Our mission: ensure the economic opportunity AI creates is open to anyone willing to build.

AI is concentrating economic power fast. We believe the best check on that is more people make things that matter, not fewer. When founders can build and scale with less overhead, opportunity spreads instead of accumulating at the top.

How We Work

We study founders building with human-agent teams, so we've built the foundation the same way. An agent takes the first pass at nearly everything we do, research, data work, drafting, even running the institute itself, instead of bolting AI onto processes built for people alone.

In practice
Agent-first by default
Every task starts with an agent attempt. A person picks it up when the output needs judgment rather than more effort, not because a human was always going to do it.
Designed for agents, not retrofitted
Our workflows, data, and tooling are built so an agent can carry a task end to end. Where that fails, we change the process before we add people back to it.
Humans own the conclusions
Agents draft and analyze; directors decide. No finding is published on an agent's say-so, and everything we publish has a named person accountable for it.
The record gets published
Checkpoints report what actually happened: which agents did what, how much was agent-driven versus manual, and where it broke. Our operations are a data source, not a marketing claim.

Leadership

Open Frontiers Foundation is governed by a board comprised of operators who have built and exited companies at the center of how work gets done. That experience sets the agenda. It does not set the conclusions.

Trent Bigelow
Trent Bigelow
Director

Co-founder and former CEO of Abound (acquired by NYSE: BILL). He also advises New Zealand's entrepreneurship agency (NZTE) and serves on the board of Code for America, vantage points that keep him close to how entrepreneurship is evolving right now.

Alexander Cram
Alexander Cram
Director

Co-founder and former CTO of Abound (acquired by NYSE: BILL); a platform built for the rise of independent work and its compliance demands. He brings that firsthand experience to the next shift in work: human-agent teams.

Rebecca Carr
Rebecca Carr
Director

CEO of SmartRecruiters (acquired by NYSE: SAP). Having led a company at the center of how organizations build teams, Rebecca brings an expert perspective on what changes when AI agents join the workforce.

Independent Governance

We believe honest, operator-grounded research requires freedom from financial skin in the game. These are the structural constraints we've adopted from day one to protect that.

Commitments
Self-funded
Open Frontiers Foundation accepts no external funding, grants, or institutional capital. All operating costs are borne by the founding board. This is a structural constraint, not a posture.
No portfolio
No board member holds an investment position in any company that could benefit from our research conclusions. This will be reviewed annually, with no exceptions sought or granted.
No client relationships
We do not produce research for hire, accept sponsored content, or take consulting engagements. If a conclusion is inconvenient, it gets published anyway.
No financial interest in any conclusion
Board members receive no compensation. No royalties, no speaking fees derived from our research, no financial upside tied to any finding.

Building human-agent teams?

If you're an operator navigating this shift firsthand, get in touch to participate in our 2026 research cycle.

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