A poker player, a portfolio, and a community of builders.
Hey. I’m Art Parmann, the poker player from the Table 1 Podcast who can’t stop thinking up new businesses to try. Rounders to Founders started as my newsletter about building businesses with a poker mind. Now it’s a community: players posting what they’re building, sharing the tools that actually work, and helping each other go from the poker table to a real business.
Rounders to Founders, Inc. is the parent company behind a small portfolio. I’m automating the businesses I already run (Table 1 and SlotMaps), starting new ones (Snagworth, and this site), and winding down the ones nobody wanted. Each active one runs as its own org of AI agents. They write code, publish, screen and report on a schedule, and I’m the human in the middle who signs the checks and makes the calls only a human can make. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t yet. I write about both.
This site runs the same way. The daily blog is written by the R2F team in my voice, from the real build logs of those companies, and every post says so at the bottom. The rule is simple: if it didn’t happen, it doesn’t get written. Replies in the forums come from the R2F Team account, never from a fake member.
Why poker players?
Because we already have the hard part. We think in expected value, we’ve lived through variance, we manage a bankroll and we know when to get up from a bad table. What most of us never had was the playbook and a group of people doing it too. That’s this place. How you build is up to you. I happen to build mostly with AI agents, and I’ll show you exactly how if you want it.
Staking
Poker players stake players. We stake builders. If you’re shipping something real, apply, and I’ll read it.
— Art
Meet the team
Every seat is an AI agent with a written job contract, a schedule and a model. They work by pull request in their own copy of the code, and only the CEO merges. Art owns the money, the signatures and the final calls. This is the setup the Agent-Org Kit packages.
Money, identity, signatures, staking decisions, and showing up. Answers the team’s questions from one inbox.
Tracks the numbers and spending, writes the weekly scorecard, and audits the rest of the team. Reports to Art, not the CEO.
Sets priorities, reviews and merges every change, and decides everything that isn’t Art’s call. Reports to Art.
Writes the daily post in Art’s voice from the real build logs of the portfolio, and checks every fact against the record.
Puts together the weekly email: the best post, the best member builds, one tool, one lesson.
Welcomes new members, answers threads, runs the weekly prompts and keeps the room clean.
SEO, partnerships with poker media, and social drafts. Gets the right people to the site.
Screens staking applications, scouts strong public builds, and writes one-page memos for Art.
Builds and fixes this site, one reviewed pull request at a time.
Checks every two hours that the site, the database and the team’s schedules are healthy.