Founders Republic
#009 · Ottawa, Ontario · founded by Tobi Lütke
“Every citizen is a founder of something.”
Citizens run their own micro-business or ship their own software. Shopify and similar tools are the public infrastructure. Schools teach business, code, and Stoicism. Latin and Linux equally weighted.
Shopify merchants, indie hackers, builders who left Silicon Valley for Ottawa.
📍Ottawa, Ontario
Ottawa is the underrated capital. Government infrastructure, low cost, English and French, a real four seasons. Tobi already lives in the area. Anchor the polity in a converted government building near Parliament Hill, with citizen workshops running Shopify-style commerce, Linux servers, and a chess hall (Tobi reads Magnus Carlsen). Federate to Toronto, Vancouver, and a digital diaspora.
The moral case.
Canada has the talent and the values for a different version of America. Tobi has been quietly building one inside Shopify for 20 years: high-trust, async, founder-coded, anti-bullshit. Now is the moment to externalize it as a polity.
From idea to polity.
- 01Charter the Ottawa campus as the founding node
- 02Open citizenship to active Shopify merchants and any founder with $1k MRR
- 03Establish a citizen academy teaching commerce, code, classical languages, and chess
- 04Charter the polity treasury in CAD, USD, and BTC equally
- 05Apply for member-state status with Interneta in year two
Why I sent you this link.
I have lived at Network School for over a year. I have watched the network state thesis go from a book to a real, lived experiment. I have seen Balaji put it to work, and I have seen what is missing.
The missing piece is a federation. A meta-layer that gives every distinct community a constitutional home, a shared census, an interoperable passport, an anthem, and a way to recognize each other as legitimate.
That is what Interneta is. The United States of Interneta. The optimistic meta-layer for network states.
Founders Republic is what I think you would build, if you decided to build one. The One Commandment is what I have inferred from your public work. The site scout, the next steps, the citizenry: all educated guesses. They are wrong wherever you say so.
If any of this lands, I would love a fifteen-minute conversation. If none of it lands, I would still love your reply telling me where I missed.