ONE NIGHT OF MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS.

Founders and investors, around the fire. I'll pass around twelve cards. Each one names a clause that never makes it onto a term sheet but that everyone lives with anyway. The pace mandate. The narrative lock-in. The drag-along drag. The one nobody names.

For each card, the circle votes: did you choose this on purpose, or find out too late? The ones nobody defends go into the actual fire.

The term sheet is the sharpest moment between a founder and an investor, and almost nobody talks about it honestly with investors in the room. I've sat on both sides. I'll own up to how our terms as GPs create the dependencies we then turn around and criticise.

We close by writing a Founder's Pact together: three things every founder should put on the table before signing. I'll publish it afterwards, in the name of the PIRATE Night community.

Every founder calls their critical dependencies tools. Most are right. Some aren't.

This campfire is a 30-minute challenge to the dependencies sitting inside your strategy unquestioned. The method comes from Strategic Opposition: a way to surface the assumptions your own thinking keeps reinforcing instead of correcting.

Each of us names our most critical dependency. An investor relationship. A platform bet. A co-founder dynamic. A key hire. A tech stack. Then one question: did you choose this, or did it become the path of least resistance while you were looking somewhere else?

Which of your dependencies would survive a real challenge? Which ones have you stopped examining because examining them feels disloyal, or threatening? What changes if one of them turns out to be a constraint you built yourself?

You won't leave with a plan. You'll leave knowing the question you've been avoiding.

Sovereignty over your growth doesn't come from another tool or another agency. It comes from people who see what you can't, and who push each other to actually act.

This campfire is built around that. Everyone here brings two things: a knot they can't untie alone, and something they'd hand across the fire for good karma, a homemade coffee or a cocktail. Wisdom grows when you share it.

And sharing has never been cheaper. The GPT you trained. The automation you built. The investor list you vetted. The one self-mastery trick that actually moved the needle. Almost no effort to pass on, and a huge gain for whoever catches it.

Your reward? Someone in the circle holding the flag for your hardest knot: the question that reframes it, the lived experience, the intro you need right now.

Each one teach one. Pirates have lived it since day one. Come with your challenge. Bring one real thing. Leave with a real crew and one real move. ARRR!

In 2024, Tim Berners-Lee wrote that the web he built for liberation had turned into a machine for extraction. He pointed to Solid as part of the structural fix and called on builders to act. That letter is two years old now. The window is closing.

The web doesn't have a missing feature. It has a missing layer. There's no neutral, user-controlled infrastructure for personal data and consent sitting between you and every platform, publisher and AI agent you deal with. Without it, every 'sovereignty' conversation stays cosmetic.

I spent the first decade of my career inside big tech, back when it was still small tech 'changing the world', helping create this problem. I've spent the last decade trying to fix it: building the layer that should have existed from the start. A personal data pod, governed by an independent foundation, with a company funding the transition, and structurally unable to extract from you. Those two are deliberately not the same entity.

Questions for the circle: - The web was built for everyone, yet a handful of companies own and control it. Is regulation enough, or do we need a Robin Hood movement? - What if you could take your data back from big tech and use it on your own terms? Would you? - A foundation that can't sell your data, a company that funds the mission. Naive, or future-proof?

AI is creeping into more and more business decisions. But who actually controls the systems, the data and the knowledge behind it?

This is a non-technical conversation. We'll look at how organizations can cut dependency, get past box-ticking compliance, and think about AI sovereignty in practical terms. The real edge won't come from access to AI itself, since everyone has that. It comes from pairing AI with your own data, your expertise and your customer relationships.

So what does it actually mean to run AI on your terms?