Small Town America s Big AI Bet

Welcome to The Deep Dive, and more importantly, welcome to the team. Yes, welcome. If you're hearing this, the ink on your offer letter is probably what? Still a little wet. It probably. You've got your badge, maybe a box of swag, and you are likely driving a U-Haul toward Custer South Dakota as we speak. Looking at the hills, maybe seeing a bison. And asking yourself a very, very serious question, what exactly have I gotten myself into? And that is absolutely the right question to be asking, because this isn't, you know, your standard corporate onboarding. You haven't just taken a job at some tech firm where you sit in a cubicle. I wait for five p.m. Exactly, exactly. You have, and this is not an exaggeration, you have joined a live economic experiment. Experiment really feels like the right word. I've been going through all the source material, the exact summaries, the legal structures, the founders notes, and honestly, it reads less like a business plan and more like a script for a heist movie. A heist movie. I like that. Yeah, but instead of robbing a casino, the goal is to steal back the economic future of small town America. You know, that's a dramatic way to put it, but the facts actually support it. Yeah. Let's just look at the baseline stats that got you here. Okay. You were walking into an ecosystem of 11 functional companies. Not just ideas. Not pitch decks. No, not. We'll build it later. These are 11 distinct legal entities. They have software. They have revenue. They have a 15 acre campus. And here's the stat that just stops me every time. This entire thing was built in 60 days. 60 days. I mean, let's just pause on that. That defies all business logic. Oh, completely. Most companies take 60 days to approve the budget for a new printer. Here they built a whole consortium. And the mission, it's just as big. Prood that AI can save small town America. Right. And that is the core idea you have to get on day one. The whole story out there in the world is, you know, fear. AI takes jobs. AI takes jobs, replaces people, it guts the middle class. The whole bet here at the Black Hills Consortium BHC is the complete opposite. The inverse. The bet is, what if AI creates jobs? What if it lets a small team in a town of 2,000 people go head to head with Silicon Valley? So this deep dive, this is your real orientation. We're not going to tell you where the coffee machine is. No. We're going to unpack the machine that you are now a part of. We need to explain this concept they call the flywheel. Which is this wild economic engine connecting what cannabis to construction? We also have to talk about the culture, specifically why they want you to get poached. Yes. We definitely have to get to that. And we absolutely must break down the secret weapon, the AI training. Because the documents are crystal clear on this. If you don't master their AI workflow, you will not survive here. Okay. So we're going to talk about the cost of the money. Because I look at the org chart and it looks chaotic. A little bit. You've got cannabis software, a nonprofit, a media company, a cafe, real estate, normally a startup, this unfocused just collapses. It would. But it's not actually unfocused. It's built around this principle of zero waste. Zero waste. In a normal company, money comes in and then it immediately goes out to pay vendors. You pay rent. You pay a marketing agency. You pay for catering. Stammered stuff. But here, the goal is for every single dollar to stay inside the ecosystem. Every company exists to support all the others. Okay. So walk me through that flow. Where does the money actually come from? Because a 15 acre campus doesn't pay for itself. It starts with what they call the cash engine. And that is entity number two. Grow wise. The cannabis software. Exactly. It's a sauce platform software as a service for cannabis compliance. Which is such a specific choice for a project like this. Why weed? It's purely a market opportunity. The cannabis industry is, well, it's a mess of regulations. It's high stakes. It has a lot of cash. But it's really badly served by good software. So there's a gap in the market. A huge gap. Grow wise is targeting a pipeline of over 27,000 businesses. Now here's the genius part. That cash doesn't just sit in the bank. Where does it go? It flowed right into another entity called Pascree Coldings. And that's the real estate company. That's the real estate arm. So the software revenue literally buys the land and funds the campus construction. The code you're writing pays for the building you're sitting in. No bank loans, no high interest, just revenue reallocation. That makes sense for the hard access, the buildings, but what about the vibe? The culture. You can't pay for that with a construction budget. And that's where the culture funders come in. This is where the model gets really clever for you as an employee. You've probably already been to the OP. The cafe. Right. The operations. It's a cafe, yeah, but it's also the merch store. And it's a bit of a tourist trap in a good way. Also. Tourists come