Key Takeaways


Marty sat down with Luke Thomas, founder of [Formable.ai](https://formable.ai/?ref=tftc.io), who argues that AI and Bitcoin together represent a once-in-a-generation shift in how businesses form, operate, and scale. He frames AI as “unbounded leverage,” where startups can achieve outsized results with far fewer resources, while Bitcoin serves as a financial foundation that forces founders to think more carefully about capital allocation. Startups that embrace AI agents as digital co-workers can move faster than incumbents weighed down by tech debt, rigid structures, and resistant employees. Meanwhile, Bitcoin rewires treasury management, creating a new “hurdle rate” for profitable businesses: outperform Bitcoin or risk irrelevance. Luke emphasizes that small businesses have the greatest advantage, since they can adopt AI and Bitcoin without bureaucratic baggage, enabling new models of growth and capital preservation in a chaotic, shifting landscape.

Best Quotes

“We actually want to beat the hurdle rate. We want to beat the Bitcoin appreciation rate. If we don’t, we’re cooked.”

“AI agents are like little digital employees… they can contain a bunch of information about your business and do the job better than a human, because the agent doesn’t forget.”

“Most businesses sprinkle AI on top of old systems. Startups can rebuild from scratch and harness unbounded leverage.”

“Holding even a little Bitcoin on your balance sheet is like hiring a coach, it rewires how you think about building a business.”

“The number one benefit of a Bitcoin treasury isn’t price appreciation, it’s that it makes you a better founder.”

Conclusion

This conversation highlights how AI and Bitcoin together are reshaping the future of business. AI delivers unprecedented productivity through digital co-workers, while Bitcoin disciplines capital allocation and provides a hedge against fiat debasement. Incumbents struggle under old-world structures, but startups that embrace these technologies gain an edge in speed, adaptability, and financial resilience. For Luke, the combination of AI’s unbounded leverage and Bitcoin’s financial foundation marks a paradigm shift: the businesses that adapt will thrive, while those that cling to legacy systems will fade.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro

0:45 - Luke’s Background

7:11 - Unbounded leverage, AI adoption struggle

13:54 - Osbcura & Bitkey

15:39 - AI evolution retrospective

22:59 - AI agents

30:05 - SLNT & Unchained

31:37 - AI disruption of incumbents

38:41 - Bureaucratic roadblocks

41:59 - AI arms race

51:22 - Product design and UX

55:31 - Building at Formable

1:01:50 - AI-first, decentralization

1:05:50 - Navigating hype

1:12:01 - AI at TFTC

1:20:32 - Bitcoin in the AI strategy

1:29:01 - Adoption timeline for Bitcoin treasuries

Transcript

(00:00) When you're able to store your capital in a better way, are you going to hire that super senior leader that wants a ton of money and may not work out? Or you could just shovel that into Bitcoin. I think that it's going to be a wonderful thing for businesses. We actually want to beat the hurdle rate. We want to beat the Bitcoin appreciation rate. If we don't, we're cooked.

(00:19) These startups that come out of nowhere and it's like, hey, we went from 0 to 100 million in like 8 months. No one's ever seen that before. You don't see a lot of it in the news. You will see more of it. We live in an age where there's kind of this like concept of like unbounded leverage. Your balance sheet is clearly an area where there needs to be some amount of leverage as well.

(00:35) We're only starting to see the beginning in the decade plus I've been in tech. This is easily the biggest shift I've ever seen. Luke, this is uh a great pleasure for me. I've been waiting for this this episode for I think years now. Well, uh I'm definitely excited to be here and uh to all your listeners, I'm sorry.

(01:01) Uh there'll be lots of rants, lots of uh lots of uh unhinged maybe unhinged thoughts. Um but I'm really excited to be here. Well, you've had an open invite to the show for I think at least two years now, and you said you've been saying for two years, when the time's right, and I feel like I have something to say, I will let you know. And that happened a couple weeks ago, and here we are.

(01:25) um thinking of how to start off this episode. I think it's important for the audience to get context. Luke has been uh somebody who's helped me immensely behind the scenes here at TFTC think about thinking about how to position uh the brand and how to increase our SEO. Not only that, how to lean into this AI revolution.

