I should be honest about what Switchboard actually is.
One person built it. Me.
Switchboard routes AI requests, meters usage, handles billing, manages keys, enforces spend controls, and reports analytics. Each of those would normally be its own team, its own roadmap, its own year. I built all of them in a few months with modern agentic engineering tools.
That still catches me off guard, and it isn’t really about me. It’s about what the tools can do in one person’s hands.
The next phase will need a few more people. A handful, not a department. That’s the part worth sitting with. If one person can build what used to take fifty, the ground has shifted under all of us, and a system built for the old math is going to need rethinking.
So I want to propose something.
I’m not telling you this to brag. I’m telling you because Valni represents where the future is going, and it’s already here. It’s the thing I’ve been trying to convey to anyone and everyone for a while now. This tech is far stronger and better than anyone realizes. I know because this is Valni’s origin story. But this isn’t about the origin story of Valni. This is the origin story of something called usership, and its place as the corporate structure of the future.
I predict that usership becomes the new method of economic participation, one with the potential to rebalance and fix structural inequalities. Companies will no longer need laborers to do anything, because AI will be able to do it. Companies also won’t need your dollar to grow. What they will need is you, the user, to use their product. Plainly, usership is the transfer of wealth, and power, back into the hands of the people, the users. This stands in contrast to the current structure, which is built to provide shareholders with wealth. And these shareholders, unsurprisingly, are not aligned with the interests of the company’s users.
Valni is committed to being a user-owned tech company, similar to a credit union or a food co-op. The legal details are TBD, but the intent is clear, this company is for the users. Every product will be built and priced in a way that returns money and power back to the user. And any surplus will provide benefits to the users.