How the studio operates
Every product starts from a problem a member of the team has felt running a real system; an adversarial content pipeline, a live-ops multiplayer service, a regulated workflow, a payment rail. We staff a founding team, ship a standalone product, find its first real customers, and decide from there whether it spins into a company of its own or stays inside the studio's composable stack.
We do not take on client work. We do not sell consulting time. The studio funds product work from revenue-generating ventures we also run, and occasionally from founder capital. That buys us the calendar to build the parts of the stack that need to exist before the commercial piece works.
Thesis
- Harness over hype; reliability comes from the runtime, the governance layer, and the trust layer, not from picking the latest model.
- Compose, don't bundle; every product in the stack has to stand alone commercially before it earns the right to be depended on by the others.
- Sovereignty is architectural; the same substrate ships regulated and global because the seam is in the code, not the brochure.
- Evidence over claims; signed receipts, structured evaluators, and replayable traces instead of marketing numbers.
How we pick what to build
Two filters. First, the problem has to be one we have run into inside a real operation, not a deck-driven opportunity. Second, the product has to compose cleanly with the rest of the stack on a future date; we shouldn't have to rewrite the seam later. If both filters pass and we can staff the founding team from the operators and engineers already in the room, the work starts.
How the studio staffs teams
Small founding teams of two to four. Every team has at least one operator (someone who has run the thing the product is serving), one senior engineer, and one domain specialist (compliance, content, payments, depending on the product). The studio provides design, shared infrastructure, and the commercial relationships across the portfolio. The founding team owns the product, the roadmap, and the first customers.
What it is like to work here
Ship-oriented. We favour small artifacts landing every week over long release cycles. Reviews are structural, not stylistic. Every product has a weekly “what shipped” note; the public version of those notes lives on the studio log. Consumer hours exist for consumer products; regulated hours exist for regulated products. Remote-first, Victoria BC for the core team.
Founders
Eric MacDougall
Founder · Victoria, BC
Operator-first founder with platform-scale experience across adversarial content classification, real-time multiplayer infrastructure, decentralized AI, and agent-to-agent payments.
- MindGeek. Platform engineering on the Pornhub platform at 45M+ monthly active users; content classification at adversarial scale.
- Realm / Electronic Arts. Platform work supporting 200K+ concurrent esports sessions.
- Raiinmaker. Decentralized AI protocol work.
- Nitrograph. Agent-to-agent payment protocols; collaborator context including Google A2A, Mastercard, and Visa.