Introducing Thompson Street

We're excited to publicly announce Thompson Street, a boutique advisory firm working on product, public affairs, and policy for frontier technologies.

Our vision comes from conviction in two trends:

1. The most-impactful companies over the next few decades will be the ones that develop products that aggressively challenge the status quo. As a result, these companies will have an ever-increasing impact on the trajectory of policy.
2. The nature of the firm has changed. This has big implications for how you build a services company – especially one that services cutting-edge startups. Being non-technical isn't an option anymore (for both internal and external work).

Industries like crypto and AI are a great example of the first trend. Congress didn't mandate the creation of stablecoins. Builders saw a need, developed the product, and governments around the world were forced to react. The same goes for AI. The White House has an AI task force because of what Sama and Dario shipped. Policy doesn't start with politicians… it starts with a pull request.

Yet, the things that make you good at creating reality-shifting products often make you bad at interfacing with the rest of the world. Many companies will create things that don't make it past The Great Filter, not because the technology has issues but because they fail to account for sociopolitical factors.

That's where Thompson Street comes into play.

We work with founders to push through challenges of all shapes and sizes. We've helped companies build regulatory playbooks, develop GTM plans, and design product communications strategies – to name just a few things. We've been deliberate about structuring our team. We have experience working in government in the US and EU and leading policy and regulatory affairs at top-tier venture capital firms and venture-backed startups. If your product touches the regulatory perimeter, we'll make sure you break through.

Our approach is fundamentally different from what you would typically see from an advisory firm focused on policy.

• We love the technical details. Do not hire Thompson Street if you are looking for people who can only book you meetings but can't explain your product.
• We are global from day one, with partners in Washington, New York, Copenhagen, and Frankfurt. Technology has no reverence for borders, and neither do we.
• We've worked for elite organizations in the government, finance, academia, and law, but we aren't traditional suits.
• We're building Thompson Street like a startup and reengineering the policy-services stack to be AI native. Along these lines, we're actively looking for a founding engineer who wants to build our internal OS, some of which we plan on productizing.

This is our master plan.

We expect that Thompson Street will shapeshift many times in its lifetime. In fact, we only reluctantly accept the title of "boutique advisory firm," because today there's nothing out there that fully describes our vision for what Thompson Street can become.

We've been working with a handful of firms over the past few months and are excited to be operating publicly going forward. If you're working on a Good Quest that could benefit from our expertise, drop us a line.

– Brendan, Jon, Reid, and Khurram