Five seats · six months

I'm not hiring. I'm making founders.

Founding Five is a six-month practice-building apprenticeship for five people who have already built something real with AI and can name a plausible first buyer. You establish an independent practice under your own name — your clients, your revenue, your work.

Not employment. Not a franchise. No clients supplied.

Six months after leaving corporate, the practice was real: five of five clients entered at a four-figure milestone and expanded on evidence, twelve of twelve delivered milestones priced at or under $8,375, and one client grew a self-built prototype into $23.5K of production milestones.

grade: measured — deal ledger

What I can't hand you is my network or my scar tissue — that part you bring. So the only honest promise is this one: you could do better, worse, or the same.

The precedent, plainly: those months were worked alongside another job, with no map and no tooling — I built the practice and the platform at the same time. You start with both already working.

Why this exists

I've hit the ceiling of me.

The demand in front of this practice is bigger than my hours, and what I do doesn't work as a job — it only works when the person doing it owns the outcome. So I'm not hiring. Five people will build their own practice — their name, their clients, their revenue — bootstrapped by three things nobody handed me:

01 · The map

My books, open

Anonymized SOWs, recorded sales calls, pipeline history, the pricing decisions and delivery artifacts — the full motion from first conversation to production-grade platform. Not a course. The actual artifacts, as they ran.

02 · The machete

My platform, in your hands

The same governed delivery infrastructure I run every engagement on — the gates, the evidence chain, the review pipeline. You start where I am, not where I started.

03 · Me, vested

Your deals, my review on the line

Every qualifying deal gets reviewed before it goes out — call prep, pricing, the SOW, and the debrief after. One opportunity in formal review at a time. We meet in one 90-minute deal room each week — all five of us, wins and receipts, one deal in the hot seat, commitments — with async review on the platform between blocks. And half my fee only exists if you win, with your outcome published on the public ledger either way — by row number, not by name.

The total is at most $15,000 — $7,500 to enter, plus up to $7,500 more, charged only as a percentage of what you actually collect. No other program fee. The trigger and the operating terms are stated below.

Term sheet — Founding FivePlain terms · the trigger stated below
Seats5 — this offer closes when they're filled, not on a countdown timer
Term6 months, founder-paced
Entry$7,500 to enter
Honest exitFull refund of the $7,500 entry through the Week-2 bailout checkpoint. The curriculum builds that checkpoint in: Week 2 ends with a plain-talk decision — anyone without a schedulable prospect pushes on or exits clean. Exit there and the entry is refunded in full. After Week 2 the entry is committed; the success fee is unaffected either way — it only ever applies to what you collect.
Success fee10% of what your practice collects on client engagements during the term, capped at $7,500. No threshold, no cliff — every additional dollar you collect leaves you better off, so there is nothing to price around. Collect nothing, owe nothing.
CadenceOne 90-minute live block each week for 24 weeks, plus async review on the platform between blocks, answered on business days. Sessions are scheduled ahead; if one moves, it is rescheduled, not dropped.
Curriculum24 weeks, mapped end to end — listen, deal, prototype, MVP, production, operate. Weeks 1–6 are built module by module from the deal ledger: every lesson cites the receipt it came from, including the deals that lost. Later weeks apply the same system to the cohort's live opportunities, producing new evidence as the work runs.
MeasurementTwelve dimensions of practice judgment — listening, pricing, scope control, calibration and more — graded three times: week 1, week 12, week 23. The change between them publishes with your ledger row.
AccountabilityRows FF-001 through FF-005 are already reserved on the calibration ledger, in public, before anyone has signed. Outcomes publish by row number — win or miss — not by name, unless you ask to be named. Graded like my own numbers; my failure would be public too. Price my incentives accordingly.
What you ownEverything. Your practice, your clients, your name — you leave as the Principal of your own practice. This is not a franchise and not employment.

Who this is for — I don't care what your business card says

  • The exec who won the game once — and found out the prize was just more game.
  • The blue-collar builder — underestimated by people they out-think, quietly building with AI after the shift ends.
  • The domain expert — who knows an industry's pain from the inside. The founders I learned the most from came from exam rooms and hospital floors, not boardrooms.
  • The marketing mind — who can smell real product-market fit through a wall.
1

You've built something real with AI that nobody asked you to build.

Obsession, not curiosity. A thing that exists because you couldn't not make it.

2

You can name one human who might pay you.

Your first client is already in your phone. If they aren't, this isn't your season yet — and that's a cheaper lesson free.

One email, read by me

What you built. Who might pay you. Why now.

Subject line "Founding Five." No deck needed — the filters above are the application.

​

or compose in Gmail · your mail app

The honest print, on top My results are mine — not typical, not a guarantee, not a projection of yours. They sit on the claims ledger with honesty grades, including the ones still marked "asserted." AI will keep compressing jobs; I can't stop that. What I can do is put the tools in five sets of the right hands — and stand there while you swing them. Better, worse, or the same: that part is yours.