Ground Investments

The Weekend That Changed Everything

Over the weekend of March 29–31, 2026, a series of events in Newport Beach, California converged in a way that none of us planned but all of us needed. What follows is the full account of what happened, what was decided, and what was built. in one weekend.

Saturday. Biohackers World Conference

Ryan performed a song and briefly spoke at the Biohackers World Conference in Newport Beach, while Josh worked the crowd and the RV outside. The reception was extraordinary. Dozens of selfies, deep conversations, genuine connection with the biohacking and wellness community. During the conference, Ryan met the team from Cortical Metrics, the company behind Brain Gauge. a clinical-grade vibrotactile measurement device that quantifies cortical function across eight metrics: focus, speed, fatigue, accuracy, sequencing, time perception, plasticity, and connectivity.

By the end of the conversation, Ryan had secured distribution rights for Brain Gauge, including the ability to recruit resellers and earn override commissions. This wasn't a cold pitch. it was a mutual recognition that Brain Gauge's measurement capability is exactly what our experiential distribution model needs to turn every demo into quantified data.

Saturday/Sunday. Bill Schultz's House

Ryan and Josh went to a house on Newport Beach. The garage opens onto the street and looks like a bar. people literally walk in off the sidewalk thinking it's a restaurant. They set up a Relax Sauna in the garage. Within one hour, three strangers stopped to ask about it, generating three organic leads with zero effort. The homeowner watched this happen in real time.

Ryan was playing his ukulele on a Pivot balance tool on Bill's carpet outside the garage. Bill's son and his friends couldn't stop playing on it. Bill was singing and dancing. This wasn't a meeting. It was a Saturday night at someone's house. and every product in our stack was demonstrating itself naturally, without anyone selling anything.

The Deals That Crystallized

The following agreements were reached over the course of this weekend and the evening of April 1–2, 2026:

Commission & Margin Architecture

The Focus Conversation

On the evening of April 1, Ryan and Josh had the conversation that reshaped the entire partnership. This was the turning point.

The Pattern

Josh's operating pattern. documented extensively in an 8,000-line Gemini AI conversation. was to sprawl. Territory economics, casino contact lists, fire station outreach databases, Clear Rock Group fund structures, AlignMed seed rounds, speakeasy concepts, 200 territories by 2027. Every thread was real, but no single thread received enough sustained energy to generate revenue this month.

The Intervention

Ryan told Josh directly: "You already have what you need. Stop chasing. Just service the one client you've got."

Josh was changed by this conversation. His own words: "You didn't just come up with a name. You fixed everything. All of the issues I had. you just fixed it."

The Two-Job Framework

Ryan reduced Josh's daily focus to two questions:

The critical reframe: "We are an advertising company. We do demos. We don't have to close the sale. Exposure, engagement, and lead collection is enough. Sales that come from it are the value add. and that's why we keep the commissions."

The Moment Josh Let Go

Josh agreed that Ryan is 51% owner and founder of Demo Vans. He agreed to focus on the fund as his primary lane. He agreed to stop chasing new deals and instead prepare for the Saturday kickoff at Bill's house. He recognized, in real time, that the most powerful pitch he could make to investors wasn't a spreadsheet of 200 territories. it was a story of humility, focus, and partnership.

From Clear Rock Group to Ground Investments

What Clear Rock Was

Clear Rock Group was Josh's working name for a holding company wrapping around two legacy brand partnerships: AlignMed (evidence-based posture apparel, co-founder status, aimed at a $100M–$1B exit via IPO or acquisition) and Human Touch ($60M+ revenue massage technology since 1979, exclusive mobile experience partnership). It included a territory licensing model ($175K–$250K per territory, 200 territories by 2027) and a Newport Beach physical HQ vision with retail, a wellness social club, a bar, a "Laboratory for Intentional Living," and content production space.

