Innovation Built America - Now It's Time to Take It Back

(And, the Latest Silicon Valley Buzzword: "Vibe")

March 14, 2025

Delivered March 14, 2025 @ 5:00pm ET

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Table of Contents

Welcome new subscribers!

Happy Friday!

My name is Gerry Hays, and for lack of a better description, I’m the custodian and convener of Doriot, a movement to break open the gates of venture and expand innovation and wealth beyond an elite few.

I’ve been in the game of venture as a founder, investor, researcher, inventor, author, game designer, and professor. I’ve built companies and developed a global venture portfolio entirely from the great state of Indiana, all while teaching over 6,000 undergraduates and MBAs at Indiana University, as well as in Croatia, Hong Kong, Slovenia, and Singapore.

This Week’s Highlights in the Democratize Venture Space

  • I met with Joe Milam this week to discuss pending legislation in Congress regarding Section 1244 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows investors in small businesses to deduct losses as ordinary losses rather than capital losses, up to $50,000 per year. Joe is a leading advocate for indexing Section 1244 to 2025 inflation levels and increasing the deduction fivefold, a move that could unlock billions in new investment for innovation. You can read and share his full report [here].

  • A new term is spreading through Silicon Valley: "Vibe" coding. Most Y Combinator startups are no longer writing code but prompting AI to generate it, launching products in days instead of months. So why does this matter for Democratizing Venture? If "vibe-coding" is real, in the future anyone will be able to describe a problem in plain language and build a product — further eroding Silicon Valley’s capital advantage.

Latest Doriot Updates

  • As mentioned last week, this coming Monday, we’re moving all our education programs to DoriotU.com (Doriot Venture University), allowing Doriot.com to focus entirely on the Reveal.

  • Perhaps our greatest challenge right now is figuring out how to present a new idea in a way that anyone can understand within seconds. As Mark Twain famously said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” In that spirit, our entire team is focused on simplifying, simplifying, simplifying — so that by the time of the Reveal, anyone will immediately grasp the opportunity before them in both words and design. And yes, I believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of something truly powerful — but it's up to us to communicate the value proposition clearly.

This Week’s Feature Article: Innovation Built America - Now It's Time to Take It Back

Innovation has been the backbone of America’s rise as a global powerhouse, driving its economic growth, shaping its culture, and cementing its leadership in technology, industry, and science. From the industrial revolution to the digital age, American ingenuity has fueled breakthroughs that have transformed the world — Edison’s lightbulb, Ford’s assembly line, the internet, and Silicon Valley’s tech boom. This relentless spirit of innovation has not only created world-changing companies but also lifted millions into prosperity, reinforcing the idea that progress is born from bold ideas and risk-taking.

Consolidation of Wealth and Power

But what we’re seeing in 2025 is Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and Wall Street tightening their grip on wealth and power, positioned to become even more dominant after the latest election. They all speak of innovation and expansion, but their actions reveal a different goal — consolidation and control.

Their playbook is simple: create systems and incentives that extract our time, capital, sovereignty, attention, and ideas, reinforcing their dominance while keeping everyone else on the outside looking in or, worse yet, keeping us distracted and inflamed with one another so we tear each other apart versus coming together to build a world we want to see.

How Wall Street, Washington DC, and Silicon Valley are consolidating power and influence

The stakes are higher than at any point I can remember. Artificial Intelligence has been unleashed, and that genie isn’t going back in the bottle. While I firmly believe in AI’s potential for good, there are no safeguards to ensure it evolves alongside humanity rather than overtaking it. In fact, it’s an arm’s race and, without government regulation, we are basically asking Billionaires and aspiring Trillionaires to look out for us.

Meanwhile, our political system is in upheaval, with ongoing attempts to stress-test the U.S. Constitution. On the global stage, we’re turning on our trading partners, threatening 100% tariffs on nations that don’t recognize the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency — despite the fact that we’re already losing 3–5% in purchasing power each year due to inflation and decades of quantitative easing (money printing).

Financial markets reflect this fear, and the vultures are circling, ready to pick off the weak holders, further creating a disparity in the haves and have nots.

Throw Politics Out the Window

Listen, people — the isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s now about about wealth and power, and we’re witnessing both being consolidated by the three institutions above, at the expense of the masses. And that’s really the purpose of this article—to highlight that each of these three institutions originally rose to power through innovative thinking with a mission to make the world a better place, uplift humanity, and create more opportunity. That’s how they became institutions in the first place, but that’s not their game today.

Thus, we can no longer rely on the government and billionaires to be the torchbearers of innovation—this is now on each of us. For this to happen, we need two things:

  1. Enough people who are fed up and ready to spark a renaissance in innovation and capitalism — one where Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, D.C. are no longer picking winners and losers, but where the people decide what gets built and what wins in the market.

  2. A new source of capital to fund innovation—one that is controlled by the people. And we’re not talking millions; we’re talking billions, which means millions of micro-investors eventually will need to step up and get involved.

We pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, tap into the energy of innovation, and grow our way out of this problem. We create the companies, jobs, wealth, and opportunities we want to see. We stop looking to Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street and start focusing on the problems in our own backyards — funded by our communities, keeping wealth and opportunity where it belongs.

I do believe there are enough people fed up to contribute meaningfully to such a movement. We’re not here to protest — we’re here to build a permissionless system for entrepreneurship and wealth creation.

The real challenge is creating a “winnable” game of capital formation — and that’s what I’ve spent the last seven years and 25,000 hours figuring out. Because if people can’t make money supporting innovation, they won’t participate. But if they can, they’ll show up in droves.

And as absurd as this sounds, I believe we have that winnable game: VentureStaking™ — an unheard-of approach to startup investing. I am so confident in this that I’m putting my entire professional reputation on the line. This is our best idea yet to un-gate innovation and capitalism.

On April 15, 2025, we will reveal our model and blueprint, offering an immediate opportunity to get involved at the ground floor. If this is lighting a fire in you, then my only request is this: don’t let the fire go to waste.

Georges Doriot, the man who created a new form of capital that fueled 80 years of innovation, now known as Venture Capital, once said, “Without action, the world would be an idea.” Ideas without action are meaningless. So please, share this with your network. Post a link on social media. Tell people innovation matters.

It’s time for us to step out of the fog and white noise created by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, D.C., reclaim our agency, and seize this opportunity. Parents, bring your high school and college kids into this — it will expand their world and unlock opportunities they won’t find anywhere else.

And to be clear: This will not be a traditional venture story, where a small group captures billions in value created by millions of people (think Robinhood). Doriot is being organized as the first-ever “Capital Creation Cooperative.” Our blueprint details exactly what that means, but the punchline is simple — Doriot will be owned and democratically controlled by those that have woken up and made the decision to change the trajectory of humanity for the better — by “un-gating” innovation and capitalism for decades to come.

That’s my call to action to join Doriot. Until next week. 🫡 

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