Why I'm Building veradis

A note for the people who know me — about the thing I've decided to spend the next ten years on, and why it makes me happier than any decision I've made in a long time.

If you've known me a while, you've watched me do a lot of things. Thirty years in technology. A stretch in the army before that. Companies built, a company run, four children, a move across the world to a small town in Switzerland. So when I tell you I've started something new, you'd be forgiven for a small, loving eye-roll. Fair enough.

But this one is different, and I want to tell you why — plainly, and in a good mood, because I've rarely been this sure about a decision.

Start with a drawer.

Most families have one. A watch that belonged to someone. A medal in a box. A photograph of a face nobody can quite name anymore. We keep these things because they matter, even after the story behind them has gone quiet. My own pull toward this is old — a grandfather who served, a childhood spent around old forts and museums, a lifelong soft spot for the object that outlives the person. History you can actually hold in your hand.

Here's what changed.

In the last three years, AI became very, very good at making things up. It can produce a photograph, a document, a certificate that looks entirely real — in seconds, for almost nothing. That's dazzling. It also quietly broke something. The two oldest ways we knew a thing was genuine — our own eyes, and the paperwork — stopped being reliable at the same moment.

And I found that oddly hopeful. Because if almost anything can be faked, then the one thing that can't be becomes precious: the real record. The museum's ledger. The regiment's file. The maker's own book. The places a forger can't get into. Someone is going to gather those records into an honest index of what's real — connect them, and keep them — and I realised, with a clarity I don't often get, that this was the thing I'd spent my whole career getting ready to build without knowing it.

If anything can be faked, the thing that can't becomes the most valuable thing there is.

So I'm building it.

It's called veradis. The promise is small enough to fit on a coin: know it's real, know its story. You photograph an object, and we check it against real museum archives, maker records and public registries, and hand you back an honest answer — is it genuine — and then the part I love, the story: who made it, who carried it, where it has been.

And we connect the institutions that hold all of this — museums, archives, regiments — into one network, so a medal in one town can link to a war diary in another. The great national museum stops being the whole show and becomes an anchor for hundreds of small ones. Together they show something none of them could alone: the whole shape of a country's history, told through the things that survived it.

And it's already working.

This is the part that still makes me grin. It's real, and it's running. Our first museum — the Seaforth Highlanders, a regiment I served with — put their collection on it. Their records went from about forty percent complete to nearly eighty. And we surfaced dozens of objects connected to the Canadian War Museum and the Imperial War Museum that their own people had never seen.

Watching that graph light up for the first time — connections nobody had ever drawn, appearing between one collection and another — is one of the most satisfying things I've done in my working life. There are five institutions on it now, and it grows a little every week.

Why I'm telling you.

Two reasons, both happy ones. First, so you understand what I'm doing when I vanish into this — it isn't a whim, it's the plan for the next decade, and I'm all in. Second, because you can be part of it, and I'd love that.

The simplest thing, and the one I'd love most: go to verify.veradis.ai and check something you own — the watch, the medal, the painting your aunt swears is priceless. It costs less than lunch, and you might learn something wonderful about a thing you already treasure. If you'd like to help in bigger ways — an introduction, a museum you know, a good conversation — you know exactly where to find me. And if you just want to follow along, I write about the build most weeks.

To my family especially: thank you. You've made room for this, and for me, more times than I can count. This one is worth it.