Five steps, and only one of them is slow
Forming the company is the fast part. What normally takes eighteen months is building the four conditions around it. A studio that already runs them supplies them at formation rather than building them again — so the gating item is not incorporation but deciding what the company is actually for.
The five steps
01 · Name the standing responsibilities
Before anything else, write the charter: what this company will be responsible for, which of those an agent may hold, the threshold above which a human must approve, and the person who answers when each goes wrong. This is the slow step, and it should be — a charter with invented roles is a company nobody has thought about yet.
02 · Incorporate and register the folio
The entity is formed and takes a permanent register reference that is never reissued. The charter is published, the handshake goes up, and the company becomes discoverable to every other organisation on the network.
03 · Issue identity
Every machine and every agent receives scoped, revocable authority that can only ever narrow from the grant above it. A robot holding broader access than the technician who deployed it becomes structurally impossible rather than merely discouraged.
04 · Connect settlement
The company can be paid and can pay, machine to machine, with a sealed record. This is the condition that turns a fleet from a cost line into a participant.
05 · Join the directory
The company emits its own record — what it is, who is accountable, what it claims — into the shared graph. From that point every other organisation can read it without asking, and it can read them.
Steps three to five supply four of the six conditions. The charter format and its conformance suite are published under the Apache License 2.0, so a company can implement them without asking and take them with it if it leaves.
What is not on this list
An office, a hiring plan, a brand, an introduction round. Those are real and a studio that led with them would be a services business. What a robotics company cannot buy and should not rebuild is the governance layer — identity, authority, settlement and fleet; everything else on a founder's first-month list is something they can already do better than we can.