A few weeks ago I wrote about drinking radioactive gatorade. My term for how a bunch of us nerds are not-so-quietly discovering a new addiction to building things that were either impossible or prohibitively expensive a year ago. Yes, of course people are making memes in high-def now, but in case you missed it, a man in Australia used AI to help design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog. Not a cure: one tumor shrank by 75%, another didn't respond, and the scientists involved will be the first to tell you the results are preliminary. But the fact that a tech entrepreneur with no biology background could even attempt that is the part worth sitting with. (The full story is wild if you haven't seen it.) Anyway, despite all the fear around this stuff, well-placed or not, it's not replacing me yet. But it has expanded what I can do. By a lot.
So what did I make?
It's called Management Craft. I built it in four weeks, by myself, from a calendar event titled "brainstorm founder library thing" to a real, working product. But I want to be honest about what "built it by myself" means in 2026, because the internet is full of people claiming they one-shotted an app over a weekend and I find that story mostly unhelpful. Four weeks is shockingly fast for what this is. It's not effortless, though.
I designed the whole thing in Figma first. I had my first date with Claude Code on a plane (gin and tonic in hand, okay two), and when I landed, things were in pretty good shape. "Pretty good shape" and "done" are not the same thing. Then came weeks of iterating, refining, throwing things away, rebuilding. The skill here isn't pasting a paragraph and watching a robot build your app. The skill is taste, direction, and knowing how to talk clearly about what you want. If you can describe what's wrong with something and articulate what better looks like, you can build things now that would've required a team a year ago. That's a better story than "I one-shotted it." It also happens to be true.
As for the content, I built a process I'll write about soon. But for now let's say it's the spiritual grandchild of how we made stuff at Holloway, my last startup where we spent years obsessing over how to make expert knowledge useful. And to think, we did it all by hand back then!
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I mainly wanted an excuse to tinker. I, like many of you, have an addiction to the internet, and so I kept seeing all these internet people saying stuff like "code is free now" and describing a desperate destiny for white collar workers. I figured I better find out how soon I'd be out of a job. And I wanted an excuse to play, so play I did. I polled my twitter bookmarks like a spice rack and started cooking.
Now, after five and a half years of coaching startup founders, you start to notice some patterns. The process of company building isn't exactly predictable, but it's not not predictable. Founders, executives, managers, leaders, they all kind of run into the same stuff. Sometimes it's their stuff, and sometimes it's just company-building stuff. And to help people with that stuff, I keep returning to a collection of frameworks, ideas, mental models, cognitive handles, whatever you want to call them.
And despite collecting all this stuff, the people founding, leading, and building startups don't have time to read all of Barnes & Noble. So I started making my collection shorter, crisper, more to the point. I began thinking about each framework like a prescription I could dispense in the right moment. And when I get the prescription right, they run with it.
Over the years I've turned these prescriptions into Notion docs and slides in Figma, but now I'm taking them to the lab and giving them the full treatment.
Management Craft is a visual library of management frameworks. Each one is a card that teaches a single concept. The first complete pack is on hiring: seven cards covering everything from defining the role to making the offer. It's for founders and executives and managers at startups scaling from their first hire to their hundredth, people who are trying to build awesome teams, to build awesome products, to find more friends to make cool shit with.
But the part I am most excited about is machine mode.
A big problem with management frameworks is that you read them, you think "that's great," and then you think to yourself, "Jesus Christ, now I've got even more work to do." Every founder knows they need a better hiring process, but to actually sit down and make one is a ton of work. So most founders review a pull request or answer an email instead and then fire the poor sap they mishire a month later.
Machine mode is where reading stops and doing starts. Every card has a toggle in the top right corner. Hit it, and the card becomes a step-by-step prompt you can use with an LLM. Copy the prompt, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT, and it walks you through implementing the framework. As in, at the end, you will have an actual thing you can use with your team instead of a sticky note you ignore until it "accidentally" gets thrown away.
For millennia, a conversation partner who's read the actual playbook was something even the wealthy couldn't always find. A secretary, an executive assistant, someone to take your thinking and go make it real. Now it costs twenty bucks a month.
So, go to managementcraft.co. Poke around. Try a card. Start with The MOC if you want a good entry point. Try machine mode. Seriously, try it. If you hate it, write me an email telling me why I suck. If you like it, and you want new cards as they come out, sign up for the email list on the site. And if you know a founder who's scaling a team right now, send it to them.
There's more coming. More packs, more frameworks. Right now the whole thing is free, and I don't expect that to last forever, so this is a good time to poke around. I'm working on a post about how I make this content, because the process itself is worth hamburgling.
Reply to this email. I'm having a blast with this, staying up late because I want to, not because I have to. I want to know if people think it's as cool as I think it is. Even better, tell me how to make it more useful so you can be more useful.
Acknowledgments
The visual format for Management Craft was inspired by Josh Puckett's Interface Craft. I asked if he minded and he was gracious about it. Card illustrations generated with Midjourney.