Founders Codex

An incrementally-built, interactive reference of the entrepreneurs who built the digital world — dot-com boom through Web 2.0/mobile/social, cloud/SaaS, fintech, and the AI age. A chronological ledger of founders and the companies they built, with correlation lines showing how one person's technology, exit, or fallout enabled or shaped the next.

Live site: founders-codex-chi.vercel.app

What this is

Each entry is a founder with a full narrative bio — background, pivotal moments, setbacks and how they navigated them, and every venture they founded, not just their most famous one. Selecting a founder highlights the documented and editorial correlations connecting them to others in the Codex: the PayPal Mafia funding Facebook, Stripe, and OpenAI; Amazon's internal infrastructure becoming AWS; the browser wars giving Google its opening; OpenAI's split producing Anthropic.

Every consequential claim is cited. Correlation edges are tagged sourced (documented history) or editorial-synthesis (this project's own curatorial connection) so the two are never confused.

How it's built

• data/founders.json, data/ventures.json, data/links.json, data/sources.json, data/taxonomy.json — the source of truth. See data/schema.md for field docs.
• build/render.js reads data/*.json, validates that every reference resolves, and injects the data into build/template.html to produce a self-contained dist/codex.html — no external network calls, everything inlined.
• Deployed on Vercel, which runs node build/render.js as its build step on every push to main. dist/ is gitignored; it's a build artifact, not checked in.

npm run build   # regenerates dist/codex.html from data/

Contributing / extending

This is a personal, ongoing project — see CLAUDE.md for the full research discipline (tiered verification, how to add a founder, current roadmap of planned waves) and research/log.md for the running log of what's been researched so far and how.