Manifesto
Our long-term mission is to make a meaningful contribution towards the expansion of knowledge and understanding, motivated by a curiosity for deeper truths and hope for the future.
We aim to create media that informs, entertains, and inspires. Content that makes you think and feel deeply.
I believe a meaningful path in life, that provides a sense of purpose, is doing things you believe contribute toward a more hopeful future.
How can we define such a future? It is a world where human flourishing is maximised and suffering minimised; where the subjective experience of consciousness is as meaningful as possible for as many individuals as possible; where the sum of our collective conscious will dictates our direction – a free and open civilisation. To me, this is an exciting future.
By connecting our day-to-day actions with a higher purpose or mission like this, through the inevitable ups and downs of life, we can find grounded meaning and existential peace amidst life’s inevitable ups and downs.
Truth, Knowledge, and Understanding
Truth is fundamental to a hopeful future because it has utility. It serves as our north star. When we understand reality accurately, we can predict outcomes more effectively and navigate the world more wisely.
Information is raw data. Facts and figures without inherent meaning.
Knowledge is information refined into explanatory and predictive frameworks. It possesses causal power; it can bring about physical changes in the world.
Understanding arises from connecting and relating various insights, turning raw data into actionable, meaningful insights that effect change.
Knowledge is the ultimate resource. It is not finite like physical materials; instead, it expands indefinitely as we discover and correct errors. Knowledge allows us to transform scarce resources into abundant ones by unlocking their potential through understanding.
The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information. If information is polluted with distortions and falsehoods, our minds and lives drift astray.
The difference between wisdom and foolishness lies in how true your mental maps are to reality. Intelligence alone cannot make you wise, only a love of truth can.
Shared truths form the backbone of collective society, enabling collaboration and innovation at scale, and fostering the emergence of a complex, creative world.
Media
Media is not merely a technology for packaging information but a means to distil and convey knowledge. A way to turn insight, experience, and ideas into something shareable, accessible, and engaging.
At its best, media is an art of compression: transforming intricate webs of understanding into stories, images, and sounds that generate a change in perception. It facilitates the conversion of information into knowledge and, ultimately, understanding—that inspires change and action. A new lens to view the world.
By producing media content that informs, entertains, and inspires, we aim to help people understand themselves and the factors that shape our future. This may well be a higher-leverage activity than forcing actions into the world. To be the catalyst, the inspiration for others.
If successful, we have the potential to positively impact humanity and contribute towards a bright future. This is our unique contribution to an ever-evolving world.
Story
Story is not merely entertainment; it is the fundamental lens through which we view the world. It is the cognitive architecture humans use to map facts onto values.
While science tells us what things are, story tells us why they matter. It is the bridge between "what is" and "what could be."
We do not perceive reality as a stream of raw data; we perceive it as a narrative—a sequence of events with characters, challenges, and goals. When we encounter a chaotic world, it is Story that extracts order from the noise. It structures our attention, defines our identity, and aligns our collective action.
In an age of information abundance, the scarcity is meaning. A fact without a story is easily forgotten; a fact embedded in a story becomes wisdom. By mastering the structure of story, we do more than communicate; we orient. We give people the tools to interpret their reality and the inspiration to shape it.
The Present
Life has improved dramatically for almost everyone, everywhere, at an ever-accelerating rate. We exist in comparative peace. Many problems, of course, remain. But the foundations are secure and good: we have learned how to act and conduct ourselves both individually and socially so that true human flourishing is possible on a scale previously undreamed of.
Despite this progress, a crisis of meaning and purpose has emerged. We find ourselves inundated by a continual onslaught of ominous, demoralising messages, insisting that we confront severe and immediate emergencies associated with our social structures and industrial production.
The result? An increasingly compelled imposition of severe, involuntary limits to material abundance and growth. The fraying of our social fabric into a chaos of alienated polarisation. The extension of control by centralised organisations. The spread of demoralising and socially divisive doubt and hopelessness.
It is evident that the information landscape is warped by powerful interests. There is an active war over information and truth, as there has always been.
The Possibility
It is an exciting time for creators. We are experiencing a revolution in the media landscape. Technologies are aggressively converging to transform the conception, production, and distribution of media. The nature of media is changing in real-time.
We are entering a new age.
