The origin
"I was signed off work with depression and anxiety. My ADHD brain wouldn't stop. And from that dark, difficult place came something I believe can change the world."
— Richard Guilder, founder of Conduit
Conduit was not born in a boardroom or a university lab. It was born during the long, difficult days of a mental health crisis — when Richard Guilder, 48 years old, newly diagnosed with ADHD, signed off work with depression and anxiety, and found that the only thing keeping him going was building.
Richard has no formal training in computer science. No degree. No institutional backing. Completely self-taught — and that is not a caveat. It is the point. Because what he built, from a bedroom, in two days, while fighting his own mind, is the proof that the walls we build around who gets to create technology are entirely artificial.
What started as a personal project — connecting two computers to render Blender animations faster — became something far larger. Through two days of relentless problem-solving, debugging undocumented Windows 11 Pro firewall issues, fighting configuration files that reset themselves, and refusing to give up — a working AI-controlled render farm came to life.
And in that moment of exhausted triumph, a question arrived: what if this technology could do something that actually matters? What if a child with no technical knowledge could type a story and watch it become an animation? What if a person who is deaf or mute could have their thoughts translated into real speech? What if the walls between human imagination and human expression could simply be removed?
That is Conduit. Not a product. Not a startup. A movement.