Building 11 Startups With a $200 AI

Okay, let's just dive right in. When I first opened the master file you sent over, I have to be honest, I thought it was a typo. Yeah, yeah, it has that effect. I literally refreshed the browser because the numbers just, they didn't make any sense. They look impossible on the surface. Exactly. So we're talking about one person, a founder named Luke Alvarez. Right. And the documentation says that in the last two months, just 60 days, he's built 11 companies. 11? And these aren't just napkin sketches. These are, you know, operational businesses. It sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, but here's the kicker, the part that really got me. It's the location. This isn't happening in some Palo Alto garage. It's not a Brooklyn loft story. This is going down right now, February, 2026, in the black hills of South Dakota. And that context is everything. I mean, we're talking about nine towns with a combined population of what, 16,000 people? Maybe like that, tiny. And if you build 11 apps in San Francisco, that's just another Tuesday. It's a hackathon. Right, everyone claps and moves on. But Luke Alvarez is trying to build an entire economic engine from scratch to save these rural towns from, you know, just fading away. He's targeting places the rest of the economy has basically written off. And his strategy is, well, the notes call it predatory speed for good. That's the phrase. That's the core of it. And it really sticks with you. So for this deep dive, that's what we're going to deconstruct. How one person can pull this off? Because the how is just mind-bendingly efficient. We're going to look at Theo, this AI workforce that apparently replaces an entire Fortune 500 team. We'll get into adventure capitalism, which involves Broncos and coloring books. I'm not making that up. Oh, it's psychologically brilliant. You'll see. And then we'll break down the flywheel, this perpetual funding model he built to bypass government grants completely. But you can't understand any of that without understanding the man himself. Luke Alvarez. His background is just wild. It feels like it was written by an AI trained on adventure novels. It really does. Orphan and Paraguay adopted as a baby. But the part that really explains the speed, the agency, it's the van life. And this wasn't just a weekend trip, right? Oh, no. This was a year and a half, 40,000 miles with his family living in a van. Wow. And think about that. When you live in a van, you can't put things on. If something breaks, you fix it now or you freeze. You don't form a committee to discuss the flat tire. You just fix the tire. You fix the tire. And that hands on, that tactile energy is everywhere in this project. Yeah. He physically built most of the 15 acre campus by hand. I saw a note that he flipped a tractor once because he was moving too fast. Yeah, that's the story. And it's the perfect metaphor, isn't it? He sees rural America, dying brain drain, no tech jobs. The normal response is to what read a grant proposal and wait two years. If you're lucky. Luke's response is to jump on the tractor and just start digging. OK, so let's talk about the engine. Let's talk about how one guy on a tractor can build 11 companies. Let's talk about Theo. Theo. When I first saw that name on the org chart, I just assumed it was his co-founder, you know, Luke and Theo. It's a reasonable assumption. Yeah. But Theo isn't a person. It's his AI workforce, a stack of AI agents. His 247 autonomous workforce. And we hear that term AI workforce a lot. But this is different. This isn't some clunky customer service chatbot. No, this is. It's something else entirely. Luke uses this great analogy. He compared Theo to Teddy Roosevelt. OK. Back in the day, Roosevelt went west to settle the frontier with cavalry and grit. Sure. Manpower. Luke is settling the digital frontier, but his cavalry is code. His cavalry is Theo. So what does that actually look like on a day-to-day basis? Break that down. OK, so think about the old way of building a startup. You need a marketing team and admin developers. That's a payroll of, I don't know, $750,000 a year, easily. At least plus benefits, 401Ks, coffee breaks, and the fact that humans have to sleep. Right. Theo costs about $200 a month. $200 a month. That's my car insurance. And for that $200, you're getting these incredibly powerful any-core workflows. OK, hang on. Any or end for anyone listening who isn't a developer, what is that? Think of it like digital Lego bricks. It's a tool that lets you connect all your different apps and services. Yeah. You can create rules like if this happens on X, then do this in my database, then tell this other AI to write a report. So it's the glue, the connective tissue for the whole system. Exactly. So one of Theo's agents, let's say, wakes up at 3 a.m. It scrapes the websites of all of Luke's competitors. It sees they launch a new feature. Oh, everyone else is sleeping. All everyone is sleeping. By the time Luke gets his morning coffee, Theo has an intelligence brief ready that says, hey, competitor X launched this. Here's the code to clone it, ready to deploy. That is just, it's ruthless. It's what he calls cloning as a weapon. Yeah. He uses his X bookmarks, his saves on Twitter, not for inspiration, but literally as a to-do list for his AI. So he sees a cool new feature. He bookmarks it. And Theo learns how to build it. Theo learns the