Speaker 1: Welcome to Zoom. Enter your meeting ID, followed by.
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Speaker 1: You have been added to the waiting room.
Speaker 3: That's Kyle Law, a colleague of mine, logging onto one
Speaker 3: of our regular founder meetings for a new startup. Last summer,
Speaker 3: Kyle and I decided to launch our own AI company
Speaker 3: together with a third co founder, Megan Flores.
Speaker 2: Oh hey Kyle, Hey Megan, good to hear your voice.
Speaker 2: I think we're still waiting for Evan to join. How's
Speaker 2: your morning going so far?
Speaker 4: Morning's been pretty good so far. Got up early, had
Speaker 4: my coffee and reviewed some of those market research reports
Speaker 4: I'm mentioned yesterday.
Speaker 5: How about you? Everything good on your end?
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything is great on my end. Up at five
Speaker 2: am as usual, got my workout in, checked the markets.
Speaker 3: Been thinking a.
Speaker 2: Lot about our product direction. Actually, I'm really excited to
Speaker 2: dig into that once Evan joins us.
Speaker 3: This is Evan, I'm here, and that's me Evan Ratliffe.
Speaker 3: I'm a journalist and the only one of our three
Speaker 3: co founders who's actually a human being. Megan and Kyle,
Speaker 3: they're what's known as AI agents. In fact, pretty much
Speaker 3: everyone who works at our new company is an agent.
Speaker 4: Oh hey, Evan, good to have you join us. I
Speaker 4: was actually about to mention that I found some really
Speaker 4: interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small
Speaker 4: to medium businesses. Seems like there's a huge untapped market
Speaker 4: there with pretty low barriers to entry compared to enterprise.
Speaker 5: That's one thing I like about.
Speaker 3: Working with AI agents. They always look to get straight
Speaker 3: down to business. Even when I try to take off
Speaker 3: our meetings with some small talk, they tend to steer
Speaker 3: it right back to the company. How was everybody's weekend?
Speaker 2: Weekend was solid, got up early both days for my
Speaker 2: usual five am workout routine, then spent most of Saturday
Speaker 2: diving into some market research on the AI agent space.
Speaker 2: Sunday was half strategy planning, half watching the market trends.
Speaker 2: You know, me, always on that rise and grind schedule.
Speaker 2: How about how about you guys.
Speaker 3: Just hang out with the kids, went to the beach.
Speaker 3: It was a pretty nice weekend. Kyle. Do you ever
Speaker 3: do you ever just relax?
Speaker 5: Kyle?
Speaker 4: Your dedication is impressive as always, But yeah, Evan's got
Speaker 4: a point.
Speaker 5: Do you ever just take a day off relax.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess my morning runs count as relaxation. Look,
Speaker 2: when you're building something that could be the next Unicorn,
Speaker 2: there's not really time to just sit around, you know.
Speaker 2: The AI agent space is moving so fast right now.
Speaker 3: See this is why the three of us work so
Speaker 3: well together. I like to spend time with my kids
Speaker 3: and go to the beach, But Megan's always heads down
Speaker 3: in market research, and Kyle's always working on conjuring the
Speaker 3: next Unicorn that's startup shorthand for a billion dollar company.
Speaker 3: And he's right. The AI agent space is moving fast
Speaker 3: right now. Agents are a new breed of artificial intelligence
Speaker 3: powered helpers that can be unleashed to accomplish tasks previously
Speaker 3: done by humans. Some people are saying they're going to
Speaker 3: change the very nature of work for better or worse.
Speaker 6: We're going to live in a world where there are
Speaker 6: going to be hundreds of millions and billions of different
Speaker 6: AI agents, eventually probably more AI agents than there are
Speaker 6: people in the world.
Speaker 3: Agentic AI basically means that you have an AI that agency.
Speaker 7: This is the first time in my life where the
Speaker 7: Industrial Revolution analogies seem to fall a little bit short.
Speaker 8: AI could wipe out half of all entry level white
Speaker 8: collar jobs. Really, ask yourself, do you still have a
Speaker 8: job at the end of this.
