MLNR

Senior consulting pods that ship.

PE-backed mid-market·VC fund portfolios·AI-native scale-ups

↓ The thesis
The thesis

When depth gets cheap, breadth gets expensive.

AI made depth cheap. Whatever you went deep on for twenty years, a model can now do at 80% of your output for 2% of your cost. The cross-stroke of the T (taste, judgement, cross-domain pattern-matching) is what scales unevenly. The era of I-shaped specialists was an anomaly. AI is restoring the default.

Most strategic work doesn't ship. Most shipping work doesn't think. Big consulting writes strategy decks and walks. AI shops ship code without diagnosing the operating model. Agencies build what you brief, not what your business needs. The work goes live, or the deck gets filed. Either way, the outcome doesn't last.

Read the manifesto →
How we fit

Three comparisons worth making.

Most alternatives fail at one half of the work. We're built to do both. Same pod, end to end.

vs Big Consulting

They write the strategy, deliver the deck, and leave. Senior partners run the sales meeting. Junior consultants write the work. You get reframes you can defend in a boardroom. You get nothing that runs in your business. Our pods do the consulting and ship the product. Same pod, same operators, end to end.

vs Junior+AI Shops

Cheap, fast, and unconsidered. They ship quickly because they don't think slowly. They skip the reframe, the operating-model diagnosis, the parts of the work that don't have code in them. The output goes live but doesn't survive contact with the business. We ship methodically: diagnose what's actually happening, reframe the problem, build only what survives.

vs Building In-House

Six months to hire a senior AI lead. Twelve months for them to build a team. Eighteen months before the team ships anything you'd point an acquirer at. We staff a senior pod in two weeks and ship inside the quarter.

How we engage

Three buyer cohorts. One federation. Pods, not pyramids.

Every engagement starts with a Discovery Sprint. After that, the right structure depends on who you are and what you need to ship. Senior pods throughout. No agency layer between strategy and build.

01 / PE
PE-backed
mid-market
Base Outcome upside
Primary engagement
Transformation Engagement
Four to six months. Six stages: Reset, Review, Reframe, Horizon, Operating Environment, MVP. Ends with a shipped product, not a deck. Operating Partner Retainer available as continuation, offered not pushed. Tied to your value-creation plan.
02 / VC
VC fund
portfolios
A
B
C
D
Primary engagement
Venture Build
Eight to twelve weeks. Senior pod embedded with one of your portfolio companies. Strategy and ship under one roof. Four pathways from clean hand-over to equity participation, chosen at Discovery. Repeatable across the portfolio.
03 / Scale-ups
AI-native
scale-ups
Primary engagement
Founding Pod Retainer
An embedded senior pod operating as an extension of your founding team. Multiple workstreams across strategy and build, ongoing roadmap, scaling with engagement loading. From six months minimum. Senior product, engineering, design, and operating muscle you cannot hire fast enough.
Every engagement starts with a Discovery Sprint. The right structure follows from what the workflow asks for.
See the full engagement model →

If you've read this far, we should talk.

A 30-minute conversation about your workflow and whether the offer fits. No commitment.