Nat Eliason

Eliason was born in Washington, D.C., in the United States, and studied philosophy at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry. The publisher’s author biography lists 2013 as the starting point of his ongoing writing.⁠[1]

In his junior year of college, he co-founded Tailored Fit and received $25,000 from a Pittsburgh incubator, later raising another $50,000. In a 2018 retrospective, he wrote that the team shut the project down after spending the money, with revenue of less than $1,000; he regarded the experience as a lesson in focusing too much on fundraising and business plans while neglecting real customer needs.⁠[2]

In 2017, Eliason provided search engine optimization services to Kettle & Fire, founded by Justin Mares, and then took on projects for Patreon and Spire. In September of that year, he decided to turn his independent consulting into an agency, founding Growth Machine to organize search-focused content production for clients.⁠[3]

In his 2020 retrospective, Eliason wrote that Growth Machine went through hiring and client project management problems in 2019 and then lost about half of its clients within three weeks early in the pandemic, after which the business gradually recovered. These descriptions come from the founder’s own review of the business.⁠[3]

In December 2020, Eliason handed day-to-day operations to Nora, who became chief executive officer, while he retained only limited strategic involvement. He chose at the time to hand over management rather than sell the company so that he could return to writing and other projects.⁠[3]

In 2018, Eliason described Cup & Leaf, the tea business he was building, in an article on entrepreneurship. The project later spanned online sales, a content website, and a physical coffee and tea space.⁠[2][4]

His personal retrospective of March 2021 records that Cup & Leaf Cafe closed during the pandemic the previous year and that the online business was sold separately. He used it as an example of spreading operating pressure across multiple businesses and did not describe the closure of the physical store and the sale of the online business as a single transaction.⁠[4]

Eliason wrote about his 2021–2022 involvement in the crypto industry in Crypto Confidential. The book uses his personal experience to present crypto asset speculation, code and financial risks, and the gains and losses of the market frenzy; these are accounts from his memoir and do not represent an independently verifiable current asset figure.⁠[5][6]

Crypto Confidential was published by Portfolio on July 9, 2024. The publisher positions it as a nonfiction work that explains get-rich-quick culture and its risks through an insider’s experience.⁠[6]

In an October 2025 retrospective, Eliason said he began using CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry in January 2024 to help build a writing-log app and released it publicly in June, but later set the project aside because of maintenance and development difficulties and his writing schedule. In late 2024, he tried again to use AI to build a tool to help with book editing.⁠[7]

In January 2025, he launched the Build Your Own Apps course; that summer he developed the writing tool Covici. He stresses that AI lowers the barrier to writing software, but planning, debugging, security, performance, and long-term maintenance still require investment. This is a summary and judgment drawn from his personal practice.⁠[7]

On January 14, 2025, Eliason and Nathan Baugh launched the Between Drafts podcast, covering the process of writing, editing, landing a publishing deal, marketing books, and building an author career, with three episodes in the first release.⁠[8]

On May 27, 2025, he released the science fiction novel Husk, the first book in the Meru Initiative series. The story follows Isaac, a technician who maintains servers holding human digital consciousness, and deals with consciousness transfer, virtual immortality, and its costs.⁠[9][10]

Eliason’s personal website lists Growth Machine as acquired in 2025; this is a separate stage from his handover of day-to-day operations in 2020. The website does not disclose the acquisition price in that description.⁠[11][3]

On January 20, 2026, Eliason published the science fiction novella The Birth of Paradise. The work is set in the same fictional world as Husk but takes place about a hundred years earlier, following the events involving Felix before he entered Meru, and can be read on its own.⁠[12]

In 2026, he took part in building Founders School in New York, a four-year entrepreneurship high school program within the Alpha School system. On the April 28 episode of POWERS Pod, Chris Powers interviewed Eliason about the program’s curriculum and entrepreneurship training; the school’s website lists fall 2026 as the start of its first class.⁠[11][13][14]

The school’s public materials describe AI-assisted learning of core academic subjects, with the remaining time devoted to entrepreneurship practice, and promote an arrangement under which students reach $1 million in profit before graduation or receive a tuition refund. The website FAQ states that this guarantee applies only to students who enroll in the first year, is subject to the conditions and exceptions of the enrollment agreement, and does not apply to students who voluntarily withdraw.⁠[14]

As of September 23, 2026, Eliason was still describing his work at Founders School on his X account and publicly thanked Jay Yang for sharing his experience with the school’s students the previous week. The post reflects his involvement in the school’s entrepreneurship education activities.⁠[15][16]

Founders School: The entrepreneurship high school program he is helping build. Official website: https://founders.school/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11][14]

Alpha School: The education system to which Founders School belongs. Official website: https://alpha.school/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11][14]

Growth Machine: The content marketing agency he founded. Official website: https://www.growthmachine.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

Personal website: https://www.nateliason.com/ (opens in a new window), featuring articles, books, and reading notes. X: Public account: https://x.com/nateliason (opens in a new window).⁠[11][15]