# Meet the Slowest Startup Incubator in the World—Pumping Out Billion-dollar Companies

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/ai-i-6714658/meet-the-slowest-startup-incubator-in-the-world-pumping-out-billion-dollar-companies
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/ai-i-6714658/meet-the-slowest-startup-incubator-in-the-world-pumping-out-billion-dollar-companies.md
Podcast: [AI & I](https://stenobird.com/podcast/ai-i-6714658)
Published: 2026-03-04T16:06:40+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/ee51a639
Audio file: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/media.transistor.fm/ee51a639/7afac8c4.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/ai-i-6714658/episodes/meet-the-slowest-startup-incubator-in-the-world-pumping-out-billion-dollar-companies
Duration seconds: 2728

## Resource

Silicon Valley loves billion-dollar moonshots and AI darlings. Sam Gerstenzang and Dan Friedman are doing something different—they're starting medical spas and funeral homes. On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Gerstenzang and Friedman, partners at Boulton and Watt, which they call the "world's slowest startup incubator." Their model: Come up with an idea, achieve five or 10 million dollars in revenue themselves, then hand it off to a CEO who can take it to the next stage. They've used this playbook to build Moxie, a Series C company that helps nurses open their own medical spas, now with 600-plus customers and a 200-person team globally. Their second company, Meadow Memorials, is a contemporary funeral home with no physical real estate. It has become the largest provider of funeral services in California. Both businesses launched right around the arrival of ChatGPT—and neither was built with AI in mind. So how are they thinking about AI inside companies where the core work isn't going to change? In this conversation, Gerstenzang and Friedman share how they built an AI agent called Matthew Bolton to power their customer discovery process, why synthetic customer calls completely failed for them, and why they believe you shouldn't give anyone credit for using AI. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It's usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Intent is what comes after your IDE. Try it yourself: augmentc…

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