Building 11 Companies in 60 Days with AI

Usually when we sit down to prep for one of these deep dives, we're looking for one thing, just one miracle. The one silver bullet, yeah. Exactly. We're looking for that one founder who's cracked a specific code. Maybe it's a new battery chemistry or a logistics breakthrough. One unfair advantage. And you're lucky if you find it. Right. But the documents we're looking at today, they aren't claiming one miracle. They're claiming something that sounds, frankly, statistically impossible. We've got a whole stack of internal files here, financial models, a copy, playbook, pitch decks, for a project claiming to have built 11 companies in 60 days. Sounds like a typo, doesn't it? 11 companies, two months. Sounds like a scam. Let's just be honest. If someone came up to you and said, I just found it at Conglomerate this morning, you'd probably walk away. You check your wallet first. Yeah. But we've been through these documents. They call it the Black Hills Consortium. And the details are surprisingly, almost disturbingly concrete. The really are. And that's our mission today. We're not just looking at a startup. We're looking at a potential shift in the, well, the physics of building a business. This founder, Luke Alvarez, out in Custer, self-decoda, he claims he used AI native strategies to basically compress a decade of corporate work into eight weeks. And he's not thinking small either. I'm looking at the projections and he's asking for a $52 million raise to hire 58 people. Immediately. So the big question we have to answer for you listening is, is this for real? Is this actually execution velocity, like they call it, or is this just a huge mountain of AI-generated noise that's going to collapse? Well, to figure that out, we have to look past the headline. I mean, 60 days is the hook. It's the sexy number. Of course. But if you really dig into the timeline in these source materials, you realize that's not the whole story. This is really a tale of two very different speeds running in parallel. Okay, yeah, let's unpack that. The two tracks. Because you're right, when I look at the dates on the land deeds versus the incorporation papers, they don't line up at all. Not at all. You have what I'd call the physical track, which was this slow, deliberate, five-year grind. And then you have the AI track, the sprint. And you really can't understand the speed of the second track without respecting the slowness of the first. Let's start with the slow part then, because I think this is where the whole thing gets its credibility. He didn't just, you know, parachute into South Dakota with a laptop two months ago. No, not at all. This goes back to 2021. Alvarez buys 15 acres of land in Custer. And for context, Custer is a small town sure, but it's like 15 minutes from Mount Rushmore. So massive tourist traffic. And he didn't just buy the land to flip it. The notes here say he built a barn to minium, a 40 by 60 foot structure, right? And he did it largely by himself. This is so important, because it establishes local credibility. You can't just be some tech guy from the coast, showing up in a rural town, telling people how you get to fix things. He joined the local search and rescue team. I mean, he's been five years literally moving dirt and building a community presence. That's social capital. You just can't code. It grounds him there. But the financial part of this physical track is, I think, even more critical. There's a line in the financials that jumped out at me. The property is owned free and clear. That's the key. That is the foundation of this entire plan. Most startups have a burn rate, right? They're just bleeding money every month on rent for some fancy office in Austin or San Francisco. Yeah. Because Alvarez owns the land and the HQ outright, his burn rate for all the physical infrastructure is basically zero. Which gets us to that infinite runway concept they mentioned in the pitch deck. Exactly. If you're not bleeding cash, you can't bleed out. He can afford to wait. That's a luxury that, you know, most venture backed founders just never ever have. The clock is always ticking for them. Okay. So five years building the stage, he's got the land, the trust, the building. And then according to these documents, he just waits. He's waiting for the tech to catch up. And that moment happened about 60 days before these documents were put together. It was the release of advanced AI tools, specifically things like Claude and Cursor. We should probably clarify Cursor for people who might not know. It sounds like a generic term, but it's a very specific tool. Right. Cursor is an AI-powered code editor. It's like a work processor for programmers that can actually write huge parts of the code for you. It lets one developer work at the speed of a small team. And Claude is a language model that can chew through enormous amounts of text legal contracts, complex financial models. You name it. So once those tools were ready, he pulled the trigger on the AI track. That's where the 11 companies come from. And it wasn't just him, you know, typing like a maniac. He used these tools to generate the operating agreements, the financial models, the pitch decks, the whole shebang. He calls it the copy playbook. He wasn't inventing new business models. No, he was cloning successful ones and using AI to adapt them to his specific ecosystem just way faster. They draw comparison in here to a company called PropertyMeld, which is a really interesting benchmark. It is. PropertyMeld is a real-world successful company. It took them about eight years and what, $28 million in funding to build their platform. Alvarez is basically arguing that with AI, he built the infrastructure for a similar level of complexity in two months for pennies. But infrastructure