A Build Weekend, Not A Conference
The Tahoe Build RetreatFly in Friday. Drive home Sunday with your time back, and a personal AI chief of staff running on hardware you own.
A chief of staff used to be a luxury. This weekend you build the AI version: an agent that texts you a brief every morning, triages your inbox, and runs the routines that eat your week. You stop waiting on anyone else to give you your time back.
Two and a half days on the lake. Two focused build blocks, two real adventures, and the Mac Mini it all runs on packed in your bag for the drive home. Everything is yours to keep.
“Chief of staff” is a big claim. See exactly what mine handles: morning briefs, inbox triage, grocery orders, and total recall of every conversation. That's the system you build.
Luxury accommodations and your Mac Mini included. Everything except your flight. See pricing
A word from your host
Where You'll Be
South Lake Tahoe, for a weekend.
Black Bear Lodge sits a few minutes from the water. Here is where you'll stay, the room we build in, and what Saturday afternoon looks like.
The Pitch
The opposite of a webinar.
You've seen the AI agent hype. Demos, decks, a replay link you never open. This is the other thing: two and a half days, hands-on, eight people, and you leave with working personal AI infrastructure, not notes about it.
Day one, you build a chief of staff. Not because you need another app, but because it is the ideal first agent to build. The skill it teaches you is how to build an agent, how to think about structuring it, and how to feed it the right context. Once you have those basics, you can build any kind of agent you want. The chief of staff is just where it clicks. If the phrase is fuzzy, mine is documented in detail, down to the 48 things I actually use him for.
The point isn't the tools. It's what changes after. You stop waiting on other people to build the things that would give you your time back, because now you can build them yourself.
The test is simple. Monday morning, at your own kitchen table, your phone buzzes with a brief your agent wrote, from a machine on your own network. Either that happens or the weekend failed. It happens.
A chief of staff
A private agent you reach on Telegram. It runs your morning brief, triages your inbox, captures ideas the second you have them, answers questions from your own notes, drafts in your voice, and runs routines on a schedule. Built on a second brain it reads. Yours, on your own keys.
See what mine does all dayThe skill to build anything
On Sunday you build a real app you'll use, a wealth or health tracker. But the app is the vehicle. What you actually learn is how to put agents to work: how to go from an idea to working software you direct and own. You leave able to build the next one yourself.
The hardware it runs on
A Mac Mini M4, pre-configured, packed back in its box before you leave Sunday. It sits on your network at home and runs your infrastructure 24/7. It's yours to keep, on your own hardware, holding your own data.
Who It's For
Time-poor operators who want leverage.
Executives, business owners, and acquirers. People whose calendar is the constraint, who have watched the AI wave from the outside and want in. You leave with systems that keep working while you sleep, and the skill to build more of them.
No coding background required. Bring a laptop; we handle the rest. If you can write an email describing what you want, you can operate everything you build here. The whole weekend is designed around that fact.
The Weekend
Two build blocks. Two adventures. One machine to take home.
Each day has the same rhythm: one long, focused build block while everyone is fresh, then a real adventure once the work is done. No split days, no context-switching, nobody staring at a laptop for ten straight hours.
Friday
Afternoon
Arrive
Fly into Reno or drive up from the Bay. Check in, get your bearings, meet the cohort. No agenda until dinner.
Evening
Welcome dinner on the lake
Dinner, introductions, and the framing talk: time is the only asset that doesn't compound, and systems beat effort. Then you unbox your Mac Mini. No code on Friday. The machine sits on the table as a statement of intent.
Saturday
Morning to mid-afternoon
The build: your chief-of-staff agent
Five or six hours in the room while everyone is fresh, in one focused block. You build your second brain first, then the agent that reads it: a private assistant on Telegram that runs your morning brief and answers when you text it. Lunch comes to the room. The block ends when everyone's agent messages them, so we stay until yours does.
Late afternoon
The adventure: Mt. Tallac
Work done, we drive to the Mt. Tallac trailhead and hike as far as suits you. Floating Island Lake is an easy hour in, Cathedral Lake a bit beyond, with the whole of Lake Tahoe opening up behind you, and the strong-legged can push toward the ridge. Every turnaround point is a summit. A real mountain afternoon, not a hotel-lobby break.
Evening
Group dinner
Dinner together after a full day of building and a hike. The conversation tends to be good.
Sunday
Morning
The build: an app you'll actually use
The second build block. You stand up your own copy of a real app I built and use every day: your choice of the wealth tracker or the health tracker. Both work for anyone. By late morning it's running on your Mini, wired to your own data, with a roadmap for what to add next.
