Uh, “shareholder” is code for anyone reading this.

Introduction⌗

In some circles, it is traditional to write an annual end-of-year letter from business leadership to a wider audience. The letter will usually cover an organization’s past year and shares an outlook for the upcoming one. It’s typically addressed to shareholders, especially if it’s a public company CEO writing it.

(I am not a CEO of a public company)

But I’d still like to share a letter about a company. A company I work at, Wayspire LLC. Led by Lucas von Hollen (famously, the Techno Wizard of Tallahassee) and myself (famously, not a wizard), we’re a “private diversified technology holding firm.” That translates to a small organization housing diverse ventures & brands and their associated products. We’ve been around for a little over five years, but you won’t find much about us out in the wild. That’s purposeful on our part. We want the focus on our brands and products, not the corporate HQ where they sit.

This letter will continue that tradition and focus on our brands: Arcvale (game studio), Lenetic Labs (R&D), and Sitebolts (client services). These divisions have very diverse technology concentrations, audiences, and priorities but share a common thesis:

- we can create a robust and scalable intellectual property advantage by cultivating a diversified portfolio of technology and brand assets.

Basically, we believe that great ideas are the most valuable things out there, and we want to increase the number of great ideas we can work on. We extend this with the philosophy that these ideas emerge from mixing different kinds of expert perspectives and fresh eyes. That’s the high-level view.

Portfolio⌗

We’ll start with our most well-known brand, Arcvale. As I mentioned above, it’s a studio focused on the creative application of emerging technologies. This translates to game development, simulation research, and a bunch of other applications in mixed reality, cloud, AI, and more. The studio is extremely education-oriented, prioritizing community growth and learning experiences. In 2024, this impact was evident in the growth of our Discord community, the quantity (and consistency) of our workshops, and our IRL events.

From a shipping perspective, we published our long-awaited word game, Lexicon! Available on Android and (soon) on iOS, it’s a construction puzzle game, sort of like Tetris meets Scrabble. You can construct words up to 8 letters long, with longer ones worth more points. We also wrapped up the wider roll out of the virtual reality simulation we developed with March Labs at FSU’s Psychology Department, with hundreds of participants going through the simulation after a year of testing. We continued operating our publicly available training tool, DrawDrills, which is set for major updates (new interface & slew of features) in 2025. We are also gearing up to ship another educational virtual reality project to stores in 2025!

On the other hand, from the community side, we currently have nearly 200 members in our Discord and hosted over 20 online and IRL workshops on topics like technology commercialization, the history of the internet, game design, and much more. Our community projects continue to integrate students, industry professionals, and enthusiasts, creating a wide studio network to help folks learn, pivot, and grow in both their professional and personal lives. Our goals for next year continue to revolve around this community, aiming to expand our series of in-person events, broaden the reach of our remote ones, and continue to add to our community & network.

The next brand is Lenetic Labs. This group is focused on hardware R&D, additive manufacturing, and rapid prototyping — real skunk works stuff. Due to the nature of this work, Lenetic Labs has priorities with much longer time horizons than the other sides of the business. Progress here is tracked in terms of the development of intellectual property and moon-shot research collaborations (“our plans are measured in centuries”). For this group, 2024 saw…intermittent progress. Some projects are confidential, so we can’t disclose details, but in 2024, the portfolio includes two major hardware rapid prototyping projects based on our schematics and designs from previous work. Both of these have required CAD work, additive manufacturing, and even several rounds of machining. Unfortunately, these major efforts were very spiky (a lot of work followed by lulls) and all required extended timelines. This work is research-oriented and, as such, is at the whims of both genius and bureaucracy. With that said, we anticipate the final implementation of both prototypes to be done in the first quarter of next year. The goals for this division are essentially to increase the overall number of projects started and finished by this group and to publish at least one of the projects once NDAs have been cleared.

Finally, we have Sitebolts, the most buttoned-up of our brands. It is a technology consulting firm focused on web development, cloud technologies, and data science. Our clients are mostly in the TMT, public, and government sectors. This division is more commercially oriented and generates cash flow from retainer-based engagements and traditional development and advisory projects. The team’s philosophy revolves around becoming a true technology partner for our clients, capable of not just advising on strategy but rolling up our sleeves and implementing it.

Our retainer model focuses on site reliability & security, emphasizing resilient architectures and consistent uptime for sites, applications, and enterprise systems. This recurring revenue stream now accounts for about half of the division’s overall revenue. The other half comes from green-field project work, with web design & development, application development, and technology strategy as common service areas. Notable achievements include launching our redesigned brand and website, delivering over 25 websites for XL Technologies, scaling Privity’s mobile generative AI application from prototype to serving hundreds of users on iOS and Android, and maintaining Florida Politics’ infrastructure during an intense election season.

However, arguably the most impressive achievement for this division was a ~33% decrease in costs compared to last year, reflecting more efficient client service delivery, optimized architecture for our managed infrastructure, and generally higher budgeting discipline when it comes to projects. With all that progress, the 2025 goals are quite ambitious. Due to the more mature commercial nature of this brand, we are pouring fuel on the fire of growth, so to speak, and aiming to increase that monthly recurring revenue by at least 25% to become a larger share of our cash flow while matching this year’s level of decreased costs (I concede that growing revenue while cutting costs is, uh, an ambitious target). However, this push for a particular type of growth is strategic to increase stability in our cash flow and smooth out the inherently spiky nature of project-based revenue. The tactics behind this strategic goal are three-fold:

- Materially increase our content marketing.
- Continue to optimize our digital assets and infrastructure costs.
- Roll out an updated pricing plan for retainer and greenfield projects.

