Before Kiton made a single suit, the Paone family had spent five generations in fabric. Not fashion.
Ciro grew up trading the finest wool in Naples, and only started tailoring when he realised no one was doing his fabric justice.
This gave rise to 𝗞𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗻, the brand as we know it today.
Founded in Naples in 1968 with one aim: make the best jacket on earth, then go one better. "The best of the best, plus one," as Ciro Paone put it.
The name comes from the word 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘯, an ancient Greek ceremonial garment, a single piece of cloth closed with one seam. Plain to look at and yet almost impossible to do well.
Everything the house makes boils down to three core pillars:
1/ 𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆
Kiton owns its own wool mill in Biella and hunts the finest fibres on earth. Most houses design a jacket and search for the fabric. Kiton starts with the cloth and works backwards.
2/ 𝗖𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁
A tailor spends 8–10 years learning to set the shoulder, and that's just one step of the roughly 25 hours of handwork in a single jacket. Which is why a Kiton feels more like a shirt than a suit.
3/ 𝗘𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Handwork like this only survives if someone is taught it. So in 2000 Kiton opened its own tailoring school. A three-year course, taught by the house's own masters, taught to younger generations. "If the world does not produce tailors," Paone said, "we must strive to create them."
Every other brand guards its secret. Kiton teaches it to 18-year-olds because they know the only way to protect mastery is to pass it on before the masters are gone.
This will give rise to 𝗞𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗻, the legacy, beyond the brand as we know it today.
I spent 15 years building energy software for data centers.
The public debate around data centers is stuck in a false binary between hitting pause and building blindly.
Both sides ignore the one part that’s bleeding capital - Admin and back office work
If AI is going to cure diseases and transform education, infrastructure needs to scale dramatically.
That scale cannot be sloppy.
Towns push back because data centers cannot freeload on local ratepayers for electricity and water.
Operators must pay their own freight.
The actual bottleneck is unverified contractor billings and un-audited megawatts.
Every dollar lost to back-office waste keeps compute locked in an elite oligarchy.
We need to track every billing deviation and audit the line items before payments leave the account.
Grid pressure does not get solved by hitting pause.
It gets solved by building faster with strict fiduciary discipline.
AI is going to get DIRT cheap
We might even reach a point where it takes 0 water to use AI
I know how that sounds
I’m not trying to ragebait anyone so let me explain
There is a part in the AI cost curve that’s being hidden from you
Everyone talks about Nvidia pricing power and next gen chips.
They want to make you believe that AI compute will keep getting more expensive because demand is exploding.
I can (with full confidence) say that this is 100% false
How do I know?
I’ve been in this field for 15 years now
I started by doing AI research at stanford
The thing that people end up forgetting is that hardware is one component of the bill
On a $1B to $2B data center build with 8,000 workers on site, up to 30-40% of the total cost is administrative and contractor bleed.
400-page PDFs….. contractor pay applications….3,000 line items per invoice….Equipment rental markups….
These are the single LARGEST hidden cost in the entire AI infrastructure buildout.
The waste is systematic.
Cheap ubiquitous compute is a financial controls problem
We’re fixing this now and when it’s done AI will be dirt cheap (and safe)
Introducing Multilingual Voices
We partnered with Baklavastory, our neighbor in the Mission, to show what it sounds like when a business's character and warmth stay consistent, no matter who calls or what language they speak.
It's easy to translate speech, but much harder to preserve a single identity across languages. Every language has different rhythms, tones, and emphasis. When you change the language, identity tends to get lost in that shift, and your voice ends up sounding like someone else.
With Multilingual Voices, pick a voice and keep one brand identity in every market you serve: https://t.co/CDgBhsRR2o
Everyone on X is lying to you
They say “China is going to win the AI race”
Yes they will…But the reason is not what you think
Everyone on the internet believes it’s environmental pushback and energy shortage
That we need to “slow down”
I think we need to speed up (now more than ever)
Don’t get me wrong
Protecting local grids and water is non-negotiable, being a responsible fiduciary is non-negotiable
But If compute stays scarce, only the rich get to use it.
Ubiquitous, cheap compute is the only way America beats China and makes intelligence accessible to everyone.
The reality is of AI is not models and AGI
AI is concrete, steel, chips, equipment, power plants, substations, and transmission lines.
That’s where we’re losing
We’re wasting money and infrastructure on things that don’t need it.
We’re so excited to discuss the “$50B AI deal” that happened last week
But what happens after?
That capital most likely ended up in an analog back office.
With a bunch of contractors reviewing that line by line
Billions of dollars bleed out through these contractors
And THAT is why AI is expensive and slow
Trust me, I spent the last 15 years inside that physical layer.
I started in Stanford AI research under Sachin Katti.
I built networking hardware for server racks, wrote energy efficiency software for data centers, and deployed computer vision on oil rigs and construction sites at Spot AI.
I watched the money pipeline for years
This contractor chaos and pure wastage are the reasons compute stays artificially scarce and expensive.
This is what i’m building now
A financial layer so strong that compute becomes cheap and easily accessible
Because if we want cheap AI for the world, we have to fix the back office first.
Lots of opinions, exciting things and announcements coming soon
Follow along if you like nerding out on AI, Tech and Financial systems