Human Equity Derivatives

What if you could invest in a person the same way you invest in a company?

That’s the premise behind human equity derivatives—a financial model based on the idea that some individuals have untapped earning potential, which can be unlocked through targeted investment. In return, the investor receives a share of that upside.

At its core, it’s simple: fund someone’s growth, and take a slice of the value they create.

The Theory Behind It

This isn’t about owning people (obviously), and it’s not as dystopian as it sounds. It’s about aligning incentives—funding someone’s education, training, or access to opportunity in return for a share of the increased income they generate.

You can’t exactly walk into a university, pay for someone’s law degree, and demand 10% of their wages for life. But the idea of pre-financing someone’s earning potential has real traction—and real use cases.

A Case Study: Training the Untrainable

My favourite application of this idea isn’t in education finance or creator tokens. It’s inside companies—specifically, when critical knowledge is bottlenecked in the minds of a few key people.

Imagine you run a company that relies on a specialist operator—someone who runs a unique machine, holds rare knowledge, or performs a process that’s hard to replicate. You want to scale, but training new operators is expensive, and the current experts aren’t exactly eager to create their own competition.

So, you flip the script.

You offer your current operator an incentive:

Train someone new, and earn 10% of their salary for as long as they stay.

Now the incentive is aligned. Knowledge flows. Skills scale. And the business grows.

It’s a practical version of human equity derivatives in action—an investment in potential, with returns tied to performance and retention.

Why It Matters

This model reframes people not as costs, but as assets with exponential upside. It opens up new ways to finance education, build talent pipelines, or unlock internal scale.

Yes, it’s messy. There are legal and ethical edges to consider. But the core idea—that human potential is investable—is powerful.

And maybe the most valuable derivatives won’t be traded on Wall Street, but written into agreements between people who believe in each other.