(01:47) And I think just to start off the conversations, get a little history of your career, what you've built, where you've worked, what you're working on now, and what people may may learn if they stick around for the whole episode. Yeah, sure. So, I'll do my best to keep it short. Um, yeah. So, a little bit about me. Um, I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Maine.

(02:10) Uh, up until, uh, when I first went to college, I had always lived on a dirt road. Um, I grew up in a uh small town um in uh in central Maine. It was about 800 people. I think half of the town was on some form of general assistance. Um I was homeschooled growing up. Um I uh attended, yeah, a mixture of homeschooling, private schooling. Um in high school, I ended up getting into web design.

(02:36) Um because I wanted to customize my MySpace profile. I thought it would be cool and maybe uh maybe more girls would talk to me. Um and so uh so that's what I did. I ended up uh basically devoting call it half of day. So I would homeschool for half of the day and then for like the other half of the day I would go to what's called a vocational technical school.

(03:00) Um and uh you know I was in a class with a bunch of kids that wanted to create video games. And I thought web design was cool and I thought maybe there's something there. Little did I know that it would basically influence the rest of my life to date. Um, and so yeah, in high school I kind of learned how to code very uh I wasn't very good at it, but I started creating websites for, you know, small businesses. I ended up um graduating.

(03:24) I I went to school one year in Boston because I thought sports management be would be really fun. Turns out that spending, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a year for fizzed classes probably wasn't the best idea. So I ended up uh uh going to school for marketing and uh paid my way through school.

(03:44) Um kind of did the consulting thing, ended up graduating college uh and wanted to join the startup thing. And so um long story short, my wife and I the second we graduated, we moved um to Boston. I started working in early stage tech companies. I originally joined as an engineer. Um quickly realized I wasn't good at writing code.

(04:03) Uh but I I always viewed uh writing code as a means to an end. For me it was like I loved the uh to grow businesses. And so I ended up uh kind of falling into this uh industry called like growth um which is you know how to think about marketing through a programmatic um lens like a programmer would. And anyway, did that for a few years.

(04:28) Um, you know, learned SEO, learned a bunch of, you know, internet marketing techniques and ended up falling down the product rabbit hole largely because, you know, when you build, uh, when you're building like a startup that is, you know, uh, like a digital product, um, a lot of the growth work, so to speak, that you do ends up actually being product work.

(04:46) It's like how can you create a product where these these like flywheels that help you grow at a low cost. So, you know, for those are who are familiar with like Dropbox, right? It's like people sign up for Dropbox, they get free space. If you want more free space, you share it with a friend. I became very obsessed with that. Um, and ended up doing that for a while.

(05:03) Um, in 2019, I decided to make the plunge, decided to start a remote work um, software company. I saw a bunch of these um, you know, fully distributed companies building their own like internet is the best way of describing it. um Zapier and Stripe and all these kind of well-known uh remote companies had kind of hand rolled their own systems.

(05:26) So I started that and then six months later COVID hit um and so we experienced a lot of growth. Uh I did that for about two years but I ended up shutting the business down because I didn't see a clear path to scaling um on the revenue side in particular. So I ended up joining Zapier for about three years and uh went super deep there on AI and automation. And so yeah, in many ways a culmination of um what you know your listeners will probably hear is like maybe a little bit more of a deeper dive on AI, what it looks like um how it's changing things.

(05:56) Um I also uh left uh about two months ago and I'm I started a new company called Formable. We basically are making it easy for businesses to respond to inbound leads way faster. And so for a lot of businesses, um, you have a contact form on your website. When someone fills it out, they usually have a high level of intent. You want to get back to them as fast as you can.

(06:15) Well, we're building simple and easy to use tools that make it easy for businesses to get back to their c potential customers way faster using AI and automation and a better um data collection or form uh experience. So longterm though, we we want to build kind of a a new school uh marketing automation platform, which is just like making it easy for businesses of all shapes and sizes to um market in a way where you're leveraging AI as much as p