Only the Future is Certain
What used to be the hard parts of many problems are quickly coming
within easy reach. There is a growing backlog of demand to apply
rapidly evolving technologies to a diverse array of problems with
real impact on people's lives. At the same time, the speed and scale
of online organization, a now mature phenomenon, represents an
untapped potential to create effective action wherever there is mass
incentive-alignment. This demand to directly employ life-changing
technologies will not wait for the speed of traditional
capitalization and product cycles.
The Problem We Are Solving
Developing business models can sometimes add prohibitive friction
between innovation and adoption. Bending technology to fit behind a
toll-gate takes time and impedes value. When almost 100% of the value
creation will be downstream, spending time figuring out the upstream
business models only slows down people who are ready to create real
value now.
Our mission is connect demand for downstream value creation directly
to upstream enabling technologies.
Wherever ready demand exists, we want to connect it with capable
hands. Downstream customers & value creations don't care if or how a
technology will be profitable for hypothetical upstream service
providers. Downstream value creators need direct access to these
enabling technologies in order to adapt them for the real
applications, the long-tail of hard science & engineering problems
that deliver life-changing solutions. Their customers are counting on
them to deliver the next wave of advances in biomedical, material, and
energy solutions.

Our first product, PrizeForge, will begin by unlocking this latent
downstream value for users of open source software. For decades we have
been waiting for "more volunteers" while collectively missing
years of opportunities. Millions of users share the same problems.
These are millions of people with jobs, specialized skills, but not the
specialized skills they would need to work on the software they use
every day. It's time to get the right resources into the right hands.
As another era of rapid innovation unfolds, we should make the most
of it. We can't rely on massive legacy platforms. They will invest
billions in technologies that only look like the products they already
sell. Their implementations will be unique to their massive data
centers and huge stockpiles of user data. PrizeForge will give
millions of users a way to build technologies that looks like how we
want to use it to build things we actually want.
Just the Beginning
Positron's earliest origins can be traced to slightly before the
generative AI wave began. The pace of advance in whatever comes after
transformers has changed the landscape a bit and created even greater
needs.
Throughout our product design process, we have identified numerous
areas of improvement for all kinds of social and crowd-sourcing
applications. Our vision extends well beyond software.
Topics such as open community governance, decentralized peer-to-peer
services, and alternative payment rails were and remain hot. Over the
last decade, a lot of useful infrastructure has created potential that
remains untapped.