Ten years building products for others. Now I build —and make you capable.

By late 2025 I had a first product in my hands and the usual question hovering: do I raise a round to go faster? The standard plan was to bring in four engineers and multiply our speed. But when I talked it through with my CTO, he couldn’t guarantee that four more people would mean four times faster —and we both knew they wouldn’t. More people isn’t simply more speed.

So instead of raising the round, we started looking. And we found a role just beginning to surface in Silicon Valley: the product engineer —a single person who, with AI and agents, takes an idea from zero to production. What used to need a whole team was starting to be done by one experienced person with the right tools.

That profile struck me as so powerful that I decided to train it. FoundingProductEngineer was born: the course where the product engineers of tomorrow are founded —PMs and senior engineers who learn to take AI-native product from zero to production on their own.

Through 2026 something I hadn’t gone looking for happened: companies started writing to me. Not for a course or a talk —they wanted their own teams to become genuinely AI-native, with the same level I was teaching at FoundingProductEngineer. The transformation I’d lived first-hand, they wanted inside their own walls. It wasn’t a hunch of mine: the shift was already happening, and they felt it.

And that’s when I saw it. What fulfills me —building, teaching, learning— could multiply far beyond training people one by one: I could sit down with a company, build the product alongside them and leave the capability inside so they could carry on without me. Teaching and building stopped being two paths —they were the same one, at another scale. That expansion is Cardan House: the house; Cardan Academy, its school —and FoundingProductEngineer, its first program.