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Ex-Salesforce & PagerDuty · Solo Founder · Capital Allocator

Joshua Thacker — Founder & Fractional AI Officer.

Former Salesforce and PagerDuty exec. Now I ship production AI agents for operators and business owners, acquire cash-flowing assets, and document the entire process.

Free 1-Hour AI AuditBuild Your First AI Agent

The audit: free for business owners — no fee, no deck. The agent: I build it, you text it.

For Builders

Build your first AI agent.

Free setup guides and the agent hierarchy behind the system I run my own life and business on: the Mac Mini, the memory, the mandates.

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For Business Owners

Put AI to work in your business.

A free one-hour audit. No fee, no deck, no pitch. You leave with your two to three highest-ROI places an AI agent would pay off.

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Just Watching?

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One email per post: the AI systems, the acquisition screens, and the real numbers — including what didn't work.

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15yr

SaaS Executive Career

350+

Broker Sites Scraped Daily

85%

Cash Flow Coverage

50

Countries Explored

The Thesis · Three Bets

Time is the only non-renewable asset.

Systems compound. Effort decays. Everything I build ladders back to one outcome: income that doesn't require more of my time as it grows.

Build with AI

SearcherOS

The operating system for business acquisition. A Salesforce-caliber CRM built for people searching to buy a business. Scrapes 350+ broker sites daily. Built by a non-technical founder with Claude Code.

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Cash-Flowing Assets

Investing

Strip malls, short-term rentals, syndications, and business acquisitions. Every asset evaluated on one metric: cash-on-cash return.

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Engineer Autonomy

AI Systems

My AI operating system, a 6-agent team on Hermes and Claude Code. Hermes, an AI chief of staff built on a second brain. And a custom wealth tracker that replaced 5 subscriptions. The systems I built to buy back my time.

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From the Blog

Recent writing.

Investing

A Year Ago I Bought My First Airbnb

September 30, 20266 min read

Huge tax benefits in year one, but not the cash flow I was hoping for.

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AI Operations

A Few Million Words In, It Starts to Act Like a Counterpart

September 24, 20263 min read

I flew to Denver to build a company brain: 2.5 million words of a business, continuously ingested, feeding automations the founders asked for. The surprise came 3 weeks in, when one founder stopped talking about the automations.

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AI Operations

Howard Caught the Fraud. Then He Fixed My Workout.

August 27, 20263 min read

My AI chief of staff flagged a $1,500 fraudulent charge my old process would have missed for months. Then I gave him 5 years of health data, and he pulled my best-ever training block out of it. Context is the whole trick.

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Origin

Turning Around at 13,000 Feet

August 20, 20263 min read

This year's misogi: 10 hours up Mount Shasta, 6,600 feet gained, no summit. Why I score the day as both a failure and a success, and the one challenge that can never be delegated to an agent.

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Origin

6 Years on an Army Cot, and the 14 Investments It Turned Into

August 13, 20266 min read

Black Monday put my family in a single-wide at the end of a 6 mile rock road. Here's every cash flow source I own now, what each one actually paid over the last 12 months, and what a paycheck would have to pay to match it.

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Building

5 Weeks of Freemium, and What the Business Is Actually For

August 4, 20265 min read

The freemium checkpoint I promised: signups 4x'd, 100 paying customers, and every upgrade arriving in week 1 instead of the week 3 I predicted. Plus the bigger story: a SaaS run by AI agents, and what it's a platform for.

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Building

The Trial Wall Was the Bottleneck: My Freemium Pivot in Numbers

July 23, 20265 min read

141 expired trials taught me the scarcity mindset was capping my SaaS. The teardown of a trial-to-freemium pivot: the reasoning, the switch, the first 2 weeks of data, and the checklist to run before you touch your own pricing.

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AI Operations

The Daily Loop: Where the Second Brain Earns Its Keep

July 15, 20266 min read

The markdown vault was the memory. This is the loop that feeds it, queries it, and patrols it — the morning ingest, the 4-button brief, recall on demand, and the overnight patrol. With a starter version you can set up today.

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Building

I Cancelled 5 Apps and Built My Own Wealth Tracker in an Afternoon

June 25, 20264 min read

I cancelled 5 finance subscriptions and built one wealth tracker in an afternoon to handle a dozen entities and a stack of K-1s. The build-vs-buy line is moving, and here's the catch nobody mentions.

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AI Operations

I Built My Chief of Staff Out of Markdown Files

June 23, 20266 min read

My personal AI chief of staff runs on a folder of markdown files and a Telegram bot. Here's how the second brain is actually wired, and why it buys back my attention.

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Building

Code Where You Can, LLM Where You Can't

June 17, 20264 min read

Why my best AI agents do as little thinking as possible. The design rule that turned Marcus from a sloppy, expensive deal-screener into a trusted one: deterministic code for the exact work, the model only for genuine ambiguity.

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Origin

A Front Row Seat to the New Industrial Revolution

June 11, 20264 min read

Why I left a lucrative SaaS executive role for a front row seat to the AI revolution, and how cash flow plus AI made the leap less risky than it sounds.

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AI Operations

The Model Is the Cheap Part

May 28, 20264 min read

AI adoption is stalling on process, data, and people, not on the models. Why the model is the cheap part of any real deployment.

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Acquisitions

Mapping the US Business Broker Market

April 21, 20266 min read

I scraped hundreds of broker sites for 18 months. 17 firms list half of all US small-business inventory. Only 4 operate in all 50 states. Plus a free broker finder tool for searchers.

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Acquisitions

The Silver Tsunami Deal That Looked Like a Layup

April 16, 20265 min read

A $1.25M manufacturing deal looked like a 33% return on paper. Then I checked what the owner actually did all day, and the math fell apart. A numbers-driven look at why most sub-$1M acquisitions are a job, not a business.

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Building

How to Build a Production App With AI

April 10, 20268 min read

The exact 8-phase system I use to go from idea to production software. No coding required. Just clear thinking and AI agents.

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Building

Two Weeks of Work. Two Hours. Here's How.

March 26, 20264 min read

A PE firm CEO sent me a long feature list. I shipped it in two hours. The secret isn't prompting. It's decomposition and agents grading agents.

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AI Operations

I Built an AI C-Suite Out of Survival. Here's What Actually Works.

March 20, 20268 min read

How I built a 6-agent AI operating system to run go-to-market, customer ops, and product maintenance as a solo founder. The practical lessons after months of tinkering.

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Origin

Bob Is My CEO. Bill Handles Bug Fixes. They're All AI.

March 19, 20263 min read

After 15 years in SaaS, I left corporate to build with AI and buy cash-flowing assets. Here's what happened in the first seven months.

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Investing

Why 8% in Real Estate Is Not 8% in Stocks.

March 18, 20264 min read

The real yield stack on a Texas strip mall acquisition. Purchase price, depreciation, rent escalations, and why the comparison to stocks is wrong.

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Acquisitions

Speed to No.

March 17, 20264 min read

The most valuable skill in deal screening isn't finding the yes. It's how fast you find the no. A real deal teardown showing why.

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