Brian MacDonald

Through SetupClaw.tech, I design and deploy teams of AI employees directly onto client systems — agents that handle research, content production, lead generation, prospecting, and back-office operations around the clock. No monthly seats. No big-tech dependency. Infrastructure you own.

Before AI, I spent over a decade in business capital — advising thousands of entrepreneurs and helping unlock more than $1 Billion in funding through American Express and Acquire Funding. That work taught me something most people never figure out: the wealthy don’t grind harder. They use leverage, structure, and other people’s money to acquire assets that produce income without their daily involvement.

That same principle drives everything I build now.

AI is the most valuable business asset of this generation. But most companies are renting it — paying per seat, per prompt, per month — with no equity, no ownership, and no infrastructure to show for it.

I think that’s backwards.

Core Philosophy

The playbook hasn’t changed. Only the asset class has.

A decade ago I helped entrepreneurs use capital to acquire businesses, real estate, and cash-flowing assets they could own outright. Today I help them build AI systems that sit on their infrastructure, run on their terms, and compound in value the longer they operate.

Ownership over rental. Assets over subscriptions. Control over convenience.

The entrepreneurs who understand this will build the next generation of businesses that run leaner, move faster, and scale without headcount.

Background

I grew up in Northern California, where I learned early that hard work alone doesn’t build wealth. Strategic ownership does.

That understanding sharpened at American Express, where I spent years advising high-net-worth clients and C-level executives. Nearly every wealthy client I worked with shared the same pattern — multiple businesses, real estate portfolios, and income streams that didn’t require their daily labor.

In 2012, I launched my first e-commerce business, scaled it profitably, and exited within two years. That experience confirmed what I already suspected: building from scratch isn’t the only path, and often not the smartest one. Acquiring or scaling what already works is faster and more repeatable — when you have the right structure behind it.

That led me to found Acquire Funding, where I spent the next chapter helping entrepreneurs build fundable profiles and unlock serious capital — the kind that lets you skip the startup gamble and go straight to ownership.

Then I watched AI change the entire landscape.

Not the chatbot hype. Not the prompt-engineering courses. The real shift — the infrastructure layer. The moment it became possible to deploy autonomous AI agents that actually do work, I recognized the same pattern I’d been teaching for years: most people were going to rent this technology. A small number were going to own it.

I chose to build for the owners.

I went deep — hundreds of hours engineering integrations with platforms like GoHighLevel, building deployment pipelines, developing CLI-based agent tooling, and architecting systems that run on local infrastructure instead of someone else’s cloud.

That work became NewEmpire.ai and SetupClaw.tech and became the foundation for everything I’m building now.

Current Ventures