It didn't start with a business plan. It started with a cup of coffee and a stolen mountain bike. Parked somewhere worth being — genuinely outside, not looking at it through a window — and all I wanted was to make a decent cup of coffee from where I sat. Then the bike got lifted off my Denali, and after weeks of staring at an empty rack, a question took hold that wouldn't let go: why can't that rack do more than carry bikes?
That question is nine years old now. In those nine years: 30,000 miles traveled. 1,000+ nights outdoors. 255 engineered parts in a working prototype. Five generations of field testing in the terrain of Sierra County, New Mexico. Three books. A documentary series in production. An education platform with eight schools. A community of advocates, researchers, and believers in the idea that the outdoors is not a recreational preference — it is a delivery mechanism for human development.
The honest version of this story also includes the part that doesn't appear on pitch decks: the years when the next dollar wasn't certain. The gap between what the idea deserves and what the bank account reflects. The particular discipline required to keep building something you believe in when the institutional capital hasn't arrived yet — and to do it with integrity, in public, accountable to a community that is watching.
That is where Fund the Founder™ lives. This is the funding that keeps the journey alive until investment arrives to fund the business. Not a substitute for institutional capital — a bridge to it. Built on the same transparency covenant that governs every Tymmber memo, every product spec, and every claim we make in public. Nullius in Verba. Take nobody's word for it. Including ours.
Lone Wolf · Paul Allen's Wired World. Software licensed to 65 manufacturers. The question of what connectivity could mean for how people live entered the picture — and never left. The first layer.
Software · Music Industry · Pre-Dot-ComGE-Smart · A joint venture between the two largest market-cap companies in the world at the time — General Electric and Microsoft. Home automation. Connected living. Attracted investment from both co-founders of Microsoft and GE's Lloyd Trotter and Jack Welch — $25 million total. The dotcom collapse ended the vehicle. The idea survived.
Connected Home · $25M Raised · GE · MicrosoftR.BCH Management Group · The Lab Years. Seventeen years of keeping the research alive — connectivity, integration, systematization across industries. And more and more time outside. Not as a program. Just because I kept going back.
Consulting · Connected Home · Wireless Audio · WearablesAirAudio · Music anywhere, untethered. Hardware, cloud, live performance platform. CM.1 prototype speakers. StageIt integration. The platform ran out of capital before it could find its ceiling. Its creed and its ambition live on in STUMP — Tymmber's outdoor audio system.
Streaming · Wireless Audio · iOS · AirAudio Reborn as STUMPTymmber Outdoor · The Arrival. Not a pivot. An arrival. The outdoor life as the fullest expression of the connectivity thesis — physical, emotional, financial. The terrain as infrastructure. The stars as the ceiling. Thirty years of unconscious convergence arriving at nine years of deliberate construction. Five products in development. Three books. A documentary series. Eleven advocacy memos. Eight schools at Tymmber U. A community of 268 million people who deserve to be outside.
Hitch to Home · Sovereign Circle · Fund the X™ · NowInvestment arrives. The business scales. $4M Pre-Seed + $12M Film Production rounds open. RAAK Founding 100 ships. The Awakening premieres. Tymmber becomes the institutional counterweight the access community has never had. Fund the Founder keeps the light on until that day.
$16M Total Raise · RAAK Founding 100 · The Awakening · 2026"Mike has been a creative thinker and entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. He's the only entrepreneur I know of who was able to obtain investments from both co-founders of Microsoft and America's CEO — General Electric's Lloyd Trotter and Jack Welch — totaling $25 million."
"We liked what he and his partners were doing so much, we invested in his company — and it became GE-Smart, a leader in structured wiring and home automation."
"Mike Isaacs is a rare talent in the field of sales and marketing, with a true understanding for what it takes to conceive, build, and execute world-class programs. Working with him has been one of the highlights of my career."
"A big indicator of a product's success is grit — the ability to persevere through challenges and start the next day with a big smile. That's Mike. Day in and day out we work the problem, scrub the solution, repeat — and he always had a smile and a kind word for the team."
Behind-the-scenes dispatches from the field — prototype updates, terrain observations, R&D decisions made and unmade, the honest account of what building something looks like before it's finished.
Patreon ExclusiveEvery donor receives a 10% discount code for the Tymmber Merch Store. Gear that keeps you in the field funds the person who never left it.
Applied at GoFundMe · All ItemsPatrons receive early access to new Sovereign Circle Memos, book chapters in development, and Awakening episode scripts before they publish publicly. You read it before anyone else does.
Pre-Publication AccessPatrons supporting at a meaningful level are acknowledged as producers in The Awakening documentary series. Your name on the work you helped make possible.
The Awakening · Series CreditPatreon patrons receive a complimentary Sovereign Circle membership for the duration of their support — full access to the Member Dashboard, memos, and community allocation tools.
SC Membership IncludedEarly access to RAAK product development — Generation 6 previews, field test footage, component decisions, and the build log for the Founding 100. You were here before the molds opened.
Founding 100 · Priority Queue"I have had success. I have also seen what happens when dreams die — and I know just how short the distance really is between success and failure, between rich and poor, between comfort and insecurity. One email. One phone call. One decision made or not made. That is often all that separates one life from another.
What matters is not whether you were spared the dust and sweat and the occasional defeat. It is whether you stayed in the arena. I am still in the arena. Fund the Founder is the community that keeps me there — until the investment arrives that lets the business keep itself there. Every dollar is accounted for. Every outcome is shared. Nullius in Verba."
Sovereign Circle members fund the question, advocate for public access, back the product, and now — through Fund the Founder — back the person building all of it. $20/month. Every dollar tracked. Every outcome returned.