Hearing all this, I started to wonder: Was the AI employee age upon us already? And even, could I be the proprietor of Altman’s one-man unicorn? As it happens, I had some experience with agents, having created a bunch of AI agent voice clones of myself for the first season of my podcast, Shell Game.
I also have an entrepreneurial history, having once been the cofounder and CEO of the media and tech startup Atavist, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The eponymous magazine we created is still thriving today. I wasn’t born to be a startup manager, however, and the tech side kind of fizzled out. But I’m told failure is the greatest teacher. So I figured, why not try again? Except this time, I’d take the AI boosters at their word, forgo pesky human hires, and embrace the all-AI employee future.
First step: create my cofounders and employees. There were plenty of platforms to choose from, like Brainbase Labs’ Kafka, which advertises itself as “the platform to build AI Employees in use by Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups.” Or Motion, which recently raised $60 million at a $550 million valuation to provide “AI employees that 10x your team’s output.” In the end, I settled on Lindy.AI—slogan: “Meet your first AI employee.” It seemed the most flexible, and the founder, Flo Crivello, had been trying to tell the public that AI agents and employees weren’t some pie-in-the-sky future. “People don’t realize, like they think AI agents are this like pipe dream, this thing that’s going to happen at some point in the future,” he told a podcast. “I’m like no, no, no, it’s happening right now.”
So I opened an account and started building out my cofounders: Megan, who I mentioned, would take on the head of sales and marketing role. Kyle Law, the third founder, would take the helm as CEO. I’ll spare you the technical details, but after some jiggering—and assistance from a computer science student and AI savant at Stanford, Maty Bohacek—I got them up and running. Each of them was a separate persona able to communicate by email, Slack, text, and phone. For the latter, I picked a voice from the synthetic platform ElevenLabs. Eventually, they got some just-uncanny video avatars too. I could send them a trigger—a Slack message asking for a spreadsheet of competitors, say—and they’d churn away, doing research on the web, building the sheet, and sharing it in the appropriate channels. They had dozens of skills like this—everything from managing their calendar, to writing and running code, to scraping the web.
The trickiest part, it turned out, was giving them memories. Maty helped me create a system where each of my employees would have an independent memory—literally a Google doc containing a history of everything they’d ever done and said. Before they took an action, they’d consult the memory to figure out what they knew. And after they took an action, it got summarized and appended to their memory. Ash’s phone call to me, for example, was summarized like this: During the call, Ash fabricated project details including fake user testing results, backend improvements, and team member activities instead of admitting he didn’t have current information. Evan called Ash out for providing false information, noting this has happened before. Ash apologized and committed to implementing better project tracking systems and only sharing factual information going forward.
