The best return we have from anything we build has nothing to do with money. Four months ago we had a WhatsApp group about AI with three people in it. Today we are a registered non-profit association with about 300 members. Nobody takes money out of it. What we get back is a network, authority, a community, events, a lot of fun, and the chance to give something back to society. That is why we would recommend every group of people to start a community and let it grow into an association. It began with Douglas Mulhall, the main founder of this community, who wrote about AI twenty years ago. He asked in a Facebook group if anybody else in the AI world lived here in Cascais. We put the link to our little group under his post. By the next day, about 200 people had joined. So the demand was there. People wanted a place to ask the crazy questions we all carry around. What will the future look like? What will our kids do? What are you building, and how did you build it? Then Erik and Charlie joined, and we knew we were going to have fun. It has not been an easy ride, but it has been a delicious one. We have met so many people in these four months.
Tools change every month. A room full of people you trust stays useful. Our final goal is a clubhouse in the Cascais Council, a place where people can join, co-work and run workshops. We are far from it, but we are on the way. Three things Douglas told us
Douglas spoke to us online in May, with no slides. He said people absorb less when they read a screen, so for two hours we looked at him and listened. His talk was called AI quick money, slow science and the Darwinian future of intelligence. Three things stayed with us. 1 / What he did
Douglas spent years making products that are healthy for people and the environment. In the mid 1990s he saw that technology was moving faster than environmental thinking. He quit what he was doing for two years and moved to Santa Barbara to be near a nanotechnology school, because he wanted to see for himself what was happening. 2 / What he wrote
In 2002 he published Our Molecular Future, about how nanotechnology, genetics, robotics and AI would come together, at a time when most people did not know what those words meant. The book said that 3D manufacturing would take over manufacturing and that AI would change what we are as a species. Douglas told us it got some rather interesting reactions. Today a lot of it is happening. If you want to read Douglas, start here: Our Molecular Future for the broad view on technology, and The Calcium Bomb for his work on health. 3 / What he told us to do
He reminded us of Vernor Vinge, who predicted that AI would become self-aware somewhere between 2025 and 2030, and of Bill Joy, who wrote an essay in 2000 called Why the Future Doesn't Need Us and asked for a time out. Both were mostly ignored. After 25 years of studying this, Douglas told us to go for the short-term benefits and to push for friendly AI, instead of trying to control something that will be smarter than we are. He gave the association one practical piece of advice too: bring in generalists. They do not need to know AI. They know how to organize a non-profit and how to make a project pay, and they see mistakes that specialists miss. We are still looking for a good Cascais generalist lawyer to join as a member. What grew out of a chat group
The group turned into events, and the events turned into partners. We hold a weekly meetup, and AI Night Thinkers sits next to it. At AI Night Thinkers people talk about something they have thought about, such as their job or how to do something, or present something they have made, like an agent or a platform. Douglas spoke at one of the Thinkers evenings. Now we have several partnerships with brands and universities. We have run three events with Lisbon AI Week, and we are working with Nova University on a workshop space. We plan AI literacy workshops for older people, people out of work, young people and local businesses. For children we settled on a media literacy format with no commercial accounts for under 13s. Why we made it an association
A WhatsApp group cannot rent a room, sign a sponsor, open a bank account or apply for funding. An association can. So on 28 April 2026 we registered AICASHUB, Associação Cascais AI Hub, a non-profit under Portuguese private law, with aims in AI education, digital literacy and a community space in Cascais. We registered it with Rupert, our first co-founder. Rupert found out that he did not have the time to be fully involved, so Charlie came in. That is the beauty of a team. When one person has no time, another steps in, and the community keeps going. The structure opens doors. After the paperwork, we plan to apply for funding. The municipal grant windows open this month, Erasmus+ Adult Education fits our audiences, and DGERT accreditation would open the door to public training funds. What went wrong
No single step was hard. Together they took months, and we are not finished. Here is what we got wrong, in plain words. 1 / We asked for three signatures
Our statutes say the association is bound only when three signatures are given together. It sounded safe. Every bank form, contract and filing needed all three of us at the same time, and when one person was away, everything waited. The first bank blocked our account because of this rule. We want to bring it down to two. 2 / We changed things faster than we registered them
We rewrote the statutes in May and amended them in July, and the board changed. None of it was registered in time, so three changes stacked up. Banks and registries read the registered version, not the one we voted for. 3 / We planned a price before the rule existed
Our statutes say the General Assembly sets the membership fees. We planned a founding member round before that vote happened, so we cannot take payments yet. 4 / We tried to fit the paperwork around our event dates
We planned a public launch around Lisbon AI Week and tried to fit a legal clean-up into the same weeks. Registries do not care about our calendar. 5 / The bank was the last gate
On 30 July the tax authority wrote that our bank account number could not be confirmed, so we submitted a new one. On 31 July Social Security asked for board minutes, a decision on whether board members are paid, form RV 1011 and the statutes, within 10 working days. At the end of September we still had no bank account.
If you ever start an association, here is what we would tell you. Write the statutes for year three, not for week one. Ask the bank about its signature rules before you write yours. Register every change as it happens. Check the fee rule before you announce a price. Answer every official letter inside its deadline, even if the answer is that you are working on it. And keep every document in one folder from day one. You are welcome, even if you are not in the group
The Hub is for anyone who wants to learn, share what they know, or build something. You do not need to be a member of the group or a technical person. If you do not live in Portugal or Cascais, we want you to join us online. If you live in Cascais or Lisbon, we want you to join us both online and in person. Bring the crazy question you have been carrying around, and meet the people who are asking the same ones.
Talk soon, Mikkel, and the team at the Cascais AI Hub P.S. If you have been through association paperwork yourself, reply and tell us what you would have done differently. We read every answer. The AI Solopreneur • AI Strategy for European SMBs |
