Hi, I’m Danilo.

I’m a former YC, Greylock and Khosla backed founder. When I raised $25m out of college as a solo co-founder, I

  • Had no one I could fully trust (incentives)

  • Was flooded with advice

  • Had no rigorous foundation to filter.

I offer the highest signal-to-noise ratio conceptual co-founder* service you will find.

Debt is a well understood idea.

  • In software, there’s code debt.

  • In finance, debt is leverage.

  • Biology has metabolic debt in atp cycles.

  • Social debt comes from unreciprocated favors.

  • Politics delays reforms, creating policy debt.

But when it comes to running a company, coordination debt is no where to be found.

Coordination debt is idea debt.

And it doesn’t grow linearly—it compounds exponentially.

A penny doubled daily surpasses half a million doubled every three days in just over a month.

The lessons?

1. Ideas really matter and…

2. Initial conditions really matter

3. Startup generalisms can violate the physics of coordination.

So, I completed a PhD on physics of coordination

And built Sound-Swim for founder friends to build/study

If you…

  1. Want to clear your idea debt

  2. Could use founder level support

  3. Think we’d get along

…Then we should talk.

Follow The Physics

Follow The Physics

*Conceptual Co-Founder

I serve as a conceptual co-founder — not an executor, but as a thought partner, idea synthesizer, boundary pusher, constraint identifier and the person next to you when things get tough.

My approach aligns with Karl Weick’s What Theory Is, Theorizing is Not.

  • ‘I feel (conceptually) outgunned.’

    co-founder of $75b marketcap company

  • ‘He’s unlimited upside and downside’

    - my series a investor

  • ‘There is no one like Danilo.’

    — founder of startup building new city

  • ‘He’ll be awesome when he’s 30.’

    — former employee, current vc

    (i’m 30 next year)

About Me

My name is Danilo Vicioso. I’ve built and scaled companies at the intersection of AI and Venture Capital—raising funds from Khosla Ventures and Greylock, founding a Y- Combinator-backed startup, and hiring C-level executives. Beyond that, I’ve completed the equivalent of a PhD on human coordination and have worked with the same coaches as Fortune 500 executives and high growth startup founders.

frequently (and infrequently) asked questions

  • non-operational, high-signal thinking – i’m here to sharpen thinking, and work on either general mindset or general problems, not run the business.

    framing over facts – how you define a problem often matters more than the solution.

    first-principles grounding – beyond opinion, i provide rigorous decision-making frameworks.

    see the inspiration here.

  • ideas rarely emerge as fully developed theories. much of what is considered theory in organizational studies is an approximation.

  • they lack of variety and superficial efforts (e.g. theory is loosely attached to raw data). others, however, represent a work-in-progress, pushing towards stronger theories.

  • ongoing email/texts/slack threads, supplemented by 1:1 calls lasting one-three hours every week(s) based on the tempo of the challenges. sometimes folks bring in colleagues. there is usually no deliverable but occasionally, i’ll produce a doc

  • solo founders with $5m+ raised or solo co-founders. a requirement for who i work with is that is has to be someone i’m going to invite.

  • i too once thought that this type of work seemed grifty, but having worked with a bunch of people it’s obvious people do miss obvious and non obvious things in plain sight & it costs a lot. the idea is to (possibly) productize what i’m offering as an agent company.

explore my conceptual work

A Not Fake Theory of Everything
https://coordinationprotocols.substack.com/p/the-devils-ontology-a-brief-introduction

The Devil’s Ontology

The Goal Of Your Platform

God Explained To A Rationalist

American Business Logic

Agent Founder

  • ‘i am trying to display the problem that we face in thinking about institutions. the culture does not accept that it is possible to make general scientific statements about them. therefore it is extremely difficult for individuals, however well intentioned, to admit that there are laws (let’s call them) that govern institutional behaviour, regardless of the institution. people know that there is a science of physics; you will not be burnt at the stake for saying that the earth moves round the sun, or even be disbarred by physicists for proposing a theory in which it is mathematically convenient to display the earth as the centre of the universe after all. that is because people in general, and physicists in particular, can handle such propositions with ease. but people do not know that there is a science of effective organization, and you are likely to be disbarred by those who run institutions for proposing any theory at all. for what these people say is that their own institution is unique; and that therefore an apple-growing company bears no resemblance to a company manufacturing water glasses or to an airline flying aeroplanes.’

    stafford beer

  • ‘the technologies have been demonstrated, and our organizations are aligning toward internal improvement. what seems still to be lacking is an appropriate general perception that: a. huge changes are likely, and really significant improvements are possible; b. surprising qualitative changes may be involved in acquiring higher performance; c. there might actually be an effective, pragmatic strategy for pursuing those improvements.’

    — douglas engelbart, a strategic role for groupware, 1992

  • ‘arguably, a large fraction of startup organizations failing to get off the ground is a result of coordination headwind problems rather than bad ideas or lack of a need. in larger organizations that already exist, arguably an even larger fraction of efforts at change fail because of these problems. i’d estimate somewhere between 60% to 90% of all efforts to start new organizations or scale existing ones fail due to coordination headwind problems. at the very least, simply recognizing coordination headwinds as a real phenomenon, as real as the weather, is a big step forward. most people never get past viewing it as some sort of moral failure on the part of someone else, somewhere else in the system.’

    venkatesh rao

  • ‘in a knowledge-rich world, progress does not lie in the direction of reading information faster, writing it faster, and storing more of it. progress lies in the direction of extracting and exploiting the patterns of the world… and that progress will depend on … our ability to devise better and more powerful thinking programs for man and machine.'

    herbert simon, designing organizations for an information-rich world, 1969

  • 'there is a growing mountain of research. but there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. the investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.'

    — unknown

  • ‘fascinating that the same problems recur time after time, in almost every program, and that the management of the program, whether it happened to be government or industry, continues to avoid reality.’

    george mueller, pioneer of ‘systems engineering’ and the man most responsible for the success of the 1969 moon landing.