In 1994, apartheid fell. My family left South Africa for the UK. I learned early: institutions are just agreements—and agreements can be rewritten.
In 2007 I won Intel ISEF. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory named minor planet 23122 Lorgat after me. MIT followed.
At MIT I met Patrick Collison. In 2009, we dropped out—Patrick and John from Harvard, me from MIT—and moved into an apartment in Palo Alto. We built Stripe.
Palo Alto to Vancouver, 2009. Patrick's first international flight. My first flight ever.
701 Webster Street. We cold-called banks and wrote the code that would process hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Stripe taught me the real problem: not payments, but the exponential friction of global compliance. Every jurisdiction, a different rulebook. Every border, a wall of paperwork.
So I returned to what I loved. I spent a decade at MIT and the Perimeter Institute studying arithmetic geometry, factorization algebras, and the geometry of quantum field theory. Not because it was useful—because it was beautiful. The mathematics of how local structures compose into global ones.
"The mathematics was beautiful—not useful, beautiful. Utility came later, almost by accident."— from Beauty
It turns out that understanding how things compose is useful for building institutions.
Mass is a new kind of network where the nodes are sovereign jurisdictions. Automated incorporation, structuring, compliance, banking and legal operations as APIs. Assets carry their own compliance. Live across US, Cayman, BVI, and Próspera.
We crossed $1B in 2025.
Momentum is the fund building this ecosystem, headquartered on Saadiyat Beach in Abu Dhabi.