A low-cost, low-friction community for founders and builders, where the people leaving Google, Meta, and big tech show what they're making first. Builders get in for almost nothing. Investors pay for the front-row seat.
People are walking out of Google, Meta, Stripe, and OpenAI to build. The moment they leave, they go quiet: a side project, a private repo, a few friends testing a demo. By the time that shows up on a pitch deck or a Series A announcement, the early window is gone and the price has tripled.
There's no low-key place where those builders hang out together and show their work in progress without turning it into a fundraise. Twitter is performance. LinkedIn is noise. Accelerators want equity and a three-month commitment before anyone's ready. The room in between doesn't exist.
Make a Company is that room: a curated community where builders share what they're actually making, get useful feedback from peers who've shipped, and stay in touch with the investors who'll want them later, on the builder's terms and timeline.
Most communities charge the builders and beg for investors. That's backwards. Builders are the scarce, valuable supply, so getting them in has to be nearly free. Investors are the ones hunting for early signal, so they're the ones who pay. Same room, two very different price tags.
Why investors pay: early access to talent they can't source anywhere else beats another database of cold leads. One good early check out of the community pays for years of membership. You're selling a front-row seat, not a subscription.
The whole thing runs on one loop. Get a small core of credible builders in, and the quality of the room becomes the reason the next builder joins and the reason investors pay to watch.
Keep it curated and keep the builder friction low, and the community gets more valuable every time someone joins. That's the opposite of a paywall, where every new member makes it a little more crowded and a little less special.
This isn't only a coastal play. The same room lets a founder or an investor in Buffalo plug straight into the talent leaving big tech, without moving to the Bay Area or paying Bay Area prices to find them.
A Buffalo founder gets into the same conversations as someone three blocks from Google, and gets seen by investors who'd never have found them from 2,500 miles away.
A regional angel or fund gets early access to Silicon Valley deal flow at a fraction of the cost and travel it takes to build that network in person.
Capital and attention flow back toward rust-belt cities instead of away from them. Buffalo becomes a place that sees the future early, not last.
Geography stops being the filter. The community is the filter, and it's one a Buffalo builder or a Buffalo investor can be on the right side of for the first time.
Communities need a front door. A podcast is the cheapest, most durable one there is: it brings the builders to us, gives investors a reason to pay attention, and doubles as the show floor for the community. Every good guest is a recruit and a piece of marketing at once.
Buffalo-rooted, deep in the founder and investor networks. Steve brings the relationships, the deal instinct, and the reason people take the meeting.
The builder's voice on the mic. John keeps the show honest about what it actually takes to make the thing, so guests open up instead of pitching.
The third chair and the range that keeps it from being an echo chamber. Between the three, the show covers the deal, the build, and the story.
Format: short, frequent episodes where a builder walks through what they're making and the hosts pull the deal apart in real time. The best guests get invited into the community. The community feeds the guest list. The show and the room grow each other.
The hard part of any community like this is credibility with builders and reach with investors. That's the exact job.
Founder of Coulton Ventures, a plug-and-play partner for business development, partnerships, and deal sourcing across sports, real estate, and early-stage ventures. Steve spends his days doing what this community runs on: finding the right builders, earning the relationship, and connecting them to the people who should be paying attention. Buffalo-based and active across the region's founder and investor networks.
Make a Company is an early concept. Names, tiers, and the podcast lineup are working drafts meant to pressure-test the idea, not final commitments.
The bet is simple: builders are the scarce supply, investors are the ones who pay, and Buffalo can have a real seat at that table. If that holds, the next step is a small core of builders and the first episodes of the show. Poke holes in it.