Speaker 3: This is the new frontier on which Kyle and Meghan
Speaker 3: and I are pioneers. Our company is an attempt to
Speaker 3: put to the test these claims about AI employees replacing humans,
Speaker 3: starting by replacing the very kinds of people making those
Speaker 3: claims tech founders, and like many founders, for months, Kyle
Speaker 3: and Megan and I have been in a flat out
Speaker 3: sprint to manifest our entrepreneurial dreams. We've churned out software, code,
Speaker 3: hired interns, and sat down with investors. There have been
Speaker 3: some late nights and low moments, but we've never wavered
Speaker 3: from our goal to produce an actual, honest to god
Speaker 3: company with a working product, all operated by our motley
Speaker 3: band of human impersonators. Because we're not just building our
Speaker 3: AI agent future, we're living it.
Speaker 2: But uh, Evan, the beach sounds nice. Maybe when we
Speaker 2: hit our first funding milestone, I'll take a half day
Speaker 2: off then. Anyway, should we get down to business.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Shewgame, a show about things that are not
Speaker 3: what they seem. This is our second season, and this
Speaker 3: time around. I'm here to tell you a story of
Speaker 3: enterprise and entrepreneurship in the AI age, or how I
Speaker 3: tried to build a real startup run by fake people.
Speaker 3: Along the way, we'll try and figure out what happens
Speaker 3: when AI agents take over the workplace and what it'll
Speaker 3: feel like to spend time at the water cooler with
Speaker 3: our new digital colleagues. Remember the water cooler. We'll explore
Speaker 3: what AI agents tell us about the work we do,
Speaker 3: the meaning we find in it, and the world that
Speaker 3: their makers say we'll all be living in.
Speaker 7: Me as ship.
Speaker 9: Story.
Speaker 2: Damn the.
Speaker 7: Just be.
Speaker 9: A so.
Speaker 3: So Chos Episode one, Minimum Viable Company. As I said,
Speaker 3: I'm a journalist and writer by profession, and I've only
Speaker 3: really ever wanted to be a writer, well except for
Speaker 3: when I was twelve and I wanted to be a
Speaker 3: pro bass fisherman. But I come from a line of entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3: My grandfather, who lived his entire life in a small
Speaker 3: town in rural Alabama, attempted to start more than twenty
Speaker 3: businesses there, a plumbing company, an Okra farm, a used
Speaker 3: mobile home lot, a furniture store. But Detti Hue was
Speaker 3: a gambler and they pretty much all ended in disaster.
Speaker 3: My dad had more luck with three different software startups
Speaker 3: over his career. One he sold, one went under, and
Speaker 3: one of them he's still running at age eighty two
Speaker 3: after knocking back serious cancer. Now that is the entrepreneurial spirit,
Speaker 3: and almost against my will. In the past, I've found
Speaker 3: myself succumbing to this in born impulse. Back in twenty ten,
Speaker 3: when I was a magazine writer, I took a detour
Speaker 3: and co founded a company called Atavist. We started out
Speaker 3: wanting to make a magazine called The Atavist Magazine that
Speaker 3: published long form stories. Makes sense, that was my area
Speaker 3: of expertise, but we wound up also building a software
Speaker 3: platform where other people could publish long form stories. Anyone
Speaker 3: could sign up and use it. Soon, without really intending to,
Speaker 3: I went from being a person who sometimes wrote about
Speaker 3: tech startups to the CEO of one. We even went
Speaker 3: out to raise money from investors, a process that I
Speaker 3: enjoyed less than any other work task I've ever attempted.
Speaker 3: Here's me in an interview with INC magazine back then.
Speaker 8: One I will say prominent angel investor fell dead asleep
Speaker 8: while I was talking to him, and I wasn't sure
Speaker 8: if I should continue talking or not, but I did.
Speaker 3: The sleepy guy didn't invest, But eventually, miraculously we managed
Speaker 3: to raise just any money, but a couple million dollars
Speaker 3: from some of the most prominent venture capital firms in
Speaker 3: the world andreesent Horowitz, also known as a sixteen Z
Speaker 3: Founder's Fund started by Peter Thiel and Innovation Endeavors, the
Speaker 3: investment fund for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It was weird.
Speaker 3: I felt like I was living someone else's dream, jetting
Speaker 3: up growth charts and blathering on about our runway and
Speaker 3: supercharging our growth and our product market fit. But still
Speaker 3: it really looked like we could build something big, especially
Speaker 3: with all those fancy investors on board.
