From solo founder to scaling team — playbooks for every stage.
Learn how to build a company in today's AI-centric world from Irv Shapiro's 40+ years of hard-won experience. Then give your growing team an AI-powered platform to execute — with private playbooks they can read, extend, and query instantly.
Which founder are you?
Just starting out
Learn to build a company in the AI era
You're a sole proprietor or early-stage founder trying to figure out hiring, culture, fundraising, and product — all at once, in a world that AI is reshaping daily. Irv Shapiro's playbooks give you the frameworks he used to build and exit companies before you had to learn them the hard way.
- ✓How to hire your first employees (and avoid the wrong ones)
- ✓Building a culture that scales past 10, 50, 500 people
- ✓Fundraising, VC relationships, and term sheets explained
- ✓AI-era strategy: what changes and what doesn't
Scaling a team
Give your team an AI-powered operating system
You've got a team and you need them aligned, fast. Backtick lets you publish private team playbooks — SOPs, onboarding guides, culture docs — and gives every team member an AI assistant that answers from your content, not the internet.
- ✓Private team playbooks visible only to your team
- ✓AI answers grounded in your process, not generic web results
- ✓Track which team members have read which plays
- ✓Update once — everyone gets the latest, instantly
Not another video course your team will never finish
Traditional courses dump information and hope it sticks. Backtick builds AI into every play so your team can explore, question, and execute — not just read and forget.
Traditional courses
- ✕Employees watch videos and forget by Monday
- ✕One-size-fits-all — no context for your company
- ✕Questions? Post on a forum and wait
- ✕Individual learning with no team visibility
- ✕Static content that goes stale
Backtick AI Playbooks
- ✓Click any bullet or concept for a Gemini-powered deeper explanation
- ✓Ask AI anything about the play — answers in seconds, not days
- ✓Write your own team playbooks with AI drafting plays from your notes
- ✓AI answers from your own content — grounded in your private playbooks, not generic web results
- ✓Living documents — update a play once, AI answers update for everyone
Two things you get on day one
Backtick isn't just a library of someone else's content, and it isn't just a blank-slate wiki. It's both — and each one makes the other more valuable.
Curated by Irv Shapiro
Start with battle-tested frameworks
Access playbooks built from 40+ years scaling technology companies — from hiring your first engineer to managing 500-person organizations. Skip the mistakes. Execute faster.
- The Hiring for Culture Playbook
- The Technical Team Scaling Playbook
- The VC Fundraising Playbook
Private to your team · AI-powered
Capture your team's expertise and SOPs in AI-powered playbooks
Draft your own SOPs, onboarding guides, and culture documents as AI-powered playbooks — private to your team. The moment you publish a play, every team member can ask AI questions and get answers drawn directly from your content.
- ✓AI writes first drafts of plays from your prompts
- ✓Team members ask; AI answers from your playbooks, not the internet
- ✓Track which plays each team member has read
- ✓Update a play once — AI answers update instantly for everyone
Your team's AI runs on your playbooks
When a new hire asks "how do we handle customer escalations?" they shouldn't have to search Slack or wait for you. They should ask Backtick.
Backtick doesn't answer from the internet. It answers from the playbooks you wrote.
Your process, your culture, your decisions — the founder's knowledge, available to the whole team, instantly. No hallucinations from generic web results. No "I think we handle that this way." Just your playbook, on demand.
When your playbook doesn't cover something, AI-generated context fills the gap — clearly marked as AI Suggested so your team always knows what came from you and what came from the model.
AI drafts your plays
Describe a process or policy in plain language and let AI write the first draft as a structured play. You review, refine, and publish. Hours of documentation work, done in minutes.
Every team member gets AI answers from your content
Any team member can ask questions about your private playbooks and get precise AI answers grounded in what you wrote — not a hallucinated internet answer. Your knowledge scales with your team.
Living documents, not static wikis
Update a play as your company evolves. The AI answers update with it. No outdated Confluence pages. No "check if this is still accurate" uncertainty.
From seed playbook to company operating system
Three steps to turn Backtick into the most valuable tool your team uses every day.
Learn from the best
As a solo founder or small team, start with Irv Shapiro's seed playbooks. Each one is built from 40+ years of executive decisions — concrete examples, hard trade-offs, and real AI-era insights. No fluff.
Build your own private playbooks
As you hire and scale, create plays for your company: onboarding guides, SOPs, culture documents, technical runbooks. Write them yourself or let AI draft from your notes.
Your whole team learns with AI
Every team member reads, searches, and asks questions — answered instantly by AI grounded in your content. Your knowledge, working for you 24/7.
Start your team's playbook today
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Start reading or building
Browse seed playbooks immediately, or create your first team playbook.
About the author
For more than forty years I've founded and scaled technology companies — including Metamor Technologies (500+ employees, successful exit) and DialogTech ($60M+ in VC funding) — and I'm still building. With Backtick, I'm packaging the exact playbooks, frameworks, and hard-won lessons from those journeys into a platform your team can use to move faster, hire smarter, and scale with less chaos.
— Irv Shapiro, Founder & CEO
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