The Velcro Principle: My Friend, His Biggest Mistake, and the Future We’re Announcing Today
By Michael Noel, Founder of DeReticular
You may not know this about me, but Vic Kiam was a friend of mine.
That’s probably the worst introduction I have ever written. It immediately narrows my audience down to people who are both interested in what I think and who actually know who Vic Kiam is. So, to the two of you who will go on to read this, I will try to make it interesting.
For those who don’t know, Vic Kiam was a titan. To a generation of Americans, he was the face of the Remington Razor Company, the man who famously appeared on television, looked you dead in the eye, and said he liked the product so much, he bought the company. He was a celebrated turnaround artist, an author, the owner of the New England Patriots, and a brilliant entrepreneur who saw value where others saw failure.
Our paths crossed when I was a senior partner at the investment bank Dinan & Company. Vic was a client, but the relationship quickly became more than that. We’d spend hours talking, not just about consolidating markets or the mechanics of a leveraged buyout, but about life, about philosophy, about the gut instincts that separate a good idea from a world-changing one. He was a mentor, and his insights have stuck with me for decades.
Vic passed away in 2001. I had chatted with him just a few weeks before I heard the news, and the world felt a little smaller without him in it. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of his stories. A story he told me about the biggest mistake he ever made.
It wasn’t about a bad investment or a failed company. It was about a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
Back in his days at the corporate giant Playtex, Vic told me two young men, probably in their mid-20s, came into his office to pitch a new product. Most executives would have given them five minutes and the door. But Vic saw something—a strategic match, a spark of genius. He was so intrigued that he put the two boys up for the weekend, and together, they worked tirelessly to refine their pitch, which Vic would personally help them deliver to the Playtex board.
He told me about the energy in the room, the conviction he had. He was sure they were looking at the future.
The Playtex board passed.
They looked at the strange, two-sided fabric fastener the boys had brought in, and they couldn’t see it. They saw a novelty, a gimmick. They couldn’t imagine it on jackets, on shoes, on children’s toys, in hospitals, or on the space shuttle.
The product, as Vic explained with a wry smile and a shake of his head, was later to become known as Velcro.
He always framed it as his mistake. Not that he didn’t see the potential—he saw it with perfect clarity. His mistake, he felt, was his inability to make the board see what he saw. He was holding the future in his hands, but to everyone else, it just looked like two pieces of fuzzy fabric.
I’ve been thinking about that story a lot because, for the past few years, I feel like I’ve been one of those two boys.
When we started DeReticular, we weren’t just pitching a new piece of hardware or a faster internet connection. We were pitching a new architecture. An idea that infrastructure could be a self-funding, community-owned asset. That a town could own its digital future, powered by a resilient, decentralized grid. We called it the Rural Infrastructure Operating System (RIOS), and to us, it felt as revolutionary as Velcro.
But to many, it just looked like antennas and servers.
They saw the components, but not the new way of connecting things. They saw the cost, but not the self-generating revenue. They saw the complexity, not the sovereignty. Like that Playtex board, they couldn’t yet see it on every rural town, in every developing nation, in every post-conflict zone, holding communities together in a new and powerful way.
Today, that changes.
Just as Velcro eventually became a household name, so too will the principles of decentralized, sovereign infrastructure. The flickers of light we started are about to become a grid. The proof of concept is over. The next stage of the revolution begins now.
We are making an announcement today that marks the beginning of DeReticular as more than just a concept, but as a deployable, scalable, and unified system. This is our Velcro moment—the moment the world gets to see the full picture.
This is Generation 2. This is the dawn of the Sovereign Stack.
I’ve told you Vic’s story. Now, I invite you to read ours.
Click Here to Read the Full Announcement: “Generation 2: The Dawn of the Sovereign Stack”
To the future we build together,
Michael Noel
Founder, DeReticular
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