🧑💼 For people who are done asking permission
Build the company in a room that meets every week.
“I'm building an AI-first company.” — so the first thing this path does is make you name what a month of your life costs and how many hours somebody will really pay for. The calculator below is the two-minute version of the bench Week 0 opens with. Then 9 classes, in the order they stand on each other, and a cohort you can run more than once.
You come to all of it. The Founder — Recordings is $250 a month — every class on this path, live, as often as it runs, plus the recordings and the written curriculum behind them. Month to month, cancel any time.
The two-minute version of the bench
What do you actually need to charge?
Not what feels reasonable. The rate below which the month does not close. Put your real costs in — the page keeps them in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.
Your floor, per billable hour
$96 an hour, before tax, before the business costs anything
To cover $3,000 a month you need 31.2 paid hours out of 52 sellable ones.
What the same costs demand as the fill rate falls
Halve the fill rate and the required rate doubles. It is a reciprocal, not a discount. Every row of that ladder covers the same monthly cost; the only thing that moves is how many hours are left to carry it.
Twelve sellable hours have to buy all forty. The other 28 are the business — selling, invoicing, fixing the thing that broke — and a rate that covers them is what makes the company a job you can keep.
That is the two-minute version. The bench you get inside the cohort — the Pricing Bench, ten stations, the first thing Week 0 puts in front of you — does Survive, Sustain and Thrive as three separate numbers, works out your runway, costs the leaks you have not noticed, and turns the whole thing into a transition plan with a date on it. Later, the Pipeline measures the fill rate you actually got against the one you just guessed.
On the calendar
The next 5 sessions on this path. Your seat is in all of them.
Every recording and the written curriculum for this path. Anything you finish stays yours. So the question is not which class you can afford this month — it is which mornings and evenings you are going to give it.
Digital Identity Defense
Two hours on the accounts the company runs on, ending with a recovery path you have tested.
6:00 pm Pacific
Automate Your Email: No Code AI Automation
The repetitive hour of your week, running without you and calling a model to do it.
10:00 am Pacific
Control AI Spending
What the model bill actually is, line by line, and what one user costs you to serve.
1:00 pm Pacific
Intro to Agents
The build session: an agent of yours that calls real tools and comes back with an answer.
6:00 pm Pacific
Context Engineering
Your own documents through nine stations, until the model answers from them and not from the air.
6:00 pm Pacific
Every one of these is in the pass. The pricing hour, the automation class, the security session, the cohort — no second ticket for any of them, and no limit on how many times you sit through the same one.
Join us $250/monthNew dates go up as sessions are scheduled, and the recordings are there in the meantime — 106.3 hours of them across this path, open the day you join.
The two-minute version of the social budget
How many people can you keep warm?
Your first customers come from people who already know you, and a relationship you never touch stops being one. A dinner for four costs the same evening as a coffee for one. Put your real week in and the arithmetic hands you the size of the list it can carry.
The three assumptions
These are the rates the arithmetic runs on. Change any of them you disagree with — the answer moves with you.
People you can keep warm at once
70 people, every one of them touched 6 times a year
This week holds 70 people. Reaching 80 is one more block a week, or one more person in the blocks you already spend — and the Social Budget in Week 0 works out which of the two is cheaper for you.
Where your list stands
- New conversations a week3.6
- Weeks to fill the list18.1
- Touches a year, in total420
Reach costs no extra evenings. Set the reach box to 1 and the same four blocks a week carry a list of 23. Set it to 3 and they carry 70. Nothing else changed — the difference is a dinner instead of a coffee, or a call anybody can join.
Cadence is the other dial. Twelve touches a year halves the list; three doubles it. Sorting who gets monthly from who gets yearly is the work the tiers do.
That is the two-minute version. Inside the cohort, the Social Budget runs the same arithmetic across every way you have of seeing someone, prices each one in blocks, reach, depth and recovery, and gives you a plan for the year that fits in the life you actually live. The Pipeline then puts real names in the tiers, and Outreach drafts the first-touch sequence you send on a schedule.
The program at the center
Founding Federation: choose one for this cohort, come back for the other
Two of the nine classes are a room you sit in with other founders. Everyone starts together in Week 0, and then you choose the live hour your company needs first — Go To Market or Build an MVP. The cohort runs again, so the other hour is yours whenever you want it.
