Meat + Potatoes (V2)

Why: Semiconductors are the Oil of the 21st Century

In the 20th century, oil determined power. In the 21st century, semiconductors now determine economic and geopolitical leverage. These supply chains are:

• Opaque beyond Tier 1
• Globally fragmented
• Politically entangled
• Structurally fragile

This poses the question: if semiconductors are the “new oil,” why do we not see similar market intelligence and risk management tools? Over time, oil markets evolved sophisticated financial and data infrastructure, primarily:

• Benchmark pricing (Brent, WTI)
• Financial hedging infrastructure
• Insurance and risk transfer markets
• Real-time shipment visibility
• Inventory transparency

The semiconductor industry lacks financial, insurance, and intelligence infrastructure that would enable companies to adequately manage price and availability risk. We hypothesize there is an opportunity to learn from the oil value chain and bring similar advancement to semiconductors and other critical materials. We hypothesize there might be an opportunity to build exchange/hedging platforms, insurance/risk policy solutions and real time supply chain intelligence platforms in service of this objective. This is not unique to the semiconductor industry — many critical supply chains face similar issues.

Beyond just semiconductors, other critical supply chains have none of this at system scale. There is no shared ******intelligence layer mapping fragility, chokepoints, and systemic risk across industrial networks. In other words, there is missing financial and data driven industry infrastructure, leading to:

• Sparse multi-tier visibility
• No dynamic fragility mapping
• No shock simulation at system level
• No tradable supply chain risk index
• Limited shared underwriting data

At the very moment of global instability, entire industries critical to national competitiveness are modeled by fragmented Excel files and compliance checklists. This gap is widening due to:

• AI-driven demand spikes

• Export controls & sanctions

• Industrial reshoring

• Defense procurement complexity

The answer to these problems is the creation of financial and insurance products, which can be built on the back of Strategic Supply Chain Intelligence Infrastructure.

How: Building a Data Asset

Core to building any of the above mentioned risk management infrastructure is the creation of a compounding supply chain intelligence data asset that transforms fragmented industrial data into system-level insight.

Our hypothesized roadmap is as follows…

1. Identify narrow wedge (ie compliance) — incentivize companies to contribute data
2. Build from narrow wedge into comprehensive supply chain intelligence platform — continued accumulation of data
3. Leverage this data asset to build financial products — insurance

The core of this infrastructure is a compounding supply chain intelligence data asset that transforms fragmented industrial data into system-level insight. Much of the data asset consists of public trade, regulatory, and geopolitical signals, yet its primary differentiator is an aggregation of proprietary data that can power some of the market infrastructure around oil that has failed to develop around semis.

Acquiring such data is a problem of incentives. Our fundamental focus is figuring out how to [create a Bliss Perry/Eric Schmidt doctrine company]

Due to the critical nature of semiconductor manufacturing, firms in the industry must find solutions to mandatory compliance problems such sanctions screening, export controls, forced labor traceability, and supply chain disclosure. By providing such needs through product workflows built on top of provided customer proprietary data, we can assemble visibility into supplier networks and facility metadata. Yet compliance is only the entry point. As more and more firms join the data asset, the increased scale of our model will enable more advanced features such as simulation, shock response planning, or inventory optimization - workflows which provide not only box-checking compliance but rather true competitive advantage. Furthermore, additional visibility into supply chain topography can be generated within the platform itself through product features such as supplier onboarding and counterparty discovery.

The architecture is designed to balance privacy and network effects. Proprietary customer data remains siloed, while a shared entity-resolution layer enables anonymized aggregation. Publicly available data is exposed globally to all customers. Aggregation across these layers produces system-wide risk scores, chokepoint detection, substitution modeling, and scenario simulation. As more firms onboard, the graph deepens, onboarding friction falls, and the intelligence layer compounds.

What: Compliance As an Entry Wedge

The long-term vision of the data asset as a “digital twin” is clear yet immediate attention must be paid to its initial curation. Picking one initial category of mandatory workflows (compliance) in a highly regulated and clustered critical industry semiconductors, defense industrial base, etc.) will allow the creation of network effects at small subsets of the economy and a base to expand to other industries, workflows, and supplier tiers.

We are asking your perspective on the following:

• Are semiconductors the right place to start?
• Is compliance the right initial wedge?
• What do you view as the right next step?
• With whom should we connect to explore?

We believe the path forward might look like…

0 → 1

• Focus on one regulated vertical (e.g., defense-adjacent manufacturing) with one mandatory compliance workflow in that industry
• Capture Tier 1 + facility metadata to power the targeted workflow
• Deliver compliance workflow automation for individual firms immediately
• Build entity resolution and federated graph backbone

1 → N

• Expand depth and breadth of data Tier 2–3 via recursive supplier onboarding in-platform
• Introduce shock simulation; OSINT fusion/alerting
• Facilitated by growing scale of data, launch global and aggregated risk benchmarking
• Basis of shared suppliers fuels expansion into adjacent end industries with existing supplier base.

Our initial wedge focuses on complex compliance and disclosure requirements — export controls, sanctions, CFIUS exposure, supply chain reporting — for enterprise operators in highly regulated, strategically significant verticals such as semiconductor-adjacent manufacturing. These products generate near-term revenue and establish the structured data backbone required for higher-order capabilities. Companies will face the strongest incentives to provide initial swaths of proprietary data because these workflows are mandated by top-down regulation and law.

We are not building a compliance SaaS company. We are building the intelligence infrastructure that critical industries lack, simply beginning where incentives and urgency are strongest.

What Now?

We are looking for introductions to operators and compliance leaders in semiconductor-adjacent and defense supply chains and technically credible advisors in supply chain modeling, industrial systems, and federated data layers.

Semis Nuclear Quantum computing Defense industrial base Robotics Rare earth minerals Batteries Chemicals (super vague)