Every great venture starts in the same place: a storm of ideas and a healthy dose of confusion. You have a vision, a conviction that there’s a better way to do something, but the path from A to Z is a fog. This is our story. It’s the story of how we at DeReticular are navigating that fog, not with a map, but by building the compass as we go.
We are, in the truest sense of the phrase, eating our own dogfood. The complex, AI-Native ecosystems we are designing for others are the very same systems we are using to build our company, our community, and our future. This isn’t a theoretical exercise; it’s a live-fire drill.
The First Spin: From Chaos to a Flywheel
It began with a foundational concept: Digital Adventures Outdoors R Us, powered by a DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) network. The idea was to merge real-world experiences with a digital layer, creating a new kind of interactive adventure. But the “how” was the hard part. How do you capture value? How do you process data? How do you create a self-sustaining loop?
The answer was the Data Flywheel.
We set about building our first one. Every interaction within the Digital Adventures network—every ticket scanned, every piece of geolocated data, every user review—would feed the flywheel. More data leads to better insights, which leads to better adventures, which attracts more users, generating more data. It was our first attempt to channel the chaos into momentum.
Iteration and Expansion: Reimagining the Flywheel
Once we had one flywheel spinning, we realized the model was not a rigid template but a flexible framework. We saw other needs in our community, other problems we could solve.
So, we added Kurb Kars, our AI-Native logistics and autonomous transportation solution. It needed its own flywheel, one that consumed a different kind of data: hyperlocal road conditions, vehicle telemetry, passenger demand, and route efficiency.
Then came Agra DOT Energy. To power the growing network of AI clusters and autonomous vehicles, we needed a resilient, decentralized energy solution. This required a third flywheel, one fed by data from solar arrays, plasma gasification units, and the local power grid.
With each new addition, we didn’t just copy and paste. We reimagined the flywheel, adapting its structure to the unique data and operational needs of each new entity. Then, we began to see the next layer: connecting the flywheels. Data from Agra DOT could inform the most energy-efficient routes for Kurb Kars. Data from Kurb Kars could predict peak demand times for community services.
This led to our latest flywheel, one focused on Community Services and autonomous Non-Emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT), using the efficiency of our logistics network to solve a critical local need.
The Human Element and the Magic Formula
This journey wasn’t taken in a vacuum. A team has formed, a community has rallied, and a core principle has emerged from the process. It’s a formula that we believe is the key to building the future, and it’s the same process other builders will inevitably encounter.
It boils down to this: When you have your community and a team working in unison, and you have a problem in your community that needs to be solved, and you have an AI-Native solution… it’s time to apply for your first grant.
We believe this model is so powerful that we can simplify it even further for communities around the globe.
Really, all anyone else needs is a community, a team, and a problem. The DeReticular Team will help create the AI-Native solution—the agents, the protocols, the flywheel architecture—that you can plug into an AI Cluster built right in your hometown.
So, What’s Next? The Grant Gauntlet
With our ecosystem taking shape, the next logical step was to secure the resources to scale our research and development. We needed to apply for grants.
Our internal AI agents and human team members began the search, casting a wide net. The result was a comprehensive report on the landscape of AI and education grants, which we published here.
This research allowed us to focus our efforts, narrowing the field to the opportunity that best fit our core mission: the Department of Defense (DOD): Fundamental AI Research Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). It aligns perfectly with our work in multi-agent AI workflows and decentralized AI ecosystems. The challenge was clear: how do we communicate our complex, multifaceted vision to a grant provider?
The MVP: Turning Vision into a Syllabus
The answer, once again, was to eat our own dogfood. We needed to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of our vision. Not code, but curriculum. We decided the best way to explain what we do is to detail how we would teach it to others.
This led to the creation of two distinct, yet complementary, course syllabi:
- C5-ISR-E: Architecting AI-Native Organizations: A high-level, strategic framework for building resilient, intelligent ecosystems.
- The Great Unboxing: Architecting Agentic AI Strategies: A deep dive into the technical protocols and agentic strategies that make these ecosystems possible.
Notice that in the second syllabus, we introduce the concept of an instructor-led introduction by my AI Avatar. This is a critical piece of our educational model. The future DeReticular Academy courseware will be led by similar Animated Video Avatars, providing incredible flexibility and an opportunity for our own community members to contribute their expertise to our Learning Management System.
These syllabi are now the cornerstone of our grant applications. They are our way of clearly and concisely communicating our vision, our methodology, and our capability to potential grant providers.
Welcome to the Lab: Learning in Real Time
This entire process—from the initial confusion to building interconnected data flywheels, from identifying a community problem to architecting a detailed curriculum for a grant application—is the very dogfood we consume every day.
And now, we’re going to turn it into the courseware. We will teach you how we did it, and we will show you our work, our successes, and our mistakes in real-time.
This is our process, live and on the record. Transparent – What could possibly go wrong?
Welcome to DeReticular.