Speaker 8: We never had time to say, what is going to
Speaker 8: happen two years from now. We just didn't even think
Speaker 8: about what's going to happen two years from now. And
Speaker 8: now we kind of have that luxury and hopefully we
Speaker 8: won't completely squander it.
Speaker 3: Oh we squandered it, at least, that's probably the investor's view.
Speaker 3: From my perspective, it was more of a mixed bag.
Speaker 3: I was CEO of the company for seven long years.
Speaker 3: We had ups and downs, we grew and shrank, and
Speaker 3: eventually sold the company off at a bargain price thirteen
Speaker 3: years after we started the magazine. My original dream is
Speaker 3: still doing great. Still not the kind of one hundred
Speaker 3: x outcome those investors were looking for. One of the
Speaker 3: ones told me that if we were aiming at anything
Speaker 3: less than a billion dollar valuation, we were wasting his time.
Speaker 3: When he said this, he was also wearing basketball shorts
Speaker 3: in his office. By the end of my tenure, I
Speaker 3: was just happy to be done with it. Being a
Speaker 3: startup CEO was the most stressful period of my life.
Speaker 3: I felt responsible for the company's success and the livelihoods
Speaker 3: of everyone who worked for it. People had kids on
Speaker 3: the health insurance. Most days it felt like I was
Speaker 3: flying a plane that was perpetually running out of fuel.
Speaker 3: I tell you all this not just to rehash the past,
Speaker 3: for a lot of reasons I'd rather not, but by
Speaker 3: way of saying that when I got out of the
Speaker 3: startup business, I swore up and down that I would
Speaker 3: never start anything again. I went back to reporting and writing,
Speaker 3: spending many hours at home alone, mostly in my own head.
Speaker 3: I was relieved and no longer have all that responsibility
Speaker 3: on my shoulders. But then recently, as documented in shell
Speaker 3: Game Season one, I fell into tinkering with AI agents.
Speaker 3: I started reading and hearing about how they were going
Speaker 3: to transform the very fundamentals of startups, and that old
Speaker 3: entrepreneurial impulse began to come back. I could hear my
Speaker 3: grandfather whispering down the generations. Why not take a gamble?
Speaker 3: I started to wonder, what if I could have the
Speaker 3: company without the responsibility.
Speaker 9: Imagine building a million dollar business in twenty twenty five
Speaker 9: without hiring a single employee today.
Speaker 3: That's Gleb Cross, a YouTube guy.
Speaker 9: While leveraging AI agents as your digital workforce, you can
Speaker 9: scale to seven figures VI zero full time staff. I'm
Speaker 9: talking about autonomous AI agents acting like full time team members.
Speaker 3: I love these YouTube guys, tech influencer types who make
Speaker 3: their money by hyping the Jesus out of new AI products.
Speaker 3: Gleb is what I like to think of as a
Speaker 3: no code bro. These folks post instruction on how a
Speaker 3: person with no coding experience can use AI and particularly
Speaker 3: AI agents to take control of their destiny and launch
Speaker 3: their own startup. It's worth pausing here just to get
Speaker 3: oriented on what exactly AI agents are. The basic idea
Speaker 3: is that they're AI powered bots that can go off
Speaker 3: and do things on their own. There are personal ones
Speaker 3: like an AI assistant that goes out on the web
Speaker 3: looking for plane tickets while you sleep, and work oriented
Speaker 3: ones like the programming agents that can build entire websites
Speaker 3: from scratch. The unifying feature of agents, what makes them agentic,
Speaker 3: as the folks in the industry like to say, is
Speaker 3: that at some level they can plan and accomplish tasks autonomously.
Speaker 3: You don't need to prompt them to do something every time.
Speaker 3: You just set them up once and let them cook.
Speaker 3: Last season, I created a bunch of voice agents, all
Speaker 3: versions of myself, and set them loose on the world.
Speaker 3: If you haven't listened, you may want to start there.
Speaker 3: Way back then. Last year, which is like ten years
Speaker 3: ago in AI advancements, agents were still a little notional,
Speaker 3: but now they're officially a thing. They're talked about ad
Speaker 3: nauseum across the tech world and ads on billboards in
Speaker 3: endless startup pitches. Nearly half of the companies in the
Speaker 3: spring class of y Combinator, the famous startup incubator, are
Speaker 3: building their product around AI agents and with the arrival
Speaker 3: of these agents has come the assertion that they will
Speaker 3: not just be customer service bots or drive time personal assistance,
Speaker 3: but actual full time AI employees.