to Custer for the Black Hills. They see the campus. They stop in. They buy a really good coffee and they grab a cool looking BHC hoodie. And that money. That's in the guess. That revenue pays for your swag. It pays for the snacks in the break room, the free coffee you're drinking, the jacket you got in your onboarding kit. So a tourist page for my hoodie. A tourist from Ohio just paid for your hoodie. That is brilliant. It takes what's usually a huge expense company swag and turns it into a profit center. It's totally self-funding. And then there's the session media. The in-house production crew. Right. Podcasts, YouTube, documentaries. Their only job is to document everything happening here. I saw a note in the welcome packet. Brush your hair. You will be on camera. They're serious about that. Oh, 100%. But it's not about vanity. It's a strategic moat. A moat. Think about it. A competitor can copy your software. They can even buy land and try to build a campus. But they cannot copy the story. The story of the town that saved itself with AI. You got it. That story is what protects the whole business. It brings in investors. It brings in top talent like you. Yeah. And it gets the attention of politicians. Which creates a feedback loop. The media goes out. More people visit the cafe. More hoodies get sold. More culture gets funded. And the big finale for this flywheel is the cult. OK, I have to ask about the name. It's aggressive for a corporate event. It gets your attention, doesn't it? It's short for cultivation. It's their big annual summit. Oh, good. It brings VCs, politicians, developers, right to the campus. That floods the cafe with revenue. It fills up hotels and partnered towns, which builds political capital. And it shines a huge spotlight on the work that you're doing. So unlike my last job, where I was just a cog in a machine, here, everything is connected. The cafe, funds the perks, the software, funds the real estate, and the media tells the story that protects it all. And that brings us to the people because to make an engine this complex run this fast, you need a very specific kind of person. I was reading the hiring notes and their blunt. It says we don't hire for degrees. Nope. That comes directly from the founder, Luke Alvarez. He has a background in ed tech, he's a big deal of canvas. He knows that a degree is a piece of paper, not proof you can actually do anything. I don't know. They hire for imagination, speed of learning, and cultural fit. He wants to know what you can build, not where you went to school. There's this one phrase in the HR docs that I just love, but it sounds completely backward. The poach me goal. This is one of my favorite things about the BHC philosophy. Normally, companies are terrified of you leaving. One competes, golden handcuffs, all that. They hide their best people. BHC does the exact opposite. They want you to get poached. Explain that. Why spend all this time and money on me just to hope I leave? Okay. Think about who visits the campus. Venture Capitalists from Silicon Valley, founders of huge companies, big shots. If one of them sees you an intern, maybe pitching a project and says, wow, I need that person on my team right now for double what you're paying. BHC counts that as a win because it proves the training works. It proves their system, their seed academy, produces a lead talent. It creates this powerful alumni network of people who got their big break at BHC. And it sends a message to the next round of recruits. Come here and your career will take off like a rocket. It turns the company into a launch pad. Not a parking lot, exactly. And speaking of that, the interns get the full experience, right? They live on campus, same onboarding. Full immersion. They're expected to pitch to real VCs. It all fits this aesthetic they call builder chic. Builder chic. I saw that. It sounds like a fashion line. It's more of an operating philosophy. It comes from Luke's background. He's lived in a van. He's built tiny homes, custom barned aminiums. So it's about being resourceful. It's resourcefulness over polish. The campus isn't marble floors and fancy art. It's functional. It's efficient. It's about building things that work, not things that just look good. And this is important. Don't let that van life vibe fool you into thinking this is a cheap operation. The benefits, the day one kit, it's actually insane. It is incredibly comprehensive. I mean, you walk in and they give you a laptop, sure, but also suits, blazers. The whole wardrobe from Anne College plus your MacBook monitors and Starlink. Okay. The Starlink is a huge deal. Every single employee gets one. Everyone. This goes right back to the mission. You can't build a tech hub in rural America on dial-up. So BHC just, they solve the problem themselves. They bypass the bad local internet. And that enables all the other perks. There's a $10 a day lunch credit, free premium coffee. But the one that jumped out of me was the Explorer stipend. $200 a month. Just to go see things. To go see the region, go to the bad lands, visit the partner town, see