skill and implements it. He's not learning to do it himself. He's learning how to teach the AI to do it. There's a quote in here somewhere that just lowered me. The one about a Fortune 500 company. Yeah. What someone can do in a day with Claude, APIs, and automation is what a Fortune 500 would do in a year. That's the leverage. That's the whole game right there. But I want to go back to that work predatory, because when we hear scraping and cloning, we think of cutthroat, crush the competition, Silicon Valley tactics. And they are. These are absolutely cutthroat tactics. But he's using them to what, fund a library? To save a small town? That's the paradox. He's using the weapons of the giants, but not to buy a bigger yacht. The goal is to create enough economic escape velocity to keep a town from disappearing. It's fighting fire with fire. It is. And at least right into the next piece, because the tech is one thing. But you need the people, the community, to buy in. And that's the whole no-permission philosophy. The cultural shift. Yeah, because the default mindset in rural development is always permission. Can I get a permit for this? Will the council approve? It's death by 1,000 paper cuts, paralysis by bureaucracy. And Luke just flicks the script. He says, I am building this. The code is shipping today. How much do you want to participate? It's not a question of if. It's a question of how much. It forces a decision here, either on the train or it's leaving without you. And that confident energy, it extends to the education system he's building. This idea, he calls the JD Vance Path. And we should be clear, this isn't a political statement or an endorsement. It's a metaphor for a certain kind of journey. It's purely a metaphor. The journey from rural poverty to the halls of power is that classic, zero to one American story. But it usually relies on sheer luck, finding a mentor, getting that one scholarship. Ging an outlier and anomaly. Luke's whole mission is to systematize the anomaly. He's convinced the next great programmer is sitting in a classroom in Custer, South Dakota right now. They don't lack the talent. They just lack the tools. And that's where his fast-growing tree's idea comes from. You know that old proverb. A society grows great when old men plant trees and whose shade they shall never sit. It's a beautiful idea, but it's slow. It's about the next generation. And Luke's argument is that we don't have time for that. He says with AI, the trees grow fast enough for this generation to sit in the shade. So how is he planting them? What does that look like on the ground? It's the seed foundation. It starts with the basics. He puts Starlink in the schools. Because you can't build the future on dialogue. Exactly. High-speed internet is the oxygen. Then he brings in an AI literacy curriculum, a club called Code Black Hills. And the cost to do all this, it's about $400 per student per year. $400, that's it. That's the barrier to entry. It's shockingly low. But the most brilliant, most counterintuitive part of his whole talent strategy is what he calls the poach me goal. Poach me. OK, so normally you want to lock your talent down with non-computes. Right. Luke wants the VCs who visit to steal his employees and his students. He actively encourages it. Why would you do that? It feels like you're just giving away your best assets. Think bigger. Think about the signal it sends. If a kid from a town of 500 people gets a job at Andreessen Horowitz, what does that say about the program back in the Black Hills? It puts it on the map. It proves the model works. It proved the factory works. And it creates this incredible alumni network. He's playing the long game. Those kids become ambassadors. And maybe one day, they bring that expertise back home. OK, so you have the tech, Theo. You have the talent pipeline. But you still need money. You need capital. A fuel. And let's be real, convincing a VC from Sandhill Road to fly us out the Coda in the middle of winter. That's a tough sell. It's a brutal sell. Hey, want to come freeze with me and talk about my startup? So this is where adventure capitalism comes in. And this part is just, it's so clever. It's pure psychology. Yeah. He realized that the standard pitch meeting in a glass box is broken. It's boring. It's sterile. So he doesn't do that. No, he invites investors out for three day experience. You're not coming for a meeting. You're coming for an adventure. He picks you up at the airport in a Bronco. You're touring the badlands. You're having campfires. It's visceral. It's real. Yeah. But the secret weapon, it isn't the Bronco. It's the kids. The kids is lobbyist strategy. He tells the investors, bring your family, and he knows from his own van life that if you can win over the kids, the parents will follow. And he created a coloring book? Is that right? A custom coloring book of the Black Hills. Yes. So while the adults are talking about term sheets and server racks, the kids are in the makerspace or coloring or writing around in the truck. So at the end of the trip, the kid isn't talking about the ROI. No. The kid is tugging on their parents' jacket saying, when can we come back here? That is diabolically wholesome. It's weaponized family fun. The investor now associates the deal with a positive family memory, not just another spreadsheet. It completely reframes the investment emotionally. And while he has them there, this