Max Novendstern and the problem with joining in

At Harvard, Max Novendstern looked at a political magazine and saw a startup problem. The Harvard Political Review had editors, traditions and an institutional life of its own. He wanted a blog with fresh arguments and a different working rhythm. HPRgument became a competing center of activity inside the publication. There were Sunday gatherings. There were metrics on the wall. Campus journalism had acquired something resembling a product meeting.

Years later, he described the magazine’s structure as something to approach “like a tech company startup problem.” It is an unusually useful starting point for understanding a founder whose better-known work would involve cryptocurrency and a device that verifies people through their irises. Before asking how to bring humans into a global network, he was asking how to get a roomful of student writers to build something together.

The scale has changed considerably. Novendstern co-founded Tools for Humanity with Sam Altman and Alex Blania in 2019, helping start the project originally known as Worldcoin. His own biography identifies him as its founder and former CEO. He now leads Mana, which applies AI to investment research. The early magazine episode offers a smaller, more legible version of the same fascination: institutions have rules, participants and habits. Some of those arrangements can be rebuilt.

That is a reading of his career, rather than a mission statement he has supplied. But the sequence is suggestive. A campus publication, a neighborhood network, a financial network and an investment-research application all have a practical question in common. How do you help people take part? The answer changes when the participants are writers, neighbors, account holders or analysts. The difficulty never quite disappears.

The neighborhood came before the network

Novendstern’s interests were already broader than software. Before Harvard, he organized an artisans’ cooperative in Peru’s highlands and walked trails through New York’s mountains. At Harvard he studied Social Studies; his later personal biography describes studying philosophy. His background makes the transition into technology less surprising than a conventional division between the humanities and business would suggest. Politics and philosophy spend considerable time asking how people should live together. A neighborhood website gives that question a login screen.

“like a tech company startup problem”Max Novendstern, on the magazine’s structure

In an October 2010 essay, he argued for political writing that tried to understand a movement before rushing to praise or ridicule it. The subject was the Tea Party, and his complaint was directed at the habits of student commentary. Even in the business of having opinions, he wanted attention paid to the underlying problem. A discussion platform needed better discussions. With fellow Harvard student Peter Davis, he co-founded CommonPlace, a platform for local civic engagement. The ambition was tangible: make it easier for people in a town to share information and connect. A contemporary account of Davis’s work described the service as operating in ten cities. The scale was municipal, and the promise depended on what happened among actual neighbors. A website could provide a meeting place; it could not supply the community by itself.

In 2011, Harvard listed Novendstern as a Presidential Public Service Fellow working with CommonPlace in Cambridge. That placement matters to the story. His early company belonged as comfortably in a discussion of public service as in a discussion of entrepreneurship. The product was a way to organize participation, carrying civic aspirations in the fairly ordinary packaging of a web platform.

He also had a clear idea of the work he admired in Davis. In a 2011 profile of his co-founder, he praised the less visible effort involved in creating useful things and institutions that endure. That is a more demanding standard than an attractive launch. A launch can be arranged. An institution has to persuade people to keep showing up after the novelty has gone home.

Taking leave of the syllabus

CommonPlace demanded enough of his time that Novendstern took leave from Harvard. In April 2011, he was a Social Studies concentrator who had yet to take a computer-science class. He regarded technology startups as a practical avenue for activism. The relevant test, in his account, was whether users actually engaged. Prizes and technical sophistication could not answer that question on their behalf.

He also described a tension familiar to students trained to accumulate correct answers. Building a company meant allowing mistakes to arrive quickly enough to teach something. An academic record rewards a certain tidiness; a new product has an unhelpful habit of returning unfinished questions. He was prepared to make room for that mess, while still saying he intended to return and graduate.

By 2012, he was explaining entrepreneurship as a change in the direction of attention: less time evaluating oneself, more time considering a product’s usefulness to somebody else. He still valued books and serious study of the problem at hand. The picture is of someone impatient to act who also wanted an intellectual basis for acting. It is possible to be restless without thinking the library a mistake.

From money moving to people proving

His subsequent work brought him into finance. His biography lists a role as an investment associate at Bridgewater and a place on Wave’s early team. A 2018 Omega One white paper also lists him as finance lead, with Bridgewater and Wave given as his background. Those roles put investment and financial technology into the same career well before Mana’s present focus on research.

Then came Tools for Humanity. Founded in 2019, the company helped develop Worldcoin, a project joining digital identity with a proposed financial network. Altman, Blania and Novendstern were its co-founders. These are related parts of a larger endeavor, with different responsibilities: the company builds technology, while the network and its foundation have their own roles. A founder’s early involvement should be understood in that institutional context.

Novendstern also helped bring Blania into the undertaking. The recruitment began with an email inviting him to discuss the venture in San Francisco. Blania, who had been working in physics and machine learning, ultimately became CEO. A consequential connection can begin with the least ceremonial object in business: a message asking whether someone would like to come and talk.

The Worldcoin project launched on July 24, 2023. Its components included World ID, a credential intended to establish that someone is a unique human, and the WLD token. The verification problem is easy to state: a network distributing access or resources needs a way to distinguish one participant from a collection of duplicate accounts. Agreeing on an acceptable way to make that distinction is considerably harder.

The original idea became a public system with questions about trust built into its operation. People need reasons to accept the machinery and the institutions around it. Calling a network inclusive expresses an ambition; usefulness has to be experienced by the person joining. That distinction gives the CommonPlace years continuing relevance. Even when the proposed community becomes global, participation remains an individual decision.

Mana brings the question back to the desk

Today, Novendstern identifies himself as Mana’s founder and CEO. Its current product description is specific: an investment-research application for analyzing companies, building research and monitoring markets. Analysts can connect files from Google Drive and research correspondence from Gmail, then ask questions with answers linked back to documents. The work begins with material an analyst already has, distributed across the familiar clutter of a working day.

This is a useful place to look beyond the drama attached to his earlier company. A research memo, an email exchange and a model can contain related information without being easy to consult together. Mana proposes to make that accumulated work more accessible. Its description keeps the analyst in view, using the application to examine companies and markets. The practical unit is a question with something checkable behind the answer.

Across the career, the interface keeps changing. CommonPlace put civic information in reach of neighbors. Worldcoin attempted to establish a basis for participation in a much larger network. Mana works on the movement between a person’s question and the documents that might answer it. Those comparisons describe the work rather than prove a single lifelong plan. Their interest lies in the recurring attention to the conditions under which people can use a system.

A computer that knows when to stop

There is a more personal expression of that interest in his taste in computers. Novendstern commissioned a Mythic computer from Keegan McNamara with a focused brief: writing, dictation, AI research and a receipt printer. His own formulation was sharper: “Strip computers of their dopamine faucets, leave their crystal balls.” A machine allowed to print its thoughts seems a fitting companion for a former student editor.

His public record also includes support for the Aaron Swartz Statue Project, whose donor list records a $10,000 contribution in his name. That places him among the people backing a physical memorial to an advocate for access to information. It is another small but concrete choice about what deserves to be built and kept in public view.

The magazine, the neighborhood platform and the research application make an interesting collection. They suggest a founder interested in the arrangement of human activity as much as the capability of a machine. The computer commission makes the point especially well. A useful device needs a clear purpose and a few deliberate limits. Sometimes the work is deciding what to add. Sometimes the good idea is a printer, a piece of paper and permission to leave the screen.