W4-001 · Across all four conditions
Condition audit
A condition audit is the examination of a company against the four conditions of Web 4 — establishing which it supplies itself, which it obtains from elsewhere, and which it is silently missing.
Every company on the convergence has four dependencies. Most founders can name one.
The audit is the studio’s first act and the only question it asks before any other. It is deliberately mechanical: for each of the four conditions, state whether the company supplies it, sources it, or does without it. Three answers, four rows, and the result is usually uncomfortable.
What makes it useful is that “does without it” is a legitimate answer only when the company genuinely does not need that condition. A social product with no redemption is fine if it never claims to be an economy. The failure is the silent case — where a condition is needed, absent, and nobody has noticed.
A condition audit performed honestly at seed stage prevents the specific death that killed most of the last cycle: building three years on an incomplete stack and discovering the gap at the moment of scale, when it is structural and unfixable.
| Condition | Supplies | Sources | Does without |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Somewhere to be | Builds the world | Runs inside an existing one | Not a spatial product |
| 02 Someone to be | Issues identity | Uses a portable layer | Anonymous by design |
| 03 Something to earn | Operates a unit | Settles in someone else’s | No economy claimed |
| 04 Do the work | Builds agent runtime | Runs on a mesh | Human-operated |