Overlook

Two founders run dozens of ventures, a service line and the network of people around both. Overlook is where Coach House keeps all of it.

It holds every venture read straight from its repository, everyone the studio knows, and the week's to-dos, rocks and issues. It replaces six years of Notion. When you open it, the first thing on the screen is a decision waiting for you.

Overlook is internal. Sign-in is Google, and the allowlist has two names on it.

The front door asks for a decision before it reports anything

Every overview opens on Needs you: the things only a person can decide, oldest first, each card carrying its own buttons. Merge, Reply, Mark customer, Later. More than three of one kind fold into a single item that opens Triage. Below sit the receipts, every change the agent or the other founder made, grouped under the input that caused it. In the Blueprint frame, a voice memo about running into someone at lunch comes back as three lines: a note on his record, his closeness moved from cold to warm, and a coffee on Zach's list for Thursday at 9. Undo takes a line back, and a merge that can't be undone says so and points to the archive. Wrong takes it back and asks for one line of why, and only Wrong counts against the agent.

Running the business is the data entry

Nobody types records into Overlook. Things arrive through doors: a capture email address you forward to with a line of context on top, an Apple Shortcut in any app's share sheet, a dropped spreadsheet, Claude Code through an MCP server, and each founder's personal assistant. Every door answers back with what it did. An agent called the keeper reads each input and proposes the writes, and the rules decide which ones land on their own. Merges, deletes, marking a customer, moving someone close in and any send always wait for a person. The keeper never invents: a date is only as precise as the material it came from.

People sit at one of three distances, and the keeper can only move someone the first step:

Cold

Came from a list, or a relayed intro

Warm

One of us knows them, so an email would be person to person

Inner

Close in. Only a person moves anyone in or out

If the founders stop trusting the keeper, the network rots back into Notion

Zach and Vince named that as the failure that matters most when they drew the frames: catch the agent making mistakes and you route around it, and then nothing gets captured. So the core has to pass four checks before anything else builds on it.

• The Notion import reconciles: every record applied, queued or rejected with a reason.
• A 30-person messy dump with eight traps (an old email, a nickname, a typo, a job change, two different people sharing a name) creates no duplicates.
• Ten real questions, written before the build and stored in the repo so they can't be tuned to the result, all answered right through the MCP door.
• An agent key is refused when it tries to mark a customer, move someone inner, delete a record or approve a merge.

Duplicates get one card at a time, with a key for each verdict

Triage is a mode for any batch of the same decision. One card holds your full attention and shows only the fields that could change the verdict, with the differences marked. Three verdicts each have a key: keep both, merge and fix later, merge. Z undoes as a stack and S skips to the back. The same card runs an import review, an event invite list or a pass over who is warm. It is built on a triage tool Zach made for himself before Overlook had one.

Hold Shift and every noun on the screen becomes something you can act on

Every person, org, to-do, rock and scorecard number renders through one component that knows what it is. Hold Shift and they all get a dashed outline; the one under the pointer fills in amber. That pairing is what Zach picked on 2026-10-15 from three styles switched live on his own data. The next layer is drawn and not yet built: Shift-click opens a chat about that one thing, and Shift-hold opens a ring of verbs that fit it. A person gets Email and Note, a scorecard number gets Issue and Chat.

It started as a map of the ventures, and found a link nobody had written down

Overlook began on 2026-07-27 as a live map of every Coach House venture, read from each repository through the GitHub API with nothing typed in twice. The first test asked whether relationships between ventures could be computed from their documents instead of hand-linked. Out of 2,145 pairs, the closest was take-me-to-bourbon and take-me-to-coffee at 0.830, with second place at 0.424. Both are reskins of Take Me To's pizza original and both were hand-linked to it, but neither was linked to the other. Part of that score is two short early documents resembling each other. The map still opens at Overlook's root. Since Gate 2 on 2026-09-30, it is one room in the studio's operating tool instead of the whole building.