The first two are extensions of work that started earlier, with the fruits of that labor beginning to show in our statements. Our content marketing push began in late Q2, with the launch of our new brand, website, and accompanying blog. We’ve posted a case study or deep dive monthly and aim to double this cadence in 2025. On the other hand, our optimization on the infrastructure side has been ongoing since this group’s inception. The core members of the team have researched all major (and minor) underlying infrastructure providers and run several benchmarks to discover how they compare across the metrics and dimensions that are crucial for our clients’ environments. This led to several strategic architectural shifts and decisions that have been rolled out across a significant portion of our existing portfolio, with the remainder slated for 2025. Those effects should continue to be reflected in our 2025 numbers.

Details on the third point, the pricing plan, will be rolled out soon, but the theme has been to “productize” as much of our offerings as possible. This has resulted in 3-pronged approach:

  • Retainer-based: monthly site reliability and hosting plans, starting with plans as low as $250.00 a month, all the way to an enterprise tier that starts at $2,000.00 a month.

  • Project-based: work with a defined scope and deliverables with a dedicated project team. This continues to be an area with custom pricing, so the “productization” shift has come from standardizing our engagement processes and aiming for high-margin work in more specialized sectors (TMT, public, and government).

  • “Fractional CTO”: Due to increased demand for comprehensive strategic expertise from both early-stage and more mature organizations, we’ve decided to standardize partnerships of this scale as retainers with minimum commitment terms of at least 3 months, starting at $7,000.00 per quarter.

By meeting the diverse scales of our client pool at these different points of engagement, we can standardize our work and cash flow as much as possible while continuing to provide excellent services that match our clients’ use cases at any point in their journey.

Conclusion⌗

That was a lot of numbers. I imagine most of the people who started reading this already dropped off, so I won’t push it much farther. However, I’d like to conclude this letter on a less quantitative note. After all, this is probably the most comprehensive public look we’ve ever given into the Wayspire multiverse. There should be more story and not just numbers.

Why is it around? To be completely transparent, it wasn’t meticulously planned ahead of time. The original corporate vehicle was registered to house a collection of random projects that a certain Techno Wizard was working on at the time. It did not have a very well-thought-out strategy or anticipated lifespan. This is highlighted by the fact that in the early days, we were all working full-time jobs and coming together in our off-hours to work on various projects, like a group of friends jamming together. We’d work on games, or apps, or even musical compositions, but the idea was essentially a group of friends working on things they enjoy. However, as things tend to do, some projects grew to be more successful than others and required more identity and coordination. Hence, the birth of the house of brands. The three that remain today are the ones that survived the culling process of time. This has taken a little over five years, with the goal always being, “How can we keep doing this kind of stuff for longer and longer?”

Over time, what emerged was a central belief in technology and how it can be developed, along with a wide network of partners, researchers, consultants, (and friends) that could be mobilized as required. We continue to “jam” on internal projects that excite us, but as the business has grown, we’ve staffed dedicated teams for our client projects, working with clients from early-stage startups to large multinationals and everything in between. Basically, this hasn’t been a typical corporate origin story, which means there’s no typical structure or precedent to learn from. Our jam sessions became something that was sort of an agency, sort of a game studio, sort of a startup, and also sort of none of the above. There was no rule book, so we figured out the best way to continue our unique experiment and write some new rules along the way. We plan to keep doing more of the same in 2025 and hope you’ll join us, whether at an IRL event or on Discord.

Diego

Principal Wayspire LLC | Arcvale | Sitebolts | Lenetic Labs

Themes & Observations⌗

In 2024, I observed the following themes in the market and our own orgs:

  • AI is hot, but most of the world still just needs server updates: basically, while we certainly got our fair share of work in the generative space, most organizations are still trying to catch up to the previous eras (mobile and cloud). People still need well-designed websites, database migrations, infrastructure modernization, and site reliability, not just chatbots. There’s still plenty of work to be done in more traditional technology spaces, even with LLMs and agents sucking the oxygen out of the room.

  • Processes and systems must always prioritize people: amidst our battles to manage internal and external projects with greater efficiency, as well as the challenges our clients encounter with new systems, we continue to observe that throwing more SaaS and AI tools at management dilemmas will never be enough. If your team isn’t fully embracing and utilizing these tools, the efficiency gains they promise will never materialize. In most organizations, this adoption should genuinely be bottoms-up. With that said, we have found success with Linear for corporate-wide task tracking, GitHub and Discord for the usual comms and version control, and have rolled out our own custom internal monitoring and alerting tools (cleverly dubbed ‘Sitebolts Monitor’).

  • Open-source is at a crossroads: it’s vibes-based, but a lot of trends feel like they’ve come to a head in 2024. The WordPress saga (conveniently covered here), the battle to define “open-source” LLM models, the metamorphosis of non-profits to profits, and so many different lawsuits on intellectual property & training data all point to a feeling that we’re at a precipice, that perhaps certain long-held paradigms & social contracts are shifting. While I can’t offer certain predictions, something tells me next year will birth new governance types, new precedents, and some very weird public-private things.

  • ‘GPT wrappers’ are cool, actually: at the start of the generative AI era (let’s say the release of ChatGPT a couple of years ago), a common observation was that the advantage lay in the underlying large language models and hardware. The second part of that observation was that the disadvantage was in the application layer, and the derogatory “just a wrapper on OpenAI” got tossed around. This past year has shown evidence that it might be the other way around. As the models have undergone a “commoditization” effect from the intense competition at the hyper scalers and research labs, there’s been more development happening from the application perspective. In the enterprise and startups, vertical applications using the underlying models (almost interchangeably) have become both valuable and (dare I say) useful. I think 2025 will be the year of the first couple majority adopted non-chatbot LLM-based applications.