One Human + One Agent Stack = A Film That Moves a Room 🎬 automateandgrow.beehiiv.com/…

1957. Milwaukee. A businessman named Robert Nourse is watching his company die and he cannot tell a soul. His board would panic. His managers would update their resumes. His wife would hear the fear in his voice. So he does something no one did in 1957. He calls eight company presidents who do not compete with him and asks them to meet once a month and open their real books to each other. No consultants. No press. One rule: the room stays the room. They called it TEC. It became Vistage. Today 45,000 CEOs pay for a chair at that table. I keep hearing founders say AI is their pack now. It isn't. An agent will write the deck and run the model. It will not look you in the eye and tell you the co-founder problem is you. The mastermind is one of the three wolves. The other two are your partners and your customers. Skip it and you are a very well-automated solo act, dying politely. Pack plus technology. Never pack or technology. amazon.com/Form-Your-Own-Pac…

Fifty-three heirs. One holding company. And a twenty-year lock that no raider on earth has picked. I went looking for the most expensive handbag in the world and found something better. A family that built a vault out of paperwork. October 2010. Bernard Arnault personally called the CEO of Hermes - two hours before the press release - to tell him LVMH had quietly assembled 17% of the family firm. He did it with equity swaps across three banks, each slice parked just under the line where French law forces you to speak. Arnault is the best dealmaker alive. And the play was surgical: a raider never needs the whole family. He needs the weakest three percent, one at a time. So the family stopped trusting blood and started welding steel. Late 2011. Fifty-two of the fifty-three eligible heirs poured their stock into one company - H51 - holding 50.2% of Hermes, with a priority right to buy another 12.3% if any member ever tried to sell out. A twenty-year lock. Not one of them could exit alone. Not even the ones who wanted to. Succession, if the Roys had a lawyer. Six generations of Dumas, Guerrand and Puech. Two thirds of the capital. Three quarters of the votes. Still holding the house in 2026, five years before the lock even opens. Here is what the lone-wolf gospel can't price. Not one of those heirs could have out-negotiated Arnault one-on-one. Not one. Pooled, they became a wall he couldn't buy, bluff, or break. Cross-shareholdings are not paperwork. They are a wolf pack in a legal jacket. The lone wolf sells when the price is right. The pack decides when it sells at all. Form your own pack. Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ #FormYourOwnPack

Seventy researchers. One borrowed lab. A country that had never built a computer chip. I went looking for the moment Europe stopped apologizing for silicon. I expected a factory. A billboard. A minister with giant scissors and a ribbon to cut. I got a university town in Flanders. 1984. Leuven. A professor named Roger Van Overstraeten and a fistful of researchers, most of them trained in California, who came home with one lunatic idea: build a laboratory where the enemies share the benches. Here's the problem nobody says out loud. A modern chip costs billions before you know if it works. Intel can't afford to guess alone. Samsung can't. TSMC can't. So they do the one thing the lone-wolf gospel says is impossible. They split the bill. Today imec is nearly six thousand researchers from more than ninety countries. ASML, Intel, Samsung, TSMC - companies that sue each other in every other room on earth - pay to stand in the same cleanroom, on the same tools, on the same pre-competitive problem. Nobody owns the building. Everybody funds it. That's the keiretsu move, translated to Flanders. Own the shared infrastructure everyone needs. Let the pack pay the rent. Shared assets. Shared risk. Shared data. Competitors on the same floor, because the alternative is going broke alone. And when ASML built a $400 million High-NA EUV machine, where did the first one go? Leuven. To the neutral ground. To the pack that de-risked it. The lone genius did not win the chip era. He couldn't afford the entrance fee. Europe spent forty years trying to clone Silicon Valley. It ended up building something Silicon Valley never had: a room where rivals cooperate on purpose. Build the room. Charge the pack. Let the pack build the future. Form your own pack. Get the book: amazon.com/Form-Your-Own-Pac… Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ #FormYourOwnPack

63% of new C-corps on Stripe Atlas were started by one person. Stripe just gave them a Treasury agent. Checks balances, settles invoices, moves money — through MCP. Kubrio runs a whole company on one founder and his agent. via @stripe → automateandgrow.beehiiv.com