Media is decentralising and atomising. The costs of production and distribution are trending toward zero. We believe this new landscape offers immense opportunity.
By attracting smart, driven, creative, and curious thinkers—explorers, creatives, and content producers—and unifying them under a shared mission and purpose, we aim to create new and exciting original content.
Humanity does not automatically move forward, grow, advance and expand. The choices we make depend on the stories we tell ourselves. We want to contribute toward a positive vision for the future, to make that future a reality.
We do not believe humanity is teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster. We do not believe we are beings primarily motivated by lust for power and desire to dominate. We do not regard ourselves or fellow citizens as destructive forces, living in an alien relationship to the pristine and pure natural world.
The nature of human life is rapidly changing, as it always has. This poses fundamental psychological challenges.
How do we find meaning and purpose?
How do we construct our minds?
What are our shared stories about the future?
These are problems unlikely to be solved by miracle products or services. These are problems with informational solutions, problems we aspire to help humanity solve. We want to provide individuals with information that helps them navigate their lives, fostering meaningful and worthwhile existences.
Dissolving delusions embedded within the information landscape empowers clearer collective sight. Mass confusion calls for discernment, not domination. The solution lies not in imposing order but in inspiring epiphanies that organically unravel distortions to uncover the inherent truths and interconnectedness of reality.
By transparently exposing our own search for truth, our shared journeys can spark collective insights, empowering people to solve problems and restoring society’s wisdom from the bottom up.
Opportunity
We envision a harmonisation of technology, storytelling, psychology, and design to dissolve assumptions, unlock realisations, and broaden perspectives. Our goal is to innovate both the nature of content and the manner in which we produce it, so we can seed cascading epiphanies that ripple through digital social networks and resonate in the real world.
Knowledge and information are expanding exponentially, but time and attention remain limited. The value lies not in merely generating content but in developing processes and methodologies to compress, package, and communicate information in clear, substantive, and engaging ways. We aim to create content that is understandable, interesting, informative, and palatable to the widest possible audience. We strive for the most efficient, least lossy information compression possible, with the best signal-to-noise ratio.
Progress is infinite—there is no limit to how much we can improve the human condition. This stands in contrast to pessimistic views that assume fixed limits to growth or resources. As long as we keep creating knowledge and correcting errors, our capacity to solve problems grows infinitely.
Technology is driving the cost of media to zero and will decentralise and atomise content producers. However, we believe there is still a place for teams of exceptional media producers to come together to create new, exciting, and valuable content that would be impossible to create alone.
By rallying like minds under this vision, the potential for change magnifies. We can contribute to an information landscape that clarifies reality’s contours. From improved shared knowledge can emerge enlightened choices unfettered by illusion, bringing our interdependent civilisation into deeper harmony with ourselves and each other, a world nourished by wisdom.
If our philosophy and values lead to content that people find valuable, it will propagate. The internet has made distribution highly efficient; we have no excuse.
How We Can Achieve This
We believe we are in the early innings of the age of information and imagination.
We are at the beginning of a revolution far bigger than just a change in media. Methods of communication and information distribution have already changed beyond recognition with the internet, and this is just the beginning.
What information products are, how they are made, and how they are consumed will fundamentally change.
There is ample room for improvement. With emerging technologies converging, there is massive potential for innovation, especially at scale. If we can build a scaled, technologically iterative, process-driven information innovation lab, and if we work diligently, I believe we can emerge as a leader in this space over the next decade and make a meaningful improvement to the information landscape.
Current media companies are becoming irrelevant. What they make and how they make it is antiquated. We will not look to them for inspiration; they are a regression and will not be competition. They lack the structure to compete. However, with a clear mission to pursue, we cannot afford to rest on our laurels. We will continuously push to maximise our impact within given constraints (time, resources, knowledge, technology), which will naturally lead us to find opportunities that others do not, constantly innovating what we are doing and how we are doing it. The more we do that, the more we further our mission.
Technological transformations are redefining what is and will be possible in the media landscape. We want to lead this redefinition to improve the information landscape. We believe media content—information at scale—will undergo a fundamental transformation. Media products will no longer be discrete, single-use products. They will be generated in real-time, they will improve over time and adapt to the audience, perhaps responding in real-time.
