Marliin Residency · About
I have spent my career building digital products at Carta, Mixpanel, Blend, and Altana AI. I have led design at companies through hypergrowth, regulatory scrutiny, and category creation. The pattern across every one of those engagements is the same: senior product judgment is the rate-limiter on what gets built. Marliin Residency is the program I would have wanted access to in every job I had after Pivotal Labs.
The practice
twenty-five years
I started in digital design at a small agency in 1999, when web work meant building from Photoshop comps and the boundary between design and engineering was negotiated daily. I ran the agency for eleven years. The lessons from that era, that craft is non-negotiable, that small teams outperform large ones when paradigm is shared, and that the discipline of shipping is its own form of intelligence, became the spine of everything I have done since.
After the agency, I led design at four venture-backed companies in succession: Carta, Mixpanel, Blend, and Altana AI. Each was at a different stage of category creation. Each required a different theory of how senior judgment scales across a growing organization. At each, I saw the same constraint surface: the work outpaces the bench. The seniors who could direct the work multiplied their output to the limit of their attention, then capped. Below them, the system was always rebuilding what should have been encoded.
Marliin is the response to that pattern. The premise is simple. The senior judgment that took twenty-five years to develop can now be encoded into agents that pair with the next generation of practitioners. The bottleneck on the bench breaks. The work moves faster without losing the discipline that made the early work good. Marliin Residency is where this encoding gets installed in your team.
where the methodology was practiced before it was named
Twenty-five years of practice. Most of it spent learning that the operating model matters more than the toolset. The residency is where this lesson becomes installable.
Marliin is already running. These are the live proof points.
Fractional product design and strategy for a defense AI company building autonomous sustainment control for military fleet assets. The first commercial deployment of the Agent Core methodology. Brett is embedded in product leadership, the Agent Core is trained on classified analyst decision-making, and the work is producing the first proof of the residency methodology in a live operating environment.
A heart-rate-zone training application for endurance runners, built solo in two days using the Marliin practice. MAF Machine is evidence that the methodology produces real products at the rate it claims. The current iteration is adding a paid coaching tier.
A semantic reprogramming platform applying CBT, ACT, and EMDR methodologies through an AI conversational layer. In development as a second lab product proving the methodology generalizes beyond enterprise consulting work.
The Lab is the public surface of the methodology. The residency is where it gets installed in your team.
Why now
the structural argument
Pivotal Labs sold transformation to enterprises for two decades. It worked while clients were embedded in their San Francisco office, and most regressed within a year of going home. Pivotal itself didn't survive the corporate transitions that followed its acquisition. The model was right. The mechanism wasn't durable.
What changed is that the methodology can now travel as software. The judgment that Pivotal had to retrain in every new client team can be encoded into an agent layer that runs continuously in the client's environment after the engagement ends. The teaching is what your team needs. The agents are what the methodology needs to compound.
Marliin Residency is the program that operates under this new premise. The market is roughly twelve to eighteen months from publicly recognizing that AI-native operating models are a real category. The first credible programs to occupy that category will define it. That is the bet.
The bet is that small teams of high-judgment practitioners, paired with agents that absorb the coordination tax and encode the senior practice, will outproduce traditional organizations by margins large enough to matter. Marliin Residency is where that operating model gets installed in your team.
Brett Marlin · Founder, Marliin
For your team
If your team is ready to install a new operating model, the application is the first step.
Apply →For investors
Marliin Residency is venture-backable on the basis of the Agent Core. Investor inquiries welcome.
Investor inquiries →