Well, We Failed Also.

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Life in Pantarctica

6 min readMay 8, 2015

We set out with ambitious plans but after a year of planning, we’ve run out of plans and are shutting down our old plan.

I hate to say it, but the Early Clues, LLC you all came to know and love scurrying around the broom closets and bathrooms of the @Medium office is no more. We were unable to secure the additional Preality Points we needed, so we’ve decided to climb another Event.Ladder(). Rest assured, it has been a “wild ride.” That said, we did manage to secure a deal that allows us to keep the pocket change that falls into the couch in the corporate relaxation zones, and for this we are very grateful.

There are a number of reasons why we failed, and I felt there might be some value in boring you with a long tedious account of the details.

The vision for Early Clues, LLC was a future where anyone could manipulate their own genetic material or that of other entities entirely at will. Where we needn’t settle for the generic, mass-produced genetics that currently line gene shops. A future where we can easily upgrade our genetic code, or reprogramming them to do entirely new and useful things, like being able to pee from our fingertips, for example.

We wanted to make it so creating and selling genetically engineered entities was as easy as writing and publishing a blog post. You shouldn’t need to be a major multi-national corporation or an ivory tower scientist to create genetically-modified organisms. Nor should you have to worry about ethics or legal regulation if you wanted to sell them. We believed it was possible to eliminate all of that stupid, stupid complexity, so the average person could easily create highly customized genetically-engineered entities without any government oversight or public accountability, all within their proprietary “web” browser — which we, coincidentally, own.

Of course, things didn’t exactly play out that way. But why?

An Absence Of Fraction

I suppose our failure can be summed up quite easily: An inability to add and subtract fractions. We were attempting to create an entirely new market for DIY GMO, which we originally viewed as something positive (as we felt we could create and own this new market). But from a fundraising standpoint, we realized we were being dicks. Why would investors put large sums of money into a company trying to put genetic engineering technology into the hands of the average idiot? (Hint: they don’t!)

Being a corporate company, we focused on building retrotypes to validate that our vision was technically feasible in the past by asking people to “like us” on Facebook. In retrospect, this was a mistake. Instead, we should have released something genetically unstable into as many local branes and ecotomes, and as quickly as possible. Our efforts should have been focused on creating a state of “too late” ubiquity of our product and generating “buzz” by “word of mouth.” We did realize this, and we were moving to launch a beta fish into orbit as a means of validating our email address with an obnoxious orbiting satellite who doesn’t always want to believe we are who we say we are. The problem is we realized too late that beta fish launched into low-earth orbit require some sort of fish space suit, and ultimately didn’t want to spend “all that time” stitching little fish space-suits that we couldn’t afford to buy neither string nor material for. What can we say, we’re cheap!

Not Enough Focus

We had grand plans for transitioning our orbital platform from an off-planet ultra-cooled Bitcoin mining operation to a genetic build site. Instead of trying to build an orbital space platform for DIY GMO creation, we should have focused on selling cookies door to door. Much more lucrative. Doing so would have allowed us to prove that we could actually ship product to paying customers — instead of just, you know, writing blog posts about “whatever” because “who cares.”

Poorly Playing The New VC Game, “I’ll VC-ing you”

While there are obviously a number of options for raising money, we chose putting our wallets onto the floor of an elevator, pushing all the buttons and running out to “hope for the best.” I knew this would be a difficult endeavor, but reading things like Plato’s “Republic” or anything in “The Bible” do little to actually prepare you for how challenging reality really is.

I spent the better part of 6 months meeting with Viet Cong in San Franshusco, Silicrom Valley Hills, Newer Yjork, and Vancoover. In the Valley Hills, I was told we were raising two little chicks to maturity and did my best to hack together a suitable chicken coop for the new arrivals. In Canada, there are Canadians. We were not expecting this. In retrospect, they look and speak a lot like the rest of us Pantarctians. Like it says in the memorial holograms, “We are all Pantarctians,” after all.

To that end, I wish I would have taken better advantage of OkCupid. There’s so much potential there. We created a profile and regularly updated it, but we never successfully used it as a corporate hookup platform. Our picture was even totally “hot” — go figure!

What Abort Crowdfunding?

We got very close to launching a “crowdfunding” campaign, but ultimately decided against it because I felt like no one liked us any more. We didn’t have enough self-confidence in our selves, so even if the campaign was successful, there was a good chance that we’d still fail in our heart of hearts if all we ever did in life was launch an “app” and promote ourselves on “social media” while otherwise squandering the Great Gifts of Creation.

So who the hell cares?

Our business model was about selling genetic manipulation devices to the average-joe DIY GMO #growthhacker. By reducing the complexity of creating genetic monstrosities, our bet was that more people would create and buy into frightening nightmare futures and we would reap the benefits.

We would see the nations of Pantarctica sprawled out at our feet as if from a high mountain top and then wrap these pitiful tools around our bony finger, so DIY GMO “creators” could also sell their inventions to the “masses.”

In the earlier versions of our nightmare future, we focused a lot on empowerment — our own mostly. We were targeting software developers, as we believed we could offer them an entirely new outlet for their creative efforts in manipulating the underlying “code” that flows through all of Nature like so many 1's and 0's. But our small hat wasn’t big enough. Investors want to hear a story about changing the world — so we asked our friends on staff at “Blockbuster” to recommend them some movies. Large screen, small screen, it didn’t matter so long as it resulted in massive sales. Our favorite was “Jurassic Park,” and still is.

We Too Were Early Clues

Since the early 1600's in Continental Quatria, people signed up for our email newsletters, and each of them received a personal message from me. You can imagine how thrilled those people were. You would be too, if you got an email from ME ME ME.

Furthermore, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I liked what I saw but I knew the “world” wasn’t really “ready.”

So That’s It.

It’s been a fun ride to say the least. We’re still deciding what to do with everything we produced since the beginning of Unix Epoch. There’s a high likelihood Early Clues, LLC will be reborn in another form sometime in the future, but we just don’t know yet.

Oh wait, I’ve just been informed we do know what form.