Presencing (Ventures)
For the past several months I’ve been building Former, an investment platform for expert operators with deep sector experience who are ready to build ventures of their own. Our thesis is that earned insight is consistently undervalued by the VC ecosystem, and that the companies built from it tend to be more durable. I’ll have more to say about Former as it develops.
The topics I explore here overlap with the logic shaping Former. ’rithmic has always been about the role of design in how we create and build, an aspect shared with Former. The two threads are connected, and they’ll keep showing up together. This piece shows one of those intersections.
Most approaches to building something new start from the past. Traditional product development extrapolates from what worked before. Trend analysis identifies what’s already emerging. And AI, for all its power, also restructures pre-existing knowledge patterns.
The result is a boundary of sorts. You can see and reach the adjacent and get close to what’s already arriving. What is yet to emerge stays beyond reach.
Markus Peschl, building on Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, explores this problem. ”Presencing” — a blend of sensing and presence — is the act of bringing a possible future into the present to realize it. It means learning from the future as it emerges, rather than projecting forward from what already is. In this frame, the future is a space of potentials rather than a space to predict—latent in the present, waiting to be actualized.
Former’s ideal founder’s experience and intimacy with today’s limitations enable presencing.
To sense what a domain is ready to become, you have to understand it deeply, feel the direction in which it’s moving. That intimacy is earned over time, and becomes the foundation for a longer view. It carries within it a record of concrete ‘actuals’ (what has been tried, what worked, what failed, and why) and helps map adjacent ‘possibles’—what the field is structurally capable of next. And it brings a sensitivity to latent ‘potentials’ already present in the domain, yet to be actualized, that want to emerge.
Traditional innovation frameworks work from the actuals, and AI builds patterns across them. Presencing requires the capacity to sense what they make possible next — and that capacity lives in the accumulated experience of someone who has been shaped by it.
This is the foundation Former builds from. Working with expert operators with 15 to 20 years inside their sectors. Careers of that depth are generative stories: they keeps evolving, each chapter expanding what the next one can become.
Experience is a condition for presencing, and for producing ventures toward a future ready to become present.
Source: Peschl, M.F., ”Theory U: From potentials and co-becoming to bringing forth emergent innovation and shaping a thriving future,” in Advances in Presencing, Trifoss Business Press, 2020.