urbit.org/company.md at 471f77fb653ab34be6aa227180ed462c98e6abf0 · urbit/urbit.org

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History

Curtis started working on Urbit in his garage in 2002. By 2008 he'd finished Nock, a productivity level of approximately 1 bit per day. By 2012 Hoon was essentially in its present form. By 2014, he had a prototype of Arvo, and used it to raise a little seed funding so we all could join him.

Urbit in early 2014 did most of the things it does today, but badly. For example, Urbit has chat and a shell now, and it had both in 2014. But in 2014, chat was built into the network module and the shell was a kernel module. Operating systems are hard (but fun).

Tlon

Urbit is open source (MIT license) and patent-free.

Tlon (named after a Borges story) is a vehicle for using the potential value of the Urbit address space to make Urbit real. Tlon owns about 40% of the address space (95 galaxies).

Another 50 galaxies are reserved for a future nonprofit. Tlon's long-term goal is to become a boring real-estate investment trust, and shift development control to a Mozilla-style foundation / community. This will not happen any time soon.

People

Some companies are all about cultural uniformity. We couldn't differ more. No two people at Tlon see the world eye-to-eye.

Galen (CEO) is a surfer from Santa Cruz with an architecture degree. Curtis (CTO) is a former CS grad student who loves old books. Anton is a rationalist Bolshevik and trained baritone. Philip is a homeschooled Christian and baseball fan. Henry is an amateur soccer player who speaks four languages.