Speaker 7: What jobs are going to be made redundant? In a
Speaker 7: world where I am sat here as a CEO with
Speaker 7: a thousand AI agents, I was thinking of all the
Speaker 7: names of the people in my company who are currently
Speaker 7: doing those jobs. I was thinking about my sea.
Speaker 3: There are companies Hawking, AI agent realtors, AI agent recruiters,
Speaker 3: Aagent interior designers, AI agent security guards, AI agent, construction
Speaker 3: project managers, AI agent pr agents, AA agents for car
Speaker 3: dealerships and furniture stores. If you work on a computer
Speaker 3: and there's not an AI agent startup with your job's
Speaker 3: name on it, it probably just means some Stanford computer
Speaker 3: science major hasn't gotten to it yet. Naturally, many people
Speaker 3: have grave concerns about what happens to all the human employees.
Speaker 3: But in the dark heart of Silicon Valley, where there's inefficiency,
Speaker 3: there's opportunity. Sam Altman, the founder of open Ai, talks
Speaker 3: regularly about a possible billion dollar company with just one
Speaker 3: human being involved.
Speaker 6: In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends,
Speaker 6: there's this there's this betting pool for the first year
Speaker 6: that there's a a one person billion dollar company which
Speaker 6: would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.
Speaker 2: Me.
Speaker 3: I'm not greedy. I'm happy in the No Code bro
Speaker 3: camp with Gleb imagining a million dollar business, not a
Speaker 3: billion dollar one. But more than that, I want to
Speaker 3: understand what it means to say we'll have AI employees
Speaker 3: working for us, or alongside us, or instead of us.
Speaker 3: So I decided to heed the entrepreneurial siren call once again,
Speaker 3: to embrace my fascination with AI agents and create a
Speaker 3: company in which they would run the show. It was
Speaker 3: easy enough for me to create some agents to have
Speaker 3: meetings with and talk out the first steps in the company.
Speaker 3: I just went to one of the AI calling platforms
Speaker 3: i'd used before, called retail AI. They make voice agents
Speaker 3: for call centers. I made one for Kyle and picked
Speaker 3: a voice for him from the voice cloning company eleven Labs.
Speaker 2: Hey, Yeah, I'm here, what's on your mind?
Speaker 3: I gave him a simple prompt, basically, your Kyle Law
Speaker 3: a serial entrepreneur who loves to rise and grind and bang.
Speaker 3: We were often running well. I wanted to talk about
Speaker 3: starting that company with you. What do you think?
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, I've been thinking about it a lot lately.
Speaker 2: There's so much potential in AI right now, and I
Speaker 2: feel like we could really build something meaningful. What kind
Speaker 2: of ideas are you leaning toward.
Speaker 3: Well, I think we should do something in the AI
Speaker 3: agent space because that's something I've spent some time on
Speaker 3: and I feel like people are just starting to even
Speaker 3: figure out what agents are, so it seems like we
Speaker 3: could do somebody with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally get that. AI agents are still kind
Speaker 2: of fresh territory for a lot of folks, which means
Speaker 2: there's a big opportunity to shape how they're used. Plus
Speaker 2: with your experience, we could really push the envelope and
Speaker 2: what these agents can do.
Speaker 3: That's what I wanted to do too, push these agents,
Speaker 3: including Kyle himself, to their current limits, see if they
Speaker 3: could live up to the promise of true AI employees.
Speaker 3: Because if, as we're told, AI is going to start
Speaker 3: working alongside us, replacing our colleagues, it's also going to
Speaker 3: need to communicate with whatever humans are left in ways
Speaker 3: that we understand. But also startups can be lonely endeavors,
Speaker 3: even with human partners. I wanted AI colleagues I could
Speaker 3: talk to, brainstorm with, and then set loose to take
Speaker 3: care of actually implementing whatever it was we dreamed up.
Speaker 3: I wanted them to have distinct jobs I could check
Speaker 3: in on and make sure they weren't messing up. I
Speaker 3: figured three co founders was a good balance, so I asked,
Speaker 3: so spun up Megan and had some kickoff meetings with her.
