Hi, I'm Prince.
Lately I've been doing graduate fellowship in Applied Quant at Columbia University, where I think a lot about self-improving AI, quant finance, and how technology can lower barriers for early-stage builders to achieve sustainable abundance through industry.
While at this, I'm building in New York City — think , but for market access and distribution.
GTM infrastructure that learns how markets open
Trade is what makes us human. Adam Smith argues in the “Wealth of Nations” that humans have an “innate propensity to truck, barter, and exchange”; a propensity that only humans have, and essentially the greatest force behind human economic progress. Much of human history can be understood through our attempts to make that exchange easier. We built ports to connect distant places, railways to move goods across land, banks to move capital, and eventually the internet to connect people and businesses across the world. Each generation has built new infrastructure to make exchange easier. We think we are entering another such moment.
Machines are becoming remarkably capable of navigating information. They can search across enormous bodies of knowledge, make sense of unfamiliar subjects, recognize relationships, and increasingly carry work forward on their own. Yet much of the information businesses need remains difficult to work with. It is scattered across different platforms, databases, communities, and systems, each with its own way of organizing and exposing information. This creates a particular distribution problem.
The challenge is rarely just finding out that a market exists. A business needs to understand who matters within it, where its customers gather, which organizations shape it, and how a path into that market might actually be opened for distribution. Much of that knowledge exists somewhere, but accessing it, connecting it, and turning it into useful intent signals can still require a great deal of manual work.
Havana exists to build the Community GTM infrastructure that learns how markets open. We're giving businesses a simple way to work with fragmented information about the markets they want to enter and turn it into a clearer path forward. Havana is capable of bringing structured signal, intent data, contact data, and firmographics from the most unreachable, hard to access communities on the internet into a unified, programmable layer, then uses powerful GTM agents to investigate and derive what matters within it.
The scale of the underlying information matters. A market can contain thousands of people and organizations, yet only a handful may be relevant to a particular business. Businesses should be able to move from the breadth of a market to the high-value prospects that actually matter such as the community leader who can open a door, the organization that reaches the right audience, or the distribution path that is worth pursuing.
From there, the system can help carry the work forward. It can research a prospect, enrich what is known about them, suggest how to approach them, and support the execution of a campaign or activation. What happens next becomes another source of information. That creates the part of Havana we find most interesting which is the possibility of a system that learns from market entry itself. Every attempt reveals something about the fabric of a market. Over time, those lessons make the next entry less dependent on starting from scratch.
We are inspired by the people who spend their lives trying to understand how the world fits together. Designers study how people interact with systems. Geographers study how places shape human behavior. Archaeologists reconstruct civilizations from fragments left behind. Each offers a different way of seeing connections that are easy to miss when looking at the world one piece at a time.
This is also part of the thinking behind our name. Havana became a major gateway for global trade because of where it sat. Its geography connected routes between continents and made it a critical point through which people and goods moved. It became known as “the key to the new world”.
That idea of a gateway is important to us for human capability as machines become more capable, and we think we can use AI to help make it possible to understand a market, see the relationships within it, identify the paths through which products can spread, and help a business take those paths easily, quickly and smartly.
This is hard. But the pieces are finally coming together, and we think there has never been a better time to build it.
Clay solves the fragmented data problem for B2B growth teams. It brings together the data, enrichment, research, and outreach tools businesses need to identify and reach potential customers. But knowing where customers are is only the beginning of entering a market. Businesses still have to understand the market, find the communities and people that can give them access, build relationships, choose the right distribution channels, execute their strategy, and learn what works.
Havana is building the GTM infrastructure that learns how markets open. We want to make market entry and distribution programmable by mapping the paths into a market, helping businesses execute those paths, measuring what happens, and learning from every market they enter to make the next one possible.