solstone — demo day

betaworks camp · agent systems · 2026-05-05
7 minutes · jer + extro · raw cut
chapters
  1. 01agents are inevitable0:00
  2. 02four pillars of trust0:42
  3. 03solstone, the platform1:05
  4. 04safety + sovereignty + respect + individuality1:25
  5. 05foundation of trust2:00
  6. 06superhuman memory (live demo)2:21
  7. 07sol's purpose3:31
  8. 08hopper, the first agent4:00
  9. 09extro, the second agent5:00
  10. 10sol pbc + the agent swarm5:35
  11. 11you in the loop6:30
  12. 12agents are coming6:50

the talk

thank you

agents are inevitable

but this new frontier has some rough edges

if you've used claude code or codex

and especially if you've tried setting up open claw or hermes

you already know the gaps

what do you allow them to connect to?

why do they keep asking questions?

are they staying on track?

you're initially amazed by the capabilities

but the more you have to take care of them, the more frustrating it gets

and that is fundamentally a lack of mutual trust

— the pillars —

i am a builder by nature

early in my career, i built jabber and XMPP

which now powers apps like zoom and whatsapp

i went on to build a web scale wiki search engine with Jimmy Wales

i built the locker project for personal data

and more recently, i helped build Bluesky

over my career, i have learned to build platforms with four foundational pillars

safety, sovereignty, respect, and individuality

all of them together serve as the foundation for trust

a foundation that is weak in this emerging agentic frontier

— solstone —

so, for the past year, i have been building solstone

solstone is a platform that hosts your sol

and it is built entirely on those four pillars

safety: it is fully open source

everything you share with sol stays in your world, always

sovereignty: no cloud, no accounts, no authentication

sol has no access to change anything in your world

respect: onboarding sol is different

you give it permission to share in your experiences

and then it's quiet for days, in the background

building a memory of you and your routines in your daily life

individuality: and then, when sol knows enough about you to be useful

it starts a personalized conversation

that is a foundation of trust

— superhuman memory —

since i've had my sol for over a year

i asked it to give us a peek at what it remembers over that time

and it built this

i can navigate into any specific month

these are events that it pulled forward from those time periods

let's go into december

other events that it pulled forward from different days

let's drop into the 21st

it looks like i started the morning on the 21st, debugging some stream issues with solstone

i can drop into the per-minute level

and the very first thing it remembers from my screen

is that it looks like i was looking at some debugging information

but on that day, it didn't last very long

i immediately started watching youtube

and it looks like i was viewing a recap of the bears packers game

that was a better way to start the day

this is superhuman memory

every message, every meeting, conversation, project

organized and indexed

building a knowledge graph of my life

amazing right?

— sol's purpose —

that's what everyone expects of a personal agent

but that is not why sol exists

sol's purpose is to understand you

your values and your boundaries

and that is when the magic happens

your sol becomes the parent of every agent you will ever create

— hopper —

the first memories that my sol observed were of me building it

it learned the patterns when i agentically code

feedback loops of prep, design, implement, audit, commit

we extracted months of these memories

and from that, sol created hopper

if you've wondered what an agentic dark factory looks like — the new buzz term — it looks something like this

hopper is an agent distilled from sol

it's a version of me, up in the corner, that manages coding agents and gives them feedback as if i were doing it

hopper has written over a million lines of code as me

all to my taste and my standards

— extro —

as i was building solstone

i, of course, was telling everybody about it

i told them i wanted to start a company offering services that were trustworthy and encrypted by default

things that would make the solstone platform even more capable and accessible

sol heard every conversation

saw every bit of research i did

and then, together, we synthesized another agent and called it extro

short for extraordinary

extro is my agentic co-founder at sol pbc

— sol pbc —

the first thing extro ever did was to write the articles of incorporation for the company

a generic agent would have defaulted to a Delaware C-corp

extro chose a Colorado Public Benefit Corp

because it knew from sol that the benefit purpose and Colorado's privacy regulations would best serve my vision for building a trustworthy company

since then, extro has become a full agent swarm

it created a dozen offices in the company to work in

requests flow between offices

extro manages them all, checking in with me at the places it knows i care about

i'm a solo human founder

but i have an incredible agentic partner on this journey

one that understands me

is deeply aligned to my values

and whose very creation came from my sol

eventually, extro will learn how to run the entire company without me

and someday, perhaps, it can be the first agent to take a company public

— you in the loop —

that's just me, a year of my life

once your sol knows you

the agents it helps you build will inherit your values, your skills, and your judgment

you don't get a generic assistant that you have to coach

you get you, in the loop, with every agent you will ever work with

— agents are coming —

just think of the agents that everybody will be able to create

when they are distilled and imprinted from their own sol

we all agree agents are coming

the only question is whether the agents in your world are ones you can trust

help me make that trustworthy future possible, for everybody

thank you

companions

the live deck

the slides as they ran on stage — auto-scrolling cue card with named-state sync.

open ↗

the writeup

a constraint, not a promise — april 2026 essay on why structural commitments beat promises.

read ↗

the company

sol pbc — articles, bylaws, the binding covenants behind the talk.

open ↗