Building 11 AI Companies in 60 Days

This is the brief on the Black Hills Consortium. So we're looking at a set of strategy docs from founder Luke Alvarez and his mission. Well, it sounds kind of like science fiction to prove that AI can actually save small town America. First is the absolutely wild speed of it all. Using AI tools like cursor and clawed, Alvarez basically acted as his own engineering department. Think about this. He built the backbone for 11 companies in just 60 days. And he's doing it in Custer, South Dakota, a town of 2,000 people, where he's planning to create about 70 tech jobs in a place that had absolutely none before. Second, how does he pay for all this? Well, he's designed this really clever, a zero waste flywheel. See, he has a profitable software company. It's called Grow Eyes. And the money from that funds a nonprofit called the Seed Foundation. And what does the foundation do? It gives every single home in town free AI training and starlink internet, building a local talent pipeline from the ground up. And finally, this isn't just about one town. The whole thing is designed as a template, right? Something that other struggling towns in places like Appalachia or the Rust Belt can just copy. The big idea is to totally flip that script from AI takes our jobs to AI creates our jobs and give young people the kind of tools you'd find in Silicon Valley, so they don't have to leave home to build a great career. So by basically cramming decades of economic development into a few months, the whole point is to prove that AI can turn these small towns into their own little tech hubs. It seems like these super high tech tools might just be the only hope for our low tech economies.