Building Eleven AI Companies in Sixty Days

Usually when we look at a business plan, you know, a start-up pitch, we're talking about one company. Right. One idea. Exactly. You know the drill, it's the uber for dog walking, or a platform for knitting enthusiasts. Just one clear, singular idea. But today, well, today we are looking at something that honestly feels a little bit impossible. It really does. It reads like science fiction. Or if you're feeling cynical, like, a very, very elaborate scam. My first thought was vaporware. We're talking about a single founder who claims to have built the infrastructure for 11. 11. Yes. 11 functioning companies in just 60 days. And the kicker, he claims to have done it using almost entirely AI tools. And just to add another layer of difficulty here, he's not doing this in some hacker house in San Francisco or a loft in Brooklyn. He is doing this in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Yeah. Specifically a town called Custer. Yeah. Population, what, like 1900? Roughly. Yeah. So you've got this incredible contrast. You have the highest of high-tech AI meeting, you know, rural, small town, America. But we aren't just reacting to a press release here. The source material we're diving into is, well, it's massive. It's a stack of 46 vision documents from something called the Black Hills Consortium, BHC. And these are not just napkin sketches. We are looking at the receipts, financial models, construction blueprints, legal frameworks, incorporation docs, a whole master plan dated January 31st, 2026. So the core question for this deep dive, our mission really is to figure out if this is real. Can AI actually save rural America? Because that's not the story we usually hear, right? The narrative is that AI is coming to take jobs. Right. Especially in places that are already struggling. But this founder, Luke Alvarez, he says AI is going to create 800 tech jobs and a nearly $1 billion economic impact across seven tiny towns. It's an incredibly bold claim. But when you get into the source material, the math is surprisingly detailed. So let's unpack this. We have to start with the builder. Who is Luke Alvarez? Because to build 11 companies in two months, you have to be a little, let's say, unusual. He is definitely unique. He's a legal immigrant from Paraguay, grew up in Virginia. His professional background is an ed tech. He actually worked for Canvas. Do learning management system. The one every university uses. That's the one. But here is the detail that for me provides all the context for this project. Yeah. He is a former van lifer. You mean he lived in a sprinter van? lived in a van, traveled 40,000 miles with his family. And this is the key part. He is physically built three custom homes himself. Wow. This is the guy who just codes in a dark room. He pours concrete. He frames walls. He calls his whole philosophy builder chic. Builder chic. Okay. It sounds like a fashion trend. But I get the sense he means something a bit grittier. It's all about resourcefulness. The documents he talks a lot about the no permission philosophy. When you're living on the road or building a house with your own hands, you learn to operate extremely lean. You don't wait for a committee to approve your decision to fix a leak. You just fix it. Okay. So he has the mindset. I get that. But mindset doesn't write code or draft legal contracts. Let's talk about this 60 day sprint. How exactly did he build 11 companies in two months? This is where we get into what he calls the AI 80% multiplier. This is really the core technical thesis of the whole thing. Let's drill down on that because using AI is such a buzzword now. Everyone says they use AI. What does this 80% multiplier actually look like in practice? We'll think about a traditional CEO starting a company. If they want to build a software product, they need a VP of engineering, a dev team. They want to incorporate setup bylaws. They need a general counsel. Alvarez just treats AI models as those specific departments. So instead of hiring a lawyer, he hires a bot. Pretty much. Yeah. He uses Claude as his general counsel to draft the articles of incorporation, the operating agreements. But the coding part is even more interesting. He uses a tool called cursor for our listeners who aren't developers. What is cursor? It's an IDE, an integrated development environment. It's where you write code. But it has AI baked right into the fabric of the editor. So it's not just auto complete. Oh, not even close. It understands the entire code base. You can literally tell it, I need a feature that tracks inventory and it acts like a team of junior engineers to build out that whole architecture. So he's not just typing into chat GPTA. Please make me an app. No. And that's a crucial distinction. He acts as the architect. He provides the vision, the oversight. The AI does the heavy lifting that 80% of the work that's usually tedious or time consuming. He claims this allows one person to do the work of a 50 person committee in weeks, not years. Exactly. He creates the floor, the base work, and then he just reviews and finalizes that last 20%. And that's how you get everything from software code to architectural plans for a 15 acre campus called the grow campus in 60 days. That's the claim. Okay. So he has the speed. But let's talk about what he's actually building. Because usually when I see a startup pitch, investors tell you to focus, you know, do one thing and do it well. This guy's doing 11 things. Is he just distracted? Or is there some logic to the chaos? It's designed as a flywheel. The BHC isn't really one company. It's an ecosystem where every single entity feeds the others. They have a nonprofit side and a four-profit side and they're completely interdependent. Let's look at the engine first. How does he plan to pay for all of this? Building a campus isn't cheap. This is where it's really interesting and specific. The cash engine is a company called Growwise. It's a sauce platform and it's focused on cannabis compliance. Whoa, pause. We are in rural South Dakota, a very, very conservative area and he's banking on Canada's