Project TBD Memory Vault

Intake Brief

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Intake Brief

Phase: 1 — Intake Interview

Project: project-tbd

Date: 2026-04-11

Confidence: High (founder-provided information)

The Problem

The semiconductor supply chain — the most strategically important supply chain in the global economy — lacks the real-time structural visibility, market intelligence, and risk management infrastructure that other strategic commodities have had for decades.

Oil has 80 years of accumulated market infrastructure: CME futures contracts, Lloyd’s syndicate capacity, PIRA Analytics pricing indexes, satellite tracking of every tanker. Semiconductors — despite underpinning every defense system, data center, electric vehicle, and consumer device — are still managed through bilateral relationships, reactive phone calls, and quarterly supplier surveys that are obsolete before they are published.

When a magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck Taiwan’s Hualien County in April 2024, the world’s largest chipmakers could not answer basic questions: which tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers were within 50 km of TSMC’s fabs? What was the cascading revenue impact of a 15% drop in CoWoS packaging capacity? The answers were buried in disconnected spreadsheets and institutional memory.

This infrastructure gap represents one of the largest unaddressed risks in the global economy and the largest infrastructure opportunity.

The Solution

A multi-tenant, proprietary digital twin (ontology) of the global semiconductor supply chain.

A continuously updated data model mapping the real-world relationships between semiconductor firms — who is buying what from whom, at what capacity, through which logistics pathways, and under what regulatory constraints — updated as close to real-time as possible.

The Compliance Wedge (Go-to-Market)

Compliance is the entry strategy, not the end vision. Mandatory, regulated workflows serve as the data acquisition engine:

  1. Supplier Onboarding & Restricted Party Screening — Entity List, OFAC SDN, BIS Denied Persons, UFLPA screening. Data produced: supplier graph topology.
  2. Export & Import Control Verification (ITAR / EAR / ECCN) — Classification and end-user review. Data produced: product flows, technology transfer pathways, jurisdictional exposure.
  3. Forced Labor & Country-of-Origin Tracing (UFLPA) — Multi-tier origin tracing. Data produced: upstream material sourcing relationships.
  4. Government Mandatory Disclosures (CHIPS Act, CFIUS, EU Battery Passport) — Structured filings. Data produced: ownership structures, capital flows, materials provenance.

Each compliance workflow is valuable as standalone SaaS. The real play is the data exhaust: every compliance check feeds the digital twin.

Sequenced Product Roadmap

  1. Agentic Simulation — AI-native scenario modeling; conversational interrogation of the digital twin
  2. Alerting & Monitoring — Real-time detection of supply chain disruptions with customer-specific impact diagnosis
  3. Prediction — Forward-looking models identifying concentration risk, bottlenecks, cascading failures
  4. Remediation — Automated rerouting and contingency planning
  5. Recommendation Marketplace — Cross-customer matching of supply and demand

Long-Term Vision (“Big Swings”)

  • Financialization of supply chain risk — Parametric insurance, capacity hedging, forward allocation contracts
  • Prediction market middleware — Institutional-grade risk transfer combining prediction markets with the digital twin
  • Government design partnership — Back-end infrastructure for federal semiconductor oversight
  • Becoming the supply chain — Evolving from intelligence to transactional fabric

Aspiration: “Bloomberg Terminal for the global supply chain.”

What Triggered the Idea

The observation that semiconductors are the new oil, yet lack equivalent market infrastructure. Reinforced by:

  • Eric Schmidt model of compounding data moats
  • Palantir ontology model for structured, legible data
  • Munich Re / battery company model proving digital twins enable parametric insurance
  • The shift to AI-native product design

Existing Work

  • Several months of research, expert conversations, and iterative strategy sessions
  • Charter document, press release, quarterly goals, and competitive dossier (16 companies across 6 market petals)
  • No prototype or MVP yet
  • Immediate next steps include building an agentic simulation demo with synthetic data

The Founders

Dustin J Ross — Co-Founder

  • Current MBA student at Stanford Graduate School of Business
  • Founder/CEO of Sunflower Network — humanitarian logistics startup that built a supply chain delivering $4.5M in military and medical supplies to the front lines of Ukraine, raised $7M and constructed the first hospital in Ukraine since the start of the war, first deployment of prefabricated modular construction technology in a conflict zone
  • Proven startup founder: built an organization from scratch, raised $11.5M+ total, deployed cutting-edge technology in novel high-stakes environments
  • Previously at Hines (commercial real estate)
  • Strong finance background

Relevant edge: Startup founder who has built, raised, and shipped. Wartime supply chain operations under extreme constraints. Finance fluency for the financial products roadmap.

