Travers Nisbet
San Francisco.
Work
I'm a cofounder of Parallel. The web is humanity's most important source of information. It was built for humans; AI is becoming its second user. We're building the infrastructure to support and enable that shift: search infrastructure and interfaces for AI, and new incentives for the source knowledge AI uses.
Before Parallel, I worked at Chime, where I led strategy for its bank partnerships, ran the savings product, and evaluated whether the company should become a licensed bank.
I started my career at McKinsey in San Francisco, working on payments, growth strategy for technology marketplaces, and research at the McKinsey Global Institute, including reports on the Bio Revolution and AI safety.
Earlier still: an internship at SeatGeek and a no-code startup that didn't make it.
I was previously a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, where I wrote about progress and prosperity.
Side tinkerings
I've always made things alongside the main thing:
- Helped launch The Pudding, a visual, data-driven publication
- Made documentaries
- Re-ran a 2015 algorithm for measuring creativity across 36,000 paintings
- Ran a semi-successful music blog before streaming took over
More recently, I've been working on The Paradox of Progress, an ongoing research project about how knowledge and technology shape prosperity - and the losses conventional accounts of progress miss. It includes "The Leaning Tower of Progress," "The Compression Paradox," and other essays from time to time. Everything is on the writing page.
A few things I believe
- Understanding is compression that transfers. A complete record is not an explanation. A good explanation compresses many observations into a simpler pattern that still holds in a new case. Intuition often senses the pattern before reason can state it; wonder keeps us looking at what it still can't explain.
- Knowledge compounds when it remains open. People (and machines) keep learning by testing, connecting, and building on what came before. Keeping knowledge open requires durable incentives that let the people / institutions / machines that create it share in the value it produces.
- Progress should widen (and be in service of) prosperity. Open markets and new technologies are powerful engines of wealth and freedom. Whether they produce broad prosperity depends on the incentives, institutions, and ownership structures around them.
- Make the ambition large and the next step narrow and fast. Constraints force priority and simplicity. Build the smallest reversible thing that can resolve the biggest uncertainty, then make contact with reality. Keep the loop tight.
- Build some things to outlast you. Expecting something to last changes how it's made and cared for. Long horizons make craft, beauty, and repair worth the cost. The return comes slowly, and wear becomes patina.
Reach me