Chicago's Founder Performance Center

An entire building,
working on your company.

A building designed for focus and wellness, with a personal AI woven into every room. Two parts, one system, so your hardest problem gets your best hours.

543G
Grade
B1
Ferris AI
  • A building designed for focus and wellness Based on the Eudaimonia Machine
  • A personal AI for every member Woven into the building, not bolted on
  • 125 founders maximum A founders' club, by application

You're not short on effort.
You're short on energy and time.

Ask a founder where the day went and most can't tell you. Two things leak out of every founder's day, and almost nothing about the way we work was designed to stop either one.

Where your energy goes

  • > Twenty minutes to climb back into a thought you left twenty minutes ago
  • > A queue for the phone booth at the exact moment the investor calls
  • > Training happens at nine at night, or it doesn't happen
  • > Nobody within fifty feet has shipped a model, closed a round, or hired a founding engineer

Where your time goes

  • > The investor follow-up you meant to send on Tuesday
  • > An afternoon blocked for product, lost to calendar Tetris
  • > Research you'll redo because nobody kept the last version
  • > Your sharpest two hours spent on the day's shallowest two problems

Every field that takes performance seriously
gives its people two things.

A room designed for the work, and a team that handles everything else. The pit lane and the pit crew. The operating theatre and the surgical team. Company building is the only one where we hand people a desk and wish them luck.

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Two parts, one system.

The building gives you energy.
The AI gives you time.

Ferris is a double helix. A building designed for focus and wellness, and a personal AI woven into the building itself. Neither works alone. Where the two meet, in every kind of room they compound.

The building energy Ferris AI time
GallerySalonLibraryOfficeDeep workBody
Each rung is a kind of room where the building and Ferris AI work together.
01 The Building

A building designed so your mind
and body keep up.

Building a great company asks more of your mind and body than any job you've had. So we designed Ferris as a eudaimonia machine, from the Greek for flourishing, with a room already built for every need you hit during the day. Select one to see where it lives.

Level 5 selected
Street
02 Ferris AI

Built for the era
of the 100x operator.

Every member is paired with their own Ferris, same name as the building, because they're one system. A team of three to six, working with Ferris, operates like a team of thirty to ninety.

  • It learns: Your voice, your priorities, your rhythms. The longer you work with it, the more its drafts sound like you and the less you have to explain.
  • It handles: The follow-ups, the research, the calendar Tetris, the drafts you'd otherwise labor over. The investor update goes out in your voice while you're heads down on product.
  • It anticipates: It pulls the last three exchanges with a candidate the night before the interview, and writes your Sunday-evening briefing without being asked.

Not an app you open.
A layer over every room.

Ferris speaks and listens through voice, wearables, and screens built into the building, so it's in the room before you need it.

RoomWhat Ferris does there
GalleryThe mirror at the entrance greets you with your day, prepared overnight.
SalonYour usual order reaches the kitchen mid-conversation. The long table stays a table, not a meeting.
LibraryIt keeps the record for you: every decision, draft, and exchange, ready when you need it.
OfficeFollow-ups, research, and scheduling, handled. The few emails that actually need you, flagged.
Deep workIt holds your messages until you surface.
BodyYour workout, built from your goals, waiting in the gym.
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We know what it costs
to build in the wrong room.

Most of us started in a spare bedroom, a hot desk, or the corner of an open plan with a queue for the phone booth, and wrote our own follow-ups at midnight. The work still got done. It just cost more than it should have, in energy, in hours, and in the ideas that never got a quiet afternoon.

Ferris exists because that cost is fixable. It had never been fixed, because no one had built the building and the AI as one thing.

A building by the architect who wrote the theory

David Dewane created the Eudaimonia Machine, the workplace model built around sustained concentration. It was taught and cited for a decade before anyone built one. Ferris is the first, designed with a team at the top of architecture, hospitality, and operations.

An AI designed into the architecture

Plenty of offices have Wi-Fi and an app. Ferris was designed around a personal AI for every member, from the mirror at the entrance to the focus rooms upstairs. Nothing like it has been built before.

In the center of the Loop

1 W Monroe was a Chicago WeWork. We rebuilt every floor around one question: does this help founders build great companies? The last tenant rented desks, we admit founders.

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The Ferris & Co. building at 1 W. Monroe, Chicago
“I got six weeks of work done in six days. Same company, same laptop, different building.”
David S. · Ferris member
“On any given day, I'm working through a problem with someone who knows Bitcoin, agentic tooling, growth, security, or content better than I do. Those conversations are hard in the best way. That's the room I was missing.”
Jordi · Ferris member
“Every other space rented me a desk. Ferris put me in a room with founders working through the same problems I am, and I've learned more here than anywhere I've worked. The building isn't even finished yet.”
Sean · Ferris member

We don't rent desks.
We admit founders.

Ferris is a members' club. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and membership is intentionally limited to about 125 founders and founding team members.

  1. 01

    Apply

    Ten minutes. What you're building, who's on your team, and what you'd bring to the floor.

  2. 02

    Walk the building

    Come to a Preview Day. See the floors, meet the team, and get a feel for who else works here.

  3. 03

    Sit down with us

    A real conversation about your stage and your goals. We decide together whether this is the right room for your next year.

  4. 04

    Take your place

    Your office, your access, and your Ferris are configured before your first morning. You begin with the work, not with setup.

A year from here,
one of two things is true.

Eudaimonia

Greek, flourishing. Not a good day, but the trend of a life.

You built somewhere that was on your side.

MTWTF
20 hours · Five unbroken blocks

You had more uninterrupted afternoons this quarter than in all of last year. You trained before your first meeting instead of after your last. The follow-ups went out the day you promised them, and you didn't write most of them.

The hardest problem in your company got the best hours in your week, every week, and it shows in what you shipped.

Languishing

The gray middle. Nothing went wrong, and nothing moved.

Or you spent another year being busy.

MTWTF
20 hours · Twenty fragments

The hard thing kept sliding to next week. The afternoon you blocked for product went to scheduling and the inbox. The gym kept losing to the calendar. You met the same forty people you already knew.

Not because you didn't work hard enough. Because nothing around you was designed to help.

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Great companies are downstream of great days.

You can't control the market, the round, or the hire that falls through at the last minute. You can control how much energy you bring to the work only you can do, and how many hours it actually gets. Almost every founder leaves both to chance.

Ferris is the alternative, a building that gives you energy, an AI that gives you time, and a club of founders who make both worth more. Whether it's your first company or your fifth, you get an environment that returns more than it takes.

“

Extraordinary companies are not built on extraordinary effort alone. They're built by founders who stopped fighting the room.

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The room is ready.
The question is who's in it.

Ferris is a founders' club, by application. We're looking for founders building with AI who will make the building better for everyone in it.

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