Week 0 · everyone in the same room
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
Pricing and the economics of the thing you want to sell. 7 capabilities and 34 exercises, and the two benches you keep: Pricing Bench and Social Budget. Nobody has to choose a lane yet. Everybody produces the three numbers their life costs and the capacity those numbers have to come out of.
Outbound Hour — GTM
9:00 Pacific · Mon-Thu · led by Spencer
You spend the hour finding the people who will pay, and asking them.
- An offer for one segment, end to end
- A first-touch outbound sequence you run on a schedule
- A pipeline with real names in it and a measured fill rate
Make & Do
9:00 Pacific · Mon-Thu · led by Neek
You spend the hour making the smallest sellable version of the thing exist.
- Ship something a stranger could actually buy
- Cut scope until the floor price fits the build
- Leave with a thing, not a plan for a thing
Why founders run it more than once
Both hours run 9:00 Pacific, Mon-Thu. You give the hour to whichever your company needs this season, and the founders sitting in it with you are working the same week of the same problem you are.
Then you come back and take the other. The second time through, Week 0 runs on measurements: the fill rate you invented in your first one is a real figure by your second, and the floor you guessed has a year of invoices behind it. The room holds founders at every stage on purpose, so the people a season ahead of you are in it with you.
Both lanes are on this track, so one pass covers them both and the second run is a decision about which season you have room for rather than another checkout. Sitting in on both hours in the same cohort is allowed too — nobody counts the doors you walk through.
The order, and it is the order
What you take, and what each one leaves you able to do
Curated, not sorted. Each class stands on the one above it, the capability named under each is the hardest thing that class certifies, and the date it carries is when the room next opens.
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01
Control AI Spending
Next Sat 12 Sep1:00 pm PTLeaves you able to segment text into tokens and cost it
-
02
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
Leaves you able to justify a price when the buyer pushes back
Live cohort work, everyone in the same room. You leave with two benches loaded with your own numbers instead of somebody else's worked example.
Pricing Bench Social Budget -
03
Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing
Leaves you able to design an offer for one segment end to end
Where you choose your lane, and where four of the guided apps live — they open the moment you enroll, before the room does.
Front Page Audit Offer Designer Outreach The Pipeline -
04
Automate Your Email: No Code AI Automation
Next Fri 4 Sep10:00 am PTLeaves you able to parameterise an agent persona
Automation Blueprint -
05
Context Engineering
Next Wed 16 Sep6:00 pm PTLeaves you able to design a recursive summariser for oversized documents
329 exercises against 27 clips, run on your own documents rather than a sample corpus.
Context Workbench -
06
Intro to Agents
Next Tue 15 Sep6:00 pm PTLeaves you able to construct an agent that uses tools
42 clips and 56.7 hours, ending with an agent of yours that calls real tools.
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07
Digital Identity Defense
Next Wed 26 Aug6:00 pm PTLeaves you able to falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
Six Roses -
08
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
Leaves you able to justify a safety case for a system that acts without you
Agentic AI Security Frameworks Agentic AI Security Map -
09
Keep It Running
Leaves you able to verify you would know your system broke before a user tells you
The live hour where you bring the thing you shipped and work out what it costs to serve one user, what breaks first, and how you would find out before a customer tells you.
106.3 hours of recording sit behind this sequence — 56.7 in Intro to Agents, 35.7 in Context Engineering, the rest spread across the others. All of it opens the day you enroll, so you can be three weeks into the material before your first live hour comes around.
