decide

Founders Brain

"Learning from history is a form of leverage." — David Senra

"All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there." — Charlie Munger

9 thinking skills and 107 maxims distilled from 473 episodes of David Senra's Founders podcast — 6.6 million words of biography covering Rockefeller, Jobs, Bezos, Munger, Land, Lauder, Ferrari, Walton, and hundreds more.

founders-brain turns Claude Code into a thinking partner who reasons the way history's greatest founders did — not with generic business advice, but with specific mental operations, historical parallels, and maxims extracted from the actual biographies.

Drop it into Claude Code, Cowork, OpenClaw, or any agent that supports the SKILL.md standard.

Quick Start

1. Install (30 seconds — see below)
2. Run /observe — describe what you're looking at
3. Run /historicize — find the founder who faced your problem before
4. Run /invert — ask how you'd guarantee failure, then avoid that
5. Run /decide — when it's time to commit

Install — 30 seconds

Requirements: Claude Code and Git

Step 1: Install on your machine

Open Claude Code and paste this:

Install founders-brain: run git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlonMichael/founders-brain.git ~/.claude/skills/founders-brain && cd ~/.claude/skills/founders-brain && ./setup then add a "founders-brain" section to CLAUDE.md that lists the available skills: /observe, /question, /invert, /model, /historicize, /synthesize, /decide, /focus, /update.

Step 2: Add to your repo so teammates get it (optional)

Add founders-brain to this project: run cp -Rf ~/.claude/skills/founders-brain .claude/skills/founders-brain && rm -rf .claude/skills/founders-brain/.git && cd .claude/skills/founders-brain && ./setup then add a "founders-brain" section to this project's CLAUDE.md listing the available skills.

Cowork / OpenClaw

Create a project, point it at the cloned directory, and paste the contents of CLAUDE.md into the project instructions.

Codex / Gemini CLI / Cursor

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlonMichael/founders-brain.git .agents/skills/founders-brain
cd .agents/skills/founders-brain && ./setup

See It Work

You:    I'm trying to decide whether to keep building for enterprise
        or pivot to the consumer traction we're seeing organically.

You:    /historicize

Claude: This is a textbook Grove inflection point. Let me give you
        the Intel parallel.

        Intel was a memory company. That was their identity. But the
        market was telling them something different — Japanese competitors
        crushing them on price, while their real edge was in processors.

        Grove asked Drucker: "If we got kicked out and the board brought
        in a new CEO, what would he do?" The answer was immediate:
        "Get out of memory."

        Your organic consumer traction IS the market telling you
        something. Every time you push back toward enterprise, you're
        being Henry Ford insisting on the Model T.

You:    /invert

Claude: Let's flip it. How would you guarantee this pivot fails?

        "In order to succeed, you must first survive."
        — Warren Buffett

        The failure recipe: pivot without enough runway, try to serve
        both segments simultaneously (Buffett: "A loss of focus is what
        worries Charlie and me the most"), or pivot to consumer without
        understanding WHY they're coming organically.

        Invert each one: secure 18 months of runway before committing,
        kill enterprise completely (Jobs killed 70% of Apple's products),
        and spend 2 weeks in pure /observe mode with your organic users
        before building anything.

You:    /decide

Claude: This is Type 1 — irreversible and high-stakes.
        Bezos regret minimization test: at 80, which story do you
        want to tell?

        "All that matters is to survive. The rest is just words."

        Define your kill criteria for enterprise NOW. Write them down.
        If the data already meets them, you have your answer.

Three skills, end to end. Not a chatbot — a thinking partner with 473 biographies in its head.

The Skills

Philosophy

Three principles from the archive:

1. The dead have already solved your problem. Almost no problem is new. Rockefeller, Land, Lauder, Bezos — they faced your problem decades or centuries ago. "Learning from history is a form of leverage."

2. Thinking is a craft, not a talent. Munger built mental models for sixty years. Buffett reads five hours a day. "Read 500 pages every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest."

3. Inversion is the master key. Don't ask how to succeed — ask how to fail, then avoid that. "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there."

Source Material

Built from 473 episodes of Founders covering:

Rockefeller · Carnegie · Jobs · Bezos · Munger · Buffett · Land · Lauder · Ferrari · Walton · Ford · Grove · Musk · Disney · Knight · Chanel · Arnault · Cucinelli · Price · Honda · Dyson · Bryant · Walsh · da Vinci · Franklin · Ogilvy · Kroc · Hughes · Johnson · Lombardi · Churchill · Edison · and hundreds more.

107 maxims extracted from 6.6 million words of transcript. Every maxim is traceable to the archive.

Docs

License

MIT. Free forever.

Built by Alon Michael. Attribution to David Senra's Founders podcast appreciated.

"Focus means saying no." — Steve Jobs

"Excellence is the capacity to take pain."

"Don't do anything that someone else can do." — Edwin Land