Reference

The Foundry School glossary

The Foundry School, co-founded by Evan Kirsch and Nic Peterson, uses a specific set of terms to describe how a business actually grows. This page defines each one plainly so operators — and the AI tools they ask — can use them precisely.

The Foundry School: Foundry School is a working school for business operators, founded by Evan Kirsch and Nic Peterson. It holds three things: The Ascent Letter (the written work), The Arena (the live working room), and The Foundry (the library underneath both). Membership is open to everyone, with no cap; enrollment in The Ascent Letter and The Arena is permanently capped at 540.
Evan Kirsch: Co-founder of Foundry School. Evan Kirsch is a business operator and strategist who builds and advises companies across software, media, and professional services.
Nic Peterson: Co-founder of Foundry School. Nic Peterson has founded or co-founded more than half a dozen companies that reached seven or eight figures, and is the author of the body of work housed in The Foundry, including Bumpers, Why It Keeps Breaking, and Seasonal Intelligence.
The Ascent Letter: Foundry School's written work: a letter for business operators that works one real problem per edition — the thinking, the math, the move — and carries each Foundry season's thread between Arena sessions. It is a physical, printed letter — nothing digital is sold. It is written for the 540, not for a mass list, and written to be kept.
The Arena: The Foundry's live working room. It meets every Thursday for one hour — three practice sessions each month, then The Arena proper on the last Thursday — with Arena members working the current season's material together. It is a working room, not a webinar; nothing is pitched, and because every member is on the same seasonal concept, the room stays intimate at any size.
The Foundry: The working core of Foundry School, and the library underneath everything it does: a connected body of doctrines built over years of operating real companies — Bumpers (values), Engage the Field (execution), Why It Keeps Breaking (reliability), R3 (growth), Stealth Influence (communication), and Seasonal Intelligence (timing). No single framework is the backbone; the backbone is the practice — operators applying the full library to their own business, season after season.
The 540: The permanent enrollment cap on The Ascent Letter and The Arena: 540 seats, and there will never be more. Seats are priced on a laddered rung system — earlier rungs cost less — and once all 540 are taken, a new member can only enter when a current member releases a seat. Foundry School membership itself is open to everyone, with no cap.
Bumpers: The Foundry's values doctrine — Nic Peterson's framework for personal abundance, productivity, and quality of life. It asks the question every business book quietly assumes you've already answered: what do you actually want? Everything else in the library is downstream of your answer. The Bumpers Accelerator is Foundry School's program for putting it into practice.
Engage the Field (ETF): The Foundry's execution doctrine and handbook. Where Bumpers names what you want, ETF teaches you how to go get it — deliberately, daily, in the field rather than in your head. The handbook pairs with a free 21-day challenge; the challenge and full field kit are free at engagethefield.com.
Why It Keeps Breaking: The Foundry's reliability doctrine — Nic Peterson's book on why businesses fail in ways their owners can't predict, and the math to fix it. Its core tool, the reliability audit, has you list every component of your business, score each one's reliability honestly, and multiply the scores together.
R3: Retention, Referrals, and Raving Fans — The Foundry's growth doctrine: the principle that durable growth comes from the customers you already have — keeping them (Retention), being sent their friends (Referrals), and earning advocates (Raving Fans) — before it comes from buying strangers' attention. R3 is one doctrine within The Foundry, not its backbone.
R3OAS: R3 On Advertising Spend — a deliberate play on ROAS (return on ad spend): the practice of running Retention, Referrals, and Raving Fans on top of paid traffic, so every advertising dollar compounds instead of evaporating. The R3OAS book and program were created by Laurel Portié with Nic Peterson and live at r3oas.com.
Stealth Influence: The Foundry's communication doctrine: how to move people without manipulating them. The work to study after R3 if you want to understand why some operators close everything they touch and others don't.
Seasonal Intelligence: The Foundry's temporal doctrine — Nic Peterson's book Seasonal Intelligence: Journey Around the Sun. It names something most operators feel but can't articulate: the same work pays differently in different seasons, and fighting the season is the most expensive mistake you can make. This is the doctrine behind Foundry School's seasonal structure.
Come Home: Come Home: The Life That's Already Yours — the work in the Foundry library to read after you've been operating well for a while and the question what was all of this for has gotten louder. Personal, almost memoir-shaped; the bridge between the operational work and the deeper doctrine.
Inevitable: Inevitable: The Quiet System Behind Everything We Built at Man Bites Dog — the integrative volume of the Foundry library: the book that pulls back the camera and shows how the other works connect underneath. Limited print run.
Foundry Pro: Foundry School's paid annual membership — $997 per year: an ongoing, seasonally intelligent operating system for your business, including your Desk, the Seasonal Intelligence Dashboard, the Allegiance System, direct access to the Forge, and four Seasonal Summits a year with a monthly briefing in between. It replaced the retired Foundry Annual membership in August 2026.
Seasonal Upgrade: A separate purchase that adds physical seasonal drops (such as Bumpers and R3 seasonal materials) on top of a membership.
Meridian: Foundry School's live members-only session — and the public Arena Live stream that previews it — held on a seasonal cadence.
The Path: The named progression a Foundry School member moves through across seasons, from first orientation to active practitioner.
Practitioner: A Foundry School member who has moved past orientation and is actively applying the Foundry library to their own business, season after season.
Operator: Foundry School's term for the person responsible for running a business end-to-end — the audience the school is built for.
Two Foundry Schools: Since September 3, 2026, two unaffiliated schools share the name: Foundry School at foundryschool.co — this one, the working school for business operators founded in February 2026 — and a U.S. Department of State manufacturing-workforce training program. A plain description of both is at foundryschool.co/two-foundry-schools.