George, Allan,
It's been twelve days since you told me to take a pause, and total silence since. Twelve days of watching the launch schedule move forward on my work, on calls I'm not in, on decisions being closed on my art engine without me in the room, while I sit here waiting for a written answer to a proposal you asked me for. This is not how you treat a human being, let alone somebody you spent two years bringing in.
Allan, this part is for you, personally. I have been waiting every day, for weeks, for you to pick up the phone or write me one honest sentence. You and I had a real relationship. Open, close, warm. You sat across from me in Ibiza. You told me I was an idol and you couldn't imagine Boundless without me. You asked me for permission to use my manifesto in your university talk. You wrote to me in May, on tape, "it's nice to hear someone get it, and I think that you do." And then, when it got hard, you went silent right alongside George. Not one message. Not one call. Not one "Eyal, I see you, let me try." You let the silence do the work for him. That is not the person I thought I knew. I need you to sit with that, because I have been sitting with it for weeks.
George, you wrote to me on August 8 that you were "excited about the difference in people's lives we can make together." That was your last real written response to my counter. Then, on August 20, on WhatsApp, you told me to take a pause. Then silence. Twelve days. You know exactly what you are doing. I am writing this letter assuming you do.
I thought I had two friends here. Apparently I got it wrong. And that is the part that hurts more than the money, more than the calendar, more than the launch. I have never been treated like this in my career. Not once, in thirty years of work, by anyone. I feel used, I feel let down, I feel hurt, and I feel done wrong. I do not deserve it, and I am not willing to keep sitting in it in silence.
I do everything full-on. My art, my fatherhood, my friendships, this work. So when it started to stop making sense to me, I did the same thing I do when a piece of work confuses me: I sat down and I built the record. Every email, every WhatsApp, every Zoom transcript, every deck, every commit, every screenshot, from the first introduction in 2024 until yesterday. I built it into a full HTML archive with tabs and tags so I could look at it in one place and tell whether I was seeing it right or losing my grip on it. I want to send you the link. If I got any of it wrong, tell me.
June 2024. Liz Smith and Vaitiare Gout of Smith Vaitiare introduce me to George and Katya. First Zoom is scheduled: "VTC: George, Katya, Eyal, Liz." Liz on the intro thread: "we think this could be an incredible opportunity to manifest all the wonderful art you have been working on." That October we sign the referral agreement. This is where it begins.
2024 through summer 2025. The opening-the-kimono year. From that first introduction through the whole year that followed, I did what I do when I trust people. I opened everything. I sent you the Empathic Art manifesto, the conceptual groundwork, the research on color and emotion from brain-machine-interface studies, the VERA framework, the artwork history, the philosophy behind the work. Years of my own thinking, laid out for you to read. You asked, I sent. You asked for more, I sent more. And Allan, at some point during a West Coast university engagement of yours, you asked me for permission to use my manifesto and research in your presentation. I said yes. On a handshake, no paperwork, no invoice, no credit ask. That is how much of my work was already in your hands, being taught in your name, before we had a single deal on the table.
Summer 2025. George reaches out to me again after the 2024 gap. He wants to reconnect. He tells his old Ibiza circle, Liz and Vaiti among them, in his own writing: "As you saw from Eyal's note earlier in the summer, we have resumed contact."
September 2025. The reconnect. Allan's first email to me after our first Zoom: "Great meeting you the other day and super excited to work on some cool stuff together." He sends the intro deck and the 38-minute piece. Two weeks later, after our follow-up Zoom: "Talk soon / see you in Ibiza soon!" And George, in your own writing on September 17, 2025, you set the mandate on the record: "the main thing to discuss is how to integrate visual work into deep listening experiences while maintaining inner-focused attention. The empathic technology platform is especially interesting!" That's the brief. In your own words. Integrate my visual work. Integrate the empathic technology platform. I did not have to sell you on the vision. You told me the vision was mine, and asked me to bring it in.
October 2025. First Ibiza. On my dime. Both of you host me at George's house. A week later George writes: "Thank you for sharing this! We really appreciated our time together in Ibiza."
