Billy Tetrud is co-founder and chief executive of Meridia, a planned town near Austin, Texas, which its founders describe as a federated settlement built around human flourishing. The published design proposes a largely car-free layout with a dense mixed-use centre, nontoxic construction, zoning by externality rather than by use, arbitration in place of litigation, a Georgist land rent, supermajority decision rules and borough-level sub-governments, with separate neighbourhoods built by collaborating communities. He founded it with Stacia Wilson, who is its chief community officer.
He spent roughly fifteen years as a software engineer and entrepreneur before that, including time at Google and later work on Bitcoin self-custody at the Austin firm Unchained, and he founded Tixit, which built an extensible project management system.
In Bitcoin he is known for technical writing rather than for a company. He has published an analysis of the network’s transaction throughput bottlenecks, documented methods for backing up and storing bitcoin, and circulated a proposal for efficient Bitcoin vaults introducing new script opcodes, which he took to the Bitcoin development mailing list in 2023. He publishes code under the handle fresheneesz.
He has written about governance and economics for about a decade at his Governology Substack, whose subtitle is the science of government, and he co-founded an Austin meetup on eco-development, sustainable real estate and land projects. What distinguishes the position is where he wants it tested: at the scale of one town that people choose to move to, rather than in an argument about how a country ought to be run.