isn't a business, right? I can go file 11 LLCs tomorrow. That just gives me a headache. It doesn't give me revenue. That's a fair pushback. But this is where the documents introduce this concept called Theo. Theo, the AI persona. It's not just a chapot. He describes Theo as a 247 AI CEO. The idea is that the AI handles 80% of the execution work or the market research, drafting code, financial modeling. And that leaves the human founder to do the 20% that AI is terrible at. High level strategy and I guess human relationships. Precisely. Let's one person simulate the output of like a 50 person support staff. Yeah. And CEO doesn't sleep or need health insurance. Okay, let's test that output. Because if you have 11 companies, some have got to be just shells, right? But there's one in the stack that seems to be the real engine, the rocket ship, monumental highs. Yep. This is the VC track entity. This is where the big venture returns are supposed to come from. It's a software as a service platform for the cannabis industry. cannabis tech is a super crowded market, though. You've got giants like weed maps, leafly. Why go after them? That feels like a frontal assault. He's targeting what he calls subscription fatigue. Yeah. If you're running a dispensary right now, your software stack is just a mess. You're paying weed maps for marketing, maybe flow hub for your point sale, leafly for data, plus consultants for compliance. The source material breaks it down pretty clearly. The average dispensary is paying something like $8,800 a month for all these separate tools. That's a huge piece of overhead. So monumental highs with their product grow wise. They're pitching an all-in-one dashboard. They're saying, look, we'll do everything those four services do, but for one price. $2,999 a month. That is a serious undercut. It is. But look at the pricing psychology. That $2,999 price point is almost exactly the same as the average weed map subscription alone. So the pitch isn't we're cheap. No, the pitch is for the price of just your marketing tool will give you your entire operating system. It's a value play, not a discount play. Okay, but this is where I got a little stuck. To compete with weed maps, you need their data. They've spent a decade building up that database of dispensaries and strains. You can't just code that overnight. You can if you scrape it. And this is the real aha moment in the technical docs they call it the database mode. Right. This is that comparison between their day one and weed maps year 10. Exactly. weed maps has what? Around 5,200 paying clients. monumental highs claims their CRM is already preloaded with over 5,000 verified contacts. Yeah. And they haven't even launched. Verified contacts. So actual decision makers at dispensaries and cultivators. Yep. And not just names. They built out a strain encyclopedia with 504 strains complete with terpene profiles and mapped contacts across 52 different regions. How is that even possible? A sales team would take years to build that list by hand. AI aggregation. He almost certainly used AI agents to scrape public licensing databases, cross-reference them with other directories, and structure all that data. A human team takes years to do that data entry. And AI can do it over a weekend. So day one, he starts with the database that basically matches the market leader. That's honestly that's terrifying if you're in incumbent. It just collapses the moat. Data used to be the barrier to entry. Here, he just bypassed it. And they mentioned a phase two import that will add another 27,000 license holders. It's an incredibly aggressive data play. Okay. So that's the tech side. That's the high growth silicon valley part of the pitch. But then you flip a page in this playbook and the tone gets well, it gets almost hostile. We have to talk about the chamber domination strategy. This is where that copy playbook gets pretty ruthless. Alvarez is very, very clear. He is not trying to partner with the local economic establishment. He's trying to replace it. And he's targeting chambers of commerce, which to me always sounded like the most harmless organizations on the planet. Specifically rural chambers. He views them as direct competitors. Competitors for what? For influence? For influence and ultimately for relevance. He benchmarks his nonprofit arm, the Black Hills Consortium, against an organization called Elevate Rapid City. Elevate took 10 years to build up 35 million dollars in assets for just one city. Alvarez is targeting $52 million for eight cities in year one. That comes off as incredibly arrogant. I can do in one year what took you a decade. How does he sell that? By contracting the offering. The pitch is essentially your chamber offers ribbon-cutting ceremonies. We're offering 58 actual high-paying jobs right now. Plus AI tools for your local businesses. It's results versus pageantry. And he's got that unfair structural advantage again. Chambers have to pay rent. They survive on member dues. Because he owns his land and has zero overhead, he calls it a siege strategy. He can just wait them out. He doesn't need the dues to keep the lights on. It's like he's trying to privatize regional economic development. Your pound is failing. Here, subscribe to my OS. It is. It's applying the move fast to break things ethos to a sector that usually moved at the speed of a government committee meeting. Okay, so we've got the cannabis saws making the money and the economic development arm-building influence. But how do these pieces actually work together? On paper, a cannabis company and a rural nonprofit. They don't seem to connect. This is the most complex part of the plan, but it's also I think the smartest is what he calls the ecosystem flywheel. None of these 11 companies exist in a vacuum. They're all