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

Introduction⌗

We doubled our income in 2025. That sounds like good news. It was. It also nearly broke our systems.

Last year, I wrote the indie equivalent of a public company’s end-of-year letter to shareholders, made famous by a certain Oracle over in Omaha. For those new to the Lucas-verse, Wayspire is a “private diversified technology holding firm,” led by Lucas von Hollen (famously, the Techno Wizard of Tallahassee) and myself (still not a wizard, still not CEO of a public company). Our portfolio consists of 3 main tentpole brands: Arcvale (game studio), Lenetic Labs (R&D), and Sitebolts (enterprise tech).

This year’s letter is about scaling, which is another way of saying what happens when growth arrives faster than your systems can handle it. We recorded our highest earnings, expanded our developer pool significantly, and published multiple products across the portfolio. We also had weeks where I genuinely wanted to bash my head against the wall. Scaling from a handful of developers to 6 squads means scaling complexity faster than revenue. We survived it (and consequently, I developed an obsession around resource allocation and bandwidth).

The thesis from last year still holds: great ideas are the most valuable things out there, and we want to increase the number of great ideas we can work on. But 2025 taught us something about how that actually works at scale.

Portfolio⌗

Before diving into 2025, let me revisit what I said we’d do.

Goal: Productize our services work. We struck digital ground on two platforms (Sitebolts Workflow Automation, Echelon Pulse). Grade: B+. The platforms exist; none have hit sustainable MRR yet. Shipping is the easy part.
Goal: Shift toward recurring revenue. Retainers now comprise over 50% of Sitebolts revenue. Grade: A. This was the most important structural change we made.
Goal: Roll out Lexicon on iOS. Done, with 500+ downloads since Q2 launch. Grade: B. The app works; the commercial model doesn’t yet

On with the deep dive.

Arcvale

Arcvale is a studio focused on the creative application of emerging technologies (and our most well known brand). The studio exists to build capability and community, not (necessarily) profit. When I say “diversified portfolio,” I mean it structurally: Sitebolts funds the ability for Arcvale to take long-horizon bets. The mission, “making universal leaps in learning and expanding technology” (aka MULLET), is educational and communal, not commercial. If that changes someday, great. If it doesn’t, the studio still serves its purpose.

Lexicon hit iOS in Q2 after last year’s Android release. With 500+ downloads and no marketing, the game is in the “learning, not earning” phase aka testing mechanics, gathering feedback, and deepening our understanding of what players actually want. The game follows intuitive construction mechanics up to 8 letters, with longer words worth more points across various modes. It works. Whether it has commercial legs remains unproven.

The VR simulation we developed with March Labs at FSU’s Psychology Department saw significant expansion after some bureaucratic delays in research funding (a story for another time). More subjects used it than the previous year, with multiple hundreds going through by our last count. The additions expanded the research reach, which is the actual goal.

DrawDrills, our publicly available training tool for artists, continued to operate in 2025 with major features deployed including digital drawing pads, a tagging system, and new user interfaces.

On the community side—and this is where Arcvale actually delivers value:

We became official community partners with Florida State’s Innovation Hub, holding workshops, demos, and in-person events throughout 2025. This gave us credibility and wall space. It also committed us to workshops we sometimes scrambled to prepare the night before. The accountability was good for us.
The Discord community hit 200+ members, with projects blending students, industry experts, and our wider studio network.
This network publicly demo’d a new game called Bridge Weaver, which won second place at the Innovation Hub’s project showcase.

2026 Goals: More in-person events (we’re committing to a regular cadence, not ad-hoc scrambles), Bridge Weaver to app stores, and continued network expansion across academia and industry. I’m not setting revenue targets for Arcvale because that’s not what it’s optimizing for.

Lenetic Labs

Next up is Lenetic Labs. This brand handles atoms, not bits: hardware R&D, additive manufacturing, and rapid prototyping. The skunk works side of the business. As we often say, this division has “plans measured in centuries” (which is either visionary or delusional depending on your tolerance for long time horizons.)

