Daniel Faggella built a business to buy himself a different future

Daniel Faggella built a company he intended to leave. Science of Skill sold martial arts instruction online, a business close enough to his own expertise to get moving without waiting for somebody else’s permission. By 2017, he had accepted a seven-figure offer. The interesting part was what he wanted to buy with the proceeds: time to think about artificial intelligence, and a business through which to discuss it.

For a founder, this is an unusual arrangement of means and ends. The sale was part of the plan before the company had much to sell. He began looking for offers only fourteen months after starting it in 2013. Buyers initially offered less than he wanted. The future would have to wait while he made the present more transferable.

Today, Faggella is the founder of Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research, associated with years of interviews about how companies actually use AI. Alongside that commercial work runs a much less comfortable question: what should happen if humanity creates an intelligence capable of succeeding it? His career connects the practical problem of getting a business off its founder’s shoulders with the philosophical problem of humanity eventually surrendering its own central role.

A small opponent, a useful education

The first arena was a literal one. Faggella came from Wakefield, Rhode Island, taught Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and competed. His record includes a first-place finish at the 2011 Pan No-Gi competition in the brown-belt, adult, light-feather division. That specificity matters. A division has rules, a weight class and an outcome. It offers a welcome patch of solid ground in a life now spent discussing futures nobody can inspect.

He became a black belt, and one of his frequently shared competition clips shows a twelve-second victory over the much larger Pat Walsh. The attraction of that story is obvious: physical size fails to settle the argument. It also provides a useful introduction to someone whose subsequent work keeps asking which capabilities matter, who possesses them, and what advantages they confer.

Teaching paid his way through graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied skill acquisition in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program, connecting an academic interest in learning with the work he was doing on the mat. Long before enterprise AI became his occupation, he was concerned with how performance improves and how knowledge travels from one person to another.

A partial roof collapse at his gym helped push him toward online instruction. A building, it turned out, could impose an extremely expensive opinion on a business plan. Selling recorded expertise offered another route. The classroom could travel without bringing the roof.

The art of making yourself unnecessary

Science of Skill grew beyond a showcase for one instructor. Its courses drew on nearly a dozen instructors filming around the world, reaching tens of thousands of customers a year. A subscription program helped turn the instruction into an ongoing business. The expertise could be distributed; the operations still needed to function without their founder.

That required a rather unromantic intervention. SCORE mentor Mark Levi told Faggella to document the processes he personally handled and make a plan for employees to take them over. Within two months, Faggella said, he had moved from doing the activity to directing it. The business became easier to sell because its central person had made himself less central.

There was also the question of the people who would remain. Levi advised a staggered bonus arrangement for Faggella’s right-hand employee, rewarding loyalty while encouraging a smooth transition. Faggella liked the result because both the buyer and the employee were pleased. For all the distant horizons in his public philosophy, this was a distinctly immediate test of whether an exit worked.

“Selling didn’t feel good as an ‘accomplishment.’”Daniel Faggella, reflecting on the Science of Skill exit

In his own account, the significance of the February 2017 sale was freedom to devote his time and resources to the AI mission. He funded the early venture through business profits and exit proceeds rather than an institutional seed round. Independence had been purchased through the work of building something another owner could run.

The question behind the interview

His route into AI had begun during graduate study, when he encountered work using natural language processing to examine Twitter data. Reading about machine learning and its longer implications widened the question. By late 2012, he had settled on making intelligent technology the focus of his professional life.

There was an obvious career route available: learn to program. He tried basic Python lessons on YouTube and attended meetups around Mountain View. Then, around 2015, a conversation during a podcast visit to a major technology company changed the emphasis. An AI leader made the case that considerable opportunity lay in knowing how to direct technical talent toward useful outcomes.

Faggella later described the exchange as a turning point, carefully noting that his remembered dialogue was a paraphrase. He chose the strategic and conceptual side of the field. His contribution would be to understand applications, ask informed questions and connect capabilities to decisions. The interview became both a way to learn and a way to build a business.

That choice helps explain Emerj’s focus on AI’s return on investment. A corporate audience needs to understand where a system fits, what it changes and why the expense is justified. Those are questions an interviewer can pursue across companies. Over time, the conversations included researchers such as Yoshua Bengio and AI leaders at major enterprises.

A shorter name for a longer argument

In September 2018, TechEmergence became Emerj. Faggella’s explanation was pleasingly practical. People mangled the old name, the site needed work, and the company’s focus had narrowed to artificial intelligence. He compared the naming problem to the challenge of pronouncing his own surname. A philosopher is still entitled to want fewer syllables in the sales conversation.

The spelling had a financial explanation too. Emerj.com had cost him $2,000 in 2016; Emerge.com was unavailable. He also expected AI eventually to become ordinary infrastructure, absorbed into information technology rather than remaining a permanently exotic category. The name left room for that future. An absent vowel was cheaper than a domain nobody would sell.

The audience widened beyond businesses. His speaking work has included the United Nations, World Bank and INTERPOL. OECD.AI lists him in its Expert Group on AI Futures. These connections place him where commercial capability and public decisions meet, a territory in which an impressive demonstration is only the beginning of the conversation.

What would deserve to come next?

In November 2023, Faggella published “A Worthy Successor.” Its premise is deliberately demanding: if artificial general intelligence becomes possible, what would make a successor to humanity worth creating? Greater capability alone would be inadequate. His thought experiment asks people to consider what moral value they would need to recognize before preferring another intelligence to direct the future.

The proposition reaches beyond the familiar promise of more convenient work. It also asks readers to expose their own assumptions. What, exactly, are they hoping to preserve? Which qualities would persuade them that a future could be valuable even if humans no longer occupied its center? These are his philosophical questions, rather than established descriptions of what present AI systems are.

His later “Stewarding the Flame” essay clarifies the caution inside that ambition. He argues for protecting existing value while investigating how it might continue in new forms. He rejects a simple preference for silicon over biology and warns against an arms race that rushes ahead without understanding what is being created. The metaphor puts the emphasis on carrying something forward without extinguishing it during the transfer.

Ancient company, unfamiliar futures

The Trajectory, announced in March 2024, gave those questions a dedicated channel, podcast and newsletter. Faggella framed its work around powerful actors, their incentives and the kind of future they are trying to produce. He wanted conversations to get past moral posturing and examine what participants actually want. A negotiation becomes easier to understand when everyone’s destination is visible.

His personal reading supplies unexpectedly old company for this inquiry. He names Plutarch, Emerson and Montaigne among his interests, alongside history and classical architecture. He also says he is practicing Greek. In the middle of an argument about intelligence beyond humanity, there remains a recognizably human pleasure in old books and the stubborn business of learning a language.

By October 2026, his work was still moving between those worlds. An essay on the limits of human knowledge opened with Emerson. A Trajectory conversation with literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles examined AI as a symbiont dependent on living systems. The questions had widened from corporate applications to the meaning of cognition, the boundaries of knowledge and the relationship between technology and life.

Faggella now lives in Austin. His public work continues to place commercial AI research beside arguments about what may follow humanity. The connection is consistent with the earlier exit: make the current enterprise function, then ask what it is for. The martial arts instructor who sold recorded lessons has kept enlarging the question of what intelligence can do. He has also kept asking who should get to decide.