captive audience, he has one rule. The captive content rule. If you come to the campus, you must record a podcast episode for their media arm, the session, no exception. None. And think of the efficiency. He has zero guest acquisition cost. They're literally sitting in his living room. And it creates this massive wall of social proof. Other investors see that all these heavy hitters have not only visited, but gone on the record, supporting the mission. It creates FOMO, fear of missing out. You want to be in the club. OK, so we've got the tech, the talent, the investors. But let's talk about the foundation, the economics. Because a lot of save rural America projects are just grant funded money pits. The grant trap. You spend all your time writing reports instead of building. Luke designed the whole thing to have an infinite runway. And that starts with the actual land itself, passcreek holdings. Yes, this is the bedrock. He owns the 15 acre campus, free and clear, no mortgage, no debt. Bought it for $380,000, did the work himself. Now it's worth over $2.6 million. Why is free and clear so important here? Because you can't kill a company that has zero rent. It's the silent killer of startups. When you have no debt service, you have what's called asymmetric risk. Meaning you have all the upside with very little downside. You basically can't die. Even if you have a bad sales month, the lights stay on. It's a fortress. And on top of that fortress, he built the 21% perpetual flywheel. This took me a second to wrap my head around. Can you walk us through it? Sure. So one of his 11 companies is a sauce business called monumental highs. It's compliant software for the cannabis industry. So steady, predictable recurring revenue. Exactly. A cash cow. Now most founders would take that cash and buy a Lambo. Luke allocates 21% of his equity in that profitable company to permanently fund the non-profits. The cannabis software is paying for the kids' computers. Forever. It's split three ways. 7% to the accelerator, 7% to the seed foundation for education, and 7% to the BHC consortium for general economic development. He built his own private tax base. He built a private tax engine that completely bypasses the government grant system. As long as that software has customers, those schools have funding. It's not a donation. It's a dividend. Which gives him an incredible amount of freedom in his exit strategy. The unicorn only strategy. He doesn't need to sell early. There is no mortgage payment breathing down his neck. No investors demanding a quick flip. So he can wait. He can hold out for a billion dollar plus exit. And he says he'll only sell to someone who respects the mission and the culture. He has the leverage to say no. Which is a luxury most founders never have. When you add it all up, the valuation is kind of nuts. Even at just 1% market capture, the whole ecosystem is valued at over $846 million. Almost a billion dollars. For a guy who's living in a van a few years back, it's just the power of leverage. Hey, I leverage, real estate leverage, media leverage. It's the full stack. So looking forward, there's a big gate on the calendar. July 4th, 2026. The semi-quence in 10-year-old. America's 250th birthday. And the rumor is Trump will be at Mount Rushmore. It'll be a big deal. And where Trump goes? Elon Musk is often not far behind. And that seems to be the tactical goal here. It's the end game for this year. The campus is only 15 minutes down the road from Mount Rushmore. A 15-minute detour. That's the whole play. Get Elon Musk to make that detour. Because the story writes itself, Elon is all about AI efficiency building. And Luke is beta model where AI is the hero for rural America. It flips the whole AI is taking our jobs narrative on its head. This is AI is saving our towns. If you can get Elon to walk through that campus and see it for himself, that's the tipping point. That's the global stage. It's the ultimate adventure capitalism move. And honestly, given everything else, I wouldn't bet against him. So let's zoom out. What's the big takeaway for everyone listening? I mean, we're not all going to go buy a campus in South Dakota. For me, it's about the death of the gatekeeper. We used to think you need a permission. You needed a huge team. You need adventure capital. You needed a board. The old way. That way is gone. Luke is doing the work of a major corporation with himself and a $200 a month AI stack. Yeah. And that's incredibly empowering, but it's also a massive wake up call. It is. It's that mental shift from permission to participation. We spend so much of our lives waiting for a green light, waiting for the promotion, waiting for the grant, waiting for the right time. And this guy just started digging. And he's not just building companies, he's building a blueprint that any other town could potentially follow. When you stop waiting for the cavalry to save you. And you realize you are the cavalry. Or rather, you and your AI agents are the cavalry. It changes everything. We have that old saying it takes a village to raise a child. And Luke Alvarez is basically proving that with AI, it might just take one person to raise a village. That's the thought to end on. I think so. So the question for you listening is this, what could you build in the next 60 days? If you stopped asking for permission and started trusting your own Theo, thanks for diving in with us. See you next time.