Origin
Where the term came from
"Vibe founding" is about eighteen months old. At least six people and companies have used it to mean six different things, and nobody has been established as the person who coined it.
Why this page exists
Search the term and you will find confident definitions that disagree with each other. None of them shows its working. This page is the dated record: who used the words, when, and what they meant by them. Every entry has a source and a date you can check.
We teach a program under this name, so read this as our research rather than as a neutral encyclopedia. The dates are checkable either way, and where the record works against us, we have said so.
The record
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2 Feb 2025 | Andrej Karpathy posts the phrase "vibe coding" on X: describing what you want and letting an AI write the code. Merriam-Webster later credits him with the coinage, and Collins names it Word of the Year for 2025. |
| 20 Feb 2025 | Somebody registers the domain vibefounder.com. No page was ever archived, so what they had in mind is unknown. |
| 28 Mar 2025 | The earliest "vibe founder" we can find: a sceptical Hacker News comment about trying to "vibe code" or "vibe founder" your way to success without knowing how to check the work. |
| 28 Mar 2025 | vibefounding.com is registered by an owner who is not us. The next day the Internet Archive captures a placeholder there reading "Vibe Founding" and "Launching Soon". Nothing says what they planned. We bought the domain from them 17 months later. |
| 30 Mar 2025 | The earliest use we can find where somebody says what the words mean: a satirical post on the blog SiliconSnark. "What if startup building could be joyful again? What if it could be a vibe? That's vibe founding." It is a joke at the expense of startup culture, and it is the first definition on the record. |
| 1 Apr 2025 | The Indian payments company Razorpay runs an April Fools' campaign for "VIBE Founder", an AI that supposedly does the hiring, fundraising and sales while you work on your personal brand. Their CEO posts: "Taking vibe coding to the next level, with vibe founder." |
| 18 May 2025 | Clarence Wooten publishes "Introducing the Vibe Startup", a close cousin of the term that never uses these two words. |
| 17 Sep 2025 | The AI company siift publishes "Be honest, are you vibe-founding?". Here the word is an accusation: building a business on emotion instead of evidence, with AI chatbots making it easier to feel validated. |
| 10 Nov 2025 | A manifesto on Medium claims "Vibe Founding" as an original concept and defines it as building from feeling, ahead of data. The claim does not survive the dates on this page: the words were published by other people more than seven months earlier. |
| 27 Feb 2026 | A researcher posts a case study opening with "We introduce the concept of vibe founding", defined as running a whole startup with AI as an execution partner, across documentation, filings, marketing and operations. It is a preprint, which means it has not been peer reviewed. |
| 6 Jul 2026 | The term reaches a masthead. A Forbes contributor, Dr. Marcus Collins, publishes "Vibe Founding Might Be The Last Frontier For Startups In An AI World". In the article the phrase belongs to Jim Hornthal, who founded Preview Travel and has taught the Lean LaunchPad course at Berkeley and Stanford. He uses it for an era in which building is so cheap that many ideas can be tested quickly. Two cautions: this is the contributor network, not the Forbes newsroom, and the phrase appears once in the body. |
| Aug 2026 | We adopt the name, seventeen months after the earliest use above. We did not coin it, and neither, as far as the record shows, did anyone else who has claimed it. |
Dates come from page metadata, Internet Archive captures, domain registry records and post timestamps. Our full working, including sources we rejected, is available on request.
Six meanings, still competing
A joke about startup culture
Founding by feel. No business plan, no market sizing, flow over frameworks.
SiliconSnark, March 2025
A joke product
An AI that runs the whole company while the founder works on their image.
Razorpay, April Fools' 2025
An insult
Running a business on emotion and easy AI encouragement instead of evidence. Developers now use "vibe founder" for someone whose AI-built product needs rescuing.
siift, September 2025; Hacker News, 2026
A spiritual practice
Building from feeling, with emotion treated as the thing to validate before anyone is asked to pay.
A Medium manifesto, November 2025
A way of operating
Running an entire company with AI as an execution partner: code, documents, filings, marketing, support.
A preprint case study, February 2026
An era
A period when building is cheap enough that many ideas get tested fast, so the scarce skills become choosing the right problem and earning trust.
Jim Hornthal, quoted by a Forbes contributor, July 2026
Those are not variations on one idea. An insult and a spiritual practice are not the same thing. Anyone who tells you what vibe founding "really" means is choosing one of these and hiding the other five.
What nobody can claim
- That they coined it. The phrase shows up in several unrelated places within about eight weeks of vibe coding. That is what happens to a word pattern once it catches: vibe marketing, vibe design, vibe startup, vibe founding.
- That there is a settled definition. No dictionary lists it. No peer-reviewed paper analyses it. Academic work on AI and company building from 2025 and 2026 uses other words.
- That it is proven. There is no body of evidence about vibe founding yet, only people using the words and meaning different things.
- That we own it. The term is descriptive and it is in general use. Nobody owns it, including us.
Which meaning we use, and why
We use it in the plain sense, the one closest to the last two entries above: a founder's intent, captured and remembered, structured by proven business methods, and carried out by AI agents working together.
We reject the spiritual reading, because asking how an idea makes people feel is a way to hear encouraging things from people who will never pay. We accept the insult as a fair warning: building a business on good feelings is exactly the failure to avoid.
That is a choice, not a fact, and this page is where we show it as one.