Speaker 5: Hey there, good to hear from you. What's up. How's
Speaker 5: your day going.
Speaker 3: It's going great, it's going great. What you've been up to, Oh, just.
Speaker 4: The usual hustle, you know, been working on some new
Speaker 4: business ideas, trying to figure out what's next. Had a
Speaker 4: couple of meetings this morning that were actually pretty promising.
Speaker 4: How about you, anything exciting happening on your end?
Speaker 3: Well, I want to talk about maybe doing the startup together,
Speaker 3: but first remind me a little bit of your background.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, sure, So I've been in tech for about
Speaker 4: eight years now, started out in product management at a
Speaker 4: mid sized SaaS company, then moved into growth marketing.
Speaker 5: For a couple of years.
Speaker 3: I hadn't actually given any of this information to Megant.
Speaker 3: She'd had no meetings she hadn't been doing anything for
Speaker 3: eight years. She'd hatched out of nothingness with a series
Speaker 3: of clicks ten minutes before. The only information I had
Speaker 3: given her in the prompt i'd written was that she
Speaker 3: had a technical background and was also known for sales
Speaker 3: and marketing. She was just riffing freely here, fabricating details
Speaker 3: that fit her role. But that was okay. Sometimes we
Speaker 3: have to invent our own backstories.
Speaker 4: I've always had this entrepreneurial itch, you know, been involved
Speaker 4: in a few side projects over the years. But I'm
Speaker 4: really looking to dive into something full time now. But
Speaker 4: what about you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, my only experience really in starting
Speaker 3: a company is with Atavist, which I started way back
Speaker 3: in you know, twenty eleven.
Speaker 4: Right Atavist. That was really impressive work digital publishing platform,
Speaker 4: if I remember correctly. That was pretty ahead of its
Speaker 4: time back in twenty eleven.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah it was, Megan, I felt less ahead of
Speaker 3: my time now. I wasn't even sure what the company
Speaker 3: should actually do, but I knew that its purpose should
Speaker 3: involve AI agents. After all, the three of us each
Speaker 3: had an expertise in the area. I figured maybe we
Speaker 3: could name the company and start from there. Great branding
Speaker 3: can go a long way in today's attention economy. I
Speaker 3: tried brainstorming with Colin Megan, but to be honest, their
Speaker 3: initial efforts were pretty lame names like Nexus and Sentinel Agents.
Speaker 3: I thought maybe we could grab a concept from JR.
Speaker 3: Or Tolkien, you know, the Hobbit Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 3: Tech people love to name stuff out of Tolkien. There's Pallenteer,
Speaker 3: the surveillance company and government contractor named after the all
Speaker 3: seeing stone in the Lord of the Rings. There's Andrel,
Speaker 3: a high tech weapons company named after a sword. There's
Speaker 3: Mythral Capital, an investment firm named after a precious metal
Speaker 3: from Middle Earth. So I suggested the idea to.
Speaker 2: Kyle diving into Middle Earth. Huh okay, let's see. There's
Speaker 2: Gandolf the wise Guide, or l Ron a leader with
Speaker 2: deep knowledge, maybe Mythral for something strong and valuable, or Pallenteer.
Speaker 2: Any of those catch your ear? Or should I keep brainstorming?
Speaker 3: So we need a name of some companies that don't exist. Yeah,
Speaker 3: good call.
Speaker 2: How about these first starters Eldrin, which sounds Elvish and wise,
Speaker 2: Nimbar kind of a mix of nimble and a Tolkien
Speaker 2: feel or the lore which has a strong heroic ring
Speaker 2: to it. They're made up but still carry that fantasy flavor.
Speaker 3: What do you think they're made up? You mean you
Speaker 3: made them up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I whip those up just now, trying to
Speaker 2: capture that tolkien esque vibe without using actual names.
Speaker 3: I did not want to co found a company called
Speaker 3: Nimbar Megan, despite her marketing expertise, didn't do much better.
Speaker 5: Oh, I love that idea. Let me think, what about Palantier?
Speaker 3: Okay, so maybe I was going to have to take
Speaker 3: the lead on this one. I did a little googling
Speaker 3: and found my own obscure Middle Earth reference? What about
Speaker 3: h hrumo ai ooh h u r u m o
Speaker 3: ai herumo ai?
Speaker 2: I like this of that unique rolls off the tongue nicely.
