From IdeaMarket to AINative.
I've been obsessed with one problem for a long time: how do we remove the friction between an idea and the market?
Years ago, I was employee #1 at IdeaMarket, an Idealab company founded by Bill Gross. I developed the initial UI/UX and product concepts and drove product and the development team.
The idea was essentially a reverse venture capital network: start with promising ideas, then match them with the entrepreneurs, talent, and capital needed to bring them to market.
Investors and entrepreneurs including Steve Case, Shervin Pishevar, Max Levchin, and others invested in IdeaMarket and submitted ideas to the platform. Peter Diamandis was an advisor and idea collaborator.
The model was simple: Idea → Talent → Capital → Market. That experience left me with a question I've carried ever since: how quickly can we get from a good idea to finding out whether customers actually want it?
Years later, I encountered that problem again. During the Spring 2023 Techstars Tulsa cohort, I was mentoring founders in a three-month accelerator. These were talented entrepreneurs with ideas, mentors, networks, and access to investors. But I watched some of them burn the most valuable early weeks of the program simply trying to get an MVP built.
And I kept thinking: by week four, you shouldn't still be building something to test. You should already be learning from customers.
That became the catalyst for AINative.
The real gap isn't idea-to-code. It's idea-to-customer.
Generative AI has made building software dramatically faster. But an application isn't a company. You still need data, authentication, deployment, billing, CRM, support, communications, AI infrastructure, and all the other pieces required to turn software into something customers can actually use.
So instead of asking, “How can AI generate more code?” I started asking: “How do we remove as many steps as possible between an entrepreneur and their first customer?”
That's why we're building AINative around composable primitives: ZeroDB, ZeroPipeline, ZeroInvoice, ServiceOS, ZeroVoice, agent infrastructure, inference, memory, and Cody to help bring those pieces together.
The goal isn't more code. The goal is faster learning. Because AI can't manufacture product-market fit. Customers still decide whether your idea deserves to become a company. AI can change how quickly you get to ask them.
What once looked like: Idea → Team → Capital → Build → Infrastructure → Deploy → Customer → Learn can increasingly become: Idea → Product → Customer → Learn → Iterate.
That's the thread connecting IdeaMarket, Techstars Tulsa, and AINative. The technology has changed. My obsession hasn't.
I want to compress the distance between idea and customer to almost zero — so founders can spend less time getting ready to learn and more time actually learning. And that's the mission I'm inviting you to join.
If you're a founder, developer, investor, or builder who believes great ideas should have a faster path to the people they might serve, come help us build that future.
Let's make it easier to try. Faster to learn. Cheaper to fail. And easier to try again.
That's why I built this. Come build something.