The aim is to build intellectual property with research partnerships at the initial legs of commercialization. In plain terms, these are the moonshots. 2025 continued last year’s theme: intense effort bursts interrupted by bureaucratic slowness. Research partnerships move at institutional speed, which means we control effort but not timeline. What moved forward:

- Our established partnerships with University of Florida labs in rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing continued, though "continued" undersells the grant cycles and approval processes involved.
- We married this research work to commercially-ready applications: NFC-enabled identity systems and hardware monitoring for corporate clients.

I should be honest that “commercially ready” means “ready for pilot deployments,” not “generating meaningful revenue.” The identity systems work. The monitoring hardware works. Whether clients will pay what it costs to deliver them remains the 2026 question.

2026 Goals: Commercial release of these systems as they transition out of R&D, and launch of our public website making the non-NDA portions of this division’s work visible. I’d also like to report actual revenue from this division next year, not just R&D progress.

Sitebolts

Then, there’s Sitebolts. While the other sides of the business saw significant progress and milestones, it led the pack (and caused the most chaos.)

With a focus on enterprise technology (aka the final leg of the commercial journey), the key driver of growth here was shifting from a pure services consulting model to “product-enabled” services. This is consulting-speak for “we stopped selling only projects and started selling platforms that generate recurring revenue.” Many agencies attempt this transition. Most fail. We haven’t failed yet, but the jury’s still out on whether we’ve succeeded.

Why this matters: Pure services revenue is spiky and fragile. You’re only as good as your next project sale. This makes pure services too volatile as the portfolio’s commercial engine.

The shift to recurring revenue:

Retainers now comprise a little over half of the division’s revenue. These focus on technology operations: resilient architectures, consistent uptime, compliance-focused systems. Clients pay monthly; we deliver ongoing value. This stream smooths the spikiness.

The remaining revenue diversified into two areas:

- Advisory services: Technical due diligence and greenfield development. This is still project-based but higher-margin and shorter-cycle than implementation work.
- Proprietary platforms and partner products:
    - Sitebolts Monitor & Hardened CMS Server Images
    - Sitebolts Workflow Automation Platform
    - Echelon Pulse (developed via strategic partnership)

The shift included strategic revenue share partnerships with folks like Echelon, where we collaborated on go-to-market offerings and developed a proprietary business intelligence platform (aka Echelon Pulse), diversifying the revenue model further. “Strategic partnership” sounds clean; the reality involved learning a lot about how to maneuver different sales cycles.

What we published:

This year we wrote ~10 long-form pieces on the Sitebolts blog. Rather than list all 10, let me highlight the through-line: “the geopolitics of code.”

The argument across these pieces: technical decisions are increasingly supply chain decisions. Every npm install is a procurement act, and most organizations aren’t treating it that way.

Start with The WordPress Saga for governance failures in open-source. Then The Visible Hand for how supply chain realities hit technical teams. Then EuroStack for one jurisdiction’s sovereignty response. The Great Refactor covers why Rust adoption in critical infrastructure matters. DeepSeek examines what Chinese AI labs mean for the competitive landscape.

This isn’t just content marketing. It’s how we think about where the industry is going and it directly informs how we advise clients on technical architecture and vendor selection.

Operational infrastructure we built:

The growth forced us to systematize

We developed the team’s knowledge base: onboarding guides, development standards, methodology documentation, tooling specs across our dev pods.
We implemented project and dev management frameworks so teams speak the same language (communication standards, estimation frameworks, and of course, Linear for task tracking.)
We rolled out a profit-sharing framework to align incentives. This is heterodox; most shops pay flat salaries and capture margin at the top. We think sharing upside produces better work.

2026 Goals:

Bring the automation platform to wider market (beyond current pilot clients)
Scale Echelon Pulse out of private beta to 5-figure MRR (a meaningful multiple of current state).
Make recurring revenue the majority of overall division revenue (it’s currently half of Sitebolts revenue; I want it majority of Wayspire revenue)

By the Numbers⌗

Let me give you the quantitative picture with honest context:

Income: We roughly doubled 2024’s annual income, crossing into the mid-six figures. This is our highest year as a company.

Margins: We hovered around 50% gross profit margins, which is respectable for a services-heavy business, though margins compressed during skewed utilization project periods. Net profit margins landed around 10%, which reflects the investment in team expansion.

