Patri Friedman

Patri Friedman is the founder and general partner of Pronomos Capital, a venture firm that invests in charter cities and new jurisdictions. In 2008 he co-founded The Seasteading Institute, which promotes autonomous ocean communities; a former Google engineer, he is the grandson of economist Milton Friedman.

He co-founded The Seasteading Institute in 2008 with Wayne Gramlich and with early backing from Peter Thiel, having left a job as a Google engineer, and argued for the next few years that new jurisdictions would have to be built at sea because the land was all claimed. The institute produced designs, legal research and a movement rather than a permanent settlement. He also launched Ephemerisle in 2009, an annual gathering of lashed-together boats that was the first attempt to live the argument rather than publish it, and which the community has run itself since 2010.

He stepped down as the institute’s executive director in 2011 and co-founded Future Cities Development that year to pursue a charter city in Honduras, which is where the pivot from sea to land actually happened; that company wound up in 2012 and he returned to Google until 2019. Pronomos Capital, founded that year, follows from what he took away from the whole sequence: building on land, with a host government’s agreement, is cheaper and faster than building against the ocean and against international law at the same time. The fund invests in charter cities and new jurisdictions, its backers and advisers include Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan, and Próspera in Honduras is its best-known holding.

He is the grandson of Milton Friedman and the son of David Friedman, which makes him the third generation of a family arguing about how far markets can replace the state, and the first to try building the answer.