Founder OS
The operating layer for the person running the business. Six files run your company. Claude reads them every session.
Owned by you. Runs locally in Claude Code. Talk to it.
New here? Read the Founder OS Playbook first - a visual walkthrough with screenshots: the problem, the three parts, how to start, and what not to do. Opens framed in any browser, about 15 minutes. It lives on the web so it never drifts out of date; there is no copy shipped in this repo.
Download Founder OS - or install via one-line curl, plugin marketplace, or git clone. See Install below.
What it is. What it is not. Your personal brain. Your files, queryable by you. Not team-shared. Not always-on.
Who this is for
You run the business or run a P&L inside one. Owner, operator, agency lead, consultancy head, head of department. If the buck stops with you, this is for you.
You are sharp but your day is chopped into thirty-minute pieces. You have tried productivity templates that promised the world and quietly stopped getting opened by week three.
You are not installing a template. You are installing an operating layer. It listens, routes, forgets nothing, and pushes back when you are about to ship something half-baked.
What makes this different
- Stall detection built in. The system watches for rolling items and forces keep/kill/escalate decisions. Every retro.
- Revenue loop enforcement. Every outreach or content action must log same-session. Catches the gap between "I'll do X" and "I did X."
- Role as router. COO, BD, CMO, Chief of Staff are behavioural modes, not personas. The right mode activates based on what you are actually doing.
- Plan A defines Plan B. This product is a derivative of an actual founder's daily use. Features graduate from personal use into the product only after surviving contact with live P&L.
- Talk to it. Built around dictation. Claude Code's built-in dictation is the primary input. Wispr Flow is an optional power-user upgrade. Claude Code is desktop-only today. There is no native mobile execution surface.
- Decay-driven keep/kill. Set
Decay after: 14d on a flag and the SessionStart brief surfaces it for keep/kill review when it expires. The OS does not auto-kill, you decide.
- Invisible version control. Full history and undo, no git command ever typed. Say "save my work", "what changed", or "undo to before this morning" and the OS wraps git for you. Local by default; nothing pushes anywhere unless you ask. Undo is fail-safe: it saves your current work first and can never lose it.
What you actually get
Four layers, the same four the Founder OS Playbook draws on a napkin. Each does one job. Remove any one and the whole thing breaks.
- The Brain - memory and judgment, all plain markdown you own. The six operating files (priorities, clients, decisions, today, the week) hold the state of the business right now. The brain layer (log, flags, patterns, parked decisions, knowledge) holds what happened, what is stuck, and what is worth reusing. A wiki layer adds
[[cross-references]] between files plus a source archive (raw/) for articles and transcripts.
- The Skills - the abilities the brain has: draft a follow-up, prep a meeting, write a proposal, run the weekly retro. They read and write across the Brain, so the output lands like you, not like a chat window.
- The Hands - the tools the skills reach for: calendar, inbox, notes, transcriber, voice capture. Wired through optional MCPs; nothing hard-fails when one is missing.
- The Heartbeat - the rhythm that keeps it current: a daily anchor at the start of the day, a weekly retro at the end of the week, and a SessionStart brief that surfaces stalls and stale cadence.
Six role modes. Four switch automatically based on what you are doing: COO (default), BD, CMO, Chief of Staff. Two more are there when you need them and you invoke explicitly: CSO for the portfolio view across everything you run, CTO for your tool stack and automations. To change lens yourself, just say "switch to CMO" (or any role).
A SessionStart brief runs on every Claude Code session open and surfaces stalls, stale cadence, and items past their decay date in one screen. Background plumbing the wizard sets up. You do not need to think about it. The brief, the Stop hook, and slash commands are Claude Code-only - on Cowork or Cloud Claude they do not fire. Details under Substrate details below if curious. Surface-by-surface compatibility table in docs/tools-and-mcps.md.