Twelve nations. One continent. Zero armies. And one page of paper holding the whole thing together. I went hunting for the biggest piece of real estate on Earth that nobody owns, and found it at the bottom of the world - frozen, unmined, and held down by a document signed in Washington in 1959. Antarctica is 5.4 million square miles. Bigger than the United States and Mexico combined. Ninety percent of the planet's ice. Seventy percent of its fresh water. More untapped mineral wealth than most countries will ever see. Seven nations had already cut it into wedges on a map. Britain, Norway, France, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina. Overlapping claims, several drawn by men who had never been south of the equator. By 1950 three of those claimants were fighting each other by proxy. Then the Cold War walked in. The Soviets built a base. The Americans built one next door. Both sides did the math and landed on the same answer: a fight over Antarctica was a fight nobody could win and everybody could lose. December 1, 1959. Twelve countries - the US, the USSR, Britain, France and eight more - signed one document. The terms were almost insultingly simple: - nobody's claim counts, and nobody can make a new one - no military bases. No weapons tests. No explosions. - no mining - every base open to any other signatory's inspectors, unannounced, forever - all science shared And here is the move everybody misses. They never solved the hard problem. They agreed not to decide it. The seven claims are still on the books. They are simply frozen. They built a pack around the single asset none of them could afford to fight over, and left every other argument sitting on the table. What the pack got: 58 nations now signed on, 29 of them with a vote. Dozens of research stations run by countries that were pointing missiles at each other. The ozone hole, found at Halley Bay in 1985 by British scientists, which led straight to the Montreal Protocol and a healed atmosphere. Ice cores that go back 800,000 years. In 1991 they added the Madrid Protocol. Mining banned outright. Antarctica declared a natural reserve. Fifty years minimum, and it can only be reopened if every single consultative nation agrees. Nobody has. The lone wolf plants a flag and calls in the rig. The pack writes one page, and six decades later 58 countries are still holding the line. Talent isn't the scarce thing. Agreement is. The pack is how you get it. Form your own pack. Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ The book: amazon.com/Form-Your-Own-Pac… #FormYourOwnPack

$0. That's what a good idea costs in biology now. The experiment is the only thing left you can't buy. Every AI lab is spending like thinking is the hard part. Thinking is going to zero. The bench is not. So three 19-year-olds built the bench and rented it out. Petrichor. YC Fall 2026. The most expensive part of an industry doesn't have to be owned by every company in it. Share it. Then the pack gets to stay small. Form your own pack. Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ #FormYourOwnPack

Nineteen. Nineteen. Nineteen. Three Swedish teenagers in San Francisco run the wet lab the AI biology industry won't build for itself. Wilhelm Hedenskog, Jesper Johansson, Elias Reinfeldt. All 19. YC Fall 2026. Their company is called Petrichor. It means the smell of rain on dry earth. The smell of something arriving that nothing has watered yet. The bet: models will soon do the thinking in biology. The bottleneck moves to the doing. A model that reasons like a Nobel laureate still can't pipette. Their words: "AI labs are becoming fabless. Petrichor is their foundry." Three people. A lab built around what a model needs, not what a human researcher needs. Experiments in parallel. Results streaming back mid-run so the model changes its mind before the next batch. A group of AI-bio companies. One foundry. That's not a vendor. That's a pack. Form your own pack. Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ #FormYourOwnPack

Filmmakers and series creators: your project structure is key. AI can build your script, project brief, and even character profiles from your initial idea. Organized by seasons and episodes, it streamlines the creative process. #FilmMaking #SeriesProduction

85% of the new numbers in a $2.3B planning platform are written by an agent. Pigment raised $250M this week. L'Oréal is moving salary planning for 95,000 employees onto it. Planning was the last spreadsheet. Now it's the first agent. via Pigment → automateandgrow.beehiiv.com