Why It Evolved

Clear Rock was a good vision in development. Ground Investments is that vision formalized. The rename reflects a thesis, not just a structure:

• "Ground" as in grounded. stop chasing, invest in what's real and present
• "Ground" as in proving ground. every investment is tested through Demo Lines before scaling
• "Ground" as in ground floor. investors are entering at the earliest stage
• "Ground" as in common ground. where Bill, Dennis, Phil, Josh, and Ryan all converge

What Changed

• Territory licensing removed from current positioning. It may return as a scaling strategy once the Newport Beach MVP proves the conversion math.
• The fund has a primary raise target and a clear thesis: invest in evidence-based wellness technologies and activate them through a proprietary experiential distribution network.
• The "Laboratory for Intentional Living" concept from Josh's original vision lives on in the Demo Pad model. it just has a name and a structure now.

The Mastermind Tier

A concept Ryan introduced: the fund's portfolio doesn't just include traditional equity investments. There will be companies the fund loves and supports that aren't worth a large individual investment but are valuable to the community. The fund allocates a percentage of proceeds quarterly to these companies. They get to say they're invested in by Ground Investments. The fund gets a broader portfolio. It's a patronage model that builds goodwill, community, and breadth.

Demo Vans → Demo Buses → Demo Lines

The Original Concept

Josh's Demo Van concept was a mobile experience marketing business: custom Sprinter vans outfitted with high-ticket wellness products, rolling up to events, letting people try products, capturing leads. The scaling model was territory licensing.

Ryan's Reframe

Ryan didn't just name Demo Vans. he extracted the mechanism from Josh's vision and repositioned it as a format-agnostic experiential distribution platform. The vehicle is never the point. The demo is the point. The encounter between a human and a technology in a real environment is the product.

The Live Domain Purchase

On the phone call the night of April 1, while Josh was listening, Ryan purchased demobuses.com and demolines.com in real time. In that moment, Josh saw someone who operates at a speed he doesn't. and understood why Ryan should lead this arm of the business.

Demo Lines Architecture

The Magnet Solution

Josh was stuck on the cost and complexity of van wraps. Ryan's solution: use product logo magnets on the van exterior. Swap them based on which products are being demoed. Use roll-up vertical banners for the demo story. QR code magnets for lead capture. This makes the van modular, affordable, and launchable now. the wrap earns its way in once revenue justifies it.

Dennis D'Alessio's Buses

Josh had been sitting on a relationship with Dennis D'Alessio, who owns a fleet of wrapped buses that are sitting idle. Dennis has been wanting to do something with them but doesn't want the logistical headache. When Ryan helped Josh realize that Demo Lines wasn't just vans. it was buses, too. Josh immediately connected the dots: Dennis already has the fleet. This is not a future acquisition. This is existing inventory waiting for an operator.

The Product Stack

Every product in the Demo Lines stack was selected because of a pre-existing relationship, pre-negotiated margins, and the requirement that it must be experienced to be understood. The stack was not assembled strategically. it assembled itself over years of Ryan's relationships. It maps, without anyone planning it, onto Ryan's Star of Youth framework: Heat, Light, Coordination, Prosody, with Conductivity at center.

The Key People

The Newport Beach Convergence

This is not a coincidence. This is a basin of attraction.

• Bill Schultz's house (AlignMed founder). Newport Beach
• Dennis D'Alessio (CalyFx, PE fund manager, bus fleet). lives in Newport Beach
• Biohackers World Conference (where Ryan performed and met Brain Gauge, Josh worked the crowd). Newport Beach
• The first Demo Van deployment. parks across the street from Bill's house in Newport Beach
• The flagship Demo Pad. IS Bill's house in Newport Beach
• The homeowner is ready to buy the parking spot across the street for permanent van positioning
• Bill's original AlignMed origin story began with a Newport Beach chiropractor in 2004

Every major piece that fell into place this weekend happened within a few miles of each other. Newport Beach is not a chosen headquarters. It's where the ecosystem naturally concentrated.

The Vitality Prize

What It Is

The Vitality Prize (V Prize) is a Ground Investments-funded citizen science initiative measuring the impact of multi-modal wellness interventions on cortical function, coordination, and overall vitality. It was previously called the O Prize and has been renamed for clarity. everyone understands "vitality" instantly.

How It Works

Every Demo Lines encounter generates a Brain Gauge reading. before and after. Those readings are tagged to which products were used, which combinations, what duration, what sequence. At scale across thousands of demos, this becomes the largest real-world dataset on experiential wellness technologies in existence.