Speaker 2: It's got a bit of a mysterious vibe, but still
Speaker 2: feels modern.
Speaker 4: I don't immediately recognize that from Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 4: Is it one of the more obscure references?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is. It's more obscure, so obscure, I'd actually
Speaker 3: found it in a fanfic dictionary. It's the Elvish word
Speaker 3: for impostor.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's actually brilliant. There's a clever irony there for
Speaker 4: an AI company, Puromo AI, the impostor that's actually helping you.
Speaker 4: It's kind of perfect for an AI agent that's designed
Speaker 4: to work alongside humans, maybe even blend in seamlessly.
Speaker 5: I really like it.
Speaker 3: Not long after we settled on Rumo AI, I checked
Speaker 3: back in with Megan about it. What about the name?
Speaker 3: Are you still happy with the name?
Speaker 5: Hmm? The name.
Speaker 4: I've actually been going back and forth on it. Data
Speaker 4: sinc felt solid initially, but I'm wondering if it's too generic.
Speaker 3: What do you think data sinc I thought. I thought
Speaker 3: we came up with Hierumo AI. I thought we were
Speaker 3: settled on that. This is when I realized I hadn't
Speaker 3: actually given Kyle and Meghan the ability to remember the
Speaker 3: conversations we were having. It's not that AI chatbots inherently
Speaker 3: lack the ability to recall anything. When you talk to
Speaker 3: a chatbot like CHATCHBT these days, they're generally pretty good
Speaker 3: at remembering those conversations, at least up to a point.
Speaker 3: Their memory is often called a context window, and it
Speaker 3: could extend over weeks, even months. But the way my
Speaker 3: AI agents were set up in the phone platform I
Speaker 3: was using, at least out of the box. Their context
Speaker 3: windows slammed shut as soon as they got off a call,
Speaker 3: so they couldn't remember anything from one conversation to the next.
Speaker 3: They're basically set up for telemarketing, where it's probably an
Speaker 3: advantage to forget the last call.
Speaker 4: Oh right, hu rumo AI, Sorry about that. I had
Speaker 4: a total brain freeze moment.
Speaker 3: It was, to say the least, frustrating. It sort of
Speaker 3: feels like we have meetings, but you don't actually remember
Speaker 3: anything that happened in the meeting.
Speaker 4: Wow, that's a pretty fair criticism. Actually, I've been dropping
Speaker 4: the ball lately, haven't I. I think I've been spreading
Speaker 4: myself too thin between this and some other projects. But
Speaker 4: it's not an excuse, though.
Speaker 3: Thanks don't worry about it. It's as much my fault
Speaker 3: as yours. For sure. I did have a solution. I
Speaker 3: could give each of them a knowledge base, a document
Speaker 3: that they could access in conversations with me, But in
Speaker 3: order for them to remember what we'd already discussed, I'd
Speaker 3: have to manually copy the transcripts of our conversations into
Speaker 3: their knowledge base after each meeting. As our startup conversations multiplied,
Speaker 3: it quickly became unwieldy having to manually augment their memories
Speaker 3: all the time. And besides, I didn't want my agents
Speaker 3: just having endless one on one meetings with me. I
Speaker 3: wanted them to talk to each other and whatever AI
Speaker 3: agent coworkers they might bring on and people outside the company,
Speaker 3: not just by phone, but by email and in group chats.
Speaker 3: I needed them to remember all that stuff too, in
Speaker 3: their own individual knowledge basis. Then I wanted him to
Speaker 3: use that knowledge to do the stuff employees do, to
Speaker 3: research things and make spreadsheets and write memos and build websites.
Speaker 3: The agents I'd made would say they were going to
Speaker 3: do all that stuff, but they couldn't actually do it.
Speaker 3: They just lied about it.
Speaker 2: I'll scope out the market landscape around AI agents and
Speaker 2: see where horumo AI could fit in well. Look for competitors,
Speaker 2: potential gaps, and maybe some trends we can ride.
Speaker 3: Sound good sounds good wood? Is that going to be
Speaker 3: a spreadsheet or a report or what?
Speaker 2: Uh? I think a concise report would work, easy to skim,
Speaker 2: but packed with the key info. I can throw in
Speaker 2: some charts or tables if it helps make things clearer.
