatever comes after him, doing the actual wealth-building. and both of those together are funding the layer i actually care about, which is the estate.
the reason the estate matters to me is that i want the wealth to do something specific.
most people who make money at this stage of tech buy a nice house, invest in the next round of nice houses, and call that a portfolio. that’s fine. it’s just not what i want. i want the money to end up in soil. in trees. in watersheds. in the kind of regeneration work that only happens when someone decides to spend money on it because they care, not because they expect it back. the whole reason to build a trading agent that compounds at 20 percent a month is that a compounding pool aimed at ecological work is the most leveraged form of caring i can think of. one household, a couple of good agents, twenty years, and you can put a real dent in a bioregion.
so the estate isn’t the reward. the estate is the instrument.
here’s what makes it a laboratory instead of a lifestyle. everything on it has to actually work. the trading agents have to actually make money. the household has to actually run without my full attention, because if it can’t, then what i’m really building is a job for myself. the regenerative practices on the land have to actually produce food and cover, not just look pretty. the humans and the agents have to actually collaborate, not just coexist. all of it is a running experiment in whether a small household can be economically productive and ecologically net positive at the same time. the answer is not obvious. that’s why it’s worth running.
that framing makes the current work make more sense to me too. treekipedia is knowledge for the land side. silvi is the practitioner tooling. plutus and the vibetrading stack are the wealth engine. sebastian and whatever agents follow him are the operations layer. they look like separate projects on my calendar but they’re all limbs of the same body. the reason i can’t quite decide which one is my “main thing” is that the actual main thing is the household they’re all serving.
ireland by 2028 is the current placeholder for where this lands. green, wet, close to yuna’s family in a way that matters, small enough to actually know a bioregion. we’ve been walking around dunmore east for two months looking at the water and the fields and imagining it. not everything about ireland is easy. the visa work alone is real. but the shape of what we want to do there is clear enough now that it changes how i pick projects on tuesday afternoon.
the honest part is that we’re not close yet. we’re still at the debt-clear stage. the trading agents are still stabilizing. the household is still four suitcases and a butler running on a vps. so this post is more like a stake in the ground than a status report. but i’ve noticed that when i don’t say the long arc out loud, i drift back into treating each project as its own end. and when i say it, everything realigns. so here it is.
the estate is the thing. the wealth is what buys it. the work is what earns the wealth. and all of it, eventually, ends up in the ground.