Advisory
Via Fabri
- reads as
- the builders’ road
- and as
- the way of building
An advisory practice on AI, learning, and the transformation of education.
A practice of Matthew Rascoff (opens in a new tab)
Practice
What we do
Advisory work for institutions and for the people building inside them.
Strategy for digital and AI education
Helping universities, systems, and schools decide what to build, what to buy, and what to leave alone. The answer is usually smaller than the budget request.
Standing up the operations, not just writing the memo
Founding and staffing the unit that does the work. A recommendation nobody is resourced to carry out is a document, not a change.
Advising builders
Working with founders, funders, and boards on education ventures, at the stage where the shape of the thing is still open.
The name
Two words of Latin
- via
- The road, the way, geographic and philosophical.
- faber
- One who works in hard material.
- fabrī
- Of the builders and makers, of building and making.
01 The claim
Homo faber
Appius Claudius Caecus left the line in his Sententiae: homo faber suae quisque fortunae. Each person is the maker of their own fortune. Fourteenth-century humanists recovered it and made it central to the Renaissance, as a claim about what a human being is. Not a knower first, but a maker — someone who takes material and leaves it changed.
02 The grammar
One form, both numbers
Faber is the builder, singular — the same word the Renaissance rendered as maker. Fabrī is two things at once: the genitive singular, of the builder, and the nominative plural, the builders. Same five letters, no choice to make between them.
So via fabri is the way of building and the community of builders at the same time. That is not a pun anyone went looking for. It is how the noun declines.
03 The street
Craft passes along a street
In Rome a via took the name of the trade that worked it. Workshops of one craft stood side by side, apprentices moved between them, and everyone's work — and everyone's failure — was visible. A bazaar is the same arrangement with a roof on it. So is a guild quarter, a shipyard, a good department.
Via carries the older sense too: a way of proceeding, not a line drawn between two points. Homo faber is a claim about human dignity that is nonetheless solitary, one person and their own hands. Via Fabri keeps the making and drops the solitude.
Homo faber suae quisque fortunae.
Each person is the maker of their own fortune.
Contact
If you are building something and want another pair of hands on it.
Menlo Park, California.