David and Chris Jerard have been doing biweekly hikes around Boulder for years. They talk about ideas. Occasionally those ideas turn into businesses. ActiveFounder is what happens when you put a mic on the conversation.
David ships side projects for a living. Desktop apps, trading systems, business automation, agentic frameworks. He has been building in AI since before it was a job title, using tools in his actual workflow every day -- not for demos.
His background is in cloud pricing and enterprise infrastructure. His instinct is to build the automation first and the product second. He is the person on the trail who says "we could have this live in four hours."
He hiked Bear Peak on April 12, 2026, registered activefounder.ai at the trailhead, and had the pipeline running within a week. That is the show.
Chris is a brand and content executive at one of the largest outdoor media companies in the United States. He understands audiences, narrative structure, and what it takes to build something people care about over time.
He brings the "will anyone pay for this?" instinct to every episode. He is the person on the trail who says "that is interesting, but who is the customer and what problem are we actually solving?"
The outdoor angle is not cosmetic. Chris works in outdoor media because he believes the best businesses are built by people who go outside and think, not by people who stay inside and present. ActiveFounder is the proof of concept.
Most founder content is aspirational. It tells you what other people did after it worked. It skips the part where the idea is bad, the positioning is wrong, and three weeks of work gets thrown out.
The hike is not a gimmick. It is a filter. If you cannot explain the business between the trailhead and the summit, it is not ready.
ActiveFounder is built on a different premise. The constraint -- one hike, something real ships before the descent -- forces honesty. You cannot over-engineer a positioning slide at 7,500 feet with a friend asking hard questions. You cannot hide behind complexity when the altitude is stripping away everything except the actual idea.
The AI tools do what AI tools are good at: evaluate markets, write copy, generate brand assets, register domains, build landing pages. That is not the show. The show is the conversation -- two people who have built things before, asking the questions that matter, doing the work in real time.
The guest on each episode brings a real business problem. Sometimes it is a product that needs positioning. Sometimes it is an idea that needs a business plan. Sometimes it is both. By the time the hike is done, something tangible exists that did not exist before. That is the only rule.
These are the filters we apply to every idea before we build it on the show. They come from years of building things that did not work and learning to recognize the pattern early.
New episodes when they drop. No frequency games, no upsells.
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