Manifesto
A Maker's Journey—From a Search for Meaning, to a Blueprint for AI Independence.
My father used to tell me, "Collin, you are what you make." That idea has been the compass for my entire life. I am, and have always been, a Maker.
It started on an ice rink in Canada. I wasn’t just a figure skater; I was an architect of moments. I’d spend hours with two double-tape deck recorders, painstakingly cutting and pasting movie scores to create the perfect soundtrack. I’d skate to the themes from” Lawrence of Arabia” and Astor Piazzolla, not just performing a routine, but bringing a complete, story-driven world to life.
That impulse carried me from the rink to film school, drawn to the creative endeavour of storytellers like Wong Kar-Wai and Jean-Luc Goddard. It took me into the world of high fashion, inspired by the ateliers of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. It led me to finance and venture capital. Each step was not a distraction, but a deliberate search for alignment. I was calibrating my compass, trying to find a medium where the things I could imagine and the things I could make were one and the same, but I always hit the same wall: the Execution Bottleneck.
Then, everything changed. As AI-assisted development tools matured, I had a profound realization: the fundamental constraint of my entire creative life had been deleted. For the first time, I could build anything I could conceive of.
This superpower, however, revealed a new, more profound problem. I call it The Maker's Paradox.
When the ability to make something becomes a commodity, the bottleneck of value shifts. The new grand challenge is no longer about the technical execution of the what. It is about the human connection of the who and the why. The problem moves from code to connection.
In a world where anyone can build anything, the only durable competitive advantage is the trust you build with your customers and the unique expertise you can codify into your products. The new, harder, and more valuable problem is scaling trust.
To navigate this new world, I had to build my own compass. I developed a three-phase operating system for solving hard problems, a framework I call the "Divergent Truth."
First, I use First Principles Reasoning to find the irreducible truth of a situation. Second, I apply Contrarian Thinking to find a unique angle the consensus is ignoring. Finally, I ensure the solution is aligned across three dimensions: the Rational, the Practical, and the Emotional.
This framework led me to a powerful, contrarian vision. The "Empire" of the hyperscalers is building a monolithic "Hollywood Studio System"—a single, centralized, rented brain. My mission is to arm the Rebel Alliance. I believe the future is a galaxy of independent AI auteurs, inspired by the iconoclasts of the French New Wave. My work is dedicated to providing these founders and enterprises with the tools and blueprints to build and control their own unique, defensible intelligence. This is AI Independence.
To achieve this, we must reject the "Digital Sweatshop." Instead, I believe in the Digital Atelier. It’s a model inspired by the Parisian ateliers of Chanel and Dior, where master craftsmen codify their expertise into high-value assets. The ultimate goal, inspired by Yves Saint Laurent's dream of designing the blue jean, is to take that high-craft philosophy and build it into a simple, durable, and ubiquitous piece of infrastructure.
That is the mission of the Superstar platform.
This brings us to the final, ultimate judo move. In the age of AI, the most valuable and defensible asset is not technology. It is Trust.
The conventional wisdom is that AI will make us less human. The contrarian truth is that it will force us to be "more human than human." Authenticity, authority, and community are no longer soft skills; they are the new, hard currency. Trust is the coin of the realm.
This is the final answer to the Maker's Paradox. We scale trust by sharing our authentic stories, by publishing our hard-won insights, and by building communities.
My AI Studio is my contribution to this. It's my modern-day version of Andy Warhol's Factory—a space for the makers, the auteurs, and the rebels to gather, to deconstruct real-world problems, and to share the playbooks for building the future.
The future is not rented. It is built.
Let's build together.
The future is not rented. It's built. Let's build together.
Talk to Collin
Get Newsletter