We’re still in the stone age
We split the atom, landed on the moon, and built the internet. Yet humanity remains a Type 0.7 civilization, not even reaching Type 1 on the Kardashev scale. We have not mastered our own planet’s energy, let alone our solar system’s. We are still in the stone age of human progress.
The bitter truth is that we are not held back by physics or resources, but by two core problems.
First, brilliant minds doing operational work. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a mind that could cure cancer stuck manually copying invoice numbers. Another who could build the next SpaceX is busy writing quarterly reports. Millions of people globally have become humanity’s most tragic waste: brilliant minds turned into living duct tape holding together broken systems. They once dreamed of building great companies, extending human life, and reaching Mars. Instead, they have become the flesh-based infrastructure of global commerce.
Second, we move at the speed of coordination, not thought. A customer is overcharged. Fixing it should take minutes. Instead, it takes weeks. First, you need Tom from billing to confirm the error, but he is busy until Wednesday. Then you need Sarah from sales to approve the refund, but she is on vacation. When she returns, she says finance must sign off on anything over $10K. Finance wants the original contract, which sits with James who left the company. Three weeks later, after seven meetings and twenty-three emails, the refund is finally issued. The customer has already churned.
Every problem follows this same painful path, not just identifying what went wrong but getting five different people to actually do something about it. We have built technology that moves data at light speed, but our organizations still move at human speed: the speed of busy calendars, competing priorities, and endless approvals.
But what if it didn't have to be this way?
What if solving nuclear fusion required just one visionary and an army of AI agents, not years of hiring, management and coordination? This isn't about efficiency. It's about unleashing billions of potential founders who are currently stuck doing manual work, while simultaneously saving the giants from death by coordination. As Steve Jobs famously said, humans are special because we’re tool builders. When everyone can build moonshot tools for humanity, and when existing companies can move as fast as startups, humanity does not progress linearly. It explodes exponentially toward Type 1, Type 2, and beyond.
At Zamp, our mission is to enable people to move at the speed of thought, turning imagination directly into execution, without the bottlenecks of scale, coordination, or time
The uncomfortable truth is that building for this mission means reimagining work itself. Yes, most of today's "jobs" will disappear, including many of the ones we're hiring for, maybe our own too. But most of these aren't really jobs. They're life sentences to repetitive monotony.
When we freed ourselves from manual agriculture, we didn't create mass unemployment, we created scientists, artists, engineers. When we free ourselves from operational work, we won't create obsolescence, we'll unleash human creativity at a scale the world has never seen.
The mechanics of a humanity catalyst
We've just described humanity's core bottlenecks: operational work, and coordination costs. These are not problems you solve with incremental improvements or quarterly earnings targets. They require a different kind of organization entirely. They require building a humanity catalyst.
Traditional companies are designed for stability and predictable growth. They optimize for risk mitigation over revolution. They're built to extract value from existing paradigms, not to shatter them. Asking these companies to solve civilizational coordination is like asking a steamship to reach orbit.
To break humanity free from coordination constraints requires an organization with three properties:
First, it must have what we believe to be the world’s best team. Any organization is just a collection of people. We want to work together with people who want to do their life’s best work in order to propel humanity forward.
Second, it must repeatedly destroy its own success. Every breakthrough solution must be made obsolete by the next one, because the goal isn't to build a profitable product, it's to compress centuries of progress into decades. Whenever forced to choose between protecting what exists and building what could be, we must choose transformation. This isn't theoretical for us, we've already shut-down several products that were making millions in revenue to build what's next, and we're prepared to do it again and again for decades for come.
Third, it must operate on civilization timescales while moving at startup speed. The future isn’t something you await, but rather create. We must be imagining the future, and creating it, rather than looking at world from the lens of capturing opportunities. Today, that means building digital employees that work, think, and collaborate like humans.
When every brilliant mind can delegate operational work to these digital colleagues and focus solely on creation and innovation, we don't just build better companies, we become the catalyst that propels humanity from Type 0.7 to Type 1 and beyond