Read this before you touch anything. Twice.
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You weren't selected for your résumé. You were selected for resonance — and that selection carries real weight on our side, not just yours.
We commit capital, equipment, housing, and reputation to you before you've produced anything here. This document is how we make sure that commitment is well placed, whether you're building your first venture or already stewarding family capital.
Most creator programs hand you a room and wish you luck. We think people serious about their craft deserve more precision than that: we're specific about what excellence looks like, what we provide, what we expect, and what happens if the two don't meet.
Full backing runs one direction. What you carry forward from it runs the other — we'll ask you to name that plainly before the 90 days are up (see What We Owe You, and what we ask back).
If you skim this and then ask a question it answers, you've told us something about how you'll operate for the next 90 days.
Real estate appreciates. Gifted humans compound.
The campus, the gear, the capital structure — all of it exists to remove friction between your talent and its output. Every hour spent on logistics, procurement, or figuring out software is an hour that thesis fails. So we buy the friction away, aggressively. Then we expect the output.
The highest-quality work you have ever made, made faster than ever, in a body that isn't wrecked at the end.
Comfort, consensus, or looking busy.
Non-negotiable. Not values on a wall — operating requirements.
Provisioned before day one. If anything's missing on arrival, that's our failure — report it in the first 24 hours.
One primary metric, chosen by you, approved by us. It must be a number — yours to influence, reviewed weekly, in public.
Nobody is measured on hours. Ever.
The part most programs make deliberately murky. We don't.
State the specific thing, the reason in one line, and the timeline. "I need $400 for a lens rental for the Thursday shoot — can you approve today?"
Pre-apologize, over-justify, or bury it in small talk. It only makes it harder for us to say yes.
We'd rather you ask for too much than build around a gap in silence. "No" means resources or timing — it is not a verdict on you.
Reciprocal, and enforceable. Non-retaliation is absolute.
And what we ask back: name one concrete thing you'll leave for the next cohort before you go — mentoring a specific person, open-sourcing a tool you built, documenting a process that cost you time to figure out. Vague gratitude doesn't count. A specific commitment does.
The capacity to take a large, messy, incomplete body of information and convert it into a defensible next action.
Not IQ. Not domain expertise. Not work ethic. SQ measures the conversion pipeline — and a pipeline is only as strong as its weakest stage. Most people are strong in two adjacent stages and collapse at a third; naming which stage collapses is more useful than the composite score.
Think of it like a concentrated portfolio: the score leans on your weakest position, since that's the one deciding whether the whole thing closes. Three strong stages and one weak one still lands nearer 60 than 65.
90 minutes, four instruments, double-blind rubric scoring. AI use is permitted and disclosed — using a model well is itself a signal; using it to skip a stage shows up immediately.
The Action item's falsification question is the single most predictive item in the battery.
Twelve weeks, four modules, one per sub-construct — diagnosis, drill, application.
Every candidate gets a four-axis profile, not a single number — the bottleneck named is more useful than the percentile.
Stated to every candidate. Credibility depends on it.
If you remember nothing else: