Four ventures

Community, housing, jobs, for sale, services, gigs, résumés and an agri-market, with full-text search, price filters and both list and gallery views. Posting is free.

Two details say most of what the product is about. A listing's currency is captured when the seller creates it and is never re-derived from a location string afterwards, so a price means what it said it meant. And listings expire after thirty days unless renewed, because a classifieds site whose ads never die is a site whose ads cannot be trusted.

A small, warm place where people send each other kindness, share photographs and — if they both want to — meet. It is the venture in the portfolio that is not a marketplace, and the one whose hard problem is safety rather than liquidity.

Two rules do that work: you can only hug somebody who asked, or somebody who hugged you, and nobody can message you until you have both said yes. Between them they remove unsolicited contact from strangers entirely — not as a policy somebody has to police, but as something the write paths simply will not do. Nothing a member writes reaches another member without passing triage first.

A global marketplace connecting performing artists with the people who want to hire them — for a wedding, a festival, a corporate evening or a living room. Artists keep their own profiles and their own terms; clients get a real answer on availability instead of a chain of intermediaries.

idlidu was the first of the four to launch and is the venture through which the group's payments relationship was first established, which is why a buyer on another venture may see the idlidu name on a card statement. That is disclosed on the sites themselves rather than left to be discovered.

Carbon nanotubes, graphene, quantum dots, characterisation equipment and the services around them. Sellers are verified and listings carry transparent specifications, because the buyer here is a research group spending a grant and the cost of a vague datasheet is a wasted quarter.

It is the most specialised venture in the portfolio and the one closest to the founder's own field.