Chris Hamilton

The trick is to see beyond what you know

A founder’s note on knowledge tunnels, building across them, and what it takes to architect across boundaries.

Chris Hamilton · April 2026

I crapped out at school. I have the attention span of a gnat. I can’t spell toffee.

I have nine patent filings.

Those two sentences are both true. They sit next to each other, in the same person, and neither one is the lie.

I’ve been thinking about why that is, and I want to write about it. Not because I have a neat conclusion — I don’t — but because I think there’s something here that other people building things might find useful. Or at least permission-giving.

The knowledge tunnel

There’s a thing I notice happens to people who build deep technology. They specialise. They go deeper and deeper into one technical area, one commercial vertical, one regulatory regime. The deeper they go, the more expert they become. They earn their authority by depth.

I think of this as the knowledge tunnel. You go down it. You learn the walls of it. You become a leading practitioner inside it. And the deeper you go, the harder it becomes to see what’s outside.

The knowledge tunnel is not a bad thing, by the way. Most of what we call expertise is built inside one. Surgeons go down knowledge tunnels. Cryptographers go down knowledge tunnels. Patent attorneys go down knowledge tunnels. So do regulators, accountants, designers, engineers. Without specialists, none of the modern world works.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you: most founders end up in knowledge tunnels too. They specialise into the one thing they’re best at, and they hire other specialists for the rest. The architecture of the company ends up being a stack of tunnels, each pointing in slightly different directions, with the founder shouting down them trying to get them to align.

That’s not how I’ve built what I’ve built.

What I’ve built

In eighteen months, working mostly alone, I have:

I am not boasting. I am asking a question.

The question

How does someone who failed school build that?

The honest answer is that I don’t know. I genuinely don’t. But I have a theory, and the theory is the only reason I’m writing this.

The theory is that I never went down a knowledge tunnel.

I couldn’t go down one. Schooling didn’t take. Specialisation didn’t take. The kind of focused, sit-still, work-through-the-textbook learning that produces specialists — that didn’t work for me. I read three things at once. I lose interest in any one thing inside thirty minutes. I follow the question, not the syllabus.

For most of my life, that felt like a defect. A thing to be embarrassed about. A reason to apologise.

What I’m starting to think now is that it might be the thing that lets me build what I’m building.

Building across tunnels

The architecture I’ve built — the AI governance platform, the certification scheme, the standards body, the corporate structure, the commercial relationships — only works because the parts compose. Patents work the way they work because the regulations work the way they work because the entities are structured the way they’re structured because the commercial model is what it is because the technology does what it does.

No specialist would have built it that way. Because no specialist could.

A patent attorney would not have set up a Community Interest Company as the parent of the certification entity. They wouldn’t have known to. It’s not patent attorney territory.

A trade mark specialist would not have insisted that the certification mark and the technology be separate. They would have, but they wouldn’t have known to write the patent so that the certificate was an architectural output of the technology, not a separate filing.

A cryptographer would not have known to write the regulations of the certification scheme around the same parameter set as the patent claims. They would have written the cryptographic system; somebody else would have written the regulations; the two would not have lined up.

A commercial lawyer would not have known to structure the IBM Statement of Work so that IP ownership stays clean while still letting IBM build. They would have, but they wouldn’t have known what the IP needed to look like to support the licensing model that comes after.

The architecture only exists because one person — me, with my gnat attention span — has been crossing between all of these domains for a long time, learning enough in each to make decisions, and then making the decisions in light of all the others.

It is not depth. It is composition. It is a different shape of knowing.

What this is not

I want to be careful here because I do not want this to be read as anti-specialist, or as suggesting that anyone could do what I have done if they just ignored their teachers and read what they fancied. That would be lazy and untrue.

Here is what I think is closer to the truth:

Specialists and architects do different work. Both are necessary. Most of the world needs specialists. Some things — and I would argue the new things, the category-creating things, the cross-domain things — need architects. Both are valid. They produce different outputs. Both are valuable.

You don’t choose to be one or the other. It is more of a temperament than a decision. I did not choose to be unable to specialise. I tried, repeatedly, for years, to be a specialist. It didn’t work. What I have learned to do is to let the temperament work for me rather than against me.

It still takes the work. Architects do not get to skip the learning. I have read the patent legislation, the trade mark legislation, the EU AI Act, the EU Accessibility Act, hundreds of pages of UKIPO correspondence, certification mark case law, CIC governance rules, IBM’s commercial frameworks, cryptographic standards, and a great deal else. The volume is the same as a specialist. The shape is different. Specialists go deep into one thing. Architects go shallow into many things, often enough that they can compose them.

You will spell things wrong. I do, all the time. I rely on tools, on people who proofread my work, on my own willingness to be the one in the room who didn’t go to the right school. I have decided that is fine. The mark is on the wall. The patent is filed. The trade mark is granted. The IBM contract is signed. None of that depended on whether I could spell toffee.

What I’d say to someone reading this

If you’re reading this and you recognise yourself — if you’re the person who has always felt slightly outside, who can’t sit still inside one specialism, who picks up four interests in a week and drops three of them — I want you to consider that this might be a feature.

I am not saying it is easy. It is not. The world is largely organised around specialists, and you will spend a lot of time being talked over by people who know one thing very deeply and don’t know that you know seven things moderately deeply, and that the seven things are about to compose into something they can’t see.

But here is the sentence I keep coming back to. It is the sentence that prompted this whole post, when I caught myself writing it down a few days ago without thinking too hard:

The trick is to see beyond what you know.

That is what architects do. They see beyond what they know — and then they go and learn enough of what’s beyond to compose it back into what they know. Not as deeply as a specialist. But deeply enough to make the architecture work.

That, I think, is the work I have been doing. Not just for the past eighteen months. For a long time before that, too. The eighteen months are just where it became visible.

And one more thing

If you’ve made it this far — and I appreciate you have, because I haven’t been brief — there’s a small thing I want to add.

The reason I have written this is partly because I caught myself, in the middle of an entirely different conversation, saying something close to “the trick is to see beyond what you know” and realising that I had been articulating a thesis without meaning to.

That is also part of how this works. You build, you do, you compose. The thinking comes out as a side-effect of the doing. You learn what you think by writing it down, by saying it aloud, by accidentally producing it in the middle of trying to do something else.

That, too, is part of the architecture.

If you build across tunnels, you will not always know what you are doing. But sometimes you will catch yourself doing it, and you will recognise the shape of it, and you will write it down so the next time you do it, you do it on purpose.

This is me writing it down.

Chris Hamilton is the founder of aiGUARD Systems Limited. His current work is a trust architecture for AI in regulated sectors, built across nine patents, three trade marks, and six operating entities. None of which he could spell on the first attempt.

aiGUARD Systems Limited · Company No. 17090629 · aiguard.systems