B.E. Curt Doolittle
Serial Tech Entrepreneur, Angel Investor, Philosopher, Social Scientist, and Founder of The Natural Law Institute
Curt is a philosopher, social scientist, and polymath working in epistemology, logic, economics, and law, and serial technology entrepreneur. He founded the Natural Law Institute and the Propertarian Institute, and previously member of the Property and Freedom Society and the Mises Institute – both heterodox libertarian organizations emphasizing behavioral economics and its consequences.
In his career he was either Founder and CEO or a principle in a dozen technology companies largely based the greater Northwest ranging from 10M to 100M in revenue, and with offices and customers around the world – “I Build companies and sell them to pay for my intellectual habit without having to endure the insufferable politics of the academy.”
He has been married (and divorced) three times, having both children and stepchildren, and traveling extensively for business while living in Boston, Seattle, Ottawa, London, Moscow, Kiev, and L’viv – where as of 2012 he lived in Kiev Ukraine, having “… a front row seat to observe the struggle of the Ukrainian people to become a sovereign nation.” From 2017 he’s been living in the States, working on R&D at the institute full time and … taking care of his recently deceased mother.
Born in Connecticut, he was raised in idyllic rural Canandaigua New York. The family returned to Connecticut where he graduated from St. Francis Xavier – a private catholic school. He attended the University of Hartford, Studying Art Theory and History “Because art, architecture, and archeology is the optimum lens through which to appreciate the history of mankind”.
Career Highlights
Founder and CEO
Runcible Inc. · Full-time
Jan 2025 – Present · 1 yr 2 mos
Redmond, WA · On-site
• Founded Runcible, leading the development of the Runcible Governance Layer for AI.
• Designed governance architecture ensuring large-scale AI systems are warrantable and accountable.
• Developed formal grammars and verification procedures for reliable machine reasoning in critical sectors.
At Runcible, I lead the research, system design, and canonical corpus underlying the Runcible Governance Layer, integrating Natural Law, operational semantics, and evolutionary logic into a unified standard for AI alignment and institutional integrity.
I lead design of the governance and measurement architecture that makes large-scale AI systems warrantable, auditable, and accountable. My work centers on constructing a universal and computable method for decidability, testifiable truth, and reciprocity in machine reasoning. We translate first-principles epistemology into a computable governance layer that constrains LLMs to produce truthful, reciprocal, and liability-compatible outputs. This involves developing the formal grammars, logical closures, and verification procedures that allow AI to operate as a reliable source of decisions in high-stakes domains such as law, finance, defense, and healthcare
(Yeah. It’s rocket-science so to speak for AIs. 😉 )
Chairman and Founder
The Natural Law Institute · Part-time
Oct 2012 – Present · 13 yrs 5 mos
Kiev, Ukraine, Boston, MA USA
“It’s complicated” – I work in the completion of the scientific method, and the formal, operational, logic of decidability, applied to law, constitutions, policy, economics, and society. Or what amounts to a conversion of jurisprudence from a philosophy or ideology into a science. This is not something you understand easily. On average it is about the same as learning multiple STEM degrees. It takes about four to five years to understand it and it’s consequences. It’s not for dinner conversation. 😉
Skills: Public Policy · Natural Law · Philosophy Of Science · Political Economy
Founder and CEO
Reality By Chanting
Sep 2012 to Present · 13 yrs 6 mos
Seattle USA / London, United Kingdom / Kiev, Ukraine
At Reality by Chanting we produced a one-million-line universal application platform that obviated the need for multiple expensive management platforms. One platform could run everything from a small business to a government to a war effort. It’s incredible. But it needs an AI. And we finally have one in Runcible.
Origins: Around the time Microsoft failed with it’s Vista release, I’d understood the software theories of the eighties and nineties were insufficient for the long term direction of not only how organizations need to run at a more adaptive pace, but how they had to be managed with increased resolution and ‘culture as a business process’. I’d designed a platform for managing our business that was effectively a real time measure of our business – something that’s important when you have only a six to nine week window into revenue, and need to react on a dime. Worse, I grew the organization both organically and through acquisition of properties around the world. So I started to envision the unification of my theoretical work, with the direction of business operations, with a universal paradigm for management, and in anticipation of AI. What I’d assumed is we’d have to build our AI as an expert system as I’d done before, or as a machine learning system that was the limit at the time. But when the LLM paper came on the scene in 2017 we understood we needed to reorganize our work for that model, and we did.
Exit: Reality by Chanting Merged with Runcible Inc, 2025 largely to repatriate the assets back to the USA where funding was more viable than europe.
Angel Investor
Self-employed
Oct 2012 – Mar 2015 · 2 yrs 6 mos
Kiev, Ukraine
Mostly loans in the mid teens. Loved meeting people. But high time requirement to filter opportunities, and by the time the Maidan revolution got out of hand, I had my hands full between the institute, my political work in Ukraine, and my own company. Mostly loans in the mid teens. Loved meeting people. But high time requirement to filter opportunities, and by the time the Maidan revolution got out of hand, I had my hands full between the institute, my political work in Ukraine, and my own company.