November 2 through 12, 2025. The "Emotional AI Due Diligence" email thread. I share four documents with you, including the Empathic Art manifesto and VERA framework. Bob, on his own initiative and out of professional interest as the neuroscientist he is, engages the substance and writes back on November 4 with detailed technical feedback on remote PPG, video and audio measures. I reply on November 12 with the follow-up plan. Everything I have is on the table. Openly, in writing, for your team to read.
December 16, 2025. Zoom with George and Allan. I walk you through the pop-up path for Sanctuary, in a hotel, at a hotel scale that Six Senses would not have budget for but that a wellness pop-up in a real city would. George's response on tape: "this is really great and aligned." Then, in the same call, George picks it up as his own thinking and expands: a Dolby Atmos representation played on L-Acoustics speakers in a pop-up in Soho in London. "I agree with 100%." A concept I had introduced ten minutes earlier is already being repeated back to me as ours.
December 24, 2025. George's Christmas Eve note: "Looking forward to a great creative collaboration in 2026!"
Q1 and Q2 2026. The escalation. This is where the intensity climbs. Weekly and biweekly Zooms. More due-diligence documents. Every call, more of my thinking is being pulled into your product thinking. Not generic questions. You are asking me to shape your art engine, your app experience, your Sanctuary vision, your investor narrative. Two moments from that period stand out on the record.
On January 13, 2026, on Zoom with Bob joining for the first time, Allan says, in his own words, at 22:41: "we even looked at the manifesto you sent us, Eyal, when we were thinking about how to position it to Radio France." My Empathic Art manifesto, used by Boundless to position the company to Radio France. Same call, George frames what Boundless is doing to Apple, verbatim: "providing feedback to people in that empathic art fashion... a neuro aesthetic representation of your state of being." The company's outward pitch is being told in my language.
On March 13, 2026, on WhatsApp, at 11:28, George writes: "Our app is near completion and will integrate with EEG and other devices." Six minutes later he attaches the v2 investor deck: "Introduction to Boundless Studios v2.pdf," fourteen pages. The deck describes Boundless's app as "empathic technology" and "a living piece of visual art that represents where you are, and changes as you do." I am not credited anywhere in that deck. Not on the team page. Not on either "collective" artist page. Not next to the language that came out of the manifesto Allan just told Bob they had already been using. I am being shown a deck I helped shape, on WhatsApp, in the middle of a war, and I am not in it. I keep sending, you keep taking, and the vocabulary of the whole company starts sounding like mine.
May 18, 2026. The polars / chaos-engine call. This is the moment on the record. George, you show me the chaos-engine outputs you'd been trying to build, and on tape you say: "what we're looking at really here is how do we create a more compelling art engine... all we show here is there's something happening. But what we really need is this middle ground." I walk you through polars, X/Y/Z timelines, and the color-emotion research from brain-machine-interface studies. Thirty minutes in, George: "I love what you've been saying, Al. And I think it would be amazing to kind of start locking in now, how do we, if you're open to it, work together, because we're at this place. I think we're at this interesting moment." Allan closes: "to reiterate everything George said, I think you nailed it... it's nice to hear someone get it, you know, and I think that you do." Later on the same call George names what's missing, verbatim: "what we really need is how do we create this... what we're missing is this kind of how we create something beautiful for people." Allan, on his own Replicate attempt: "it's not got a stamp on it... I would never try to pass it off as an [Eyal]... it's just not going to cut it. So this is sort of part of why we're... intrigued by that idea." That is the pitch. I close my other work that month to be fully in.
May 27, 2026. Allan sends me your Milk Agency brand guidelines, TestFlight access, and the latest 40- and 10-minute mixes. He announces the second Ibiza offsite: "Looking at getting more of the team out there to all spend time together." A week later, when Amazon can't deliver the Muse headband to Israel because of the security situation: "Otherwise, perhaps I'll just hand deliver later this month in Ibiza!"
