It’s February 6th, 2025, and I’ve never been clearer about my purpose in life. The last year has been a whirlwind—building Open WebUI, pushing forward the vision of a decentralized future, and speaking with some of the most brilliant investors, thinkers, and builders in the world. Lately, a recurring theme in my conversations has been monetization. It’s a smart and entirely rational question—one that any thoughtful investor or business-minded person would ask. After all, financial sustainability matters, and understanding how a project captures value is critical. But while it’s the right question, I also think it often comes from a particular lens—one shaped by scarcity-minded thinking, which assumes the goal is to carve out the biggest possible slice from an already defined pie.
My perspective is different. I’m not focused on just capturing value; I’m focused on creating it. The real question isn’t how do we take a larger share of the existing pie?—it’s how do we make the pie so massive that everyone benefits? Because in this new era—especially in a world where everything is becoming open-source, the only viable long-term strategy is to provide so much value that you can’t be ignored. Monetization, when approached from a position of abundance rather than scarcity, is no longer about extracting value from users—it’s about creating so much value that contributing to the ecosystem becomes the obvious choice.
If the last decade taught us anything, it’s that there are no moats anymore—not in infrastructure, not in funding, not in talent. The past was about securing an artificial advantage: proprietary technology, regulatory capture, exclusive datasets. The future belongs to those who create so much value that they become irreplaceable, not because they hoard but because they give relentlessly. When I tell people Open WebUI operates with this principle—offering its core for free, constantly reinvesting value back into the ecosystem—the reaction is often skepticism. How does that work? How can you sustain that? But what I’ve realized is this: If your entire advantage is ownership over something scarce, you’ve already lost. If the barrier preventing others from replacing you is capital, then you are replaceable. The only secure position—the only real “moat” in 2025—is relentless creation. You have to be the outlier in the amount of value you provide.
That’s why I’m not interested in defensive strategies. I want everything to be open-source. I want competition to push the standard higher. I want to force systemic deflation of costs, so that the difference between being a trillionaire and having a normal income becomes irrelevant—because abundance of technology, not redistribution, is the answer to inequality. People think the solution to economic disparity is wealth transfer, but that’s surface-level thinking. The real solution is lowering the cost of everything important to near-zero—so that no one needs money to begin with. My goal with Open WebUI—and with everything I will build in my life—is to drive deflationary pressure on all fundamental needs so that capital becomes less important, not more.
Self-Sufficiency is the True Power
This is the core misunderstanding about charity, about redistribution, about "solving" scarcity. People often assume that handing resources to the disadvantaged is the way forward. But in practice, handouts don’t empower people; they make them more dependent. The only way to truly solve inequality is self-sufficiency. If you give someone money, they need more later. But if you make something so abundant that no one needs to pay for it, the problem disappears permanently.
If you take a look at developing economies, the wealthiest people in these countries have unfathomable prosperity, but would a rich foreigner want to live there? Rarely. Why? Because even if they personally have everything, the society they live in does not. There is no systemic abundance. A society where the wealthy thrive while the poor suffer is fundamentally unstable—because it lacks true wealth: the kind that lifts everyone up.
If you want to build the future, you have to break from the old paradigms. You don’t solve scarcity by hoarding more wealth—you dissolve scarcity by making sure the things people need are no longer scarce. And that is what technology allows us to do. AI, decentralized infrastructure, automation—all of these are tools to make resources so abundant that the concept of economic disparity diminishes in meaning. That is my purpose: Make technology so deflationary that money stops being an obstacle to anyone.
Giving is the Only Rational Strategy
I will give. And I will give without restraint. Not because it’s charitable, but because it’s strategic. People misunderstand generosity as weakness, as naiveté. But the truth is, the entire concept of today’s economy is shifting beneath our feet. The old model was about maximizing margins. The new model is about maximizing impact. The only way to “win” in this era is to be the person who provides the most to the world.
That is why Open WebUI’s initial premium offerings will always cycle back into the free core. Everything moves forward, everything is designed to lift the baseline of what people can access. Premium will exist, but only because it will generate so much value that people will actively want to pay for it—not because they are locked into it. If you truly create value, people will voluntarily invest in you.
