The biggest trap for modern entrepreneurs right now is "platform lock-in." We stack our businesses with flashy tools, only to realize our most valuable asset—our data, our frameworks, our unique voice—is trapped behind a dozen different corporate paywalls and subscription models. Lately, Kevin and I have been leaning hard into building a unified digital brain using a completely different approach: Obsidian. For those who haven't tracked with it yet, Obsidian isn't another software trap. It is literally just a local lens that sits on top of a standard folder of plain-text Markdown (⁠.md⁠) files right on your hard drive. If the company vanishes tomorrow, your data doesn't change at all. We’ve been building with it. How We Are Leveraging It Right Now: One Source of Truth: Pulling our standard operating procedures, content frameworks, and vision into a single repository. It ensures absolute voice consistency across everything we touch. Modular Freedom: Because it’s just raw text files, we can swap out our workflows, tools, or automation scripts on the fly without any import/export friction. Future-Proofing for AI: This is the real chess move. Clean, linked Markdown is the absolute gold standard for feeding data into autonomous sub-agents and custom AI skills later. We are organizing the dataset now so our future tech stack can navigate it seamlessly. The Honest Reality (The Security / Setup Balance): Because it’s local-first, the core data is incredibly secure. No big tech company is scraping it to train public models. But it does mean you own your infrastructure: The Risk: Relying on basic cloud syncing (like iCloud or Google Drive) drops you back into their ecosystem. The Fix: Using local, peer-to-peer syncing or private Git repositories keeps your data entirely yours. Stick to trusted, audited plugins to keep the environment locked down. How Are You Keeping Control of Your Data? Are you already using Obsidian, Notion, or just raw Markdown folders? How are you structuring your knowledge base so it's actually ready for future AI agents without sacrificing your privacy?

This is a recording from my VIP sessions in my community I usually don't post these online so that we can talk about personal business things, but I felt I wanted to share this one. I will never be sharing these publicly again. For my VIP members if you want your files I promised they are uploaded at the bottom of the drawing room post in a ZIP here: Session 8 6/13/2026 - The Drawing Room (VIP) · Clief Notes Time stamps: 00:00 Welcome: the Ledger and the ICM deployment layer 02:11 Member intros and what people are building 04:07 Engelbart, 1962, and software as collaboration 08:15 Fable pulled, and why output beats features 15:18 Getting unstuck on ICM 19:47 The three questions and a live ICM routing demo 33:08 AI as your runtime, humans in the compute layer 38:40 Productionize your opinion 41:40 Ingest agents and distilling your brain into files 46:39 You are not behind 49:23 London Tech Week: the rooms and the money 52:27 The buyer is changing: selling to agents 54:08 Everyone is overbuilding, and the talent layer opening 61:13 Placement fees, freelancing, and the college problem 66:47 No "best," and a bet on humans 70:05 Chicago: hollow output and the 60/30/10 rule 73:53 When to hire a human instead of automating 78:27 SkillOpt: training your skill files 90:29 Launching this week, and close

Hey all. You've probably noticed it's been quiet in here the last couple weeks, wanted to explain. We've been building something for the community, and travelling at the same time to meet with investors and a few clients. We've also been busy getting the Lyceum ready. So less posting than usual, but for a good reason!! We're announcing the thing this week, and there'll be more info on the Lyceum coming out this week too. I think a lot of you are going to be happy. We've been grinding nonstop to get this ready. Before we do, we want to hear from you. If you're Premium or VIP, what's missing for you right now and what would you want us to add? If you're not Premium or VIP yet, what would actually make you want to upgrade? Form's here, takes about two minutes: https://forms.gle/MM8PLn2f6An1dfEUA It's open until Sunday June 21. Looking forward to reading everyones answers! Back soon with the news :)

Before I get to the who and why, I want to say this plainly. Picking a winner this round was genuinely hard. I went through every submission. Pulled repos. Read identity files. Compared rules.md sections. Every entry did real work. A lot of you shipped something I would happily use, sell, or hand a client tomorrow. I can NOT explain to you how proud I am of everyone participating in these, you make this community worth and it and there is SO much potential for the future from just ONE competition let alone future ones. 💼 That part matters more than the prize. The $325 covers a year of Premium and that's great but... The portfolio piece is the real value here. A public repo of a working folder-based AI specialist with a clean README and receipts is a resume line that hiring managers can clone and test cold in five minutes. It is also something you can charge for. If you built a specialist that solves a real problem in a real domain, you already have most of what you need to license it to a peer in your industry, sell it as a service, or package it as a Done-with-You engagement. A few quick notes on that, because most of you did not realize what you actually built and I want to Highlight a few of you: 💸 @Nicolas Patron Uriburu USD Routing Coach AR could be sold to every Argentine indie consultor I know. Same playbook works for any country with FX restrictions. Subscription service, recalibrated annually, audit-pack included. It is a product. 🔗 https://github.com/Nicopatron/usd-routing-coach-ar 🔧 @Jannetje van Leeuwen RAMS specialist is a service business in waiting. Irish signage contractors will pay for this. Same model works for any trade with a regulatory documentation burden. Plumbing, electrical, fit-out, demolition. Each one needs its own folder. 🔗 https://github.com/JannetjeIQ/rams-irish-signage-installer

1. Watch the intro video and introduce yourself in the intro post here 2. Start with The Foundation (free course). Concepts, folder architecture, prompting framework. Everything else builds on this. 3. Check in at the bottom of each lesson. Polls, discussion posts, other members working through the same stuff. Use them. 4. When you're ready to build real things, move to Implementation Playbooks (Level 2). When you're ready to build your own tools, Building Your Stack (Level 3). 5. Post your work. Ask questions. Help others when you can. What are you here to build?