Unvalued

Notes on finding inspiration in what gets overlooked

1

What isn’t counted

A fin whale’s call is a twenty-hertz pulse, below human hearing, and it carries across an ocean basin. A watershed decides whether a refinery’s effluent reaches a town or a marsh. A family decides, over dinner, what its money is for. None of these shows up on a balance sheet.

For most of the capital in the world, these acts are invisible and unvalued.

Unvalued is built around this gap. I build the data and systems that let money reach where it currently can’t: where an impact actually lands, who holds authority over it, and the decisions that were never written down. Usually that means building a model, a dataset or a tool. Sometimes it means an essay exploring the history and lineage of ideas in order to better understand how to solve them.

There’s a disconnect in how we assess the health of our world. Accountability sits within an organization: a legal entity with an address and a board. Impact happens in a place: a basin, a reef, a community. These two almost never share a boundary. A company owns subsidiaries that own assets that sit on land that drains into water other people drink. Every link in that chain is a dataset someone has, but nobody has connected them.

The opportunity to bring these disconnected data sets together is my offering for a better world. More collaborative, more connected, and more generative.

Fig. 1 The way in, a lay of the land. My drawing reimagined by geometry. 2026.

The thread through my work is a central question

How do we redesign our systems so that financial value aligns with what we actually value, as people, as communities, and as part of the natural world?

Here are a few of the projects I’ve taken on

Regenerative Assessment

Create a unified assessment of regeneration that applies to projects, organizations, and nations.

Gather the 250+ frameworks that have been created in an attempt to solve this problem.
Map them to the 3000+ indicators that have been created to measure impact on regeneration.
Build an open-source model from them that gives the field a shared definition of regeneration and a shared way to assess it.

Fig. 2 The regenerative assessment model as a tree. Hover a branch to read it.

Agentic Discovery

Build an agent that can hear a person’s stories and find the patterns that describe who they are.

Tech infrastructure. The first agent was plumbing: a schema, prompts, retries, and the public filings of every non-profit underneath. It knew what to ask and recorded the answers. It worked, and it felt like a customer service agent walking you through a form over the phone.
Persona. The second had an identity, and the work stopped being debugging. The calls were about tone: when to be warm, how to hold a boundary without sounding cold, whether to apologise when someone pushes back. The skills I reached for belonged to a social worker, not an engineer.
Worldview. The third was grounded in research on how people actually arrive at their values, used as lenses for listening rather than a script of questions, and it began to hear what a story meant. The telemetry and a harness of simulated people told us when it didn’t. It moved from disclosure to discovery.

“The judgment that made it good was never engineering.”

Fig. 3 Agentic Discovery. Reason and feeling, drawn as two meshes. The bridge between them is where judgment happens, and it is the part an agent has to work in. Drag to turn it.

Bioregional Portfolio

Redesigning the investment thesis

A portfolio, recentred on protection, place, and the people who live there starts with mapping changes to the region. We do this through looking at what drives changes for the key indicator species in the region, the jaguar.

: where they once lived
: where they live now

Fig. 4a The jaguar’s range: hatched, where they once lived. About half the range is gone, and the population has fallen by about a quarter in the last twenty years.

Fig. 4b Bioregional Portfolio. A conventional allocation, in grey, and what it becomes when the allocation is weighted by its impact to the jaguar habitat and wellbeing.

3

How I work

I think by building and creating. To me, the process of exploring a complex idea begins with trying to understand it from a number of different lenses. Here’s a few principles that are important to me.

Many have thought about the same concept. Conservation biology, governance theory, linguistics and organisational design all turn up in the same model, because most problems worth solving are actually caused by narrowing complexity into contained disciplines. Holding space for this complexity allows you to see more dimensions of a problem and see different possibilities for solving it.

Messy and expansive, then structured and formal. Exploring is allowed to be messy but deciding isn’t. When my old team wrote up how I work, the first rule was that no and yes aren’t opposites. They’re siblings, drawn together by context. A no is the start of a conversation: are we talking about the map or the territory, the forest or one tree? If the boulder won’t move, can it be melted?

Build with, not for. If you want to build a pier, ask the woodcutter, the angler, the lifeguard, the diver, the sunbather and the crab on the shore. Then spend a day as the lifeguard. A good critique is an expectation you hadn’t thought of. The best designers and builders can inhabit many dimensions of the problem before designing a solution.

Fig. 5 A day, drawn from a point. Each stroke is an hour; its length is how much of it was mine, and the mark at the edge is what it was for.

4

Things I like

A non-comprehensive list of things I like. Whales! A humpback song is built like a language: units into phrases, phrases into themes, themes into a song that every male in a population sings the same way. Then one of them changes it, and within a few seasons the new song has crossed the Pacific, carried by nothing but listening. It’s the most beautiful example of sharing method I’ve come across.

New York, in its many dimensions. The city gives me energy from its people its creativity and its passion. Upstate gives me cool water, bare feet, and slower way of living. It’s the best representation of extremes showing us what’s possible and how important it is to find balance.

Cookies. Photography, mostly of light on water. Linguistics, especially where one language has a word that holds a concept we can’t communicate in another. Celebrating croissant Friday! Tennis, so much tennis. Lists! Artists who explored a question ahead of their time. And probably a whole new set of things tomorrow…

Fig. 6 Four forms I keep coming back to: protection, growth, playfulness, magic. Drawn by hand, then by geometry.

About me

I’m Rebecca Hu. I mostly build technology products, make art, and write about things I care about. I started this multi-disciplinary practice studying engineering and studio art at Dartmouth College, mostly mechanical engineering and sculpture, and I’ve been building things ever since. For nine years I worked at an asset manager focused on sustainable investing, where I built its impact reporting system and its sustainability data models, then led its sustainability and product teams as it grew to $6.5 billion managed for impact-focused families, foundations and endowments. That’s where I fell in love with the complexity of hard problems and the promise of redesigning our economic systems.

Lately I’ve been building the models, datasets and tools that let money find what it has been overlooking. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring how agents can help people decide what their money is for. I live in New York where I’m mostly exploring art and food on a Citibike.

Unvalued is my building practice. The work is project-based, and it usually starts with a question that challenges the way things are done. If you have one, I’d love to hear it: rebsdhu@gmail.com.

Fig. 7 Open questions I haven’t explored. Ours to explore together! Tap to reveal.