Are We Out of the Woods? An Open Letter to Taylor Swift Dear Ms. Swift, I want to license “Out of the Woods (Taylor’s Version)” for our launch video. And I want to do it through a system that pays you fairly — not because you need the money, but because the same system needs to pay fairly when the artist is a single mom in Tulsa making beats on her phone. ...

An Open Letter to Tatiana Schlossberg Dear Ms. Schlossberg, I read with great sorrow your New Yorker piece about your diagnosis and the maybe year you have left. About the medications that might buy you more time, if you can afford them, if your insurance approves them, if the system deems you worthy of another sunrise. I’m a stranger, but I’m writing anyway. Not because I can fix what’s broken in your body. But because you’ve spent your career documenting what’s broken in our systems, and I think you’d like to know it can be changed. I have the math, and the application, live and working, to prove it. ...

This Isn’t Philanthropy A Letter to Anand Giridharadas Dear Anand, You wrote the book on why billionaire philanthropy fails — how “changing the world” became a cover for protecting the systems that create the problems philanthropy claims to solve. How the people who benefit most from inequality get to decide how to address it, and unsurprisingly decide on solutions that don’t threaten their position. I read Winners Take All. I’m not writing to argue with it. I’m writing because I built something that tries to route around the whole problem. ...

Craigslist for Everything Else A Letter to Craig Newmark Dear Mr. Newmark, You accidentally killed the newspaper classified business and then spent years funding journalism to make up for it. That’s either guilt or integrity — probably both. Either way, it means you understand that building something useful can break something necessary, and that the builder has a responsibility to notice. I’m a veteran. I know you’ve put significant resources into veteran causes. I also know you’ve funded civic tech, journalism, and trustworthy information infrastructure. So I’m writing to you about something that touches all three. ...

A Business Model, Not a Charity An Open Letter to Warren Buffett Dear Mr. Buffett, You’ve said you’re “going quiet.” But you also said you’re not going to sit at home and watch soap operas. This isn’t a pitch for money. It’s a pitch for scrutiny — from someone who’s spent 60 years understanding what makes businesses work. The Model Liana Banyan is a cooperative commerce platform with a fixed margin: Cost + 20%. ...

MacKenzie Scott Letter — VERSION 02 (Updated) Dear Ms. Scott, I don’t want your money. I’m asking for something far more valuable: your guidance on who should run six ready-to-launch initiatives that transform how communities provide for each other, and the platform that enables, and from now on sustainably funds, those initiatives. In college, at one time I had two roommates. One was wealthy—his family literally owned ten homes. The other was poor like me. When I needed a suit and couldn’t afford one, my poor roommate immediately gave me one of the two he owned. Only then did my wealthy roommate offer one of his fifteen. That sacrifice thirty years ago still makes me cry, and it exemplifies the truth you wrote about which gift means more—$100 from someone earning $50,000 or $100,000 from someone with millions. ...

What Comes After the Foundation A Letter to Melinda French Gates Dear Ms. French Gates, You spent decades building one of the largest philanthropic organizations in history. Then you left, started Pivotal Ventures, and began doing things differently — faster, more focused, less institutional. I’m writing because you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t at scale. And because the thing I’ve built needs someone who understands that helping women often means helping everyone, and that infrastructure beats charity every time. ...

A Business Model, Not a Charity An Open Letter to Warren Buffett Dear Mr. Buffett, You’ve said you’re “going quiet.” But you also said you’re not going to sit at home and watch soap operas. This isn’t a pitch for money. It’s a pitch for scrutiny — from someone who’s spent 60 years understanding what makes businesses work. The Model Liana Banyan is a cooperative commerce platform with a fixed margin: Cost + 20%. ...

A Platform That Doesn’t Enshittify A Letter to Casey Newton Dear Casey, You’ve spent years documenting how platforms die — how they start by being good to users, then shift value to business customers, then finally extract everything for shareholders until the whole thing collapses. You called it the platform lifecycle. Cory Doctorow called it enshittification. Same autopsy, different coroner. I built something that can’t do that. Not “won’t” — can’t. And I think you might want to see how. ...

The System Isn’t Broken — It’s Working A Letter to Ezra Klein Dear Ezra, You’ve spent years trying to understand why good policy fails, why institutions decay, and why problems that seem solvable persist decade after decade. Your conclusion, as near as I can tell: it’s not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that our systems are optimized for something other than doing it. I built something based on that same diagnosis. But instead of trying to fix existing systems, I built a parallel one. ...