New Founders House, new AI company

Hey it's Damian 👋,

Lots of changes recently…

Founders House, our third space for Founders is launching our second location in the Flatiron District in NYC (October's applications here).

We're launching a new company at Stan's Launchpad: an AI agent that manages your ads, from actually creating the content to tracking the numbers (free alpha below in this week's article).

Tom, my co-founder brother, and I were one of 30 teams were selected from over 500 applications! We’ll be competing over 2 weeks for a $100k prize at Launchpad.

I’ll be sharing learnings from the Stan team, Gary Vee, Pear VC, Backstage Capital, Zach Yadegari from Cal AI and more.

But first, here's what's coming this week.

This week in NYC

Mon to Thu, 5 PM | Tour Founders House in Flatiron

Tue, Sep 29, 7 AM | West Village Founders & Creators Run, West Village

Wed, Sep 30, 7:30 AM | Williamsburg Founders & Creators Run at Padel Haus

Wed, Sep 30, 9 AM | MongoDB.local NYC for Startups, Pier 36 (waitlist open)

Thu, Oct 1, 6:15 PM | Sauna Hour at the Founders Gym, our new intro to the community

Founders House is NYC's third space for founders building to scale: a penthouse workspace with skylights in Flatiron, a few minutes from Union Square, with a gym, sauna and cold plunge next door included in membership, plus community and business programming. We have 100 members and 1,600+ applications. Apply here.

Grind House is the Founders Gym. Train where our members train. Get a 3-day pass.

Tools I've been using:

• Stanley: I'm busy running companies and don't have time to write and schedule posts every day. Stanley, from the Stan team, turns my voice notes into drafts that sound like me and schedules them across LinkedIn, X and Instagram, all from a text thread (referral link).

• Instinct: I've tried a lot of AI agents and assistants, and Instinct has been my daily driver recently. I text it, and it handles the busywork: inbox, scheduling, bookings.

• Fish Audio: the best AI text to voice tool I've found that allows you to control the emotions. It's what we're using for voice as we build ads with Rollie. Get 10,000 free credits here.

Starting over at $150k a month

Six years ago, my brother Tom and I started a marketing agency. We built it to $150k a month, and we're betting all of it on something new.

If you've ever built something, you know how hard it is to walk away from something that's working. The harder something was to build, the less you want to ask whether it should exist. And I’d been putting off that question for years.

But something shifted in me when we opened Founders House…

Suddenly, I was working next to founders doing $10M+/year in influencer marketing, raising millions to build data centers, and doing $40M/year with a platform for content creators. I realized I was thinking too small.

If you're building on your own, this is the lesson I'd pass on. Your ambition drifts toward the people you surround yourself with. Put yourself somewhere your big number is someone else's normal.

Here’s the bigger bet we’re placing now.

Rollie is an AI agent that manages your ads, from the content to the numbers. Creators handle the content and Rollie handles the data, so nobody has to sit in the middle. You stay out of Ads Manager. Rollie tells you which ads to run and what to film next, then shows what every piece of content actually earned.

If you run a business, you get results you can see, from a creator who has actually been inside your business. If you're a creative, you make $500 a month or more from every client who uses Rollie, selling AI and results instead of one-off shoots. And every project links back to you from your client's website, so new clients can find you.

If you're neither, stick around. For the next two weeks Tom and I are building Rollie in public at Launchpad, and I'll be sharing all the playbooks here.

One uncomfortable number

We started with health and wellness clinics. We hired 3,500 videographers and creators and managed $10M in ad spend. For a while we ran the whole company out of an RV across 25 states.

It was working, but the more of the agency's work we handed to AI, the clearer it got who was doing the real work: the creator in the room. They were the ones who could walk into a business and get a nervous business owner comfortable on camera.

Then I pulled our last 70 jobs. The person holding the camera kept a median of 29% of what the client paid. Six years in, that was hard to admit. We were the middleman.

Why now

AI is shrinking the middle. Software does more of the editing and reporting every month. Most agencies will bolt AI onto the old model and keep the margin. We'd rather hand the tools to the people doing the work.

We still have a lot to prove. Running an agency doesn't mean we can build a product people will pay for. Starting over means being a beginner again, in public, with cameras rolling. But I know whose problems I want to work on.

What makes me think we can do it: a health tech founder here in NYC went from 0 results on her ads to over $100k in pipeline with this playbook. And I get to build it with my brother, Tom.

Tom has been betting on me since COVID, when our chatbot couldn't keep up and he answered hundreds of customer chats a day from a semester in Australia, with zero equity. At 22 he turned down a banking offer out of UChicago to build with me.

How it works

1. Start with an audit. We go through your paid marketing and tell you what to run and what to film next.

2. The creator makes the content. That's the part AI can't replace.

3. Rollie runs the numbers. It runs the ads and shows what the content earned.

Start with a free ads audit.

While we're at Launchpad, I'm doing every audit 1:1, on a call with me. It's free, and spots are limited by my calendar. Run a business? Bring your ad account. Creative? Bring a client you already work with.

Worst case, you walk away with a clear plan for your ads and nothing to lose.

Book your free ads audit

Every new thing starts with two people showing up

Three years ago I started a run club because I wanted more friends who were building something. Plenty of weeks it was me and one other person. We kept running for nine months, winter included. Then 60 people showed up during Tech Week. Fast forward to today and that run club has become Founders House.

Rollie is day one of the same thing. It's small and uncertain, and it's built on the belief we’re betting on: the people doing the work should own the client, and the people paying should see the results.

If you're starting something too, you're early, and early looks like two people on a run in the winter. I'll share every step from Launchpad here, so you can follow along.

Talk soon,

Damian