Team scale: At peak, we ran 6 squads of 4-5 developers. Average utilization was lower than peak, which is part of why margins compressed. We learned that our pod model works best when we have 90-day visibility on project pipeline; anything less and we’re either understaffed or overstaffed.

Infrastructure costs: Maintained optimized infrastructure costs from 2024 with no material increases. This is one area where prior investment in automation paid off.

What the numbers mean: We’re in the middle of “the valley of death” for SMBs: too big to operate informally, too small to absorb inefficiency and chaos. Revenue doubled, but so did complexity.

What got us here will not get us to the next stage: While this brings problems, we’ve found our success this year came from surfing the wave of chaos and developing “chaordic systems” (shoutout to Dee Hock for those who know ball)

On Chaordic Systems⌗

I mentioned Dee Hock earlier. Let me actually explain what I mean, because it’s central to how we’re trying to operate.

Hock founded Visa and wrote extensively about organizational design. His insight: Visa succeeded because it was neither purely hierarchical (ordered) nor purely decentralized (chaotic). It was both, “chaordic”, with clear boundaries that enabled autonomous action (naming things was uh perhaps not his strength)

Here’s how this manifests at Wayspire:

The chaos: Temporal flexibility. When a project needs a pivot in scope, we accommodate without 6 weeks of change-order bureaucracy. Squads operate semi-autonomously; leads make tactical decisions without escalating to me or Lucas. We deliberately avoid the process bloat that makes larger firms slow.
The order: Infrastructure standards. Shared codebases. Common methodology. Onboarding documentation that means new developers contribute within a week, not a month. Clear financial reporting so I know margin position in real-time, not quarterly.
The boundary: Squads have autonomy within standards. You can architect a solution however you want if it meets our security and maintainability requirements. You can staff a project however makes sense if you’re hitting margin targets.

When we onboard new developers, the order meant they aren’t flailing. When a client’s scope changes mid-project, the chaos meant we don’t lose the account. When the outside world goes haywire (is 2025 not the epitome of that?), the real-time financial visibility (order) let us make fast decisions (chaos) about which bets to accelerate.

This isn’t a management philosophy I’m preaching, it’s a description of what I think we’re actually doing (imperfectly). The 2025 stress-test suggested the model works. 2026 will test whether it scales further.

Conclusion⌗

Last year I told the origin story—Lucas at mach 5, friends jamming on Discord, accidental corporation. I won’t repeat it.

Here’s what’s different now: In 2024, we were still figuring out if this thing had legs. In 2025, we learned it does, but uh maybe they’re different legs than we expected.

The jam session model doesn’t scale past a certain point. We had to introduce structure without killing the spirit. That’s the actual story of 2025: learning to be chaordic on purpose rather than chaotic by accident.

Scale brings problems and milestone moments. We’ve continued to uphold our belief in developing technology with humanistic perspectives while stewarding this network of partners, researchers, consultants, (and friends). We still don’t fit into a neat label (sort of an agency, sort of a game studio, sort of an R&D lab, sort of none of the above).

My mind is pessimistic: I see the operational gaps, the margin pressure, the competitive threats, the dozen ways this could fall apart. My will is optimistic: we’ve built something real, with people I trust, doing work that matters.

In 2026, we plan to keep growing while balancing on that knife’s edge. I hope you’ll join us, IRL or on the Internet.

Diego

Principal Wayspire LLC | Arcvale | Sitebolts | Lenetic Labs

Appendix: Full Blog Post List (2025)⌗

For completeness, here’s everything we published:

The WordPress Saga - Exploring the implications of the ongoing WordPress conflict
What is RAG? - A practical guide to Retrieval Augmented Generation
Sitebolts Link Roundup - Tools and work highlights
DeepSeek AI: A Deep Dive - The true impact of DeepSeek’s release
Conway’s Law in Practice - How org structure shapes products
The Visible Hand - When digital supply chains meet geopolitical reality
The Visible Hand Part II - The sequel
WTF is still going on with WordPress - Revisiting the conflict
EuroStack - Europe’s digital sovereignty initiative
The Great Refactor - Securing critical open-source code
2025 Predictions - Predictions for next year