tech. That seems like a massive contradiction. It does sound like one. But the source documents they explain the market gap you found. The main competitor in this space is a company called Duchy. I've heard of them. Well, according to Alvarez's research, Duchy has lost 89% of its valuation. The market is wounded. So he smells blood in the water? He does. BHC's scraped government data to find over 27,000 leads. These are cannabis businesses that are already operating but struggling to stay compliant with all the state laws. And when you say scraped, you mean he used automated tools to pull public records? Correct. He didn't have an intern manually look them up. He built a bot to do it. And the math and the documents is stark. They project that even a 5% close rate on those leads generates over $10 million in revenue. Okay, so Growwise makes the money. Where does that money go? This is the flywheel. That profit funds the nonprofit side, specifically the seed foundation and the seed academy. What? Usually nonprofits spend half their time begging for grants or writing donation letters. Alvarez wants the nonprofit to be self-sustaining from day one. So the weed money funds the school in a way. Yeah, they're taking that revenue to build the K-12 curriculum for financial literacy and AI. The goal is to put this curriculum into the schools in these small partner towns. It's a closed loop. There was a detail in the vision documents about the no waste principle that I thought was fascinating. Something about coffee and business cards. This is pure builder chic efficiency. They have a campus cafe called the OP. The business model is that tourists visiting the black hills come in by expensive coffee. Merch. Okay. The profit from those tourists pays for the free coffee and snacks for the employees. That's smart. The tourists subsidize the perks. And the business cards. Every employee's business card has a sponsor logo on the back. It's a mini billboard. So the revenue from the ad pays for the printing of the cards. It's incredibly tight. Every asset has to earn it keep. Even the housing. They're building investor housing on the campus. But when investors aren't visiting, they list the units on Airbnb. Nothing sits empty. Okay, so you have this internal ecosystem. The software funds the school, the tourists fund the coffee. But for this to work in a tiny town, you need external buy-in. You need political cover. And that brings us to the most audacious part of the plan. The strategy documents call it the July 4th play. And this isn't just any July 4th though. No, it's July 4th, 2026. The semi-quincentennial. America's 250th birthday. It could be a massive date. The documents highlight that the celebration is centered at Mount Rushmore. Former and potentially at that time, current present Trump has been invited. The eyes of the whole world will be on South Dakota. And how far is the BHC campus from Mount Rushmore? 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Okay, so I see the strategy. It's counter-programming. I'd call it complimentary programming. The narrative they want to pitch to politicians, whether it's Governor Larry Rodin or Congressman Dusty Johnson, is this. While the world celebrates America's history at Rushmore, come down the road and look at America's future. AI saving rural America. I mean, that is a story politicians would kill to be associated with. Exactly. It's a bipartisan dream. If you're on the right, it's about free enterprise and innovation in the heartland. If you're on the left, it's about creating tech jobs for the working class. BHC is positioning itself as the photo op of the century. Speaking of politics, I have to mention the quirk about the coloring books. Did you see this in the footnets? Offs. Yeah. Yes. Apparently, JD Vance's family visited South Dakota and Luke, before BHC was even fully formed, had created these South Dakota-themed coloring books. And they ended up in the Vance household. So his coloring books are already in the White House orbit. It's a tiny detail, but it shows he understands how to make connections. He also lists his mother's house in DC as the BHC's East Coast HQ, just to save money on lobbying trips. Again, pure resourcefulness. Okay. So it's got the tech. He's got the timing, but he needs the towns. He's pitching this to places like Keystone, Hill City, Sundance. These are tiny places. Keystone is a population of what? 250? Roughly 250 people. And this is probably the most dramatic statistic in the entire stack of documents. BHC is offering to bring 100 tech jobs to Keystone over 10 years. Do the math on that. If you have 250 residents and you add 100 jobs. You are effectively employing 40% of the entire town in the tech sector. That changes the DNA of the place completely. The documents don't call it economic development. They call it resurrection. But usually when a company promises this kind of thing, they want something, right? They want tax breaks, TIFF's tax increment financing. Right. TIFFs are the standard tool where the town borrows money against future tax revenue to pay for the developer's project. It puts all the risk on the town. So what's BHC's ask? BHC says no TIFF. No handouts. We don't want your money. We just want you to say yes. They just want the red tape cut. No permission. Exactly. They promise to bring Starlink Internet to every home and free AI curriculum to the schools. If you are a mayor of a town that's been bleeding population for decades and someone offers you high speed internet and jobs for free, how do you say no to that? It's a field of dreams play. If you build the infrastructure, the founders will come. But to fill those jobs, they have a program called Settle the West. It's modeled after Tulsa remote, which paid people to move to Oklahoma. But BHC calls them AI pioneers. What's the difference? Tulsa was looking for remote workers, people who already had jobs at Google or Facebook. BHC wants founders. They want people to come build new companies there. But is that realistic? It's not 2020 anymore. Remote work is pulling back a bit. Is it realistic to think top-tier tech talent will actually