About

Why I Built This

Every great founder I admire had a mentor — someone who handed them a book, shared a hard-won lesson, or showed them what was possible. Most of us aren't lucky enough to have that person in our corner.

But the lessons exist. They're scattered across thousands of pages of biographies, years of podcast interviews, documentary footage, and essays written late at night by people who learned the hard way. The problem isn't that the knowledge doesn't exist — it's that it takes years to find and absorb it all.

A Founder's Map is my attempt to close that gap. I built it because I kept finding myself wishing there was a single place I could go to understand how someone like Carnegie or Jobs or Oprah actually thought — not a listicle, not a Wikipedia summary, but something that captured the texture of how they made decisions, what they believed, where they failed, and what they passed on to the next generation.

What It Is

Each founder page is synthesized from a wide range of sources — biographies, autobiographies, long-form interviews, websites, podcasts, and video transcripts — using AI to extract and structure the most valuable content into a format you can actually use. Origin stories, the spark that started their fire, core beliefs, pivotal decisions, real failures, direct quotes, and the network of people they learned from and influenced.

Nothing is invented. If it's on the page, there's a source for it. And because every synthesis can be challenged and refined by reviewers with real credentials and real citations, the content gets sharper over time — not just bigger.

The Map

The name comes from the idea that founders don't operate in isolation. Ideas travel. Henry Ford's idea of sharing scale savings with customers ran through Sol Price, Sam Walton, and Jim Sinegal before it became the backbone of Amazon. Steve Jobs was shaped by Edwin Land. Bezos wove Walton's entire playbook into Amazon's DNA and borrowed Prime Day from Jack Ma. Elon Musk took vertical integration from what Jobs had already done at Apple and sat designers, machinists, and engineers side by side. The best founders are students first.

The connections map, the shared beliefs database, and the net worth graph are all attempts to make that invisible network and growth visible — so you can find the ideas that mattered most and trace where they came from.

A Little About Me

I'm Brandon. I've spent years reading founder biographies, listening to long-form podcasts, and trying to extract the patterns that separate the builders who made something lasting from those who didn't. This site is the tool I wish I'd had when I started.

If you find something wrong or incomplete, I want to hear about it — that's the whole point! Help me create a central hub for the interwoven belies of history's greatest founders.