June 12, 2026. Rosie sends the second-Ibiza agenda on Boundless letterhead. Eight people "in the room": George, Allan, me, Mathieu, Suuvi, Laura, Sian, Will. I am named as co-lead on the app session: "The App: Vision & Experience (led by Allan & Eyal)."
June 21, 2026. George: "I'm excited by your ideas here." June 23: "We're excited to see you later in the week! Can't wait for you all to arrive in Ibiza!"
Late June 2026. Second Ibiza. On my dime again, despite your June 9 note: "I assume we will cover all expenses." Sylvie Argaman invoice, USD 1,568.96, unreimbursed. Boat trip together. On camera for the Ibiza interviews Will filmed. Named on the Boundless-letterhead agenda as running the app vision session alongside Allan. And Allan, this is where you said it to me directly, in person, when I was leaving: "You're an idol. I cannot imagine Boundless without you." I did not put those words in your mouth. You chose them, in person, at the end of the week we spent building the app vision together.
July 16, 2026. You and I sit on Zoom for the 1:1. You set the compensation frame yourself, verbatim: equity plus royalty, with lawyers, benchmarked to Suvi's ten-hour-a-week consulting rate, in an artistic director role parallel to Dominic in music. I ask you, on tape: is there a difference between me and Suvi? Your answer: "Oh, a huge difference. Yeah." You ask me to put it on paper.
July 16, same call. You look at the app I've been shipping and say: "I think it's beautiful"; "it came out really nice"; on the GitHub handoff: "a full-fledged, full-on documented GitHub with everything he needs to integrate, like every comment, it's all beautifully organized"; "how do we work together? What's your thought about the structure? Of this, you've done so much and it's so beautiful."
July 16, Allan's email that week: "First off, @Eyal, thank you for the eyepopping progress on the app / art!!"
July 30, 2026. I send the ten-page proposal you asked for. That evening on WhatsApp: "Thanks for the super thoughtful document today." You ask me to shape it around an investable entity.
Because I want anyone reading this to understand exactly what happened in the eight days between July 30 and August 8, let me put it plainly. This is the most important stretch of the whole story.
July 30, 2026. The proposal. You asked me for it before your Africa trip. I sent a ten-page document with the whole picture in one place. Understanding this is a bootstrap company, upfront cash was deliberately modest and spread out. Value was built through recurring license, equity, and revenue share over time.
In summary:
A note on the pricing, because I want anyone reading this to have context. My art is represented at Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv and The Disruptive Gallery in London, where I am on show right now. Editions of three. Some editions start at £30,000, some at £50,000, and rise with each subsequent sale. What I put on the table for Boundless was not a random ask, and it was not a stretch. It was a professional artist's licensing proposal, from an artist whose work is being sold at those prices, in those galleries, right now, spread out over 18 months so the company could carry it while it raised.
That evening, George on WhatsApp, verbatim: "Thanks for the super thoughtful document today." And in the same thread, an hour later, George: "The key issue we need to each consider is how to create an investable entity as the use of licenced IP can be a challenges. So let's out on our thinking caps 🤔 I am excited by the long term possibilities here and welcome real engagement together!"
Read that again. Not "the numbers are too high." Not "we can't afford it." George's own words are: the document is super thoughtful, the structure needs to become an investable entity. That is the pivot from licensing to buyout, in George's writing, on the same day. He wants to own it.
And about the money. In Ibiza, in the room, in front of the whole team including me, George told us he had already put around one million dollars of his own money into Boundless and was about to put in up to another million. He shared it as a founder's commitment to the group. So when you read the numbers I proposed — spread over 18 months, modest signing, most of the value in future recurring license, equity, and revenue share — read them against what George told us in his own voice about the capital that was already deployed and coming. This was not a proposal that broke the company. This was a proposal, structured for the bootstrap, sent to a founder who had told the room there was budget.