move to Custer South Dakota? That's the big gamble. They're betting that the mission, this idea of rebuilding America and escaping the high cost of living in the cities, is stronger than the allure of a coastal office. And they aren't just relying on software. They have a media arm called the Session. Right. The podcast network. But it's structured so interestingly. Luke modeled the business structure after a company called Rooster Teeth. Rooster Teeth, the gaming media company. Yes. Luke was a fan. But he noted that Rooster Teeth failed because they bloated to 400 employees and had a massive burn rate. They were just spending too much money. So BHC's plan is? To produce the same amount of media output as Rooster Teeth, but with only 50 people and heavy AI usage. There's that theme again. Using AI to replace headcount bloat. And speaking of big tech influences, we have to talk about Elon Musk. This was one of the boldest parts of the whole document stack. The Musk ecosystem play. BHC is already a customer of Starlink X and Tesla. They are treating Elon Musk not just as a vendor, but as a strategic target. Because he's likely going to be at Rushmore for that July 4th event. Right. And the pitch they have drafted for Elon is simple. I built 11 companies in 60 days using your internet and Starlink and your move fast philosophy. Come see it. Come see it just like that. They want to show him that his tools are revitalizing the American heartland. It's a narrative that aligns perfectly with Musk's own stated goals. It all sounds perfect. Maybe a little too perfect. We have to talk about the reality. The financials and more importantly, the risks. Absolutely. The financial philosophy they use is floors, not ceilings. What does that mean? It means they focus on building the minimum viable operation. The floor for all 11 entities. Yeah. If one fails, the portfolio survives. They aren't betting the farm on just one unicorn. What are the numbers? They're targeting year one revenue of $3.35 million with the 44% net margin. To get there, they're asking for 30 to 50 million dollars in funding. That is a significant ask for a rural startup run by a guy who used to live in a van. It is. And the documents are honest about the risks. There's execution risk. Can a 60 day build actually sustain 60 employees? Things break when you move that fast. For sure. You can build a house in a week, but is the roof going to leak? Exactly. And then there's the biggest one. Key person risk. The entire model is currently inside Luke's head. He knows the construction specs. He knows the code. He knows the political strategy. He's everything. The documents mention a $5 million insurance policy on him. But let's be real. If he burns out, which building 11 companies in 60 days seems like a recipe for burnout, the whole thing could collapse. Insurance pays the investors back. It doesn't write the code. No, it doesn't. That is the vulnerability of the builder chic model. When you act as the architect, the engineer and the CEO, you are the single point of failure. But his counterargument to that risk is fascinating. He argues that speed is the ultimate mode. Unpack that for us. A mode in business is what protects you from competitors, right? Usually it's a patent or a huge network effect. Luke is saying that by the time a traditional organization sets up a committee to discuss building a campus, he will have already built it. He's compressing 10 years of economic development into 60 days. He's just out running the bureaucracy. Exactly. And that brings us back to the core question of this whole thing. Can AI save rural America? It's a compelling case. You have these small towns, Custer, Keystone, Sundance that have been left behind by the digital economy. They're beautiful places. They have history, but they don't have the jobs. And traditionally, the solution was what retraining, slow government grants, BHC is saying, no, we're going to drop a high-tech ecosystem right in the middle of the forest. We're going to give the kids Starlink and AI tutors, and we're going to do it without asking for permission. It really challenges our assumptions about what tech even looks like. We think of glass towers in Seattle. We don't think of a barned aluminum and Wyoming. But with Starlink and AI, geography matters so much less than it ever has. So what does this mean for you listening right now? Why should you care about what's happening in Custer, South Dakota? Because if this works, if one guy with AI tools can actually revitalize an entire region, it destroys every excuse we have for dying towns. It means the barrier to entry for economic development isn't millions of dollars or decades of time. It's just will. It's a blueprint. It's the Black Hills blueprint. If it works in Keystone, it could work in Appalachia. It could work in the Rust Belt, anywhere. And we'll know pretty soon if it's working. July 4, 2026 isn't that far away. No, it's right around the corner. You know, there is a quote in the documents that really stuck with me. It was the tagline for the whole project. I think I know the one you mean. A society grows great when old men plant trees and whose shade they shall never sit. And BHC adds to it. We're planting seeds. The next generation will sit in the shade. It's a powerful sentiment. It frames this high-tech sprint as a real long-term legacy project. So here's the final thought to chew on. We spend so much time worrying about AI replacing us. We worry about the Terminator scenario or just the much more mundane my job is gone scenario. But BHC presents a third option. The multiplier option. Exactly. What if AI is just the ultimate power tool? If Luke Alvarez can build 11 companies in 60 days, what could you build if you stopped waiting for permission? That is the question. The tools are available to everyone now. So when you're watching the fireworks over Mount Rushmore on July 4, 2026, maybe take a look at the landscape just 15 minutes down the road. There might just be a revolution happening in those trees. I will definitely be watching. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. Let's keep building.