Jackson Jesionowski · Founder & CEO, Persist
Persist is a venture conglomerate that pays overlooked people to become founders — then gives them a shared spine of capital, design, recruiting and distribution so the next company costs less to build than the last. Thirty companies in. The goal was never a fund. The goal is an operating system for human potential.
01 — Origin
The realisation that became a company — in the order it actually happened.
My parents wanted me to get a job. I wanted one too. I just wanted it to be minimum wage for building something — something I could lead, and own a piece of.
That job did not exist. Anywhere.
What made it absurd was sitting right in front of me. Recruiters were flying out to watch me play football. Grown adults, with budgets, boarding planes, to evaluate a seventeen-year-old's arm.
Innovation is a bigger industry than football. It had no scouts. That gap is the entire business.
The closest thing to an exception was the Thiel Fellowship. I applied as a college freshman and was rejected — then did the arithmetic that turned the rejection into a company. Roughly 220 fellows, $100k each, compounding into something on the order of $220 billion. That isn't a programme discovering rare genius. It's a rounding error of the world's talent, funded — and outperforming everything around it. Thousands turned away every year for lack of slots, not lack of merit.
So I ran it on myself. No network, no pedigree, no permission: a PayPal ↔ Ethereum exchange, $500,000 through it in four months at twenty percent margins.
Persist is the scouting layer. Startupathon is the tryout. And the salary we pay founders is, precisely, the minimum wage I couldn't find.
02 — The Router
Every accelerator says it backs outsiders. Almost none of them change the cost structure that keeps outsiders out. Persist is built as three mechanisms that only work together.
Persist searches for merit in the places the standard filter never looks — India, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the un-credentialed everywhere. It built one of the largest talent-to-startup networks in India for exactly this reason. Talent is cheap to find the moment you stop screening for pedigree.
Not a pitch competition. Not a demo day. A salary. Startupathon puts cash in a builder's hand while they build, because someone who can't make rent structurally cannot take a ten-year swing. Equity follows the work. This single substitution is what converts latent merit into shipped companies.
Thirty companies share one spine: design, recruiting, capital, legal, distribution and a 400-person advisor network. Each venture inherits the last one's scar tissue instead of paying for it again. That is the compounding — not a portfolio of bets, but a factory whose marginal cost falls with every unit.
03 — Proof of mechanism
A portfolio list tells you what a firm owns. It doesn't tell you whether the machine works.
Unrealised mark on
the initial position
Anyone can wire $50,000. Almost nobody can put that founder on the other end of it. That's the router.
Marked, not realised — a priced round, not a distributionThe replicable part isn't Bump. It's landing that founder at that entry price — a sourcing problem, not a capital problem.
04 — Theses
Sector tags are a filing convention, not a thesis. Persist sorts by the coordination failure each venture attacks — because the category is the product, and the companies are instances of it. When a thesis is right, the thirty-first instance is nearly free.
Problems where every actor is individually rational and the collective outcome is still bad — eldercare, neighbourhood-scale connection, creator-to-business matching. The bet: most "unsolvable" social problems are coordination problems that nobody is paid to solve. Build the entity that gets paid.
Recruiting, design, workflow, career mobility — the unglamorous machinery that lets an undervalued person become employable at global rates. It is also the studio's own supply chain, which means we operate what we sell and price it against our own P&L before anyone else's.
Universities, credentials, and the filtering function generally. If the credential is the bottleneck between talent and capital, then the institution is not the customer — it is the product to be rebuilt. This is the thesis that made Persist exist in the first place.
Identity, attention and creative output, in the places where the incumbent model quietly expropriates the individual who produced the value. Not tokens for their own sake — property rights for people who were never issued any.
Applied ethics, spiritual practice, addiction and habit. The operating-system layer for the humans every other thesis depends on. Unfashionable to underwrite; the reason founders survive year four.
Thirty studio companies to date, mapped across these five positions. Full roster, ownership table and pitch materials available under NDA.
05 — Instruments
Everything above is a result. These are the two things being built so the results stop depending on any single person's judgement — including mine.
The merit router. Makes talent legible where no credential exists.
Every venture firm on earth claims proprietary deal flow. Almost all of it is a warm-intro graph — which means it is the same graph everyone else has, weighted by who went to which school. It is not proprietary. It is consensus with a personal touch.
Collab.io is built to do the opposite: map merit, measure it, scale its visibility, and reward the people who demonstrate it. It is the instrument that surfaces founders like the one placed into Bump — and the reason that placement is a process rather than an anecdote.
The near-term objective is a closed loop: the teams using the tool feed signal straight back into how the tool evolves, on a cycle measured in days rather than quarters. Sourcing that compounds is the only durable edge a studio can actually own — capital doesn't compound, access does.
Where meritocracy merges with the existing regime of capital.
Detecting merit is only half the problem. The other half is that the existing regime of capital formation was never built to price an uncredentialed founder in Bangalore — and it will not retrofit itself out of goodwill. Allocators, mandates, diligence templates and regulatory perimeter all point the other way.
ASI House is the physical venue for that argument: builders, allocators and policy in one room, at government scale, with an address. Alongside America House it exists because systemic change moves faster when it has a location than when it has a white paper.
The wager is not that meritocracy replaces the incumbent capital regime. It is that the two merge — and that whoever hosts the merge sets its terms.
06 — The Long Game
Most founders keep the twenty-year version private because it sounds absurd out loud. Publishing it is the point: a target you can be held to is worth more than a forecast you can revise. These are Jack's stated milestones.
Capital at a scale where the routing problem stops being a metaphor. The mandate: decentralise who gets to decide what gets built, and take a direct run at nationwide poverty rather than routing around it.
Technology that lets a population act as the executive of its own nation — the logical endpoint of decentralising power rather than merely redistributing capital.
Humanity's long-run future secured alongside sovereign, trusted AI — and celebrated, in Jack's telling, at the annual party on the floating city.
Claiming our shared sixty thousand square feet among the stars. Written down here so it can be checked later.
07 — Operating Principles
Act on a hundred-thousand-year timeline. Present actions carry eternal weight. Pure intent isn't a virtue signal here — it's the only discount rate that survives a horizon that long.
Systemic thinking over reactive feeling. Everyone is somewhere different on their own development curve. Design the system for that reality rather than relitigating each person against your own.
Scale merit by routing capital. Opportunity into the right hands — specifically the hands the global market has systematically underpriced. Everything else is downstream of that one move.
Deliberately outgrow your own control. The architect's job is to build an ecosystem that no longer needs him. Practice being the helper, not the runner — a system that requires its founder isn't a system.
08 — Three Doors
Jack's time is the scarcest asset in the system. These are the three conversations worth taking.
$50,000 into Bump, a billion-dollar-company builder routed in, a $30M priced round, a ~200× unrealised mark — thirty companies deep, at $117M NAV, with the marginal cost per venture still falling. If you underwrite sourcing infrastructure rather than individual bets, this is the conversation.
Open the round conversation →You have the ability and not the permission. That's the exact profile Persist was designed around — a salary while you build, equity in what you build, and a spine of design, recruiting and capital underneath you. Credentials are not a filter here.
Enter through Startupathon →The long-form version of all of this — capital routing, open robotics, meritocratic infrastructure, and the argument for publishing a twenty-year target out loud — lands first on X and LinkedIn.
Follow @jackjayio →Also on video: Persist & the future of AI (Sequire) · Hacking Your Brain 101