Twenty furniture companies. One bomber. Zero rivets. I went up to High Wycombe looking for a wooden plane and found a furniture town holding a jigsaw. Buckinghamshire, England. 1940. This was the chair capital of Britain. E. Gomme built the G-Plan. Parker Knoll built the armchairs. Harris Lebus built half the bedrooms in the country. Cabinetmakers, veneer layers, French polishers — people who could cut a compound curve by feel. And every aircraft factory in Britain was already full. Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters. Aluminium, rivets, riveters — all spoken for. So Geoffrey de Havilland walked in with a plane made of trees. His argument, written to Air Marshal Wilfrid Freeman back in 1938, was heresy: a bomber with no guns, no turrets, no crew of seven. Two men. Two Merlin engines. A shell of Ecuadorian balsa sandwiched between birch ply, glued and screwed together like a dining table. Lord Beaverbrook called it “Freeman’s Folly.” Then it flew — 25 November 1940, the founder’s own son at the controls. It was one of the fastest operational aircraft on Earth in 1941. At low level, nothing could catch it. In January 1943 a Mosquito knocked the main Berlin broadcasting station off the air in the middle of a Göring speech. It hit Gestapo headquarters in daylight and it took the walls off Amiens prison so 258 men could walk out. Here is the part nobody tells. De Havilland did not build most of it. Twenty furniture companies did. Not aircraft firms. Furniture firms. Twenty rivals in one town who normally fought each other for the same English sitting room — now working from one set of drawings, to one war spec, to tolerances nobody had ever asked them for. E. Gomme. Parker Knoll. Harris Lebus. Austinsuite. Parslow. Ronson. Styles & Mealing. J. B. Dancer & Hearne cut the wing spars at Penn Street — timber in one end, finished spars out the other. About 5,000 of the 7,781 Mosquitoes ever built had their wings, fuselages and tailplanes made in that one town. That is a pack. Not a brainstorm. Not a group chat. Twenty independently owned businesses sharing the assets none of them could afford alone: the drawings, the mahogany moulds the fuselage halves were pressed over, the Ecuadorian balsa, the Sitka spruce out of British Columbia, and a century of accumulated skill in cutting wood. And when the casein glue began cracking in the monsoon heat of the Far East in 1944 — upper skins lifting off wing spars, a whole fleet grounded — the problem and the fix belonged to the entire pack at once. A urea-formaldehyde adhesive called Aerolite. Norman de Bruyne’s lab. The whole trade swapping notes to save the whole job. Nobody fixed a price. Nobody carved up a market. Gomme and Parker Knoll were still fighting for that living room after the war, and both of them knew it. They shared a specification, a supply chain and a skill set. They did not share a customer list. That distinction is the whole game. Here is the 2026 translation. You are not the twentieth furniture company. You are the design office with a spec and no factory. The capacity already exists — the contract manufacturers, the channel partners, the handful of people who own the skill you would need five years and $8M of hiring to build. You do not have to own the capacity. You have to coordinate it, and then trust it with your name on the drawing. Three wolves: the members who share your risk, the partners who own the capacity, the community that carries the word. All of it built around one shared asset none of you could buy alone. The lone wolf says own the factory. The pack says own the drawing. Form your own pack. Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ Get the book: amazon.com/Form-Your-Own-Pac… #FormYourOwnPack

$0. That's what Tesla charged Ford for the plug. I went looking for the moment the American EV plug war ended, and found a wolf doing the one thing wolves never do: handing out the blueprint. 2012. Tesla builds its own charging connector for the Model S. Proprietary. Owned. Nobody else on earth can use it. Classic wolf move - own the plug and you own the road. November 2022. Federal money is lining up behind the rival plug, CCS1. Tesla's connector is losing the standards war. So Tesla does the unthinkable: it publishes the whole spec. CAD files. Datasheets. Dimensions. Free. And renames it the North American Charging Standard. May 25, 2023. Ford calls first. Then the pack moves. GM. Rivian. Volvo. Polestar. Mercedes. Nissan. Honda. Toyota. Hyundai. Kia. BMW. Jaguar. Lucid. Subaru. Mazda. Stellantis. Volkswagen. The charging networks too: ChargePoint, EVgo, Electrify America, Blink. Hilton bolted 20,000 of them onto 2,000 hotels. Why would they? Because Tesla's network was 60% bigger than every rival fast-charging network in America combined. And it worked. One in four CCS chargers in the Bay Area was dead. Tesla's uptime: over 99%. The best road in the country, opened to the competition. Then the pack wrote it down. June 2023, SAE forms a task force. December 2023, the spec becomes SAE J3400. September 2024, a full recommended practice. May 2025, the mechanical drawings go public - so any factory on the planet can cut the plug without ever calling Tesla. Be exact about what this is. Ford and Tesla still fight over every truck and sedan. Nobody fixed a price. Nobody carved up a market. They agreed on a plug and kept competing on everything else. Cooperation on an interface is not collusion in a back room. That line is the whole game. March 2026. The last domino, Stellantis, plugs in. Every major automaker in North America now charges on a connector one company invented and then gave away. The lone wolf guards his plug. The pack makes his plug the only plug in the country. Form your own pack. Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ #FormYourOwnPack

An AI agent just got its own profile at Walmart. Its own spending cap. Its own order history. Walmart opened Walmart and Sam's Club to shopping agents via an MCP gateway — set a $50/$100/$200 cap, or approve every buy. Amazon banned agents. Walmart handed out keys. via @Walmart

Parasma pulled the GPU out of the rack and replaced it with human brain cells. March: neurons learned to play Doom. Now: next-token prediction. No silicon. A light bulb's worth of power. The most efficient computer we know was already in your skull. parasma.com

Devs just open-sourced HarnessRouter. One coordinator bot. 20+ agent harnesses. Codex, Hermes, Claude Code, DeepSeek, Pi. UHP makes them all speak the same language. Tool lock-in just got a lot harder to justify. via @_avichawla

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, acts as a bridge connecting your AI agent (ChatGPT, Codex, Grok, Dots, OpenAI, Claude) to Genflick. Ever wondered how different AI tools could interact? #AI #Tech