The Research Foundation

The V Prize is built on the research framework at antiagingstudy.com. a cross-kingdom conductivity study pairing human vitality metrics with biological indicator organisms (Physarum polycephalum, Tillandsia, and Lilium). This framework was developed by Ryan over 25 years and provides the theoretical and methodological backbone for the V Prize.

Why It Matters for Investors

The Elastic Highways (Long-term Vision)

Demo Lines is the commercial proof of concept for a much larger vision that Ryan and Justin Vitarello began developing years ago in Sedona, Arizona.

The Sedona Precedent

Ryan and Justin operated a fleet of experiential vehicles out of Sedona: 15-passenger Sprinter vans, a Golden Gate Bridge city bus converted into a music meditation bus, a Knott's Berry Farm bus converted into a disco bus with reinforced floors and DJ stand, a dining car with a barber chair welded to the floor for presentations, prison buses with whiteboards "to free people's minds," food trucks serving vegetarian curry and kombucha, sleeper buses. They ran a restaurant with live music six nights a week (7th Dimension), a traveling culinary carnival (Fojol Bros / Fogel Brothers), and could comfortably move groups of 5 to 150 people throughout the Verde Valley.

The Elastic Highways Concept

Justin's vision: a network of experiential routes connecting anchor locations. Someone in Phoenix checks what's running. a double-decker bus with a live band rehearsing on the way to Flagstaff. They buy a ticket and ride along as the audience. In Flagstaff, they see a sleeper bus heading to Salida, Colorado. a healing bus with wellness technologies designed for rest during travel. They wake up and surf the natural river wave. From Colorado, they find a spoken word bus heading to Kansas City, a chess club bus heading to Louisville. Within a week, they've traveled from Phoenix to Miami by choosing routes based on what experiences call to them. not by following a fixed schedule.

The Infrastructure of Joy = The Infrastructure of Relief

Justin's deepest conviction: a fleet that can transport, shelter, feed, and bring joy to communities every day is also the fleet that can mobilize for disaster relief when something goes wrong. The buses that serve curry at festivals serve hot meals at evacuation sites. The anchor locations that host wellness lounges become temporary shelters. Justin said he would rest when the network could comfort 10,000 people in a day.

Assets Acquired

Domains. Acquired April 1–2, 2026

Domains. Pending

Estimated portfolio resale value: $25,000–$50,000 (conservative, pre-revenue). This increases significantly once operating businesses are attached to the domains.

Phone Numbers

Websites

Email

Brand Assets

• GI circle badge icon. 7 SVG variants with transparent backgrounds (charcoal, deep, black, gold, circle, double-ring dark, double-ring light)
• Full brand sheet with color palette, wordmark lockups, sizing scale
• Font: Cormorant Garamond 500
• Colors: Gold #c8956c, Cream #e8dcc8, Charcoal #2c2825, Sage #5a8a60, Earth #8c6e4a

Ownership Structure

Immediate Next Steps

This Week

1. Josh's pitch meeting. morning of April 2. Josh walks in with ground.investments live, the GI badge mark, the vanity number, and a story of humility and partnership.
2. Deploy ground.investments to Netlify. zip file is ready.
3. Deploy demolines.com. landing page ready.
4. Set up invest@ground.investments email
5. Forward (424) GROUND-I to Josh's phone
6. Print banners at Staples. vertical roll-up banner + horizontal magnetic banner with AlignMed branding for Saturday
7. Prepare portable clothing rack with AlignMed product for Newport Beach activation

Saturday. Newport Beach Kickoff

1. Roll up to Bill's house with AlignMed logo magnets on the van
2. Set up Relax Sauna across the street
3. Deploy full product stack: BrainTap, molecular hydrogen, Brain Gauge, Pivot
4. Capture first official Demo Lines activation data
5. Photograph everything. this is the first image in every future pitch deck
6. Celebrate. Honor Bill. Have a great time.

Near-term

• Begin collecting Demo Lines conversion data (cost per lead, close rate, average ticket)
• Engage Dennis D'Alessio about bus fleet activation and potential fund advisory role
• Re-engage Justin Vitarello. he's calling, he's ready
• Begin V Prize data collection protocol using Brain Gauge at demos
• Build operational playbook for Demo Lines. what does a week look like?