A Build Weekend, Not A Conference
The Tahoe Build RetreatFly in Friday. Drive home Sunday with your personal AI chief of staff running on hardware you own.
Two and a half days on the lake. You build a second brain, a chief-of-staff agent that texts you every morning, and you carry the Mac Mini it runs on home in your bag. No subscription. No vendor. Yours.
The Pitch
The opposite of a webinar.
You've seen the AI agent hype. Demos, decks, a replay link you never open. This is the other thing: two and a half days, hands-on, eight people, and you leave with working personal AI infrastructure — not notes about it.
The test is simple. Monday morning, at your own kitchen table, your phone buzzes with a brief your agent wrote — from a machine on your own network. Either that happens or the weekend failed. It happens.
A second brain
A personal knowledge vault with operating rules — plain markdown files, structured so an AI can actually use them. Your notes, decisions, and context in one place your agent reads.
A chief of staff
A private agent you reach on Telegram. It reads your vault, runs your morning brief, and answers when you text it. Not a demo account — yours, on your own keys.
The hardware it runs on
A Mac Mini M4, pre-configured, packed back in its box Sunday at noon. It sits on your network at home and runs your infrastructure 24/7. No SaaS subscription. Nothing to cancel later.
Who It's For
Time-poor operators who want leverage.
Executives, business owners, and acquirers. People whose calendar is the constraint, who have watched the AI wave from the outside and want their own systems running — not another tool trial.
No coding background required. Bring a laptop; we handle the rest. If you can write an email describing what you want, you can operate everything you build here. The whole weekend is designed around that fact.
The Weekend
Two and a half days. Three build blocks. One boat.
The schedule is deliberate: short, focused build blocks with a real adventure in the middle. Nobody retains anything from ten straight hours at a laptop.
Friday
Afternoon
Arrive
Fly into Reno or drive up from the Bay. Check in, get your bearings, meet the cohort. No agenda until dinner.
Evening
Welcome dinner on the lake
Dinner, introductions, and the framing talk: time is the only asset that doesn't compound, and systems beat effort. Then you unbox your Mac Mini. That's it — no code on Friday. The machine sits on the table as a statement of intent.
Saturday
Morning
Build Block 1 — your second brain
A personal knowledge vault with operating rules, running on your Mini by lunch. Your priorities, your context, your files — structured so an agent can read them. This is the foundation everything else stands on.
Midday
The adventure block
A private boat charter to Emerald Bay, or a guided hike from the Mt. Tallac trailhead — rotates by cohort and season. A big, real adventure, not a hotel-lobby break. The best system decisions get made away from the keyboard.
Afternoon
Build Block 2 — your chief of staff
A private Telegram agent wired to your vault, with a morning brief. The block has a hard exit criterion: it ends when everyone's agent messages them at the dinner table. We stay until yours does.
Evening
Group dinner
Eight people who all got a text from their own agent an hour ago. The conversation tends to be good.
Sunday
Morning
Build Block 3 — automations and routines
One scheduled job running before you leave — a daily brief, a weekly review, whatever fits your operation. Plus a personal build roadmap: the next five things to add, in order, on your own.
Noon
Close
Your Mini goes home in its box. You plug it in Monday, and your morning brief arrives during breakfast — from your house, on your network, written by your agent.
What You Get
Everything you build, you keep.
Included
- Mac Mini M4 — pre-configured, yours to keep
- All build materials and a private template repo
- Welcome dinner, Saturday lunch, and Saturday dinner
- The adventure block — boat charter or guided hike
- 30 days of a private support channel after the weekend
- One group office-hours call to tune what you built
Not included
- Travel to and from South Lake Tahoe
- Hotel room — book your own; room block details provided on registration (plan ~$250–350/night)
Keeping travel and lodging separate keeps the price honest — you pay for the build, not a marked-up room package.
Pricing
$4,000. The math is short.
If the systems you leave with save you five hours a week — a low estimate, in my experience — the retreat costs less than one month of the time it gives back. After that it's all surplus, and the hardware was included.
Seats are capped at 8 so I can sit next to every person during the build blocks. The retreat runs with a 6-seat minimum; if a cohort doesn't fill, you get a full refund or the next date — your call.
This is the founding cohort. The price will not be $4,000 forever, but the people in the room this time set the bar for who gets invited next.
Request a seatYour Host
Joshua Thacker
Builder. Former SaaS executive. USAF veteran.
Fifteen years running revenue and operations inside SaaS — Salesforce, PagerDuty, then COO of Mews, an 85-person European hotel software company. In August 2025 I left to build with AI full time.
Since then I've built Searcher OS, a profitable SaaS product, solo — and the AI chief of staff that runs my own life from a Mac Mini in my office. That second system is the one you build at this retreat. I'm not teaching a framework I read about; I'm handing you the setup I use every day.
Why This Exists
Two passions, one weekend.
If you've read this far into the site, you already know I'm obsessed with AI — I left a fifteen-year SaaS career to build with it full time. What the rest of the site doesn't tell you is the other half of my life. I've traveled to more than fifty countries, and I plan my year around getting into the mountains and canyons.
Adventure isn't a break from the work for me — the novel experiences are the point. They're the milestones a life gets measured in, and I've never wanted to build a life that trades one passion away to feed the other.
Most things make you choose. A conference is fluorescent lights and a lanyard; an adventure trip is a phone you keep trying to ignore. This off-site is the refusal to choose — two and a half days where you build something real and stand on a boat in Emerald Bay the same afternoon, alongside a small group of people wired the same way. It's the weekend I'd want to be invited to. So I'm hosting it.
On my own calendar this year
Mount Shasta
A summit climb — 14,179 feet.
Zion
Five days canyoneering the slots.
Moab
Leading a group through an adventure weekend.
Straight Answers
The questions worth asking.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. The builds are template-driven and I sit next to you through every block. If you can write a clear email, you can operate everything you take home. The point of the weekend is that the era of needing to code for this is over.
What exactly do I take home?
A Mac Mini M4 in its box, with your second brain, your chief-of-staff agent, and at least one scheduled automation running on it. Plus a private template repo, your personal build roadmap, and 30 days of support channel access. Nothing lives on my infrastructure — when you drive away, I can't touch your system.
Why a Mac Mini instead of the cloud?
Ownership and the monthly-zero. A cloud setup means a subscription, a vendor, and your personal context on someone else's servers. The Mini is a one-time cost that sits on your own network, holds your data locally, and runs 24/7 for about the power draw of a lightbulb. For a personal system, the math and the privacy both point the same way.
What if I get stuck after the weekend?
You get 30 days in a private support channel with me and your cohort, plus one group office-hours call. After that, the roadmap you leave with is designed to be self-serve — and most cohorts keep their channel alive on their own.
What's the refund and date-change policy?
Full refund 30+ days out, no questions. Inside 30 days you can transfer your seat to another person or move to the next cohort. If the retreat doesn't hit its 6-seat minimum, full refund or next date — your call.
Is the hotel included?
No — you book your own room, and you'll get room block details when you register. Plan on roughly $250–350 a night for two nights. Keeping lodging out of the price means you're paying for the build, not a resort package.
Eight Seats
Request a seat.
Tell me who you are and what you'd want your chief of staff to take off your plate. I review every request personally and reply within 48 hours — this is a room I curate, not a ticket queue.
Requesting a seat costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If the cohort is full, you go to the top of the list for the next one.
Request a seat