Most systems drift toward extraction, entropy, and burnout. We are a design studio that builds the opposite: virtuous cycles in code, community, and capital that compound — a flywheel that lifts everything it touches.
Colored strokes are the disciplines we bring. Black balls are the 8 forms of capital those disciplines lift. Tap to stir the storm; hover to read what's traveling up.
Each one is a self-reinforcing loop — a flywheel where every rotation makes the next rotation easier.
Turning open source from a thankless public good into a flywheel: donors give → matching pool amplifies → builders get paid → the ecosystem attracts more donors. $60M+ in matched grants and counting. As of 2025, Kevin has returned to Gitcoin to reboot it — what does it mean to Fund What Matters in 2027–2045? The next era is a bold evolution of this mission.
A book, a podcast, a network. The thesis: how technology can regenerate the world
The un-conferences where you find your people. Trust compounds offline, then ships online.
A cooperative workspace for builders and changemakers.
A worldwide network of engineering leaders who break bread together. Builders eat → trade hard-won advice → help each other hire and ship → bring the next CTO to the table. Free since 2014.
We work with founders, DAOs, and foundations who have a virtuous loop hiding inside their org chart — and need the software, mechanism design, and narrative to turn it on.
Three lenses we hold at once. Each one teaches us something the others can't.
Through Ethereum,we understand hardness.
Credible neutrality, verifiable commitments, and systems that hold under adversarial pressure.
Through AI,we understand intelligence.
How loops learn, what machines can do for people, and where human judgment still has to sit.
Through our track record,we understand momentum.
A decade of flywheels built — we know what spins, what stalls, and how to get the next rotation cheaper than the last.
And one value function we hold across all three: syntropic, not extropian. New capacity comes from integration, not throughput. The AI transition succeeds when it produces emergent local capacity — not when it produces more aggregate compute.
Upward spirals increase agency, trust, resilience, and shared capacity.
We work in the lineage of syntropy — Fuller, Bateson, Szent-Györgyi, Schmachtenberger. When parts come together well, the whole produces capacity the parts alone never had. Cells breathe; molecules don't. Brains think; neurons don't. A civilization flourishes when its integration is right — not when its throughput is highest.
Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin, where he helped pioneer quadratic funding for public goods and shipped more than $60M in matching grants to open source builders. He's the author of GreenPill, a book about regenerative cryptoeconomics, and host of the podcast of the same name.
He's been writing code for 20+ years, shipping open source for 15, and designing coordination mechanisms for the last 8. Through the last 6 years, his work has been stewarded by Upward Spiral (formerly West Software Services Inc) , a software studiothat has builts upward spirals, product, and community at venture-backed startups from early-stage through exit.
If you see a flywheel hiding inside your org, product, or ecosystem — and you need software, mechanism design, and narrative to turn it on — let's talk.
hi@upwardspiral.io →A short reel of talks and moments that shaped how we think about spirals.
