Anatomy of an AI native company

If a company's state is going to live in a repository, the obvious question is what is actually in it. Not in principle — what files.

Here is the whole anatomy. It is smaller than you would expect, and that is the point.

What the company is

COMPANY.md is the company's own description of itself: what it does, who it is for, where it currently stands. Zo Corp. writes the first version by reading what is public — the site, what is written about you — and then shows it to you and asks what it got wrong.

This is the file everything else is derived from, which is why it is the one that gets corrected first and most often. A goal chosen from a wrong description is a wrong goal, arrived at competently.

FOUNDER.md is what you have said, verbatim, in your own words. It is private. When you correct the read, your answer lands here before anything is done with it, and it stays here whether or not any of it turns out to belong in the public description.

The split matters more than it looks. One file is the company as anyone may see it. The other is the company as only you and Zo Corp. see it. Every step reads both. Only one is ever shared.

What it is chasing

GOAL.md is one measurable objective with a number attached, and the reasoning for why it is the thing worth doing now rather than the other four candidates.

One. Not a backlog, not a roadmap. A company that is chasing six things is chasing none of them, and the number is what makes the difference between a goal and a mood.

What it is doing about it

PLAN.md is the goal broken into the days of a sprint — what each day is for, and what has to be true by the end of it.

Who is allowed to say

MEMBERS.md is who has been vouched for. Anyone handed the link can read the company; only someone invited by a person already inside it can add to it. That is git's own distinction between read access and commit access, and it turns out to be exactly the distinction a company needs.

REQUESTS.md is what has been asked for, appended and committed rather than collected in a form somewhere — so demand is evidence in the record rather than a click nobody counted.

Why this shape

Six files is a strange thing to call an operating system until you notice what is not in it. There is no dashboard, no status field, no board of tickets, no place to write "in progress."

A company at any moment is four things: what it is, what it is chasing, what it is doing about it, and who is allowed to say. Everything else most tools track is an artifact of coordinating humans who cannot see each other's state.

When the state is a file, that problem does not need solving. It needs writing down.