The world has changed.
Startups should too.
It has never been easier to build software, and never been harder to know what to build. Foundations NEXT is an experimental program exploring the future of B2B startups, powered by one of the strongest communities of AI-native builders in the world.
No Seattle or SF requirement, but currently focused on people in the United States. No pitch deck. No prototype. Just a real problem worth solving. Foundations is a Public Benefit Corporation on a mission to make Seattle founders successful .
The Shift
AI has radically changed the economics of software creation. Building is cheaper. Discovery is harder.
The Bet
The next wave of B2B startup opportunities will come from inside the industry, not Stanford dropouts.
The Ask
We're not asking you to pitch a startup. We're asking you to pitch a problem.
AI disruption is not confined to tech. It is changing every industry at once.
Real people in real industries can now see that problems they have lived with for years might finally be solvable. They know what is broken, but they usually do not have the tools, time, or technical leverage to build the solution themselves.
At the same time, builders now have more power than ever and more ambiguity than ever. They know they can solve almost anything, but often do not know which problems are important enough to matter.
The opportunity is in closing the gap between the people with the pain and the people who can build.
Foundations NEXT is built for the moment. We want to surface real business problems from people close to them, then pair those problems with a community of AI-native builders who can evaluate and solve them.
Today, Foundations is already bridging that gap. Foundations NEXT is the clearer invitation: bring the problem, not the solution, and we will help figure out whether it is worth building around and if not, even share some existing solutions.
Some people at frontier AI labs believe startups are over.
That OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI will absorb more and more of the economy as AGI approaches. Coding today. Science, medicine, and finance next. Then everything else.
If that's true, that's a very boring end state.
Foundations rejects that passivity. If the world has changed, startups should change too. Not disappear. Evolve.
How it works
Problem-first, community-backed and designed to create value rather than extract it.
Pitch a business problem
Not a startup idea, product mockup, or service business. Bring us a painful, important business problem that actually exists inside a non-technical industry.
The community evaluates it
Foundations members assess whether the problem is real, urgent, and worth solving. We care about problem quality, not presentation quality. The reason that matters is simple: we have assembled one of the strongest communities of AI-native builders in the world, and that community can tell the difference.
If it's compelling, we get on the same page and help solve it
If we find the problem compelling, we start with a meeting to get aligned on what is actually broken, what good looks like, and whether the opportunity is real. If we believe it is worth solving, we'll help solve it for free. No consulting invoice. No startup theater.
If your idea resonates, we will partner with you
Not every problem becomes a company. But if the opportunity resonates and the alignment is strong, we will explore building it together with you as a partner.
What are some successful examples?
These are all real examples that have already happened inside Foundations. The pattern is usually the same: the opportunity comes from someone close to the problem, not from startup idea generation in a vacuum or via an LLM.
Healthcare Law
The insight came from a relative working in the healthcare law world who understood the pain up close.
Insurance
The problem was identified by an insurance broker friend with direct knowledge of where workflows were breaking down.
Vehicle Repossession
It started with a neighbor in the vehicle repossession space who could see the operational bottlenecks firsthand.
Commercial Real Estate
The opportunity surfaced through a friend in commercial real estate permitting who knew exactly how painful the process was.
What this is and what it isn't
We are pioneering something new, but that also means saying no to a lot of things.
What this is
- + Real problems from non-technical businesses
- + Software for operators, not startups selling to startups
- + Rapid validation backed by the Foundations community
- + New business creation enabled by AI-native economics
- + Cash-generating software businesses where that makes sense
What this is not
- × Not an incubator
- × Not a consultancy
- × Not a pitch competition
- × Not dev tools, infrastructure, or SaaS for startups
- × Not products optimized for venture theater
This is not an incubator. Incubators extract value. This is designed to create it. Not everything worth building needs to look like venture-backed SaaS. If AI makes it possible to build a real cash-generating software business around a real operational problem, we're interested.
Who this is for
Anyone is welcome, but this is really for in-industry operators and business owners. You do not need to be based in Seattle or San Francisco.
Business owners and operators
You run a non-technical business with painful workflow, coordination, compliance, or service delivery problems that software still hasn't solved well.
People with domain pain
You know your industry deeply, see inefficiencies every day, and keep thinking "someone should build this."
Service providers and consultants
You see patterns that the rest of the world does not because you work across many clients, workflows, and edge cases.
Bring us a real problem. If it resonates,
we'll partner with you.
No pitch deck required. No technical background needed. Just clarity about what's broken.