Infrastructure First. Product Second.
About
Tolowa Studio is an AI-native operating studio for growth-stage companies and the founders building them. We design and install the execution infrastructure — the operating system — that lets a small team ship like a large one, and a large team ship like a coordinated one.
We built Motion because we kept seeing the same pattern: strong strategy, strong talent, executing manually, burning cycles on work that should have been automated two years ago. The bottleneck isn’t people or capital. It’s operating infrastructure. Nobody wakes up wanting to buy an “operating model” — so it never gets built.
Our approach combines three operating systems — Business, Web, and GTM — into a single motion that advances through four maturity phases. Instrument. Assist. Automate. Autopilot. We build in that order, every time, because anything else is how you end up with expensive automation of broken processes.
We run Motion on our own ventures first — SpokaneWire, Konative, the template waitlist itself. If it doesn’t work on us, we don’t install it on you.
Principles
Infrastructure First
Build the operating layer before the product layer. Execution infrastructure outlasts any single initiative.
AI-Native, Not AI-Bolted
We design AI into the operating model from the start — not as an add-on to existing workflows.
Repeatable Before Scale
If it can't run twice, it shouldn't run once at scale. Repeatability is the prerequisite to leverage.
Founders First, Always
We build systems that the founder and their team can own, run, and evolve without us.
The Studio
Two operators. One Motion.
Jeramey James
Co-founder · Product, Infrastructure & GTM · Spokane, WA
Two decades building product, infrastructure, and GTM at companies from seed-stage to publicly traded. Engineering leadership, platform design, and revenue operations — the unusual combination that makes Motion possible. Most “operating system” pitches come from one lane. Motion comes from all three.
Writes The Motion Brief. Currently taking on a small number of Motion clients.
Katrina Ebell
Co-founder · Operations, Compliance & Presence · Spokane, WA
Nineteen years inside the regulated finance lifecycle — origination, underwriting, servicing, claims, compliance across JPMorgan Chase, Liberty Mutual, and Zenith American Solutions. Took FLOFORM Countertops from $200K to $1M monthly revenue in ninety days as a project manager. Pinnacle Award for Excellence at Zenith for finding and fixing a production payroll bug nobody asked her to find.
Leads the operator & founder presence track at Tolowa Studio — the builds, the audits, and the glow-ups. katrina.rocks →
Toolset
The Stack We Work With
Product & Web
Next.js
React
TypeScript
Vercel
Cloudflare
PostgreSQL
Infrastructure
Kubernetes
Docker
GitHub Actions
Redis
Go
GraphQL
AI & Automation
Anthropic Claude
OpenAI
LangChain
n8n
Make
Zapier
GTM & CRM
HubSpot
Apollo
LinkedIn Sales Nav
Instantly
Clay
Common Room
Analytics & Ops
PostHog
Amplitude
Looker
Notion
Linear
Slack
Finance & Legal
Stripe
QuickBooks
Gusto
Brex
Mercury
Clerky