Midday
Sunday lunch
A long lunch together to compare what everyone built and where they're taking it next.
Afternoon
Private boat charter, Emerald Bay
After lunch we head out on a private charter into Emerald Bay: Fannette Island, the clearest water in the Sierra, the best seats on the lake. Then you drive out with the Mini in the back seat. Monday morning, from your own house, your first brief arrives during breakfast.
What You Get
Everything you build, you keep.
Included
- Mac Mini M4, pre-configured and yours to keep
- Two nights at Black Bear Lodge, your room booked for you
- Two builds you keep: your chief-of-staff agent and an internal app (wealth or health)
- All build materials and a private template repo
- Welcome dinner, Saturday dinner, and lunch both build days
- Two outdoor outings: a Saturday hike up Mt. Tallac and a Sunday private boat charter on Emerald Bay
- 30 days of a private support channel after the weekend
- One group office-hours call to tune what you built
Not included
- Airfare and travel to South Lake Tahoe
One price, everything but your flight. Your room, your meals, the hardware, and the adventures are all handled, so you just show up.
Your Host
Joshua Thacker
Builder. Former SaaS executive. USAF veteran.
Fifteen years running revenue and operations inside SaaS: Salesforce, PagerDuty, then COO of Mews, an 85-person European hotel software company. In August 2025 I left to build with AI full time.
Since then I've built Searcher OS, a profitable SaaS product, solo, and the AI chief of staff that runs my own life from a Mac Mini in my office. The same agents now help source and track much of my real estate portfolio. That second system is the one you build at this retreat. I'm not teaching a framework I read about; I'm handing you the setup I use every day.
Searcher OS
A profitable SaaS product, built solo with AI.
25.1% IRR
Across 18 real estate investments, many sourced and tracked by agents.
Every morning
My own chief-of-staff agent runs my operation.
See it running, live
Meet My AI Chief of Staff: A Live Demo
The full hour, recorded live: the second brain, Howard answering audience questions, and the 12 hours a week it gives back.
Endorsements
What people are saying.
Josh built a SaaS product, Searcher OS, to help searchers find a business to buy, and he built it all with a virtual team of AI agents. He's on the forefront of AI development and is now teaching ‘normal humans’ to create agents themselves.
Steve Aguiar
Managing Director, Fifth Third Securities
Many people are experimenting with AI agents. Josh is next level. He's built and refined agent-driven workflows that power real business operations. If you're looking to move beyond AI demos and understand how agents can create real leverage for your business, Josh is someone you'll want to learn from.
Jeremy Kmet
Notion GM (views are my own)
I evaluate companies for a living, so I default to skeptical. What convinced me was watching Josh actually run his life and business on agents he built himself. This isn't theory. And he has a rare knack for making it feel simple.
Matthew Dreith
Portfolio Manager
Do The Math
What is your time worth?
Don't take my word for the value. Put in your own numbers and see how long the retreat takes to pay for itself.
I guarantee 3. Mine gives me back about 12.
A $300k year works out to about $145 an hour.
$750/week
of your time, back
about 10 weeks
until the retreat pays for itself
260 hrs
a year, worth $39,000
Payback measured against the retreat price. Everything you build comes home with you: the system, the Mac Mini, and the skill to keep extending it.
Pricing
$6,900, all in.
One price. Luxury accommodations at the lodge, your meals, your Mac Mini, and the adventures are all included. The only thing you book is your flight.
You just ran the payback math above with your own numbers. One more thing it doesn't include: for most owners this is a deductible business expense, which lowers the real cost further.
Seats are capped at 8 so I can sit next to every person during the build blocks. The retreat runs with a 6-seat minimum; if a cohort doesn't fill, you get a full refund or the next date, your call.
This is the founding cohort at $6,900. The price goes up for later cohorts, but the people in the room this time set the bar for who gets invited next.
How to reserve
A $1,200 deposit holds your seat, and it isn't really a fee: it buys your Mac Mini. The remaining $5,700 is due by September 4, two weeks before we start. If you cancel before then, you owe nothing more and I ship your Mac Mini to you, set up and ready. Either way, the machine is yours.
Why This Exists
Two passions, one weekend.
If you've read this far into the site, you already know I'm obsessed with AI. I left a fifteen-year SaaS career to build with it full time. What the rest of the site doesn't tell you is the other half of my life. I've traveled to more than fifty countries, and I plan my year around getting into the mountains and canyons.