Beside the headline
What else each room leaves you with
Every class certifies more than the one thing named against it above. Here are some of the others, with the room each comes out of, and the whole list underneath.
classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
Digital Identity Defense
characterise what breaks when you cut the connection
Keep It Running
classify which framework applies where you are in the lifecycle
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
parameterise an offering backwards from its floor
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
constrain model output to a schema
Intro to Agents
classify which of your offerings can reach thrive not just survive
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
The whole list — all 36
- locate a tool in an open tool hub
- locate the standard that governs a system you are building
- execute a first touch outbound sequence on schedule
- run an open model locally
- name an audience and its success criterion
- execute a tool call round trip by hand
- operate a callback rule against incoming contact
- configure recovery that survives losing the device
- operate a boundary on unpaid work
- produce the three numbers your life costs
- produce a reusable system prompt
- segment text into tokens and cost it
- produce an account of an audiences current workaround
- configure inference hyperparameters
- operate a no code automation that calls a model
- produce a budget for work whose timeline you have observed
- produce an account of what you depend on and who can revoke it
- transform naive hours into billable capacity
- produce an itemised bill for what your running system costs
- transform a transcript into a structured record
- produce an offer page that answers a cold message
- characterise what one user costs you to serve
- classify which of your offerings can reach thrive not just survive
- constrain model output to a schema
- parameterise an offering backwards from its floor
- classify which framework applies where you are in the lifecycle
- characterise what breaks when you cut the connection
- parameterise an agent persona
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- justify a price when the buyer pushes back
- falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
- verify you would know your system broke before a user tells you
- justify a safety case for a system that acts without you
- construct an agent that uses tools
- design an offer for one segment end to end
- design a recursive summariser for oversized documents
What is in the box
11 apps, 7 of them fully guided
Signed in, these open now — before a cohort starts, before a class runs. Each one says below it which class it belongs to and what it does with an afternoon.
Three numbers, your real capacity, the floor rate and the leak calculators. Nothing leaves your browser.
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
How much social energy you actually have, and a networking plan that fits inside it.
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
Your front page read the way a cold visitor reads it, one question at a time.
Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing
Resume to service lines to a sharpened offer to a scoped deliverable, priced against your floor.
Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing
Seven message templates through your target shape, the follow-up discipline, the Mon-Thu cadence. It drafts; it never sends.
Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing
The sheet, three warmth tiers, and the network audit that measures your fill rate against the one you guessed in Week 0.
Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing
The reference for the no-code automation you build in that class.
Automate Your Email: No Code AI Automation
Nine stations of context engineering you work through against your own material.
Context Engineering
The identity defense reference: what to lock, in what order.
Digital Identity Defense
Which governance framework applies where you are in the lifecycle.
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
The map of agentic security standards, drawn as one picture.
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
106.3 hours of recording, 79 clips. Concentrated in Intro to Agents and Context Engineering, and yours the moment you enroll rather than when a cohort starts.
441 exercises. At a quarter of an hour each, the whole path is roughly 235 hours of work you can start on the day you join and take at whatever pace the company allows.
And the rooms themselves. The Founder — Recordings is the live side: all 9 of these, every time they run, as many times as you want to sit in. The month you need the pricing hour twice, you take it twice.
Two of the nine
The company runs on your accounts
When you are one person, your phone is the company's root credential and your inbox is its front door. Two classes on this path are about holding both: a recovery path that survives losing the device, a rule for what happens when somebody calls claiming to be your payment provider, and the standard that says which one applies to what you are building.
One of them makes you falsify your own account recovery by attempting it — locking yourself out on purpose, on a day you chose. Another has you justify a safety case for a system that acts without you, in writing, the way a buyer's security review asks for it. All 7 are listed beside this.
What the two of them leave you able to do
- locate the standard that governs a system you are building
- operate a callback rule against incoming contact
- configure recovery that survives losing the device
- classify which framework applies where you are in the lifecycle
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
- justify a safety case for a system that acts without you
Rule yourself out
Who this is not for
You already run a business
If the company exists and what you want is the repetitive work automated rather than a new thing started, the pricing-first sequence is wasted on you. Take The AI Executive instead.
The creative work is the business
If the thing you sell is the making — the writing, the images, the performance — the go-to-market lane here is the wrong shape. The AI Creative is built for that.
You want to build the tooling
This path uses models to make a company work. If what you want is to engineer the systems themselves — agents, pipelines, the infrastructure under other people's products — go straight to Build AI Systems.
The first move
Name the floor. Then build the thing that has to clear it.
9 classes, 36 capabilities, 106.3 hours recorded, 441 exercises and 11 apps — plus a cohort you can run as many times as your company needs, taking a different lane each time. The next room opens Wednesday 26 August.
The Founder — Recordings · $250 a month · any single class can be taken on its own · more than one track: