8Foundry Alliance: Why There Is an Eight in the Name?

We chose the eight before 8Foundry Alliance had a strategy, and it has since described the business better than anything we wrote afterwards.

In Mandarin the number eight, bā, sits close enough to fā, the character inside the expression for making a fortune, that the resemblance does commercial work rather than sitting quietly in a book about symbolism. Phone numbers with eights in them sell at a premium. Licence plates with several eights go to auction. Developers renumber floors so that the desirable ones land on eight. When a partner in Taipei proposes the eighth of the month for a signing, the choice is deliberate, and the part that took me longest to understand is that nobody at the table remarks on it, because to them there is nothing to remark on.

Europe took the same figure, turned it ninety degrees and read it as the thing that does not stop. John Wallis introduced the lemniscate into mathematics in 1655 in De sectionibus conicis, and by then the continent had been building the number into stone for centuries. Charlemagne’s chapel in Aachen is an octagon. Castel del Monte in Apulia is octagonal in plan and octagonal in each of its eight towers. Baptisteries across Italy and France were raised on eight sides for the eighth day, the one that falls after the week has closed and stands for beginning again rather than repeating.

One shape, two readings. In Asia a number that promises something will arrive, in Europe a figure with no end point. Both of them are statements about time, and between them they describe what we sell more accurately than the word “network” does.

What 8Foundry Alliance actually does

The alliance connects 27 members across three continents: partners, institutions, cities, universities and technology companies in Taiwan, Africa, Central Asia and Poland (as for 08.08.2026). The premise is that ambitious organisations are usually separated by nothing more complicated than geography, sector boundaries, or the fact that neither has heard of the other, and that once you remove the separation they build things neither of them could have built alone.

In practice that means handing over membership certificates in person instead of sending them as attachments, because a signature in a room commits people in a way that a file does not. It means concluding agreements at the level of national associations rather than individual companies, so that a member arriving in an unfamiliar market inherits a relationship instead of starting one from zero. It means forums and matchmaking sessions where the panel matters less than the conversations that continue in the corridor afterwards, and trade missions where somebody’s first meeting in a new country is a meeting we arranged and then sat through.

Very little of this photographs well as a launch, and all of it depends on being repeated, which is the second reason the eight fits.

What follows from it commercially

We build relationships slowly and for the long term, which costs money in the first year and returns it in every year after that. The alliance is built on that assumption. Membership gives direct access to a network that already exists and already works, where the partners have met each other, the institutions have finished at least one joint project, and a city can be told which company solved its problem two years ago somewhere else. For members who need more than access, 8Foundry works alongside on the operational side: market entry, introductions that end in contracts, and someone on the ground who has done it before. You pay when it works, which removes any incentive on our side to sell an introduction that leads nowhere.

We describe the whole thing as engineering trust between continents, and I mean the engineering part literally, because trust across that distance has components you can list: a shared calendar, a signature given in person, a follow-up three weeks later, someone who answers the phone when a shipment stops at customs in Tashkent, an interpreter who understands the industry as well as the language. Leave any of them out and what you have at the end of the year is a folder of photographs of people shaking hands.

The heart of 8Foundry Alliance beats at eight. Each beat is supposed to leave something behind for a member: a mission, a project, an agreement, or a meeting that would not otherwise have happened.

If that is how you work as well – join us – the more the eightier!