6,000 people. One valley. 250 years. And every precision machine on your wrist traces back to a ditch in the Swiss mountains. The Vallée de Joux. 3,000 feet up in the Jura. Snowed in six months a year. Population: smaller than a bad Tuesday at a Silicon Valley Starbucks. And it produced Audemars Piguet. Jaeger-LeCoultre. Blancpain. Breguet. Every complication that ever ticked. Here's the part nobody tells you: these weren't competitors. They were a keiretsu. Shared apprentices. A kid from Le Brassus trained at Piguet's bench, then walked two miles down the valley to work at Aubert's workshop. Same techniques. Same tools. Same valley. The knowledge didn't belong to any one company. It belonged to the valley. Cross-shareholdings. The watchmaking families intermarried. The Audemars married the Piguet. The LeCoultre married the Piguets. The cartel wasn't a boardroom decision — it was a wedding guest list. Shared technology. The ébauche — the raw movement — was made by specialists who sold to everyone. You didn't build your own escapement. You bought one from the guy three houses down who'd been making them for forty years. One valley. One skill pool. One supply chain. Zero competitors who didn't share a last name. The Swiss didn't win on genius. They won on density. 6,000 people in a frozen valley who decided to build the same impossible thing — and shared everything to get there. That's a keiretsu with a microscope. The lone watchmaker makes one watch. The valley makes an industry. Form your own pack. amazon.com/Form-Your-Own-Pac… #FormYourOwnPack

I went looking for another overfunded AI toy. I found a robot that chops onions. Two people. One robot. A kitchen that runs without you. Dimittri Choudhury scaled a startup to 100,000 users in six months, then dropped out. Alexandre Klobb started freelancing at 15. Mirabelle (YC W26) takes raw ingredients and cooks a fresh meal. Paris. Two founders. No line cooks. The lone-wolf myth says build alone. These two built a pack of two — and a machine that handles dinner. meetmirabelle.com

$50. That was the toll on a student's idea in 2005. It was killing the entire room. I went hunting for the most important piece of open hardware on Earth and found it named after a dead king, in a bar, in a small town in northern Italy. Ivrea. Piedmont. A hundred miles from Milan. The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. Design students who wanted to make things that blink and move and sense. The only tool that let them was a BASIC Stamp, and it cost $50 a board. For a design student, that is a car payment. So one of them built his own. Hernando Barragan, master's thesis, 2004. A board, a cable, and a language simple enough for people who do not call themselves engineers. He named it Wiring. His advisor was Massimo Banzi. Then 2005. Banzi, a student named David Mellis, and a teacher named David Cuartielles did a thing people still argue about: they took Wiring, swapped the expensive chip for a cheap ATmega8, forked it, and shipped it as a new project. They needed a name. They were drinking in a bar called Bar di Re Arduino - named for Arduin of Ivrea, the man who crowned himself King of Italy in 1002. So they named a microcontroller after a tavern. Arduino. Five people: Banzi, Cuartielles, Mellis, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino. No lab coat. No patent. No moat. Here is the part that matters. They published the schematics. Hardware files under a Creative Commons license. Software under the GPL. Any human on Earth could copy the board and sell it. Legally. On purpose. Every MBA in the room just fainted. The lone-wolf instinct says guard the blueprint, patent the chip, sue the clones. Arduino did the opposite. It gave the design away and let the pack build around it. What the pack built: shields, libraries, tutorials, teachers in ten thousand classrooms. SparkFun. Adafruit. Seeed. A hundred clone factories. A thousand compatible boards. A whole generation of hardware kids learning to code on a board cheap enough to brick without crying. Everybody building on the same shared asset. Nobody asking permission. That is keiretsu logic with a soldering iron - shared technology, shared standard, independent members, one asset that none of them owns and all of them profit from. And be clear about what it is not: nobody fixed a price. Nobody carved up a market. Cooperation on a design is not collusion in a back room. That distinction is the whole game. Then the pack's own center tried to eat it. One of the five quietly registered the Arduino trademark in Italy and said nothing for two years. Later, a man with a fabricated MIT doctorate took the manufacturing arm, copied the website, yanked the open-source files off the server, and the founders ended up suing themselves. For years "Arduino" was a knife fight between two companies with the same name and the same logo while the community they both claimed to serve watched it bleed. The pack outlived the fight. The founders bought their own brand back. By 2020 the community was roughly 30 million active users. In October 2025, Qualcomm bought the company - not for a microcontroller, but for the shelf that every hardware kid on the planet learned on. That is the argument in Form Your Own Pack, in one board: the wolf locks the door and guards the blueprint. The pack publishes it, and the blueprint becomes the standard. Form your own pack. Read more: thefounderspack.beehiiv.com/ The book: amazon.com/Form-Your-Own-Pac… #FormYourOwnPack

Mexican Student Invents Sound-Powered Fire Extinguisher, Wins a Gold Medal in Indonesia gadgetreview.com/mexican-stu…