🧑💼 For people who are done asking permission
Name the floor rate. Then build the thing that has to clear it.
Your floor rate is the hourly price below which your month does not close — rent, food, health cover, divided by the hours somebody will really pay for. The calculator below works it out in two minutes. Three weeks in you have that number, a scoped offer, and a list of the people you can realistically keep warm. 106.3 hours of recording sit behind that if you want the long version — and it is all open the day you join.
A path is one subscription and a fixed order. The school teaches one catalog of classes; this is the route through it for someone starting a company. You get every class on the path, the recordings, the tools, and the weekly standups — not a per-class ticket.
$250 a month — on your own clock.
All 7 classes recorded, every exercise, all the tools, the written
curriculum, and the standups Mon–Thu. You can be three weeks into the material before
you ever join a live hour.
$500 a month — plus the live rooms.
A seat in every class on this path, every time it runs, including the Founding
Federation cohort. No limit on how many times you sit through the same one.
Most founders start at
$250 and move up the month a cohort they want begins.
Switch either direction whenever.
The two-minute version of the Pricing Bench (a ten-step worksheet you keep)
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. Nothing is sent anywhere: the arithmetic runs in this browser, and the rate it lands on is saved in it.
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 3 sessions on this path. Your seat is in all of them.
Recordings, exercises, curriculum, standups. So the question is not which class you can afford this month — it is which mornings and evenings you are going to give it.
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 included. 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.
Start solo $250/monthNew dates go up as sessions are scheduled. All 106.3 hours of recording open the day you join — start whenever, at whatever pace the company allows.
The two-minute version of the Social Budget (a networking plan sized to your real week)
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 live cohort at the center of this path
Founding Federation: pick one lane, come back for the other
Founding Federation is the live cohort program where you work alongside other founders. Everyone starts together in Week 0, and then you choose which lane (track within the cohort) your company needs first — Go To Market (find the buyer) or Build an MVP (ship the smallest sellable thing). The cohort runs again, so the other lane 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. The exercises and the two tools 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 path, 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, and the date it carries is when the room next opens.
-
01
Control AI Spending
Next Sat 12 Sep1:00 pm PTGuided app -
02
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
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
Where you choose your lane, and where four of the tools live — they open the moment you enroll, before the room does.
Guided app Front Page Audit Offer Designer Outreach The Pipeline Guided app -
04
Automate Your Email: No Code AI Automation
Guided app Guided app Automation Blueprint -
05
Context Engineering
Next Wed 16 Sep6:00 pm PTRun on your own documents rather than a sample corpus.
Guided app Guided app Guided app Guided app Reference -
06
Intro to Agents
Next Tue 15 Sep6:00 pm PTEnding with an agent of yours that calls real tools.
Guided app Guided app Reference -
07
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
Guided app Agentic AI Security Map Agentic AI Security Frameworks
All of it opens the day you enroll — you can be three weeks into the material before your first live hour comes around. 106.3 hours of recording sit behind the sequence, most of it in Intro to Agents and Context Engineering.
What is in the box
The tools
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
The map of agentic security standards, drawn as one picture.
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
Which governance framework applies where you are in the lifecycle.
AI Security: Governance, Standards and Safety Cases
Exercises throughout. Work them on your own business rather than a toy example — start the day you join, at whatever pace the company allows.
Standups every week, Mon–Thu. On either plan there is always a room this week whether or not a class is scheduled. Bring the number you just worked out and the people around you are working the same problem.
The rooms themselves. $500/month is the live side: all 7 classes, 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 7
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 5 are listed in the rail.
Not quite right?
If this is not your path
You already run a business
If the company exists and what you want is the repetitive work handed off rather than a new thing started, you can skip the pricing-first sequence and go straight at the operations. The AI Executive starts where you already are.
The creative work is the business
If the thing you sell is the making — the writing, the images, the performance — you want a studio rather than a go-to-market lane. The AI Creative is built for exactly that, and it ends with a price you can say out loud too.
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 — The AI Builder goes all the way into the machinery.
Same school, same standups, same people in the hallway. Whichever of the four you pick, you can change your mind next month.
The first move
Name your floor rate. Then build the thing that has to clear it.
Three weeks in you have the number, a scoped offer, and a list of the people you can keep warm. 7 classes in a fixed order, a cohort you can run as many times as your company needs. The next room opens Saturday 12 September.
$250/month — recordings, exercises, tools, standups · $500/month — the same plus every live class · any single class can be taken on its own, pay what you can · full scholarships exist