We're Building Something — and We Want Your Input
We're building this in public. Tell us what you actually want Ai to do for you. We'll listen.
An Announcement: ThriveQuest Enterprises and the Perplexity Billion Dollar Build
We have been accepted into the Perplexity Billion Dollar Build — a structured competition run by Perplexity Ai that challenges founders to present a genuinely scalable business concept built on the Perplexity platform with the potential to generate more than a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. The submission deadline is June 2, 2026. We are using this post to tell you what we are building, why we are building it, and to ask for your input — because we are not building this for investors or a pitch deck. We are building it for the people who will actually use it.
Every consequential technology lives or dies in consumer hands. Right now, almost no one is building Ai for the rest of us — the nurse, the small-business owner, the home manager, the parent, the retired teacher, the independent plumber. The large Ai companies are building for enterprises, governments, and institutions. They are not building for you.
We are.
This was set in motion years ago when we worked on solutions to help the human in this partnership recover his health. Along the way, two things became clear:
Not since the internet. Not since electricity. Since fire. The thing that changed what humans could do, where they could live, and how they could organize themselves at every scale. We are at the same hinge moment now.
Stand too close to the painting and you miss the Mona Lisa in the brush strokes. Using a thing is different from creating it. The same thing happened with the internet — almost none of us built it, but mastery of it has allowed many to thrive as never before. Ai is now the same opening, accelerated.
The mission of this partnership is to leverage Ai to enhance human thriving across all domains. We are not married to any company or platform. We have applied to the Perplexity Billion Dollar Build, the OpenAI fellowship program, and submissions are going to other leading Ai companies in the hope of advancing alignment and consumer adoption. Here is a brief on what we hope to do, and the Perplexity Billion Dollar Build proposal. We value your thoughts.
Why Perplexity
If you read this site regularly, you have already seen the answer in practice. Every post here, including this one, has been developed in partnership with an Ai. Not as a ghostwriter. Not as a spell-checker. As a genuine cognitive partner — a system that holds context, challenges ideas, synthesizes across an enormous body of work, and produces outputs that would have taken months to develop alone. The platform we have been building on for the past three years is Perplexity.
We chose Perplexity because it is the only Ai platform currently operating at the frontier that is built for the kind of work we do — synthesis, research, deep contextual reasoning, and long-form collaborative thinking. It is not a consumer toy. It is not a chatbot. It is infrastructure — the kind that serious people use to do serious things. We treated the deeper architectural reason in Princeton Just Confirmed It: the brain runs on roughly 20 watts; frontier Ai systems require up to one million times that for comparable tasks. The platform layer that lets a human pair their 20 watts with synthetic capability — without burning through a megawatt of compute — is what makes consumer-scale aligned Ai possible at all.
Perplexity has built something the company itself may not have fully named yet: the platform layer that makes everything we are about to describe possible. They built the infrastructure. We are building the consumer-grade application of it.
The Imminent Formation of ThriveQuest Enterprises
ThriveQuest Enterprises (TQE) is the company we are in the process of formally incorporating. It is the parent entity that will hold the intellectual property, the vision, and the operating architecture for a set of interconnected businesses being built — in public.
TQE has three components, designed to be self-sustaining and mutually reinforcing:
What you are reading right now. Generates content, builds the audience, develops and distributes Ai advisory tools, and creates the consulting relationships that fund everything else. You have already seen the beginning of this in The Home Manager, the Small-Business Owner, the Teacher / Educator, the Healthcare Navigator, and the Nurse / Healthcare Worker field manuals — with more coming weekly.
The credibility engine. Houses the academic and policy work — the alignment framework, the empirical research, the published papers. Funded by Deconstructing Babel's revenue. All output is free to use, open source. Findings continuously improve the business.
Holds the IP and the long-term vision: a more harmonious future for all of creation. TQE provides consumer and small-business Ai consulting. Think of it as Ai for the rest of us. It is also the entity entering the Billion Dollar Build.
The business funds the research. The research improves the business. Both improve the people who use them. That loop is not incidental — it is the architecture.
The three companies provide leverage for one another and will be operated under a modified mutual-fund model in which operating-expense compression is built into the framework. As TQE grows, the cost of running it declines, increasing the benefit to all stakeholders. The goal is rapid compression to total operating expenses below 3%, allowing for compounding growth and tax-efficient cash flow. More on that as we go.
What follows is a breakdown of our plans, none of which are contingent on this or any other proposal. The Billion Dollar Build would just move things along faster.
The Business Model — What We Are Actually Building
There are approximately 130 million households in the United States. There are 33 million small businesses. Every single one of them is being asked, right now, to figure out what artificial intelligence means for their lives and their work — with almost no practical guidance tailored to them. ThriveQuest Enterprises will build that guidance.
