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Year One: Everywhere Pathfinder Foundry Showed Up

A year ago I left Meta with no plan, just a hunch. Here is what I built, who I coached, and where we are headed next.

Year One: Everywhere Pathfinder Foundry Showed Up

Last Friday I stood outside the SnoValley Innovation Center (SVIC) in North Bend and cut a ribbon marking one year of Pathfinder Foundry. Mayor Mary Miller, Chamber CEO Kelly Coughlin, SVIC President Rob Wotton, my family, and a good crowd of founders and clients came out for it. Mayor Miller said something that stuck with me: "When I walked in, the energy just ignites. You're surrounded by a lot of love, a lot of support, and that's the way entrepreneurship should go."

It was a hometown celebration, tied to my role at the SnoValley Innovation Center. But the work behind it hasn't stayed in one town. This year I've coached and built with founders across Seattle, the Pacific Northwest, and clients from other parts of the country and the world. Here's the year that led to Friday. 🥂

How we got here

Just over a year ago I left Meta after seven and a half years with no fixed plan, just a hunch that I wanted to coach founders and creators, and help them build. I finished my ICF coaching training through Seattle Coach and my Full Stack Facilitation certificate, and some retainer clients came on early needing help with their tech stack and team. That gave me the runway to figure out the rest.

Coaching is still the foundation of everything I do. I've worked with 20+ one-on-one clients this year, plus started walk-and-talk coaching on the trail (walkandtalk.coach), which has become one of my favorite things I do. Along the way I also built and launched CoachQuota, a tool that lets coaches log their sessions and track their hours as they go through their training process. So far it's logged 886 sessions and 951 coaching hours, and it keeps growing.

The method behind most of my work is something I call ProtoVibing: building with AI agents where humans are the loop, not just in it, so ideas get real feedback instead of getting built in isolation. It's central to how I run every product/team engagement now, and I've filed for U.S. trademark protection on it, which is pending.

I've taught it every way I know how: as a five-day challenge that 24 founders have now completed, in the Maven cohorts I run for virtual groups of founders, and through lightning lessons to hundreds more, including one session that drew almost 500 builders. On the platform itself, it's now powered 53 prototypes and 56 experiments across 48 builders since launch.

All of it comes back to the same idea: nobody should have to build alone. That's shown up in a few different rooms this year.

What started as about five people at a Creative Mornings meetup turned into the Pre-Beta Club: a monthly gathering, plus biweekly virtual sessions and an online Skool community, where more than 40 products have been critiqued and improved since January.

Closer to home, SVIC named me their first-ever Entrepreneur in Residence this year, running programming so local founders have somewhere to go instead of building alone. We've partnered with Startup 425 and the Founders Institute to connect that work to the broader Eastside ecosystem.

Down in Seattle, I helped launch Sound Startups at SURF Incubator, a nonprofit program I helped design from the ground up. Our first cohort just graduated, and cohort two starts in a few weeks.

Then there are the workshops: over 150 people have come through hands-on sessions on building with AI, still grounded in real customer validation, not just vibes. The next one is scheduled for Aug 26th downtown Seattle.

Underneath all of it is the work I love most: sitting down with founders and executives one-on-one, and increasingly, embedding directly with product teams for a season as a fractional hand. That's the thread running through everything above, and it's where I want to keep growing, no matter where the team sits.

What's next

I still haven't fully nailed a repeatable, scalable business model. It keeps evolving, and I'm running the business itself through ProtoVibing: testing, getting feedback, and iterating rather than locking in a shape too early.

But if any of this is useful to you, here's where to find me:

Thanks to everyone who came out Friday, and to everyone, near and far, who's been part of this year. Here's to year two.

Marc ✌️
pathfinderfoundry.com