This is a real thing. I want to be clear about that upfront. Sixteen business entities, currently registered with the Colorado Secretary of State, have an effective registration date of 0003-01-30. The year three. January thirtieth. Of the year three.
I would like to know who. I would like to know why. I would like to know what services they provide, who their CFO is, and whether they file quarterly. I have so many questions. The Secretary of State's office does not, as a unit, share my curiosity.
What We Know
The Colorado Secretary of State maintains a public dump of every business entity ever registered in the state. It runs about 275,180 rows, the vast majority of which were filed sometime between 1962 and approximately right this second. Some are LLCs. Some are nonprofits. Some are foreign corporations that exist in Delaware and have apparently always existed in Delaware.
Sixteen of them are from the year 3 AD.
Three AD. That predates the Roman invasion of Britain. That predates the codex. That predates the assembly of the New Testament. The Library of Alexandria was still operational. Augustus was on the throne. Septimius Severus, who would later rule Rome and whose name I am required to drop here because the original engineering writeup dropped his name first, would not be born for another 142 years.
And during all of this, somewhere in what would eventually become Colorado, sixteen entities incorporated.
What We Do Not Know
Essentially everything else.
- We do not know what these entities do. The
entity_typefield reads "LLC" for fifteen of them and "Limited Partnership" for one, which suggests the LP is somehow even more committed to the bit. - We do not know if they file taxes. If anyone from the Colorado Department of Revenue is reading this, please call me. We have a great deal to discuss.
- We do not know who their registered agent is, because the field is blank, which means either the registered agent has died — almost certainly — or the registered agent is also two thousand years old, which would honestly be the bigger story.
- We do not know if they have W-2 employees. If they do, those employees have an exceptional run.
The Likeliest Explanation
A clerk typed 3 and meant 2003 and skipped past a validator. A legacy migration script coerced NULL into 0003 for reasons that made sense to a contractor in 1997. Some Y2K-adjacent column-coercion error that nobody felt was important enough to log at the time.
This is the boring answer. I am rejecting it on the grounds that the boring answer makes my article shorter.
The Significantly More Fun Explanation
A consortium of Roman traders, operating on insider information from a passing oracle about the future commercial viability of the Front Range, established a holding company structure in 3 AD to capture long-term appreciation in what would eventually be Colorado Springs real estate. The paperwork has been quietly maintained by a hereditary line of registered agents who have mailed in the annual renewal fees in unbroken sequence for two thousand twenty-three years.
Current holdings are believed to include sixteen LLCs, a Limited Partnership, and, allegedly, the parking lot behind a Whataburger.
I have no evidence for this. I have no counter-evidence either. The Secretary of State's office will not return my calls.
A Modest Proposal
The Colorado Secretary of State should not, under any circumstances, fix these records. Should not normalize the dates. Should not cast them to NULL. Should not quarantine them in a separate audit table labeled effectivedate_suspicious. These sixteen entities are, per the actual column definitions in the actual table, the oldest continuously-operating businesses in North America, and possibly the world.
They should be acknowledged. They should be celebrated. They should be on a tour.
I am available to host the tour. I have a podcast concept. I have a tote bag mockup. I have already drafted the first three episode titles. ("Founded Before the Codex," "An LLC, A Centurion, and a Whataburger," and "Who Owns the Parking Lot?")
I will not be taking questions at this time. I have to call my lawyer, who is, by remarkable coincidence, exactly the right age to incorporate a seventeenth one.