Brian Cartmell

Brian Cartmell's relationship with technology started in 1982, when as a 13-year-old he got his hands on a Commodore PET and taught himself to program — first in BASIC, then in 6502 assembly language, working directly with registers and memory addresses to understand what was actually happening inside the machine. When he gained access to ARPANET a few years later, it sparked a vision of a connected digital future that would guide the next four decades of his life.

Brian's early career was driven by curiosity rather than compensation. He took jobs — sometimes unpaid — to access technology he couldn't afford and to learn skills that didn't exist in any textbook. In 1987, he began building desktop computers at Seattle's Ballard Computer.

By the mid-1990s, Brian was running a dozen internet ventures simultaneously, applying an evolutionary approach to business: launch many experiments, let the market decide which survive, and feed the ones that show life (a lesson learned while working at IEG). By early 1997, he had founded CreditReports.com and Authorize.com — among the first online credit reporting and payment processing platforms.

Recognising the untapped potential of internet domains, Brian secured the .CC top-level domain registry from IANA in late 1997, scaling it to over 500,000 registered domains before selling it to Verisign in 2001. His early involvement in the internet domain space led to an invitation to testify before the U.S. Senate on internet governance in 2001, helping shape the future of how the digital world would be managed.

He then co-founded Spam Arrest, developing early anti-spam technology and successfully defending its trademark against Hormel Foods Corporation in a five-year battle before the TTAB. The victory established the legal precedent for the word "spam" to be used in business and product names when referring to unwanted digital messages.

Brian's interest in the long-term trajectory of technology led him to become an early funder of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (now MIRI) in the early 2000s, supporting Eliezer Yudkowsky's work on human-friendly AI at a time when almost no one was taking the idea seriously. Yudkowsky's original vision was optimistic — that building aligned-AI was essential to humanity's future. In the years since, Yudkowsky's position has shifted from advocating for AI's promise to warning it poses an existential threat. Brian respects the journey but doesn't share the conclusion — four decades of technological change have shown him that the future is built by those who engage with it, not those who stand in the way of technological progress, yelling STOP.

In 2010, Brian recognised another inflection point — this time in digital currency. He was an early adopter of Bitcoin and participated in the first funding rounds of both Coinbase and Kraken, two platforms that would go on to become foundational infrastructure for the cryptocurrency industry. He was also an early supporter of Zcash, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency built on zero-knowledge proofs, funding the Electric Coin Company alongside a small group of investors before launch. For Brian, digital currencies weren't just a financial innovation — they were the payment rails that would one day allow autonomous AI systems to operate economically in the world, without the gatekeeping of traditional banking.

After relocating to New Zealand in late 2010 and making Queenstown his home base, Brian continues to invest in forward-thinking individuals and breakthrough ventures — from space companies to bio-tech. His investment philosophy is straightforward: back people who are forward thinkers in their specific domain, and bring his four decades of cross-industry pattern recognition to the investment table.