the monuments. The company wants you to know South Dakota. Yeah. You're spending money on the local economy, understanding the place you're trying to help. And that connects to the city investment days policy. It does. They encourage you to take a week and work from a partner town like Hill City or Newcastle. You just take your Starlink and go. You take your Starlink. You work from their local coffee shop. You spend your stipend there. It spreads the economic benefit beyond just custer. You are literally an agent of regional development. It really hammers home that you're not just an employee, you're part of the strategy. And here's the big butt we mentioned. To get all this, you have to master the secret weapon. The AI 80% multiplier. OK, this is the part of the deep dive where if you're listening, you need to lean in. Because the notes say this is not optional. It is the absolute foundation of the entire company. The 80% multiplier is the core philosophy that lets 60 people do the work of 300. How does that math even work? Because do more with less is usually just corporate speak for burnout. This is about working smarter or working differently. The idea is that AI can't do 100% of your job. Right. It can't replace human judgment or relationships or that final bit of quality control. But it can do the first 80% of almost any knowledge base task. Like drafting an email, writing some starter codes, summarizing a report. All of that. So you are never ever starting from a blank page. You are only doing the last 20%. The strategy, the editing, the human touch. Which makes you five times faster, at least. Luke Elvarez, the founder, he doesn't think of AI as software. He thinks of them as departments. What do you mean? He uses the AI model Claude as his general counsel, his strategy department. He uses cursor for his engineering department and chat GPT for quick research and drafts. I love that framing. So instead of emailing a lawyer and waiting two days for a contract. You have Claude drafted in 30 seconds and then you just review it. And the expectation is that you, the new hire, will work this way from day one. And the training for this seed academy is actually something they sell. Yes. Other companies pay a lot of money to learn these workflows. You get it as part of your job. That's a huge benefit. Even if you leave BHC in two years, you walk out with an almost unbeatable skill set. A career superpower. It is, but you have to learn it and you have to learn it fast because BHC is on a clock. There's a date circle on everyone's calendar July 4, 2026. The sister Centennial. I'm not even going to try to say that. It's America's 250th birthday. It's going to be a massive global event. And the main stage for that party is Mount Rushmore, which is practically in BHC's backyard. The president will be there, the governor, international media, the fireworks are coming back. The eyes, the entire world will be on the black hills and BHC wants to steal the spotlight. They want to be the future story. The narrative they're building is while you're all here celebrating America's history. Look, 20 minutes down the road to see America's future. That's it. The goal is to hold up BHC as the definitive proof that this model works. That AI can and does create jobs in rural America. That is one heck of a deadline. It's a race. It's an absolute race to get the campus done, the company's profitable and the story ready. So they can point to Custer and say, see, it works. Now, let's do this in Appalachia. Let's do it in the rest belt. So that explains the 60-day sprint. They aren't just building a company. They're building a proof of concept for a national showcase. And if they pull it off, everyone here, every single person listening to this right now becomes part of that story. You're not just writing code, you're building a prototype for the next American economy. So as you're sitting in your new office or maybe still unpacking that kit, you need to realize you're part of a sprint. A sprint with a very, real, very public finish line. Before we sign off, I just want to leave you with a quote from the founders' notes that really stuck with me. It seems to be the guiding principle for this whole thing. Which one of that? A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. It's a powerful idea. It's an admission that the work you're doing right now, building this code, training these students, saving this town, it's about planting seeds. You might not see the full forest for a decade, but you're the one putting the seeds in the ground. So here's your final call to action, your day one directive. Be visible, document your work. Because the session media is always rolling, move fast, bureaucracies the enemy, and above all else, believe in the mission. Because if you don't actually believe that a small group of people armed with AI can change the future of this country, you're probably in the wrong place. But if you do believe it, then welcome to the team. You are about to accelerate your career faster than you ever thought possible. Let's get to work. Let's get to work.