Lucky #13

On Trayodashi, the 13th day of the lunar cycle, my family fasts.

I did not grow up thinking of it as some grand act of repentance or sacrifice. You interrupted your normal appetite for a day to keep your attention from drifting while something inside the world rearranged itself. It is an observance that asks, very quietly, that you take notice.

13, in the tradition I was raised in, is a liminal number. It marks the gap between one settled state and the next. A story unfinished, whose conclusion depends entirely on the writer to act out.

That is roughly the shape of the problem I am joining Natural to work on.

Across most of human history, there have been two constraints that seem to sit underneath nearly everything else: time and money. Trace almost any other constraint patiently enough and it begins to resolve into one of them. Hunger is time-to-harvest plus money-to-buy; distance is time-to-traverse plus money-to-ship. Love, if you are willing to be briefly and unfairly unsentimental about it, has at least something to do with whose time you spend and whose bills you split.

Of the two, time has usually been the binding one. The world had a hard cap on productive human hours, set by population, skill, attention, and coordination, and money was often the way we redistributed access to that cap. You bought someone else’s hours, or you bought back some of your own.

However, agents change the shape of that constraint. We’re beginning to face the strange possibility of a vertically skilled, tireless workforce of billions, acting in parallel, completing tasks that used to require a calendar, a team, and a fairly tolerant project manager. Time, in the narrow economic sense at least, is becoming infinite. Which is the same thing as saying it is about to be repriced to roughly zero.

That leaves money as the only constraint that survives, the only interface these bodiless agents have with the physical world, or to the parts of the virtual world locked behind a paywall, an API key, or a bank rail. Whatever agents come to treat as a store of value becomes the last roadblock between us and a fully autonomous economy. That, as far as I can tell, is the most valuable problem in the world to work on right now (or at least the most interesting one to me).

I’ve been circling this problem from different angles for a few years without realising it was the same one. Growing up in India during the UPI revolution made payment rails feel almost emotional to me, because when they work, they change what small merchants, families, and businesses can be audacious about. Later, stablecoins sharpened the same instinct from the other direction. In my work around crypto payments, I saw value move instantly across borders, wallets, and platforms, while often carrying very little context about the actor behind it. The last year of working on debt, credit scores, and identity taught me the importance of memory: how someone becomes known to a system, how trust accrues, and how risk is priced against history rather than a single transaction.

I am of the belief that systems like this are not ultimately bottlenecked by infrastructure, but rather, by epistemics. An economy only functions if the actors inside it can operate from convergent assumptions about incentives, adversarial behaviour, and truth. Any platform intermediating trust between autonomous actors inherits, inevitably, the priors, judgment quality, and internal coherence of the team designing it.

So now, there remains a single pertinent question: who should we, as society, trust to reason precisely enough to build the substrate underneath it?

In my search for this answer on the investing side, I came across Natural. Tucked among all the brilliant content on their blog was an essay by Eric Jubber, called The team I want to have dinner with. I read it once, then twice. With a quiet specificity, it spoke to the fact that the people you choose to build with are not incidental to the work, they are part of the work. I closed the tab knowing I would regret it if I didn’t reach out.

A few days later, I had my first call with Kahlil. I expected, I think, some version of a company conversation: market, role, timing, what they were building, what I had done. We covered some of that, but the part that stayed with me was much simpler. It became a conversation about values almost immediately. Values in-practice, instead of a poster-on-the-wall narration of them. By the end of it, I had two more conversations booked for the same day, with Walt and Eric. That cadence is its own data.

There is a small puzzle the economist Thomas Schelling once posed: suppose you and a stranger are told to meet in New York tomorrow. You cannot communicate, and you both win if you pick the same place and the same time. Where do you go? Most people, independently, say Grand Central, at noon. Nothing about that answer is obvious, because it only becomes apparent once both of you are reasoning from the same shared context.

Schelling called it a focal point. Teams have them too. On the strong ones, the focal point is so well-worn that nobody bothers to name it out loud anymore. Natural had a complete intersection set of these focal points—I could feel it before I even started.

My work trial made the convergence visible in close detail. I can best describe it as being dropped in medias res into a conversation already underway and trusted to find my footing. The moment that stayed with me was a walk back to the office with Kendall. He asked, almost in passing, how to think about risk in a world where the actor on the other side is not statically defined. I gave him the answer I thought I had, and he gently pressed on it to extract more. I pushed back. He pushed again. By the time we reached the door we had both revised our positions multiple times, and arrived at a sum greater than its parts. This Socratic approach to engineering, but broadly, to every other aspect of building a company, is the most remarkable quality the team possesses, and the rarest to come by.

The conviction in our shared central thesis was already load-bearing in the room. I had spent a year arriving at it from the outside; they had spent a year arriving at it from the inside. Now, we meet in the middle.

I am joining Natural as the 13th employee to work on agent identity, observability, and credit.

Thirteen, as I said, is a threshold number. Early enough that the category is still being defined, late enough that the need is no longer theoretical, strange enough that the most interesting questions have not yet been flattened into obvious answers.

The fast is on! I’m paying attention. If you are as well, we’d love to have you join us at /careers.