There was 'no sex' at this reality-show-style incubator for founders — but the drama was juicy

• There was only one thing on the minds of the founders at this reality-show-style startup incubator.
• It wasn't sex.
• Founder teams had two weeks to become profitable, and potent social media was paramount.

At 9 p.m. on a recent Friday night, Max Harding had just returned from a barefoot run in the woods.

The eccentric 20-year-old Californian was back in a large barn in rural Pennsylvania — still barefoot — alternatively working on his startup and asking me about the point of life.

Though not an especially adept programmer, Harding possesses a more adroit, perhaps unteachable skill that has never been more valuable in the current landscape of founder culture.

"Max captures the attention of the camera, keeps us center stage," said his cofounder, Skyler Ji, who added that Harding's role includes "spreading our philosophy" while he runs the operation behind the scenes.

"Max brings some of the grander things," Ji told me. The pair's startup, Hivemind Research, aims to build "digital brains" in the form of social media.

Harding and Ji were among 66 mostly young, mostly imaginative startup founders taking part in a two-week "incubator" workshop called Launchpad.

The novel event was hosted by Stan, the company behind a moderately successful platform for independent creators to advertise and sell their services. At the last meetup Stan organized, startup founders jet-skied the East River at golden hour.

At the incubator event, the entirety of which was filmed for use in a reality show that Stan plans to release sometime soon (though it is uploading Instagram clips daily), magnetic personalities were among the most valuable commodities.

Stan cofounder Vitalii Dodonov told me that the 30 participating teams were chosen from a pool of 700 applicants, primarily for their existing social media followings and their ability to grow them.

"It's not the building that gets you to revenue, it's the distribution," he said of today's startup culture.

Of the many metrics competing teams were required to meet daily (10 sales calls, for example), social media videos were among the most heavily weighted.

Everywhere I looked, people were talking about their companies into phones attached to tripods. Their products ran the gamut of usefulness — ranging from an AI facial scanner that tracks acne to an AI app that connects parents with babysitters.

Dodonov and John Hu, Stan's other cofounder, were trailed at all times by multi-person film crews, who glared should you emit an ill-timed sound while the cameras rolled. (The Velcro rip of my messenger bag earned me some leers.)

Even outfits were choreographed. On the advice of the camera crews, Hu wore a "cream" colored getup while Dodonov donned a "charcoal" number to emphasize what was described to me as the "yin and yang" paradigm between the two.

I spent about 16 cumulative hours at the event over two days earlier this month, at Stan's invitation. I ate meals with the founders, did a 7:30 a.m. cold plunge in the on-site lake alongside a Danish guy selling an AI to-do list, and commiserated with the startup founders who routinely pulled all-nighters to hit their metrics.

Here's what I learned from the experience.

Reality TV meets hackathon

The event was billed as a sort of reality-TV-style game show-slash-incubator in the vein of hits like "Love Island" and "Squid Game."

As in those shows, founder teams at Launchpad were subject to firepit eliminations, discreet alliances, and competitive drama under the ever-watchful lenses of dozens of expensive cameras.

Except instead of a bunch of promiscuous co-eds doing risque challenges on a tropical island somewhere, contestants at Launchpad were mostly tech geeks with an unhealthy number of hours notched building software on their MacBooks.

"There's no sex," laughed Jacob Snarr, a 24-year-old from Philadelphia. "Nobody here is thinking about that."

Snarr and his cofounder, RJ McLaughlin, built a web browser game that lets friends debate their tastes and preferences, from their favorite foods to other everyday questions. The pair enlisted me as a product tester one morning, and we debated the merits of empanadas in the chilly barn.

McLaughlin and Snarr were in second place on the leaderboard when I talked to them on Saturday morning — saving them from elimination.

Rey Mendoza, who at 41 was one of the oldest founders in the competition, had already been eliminated. When I spoke with him, he was fighting for a chance at redemption. He showed me his sleep tracker for the six days. He hadn't slept more than six hours a night.

"Here, you're just fucking building, like 24/7," Mendoza, fatigued, said reverently.

Event organizers added a number of less-intense, more fun-oriented events to the schedule, which were largely ignored by teams scrambling to upload more videos to social media.

A "Mario Kart" meetup in a room adjoining the cafeteria was attended by precisely nobody. Two TVs showed the game's start screen, while maybe a dozen people sat at tables squinting at laptops.

It's hard to imagine binge-watching some 60 sweatshirt-clad nerds drearily prompting chatbots to refine source code for yet another quirky AI startup. After all, everyone and their cousin is vibe coding their way into progressively nicher business models these days.

In 2025, a record number of business applications — about 5.7 million — were submitted by Americans, according to census data. However, the number of businesses the government estimates will be successful enough to require employees actually declined.

Those kinds of numbers mean it takes more to stand out. In our interview, Hu pointed at my phone and said I could use AI tools to start three or four businesses today — but, of course, they likely wouldn't be profitable.

That, Hu said, is where the founders' personalities are supposed to come in, together with a bit of manufactured drama and endless streams of social media content.

In the first challenge of the event, held on the first day, for example, teams were required to submit one social media video for public review around the firepit. Then, in front of everyone, Hu tore into them.

"I was very honest," he said of one particular "roast" that produced tears from the submitters. "I was like, 'Guys, would anyone ever watch this? No. The answer is no, because of the quality — you never have a shot."

The moment would certainly make for good television. It also, Hu told me, mimicked the real-life struggle inherent in starting a company in a saturated market.

"They're going through the true ups and downs of a true cofounder relationship and a startup experience," he said of the team that was subjected to his roast, who were initially so dejected they discussed "breaking up."

Overall, most of the teams I talked to said they enjoyed the ramshackle experience of trying to make a company profitable in two weeks. At the very least, it was all happening in a picturesque setting.

A $3 million investment

Stan spared no expense to pull off the event.

It was held at a luxury, 400-acre villa two hours north of New York City that has in the past hosted retreats for high-flying companies like J.P. Morgan, whose executives, according to one staff member at the retreat at least, are keen for employees to embrace buzzwords like "team-building" and "company culture" among the illusion of rustic calm far from Manhattan.

We were in the sticks of eastern Pennsylvania — so deep in the woods, in fact, that cell service was nonexistent. There was fiber-optic internet, however, and the setting, though far-flung, could hardly be called rustic.

A squadron of golf carts staffed by the venue's seasonal workforce, many of whom were from Ireland or Australia, patrolled the grounds.

I was personally given the cellphone number of one such seasonal worker and encouraged to notify her anytime I wanted to go anywhere, at which point she would materialize with the golf cart.

Dodonov told me that Stan spent a combined $3 million renting the place for two weeks, booking camera crews, and making other necessary arrangements to host the founders, some of whom had traveled from as far away as Spain and Denmark.

For a company whose cofounder told Business Insider this year that it has an annual recurring revenue of "nearly $41 million," that's a significant sum.

"It's a very expensive experiment," Dodonov said. He said that, in his view, the return on investment is to see if "the playbook works" — the playbook being his and Hu's belief that building a successful company requires, perhaps above all, promoting yourself on social media.

"Anyone can systematically establish and build support through the power of content," Dodonov said.