Introduction

I'm Nima. I'm originally from here. I was born in Iran.

My family escaped when I was a kid, moved to Canada. I grew up here, so I'm a proud Torontonian.

From Serial Founder to Sabbatical

And in about 2011, I had a liquidity event and burnout together from having built my Nth company here. And I was on sabbatical.

Choosing Brazil as a Reset

I decided to go to Brazil because I always had a dream of going to brazil i was always either too poor to do that or i didn't have time to do that right so eventually when i had my sabbatical i decided i'd go there for six months and then i realized

Scaling Founder Institute in Brazil

it's such an amazing place and i started to build business there so i worked with has anyone heard of the founder institute here yeah yeah so i built the founder institute business in brazil i graduated a couple of classes here too in toronto and in waterloo i helped the directors here and

And in Brazil, I built it out to be one of the largest accelerators in the Foundry Institute network. I ran personally about 65 cohorts of that.

So if you can imagine, I built about 10 companies myself. I've advised another thousand of them through the Foundry Institute. I invested in a few dozen of them.

Returning Home During COVID

And then in 2020, when everything went online, I came back to Canada because our great prime minister at the time said, if you're canadian come home because covid is happening so i took literally the last commercial flight available and i came to toronto and then i got locked down with all the rest of you guys for a year you know literally in lockdown and the first commercial flight back i went to brazil

Why Florianópolis Became the New Base

and i this time i moved directly to florianopolis which is an island in the south of brazil it has 42 beaches but it's also brazil's startup capital and it's essentially the safest place that I've lived in so far including as you can imagine in different places in

Building Founder Village and Prioritizing Founder Health

Canada and so now I'm working on building the founder village because the most important thing became you can pass the slide became basically you need to

be where you feel best right because in 2020 what I didn't tell you is I got burned out again this time when I got burned out I had to quit everything I

was doing and start again I decided I'm never going to work again and by that I mean I'm never gonna do busy work again so I'm gonna prioritize everything I'm doing and it's gonna start with the priority of me because if I'm gonna be a founder I need to feel my best in order to perform my best and then therefore I

can be better for the people around myself too so basically in Florianopolis is the startup capital it's one of the number one growing digital nomad places around the world and that's because it's super safe super beautiful and the And the people around you are also very highly competitive in the same place as you are.

So my neighbors are like AI whizzes all the way to multiple exited founders in industry and all sorts of technology.

Founder House: The First Community Hub

So we've been building this community starting with the founder house, which is a beach house in the district of Jureré Internacional, which is a very safe district, modern place in Florianopolis.

this and we've been basically doing this for about three years operating events around how many events is that yeah maybe like 300 events by now and some thousands of people have come there and we have about 50 members right now so we're becoming a member owned and operated

entity so i'm trying to build a internal intentional community for repeat founders founders, who basically want to co -own the infrastructure that they're going to use to self -servicely accelerate themselves.

Because I'm not doing the Founder Institute thing again, right? I'm not going to do an army of mentors, because now you know through all the things you're seeing that through AI tools, you can do all of that.

Can you play this quick video here?

A Tour of Founder House and the Ownership Structure

So we're just going to see what the Founder House is like. It's basically this beach house. I rented it for two years and then we just put the down payment on it and we set up a company in the special economic zone in Honduras called Prospera.

Prospera and Tokenized Ownership

Have you ever heard of that? Prospera is a charter city in Honduras and you can basically set up businesses there. It's a much better jurisdiction than places like Delaware and such.

So we set up that company so that we can tokenize the shares of that company. So the members of the community of Founder House are going to now be able to own own tokens of the company that holds the house in its treasury and that's the idea there because I

never wanted to launch a token that could go to zero so the first time in my career after you know I've known Bitcoin since 2010 I've known Ethereum since 2014 and I've been now working on basically trying to build a DAO all these years but I never wanted to build something that

would go to zero yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna end this presentation with an invite for you guys you can check it out afterwards yeah actually we can do

Membership Model and Community Principles

something fun but here if you want to become a member the founder house has member for founders and residents membership but we also have a nomadic founder membership and nomadic founders are starting to get some really interesting perks I'll talk to you about them as we go forward and you guys can

check it out and see what you think about the membership if you come to Florianopolis make sure you visit we also have a day pass you can just check it out but it's a members only club now becoming that so after you use the day pass you have to apply to become a member you can check out the events but

if you want to be a member you have to be a Phoenix founder who here is a repeat founder who's like founded something one time and another in your or next one there's one there's two there's a few right i mean i hope the rest of you guys will get

The Future of Work: Founders Who Build, Builders Who Found

there too because i got news for you guys okay you think there's all these positions that are disappearing and all these new ones are going to substitute them i have like this theory that's

been a long time coming and it's aging very well i think the industries of the future are going to be founders who build and builders who found so if you're a founder learn to build your own product and if you're a builder learn to build learn to build a company around what you're building

and if you're none of those figure out how to become both of those as fast as you can because that's become abstracted away it's so easy to do it now so there's no reason for you also not to

Prompt Nights: Shipping Products in a Single Evening

be in them so we've been running 24 editions of what an event is called prompt nights in prompt nights at the founder house you come in without having any technical ability or being an ai engineer and you leave with a product we started it with prompting more than two years ago and now we develop agentic systems in the same night okay so

basically you can come into this event it's open to the public and usually people leave there with a product because building a product has become super easy right who builds a product nowadays every morning like by coding into lovable or like represents or something right like every morning I

build a new product so what does that mean that means everybody and their cousin is competing with you so you got to learn how to distribute your product right and that's the whole point of doing the founder house is so we have a network that we can distribute first to and build a more robust product that will distribute that wider for us so because our founders are a lot of them

AI Infrastructure and Secure Model Execution

are ai first companies two years ago i realized one of our ai companies needed a cluster of mac Mac Minis two years ago. This is a long time before OpenClaw came to be.