Founder, CEO
Ascentium Corporation
2001 to Dec 2011 · 11 yrs
Bellevue, WA
($100M Revenues. Inc 500 3x.) Technology, Marketing – A digital agency and technology consultancy. I wanted to try an experimental kind of company and my partners and I agreed to try. We had the lowest employee turnover in the industry, the highest growth rates, the highest customer satisfaction, and built the biggest MSFT based privately held consultancy in America, before selling off the CRM business to Avanade, and Acquiring our way into the agency business.
I’ve lost count of how many acquisitions we did, but they did help, even though 80% of our growth was organic. My favorite deal though, was getting MSFT go give me Commerce Server and $20M to put life back into the product. It worked. We acquired the company that maintained the product, integrated them, and sold the product and staff to the leading CMS provider. This should mean that within a year or two the MSFT platform will be a viable product line again in the commercial space. 🙂
Exit: Ascentium was acquired in large part by Avanade because during the financial crisis we couldn’t borrow enough money to float the scale of projects we were winning (notably defense department).
Founder, CEO
Redmond Technology Partners
Jan 1995 to Jan 1997 · 2 yrs 1 mo
Bellevue, WA
($20M) I understood that the internet was moving faster and more profoundly than most companies could keep up with. Client Server would end, and the internet would become the one ring that would rule them all. I found an angel and started a niche services business. Grew rapidly. Especially in cellular and other technology companies.
Exit: Sold in ’97 to investors. Company remains a small but viable part of the Microsoft ecosystem.($20M)
Founder, CTO
Excell Data Corp
1991 – 1995 · 4 yrs
Bellevue WA
Started with 10 people, ended with an $80M company. It’s hard to do that. 🙂
If you were in Seattle during the rapid growth phase of Microsoft it was a matter of running around catching money in a laundry basket. Really. We anticipated the rapid expansion of the resourcing and project business and sold at just about the peak point in time – when we anticipated the end.
I bet on cycles. I understand them. It’s the benefit of studying the business cycle.
Exit: Excell Data was acquired by Cambridge Technology Partners and then by Compucom who operates it today.
CTO
Seminoff Legal Research
May 1990 – Jun 1992 · 2 yrs 2 mos
Bellevue WA
Designed and build advanced platform for data transformation, legal research, docket management, document (legal forms) production and management, filings with the courts and management of the court process. I continued my work with more of an expert system with dynamic code and dynamic state engines, which until the advent of LLMs has been a trademark of the hundreds of systems and processes I’ve designed.
Humor. To hire me, the president of the company showed up on my doorstep with a duffel bag of money, a set of house keys and two sets of car keys. And you know, at some point I had to say yes. ;)Designed and build advanced platform for data transformation, legal research, docket management, document (legal forms) production and management, filings with the courts and management of the court process. I continued my work with more of an expert system with dynamic code and dynamic state engines, which until the advent of LLMs has been a trademark of the hundreds of systems and processes I’ve designed. Humor. To hire me, the president of the company showed up on my doorstep with a duffel bag of money, a set of house keys and two sets of car keys. And you know, at some point I had to say yes. 😉
Consultant
The United States Justice Department
The District of Massachusetts
I was recruited by the Justice Department because of my work in computerizing legal proceedings. But I found the experience of working through the bureaucracy of the court demoralizing and intolerable rather quickly. In other words I felt it was unethical. So I resigned rather quickly, and thankfully due to multiple offers from the commercial sector.
Founder, CTO
The Coastland Group
Legal Research · Full-time
May 1988 – May 1990 · 2 yrs 1 mo
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Designed and built an enterprise management platform for legal research. This was the first significant Legal AI I developed. The truth? We went from dockets of 30 cases to 3000, were buying panasonic printers that were burning out, and hiring lawyers that limited dockets because they simply couldn’t read and process the documents that quickly. We made so much money were were buying one carat diamonds in bulk and just sticking them in a safe deposit box. ( I have some wonderful stories.)
At the time I didn’t know how innovative it was. Today we use numbered tokens as tags, and sentences as data structures. My work, beginning in around 1983, made use of phonemes as the equivalent of tokens, and before-during-after sequences of episodic memory consisting of collections of objects (location, place, object, condition), actions or changes, and after-change state of objects. If no advantage was obtained, after X time, the sequence was devalued, and after Y time deleted. Unfortunately, it would run out of memory too quickly to be practical. So like everyone else, I understood AI was limited by hardware. And the AI ‘winter’ continued.
Full Transparency
I have worked with US Intelligence in various consultative and field activities for many years in multiple countries. I am under contract effectively for life. That’s how these things work. Anything that is public I can speak of in vague terms, but much else I can’t, particularly my work in Russia and Ukraine. So please don’t ask. ;). Instead take it as an example of my inviolable patriotism for my our people, my country, and our civilization.
So I have an intellectual life, an intelligence life, an activist life, and a commercial life.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Megan Usui