• Derek W Bailey

    Founder of True Photonic. Author of Keep Computing. Forty years building the thing before the market knows it needs it.

  • The Bet

    I have spent forty years building things before the market agreed they were needed — staffing floors, food service, out-of-home media, self-charging cars, engines most people said couldn't be built. The pattern never changed: read the shift early, build the version of the business that lives on the other side of it, and be standing there when everyone else arrives. Computing is now facing the largest shift of my lifetime. It is leaving the electron behind. True Photonic is the company I built to meet it, and First Light is where I bring the people who intend to meet it with me.

  • What I'm Building

    True Photonic

    True Photonic replaces the transistor with light.

    Our Logic-in-Light™ architecture is built on photoic logic gates and the Poovey Switch, validated at 150 to 200 femtoseconds at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology — six orders of magnitude faster than the transistors the world runs on today. Around that switch sits a patent portfolio of more than eight hundred claims and a map of the first twelve industries that light rebuilds from the substrate up.

    I'm the company's Founder and Chairman. The First Light reports come from that same map — which is why they read like a field guide instead of a forecast.

  • The Book

    For sixty years, computing got faster by making the transistor smaller. That road has ended. The machine the world runs on now meets a wall it can't climb — heat it can't shed, power it can't feed, water it can't spare — and no amount of shrinking fixes a limit written into physics itself.

    Keep Computing is the case for the way through: move logic off the electron and onto light.

    It's the long-form argument beneath everything on this site — where the wall comes from, why light clears it, and what gets rebuilt once it does. If the reports are the field maps, this is the territory.

    [ Read Keep Computing → ] paperback & Kindle - On Sale Now.

  • Forty Years of Building

    I'm from New Orleans, and I've been building companies for four decades. I've run staffing floors — OnPoint, and the family firm B&N HR Solutions. I've built in food service with CurbsideChef, in out-of-home media with digital billboards, and in mobility with Derek Automotive and Exeeder.

    With Del Wolverton — my partner of twenty-seven years, and True Photonic's Chief Technology Officer — We built the Counterpoise engine, a patented powerplant we spent years proving out when the consensus said it couldn't be done. Every one of those ventures taught the lesson True Photonic is built on: the biggest returns go to whoever reads the shift first and builds for the world on the other side - the required pain along the way endured.

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  • In My Own Words

    A few minutes on what First Light is, who it's for, and why the timing matters.

  • If You've Read This Far, You're Probably One of Us

    Start where it makes sense. The free guide tells you whether this is your kind of game — and I'll stress, it isn't an easy one.

    The reports map industry options. The community is the room where first movers meet what's coming.


    [ Get the Free Guide ] [ Browse the Reports ] [ Join the Community ]

    Rather watch from the edge? Follow along on Substack and read the thinking as it publishes — no cost, no commitment.
    [ Follow on Substack → ]

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