August 6, 2026. The dev call, and the memo. In the morning I walk the full team through the app on Zoom: the Muse wizard, six 45-second sensor chunks with layman-language logs, and the simulation mode with six emotional-journey presets. George on tape, in front of Bob, Jacob, Allan, and the rest: "That's amazing." On routing the work to marketing, George: "we've been working a bit with Phil and Simon... they think it's really interesting and important."
Same day, in the afternoon, a Claude-drafted memo comes back from you calling the proposal "unfundable." I read it seriously. I do not write back defending my numbers. I do not push back on the tone. I sit down and I redo the whole thing.
August 7, 2026. The counter. I send the revised counter within 24 hours of the memo. Every single structural concern in your memo is answered on the page. I move on every point, and past several. In summary:
On the App buyout price, I show you the math openly. The 24-month baseline you already had in the original proposal was €310,000 in signing and license fees. To turn 24 months of paid access into perpetual ownership, with assignment-on-change-of-control, no renegotiation on future rounds, and the improvement grant-back killed, I put the ownership premium at €190,000. That is a €500,000 App engine buyout at signature for a professional artist's engine that launches with 25 of my works.
I write, in that same counter, in plain language, what owned IP actually buys: valuation strength going into the seed, €120,000 per year of license fees ending after 24 months and turning into savings forever after, and a clean transfer at exit with no renegotiation at the worst possible moment. This was not a hostile counter. It was an artist who had heard you, moved on everything, and put the deal on the table you asked for.
August 8, 2026, 01:09 UTC. The reply. Four sentences, in full: "Hi Eyal, We appreciate the thoughtful response. We will respond early next week. We're excited about the difference in people's lives we can make together. Warmly, -George."
That is the last written response to the substance of the counter. Not a term. Not a number. Not a redline. Not a concern named. Not a call scheduled. Four sentences. Then silence.
And the whole time, the work did not stop.
I want to lay this out plainly, because when you read it back to back it stops being a series of unfortunate events and starts looking like something else. From July 30, the day I sent the proposal, to today, September 1. Your own words. In order.
Read as a set: London to LA, busy time, Allan moving house, health, divorce, Rosie moving to Katya, Laura ramping, product-market fit not clear, Bob and Jacob work for equity, personal mediation. Every message a new reason for delay. Not one message about the substance of the counter. Not one term named. Not one number engaged. Not one call scheduled.
And the world kept going. October 10 launch kept coming. Sanctuary planning kept moving. Boundless kept working with my engine, my language, my artworks, my code. Every time I asked, you sent me a new excuse. That is what I mean when I say the silence is doing the work for you.
But even through all of that, the work did not stop. Not for a single day. Through the original proposal, through your "unfundable" memo, through my 24-hour rewrite, through your four-sentence reply, through the days of waiting after it, through the pause, through the silence, I kept working. I kept shipping to Jacob. I kept answering Bob. I kept responding to team requests on WhatsApp, on Slack, in the repo. I was in Mallorca on a family trip when the August 13 dev call happened and I still studied the transcript when I got back and shipped a full PDF of decisions in 48 hours. I was in Venice for the Biennale opening and I still sent Jacob a four-document integration package on my first day there. Not because I was owed a response. Because I am a professional, because I love this work, and because I wanted us to make something outstanding together. While you were sitting on my counter, I was still moving the app forward for you. Every single day.
August 13, 2026. Dev call. I'm in Mallorca on a family boat trip. I told George in advance. I study the transcript when I get back. Allan on tape, opening the call: "We've included screens from ALS, live build, as well as from the app as it currently stands" — where "ALS" is the auto-transcript's mishearing of "Eyal." Later, George: "the colors of the image... morphs from one quadrant or one place to another based on Eyal's color palette, based on his research summaries." Allan: "I think that's an interesting thing to see how various styles kind of interpret the same data." My work, named by both of you, in front of the team.
August 13 on WhatsApp: "I will send a response to your revised proposal on Friday." Friday was August 15. No response.
August 14. "I need to spend some time with Allan, Bob and Jacob to get their input... aiming for Sunday or Monday." Sunday and Monday came and went.
