🧑💼 For people who are done asking permission
Build the company. Starting with the number you have been avoiding.
“I'm building an AI-first company.” — so the first thing this path does is make you say what the thing costs, what you cost, and how many hours you can honestly sell. Everything downstream is decided by that answer. Then 9 classes, in the order they stand on each other, and a cohort programme in the middle that you are meant to run more than once.
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. Most people who think they have a pricing problem have a capacity problem wearing a pricing problem's coat.
You might work 40 hours. Twelve of them are sellable here; the other 28 are the business itself, and they have to be paid for out of the twelve.
That is the two-minute version. The real one — the Pricing Bench, ten stations, and 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, and turns the whole thing into a transition plan with a date on it. Then the Pipeline measures the fill rate you actually got, against the one you just guessed.
The programme at the centre
Founding Federation, and the fork you cannot take both sides of
This is the only path here built around a cohort. Everyone starts in the same room, and then the room splits in two — on purpose, and in a way worth understanding before you enrol, because it is the reason people run it twice.
Week 0 · everyone · no fork
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 forks yet. Everybody produces the three numbers their life costs and the capacity those numbers have to come out of.
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
Outbound Hour — GTM
9:00 Pacific · Mon-Thu · led by spencer
You spend the same hour finding out whether anybody will pay for it.
- 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
Why it is one and not both
The two hours run at the same time on the same days. You cannot attend both in one cohort, and we are not going to pretend otherwise by recording them: both Founding Federation classes have no recordings at all — Week 0 and Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing alike. They are live cohort work, and the room is the product.
That constraint is deliberate. A founder who is building and selling in the same hour does neither. So you pick the side your company needs first, and the second pass picks up the side you left — with the advantage that Week 0 is sharper the second time, because the numbers you bring to it are yours now instead of guessed. The fill rate you invented in your first Week 0 is a measurement by your second one.
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, and the capability named under each is the hardest thing that class certifies.
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01
Control AI Spending
Leaves you able to segment text into tokens and cost it [9]
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02
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
Leaves you able to justify a price when the buyer pushes back [11]
Live cohort work — nothing recorded, and no date on the calendar as this page was published. What it leaves behind are the two benches and your own numbers.
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03
Founding Federation: Smallest Sellable Thing
Leaves you able to design an offer for one segment end to end [12]
The fork lives here. Live cohort work, nothing recorded, no date yet — and four guided apps you can open the moment you enrol.
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04
Automate Your Email: No Code AI Automation
Leaves you able to parameterise an agent persona [10]
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05
Context Engineering
Leaves you able to design a recursive summariser for oversized documents [12]
The exercise mountain of this path: 329 of them, against 27 clips.
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06
Intro to Agents
Leaves you able to construct an agent that uses tools [12]
The largest recorded body on the path. 42 clips.
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07
Digital Identity Defense
Leaves you able to falsify your own account recovery by attempting it [11]
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08
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
Leaves you able to justify a safety case for a system that acts without you [11]
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09
Keep It Running
Leaves you able to verify you would know your system broke before a user tells you [11]
The thinnest class here, honestly: no recording, no app, and no date on the calendar. It is the live hour and nothing else. We are telling you because you would find out on day one.
Read the recording column honestly: 106.3 hours exist and almost all of them are in two classes — Intro to Agents at 56.7 and Context Engineering at 35.7. 5 of these 9 have nothing recorded at all. Two of those are the cohort itself, which is live by design; the rest are reference-and-live-hour classes. This page is not going to sell you a video course that is not there.
The shape of it
36 capabilities, weighted where a founder lives
And by philosophy
All 36 capabilities, in complexity order
- [7] locate a tool in an open tool hub System construction
- [8] run an open model locally Infrastructure
- [8] locate the standard that governs a system you are building Security
- [8] execute a tool call round trip by hand System construction
- [8] execute a first touch outbound sequence on schedule Distribution and influence
- [8] name an audience and its success criterion Audience and market
- [9] configure inference hyperparameters Model behaviour
- [9] transform naive hours into billable capacity Audience and market
- [9] produce an offer page that answers a cold message Audience and market
- [9] operate a no code automation that calls a model System construction
- [9] produce the three numbers your life costs Audience and market
- [9] configure recovery that survives losing the device Security
- [9] produce an account of an audiences current workaround Audience and market
- [9] operate a callback rule against incoming contact Security
- [9] produce an itemised bill for what your running system costs Infrastructure
- [9] transform a transcript into a structured record Data shaping
- [9] produce a budget for work whose timeline you have observed Audience and market
- [9] produce a reusable system prompt Model behaviour
- [9] operate a boundary on unpaid work Audience and market
- [9] produce an account of what you depend on and who can revoke it Infrastructure
- [9] segment text into tokens and cost it Model behaviour
- [10] classify which of your offerings can reach thrive not just survive Audience and market
- [10] parameterise an offering backwards from its floor Audience and market
- [10] characterise what one user costs you to serve Infrastructure
- [10] characterise what breaks when you cut the connection Infrastructure
- [10] constrain model output to a schema Model behaviour
- [10] classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext Security
- [10] classify which framework applies where you are in the lifecycle Security
- [10] parameterise an agent persona Model behaviour
- [11] justify a price when the buyer pushes back Audience and market
- [11] verify you would know your system broke before a user tells you Infrastructure
- [11] falsify your own account recovery by attempting it Security
- [11] justify a safety case for a system that acts without you Security
- [12] design a recursive summariser for oversized documents Data shaping
- [12] construct an agent that uses tools System construction
- [12] design an offer for one segment end to end Audience and market
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. The six behind Founding Federation are the ones a founder can put to work the same 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-defence 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 enrol rather than when a cohort starts.
441 exercises. Charged at a quarter of an hour each, the whole path comes to roughly 235 hours of work. That estimate is the one number here that is a guess, and it says so.
The part founders skip
You are the whole company's single point of failure
There are two security classes on this path and they are not here out of paranoia. When you are one person, your phone is the company's root credential. Lose it, or hand it to somebody who called claiming to be your payment provider, and the outage is not personal — it is every customer you have.
So account recovery that survives a lost device is business continuity. The path makes you falsify your own account recovery by attempting it, which is a different exercise from believing you set it up. And once your systems act without you watching, somebody has to be able to justify why that is safe. On a payroll of one, that is you.
The security capabilities on this path
- [8]locate the standard that governs a system you are building
- [9]configure recovery that survives losing the device
- [9]operate a callback rule against incoming contact
- [10]classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- [10]classify which framework applies where you are in the lifecycle
- [11]falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
- [11]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 need a live room this week
5 of the 9 classes have no date on the calendar as this page was published, both Founding Federation classes among them. Enrolling gets you 106.3 hours of recording and 11 apps today; the cohort comes when the cohort comes.
The first move
Name the floor. Then build the thing that has to clear it.
9 classes, 36 capabilities, 106.3 hours recorded and 11 apps — and one cohort you are meant to run twice, from opposite sides.
Pay what you can from $100 · any single class is $60