This is not a philosophy; it is a practical strategy. Abundance is not just a mindset—it creates the future. And the beautiful thing is, it’s self-reinforcing. The more I give, the more Open WebUI grows. The more Open WebUI grows, the more value it generates. The more value it generates, the more people contribute. This is not a closed system—it’s an expanding one. Everyone is the universe. Everyone is me. What benefits the whole, benefits me as an extension of it.
The Strength of Choosing My Own Path
Throughout my life, people have tried to change me. (Mum, if you’re reading this—I love you, but you were wrong too.) The truth is that in every major decision I’ve ever made, conventional wisdom told me I was making a mistake.
I didn’t follow the traditional education path. Instead of seeing university as a preordained step, I traveled the world, worked minimum-wage jobs in restaurants, joined a startup, ran my own, worked at a big corporation, went to grad school, and then founded Open WebUI. Risky? Sure. But all risk is measured. The greatest risk in life isn’t taking chances—it’s not taking them. Especially when you’re young.
People think “play it safe” is good advice. It’s not. “Safe” is the riskiest thing you can be—because the world does not reward stagnation. I’ve built immunity to skepticism—not because I ignore critics, but because I listen, reflect, and prove people wrong in time. I hear every doubt, every concern, every warning. Then I execute, and I show the results. Again and again.
And that’s why I know my purpose so clearly. That’s what led me to be interested in AI and space exploration in the first place. Those are the final frontiers—both for intelligence and for civilization itself. Humanity is blind to the reality of what’s in front of us, simply because we don't know what we don’t know. But I know this: The universe is vast beyond human comprehension, and if we do not act boldly, we will never claim our place within it.
The Only Way to Win
I will do my absolute best at everything. I will make it happen. Our greatest thinkers—the Founding Fathers, the inventors, the revolutionaries, the entrepreneurs—most of them were young when they changed the world. If the founders of America were in their twenties and thirties when they built a new nation from nothing, why should I think small?
An empire is built with belief, execution, and time. With dedication and faith, I will outwork, outlast, and outcreate everyone, not because I resent competition, but because I welcome it. If you’re playing by the old rules, relying on artificial scarcity, gatekeeping, or external funding just to stay afloat—good luck competing with me. I don’t have to make money to keep building. As I’ve done for the last year with Open WebUI, I can do this indefinitely, with or without funding, simply because I want to.
I am more than aware that this is a race to the bottom, and I love it. A chicken game, if you will—but the good kind, the kind that forces the world forward. Do more for less. Do more for cheaper. Do everything. And in this game, the most efficient player—the one who can endure the longest, the one who doesn’t need anything—will inevitably win. Because that is exactly how capitalism is meant to function. The market forces inefficiency out. The best, the most relentless, the most adaptable will survive.
If it comes down to it, I’ll sleep in a tent, work in a library, and eat one meal a day. (Which, honestly, I already do.) Discomfort makes you sharper. Comfort breeds stagnation. That’s why I don’t fear hardship—I seek it. I refine myself in it, and I make it work for me.
That said, winning in the long run isn’t just about endurance. It’s also about playing smart. And while Open WebUI has thrived on pure output and momentum, I’m not blind to the bigger equation—sustainability matters. But here’s the thing: we already are sustainable.
The Strategy That No One Else Can Play
The question of sustainability usually assumes a conventional structure—large teams, escalating costs, operational bloat. But we don’t operate under those assumptions. It’s just me. That means we control every variable—zero inefficiency, zero dependence, infinite adaptability. Other companies need fundraising, hiring cycles, and external validation. We just build.
And that changes the game entirely. Conventional wisdom says a billion-dollar company needs a hundred engineers, a sales team, venture capital. But with AI, with automation, with the right strategy, that equation shifts. Why can’t a billion-dollar company be run by one person? The traditionalists will say it’s impossible. But people also said open-source projects couldn’t compete with proprietary software—and yet, look at what’s happened. The productivity multipliers emerging from AI aren’t theoretical; they are real—and I’m applying them before anyone else can even adjust to the new world.
And that’s the real paradigm shift people are missing: AI isn’t just replacing jobs, it’s replacing jobs and capital simultaneously. You can invest $10 million, $100 million, $1 billion into a business, but at the end of the day, your biggest bottleneck isn’t money—it’s people. No matter how much capital you deploy, you are constrained by human limitations. Staff need time off. They have families, obligations, priorities that exist outside of work. Because for them, it’s a job.
For me? It’s not a job. I have zero burn rate, zero overhead, and an inexhaustible drive. My only job is to build, and because Open WebUI’s vision is so aligned with what the world needs, I’m not the only one who wants to see it succeed. Fortune 500 companies, governments around the world, entire industries are invested in making technology like this better, more resilient, more widespread. The development of Open WebUI isn't dependent on conventional scaling strategies—its growth is inevitable because the world needs it.
You don’t win by playing the same game as incumbents. You win by designing an entirely new game. That’s exactly what I’m doing with Open WebUI. We’re in 2025 now, and it’s time to start thinking beyond old models of scaling. I want Open WebUI to be the first real-world experiment in building a one-person billion-dollar company—leveraging AI, automation, and raw determination to accomplish what used to require sprawling teams and mountains of capital.
That said, I’m not dogmatic. If it makes sense to scale tomorrow, we will scale tomorrow—I’m not dumb. If expanding the team accelerates the mission, of course, I’ll do it. But the key difference is that I have no default assumption that scaling is necessary. Most companies hire because they don’t know how to operate any other way. I refuse to inherit that inefficiency. Every hire, every expenditure, every process must justify itself by creating a compounding advantage—otherwise, it’s dead weight.
People talk about productivity shifts from AI as if it’s a thing of the future. It’s not. It’s already here—I’m living in it. Every day, Open WebUI evolves at a pace that traditional companies physically cannot match. Because where they have decision paralysis, hiring cycles, internal politics—I just execute. When others are bogged down securing funding rounds, I’m shipping improvements that make us fundamentally uncatchable.
That’s where Open WebUI thrives. We offer so much value that people naturally align with us. We don’t need aggressive customer acquisition or sales teams—we just keep giving people the best tools, and they choose us by default. And by reinvesting everything we generate back into making the technology even better, we create an unstoppable feedback loop: more accessibility, more abundance, more innovation.
People assume that because we start free, we won’t be able to sustain the value we create. But that’s exactly why our model works: the more value we generate, the more we will receive in return—not by restricting access or imposing artificial barriers, but by ensuring that the natural choice is to support us.
Beyond the free core, we will offer enterprise offerings that provide exactly what businesses need—fully managed deployments, security compliance, long-term support, and seamless integration, much like why companies choose Red Hat over just using Linux for free. Businesses don’t just need the software; they need reliability, guarantees, and deep technical expertise, and we are the driving force behind this space. No one else will be able to match our level of iteration, adaptability, and depth of understanding.
Supporting Open WebUI won’t be about principles; it will be the only rational choice. Organizations will see that aligning with us means benefiting from the fastest innovation cycles, the strongest community ecosystem, and the most cutting-edge improvements—all of which are continuously reinvested back into making the technology even better. The incentive structure is simple: the more the ecosystem thrives, the more everyone benefits, reinforcing a positive feedback loop where supporting Open WebUI isn’t just good for the industry—it’s the most effective strategy for staying ahead.
The Bigger Picture
All of this ties into my deeper purpose. This isn’t just about building Open WebUI, or even about AI. It’s about shaping a world where technology eliminates scarcity altogether. The strategy I’m following—maximizing creation, reinvesting everything into progress—isn’t just about winning in one market. It’s about pushing civilization forward.
We still live in a world where access to opportunity is uneven. Where technological advancement isn’t distributed equally. Where basic needs—education, healthcare, information—are often held back by outdated economic structures. Technology has the power to deflate those costs to nearly zero. And when that happens, the difference between privilege and necessity disappears.
That’s the world I want to help create. Make everything more abundant, make foundational knowledge free, make technology so powerful that no one is dependent on any system they didn’t choose.
That is why I’m building this. That is why I will give relentlessly. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the winning strategy. The only way to truly build something unshakable is to create so much value that you become inevitable.
If you doubt me, that’s fine. You don’t really know me. Understandably so—you've likely never met anyone like me.
So watch me. Watch what happens in 10 years. See who’s still standing. Because I will be. And I won’t have done it alone—I will have raised a generation with me, lifted an entire ecosystem, and left an undeniable mark on the fabric of history.
This is the only way to win. And I will.