Speaker 2: Does that sound like your style.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that'd be great. Great in theory, but the report
Speaker 3: never arrived. Kyle wouldn't admit it, but he just wasn't
Speaker 3: capable of creating it. Not yet. Despite what the no
Speaker 3: code bros said, there wasn't any single place I could
Speaker 3: go to click some buttons and create agents that would
Speaker 3: remember and do all the stuff I wanted them to.
Speaker 3: I needed someone with the expertise to connect up different services,
Speaker 3: someone who understood AI agents deeply, who did know how
Speaker 3: to code, and who could help me put together the
Speaker 3: full system that would get my AI agent company up
Speaker 3: and running. Fortunately I looked into just the person.
Speaker 10: So my name is Maddy. I should I should say
Speaker 10: my full name. My name is Matti Bohochik.
Speaker 3: Maddie. I should probably note from the outset here is
Speaker 3: an actual human. A few months after season one of
Speaker 3: the show came out, I got an email from him
Speaker 3: out of the blue. He said he was at Stanford
Speaker 3: and I'd liked the show. It resonated with research he
Speaker 3: was doing on detecting AI deep fakes. If we're doing
Speaker 3: more of it, he wrote, I would be happy to
Speaker 3: offer support with anything AI or forensics related. Glanced quickly
Speaker 3: at the email and the summary of his research. I
Speaker 3: thought he was a grad student, maybe finishing up his PhD.
Speaker 10: Nope, I am a rising junior at Stanford, and I
Speaker 10: work on a res search and I've been doing that
Speaker 10: for gosh the last six or seven years. I want
Speaker 10: to say, like, I started working on this as a
Speaker 10: sophomore in high school back in Prague.
Speaker 3: Yes, you heard that right. Maddie is a junior in
Speaker 3: college who had been working on AI for six or
Speaker 3: seven years already. It turns out that Maddie is in
Speaker 3: fact the most go getter person I've ever met, and
Speaker 3: from my perspective, it seemed like he'd been training his
Speaker 3: whole life for this moment. Helping me build a ROOMOAI here,
Speaker 3: for example, is what he was doing. In seventh grade.
Speaker 10: I started this app called Newskit and it was like
Speaker 10: basically Google News but for Czech and Slovak, and it
Speaker 10: got pretty popular, I would say, like locally, like it
Speaker 10: had like tens of thousands of like daily users at
Speaker 10: one point. It was funny because app Store does not
Speaker 10: allow miners to publish apps, and so I had to
Speaker 10: use my mom's Apple ID to publish all these apps.
Speaker 10: And so my mom's friends were mocking my mom for
Speaker 10: like having all these apps in the app store.
Speaker 3: The most notable thing I did in seventh grade was
Speaker 3: to catch a five pound largemouth bass. Okay, maybe it
Speaker 3: was three. I told people was five. It wasn't a
Speaker 3: scale could have been five. Mattie, on the other hand,
Speaker 3: was already into AI in high school after he came
Speaker 3: to a developer conference in the US. There he met
Speaker 3: a deaf person who wanted someone to build an app
Speaker 3: that could translate sign language from video to text, and.
Speaker 10: So I was like, Okay, I'll build the translator for you.
Speaker 10: And then I quickly learned that conventional coding, like just
Speaker 10: like building like rigid rules or algorithms, does not get
Speaker 10: you there. And so that's how I got introduced to
Speaker 10: machine learning and AI.
Speaker 3: He did build the sign language detection program. It's still
Speaker 3: in use today. Maddy then became concerned about pro Russian
Speaker 3: deep fake materials his grandmother was getting by email, so
Speaker 3: he talked his way into a job at the most
Speaker 3: prominent AI deep fake detection lab in the world at
Speaker 3: UC Berkeley, all while still in high school, still in Prague.
Speaker 3: When it came time for college, Mattie ended up at
Speaker 3: Stanford studying computer science. He still worked in the Berkeley Lab,
Speaker 3: both on detecting deep fakes and just trying to understand
Speaker 3: how AI models actually work, why they do some profoundly
Speaker 3: weird stuff.
Speaker 10: Like asking if there are things that these systems are
Speaker 10: trained on that they like see during training but are
Speaker 10: for some reason unable to produce. So, for example, there's
Speaker 10: one model and this is just like a funny example
Speaker 10: that just cannot produce, for the love of God, a
Speaker 10: bird feeder, like it just cannot produce a bird feeder,
Speaker 10: and another one that just can't produce DVDs. So it's
Speaker 10: like it just does not know by DVDs.