Adventure isn't a break from the work for me. The novel experiences are the point. They're the milestones a life gets measured in, and I've never wanted to build a life that trades one passion away to feed the other.
Most things make you choose between the two. This weekend doesn't. You build something real and get a genuine adventure in the same couple of days, alongside a small group wired the same way. It's the weekend I'd want to be invited to, so I'm hosting it.
On my own calendar this year
Mount Shasta
A summit climb at 14,179 feet.
Zion
Five days canyoneering the slots.
Moab
Leading a group through an adventure weekend.
Straight Answers
The questions worth asking.
What does an “AI chief of staff” actually do?
It carries the operational load of your life: morning briefs, inbox triage and drafting, to-do tracking, follow-up nudges, travel and meal planning, and perfect recall of every meeting, email, and note you feed it. The clearest answer is to look at mine: the Hermes page documents what he reads, what he runs, and the 48 things I actually use him for. That system, wired to your own life, is what you drive home with.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. The builds are template-driven and I sit next to you through every block. If you can write a clear email, you can operate everything you take home. The point of the weekend is that the era of needing to code for this is over.
What exactly do I take home?
A Mac Mini M4 in its box, with your second brain and chief-of-staff agent on it, plus the internal app you build on Sunday (your choice of the wealth or health app). It also carries a private template repo, your personal build roadmap, and 30 days of support channel access. Nothing lives on my infrastructure. When you drive away, I can't touch your system.
Why a Mac Mini instead of the cloud?
Ownership and privacy. The machine sits on your own network and holds your data locally, so your personal context never lives on someone else's servers. You'll still pay for the AI models you choose to run, in practice roughly $100 to $200 a month in model subscriptions depending on how hard you run it, about the cost of one hour of the time it saves. The hardware, your data, and your setup are yours, and it runs 24/7 for about the power draw of a lightbulb.
How fit do I need to be for the adventures?
Reasonably active is plenty, and nobody gets left behind. The Saturday hike is choose-your-distance on the Mt. Tallac trail: the first lake is about an hour in at a conversational pace, and every turnaround point has a view. The ambitious can push higher; anyone can also skip the trail and relax at the lodge. Sunday's private boat on Emerald Bay requires nothing but sunscreen.
What if I get stuck after the weekend?
You get 30 days in a private support channel with me and your cohort, plus one group office-hours call. After that, the roadmap you leave with is designed to be self-serve, and most cohorts keep their channel alive on their own.
What if I can't finish or maintain it on my own?
You won't be left holding a half-built system. Two backstops exist for exactly this. If you'd rather not do the last stretch yourself, I'll finish your agent to spec for a flat, agreed price and hand it back ready to run. And if you want it kept at peak as your life and the models change, I offer a monthly retainer where I tune, update, and maintain it for you, cancel anytime. Most people are fully self-serve after the weekend, but these are here for the times you'd rather buy back the hours.
What if I want this, but not the building part?
That exists too. I offer a done-for-you version: the Personal Chief of Staff install. I build the same system, set it up on a Mac Mini at your place, and keep it running under a monthly retainer. Same destination, different path. Pick the retreat if the building (and the weekend) sounds fun. Pick the install if it sounds like another job.
How do the deposit and cancellation work?
A $1,200 deposit holds your seat and goes straight toward your Mac Mini. The remaining $5,700 is due by September 4, two weeks out. Cancel before the balance is due and you owe nothing more, and I still ship you the Mac Mini, set up and ready, so the deposit is never money lost. After September 4 the build fee is committed, but you can transfer your seat or roll to the next cohort. If the retreat doesn't hit its 6-seat minimum, you get a full refund or the next date, your call.
Is the hotel included?
Yes. Two nights at Black Bear Lodge in South Lake Tahoe are included in your seat, and I book your room for you. The only thing you arrange is your flight, so there's no hotel logistics on your end.
How do I get to the lodge?
Fly into Reno–Tahoe, about an hour from South Lake Tahoe, or drive up from the Bay. From Reno, a rental car or a roughly $100 shuttle both work. I'll send exact options and timing when your seat is confirmed.
Eight Seats
Request a seat.
Tell me who you are and what you'd want your chief of staff to take off your plate. I review every request personally and reply within 48 hours. This is a room I curate, not a ticket queue.
Requesting a seat costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If the cohort is full, you go to the top of the list for the next one.
Not ready to request a seat?
Follow the build instead. You'll get the retreat brief, what each cohort ships, and first look at future dates.
Request a seat