The Stack

Four layers for building companies designed for abundant intelligence. Start with why, build on value, create infrastructure, transform work. Iterate across all layers simultaneously.

Layer 0: Start with Why

Before building anything, answer the fundamental question: Why does your business exist?

Purpose as Your North Star
Your purpose aligns both humans and agents. Without it, abundant intelligence optimizes toward unintended ends. With it, every decision—human or AI—moves in the same direction.

The Alignment Challenge
When intelligence was scarce, alignment was easier. Humans brought judgment and values with every action. When pattern-matching becomes abundant, you need explicit purpose to guide it. AI has vast capability without intent. You provide the intent.

Beyond Mission Statements
This isn't corporate platitudes on walls. It's operational clarity: What does success look like? What trade-offs will we make? What won't we compromise? These answers become the constraints that shape how intelligence flows through your business.

Why This Layer Matters
Skip this and you'll optimize beautifully toward the wrong outcomes. Start here and every layer that follows has direction. Purpose isn't the foundation—it's the blueprint.

Layer 1: Business Foundation

Start with what never changes: the fundamentals of value creation. This isn't about AI—it's about clarity.

Know Your Unit of Excellence
What's the atomic unit where value is created and captured in your business? A delivery, a project, a customer, a transaction? This becomes the shared metric that both humans and agents optimize toward. Until you can name it, you can't improve it. And until you can measure it, you can't scale it.

Focus on the 20% That Matters
Most businesses waste energy on activities that don't create value. The 80/20 principle still applies—perhaps more than ever. Identify the 20% of activities that drive 80% of outcomes. Intelligence should amplify these, not automate the 80% that doesn't matter.

The Five Timeless Principles
Before adding intelligence, master the fundamentals: aligned strategy, designed processes, meaningful measurement, shared knowledge, and embraced change. These principles have driven excellence for decades. They're still the foundation.

Why This Layer Matters
Without business clarity, abundant intelligence just amplifies confusion. You get expensive complexity instead of exponential leverage. This layer defines what winning looks like in your business. Only then can you build systems that help you win.

Layer 2: Intelligence Infrastructure

Build the nervous system for abundant intelligence. Not treating agents as drop-in human replacements, but designing for fundamentally different workers.

Build for Observability
Canonical IDs that track entities across systems. Data contracts that define what flows where. Decision logs that capture why choices were made. Every agent action must be observable, traceable, improvable. If you can't see it, you can't govern it.

Human-in-the-Loop by Default
Agents have vast pattern-matching without intent. They need human judgment to guide them. Build approval workflows, exception handling, and escalation paths. The goal isn't full automation—it's intelligent collaboration where humans provide taste and judgment.

Memory Systems That Learn
Your infrastructure should remember what works. Capture patterns, store context, build organizational memory. Each interaction should make the system smarter. This is where abundant intelligence becomes a capability, not just a tool.

Orchestration Over Integration
Don't just connect models to your systems. Design orchestration patterns that route intelligence where value is created. Agent coordination, workflow automation, decision routing—all focused on your Unit of Excellence.

Why This Layer Matters
Without infrastructure, you have disconnected experiments. With it, you have a platform for intelligence to flow through your business. This layer makes abundance usable.

Layer 3: Work Transformation

Redesign how work creates value. Intelligent processes that learn with every execution. Operations that scale without adding complexity.

Processes Don't Standardize Thinking—They Think
Every workflow execution generates data. Every decision creates a learning opportunity. Build processes that get better with each iteration. Capture what works, automate what's repeatable, surface exceptions for human judgment.

Seamless Human-Agent Workflows
The best workflows don't separate human and agent tasks—they blend them. Agents handle research, analysis, drafting. Humans provide judgment, creativity, strategic direction. The handoffs are smooth, the collaboration is natural.

Growth Limited by Alignment, Not Headcount
This is the inflection point. Small teams achieving what used to require armies. Ten people outshipping companies of hundreds. One person handling what took a team of twelve. All focused on the 20% that drives 80% of value.

Quality Guardrails Always Hold
The rule: improvements to Profit per Unit only count if quality guardrails hold. No gaming the metric at the expense of the whole. Speed without quality isn't transformation—it's chaos.

Why This Layer Matters
This is where vision becomes reality. Where 10x improvements move from individual tasks to entire operations. Where intelligence-native stops being a concept and becomes how you work.

The Sequence Matters

Build all layers simultaneously, iterating across them. The vision is clear even when the path isn't.

Not sequential—iterative. You don't perfect Layer 0 before touching Layer 1. You build a sliver of all four for one process. Learn fast. Scale what works. Each layer informs the others.

Start with technology and you get expensive complexity. You'll have tools that don't align with purpose. Infrastructure that doesn't serve real needs. Automation that speeds up the wrong things.

Start with purpose and value, you get exponential leverage. You'll know exactly what excellence looks like. You'll build infrastructure that amplifies it. You'll transform work in ways that compound.

We're not architecting the future in one massive leap. We're building it layer by layer, company by company, iteration by iteration, until the entire economy runs on a new operating system built for abundant intelligence.