We set up a cluster of 256 Mac Minis in Brazil. If you can imagine, even in Canada, these are M4s, by the way, two years ago.

So it's very hard to buy more than like four of these at the time. So we had to negotiate with Apple to get them. We had to negotiate with customs to be able to bring these

into Brazil at a cost near the same cost as the US, just so we don't lose one AI company from Brazil to the US. And then we learned from that that, wow, in a runtime environment where you can

run your own models and you can have your own edge inference sandbox, which is basically what this is, you're building products that other people are not being able to discover through prompt injection attacks or other attacks.

Why Founders Need an Edge Inference Sandbox

And OpenAI is not your co -founder because if you're vibe coding your product and your discovery is happening between you and whatever AI tool you want to call, that AI tool is essentially your co -founder my question is when is it going to come after the equity so let's go to the next one here so yeah I mean

higher order company is founded by one of the etherium foundations lead developers and the person who built a etherium virtual machine and his name is Victor Tallin you guys can look him up he's a very famous etherium guy on X and

and such and he did this so through the AYA accelerator we offer a backbone where you can essentially co -own or co -host your inference edge sandbox system your own technology I'll give you the backbone I can connect you to the internet and electricity stably stable and you can just basically build it there or if you want I can co -own it with you in very few cases so in many

cases that doesn't really apply to you right because you don't want to spend five ten million million dollars in hardware right now, right? Who wants to do that? Like nobody, right?

But you want to access AI in a safe way, right? Who doesn't want to do that? Who does want to access AI in a safe way to build their next product? That's a very smart answer because it's one of my biggest concerns for founders.

FounderForge and AYA: The Alternative Intelligence Accelerator

So we're launching and it has not been launched yet. This is the first ever time that I'm revealing a screen here for you guys to see. This is only being seen right now by about five companies in our portfolio.

So FounderForge is the front end of AYA which is the alternative intelligence accelerator which is the backbone inference node provider.

Agent-to-Agent Participation and Token-Based Support

So FounderForge is something where we will do a KYC so we find out there's a real human like you, a person needs to be there and then your agent needs to converse with our agent. So you must be

be operating an agent. And why are we doing that as an accelerator? Because we're predicting that in two to five years, that's the obvious thing.

So you must be operating your own agent. Your agent plugs into our agent. And then that way, we'll know how many tokens you're using, how efficiently you're using them,

and how many tokens you need. And then instead of giving you money so you can hire a lot of humans and have all that HR problems, we're going to give you tokens so you

can build your agentic startup and make money without having to have the hr problems and i say that because i love humans and i want to defend us as founders and builders but i will never again defend an employee i will never again defend a career employee because a career employee is not the right formula for not neither the employee nor the employer right i mean let's be honest like

all of us are either working in a place where we are not delivering the value we should be or the place is not being fair to us. So there's some sort of asymmetry of interest there.

So I think everybody should be founders who build and builders who found, and that's what FounderForge is trying to help you do.

We haven't launched it yet. We will launch it. It'll come with an additional membership program. Those people who looked at memberships,

those don't include FounderForge. Because it includes tokens, it's a more robust, more deeper, more expensive membership program,

but it will pay for your tokens as well. all.

Magic Island: Bringing Builders to Florianópolis

So now Magic Island is my invite for you guys to come here. Magic Island is what we call Florianopolis, Ilia da Magia.

It's not Silicon Island because we're not Silicon Valley, but we're Magic Island, right? And AI kind of has magic in it.

So the Magic Island campaign is an embassy that I'm setting up as a non -profit effort just to help you learn that you can use Florianopolis list as your second or third node for building your company and or you can just go there to

expand your product or you can just go there to recruit amazing talent because I promise you if you go to founder house and you take pictures and videos and you're recruiting people from anywhere in the world and you're like come here I'll pay you a fraction of what I would pay you if you work somewhere else but you get to live here or spend time here they'll come running okay we see

The Magic Pass and City-Backed Nomad Infrastructure

that happening like left and right so if you want to show a quick video here this is the magic pass You can actually like download this magic pass from the magic island website. We're gonna have the QR code I believe right after here.

Yeah, you can join the magic island there and This is a free thing

You can just basically check out what Florianopolis is like and the city the municipality likes this because they're gonna get to know Where you want to be when you go as a digital nomad there and then they can optimize the city more and more for you because the city wants to be a center for digital nomads and not for large infrastructure types of businesses and then I like it because then also there's

a pro model on it you can actually we haven't released it yet but you can buy a pass where then you get some perks included in it that we prepay for the whole group like basically you guys know impact hub the co -working place we've got five of those in Florianopolis it's included in the magic pass there's all all this type of infrastructure you can access as well we have so I want to

An Open Invitation to Visit Founder Village

invite you guys to come there and here's here's how it's gonna work them the first person that actually books a trip to go to Florianopolis and check out the founder village I'm gonna host you at the founder house for one or two nights

for free okay in an ensuite depending on when you come maybe I can give you the whole ensuite so you can put a few people including your family in it they're big ensuite they've got two like double or queen beds on them so you can put like a small family unit or a small team unit right that's how we have forcing functions for the teams it can't

Conclusion

be bigger than that unit but that's my invite for you and i'm sorry my demo was not as technical as it should be but i wanted to encourage you guys to try all of the alternatives you have to be able to

build ai and make sure that you're building your new discoveries and new products somewhere where it's protected and you're not giving away your discoveries to everybody else