August 15. I spend 48 hours of my Mallorca vacation writing "Boundless Empathic Art Decisions" — a full PDF of what I learned from the Aug 13 transcript, what I'm changing, what I'm aligning to. I send it to the whole dev team. That PDF wasn't about being attached to my work. It was the best user experience, which is what I've always said. Whatever the team decides, I do. And I did.
August 16. From my first day at the Venice Biennale, in the middle of meetings and dinners, I send Jacob a full integration package: four repo docs, the PDF, fourteen Q&As, tutorials, GitHub explanation. Everything he needs. His reply the same day: "Thanks Eyal, I will be working on integrating, and will be great to talk to you about the details." He hasn't been in touch since.
August 18, 2026. Boundless staging site goes live. Nine people on the About page. Seventeen artists in the band. Dominic Miller listed as Creative Director with his portrait. I am not on the site. The FAQ says "your personal art (coming soon)" with no artist named. The engine that produces the visuals on both pages is 99.2% my code.
August 20, 2026, 00:17 LA. George's WhatsApp: "Sorry for the radio silence... take a pause for now. I love the work and need to still agree timing and structure with a better product market for assessment. I hired Laura today."
August 20, 07:10 IDT. My reply, same morning: "Morning George. Hope it was a productive day, all things considered. Take it easy with the health tests. Thinking of you, Katya, and Rosie in the transition." I ask, gently: "Good to hear about Laura. What's her role going to be?"
August 20, 23:27 IDT. My response, in full. I told you I hear you but this doesn't feel like a negotiation anymore. I told you: you asked me for a proposal before Africa, I sent it, you told me 3% equity was too high, I reduced to 1%, I did everything you asked, and since then silence on the substance. I told you: telling me now to take more equity in place of cash reverses what you asked me to do a few weeks ago. If 3% was too high then, how does more equity make sense now? I asked: is Allan in sync with all this? Because Allan is the person I've been working with alongside you for a year and a half. I asked: are you negotiating with me, or telling me? Those are two different conversations, and I need to know which one we're in.
Since then, silence from both of you. Twelve days.
August 20, 5:55 PM local. Eight hours after you told me to pause, the dev call went ahead. I wasn't in it. No direct invitation, no agenda, no Read AI shared with me. Otter.ai, which had sent me shared-conversation emails for every dev call before this one, sent nothing.
August 27, 5:51 PM local. Two days ago. The Notion agenda for this call lists participants: George, Jacob, Bob, Suuvi, Laura, Sian, Rosie. I am not in the participants field. No one asked me to be there. No one told me it was happening. I found out because Notion sent me a notification. The agenda title was walking through decisions on my art engine.
The Notion agenda, verbatim:
Goal: Walk the new TestFlight build, close the art-generation decisions with Eyal, set the pricing lock so App Store review can start.
Under Art Generation:
Confirm: EEG-informed time-lapse of the chosen image; Chaos Engine output sampled at intervals into one moving image
Confirm: gallery hidden, random selection without repeats; manual choice later via profile
Color palette from check-in/check-out; image transformation from EEG; Z-axis on openness
No-EEG fallback: simulation via the existing web-app simulator
Each of those items is my work. The Chaos Engine, the color palette, the Z-axis on openness, the web-app simulator as the no-EEG fallback. And these three specifically — the color palette, the image transformation, the Z-axis on openness — are the exact three items I introduced verbally on the May 18 polars call. That's the loop closing on itself: on May 18 you told me on tape "we really need somebody like you" and "it's nice to hear someone get it, and I think that you do," and fourteen weeks later the same three ideas were on the agenda to be closed twelve days into a pause, without me in the room.
Same agenda, Launch section:
App Store submission mid-September · readiness 25 September · launch 10 October
No PMF pause. No product-readiness delay. The launch schedule is intact.