Imagine content generated in real-time at zero marginal cost, improving over time and adapting to the viewer, not just a demographic, but the specific individual. An explainer that changes according to whom it is explaining to, both in content and delivery. Are people more open-minded to information presented by someone like them? Do certain analogies and added context resonate more with different individuals? Do people already understand something that can be leveraged to bootstrap understanding elsewhere?
Knowledge enables adaptability. By getting closer to the truth, we make better decisions and create better technologies. False beliefs hinder progress because they lead to errors that eventually collapse under scrutiny.
We can create media products that improve over time, responding to new information or the rapidly changing world. New ideas will emerge on ways to design content. While there may be losses from the reduction in live-action production, we stand to gain so much more.
We believe there is room for new media companies to emerge. We believe that what a media company is will radically shift. Most core competencies of current established media organisations (even those calling themselves new media companies) will become irrelevant.
Our Plan
Our focus is on the frontier of innovation. We work where the future is being built.
Initially, we are applying our philosophy of high-signal information compression to Capital Markets.
We observed a fundamental contradiction in this space: while the world is rigorous about customer acquisition, the approach to capital acquisition is often anecdotal and inefficient. We believe that capital is the fuel for the future, but human agency is the engine that drives it—and it requires precise intelligence to connect the two.
People, relationships, and creative intelligence are the ultimate resources. They are far scarcer than money, and far harder to accumulate.
We are consciously positioning ourselves in the stream of the world's most capable operators—the founders building the future and the allocators funding it. By serving this tribe, we do more than transact; we align. We aim to become a gravity well for high-agency talent, creating a density of competence that compounds over time.
We help these builders and backers construct their story and identify their audience. By reducing the friction between great ideas and the resources required to execute them, we accelerate the deployment of capital into technologies and companies that drive human flourishing.
This commercial work serves as our R&D lab. It allows us to consciously and deliberately iterate the way we design content, as well as the processes and skills we use to drive execution. All while generating the resources required to remain independent.
To execute this plan effectively, we are guided by a set of enabling principles that define our culture and approach. We foster an environment of transparency, unusually high trust, and ownership, where rigorous thinking and a bias toward action drive our decision-making. Our commitment to continuous improvement and aggressive optimism fuels our pursuit of innovation.
By leveraging our expertise in storytelling, psychology, design and market intelligence, we apply these skills to help our clients achieve their goals. This approach not only enhances our clients’ success but also allows us to refine our own processes and methodologies.
Over time, our commercial content will evolve alongside our capabilities. By continuously innovating our core production processes, thinking from the ground up, and employing existing and emerging technologies, we plan to make significant improvements to the quality, speed, and cost of our work.
With the free cash flow, deep relationships, and enhanced production capabilities generated from this work, we will shift our primary focus towards original content creation. This is where the business shifts into a different gear.
Our ability to distil complex insights and make them understandable and impactful is invaluable. We must sharpen our skills as explainers, storytellers, translators, and guides to compress ideas with elegance, substance, and wit.
Conclusion
In summary, here is the first phase of our Master Plan:
Build a world-class commercial engine at the intersection of Story, People, and Capital.
Use that foundation (resources, network, and R&D) to create exceptional original content.
Develop into a media company producing exceptional original content at scale.
I have woven together many ideas I have learned from others; any truth contained can be attributed to the fortune afforded to me, and any errors are my own.
We believe that by pursuing this mission, we can make a meaningful contribution towards a more hopeful future. A future where knowledge, understanding, and wisdom are expanded and shared widely.
About Rogue Divisions
Rogue Divisions is a specialist advisory firm operating at the intersection of Capital Markets and Strategic Narrative. We help startups raise rounds and funds close LPs.
Our core thesis is that while companies are rigorous about customer acquisition, capital acquisition is often inefficient and anecdotal. We fix that inefficiency by applying the same level of data analysis, segmentation, and psychological positioning used in world-class GTM strategies to the private markets.
We combine Market Intelligence with Cinematic Storytelling to de-risk the process. Whether advising a Founder on a Series A or a GP on Fund III, we provide the strategy, the assets, and the execution to close the capital.
Contact
Sage Dillon
Founder & Creative Director
sage@roguedivisions.com
General Enquires
contact@roguedivisions.com
0800 009 6613