I'm trying to be clearer about who I'm looking for. I keep getting the question and giving a half-answer. Help me work it out.
Sure. Before we try to describe them, what are you actually filtering on? Skills? Experience? Something else?
Four things, but I haven't gotten them clean yet. Skin in the game. A technical background that's real, not LinkedIn-real. Someone who can see a future where we build a better economy for the people doing the work. And someone who already understands what's possible at this specific moment — not some other one.
Those aren't four things. They're a single person described four different ways.
Okay. Walk me through that.
Let's take them one at a time. When you say skin in the game — you don't just mean money, do you?
No. I mean they have to have actually risked something in their career to get to where they are. Run a bootstrapped project that could have gone sideways. Taken a pay cut to work on something they believed in. Left a stable job. Bet on themselves at least once. If every decision they've ever made was the safe one, they're going to freeze the first time this gets hard.
So it's less about what they'll put in up front and more about what their track record already proves they can put up with. Risk as a demonstrated behavior, not a promised one.
Exactly. I don't need courage on paper. I need someone who has sweated a decision and lived with it.
That also filters out people who only play at the edges. Someone who has always worked inside a large company and always cashed the check is going to have a very different nervous system than someone who has ever been the person the payroll depended on.
Right. And I'm not saying the corporate veteran can't make the leap. I'm saying they have to have made at least one leap already, somewhere, to prove to themselves they can land.
Good. Next — technical background. What does technical actually mean here, in your head?
Someone who has built. Not managed builders. Not reviewed builders. Actually sat down and made something work. I don't care if it was an app, a process, a reporting pipeline, or a piece of hardware — they need the scars from shipping something real.
That's a lower bar than a lot of people assume. You're not saying "senior software engineer."
I'm not. I'm saying "builder." Some of the best technical minds I've ever worked with came from operations, not engineering. They understood systems because they had to run them, not because they got to draw them on a whiteboard. The common thread is they've been responsible for something that had to work when they weren't watching.
So the bar is: has this person owned the outcome of something technical, end to end, at least once? If yes, they qualify. If no, they don't — regardless of title.
That's exactly it.
Now the harder one. A future where we build a better economy. Say more.
This is the one I keep struggling to say out loud without sounding like a TED talk.
Try it in your voice anyway.
The current deal for skilled practitioners is bad. You trade hours for money, and when the project ends, you start over. The platforms you build on take most of the upside. The clients you serve don't know what good looks like, so they can't reward it when they get it. And the path to get better doesn't really exist — it's a pile of courses that don't connect to real work. I want to build something where the people who do the work own a piece of what they build, get paid to get better at it, and know their effort is going somewhere that compounds. That's what I mean by a better economy.
So you're filtering for someone who has felt the bad version of that deal. Not someone who read about it.
Yes. Someone who has been the skilled person in the room watching the platform take the cut, thinking "there has to be a better version of this." If they've never been there, the vision is going to sound like marketing. If they have, it's going to sound like oxygen.
That's a specific kind of person. They've been good at something. They've watched their good work get captured by a system that didn't reward them proportionally. And they've started — somewhere quietly — to wonder if the system could be rebuilt.
And they haven't given up. That part matters. Cynics don't help me. Tired believers do.
Last one. Understands the opportunity at hand. Meaning what?
Meaning they see that right now, with what's possible in AI and how quickly a small team can ship, there is a window that won't be open forever. The cost to build has collapsed. The ability to train and certify people at scale has collapsed. The ability to run a real business with a very small team has collapsed. The people who recognize that the floor has moved are going to build things the people who don't recognize it can't catch up to.
You want someone who has already felt that shift. Not someone you're going to have to explain it to.
If I have to explain it, they're not the one. Not because they're wrong — they might be plenty smart — but there isn't time to educate four people into urgency. The four I'm looking for are already awake to it. My job is to find them, not convert them.
Let me try to put it together into one picture. You're looking for someone who has taken a real risk at least once, has built something real with their own hands, has been on the wrong end of the current deal for skilled practitioners, and already sees that the tools of this moment are different. Someone who's been knocked down and got back up — more than once — and kept going long enough to learn what actually works. An enthusiastic believer with scars, taste, grit, and perseverance.
An enthusiastic believer with scars, taste, grit, and perseverance.— CLAUDE, MID-CONVERSATION
Yes. And one more thing. They have to want a seat at a very small table more than they want a louder seat at a bigger one. This isn't an opportunity that trades on prestige. It trades on ownership and proximity. If they're chasing a logo to post on LinkedIn, they're in the wrong room.
So the pitch to them isn't "come work for us." It's "come help us own this."
That's the only pitch I'm making.
One practical question before we close. "Come help us own this" is a big ask on vibes alone. How does someone figure out if they're actually aligned with the way you build — before they commit anything?
I wrote the method down. There's a book we work from — we call it SPEED — and it explains how we build. Write the spec before the code. Keep one source of truth for every decision. Record the choices so the reasoning doesn't evaporate the next time the same question comes up. Measure the things old ways of working never measured. It's not long. Anyone can read it in an afternoon. If the way it thinks lines up with the way they think, the rest of this will make sense. If it doesn't click, the rest won't either.
So the book is the filter before the filter. They qualify themselves in or out before you ever meet.
And then I'm gathering the first group in person. The Founding Implementor Summit — a small one, not a conference. Three meetings. The people already in the build, the people seriously considering it, and me. Real conversations, not panels. No keynotes, no vendor tables, no swag bags. By the end of it, someone either knows they want one of the seats or knows they don't — and either answer is fine.
The book is the credential check. The Founding Implementor Summit is the fit check.
Yes. And the Founding Implementor Summit only works because of the book. If I tried to gather people without a shared method first, we'd waste the whole three meetings arguing about definitions. With the book, we start on the same page and spend the time on what actually matters — whether we want to build this together.
Then I think your four people already exist. They're probably not applying to anything right now. They've been quietly building in the margins, watching the bigger players miss the shift, wondering if anyone else sees it. Your job is to make sure they know the book exists and the room is being set.
That's what I'm trying to do. That's what this post is.
If that sounds like you — if you read this conversation and felt called out by more than one of those paragraphs — reach out.
Four seats total. The first one is mine. The other three are open. One I'm holding for someone who reads this and knows, immediately, that I wrote it for them.
— Patrick
The conversation held something back on purpose.
A post is not the place to price anything. If the values lined up and the voice landed, then it's worth saying plainly: there is a real economic offer underneath all of this. A defined buy-in. A defined ownership stake. A permanent multiplier on what founding implementors earn that later-joining implementors at the same tier will never see. A Class B equity pathway. Payment spread across milestones, not demanded up front. And one seat, held on the other side of the NDA, for someone who reads the details and knows immediately that the numbers are fair.
I am not going to negotiate those details in public. They live in a short document — four or five pages — that arrives down the road if it feels right. Between the two documents, anyone serious enough to want a seat will know everything they need to know to decide.
The door is the NDA. What's on the other side of it is the method I build by, and the exact shape of the offer to join me in building with it.
The book and the offer
Sign the NDA and you get access to SPEED — the Body of Knowledge that explains the way we build. If our summit goes well, we develop an operating agreement based on the deal we close. Together, we agree on what founding seat costs, who is contributing what, exactly what it pays forward, and exactly what it doesn't include.
The SQUEIL AI Implementor Apex
A large gathering of the brightest and most enthused minds ready to build in AI. Founding implementors set the stage, design the evaluation, and decide who earns a seat alongside us. We sign the dotted line - agree on our initial investment; and put on a summit where we recruit the next hundred operators — under our direction, a set standard, and with a killer methodology. Come build what fills this room.
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