Baxnet Ideas · Founder note
Everyone Is Investable. Nobody Should Be Ownable.
TL;DR: Football is comfortable investing in what a young player might become. Better personal intelligence could extend that opportunity to more people, provided the capital never gains control over the person.
Every transfer window, football supporters talk about people as though they are listed securities.
A club buys a player for £40 million, his value rises, and another club eventually cashes in. A teenager in an academy is described as an asset with a high ceiling. Nobody listening thinks the club has literally purchased a human being, but the language barely registers as strange.
The legal reality is more specific. What moves between clubs is a set of contractual, registration and economic rights around the player’s work. That distinction matters. It also leaves football with one of the clearest systems we have for investing in human potential.
A scout assesses current ability and tries to estimate what might appear later. A club supplies coaching, facilities, medical support, competition and access to people who can help the player improve. The club is not simply betting on the outcome. It participates in making the outcome more likely.
I keep wondering why that logic feels completely normal for a promising left-back and faintly dystopian for almost everybody else.
We already invest in people, although we rarely call it that
Human capital is not a new idea. Economists use the term for the knowledge, health, skills and other qualities people accumulate. Gary Becker’s work helped formalise how education and training could be understood as investments that affect future earnings. The language can sound cold, but the underlying observation is ordinary: people can become more capable when time, money and support are put behind them. The Nobel committee described Becker’s contribution in those terms.
Parents do this, governments do it through schools and healthcare, and employers pay for training when they expect the organisation to benefit from what an employee learns.
Finance is less comfortable when the opportunity sits with an individual and does not fit an established category.
A medical student has a recognisable path. A bank can make assumptions about the qualification, the likely employment and the range of future income. It is much harder to assess a customer-support manager who has been teaching herself data analysis at night, a tradesperson who could start a specialist business with better equipment, or a musician who needs twelve uninterrupted months to find out whether a promising body of work can become a career.
Their potential may be no less real. It is simply harder to see from a degree title, credit score and current salary.
This is where my interest in personal intelligence starts to move beyond reflection. A richer understanding of an individual might help them recognise abilities that are spread across years of work, learning, side projects and relationships. More importantly, it might help them assemble a credible case for what they could do next and what support would make the difference.
That does not mean an algorithm can discover somebody’s destiny. Human potential is not a hidden number waiting to be calculated. The useful job would be smaller: help the person gather evidence, understand possible paths and explain an opportunity that conventional finance cannot easily read.
Football carries the warning as well as the analogy
The uncomfortable history of third-party ownership in football shows how quickly support can become influence.
When Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano moved to West Ham in 2006, the agreements surrounding their economic rights became the best-known English example of outside investors holding interests in players. The controversy was not only about who received money from a later transfer. It was about whether another party’s financial interest could affect decisions that should belong to the player and club. A later parliamentary examination of football governance used the case while describing the opportunities for external influence and abuse around third-party ownership. The evidence is worth reading because it captures how murky the arrangements had become.
The Premier League prohibited third-party ownership in 2007. Its current explanation says the practice can threaten competition, divert transfer income and allow outsiders to influence transfer decisions. Clubs must hold the player’s registration and associated economic rights rather than splitting them among external parties. That boundary is set out plainly by the league.
The lesson travels beyond football. An investor can have a legitimate interest in whether an agreed return is paid. That should not become a vote on where somebody works, which career they choose, whether they take time out to care for a parent, or which version of success they pursue.
Mike Merrill tested that boundary rather literally. In 2008, he divided himself into 100,000 shares and began selling them at a dollar each. Shareholders were eventually invited to vote on his projects and increasingly personal decisions. What began as a playful way to fund his ideas started interfering with his time and relationships. Wired’s account of the experiment is funny until it is not.
The problem was not that other people wanted Merrill to succeed. It was that their financial participation came with governance over the life producing the return.
Pieces of this market already exist
We have made several attempts to separate the economics from the person.
In 2013, a US securities filing proposed a tracking stock connected to the future “brand income” of NFL player Arian Foster. The filing repeatedly stressed that buyers would be investing in the company issuing the stock, not directly in Foster. Even an instrument designed to track one athlete’s future earnings needed a legal container between the individual and the shareholder. The distinction runs throughout the SEC filing.
Income-share agreements apply a related idea to education. A student receives funding and agrees to pay a percentage of future income for a fixed period or until a cap is reached. The attraction is easy to see: when earnings are low, payments fall too, so some of the downside sits with the provider rather than entirely with the student.
