Meet the Slowest Startup Incubator in the World—Pumping Out Billion-dollar Companies
About this episode
Dan Shipper interviews Sam Gerstenzang and Dan Friedman about their unique startup incubator model and the integration of AI in their businesses.
Silicon Valley loves billion-dollar moonshots and AI darlings. Sam Gerstenzang and Dan Friedman are doing something different—they're starting medical spas and funeral homes. On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Gerstenzang and Friedman, partners at Boulton and Watt, which they call the "world's slowest startup incubator." Their model: Come up with an idea, achieve five or 10 million dollars in revenue themselves, then hand it off to a CEO who can take it to the next stage. They've used this playbook to build Moxie, a Series C company that helps nurses open their own medical spas, now with 600-plus customers and a 200-person team globally. Their second company, Meadow Memorials, is a contemporary funeral home with no physical real estate. It has become the largest provider of funeral services in California. Both businesses launched right around the arrival of ChatGPT—and neither was built with AI in mind. So how are they thinking about AI inside companies where the core work isn't going to change? In this conversation, Gerstenzang and Friedman share how they built an AI agent called Matthew Bolton to power their customer discovery process, why synthetic…
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