About TheoryUp

This page explains where TheoryUp came from, the way of thinking behind it, and what we are trying to build at a foundational level.

The Origin

TheoryUp did not begin as a product idea. It began with a recurring pattern we noticed while closely observing how founders of unicorns, category-defining companies, and major innovations describe how they started and how others should start.

Again and again, their advice converged on the same starting points:

• "Start from a real problem."
• "Start from something you understand deeply."
• "Start from something you're passionate about."

These ideas came up repeatedly, especially when founders tried to explain why their companies worked, not just how they were built.

And what was missing was a way to make that understanding concrete.

What does it actually mean to “understand a problem deeply”?
What kind of understanding are founders referring to when they say this?
What does the founders’ “passion” actually refer to, beyond enthusiasm or persistence?
And why do some companies keep compounding into unicorns, while many others, despite strong execution, solid teams, and real resources, stall before they ever break out and sometimes quietly fail?

We began to suspect that what separates those who truly compound is not just execution, speed, or ambition, but something more fundamental: a grounded understanding of human nature that is usually assumed, not tested.

The best founders were pointing toward something real and foundational. But there was no clear way to turn it into a system.

So, that gap became impossible to ignore.

Philosophical Influence

As we kept thinking about that gap, we realized it wasn’t a tooling or a process problem.

It was a thinking problem.

There is a long-standing way of looking at entrepreneurship, sometimes described as the philosopher-entrepreneur perspective, the idea that great companies begin as theories about human nature, not just products. In this view, startups are not just collections of features or tactics, but expressions of a belief about people. A startup compounds or stalls based on whether its underlying assumptions about human nature are actually true.

This perspective is often hinted at by thoughtful founders and investors, but rarely named, and almost never turned into something operational. It suggests that execution does not create correctness. It only reveals it.

What resonated with us was not philosophy as a body of answers, but philosophy as a discipline of questioning. Not “what should I build?”, but “what do I believe about people, and on what basis?”

Seen through that lens, many common startup problems started to look different. Misalignment between product and users. Confusing traction. Early growth followed by stagnation. These were no longer just execution issues, but signals that a founding belief about human nature had never been clearly formed.

That insight changed how we thought about starting companies.

If startups are tests of beliefs about people, then founders need a way to form those beliefs deliberately, not accidentally. They need a way to question them, refine them, and understand what kind of company those beliefs can actually support.

TheoryUp was created to turn that way of thinking into a system.

Human Nature as Infrastructure

Every startup, whether it realizes it or not, is built on assumptions about human nature. Those assumptions shape what the product is, who it serves, how it grows, and where it eventually stalls. When they are shallow or borrowed, the company inherits their limits. When they are grounded, the company compounds.

Despite this, there is no shared system for forming or examining these assumptions. Founders rely on intuition, experience, or imitation. Investors infer beliefs indirectly, long after execution has begun.

Over time, these assumptions quietly guide what founders choose to build and what they expect users to do differently. Because they are rarely stated clearly, founders move forward without ever seeing what they are actually starting from.

TheoryUp exists to surface that starting point.

What TheoryUp is becoming?

TheoryUp is becoming a system for identifying the founder’s founding theory and evaluating the alignment between a founder and what they build, at the level of human nature.

Today, this system is implemented as a software that makes explicit a founder’s understanding of human nature and evaluates whether an idea or an existing startup is consistent with the founder.

The same system can then be used by investors and accelerators to evaluate whether what a founder is building is truly aligned with how they understand people in the real world.

Not by predicting outcomes, but by examining the foundation itself.

Humanity Future

We believe the future is shaped less by technology itself and more by the understanding of human nature embedded inside it.

Every product, company, and system carries an implicit view of how people think, decide, and change. Over time, those views compound into culture, markets, and institutions.

Most of the future is built accidentally, on borrowed or unexamined ideas about people.

We are building a different future.

• A future where systems begin from a clear understanding of human nature.
• Where founders and investors are explicit about the human truths their companies depend on.
• And where what we build is constrained by what must be true about people for it to work.

TheoryUp is one concrete step in that direction.

Because for us, nature is the future, and whatever we assume about people is what our systems become.

The Team

TheoryUp was founded by two brothers, Liamine and Khaled .

Together, we bridge theory and execution to turn a way of thinking into a working system.

Today

TheoryUp is early and intentionally focused.

TheoryUp helps founders and investors see whether an idea is built on real human insight or just confident noise.

We are building the system around one problem: helping founders clearly see the belief about human nature they are starting from before it turns into a company.

The product is live. The framework is active. The work now is improving how consistently the system makes that belief clear to the founder.

We are not optimizing for noise or speed.
We are optimizing for getting the foundation right.