J Bliss Perry — Co-Founder

  • Current MBA student at Stanford Graduate School of Business
  • Palantir engineer and project manager — built enterprise software at the exact company whose ontology model, sales playbook, and architecture TBD is drawing from

Relevant edge: Palantir engineer building a Palantir-inspired product. Knows the technical architecture, the enterprise sales motion, and the ontology model from the inside.

Founder-Market Fit Assessment

Strong. Complementary skillsets: Bliss builds the product (Palantir DNA), Dustin operates, raises, and deploys into novel environments. Both at Stanford GSB with access to deep networks across VC, defense, AI, trade/customs, and Palantir alumni.

Time Commitment

Current GSB students. Running hard now with intention of full-time commitment. Going full-time this summer. Willing to drop out if warranted.

Budget / Runway

No external funding. Stanford grant provides a stipend for summer work. Effectively pre-seed / bootstrapped.

The Market

Ideal Customer

  • Near-term: Semiconductor firms with compliance burdens (supplier onboarding, export controls)
  • Mid-term: Enterprises and governments needing supply chain intelligence
  • Long-term: Financial institutions, insurers, and capital markets participants
  • Named 99% targets: TSMC, NVIDIA, U.S. Government

Target Geography

U.S.-first, with the American industrial base as the foundation. Global by nature of the supply chain.

Competitive Landscape

16 companies mapped across 6 market petals:

Supply Chain Risk & Visibility: Altana AI ($1B, $344M raised), Interos ($1B), Exiger ($1.2B, PE-backed), Resilinc ($42.5M rev), Everstream Analytics ($107M raised), Prewave ($98M raised)

Trade Compliance Software: Descartes Visual Compliance (67.5K subscribers), SAP GTS / Oracle GTM (incumbents), WiseTech Global (ASX-listed), Kharon (ex-Treasury team, UFLPA-specific)

Semiconductor Intelligence: TrendForce/DRAMeXchange (memory pricing only), TechInsights (chip architecture/IP)

Commodity Price Reporting: S&P Global/Platts ($150B+ parent market cap)

Battery / Critical Minerals Data: Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (~$500M, ICE futures partnership), Fastmarkets (LSEG subsidiary)

Parametric Insurance: Descartes Underwriting ($161M raised, $200M+ GWP)

Revenue Model

  1. SaaS compliance products (near-term revenue + data acquisition)
  2. Intelligence platform subscriptions
  3. Financial products (parametric insurance, capacity hedging instruments)
  4. Recommendation marketplace transaction fees

Go-to-Market Strategy

Dual-demo approach inspired by Palantir’s sales playbook:

  1. “Wave the shiny thing” — Agentic simulation demo with synthetic data to get in the room
  2. “Sell the practical first step” — Compliance product as the first contract

Quarterly Goals (March 2026 Quarter)

ConfidenceProductCustomerInvestor
50%Notional MVP completeSigned MOU/NDA design partnership3 meetings with top VCs
90%MVP + minimum viable data integratedPaying pilot customer exposing dataVerbal commitment from top VC
99%Product deployed on customer serverExclusive contract with TSMC/NVIDIA/USGTerm sheet from Founders Fund

Biggest Unknowns & Concerns

  1. Direction uncertainty: High conviction in team and space, but product direction still evolving
  2. Competitor clarity: Competitors change at each layer of the vision
  3. Data access: Companies may not share highly valuable, classified supply chain data
  4. Commodity analogy limits: Semiconductors are not fungible like oil

Strongest Arguments Against

  1. Semiconductors are not commodities. Not fungible like oil. Each chip is differentiated by architecture, process node, and application.
  2. Data is classified and proprietary. The supply chain data is among the most strategically sensitive information in the industry.

Flags

Yellow Flags:

  • No external funding against highly ambitious enterprise/government sales cycle
  • Altana AI has $1B valuation, $344M in funding, and existing government relationships
  • Direction uncertainty increases execution risk
  • Commodity analogy may not survive structural differences

Sources: Project TBD Charter Document; Press Release V4.3; Quarterly Goals; Company Dossier; Founder interview (April 2026)

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