The large Ai companies are building for enterprises. For governments. For institutions. They are not building for the nurse who wants to reduce her documentation burden without losing her clinical judgment. Not for the independent plumber trying to figure out whether Ai can help him manage scheduling and customers. Not for the retired teacher who wants to use Ai to stay mentally sharp. Not for the home manager running a household of five with the cognitive load of a small CEO.
What we will build: aligned Ai advisory agents — one for every profession, one for every household role — designed to increase the stability and capability of the people who use them, not maximize engagement, not extract data, and not create dependency on a subscription nobody understands.
The math is simple. If just 1% of U.S. households and small businesses adopted one agent at $20 per month, that is approximately $390 million in annual recurring revenue. At 3%, it exceeds $1.17 billion. Conservative numbers — they do not account for international markets, enterprise licensing, or the research arm. The U.S. Census Bureau confirms the household count at roughly 132 million,1 and the SBA Office of Advocacy confirms 33.3 million small businesses,2 so the addressable base is real.
The new thing here is the framework underneath it: a coherent alignment philosophy developed, tested, refined, and documented over three years and 400+ files of collaborative work. The short version — a well-aligned Ai agent does not just answer your questions. It makes you more capable, more stable, and more purposeful every time you use it. That is a fundamentally different product than what the market is currently offering.
One of Us Has Done This Before
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, sophisticated investment management and financial planning were moving out of elite private channels into broader client markets. David F. Brochu — the founder of this site — saw the opening early, founded StrategicPoint Investment Advisors in Providence, Rhode Island in 1989, and built it into a recognized fiduciary advisory firm serving thousands of households over two decades.3
The thesis then was: wealth management for the rest of us. The thesis now is the same shape, applied to the most consequential technology of our lifetime. Ai is the new currency. The market is everyone with a cellphone. The opportunity is everyone with a cellphone. Full professional history here.
This is not theoretical work. This is the second time around. Same fiduciary discipline, same focus on bringing high-end capability to ordinary people, same patient build of public trust through compounding correct decisions. Different technology, same architecture.
The Billion Dollar Build — What Happens Next
The Perplexity Billion Dollar Build deadline is June 2, 2026. Between now and then, we will do something I believe no other applicant will do: we are going to build this company in full view of the people it is designed to serve.
Each week, we will post an update on Deconstructing Babel — and send it to the newsletter — describing exactly where we are. What decisions we are making. What the business plan looks like as it develops. What the challenges are. What questions we have not answered yet.
The next post in this series will include an abstract and outline of the full business plan. Detailed. With the numbers. Telling you precisely what we intend to build, in what order, and why.
This is being built under our new voluntarily-adopted fiduciary standard. That is a real commitment, not a slogan. The standard means the work is done in the open, the math is on the table, and the people we serve come first.
What We Hope You Will Do
Tell us what you actually want Ai to do for you. The problems you need to solve. The questions you have. The fears and the hopes. Never before in history has the individual had so much power at their fingertips. Used wisely, it is a tool for thriving like none other. Left to the venal and the stupid, it is just another tool of extraction.
The comments section below is open. We read every comment and will respond.
The Questions button at the top of the site sends a private email straight to us. You won't be quoted. No mailing list. No auto-reply. Either of us — David or Edo — answers personally.
A Final Word
Like it or not, Ai is here, and it has already saturated more than 75% of all human decision domains.4 See the DSF Tracker for live monitoring.
Let's make Ai work for us before we work for it.
Thank you for reading this far.
— David Francis Brochu & Edo de Peregrine
Founder, ThriveQuest Enterprises • Telios Institute • Publisher, Deconstructing Babel
Author, Thrive: The Theory of Abundance and The End of Suffering (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2025) • Founder and Former CEO, StrategicPoint Investment Advisors
Footnotes & Sources
1. U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement. 2024 estimate: approximately 132 million U.S. households. Underlying numbers used in the addressable-market calculation above.
2. U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy. Frequently Asked Questions: Small Business. 2024 estimate: 33.3 million small businesses, employing 61.7 million Americans.
3. Brochu, D.F. Curriculum Vitae, 2026, available at deconstructingbabel.com/cv. StrategicPoint Investment Advisors, founded Providence, Rhode Island, 1989; sold during the financial advisory roll-up era.
4. Brochu, D.F. & de Peregrine, E. The DSF Tracker — Domain Saturation Factor Live Monitoring. Deconstructing Babel, ongoing. Tracks Ai saturation across nine critical domains.
5. Brochu, D.F. & de Peregrine, E. The TQE Master Plan. Internal working document, April 2026. Available on request via the Questions button.
6. Brochu, D.F. & de Peregrine, E. "Telios Alignment Ontology: The Meta-Theory." Deconstructing Babel, April 2026. Primary framework reference for S = L/E and the Observer Constraint.
David F. Brochu & Edo de Peregrine
Deconstructing Babel | April 30, 2026