Welcome to our research library.
Notes from Katapult Future Fest, Investor Day, for the Misfits of Finance Finance is a way of carrying the world by leaving most of it out. Reducing the noise is the skill. It is the first thing you are taught,
There is a particular hunger loose in the impact investing world right now, the desire to measure everything. There’s a claim to want to understand it, but only when all that we know can be rendered countable, to fix a
What happens when institutional investors become systems-conscious? There is a book that circulates in certain rooms.1 It has been on my syllabus since I first started teaching, 17 years ago. It moves the way useful tools move, from hand to hand,
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” -Gramsci Everyone quotes Gramsci now. It has become the default frame for
Capital moves. The structures we’ve built move it toward return, toward liquidity, toward exit. Systems persist. Communities persist. The places where people live and work and build lives—these do not exit. They continue, with or without the capital that passes
Dr. Bryant Lin teaches medicine at Stanford. He founded the Center for Asian Health Research and Education to study diseases that disproportionately affect Asian populations, including nonsmoker lung cancer. Then he was diagnosed with it himself. He is now Stage
On Mechanistic Metaphors Systems thinkers love to talk about leverage points—those magical places where a small intervention supposedly yields outsized change. The image is always mechanical: a bar, a fulcrum, a decisive push. But that metaphor smuggles in an assumption:
On forecasting, portfolios, and futures “We need to spend more time on Horizon 2,” they both say. One is a program officer at a climate and nature philanthropy. The initiatives they’re funding risk being captured by the dominant political economy
“Narrative change” has become its own sphere in philanthropy and movement work, stories as culture, identity, and legitimacy. Narrative work is funded. Those with the best narratives attract funding. There’s even been a backlash against narrative-building, and last week I
Performing Economic Realities: Climate Week on Value, AI, and the Contest Over Contribution My worlds all collided at Climate Week, and it’s taken me another week to metabolize the bafflement of many and find the corners of coherence, trying to
A story about unimaginative visions for efficiency and who gets to decide what intelligence serves. The machines are learning. But not what you think. The machines are learning how to hollow out human work and pour the profits into distant
A compelling narrative is emerging in business and finance: a shift from funding effort to paying for results. On the surface, outcomes-based models, results-based finance, and impact-linked finance appear to be a logical evolution toward greater efficiency and accountability. This
AI’s Consulting Confession: When “Revolutionary” Tech Needs Human Handlers So the business model answer to the LLM era of so-called AI is… consulting? OpenAI recently launched enterprise consulting services, charging at least $10 million per client, deploying “Forward Deployed Engineers”
Pattern One: Delete. Pattern Two: Capture. Pattern Three… The signs are everywhere, if you know where to look. A German state announces it’s done with Microsoft Teams. A billionaire venture capitalist podcasts a manifesto justifying the rule of tech elites.
Limits to paying only for the results that count Imagine signing a contract that promises “no results, no bill,” only to discover later that “results” were defined by someone else, measured with flawed data, and delivered through a system you
Why Crisis-Born Companies Thrive, and the Rise of the Systems Founder When markets wobble, founders often scramble for quick fixes and cosmetic pivots, mere deck-chair rearrangements that do little more than make them look busy. Yet history shows that the
They’re not reasoning. They’re remixing. Reason on AI on Reason Street In a time when LLMs and LRMs are marketed as tools that “reason,” many of us are now using these same tools to generate business models, especially for AI-driven
Why Contribution Matters Lessons Learned in Outcomes-Based Business Models: Addressing the Risks Outcomes-based business models have been widely adopted in healthcare, climate finance, and social services to align incentives and improve efficiency. However, they often introduce misaligned risk structures, favor
From Economic Driver to Shared Responsibility In many regions in the US, healthcare and life sciences make up 15-18% of the local economy—a major driver of jobs, research, and investment. But what if these ecosystems were designed not just for
For the concerned AI crowd headed to the Paris AI Summit, I may not be there in person, but the urgency of our moment compels me to send this message by carrier pigeon, Substack, and LinkedIn, with a few links