The complications are just as important. A Congressional Research Service analysis noted that risk-based terms could steer students towards qualifications and careers investors expect to pay more. It also asked how policymakers could prevent investor pressure after the money had been provided. Those questions are built into the instrument, not unfortunate details around the edge.
Even the language can conceal what has really been sold. In 2021, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that one provider had falsely represented its income-share agreements as products that were not loans and did not create debt. The provider had also failed to give required disclosures and had imposed unlawful prepayment penalties. The resulting enforcement action is a useful reminder that “shared upside” can sound friendlier than the contract behaves.
So the experiment is already underway in fragments. We have just tended to reserve it for people whose future income is easy to classify: students on recognised courses, professional athletes, entertainers and founders operating through companies.
Better information could widen the door—or tighten the filter
The optimistic case for personal intelligence is that it makes unusual potential more legible.
Imagine someone who wants to move from customer support into data work. A conventional application may show no relevant degree and no previous analyst title. The person may nevertheless have completed courses for two years, automated parts of their current job, become the colleague everyone asks when a spreadsheet breaks, and built useful projects at home.
A personal intelligence engine could help that person see the pattern, test whether the proposed move is realistic and present selected evidence to somebody willing to fund training or six months of reduced working hours. The person would decide what leaves their private system. An investor would see the case they chose to make, not an unrestricted feed of messages, calendars, searches and personal history.
But I would not call a chatbot that writes a persuasive document about somebody a personal intelligence engine. A general-purpose language model is not an objective assessor simply because it sounds calm and articulate. It can construct a coherent case from almost any premise it is handed. If I ask one to explain why my dubious business idea is actually brilliant, it may produce something that looks remarkably like an investment memo.
The failure mode has a name: sycophancy. Models tuned to be helpful can become too agreeable, matching the user’s beliefs instead of testing them. In 2025, OpenAI rolled back a GPT-4o update after it became “overly flattering or agreeable.” OpenAI’s account of what went wrong is unusually direct. Earlier research testing five leading AI assistants observed the broader tendency across several writing tasks, and found that both people and preference models sometimes favoured convincingly written agreement over correct answers. That research helps explain why this is more than a collection of funny screenshots.
That is why the underlying data matters. A personal intelligence engine should make the case earn its conclusions: which courses were completed, what projects were actually finished, how performance changed, what evidence points the other way, and where confidence is low. It should be able to say that an ambition is interesting but not yet supported. Persuasive prose is not personal insight.
There is a much darker version.
The same technology could become a behavioural credit bureau for a person’s future. A lender might want every abandoned project, period of low motivation, strained relationship and late-night search folded into an assessment. People with conventional lives would be easier to price. Messier paths—the ones for which this kind of finance might be most useful—could receive worse terms or no offer at all.
More information does not automatically make access fairer. It may simply let an existing gatekeeper reject people for more reasons.
That is why I think the personal intelligence engine has to work for the individual first. It should help them understand the opportunity, compare terms, decide what evidence is relevant and keep the raw context under their control. If its main customer is the capital provider, the product will slowly become an underwriting machine, regardless of the language used around empowerment.
Fund the opportunity, not the life
A workable version would need deliberately boring limits.
The funding should attach to a defined purpose: training, equipment, protected learning time, relocation or the early stage of a specific career. Any share of future income should expire, have a clear cap and protect a minimum level of earnings. The investor should receive no control over employers, location, relationships or later career decisions. The person needs to know how to leave the agreement and what happens when life does not follow the forecast.
There is also a difference between a return and a transferable claim. If someone can buy an interest in my development and then sell that interest to a stranger without my involvement, the relationship changes. A market designed around human potential cannot quietly recreate the third-party ownership problems that football eventually prohibited.
The science-fiction version of this end state has already been written. In Dani and Eytan Kollin’s The Unincorporated Man, every person is incorporated at birth and spends much of their life trying to buy back a controlling share in themselves. The unsettling part is not that society invests heavily in people. It is that financial ownership has become personal authority.
I believe most people carry a significant amount of ability that their circumstances never let them use. Capital, good information and aligned support could change that for some of them.
I keep coming back to the question a football scout asks as part of ordinary work: what might this person become with the right development? Outside football, whether that question helps or harms will depend on who gets to see the answer and what rights they expect in return.