Bear Brown

Talent

Bear Brown & Co.

A professor sees the best. Hire them away, please.

What we do

We build AI-era web apps — interactive tools, dashboards, assessments, wrappers around your models and data — using open-source tools and recent graduates from top AI programs.

The code is real work, delivered fast and cheap. But the bigger thing we offer is a structured way to audition top AI talent on a real project. If you want to hire the person who built your app, we'll introduce you. No placement fee. No non-solicit. That's the point.

Two lanes. No middle.

Open Lane

$35/hr

For the 95% of what most clients need: wrapping your vision in open-source tools so people can actually use it.

Recent grad developers, supervised by Prof. Nik Bear Brown (Northeastern University, College of Engineering)
$35/hr, billed weekly
Open source only — MIT, Apache, BSD dependencies
No NDAs. If your project needs one, it belongs in the Bespoke Lane.
Client never shares proprietary IP with us. We build the wrapper; your secret sauce stays yours.
Client owns the code and can do whatever they want with it.
No warranty period. Bugs get fixed at the hourly rate. Retainers available.
Either side can stop at a week boundary. No long-term commitment.
Hire the grads. If you want to bring the developer in-house, we'll introduce you at no cost. If it happens mid-project, we cover the shadowing cost for a clean handoff.

Bespoke Lane

$200+/hr or equity

For the 5% that genuinely needs it.

Nik directly, possibly with vetted senior collaborators
$200+/hr, equity, or both — priced per engagement
NDAs, exclusivity, direct IP handling — all on the table
Meaningful engagement size. Not a weekend gig.

Why this works

For clients: Essential work done — and a possible first employee. You get a working app at a rate no dev shop can match, built on infrastructure you can maintain yourself, by someone you can hire if they're a fit. The structure of the engagement is itself the interview.
For grads: Real paid project experience, real professional references, and a direct path to a job with a client who's already seen their work.

The economics only work because Nik teaches hundreds of students a year and knows who the strong ones are. No dev shop can replicate the vetting. That's the moat, stated plainly.

What we build

  • Interactive assessment tools (sliders, spider charts, scoring dashboards)
  • Data viz and executive dashboards
  • LLM-wrapper applications over your existing models, data, or workflows
  • Agentic systems — multi-step automations, tool-using agents, workflow orchestration
  • Research tools — literature review, data gathering, analysis pipelines
  • Fine-tuned models on your open data
  • Internal tools, client-facing portals, prototypes
  • Anything where the goal is to make your vision usable by other people

We don't build your core model. We don't touch your training data. We don't want to see your customer list. We build the part that turns your work into something people can interact with.

How to start

Email Nik at bear@bearbrown.co with a rough description of what you want to build. We'll scope it in a short call, match you with a grad, and start week one.

Nik Bear Brown, PhD · Associate Teaching Professor, College of Engineering, Northeastern University bearbrown.co · nikbearbrown.com