Playbooks

Stop guessing and start scaling. The Scalable Startup: a 40-Year Roadmap from MVP to Exit Playbook delivers a step-by-step roadmap built on 40 years of founder experience. Known as "Dr. Vax" since my days in the 1980s at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), where their leading product was the VAX computer system, I focused on building businesses. In this course, you will master the fundamentals of MVPs, branding, and capital-efficient growth.

The playbook emphasizes the importance of early stealth and user-driven validation, utilizing low-fidelity prototyping, and conducting quick market and profitability assessments, including Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). It stresses the need for clear product articulation before any development takes place.

Additionally, it covers essential MVP fundamentals beyond coding, such as branding, legal considerations, and team building. The guide also addresses funnel design, gathering launch feedback with a Go/No-Go decision process, and the operational shift required for scaling. This includes planning, financial projections, hiring top talent, enhancing distribution and support, and raising minimal capital to protect equity.

Building a company is a journey through ideas born, experiments launched, and lessons learned. This course is derived from over 40 years of experience founding and scaling companies—including Metamor, which grew to over 500 consultants, and DialogTech, which reached nearly $40 million in revenue and was acquired for$100 million. Most startups fail because they lack a system, not a concept. This blueprint serves as your company's "Operating System from Day Zero" to help you navigate the complex world of capital while avoiding the mistakes of the past.

The rise of AI has led many founders to believe that static wireframes are a relic of the past. Why draw a box when an AI can generate a functional UI in seconds? However, AI prototypes won't fully replace wireframes; they change where they sit in the timeline.

Wireframes are for structural thinking—deciding what information exists. AI prototypes are for experiential validation—deciding how a user feels while using it. In this chapter, we explore how to use AI to skip the "drawing" phase and move straight into "interaction," while respecting the distinct role of structural planning.

Vibe Coding 101: Building your First Complete Application is a high-velocity, project-based masterclass designed for the modern developer. In this course, you will move beyond the traditional "line-by-line" coding grind and learn to orchestrate a sophisticated, full-stack application using Cursor AI or your favorite AI development tool.

We will build a commercial-grade Restaurant Ecosystem from scratch—starting with a QR-triggered customer ordering interface, moving through a real-time Kitchen Display System (KDS), and culminating in a live public Status Board.

What You’ll Master:

• The Art of Vibe Coding: Learn how to lead AI rather than just follow it. We focus on "intent-based" development to build complex features in minutes.
• Full-Stack Orchestration: From database schema design and secure authentication to real-time API handling and multi-user views.
• The Modern Stack: Understand the infrastructure required to support a "live" application that stays in sync across multiple devices.
• Deployment & Documentation: Transition from a local environment to a live, production-ready application that you can show off to the world.

Stop memorizing syntax and start building systems. By the end of this course, you won't just have a project for your portfolio—you'll have a new mental model for how software is built in the age of AI.

Welcome to the future of growth. In 2026, the question is no longer "Should we use AI?" but "How fast can our AI-native department move?"

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Welcome to your guide on how to lead people in the fast-paced world of startups. Whether you are a first-time founder or a new manager, leading a team is one of the hardest—but most rewarding—jobs you will ever have.

This course is based on the life lessons and philosophies of Irv Shapiro, as shared on his blog, Cogitations.com. We will also look at how the world has changed since COVID-19 and how you can use timeless principles to build a team that doesn’t just work hard but wins together.

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This course is designed for those who believe that the expiration date on a mind is only set by the person inhabiting it. It is based on the philosophy that "to create is to live" and that the most valuable asset you possess is your ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn—regardless of your birth year.

Throughout these chapters, we will weave together personal experience from over forty years in the technology and business trenches with cutting-edge research from institutions like MIT, Harvard, and Oxford. We will explore why a 70-year-old brain is often more capable than a 30-year-old brain, how the "new new thing" is always within reach, and why the tools available today—specifically AI and YouTube—have effectively destroyed the barriers to entry for anyone with a curious mind.

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When you’re first vibing out a new application, it’s the golden window to bake in performance, SEO, and activity tracking right from the jump—saving you the massive headache of retrofitting them later. From mapping out complex page funnels to dissecting granular device statistics, the telemetry required to understand your users is surprisingly easy to implement and report. With a little bit of upfront planning, even deep-level metrics like API execution times become readily available, turning your "black box" backend into an open book. This course is designed to move you beyond just "writing code" and into the realm of data-driven engineering; once you have this data, you can stop guessing and start making informed decisions about scaling and architecture to ensure your application remains viable, available, and snappy under pressure.

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