What this site is
A public reference layer for ~345 deep-tech concepts — semiconductors, photonics, materials, energy, biotech, space, quantum — organised into 9 macro domains and 42 mesos. Each concept page covers physics or mechanism, competitive landscape, frontier questions, and the recent sources citing it.
The substrate is a private knowledge base updated daily from ingested papers, granola call transcripts, news, Substack archives, and investment memos. A nightly publish pipeline filters out the internal stuff (deal flow, founder names, IC notes) and emits a public-safe snapshot of the concept layer. The rest of the site — the cross-cuts surfaces, the neighborhood graphs, the atlas, the tours — is rendered from that snapshot.
Why this format
Most VC writing is essays. Most analyst writing is paywalled. The middle ground — structured, opinionated, free, cross-referenced — barely exists. The reference layer below this paragraph is the attempt at it. The narrative layer (the Substack, accessible via Writing) draws on the references.
The structural pattern is borrowed from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: a hierarchical taxonomy you can drill into, plus a graph view (the Atlas) that makes the interconnection visible. Every concept page has a small neighborhood graph at the top showing what it connects to.
How to follow
Subscribe to State of the Future on Substack for the weekly dispatch and longer essays. The reference layer here updates nightly — no need to subscribe.
Contact
lawrence@stateofthefuture.io · LinkedIn