hugh francis

This week, with @mozilla and @usbclub we launched intelligence.family - a speculative design piece exploring the potential of local LLMs for protecting and preserving our precious family memories, stories and heritage. Explore the research here → & read on 🧵

A Call for New Aesthetics: newaesthetics.art.

Today we rolled out the Little Plains Equity Program giving every full-time team member and contractor a share of our upside. I know the work we do creates real value, I was fortunate enough to be part of over a half dozen successful exits via @ginlane. From the start I wanted @littleplainsxo to share that same upside with our best clients and partners. We almost exclusively work in the early stage startup sector, and this is why you play the game. It's human nature to go the extra mile when you have skin in the game; when you feel like you are really a part of the ride. When you know the harder you push, the better the outcome can be. It's not just about compensation (which is important), even a small bit of ownership can create real pride because you actually own a part of what you’re making. For our early stage founders and teams we work with, we want them to feel we’re partners who will push harder and stick around longer than just transactional service providers. We care more than just getting a check, and we hope that shows. This took real work to put together! The system we all work in is not really designed to distribute ownership like this in a simple way. It took a half year of creative research, legal back and forth, and scenario testing. Here is a summary of where we landed: For full-time team members - Profit Interests that give each member a percentage of all Little Plains total equity upside - Monthly vesting over four years with no cliff - Once vested, it is theirs permanently and pays out on any future exits from projects started while they were here - (FT team members also get quarterly & annual profit sharing and guaranteed annual pay raises) For contractors: - Phantom Equity that gives them a proportional share of the contractor pool for any equity project they contribute to - Their share is based on the fees they earned relative to total contractor fees - It vests immediately once their work is done and paid Thank you to @alexleiphart for so diligently helping me to architect this, and bringing it to life. Thank you to the incredible team members, and contractors who work with us. With you none of this would be possible. Lastly, here is a one pager overview if anyone with a studio or creative agency is curious about working on something similar, happy to share more: docs.google.com/document/d/1_e…

I'm very happy to tell you that Are.na Annual vol. 7, themed “pool,” is now available for pre-order! Full of essays, interviews, and other writing about resource pools, vernal pools, hypersaline pools, carpools, gene pools, swimming pools, pooling neurons, pony pools. store.are.na/products/are-n…

The last couple months we've been working with @usbclub to compile our research into the feasibility and design thinking around building hardware devices running local LLMs. We just published the piece on Substack, but here's the seed that got us started: garden3d.substack.com/p/where-the-fl…

Sam Valenti IV launched independent record label Ghostly International in 1999. Now he’s gathered its evolution into a large-format book. At the link, @VALENTI talks to T.M. Brown about continuity, the future of taste-making, and why labels still matter. ssense.com/en/editorial/m…