Artificial Intelligence is about to change the world dramatically, at a point when things are already evolving faster than ever. Bringing to bear our creative powers, a dash of patience, and a commitment to civilized collaboration, we can ride with it into a great new world, carrying what we love along with us. Luckily, AI seems poised to help us, if we decide to help ourselves.

I’m Blake Borgeson.

I love startups, nonprofits, collectives, and crews. I love thinking together with groups about what we want in our future and how we can get there. In my over two decades of founding and building companies and nonprofits, and investing in and advising many more, I’ve seen ways people work well together, and ways we don’t.

Out of college, I co-founded and built BuildASign.com, bootstrapping with no outside investment to over $100M in revenues, eventually selling to the gorilla in the online printing space. Next, shooting for a large positive impact of my work, I did a PhD in biology and co-founded and helped build Recursion Pharmaceuticals, to bring computational sophistication and machine learning into drug discovery. Recursion went public in 2021, likely does the most cellular experiments of anyone in the world, and has several potential treatments in clinical trials. Seeing AI advancing much more rapidly than I anticipated and wishing for a safer AI development trajectory, I went to work in AI safety for the late 2010s, at MIRI.

Now, I’m working on helping us all collaborate more and better, first as small groups, and eventually as the whole world. Part of that work is “experiential experimentation,” aka creating apps and dog-fooding them. One lightweight decision-making app we call Resonance foregrounds seeing where we already agree, turning consensus from a show-stopper into an easy flow. Another scratched a personal itch I had. I had some paragraph-length ideas I wanted to share with collaborators, but not as a way of getting suggestions or edits (google docs), not as part of some hopefully productive process (slack), not as a demand on folks’ attention (email), but as a way of inviting and initiating a lively conversation. So I made one, and called it Riff. The next piece is finding more people to run these experiments with: new collaborators, new crews. If you’re doing anything like this, or want to, reach out!

trees outside the window — LARC workshop, aug 2026

Inspirations:

Formal affiliations:

a bit of southern Norway — aug 2026

Email me at “hello” at the domain of this website. Cold outreach about funding: long shot. Cold outreach about collaboration experiments: yes please!

drawn and written aug 2026 · last updated aug 2026