designed to feed each other. Okay, give me an example. All right, look at the session. It's listed here as a media company, basically a podcast network on the campus. Sure, everyone's got a podcast. But the rule here is that any investor or major partner who visits the campus must record an episode. It's a condition. So if you want to put money in, you have to contribute to the content library. It becomes this captive content machine that markets the entire ecosystem for free. That's clever. What about the real estate side? I saw something about a Felipe deal in the deck. Yes, the Felipe deal is the perfect illustration of how the flywheel is supposed to turn. Okay, so Felipe is a partner who wants to open a dispensary. Walk us through it. Normally, Felipe would just buy some land from a developer, and that's it. Transactions over. In the BHC model, Luke sells Felipe a parcel of land right there on the campus, but it comes with a string attached condition, a condition. Felipe must use the grow-wide software from monumental highs to run his new dispensary. Wow. So the real estate sale forces a software subscription. Exactly. It turns dirt into data. It creates a guaranteed first user for the software, which generates data for the database, which in turn makes this software more valuable for the next customer. And crucially, Felipe is paying rent or a mortgage to an entity called Past Creek Holdings. And Past Creek Holdings is the entity that owns all the land, which Luke owns 100% of. So BHC, the nonprofit, monumental highs, the tech company, they all pay rent back to Past Creek. He'd all stay in the family. It de-risks the whole venture. This is his real estate $18,000. The documents spell out the worst-case scenario. Let's say the AI bubble bursts, cannabis software fails, everything goes to zero. What is he left with? 15 acres of prime commercial real estate and a massive tourist hub. Exactly. Appreciated land near a place that gets 14 million visitors a year. He calls it asymmetric risk. The downside is capped. He still owns a hard asset. The upside is, theoretically unlimited, a $295 million exit. That really changes how you look at the risk profile. So speaking of that exit, let's talk about the ask right now. $52 million, that's a huge series A, especially for a company in South Dakota. It is. But did you notice the subtle shift in why he's asking for it? Yeah, it wasn't the usual we need this money to survive pitch. Right. Most startups pitch from desperation. If we don't raise this money, the lights go out. Alvarez flips that completely. He says, look, I can run this thing indefinitely for $0 because I own the land and the AI does the work. So the money isn't for survival. It's for speed, pure and simple. The argument is, I can build this organically over 10 years or you give me $52 million. I hire those 58 people tomorrow and I use execution velocity to compress that decade of growth into two years. He's selling time compression. He's selling the ability to skip the slow, painful grind and the projections reflect that ambition. They're targeting $59.1 million in ecosystem revenue in year one alone. That seems wildly optimistic. Where does that even come from? It's a mix mostly from the can of the sauce fees and interestingly conventions. They plan to host large summits on the campus. But again, you have to look at the year 10 target to see the scale. They're aiming for an exit north of $295 million. There's also a specific note in here about political neutrality. In today's climate, that feels like a very deliberate choice. Oh, it's a core survival strategy for a rural tech hub. The slogan they use is rural revitalization through technology. Just think about who that appeals to. I mean, pretty much everyone. Exactly. For the left, it's about job creation and tech progress. For the right, it's about economic independence and empowering rural areas away from the coastal elites. By not picking aside, they create the widest possible funnel for investors and for local partners. They're not red or blue. They're green. So if we step back, we're really looking at what you called a full stack economy. It's not just an app. It's real estate. It's media. It's a nonprofit. It's software. It's vertical farming, all integrated by one guy using AI as a massive force multiplier. It feels like the barrier to entry for building something complex has just completely collapsed. I mean, complexity is usually what kills companies here. He's using AI to manage it. And that is the key takeaway for you listening. Two years ago, if you wanted to do something like this, you needed a team of 20 people just to handle the paperwork and the initial code. Now, now if you have the vision and you know how to prompt these AI agents, the cost of just trying has dropped to almost nothing. It's exciting, but I keep coming back to Theo. The 24-7 AI CEO, if one person, Luke Alvarez, can really replace the output of a 50 person organization. What happens to those other 49 people? That's the billion dollar question, isn't it? We might be seeing a decoupling at output from headcount for the last century to do big things. You need big teams. This suggests that might not be true for much longer. So what does that do to the idea of the corporation as we know it? It could mean the end of the midsize company. We might be moving towards a world of trillion dollar giants and then just thousands of these tiny, hyper-efficient empire of one operations. So is Luke Alvarez an outlier, a unicorn? Or is he the first of a whole new species of founder? I think we're going to find out very, very quickly. Because if this model works in South Dakota, you're going to see it pop up everywhere. Something for us to chew on, thanks for taking this deep dive, my pleasure. We'll catch you on the next one.