<aside> 👉🏻 This is a lightly edited version of the letter Ellie sent to our investors on 30/11/23

</aside>

Hi all,

Please find here a detailed post-mortem, which covers our founding worldview, design philosophy, our product development journey, and our learnings.

Writing this has been an important part of reorienting ourselves after an intense year, and we invite you to share any questions that you have - answering them will continue to help us gain perspective on our journey. There are a number of additional layers of insight under each section of this document, and we hope to share more of our thinking in the months to come.

My calendar is open here - please note that as of next week I will be on Indochina Time (GMT+7) for a couple of months, as I take some time to recharge.

As for our next steps, Conan is looking to secure a new role - his criteria are here. If you’re able to make connections in this space, he’d love to discuss further. Having had the exceptional privilege of being his co-founder for the past year, I am confident that he will bring an enormous amount of value to whichever team is fortunate enough to work with him. As well as having a wealth of experience architecting and developing software and data systems, he is a top-tier coach / manager, and the definition of someone playing an infinite game.

While I take some time to work out my next steps, I am open to interesting consulting opportunities - my criteria are here.

Finally, on behalf of Conan and myself, I’d like to thank each of you for your belief in us as founders - while the outcome for this particular company was not that which we aimed for, we do hope that in executing as we have, we’ve done you proud. We hope to stay in touch with the view to working together in the future.

With gratitude,

Ellie and Conan

Founders, OODA Experimentation Technologies

Table of Contents

Worldview

“I can remember previous moments of equal or even greater gravity for the world economy, but I cannot remember moments when there were as many separate aspects and as many cross-currents as there are right now.” Larry Summers, Martin Wolf column, FT, Oct 2022

• When we came together last Autumn, we were interested in finding ways to help organisations become “fit” - that is, able to thrive according to their purpose - in the face of a global polycrisis
• Why? Because we believed that organisations’ failure to adapt to our changing world would lead to wide scale value destruction - and ultimately, human suffering - as governments around the world became unable to afford to step in
• Our view was that this version of the future wouldn’t simply result in ‘stranded assets’ in some parts of the capital markets, but instead, a global market correction that stemmed from a shortage of assets that had been ‘made fit’ for our new world ahead of time
• These assets then, would be disproportionately valuable relative to their oil-economy counterparts (and as such, would behave like Veblen goods)
• Our view was that there was a $T+ commercial opportunity in building solutions that help organisations identify and act on the delta between the value of these assets today, and their value tomorrow
• This opportunity, we believed, was both direct and indirect, in that by providing these solutions, we’d have a ‘birds eye view’ of the rate at which decarbonisation was assigned a positive value by different organisations

Design Philosophy

Yet, when I think of what’s needed to actually solve the on-going crises of the world, it’s not more narratives and more “understanding.” It’s really about agility, both individual and collective. To use the military mental model, it’s OODA — observe, orient, decide, and act. Narratives get at the first “O”, but do nothing to orient and drive decisions and actions together. In a world of such complexity and emergence, it’s better not to build extensive intelligence systems but to just be fast. Learn quickly, adapt quickly. Omnivorous Explanations, Lux Capital **

• With a design philosophy rooted in evolution and experimentation (hence our name OODA(X), hailing from Colonel John Boyd’s famous observe-orient-decide-act loop), our question then was how to build an organisation that improved information about, aligned incentives around and increased the availability of transition assets
• With 12 weeks’ cash in the bank from Ellie’s previous raise for Liminal, we got together in an office we’d sublet and set about identifying a customer, a set of urgent pains, and a solution that they’d pay for

Where’s the whippet?

Product Development

The Adaptation OS

• We started by exploring a scenario modelling tool