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Spencer Schneier

@spenceraviav • 2,273 subscribers

Capitalist. Co-Founder/CEO at @CommendaHQ and Co-Founder/Publisher at @CommendaMedia

Shorts

Announcing our manifesto, Lex et Libertas. The history of commerce is a history of The People writing their own rules. When a merchant in thirteenth-century Venice wanted to trade across the Mediterranean, he signed a commenda — a private contract that split the risk between an investor and the merchant who sailed, and held up wherever the ship made port. It was not issued by a king. No parliament approved it. Merchants wrote it because it was machinery for their economic freedom. This was the precursor to the modern corporation. This set of norms, jus gentium, grew out of how foreign traders actually dealt with one another, not out of a sovereign's decree. The merchant law was customary, portable, and enforced in the merchants' own courts. It still works that way, when we let it. In 2013 a startup accelerator, not a legislature, wrote the SAFE, and it now governs a huge share of how companies get funded. That is the spirit of merchant law. Yet despite all of this fantastic success, we’ve lost that spirit. The civilization that invented the corporation is now strangling it. The US Code of Federal Regulations ran 9,745 pages in 1950 and runs more than 190,000 today. The average large multinational holds 549 subsidiaries across 56 countries. The rules merchants once wrote for themselves now arrive from thousands of jurisdictions at once. It is impossible for it to be owned by anyone, and the price is paid after midnight by people no one is paying attention to. Lex et Libertas is our argument for the future we are building. It is the manifesto for my life’s work. The merchants built their own freedom technology. In dedication to these giants, we are building the only managed entity platform, enabling businesses to seamlessly operate across 100+ countries. 500+ firms including TRX, Remote, Exa AI, Seismic, and Composio have already joined us. As we enter into the agentic era, software will form the backbone of global industry. A new legal order will emerge to facilitate the future of commerce across our planet, and beyond. And Commenda is where it will be built. Jus agentium.

Announcing our manifesto, Lex et Libertas. The history of commerce is a history of The People writing their own rules. When a merchant in thirteenth-century Venice wanted to trade across the Mediterranean, he signed a commenda — a private contract that split the risk between an investor and the merchant who sailed, and held up wherever the ship made port. It was not issued by a king. No parliament approved it. Merchants wrote it because it was machinery for their economic freedom. This was the precursor to the modern corporation. This set of norms, jus gentium, grew out of how foreign traders actually dealt with one another, not out of a sovereign's decree. The merchant law was customary, portable, and enforced in the merchants' own courts. It still works that way, when we let it. In 2013 a startup accelerator, not a legislature, wrote the SAFE, and it now governs a huge share of how companies get funded. That is the spirit of merchant law. Yet despite all of this fantastic success, we’ve lost that spirit. The civilization that invented the corporation is now strangling it. The US Code of Federal Regulations ran 9,745 pages in 1950 and runs more than 190,000 today. The average large multinational holds 549 subsidiaries across 56 countries. The rules merchants once wrote for themselves now arrive from thousands of jurisdictions at once. It is impossible for it to be owned by anyone, and the price is paid after midnight by people no one is paying attention to. Lex et Libertas is our argument for the future we are building. It is the manifesto for my life’s work. The merchants built their own freedom technology. In dedication to these giants, we are building the only managed entity platform, enabling businesses to seamlessly operate across 100+ countries. 500+ firms including TRX, Remote, Exa AI, Seismic, and Composio have already joined us. As we enter into the agentic era, software will form the backbone of global industry. A new legal order will emerge to facilitate the future of commerce across our planet, and beyond. And Commenda is where it will be built. Jus agentium.

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