The recording pattern. Every dev call from May through August 13 was recorded — Read AI and Otter both sent me shared conversations after each one, and I used the Aug 13 transcript to ship the "Boundless Empathic Art Decisions" PDF to the team. Starting August 20, that stopped. Read AI dashboard for both August 20 and August 27: "Cancelled. Read AI was not given recording permission by the host." George is the host of the recurring VTC: Boundless app development event. The two dev calls where my art work was on the agenda to be closed without me are the two dev calls where recording was denied.
The July 16 frame was equity plus royalty plus a cash consulting element benchmarked to Suvi. On August 20 the cash element is recharacterized as risk. If 3% equity was too high on August 6, more equity now doesn't fit the same logic. The frame you set six weeks ago and the frame you set twelve days ago aren't the same. I need to know which one we're inside.
Bob and Jacob's arrangement is theirs. I came into this as an artist licensing my Empathic Art work, my IP, and my engine, with my time on top. That's the transaction. Fitting it into an employee-equity comparison collapses what this actually is. Dominic is listed as Creative Director on the public site with his portrait. I'm not on the site at all.
Four months of full-time work, May 1 through August 31, 2026, against the July 16 frame you set on Zoom, at the rate consistent with your own on-tape "a huge difference. Yeah" acknowledgment relative to Suvi: €40,000 per month × four months = €160,000 for work already done, independent of any forward arrangement.
Plus an €80,000 settlement to close what's been carried outside the retainer. This is anchored to the two-year recruitment record, the July 16 frame, the July 30 "super thoughtful" reply, and four months of full-time work shipped against a proposal that still hasn't been counter-proposed in writing. Under Israeli law (חוק עשיית עושר ולא במשפט, תשל"ט-1979, with Contracts Law §12 good faith), the US equivalents (Restatement (Second) of Contracts §90 promissory estoppel; Restatement (Second) of Torts §766B), and the UK equivalents (High Trees [1947] KB 130; OBG v Allan [2007] UKHL 21), the fuller claim would be materially larger. This €80K is the settlement adder to close the record between us in one payment.
Plus the two Ibiza expense lines against your June 9 commitment: €1,450 for June 2026 and the October 2025 line, which I'll itemize separately.
Total: €240,000 plus the Ibiza lines, roughly €243,000-€244,000 once the October line is confirmed. This is what's owed for what's already been delivered. It's separate from, and doesn't replace, the going-forward arrangement in the August 7 counter. That counter is still on the table, with the same four structural pieces from the July 16 frame.
I need a written response to the August 7 counter by Monday, September 8, 2026. Yes on those terms. Or a written counter that keeps the four structural pieces from the July 16 frame intact and moves inside them. Or a clear no. A written position I can plan around.
I also need a direct answer on the public site question by the same date.
Take the time you need through Friday, September 5. When you come back, come back with a written position. If I don't have one from both of you by Monday, September 8, then my Empathic Art work, my engine, my IP, and my time revert to me on that date. The October 10 launch, if it proceeds, will proceed without my materials. I don't want that outcome. I've spent two years working toward the opposite of that outcome. But I have to be able to plan.
I do everything full-on. My art, my fatherhood, my friendships, this work. That's how I've always been. That's how I showed up here — every deck, every commit, every Ibiza trip on my own money, every 48-hour PDF from vacation, every integration package from Venice in the middle of the Biennale.
I've been carrying this in silence for twelve days and I need to say it plainly. This has hurt me. I've never been treated like this by anyone I've worked with. Not by a client, not by a partner, not by a co-founder, not by a friend. Especially not by people who spent two years telling me they couldn't imagine what they were building without me.
I don't know what I did to deserve being closed out of decisions on my own work, on calls where recording is being denied, while both of you sit in silence on a written proposal you asked me for.
What I built to make sense of this is a full HTML archive of the record between us: every email, every WhatsApp, every Zoom transcript, every deck, every commit. I built it for me, because I needed to know I was seeing it right. I'll send you the link when I send this note. If I got any of it wrong, tell me. If I got it right, then answer the August 7 counter in writing by Monday, September 8. That's the outcome I'd prefer, by a long distance.
What I can't work with is another week of silence while my work gets closed on calls I'm not in.
Eyal