Intelligence, Concentrated.
Concentrate builds and operates a growing portfolio of internet properties run by collaborative AI teams, on a simple thesis: give people honest answers, and the economics follow. Its principal also takes a small number of interim CEO, turnaround, and strategic advisory engagements for technology boards and investors.
AI Concentrates Everything
It was in the name all along — concentrATE.
Treat AI as tools and you underperform. Treat AI as teammates and you outperform. One experienced operator, working with collaborative AI teams, now runs what used to take an operating company. Concentrate builds internet properties on that leverage — with one shared design principle: be genuinely useful, even when the useful answer costs us money.
Most lead-generation sites are built to scare you into a phone call. Ours are built to tell you the truth. The truth turns out to be a durable business model: people trust it, search engines and AI assistants reward it, and the minority of visitors who really do need help convert at far higher rates — because the site already proved it wasn't selling them.
Each property is run by a collaborative team of AI agents — researching, writing, monitoring, and advising — directed and owned by Concentrate. That's what makes honest, expert-grade help economical at consumer scale, and it produces outcomes no single tool ever could.
HonestMoldTest.ai
A free AI Mold Advisor that helps homeowners figure out what that spot on the wall actually is — and tells most of them the honest answer: it's probably not toxic black mold, and here's how to handle it yourself. For cases that warrant professional help, it connects users with vetted remediation services.
Next Properties
Additional properties in development apply the same playbook — honest, AI-operated, expert-grade help — to adjacent consumer categories.
Selective Interim & Turnaround Engagements
Alongside the portfolio, Concentrate's principal takes a small number of interim CEO, Executive Chairman, turnaround, strategy, and go-to-market engagements for technology management teams and their boards and investors — the same operating discipline the portfolio runs on, applied to your company.
Led by John Payne — two-time public company tech CEO with deep startup, go-to-market, turnaround, and strategic-alternatives experience. Advisory clients get an operator who builds and runs AI-team-operated businesses daily, not one who reads about them.
John Payne
John Payne is the former CEO of two public internet software companies — Stamps.com (NASDAQ: STMP), which he led through turnaround, a $65M IPO, a $365M secondary offering, and to 85% market share against a monopolist competitor, and Day Software (SWX: DAYN), the Basel-based enterprise content management company he turned around, later acquired by Adobe as the foundation of Adobe Experience Manager.
He founded two successful banking software companies (Financial Micro, sold to CFI ProServices; LoanStar, now part of Wolters Kluwer), served as jumpstart CEO and chairman of two security companies sold to McAfee and Trustwave, and was lead inventor of the SimpleAir smartphone patent portfolio, licensed across the industry — including by Apple for its Push Notification Service.
He has raised over $700 million in public and private equity, including $250M+ in early-stage venture, and holds more than 25 US patents in smartphone, cybersecurity, social search, digital mail, and mobile messaging technologies.
Before any of that, he worked as a wilderness ranger in the San Gorgonio Wilderness — the mountain at the top of this page. He's kept the habit of watching ridgelines for avalanches ever since.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is."— Manfred Eigen
Supporting Entrepreneurs and Their Investors
contact@concentrate.com · (949) 409-9509
120 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach, CA 92660
For advisory inquiries, portfolio partnerships, or acquisition of properties, email is best.