Futurist Technologies .com

Introduction

You might have noticed that our civilization has become sidetracked. Everyone seems to be scrambling to make some money, without anyone looking to sidestep our Easter Island economy that is now turning the Earth’s resources into products that soon end up in landfills. On our present trajectory, there is no chance of ever tripling lifespan, reaching the nearest stars, or even curing many of our present health afflictions.

The problem is that we now find ourselves in need of another Renaissance, but we seem to be lacking visionary financiers, like the Medici family who bankrolled the first Renaissance. Fortunately, there are now many more people who can underwrite futurist technologies – though still too few with a vision of the future.

Futurist scientists, like Da Vinci and Galileo, have become harder to find due to the digital din from the Internet that now permeates our society.

First, Some Definitions

innovations – new products built with existing or slightly advanced technology to address near-term markets.

enabling technology – new technology that enables numerous more advanced innovations.

futurist technology – new enabling technology that seeks some facet of civilization’s apparent manifest destiny.

Our Mission

Our mission is to be a matchmaker – to put together win-win-win deals between futurist scientists who see bright futures beyond most people’s imagination, visionary financiers who see that it is vitally important to bring selected bright futures into existence, and industry leaders who want their companies and/or nations to have a fair share of these bright futures. These “golden triangles” will become the basis of future wealth, once the present innovation craze has finished running its course.

Like other forms of matchmaking, this requires human interaction. It is not (yet) suitable for automation. If you feel that you should be a part of a future golden triangle, then please email us. Otherwise, we will probably encounter you at some future conference or other gathering of people focused on futurist technology.

Some Examples of Futurist Enabling Technologies

To illustrate what futurist enabling technologies are all about, here are some technologies we are now working on wrapping deals around.

1. A new microscope will make it possible to observe the inner workings of cells within living organisms at UV wavelengths, which will answer a LOT of present questions in biology and neuroscience.
2. A new method will make processors and computers fault tolerant, so chips can be made arbitrarily large and complex without generating lots of rejects.
3. A new approach to fission fragment propulsion breeds Thorium to Uranium and beyond, accelerating the spent fuel to relativistic velocities. Thorium fuel is close to two orders of magnitude more efficient than Uranium fuel because the decay chain is usable. This technology looks much more promising than fusion or anti-matter propulsion, because fission fragment propulsion systems are much simpler and come with their own ready-made propellant. Done at astronomical temperatures in a magnetic bottle, only tiny amounts of radioactive material would exist at any moment in time.
4. A new approach to parsing natural language is capable of dealing with the incredible complexity of natural language, and does so at scan-the-Internet speeds. This will make automated problem solving practical across the Internet, which will revolutionize healthcare.

What Futurist Technologies Are All About

Futurist technologists have identified technologies are that seem to be missing, and they are targeting and developing them as far as practical absent adequate funding. The obvious question is: Why haven’t these technologies been fully funded?

1. If it was quick, easy, and cheap it would just be a business opportunity.

2. If it was quick, cheap, but difficult, it would be an innovational opportunity.

3. If it was slow, expensive, and easy it would be a long-term investment opportunity.

4. If it is slow, expensive, and hard everyone would avoid it – but wait, THIS is what futurist technologies typically look like, and these can and will operate the world in the future.

So, why would anyone in their right mind prefer to invest in something whose development is slow, expensive, and difficult?

1. No one else is funding this, so there is lots of “low hanging fruit” from which to choose.

2. This makes it too expensive for customers to develop replacements for your products.

3. The combination sets an impossibly high bar for future competitors.

4. You no longer have to rely on your patents to protect your intellectual property (IP).

5. The best enabling technology can support diverse products, so that you have market diversification to avoid marketing disasters.

6. Enabling technologies generally render existing technologies obsolete, so with an enabling technology you will end up “eating the lunch” of others who took the “safer” path of incremental innovation.

In short, the “lemons” of development (slow, expensive, and difficult), if taken together as part of a cohesive plan, make rather good “lemonade”. The trick is to find futurist enabling technologies with just the right combination of slow development, high investment, and technical difficulty so that there is a high degree of confidence that the technologies CAN succeed in securing a desirable long-term market against future competitors, while staying within a rational budget.

The very best futurist technologies develop something really important you would expect to see and use in the long distant future. They often cost millions of dollars just to demonstrate proof of principle, take half a decade to develop and deploy, and cost tens of millions of dollars to launch the first products. There are numerous candidate futurist technologies, but these are NOT for investors looking for short-term innovations.

A Novel Financial Technique

Fortunately there is a little known path past the “expensive” part of this, and that is to structure the financing in a new way. Just like the inventors and management get their share for bringing their part to a company, the financiers would get their share for funding the company. Just like everyone else is expected to perform without limit for success, the financiers are expected to supply anticipated financing as needed, without limit. Just like everyone else who can’t perform walks away without stock, financiers who abandon their companies in the middle of development walk away without stock.

In reality, most enabling technologies require the efforts of a small team that is NOT spending a lot of money to do much of the initial work, with a high burn rate period during the last months before rollout. If something goes wrong before getting to the high burn rate period, which sometimes happens, then little money would be lost, rather than losing an entire round of financing as is common in conventional investment funding. A financier can walk away at any time, without losing any more than has already been spent up to that point in time. Of course, financiers can sell part or all of their interest to other financiers who are willing to accept the responsibility of acting without limit or losing their investment. In short, EVERYONE assumes the SAME moral hazard to either perform without limit to succeed, or walk away with nothing.

Some potential financiers have had a problem with the choice of continuing to invest, selling their position, or walking away with nothing. Other alternatives are clearly worse, like investing all of the money up front, with no way of stopping financial hemorrhages. If this really bothers you, then you have just failed the test for becoming a futurist investor, and so should probably stick with incremental innovation investments.

How We Work

We identify people who are both interested and capable of becoming part of a golden triangle. We work with the parties to forge a deal that works for everyone.

We charge 10% in kind, usually stock in a new enterprise.

We are looking for those rare people who are any of the following:

1. Has a futurist enabling technology that would seem to fit our needs, or
2. Has millions/billions of dollars and is interested in becoming a financier to a futurist technology of your choosing, or
3. Represents a company or nation who wants the use of particular types of futurist enabling technologies, or
4. Has the combination of broad scientific skills, marketing and sales skills, financial connections, and an interest in working with us for a piece of the action – that being a part of the technological future of the world.

If you fit ANY of the above criteria, then please email me at Steve.Richfield@gmail.com and tell me about yourself, what you have to offer, and what part of this vision of the future you wish to claim for yourself.

Steve Richfield