Everything42

Life, the Universe, and Fusion42 #027

Hello hello,

I hope you’ve had a solid week and are making great moves.
Just a quick one from me on Arthur — it’s been a busy stretch tightening and lighting things up.

Before we get into the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly, a quick Arthur update.

ARTHUR – BUILD IN LIVE #5. Your startup mentor, co-founder and team.

Three intake lanes. One reality check.

This week still wasn’t really about Arthur.

It was about the founder on the other side of the screen — and the fact customers and investors already run three tests on you, usually without saying a word:

• how you pitch (video / call)

• what you claim (deck)

• how you sell (website)

So we’ve made Arthur’s intake stack dead simple:

Danger Room (video) — how you show up when it counts
Pitch Intel (deck) — whether your positioning and narrative survive investor logic
Website Intel (URL) — whether your positioning lands with customers

Pitch Intel is the second piece, and it goes into production next week.

Why this matters

It’s not complicated.
Positioning. Clarity. Execution. That’s the gap.

Founders are working hard — but too often the message is muddy, the focus is blurred, and the plan doesn’t survive contact with reality.

Customers are thinking: What is this? Is it for me? Why should I care?
Investors are thinking: What’s the wedge? What’s the proof? What’s the path?

Arthur’s job isn’t to give you a clever verdict.

It’s to surface the gap early, hand you a fix-first list, and then help you do the work.

Arthur isn’t the hero. You are.
Arthur just stops you spending six months busy… and still unclear.

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ARTHUR - BUILD IN LIVE #4

ARTHUR - BUILD IN LIVE #3

ARTHUR - BUILD IN LIVE #2

ARTHUR - BUILD IN LIVE #1

👉 Early Access is now open, if you want to be part of Arthur’s early access group, the founders who get the first features, the first tools, and the ability to shape what we build, sign up here and earn more Fuel units

* F42+ members will be automatically added with your subscription automatically translated into Arthur Fuel_units for the next 3 months.

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The 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly…

😇 The Good

Watching founders move from “here’s my idea” to investor-ready proof is a leveller. It makes it obvious where the friction really is — and where the leverage is.

The Sum of the parts, Danger room + Pitch Intel + Website signal has brought us a total solution (why we built it as a microservice) that is already getting interest from several Incubators and accelerators to manage their cohort intake.
The lesson: run experiments in parallel, keep iterating, keep your eye on the prize. Stay open, keep joining dots, and you’ll find opportunities that aren’t visible from the plan.

I’ve also been eating my own cooking on GEO (Generative Search Optimisation). We rebuilt fusion-42.com with LLM discovery in mind — not just traditional SEO — as a real-world test.

Quick update: it’s working. Over 50% of our site traffic now comes via ChatGPT.

Next step is the obvious one: conversion. Being discoverable and cited is great, but right now we’re light on proper CTAs and funnels — so we’re not turning that traffic into sign-ups yet.

And working out how conversion works in a world of LLMs is a genuinely interesting problem. AEO is the first stop — and I’ve got a few other angles I’m testing too.

I love looking into the future. It is the only way I can manage to come back to today and try and understand how technology will change the world and the stepping stones that need to be built to arrive at this point. Over the last month, digging into this, I have put together a series of writings I’m calling The Vertical Economy.

It’s an attempt to connect the dots between three forces that are usually debated in isolation but are, in fact, deeply connected: the end of the debt-supercycle, the rise of planetary-scale AI, and the quiet industrialisation of space. The argument is that the horizontal world we’ve known for 500 years—one of geographic expansion, trade routes, and terrestrial industry—has hit its physical and political limits. The next frontier for growth, industry, and power is not across the map. It’s upward.

This isn’t a utopian dream. It’s a story about thermodynamics, cost curves, and the brutal logic of capitalism. When a system runs out of room, it either collapses or finds a new dimension.

The Vertical Economy: The 25-Year Blueprint

I’ve broken the argument down into a six-part series:

• Part 1: The Vertical Economy. Capitalism won, so completely that it lost.
  Debt, AI and the rise of off-world industry

• Part 2: The Vertical Economy. Debt was a bridge to the future. Then it became the future.
  How the developed world replaced productivity with leverage — and why no democracy can admit the arithmetic

• Part 3: The Vertical Economy. The vertical turn isn’t ideology. It’s thermodynamics.
  Cost curves, industrial arithmetic, and why the next frontier is upward

• Part 4: The Vertical Economy. Hegemony doesn’t disappear — it migrates.
  Why great powers rise or fall on their ability to control energy, compute, and industry in orbit — and why alliances fracture in the process.

• Part 5: The Vertical Economy. WHAT HAPPENS TO HUMANS
  Life After Labour, by Design

• Part 6: The Vertical Economy. THE CHOICE THAT ISN’T OPTIONAL
  Architecture beats ideology. Every time.

It’s one of the most ambitious thing I’ve written. It’s an attempt to build a coherent framework for the next fifty years, starting today. I hope you’ll come along for the journey.

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⭐️ AI for Startups this Tuesday

Super stoked to have Ahmed join us to share all the AI tools and tips in the GOOGLE stack.

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😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

🤝 Community update (and a quiet ask)

One honest note: community activity has been lighter than it should be.

The structure is there — Resilience, GTM, Fundraising, AI, Danger Room — but like any good builder space, it only really works when a few people help set the tone.

So here’s the ask: we’re looking for a handful of channel champions. Not moderators. Not noise-makers. Just founders who are happy to:

• kick off discussions

• share what they’re working through

• ask the questions others are thinking but not posting

No commitment, no theatre — just helping turn a good space into a genuinely useful one.

If that sounds like you, raise your hand in the channel or drop me a message.

Builders first. Everything else follows.

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🤢 The Ugly

Context switching is still the tax we’re paying. Lots of moving parts, lots of experiments, and the constant work of keeping focus where it matters. Not glamorous, but unavoidable when you’re building something properly.

If you have not joined the Fusion42 Community on Telegram —
it is probably time to do so.

For the ❤️ of Startups

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.
❤️ & ✌🏼

Derek

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