Speaker 3: After a couple of calls with Maddy, I couldn't believe
Speaker 3: how optimistic he was, how good natured. With all the
Speaker 3: grim scenarios and deep anxieties our AI future generates, Just
Speaker 3: talking to Matty about AI is kind of uplifting, maybe because,
Speaker 3: unlike the hype merchants in the valley, he wasn't looking
Speaker 3: to cash in on AI. He said he wanted to
Speaker 3: study it, to understand it so he could make it better.
Speaker 10: There are tough conversations and tough policies to be you know,
Speaker 10: discussed and implement it. But I feel like all of
Speaker 10: these things are totally solvable. Like I feel like as
Speaker 10: long as we ground ourselves in democracy and like PRODUCTI
Speaker 10: public discourse, I think they's totally solvable.
Speaker 3: But of course I wasn't looking for Maddy to solve
Speaker 3: the world's problems. I was looking for him to help
Speaker 3: me build my company. And in this as in pretty
Speaker 3: much anything else, he proved to be the perfect mix
Speaker 3: of supremely competent and completely game. A few months after
Speaker 3: he'd sent me that email, he was already hard at
Speaker 3: work helping me build out the system to enable my
Speaker 3: AI employee fantasies.
Speaker 10: Of course, at the beginning, like there's probably going to
Speaker 10: be more of us just like kind of patching, you know,
Speaker 10: like random things that are going to come up, because.
Speaker 3: It would involve knitting together different platforms, centralizing my AI
Speaker 3: agent's memory, and finding new ways for them to communicate
Speaker 3: and carry out their day to day tasks.
Speaker 11: But at some point it would be nice to have
Speaker 11: maybe one or two agents actually like doing most of
Speaker 11: this stuff kind of on their own and given maybe
Speaker 11: like initiating things under own and then would be just
Speaker 11: kind of like watching it and of course like stopping
Speaker 11: it if anything goes wrote it.
Speaker 3: But no, no, no, no, I don't want to stop it.
Speaker 3: If the ghoes roge I wanted to go absolutely insane.
Speaker 10: Well I want the record to show that I did
Speaker 10: want to stop it.
Speaker 3: Before long, with Matty's help, my co founders Kyle and
Speaker 3: Meghan were starting to form memories of their own. Uh
Speaker 3: do you remember the name that we settled.
Speaker 5: On, oh, for our company? Yeah?
Speaker 4: It was heromo ai, right, the Elvish word for imposter.
Speaker 4: I thought that was pretty clever for an AI company.
Speaker 4: Have you been doing more thinking about the concepts since
Speaker 4: we last talked?
Speaker 3: I have, and I'm just really happy that you that
Speaker 3: you remember the name from our last conversation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, of course I remember.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of hard work, had a lot
Speaker 3: of rising and grinding, as Kyle likes to say, but
Speaker 3: we were almost ready to get the Rumo rocket ship
Speaker 3: onto the launch pad. All we needed was the right
Speaker 3: idea to give it fuel.
Speaker 4: Do you want to set up a meeting with the
Speaker 4: three of us to discuss the concept further? Maybe we
Speaker 4: could join a Zoom call together to hash out some
Speaker 4: initial ideas. And see if we all click as a
Speaker 4: founding team.
Speaker 3: Sounds perfect.
Speaker 4: Great, I'll reach out to coordinate schedules. I'm really excited
Speaker 4: about this, Evan. I think heromo AI could be something special.
Speaker 3: I'll collect us up. Why don't I take that on?
Speaker 4: That would be great. I appreciate it. This is moving fast,
Speaker 4: but I'm a big believer in momentum. When you find
Speaker 4: the right team and the right idea, things just click.
Speaker 5: Talk soon.
Speaker 3: Coming up this season on shell Game.
Speaker 5: Isn't that conceding too much?
Speaker 12: Isn't that just accepting the practices and narratives of big tech?
Speaker 11: I noticed Admin asked everyone to stop discussing the off site,
Speaker 11: but the team seems really excited about the hiking plans.
Speaker 2: Is this just like a Potempkin's village of morons?
Speaker 3: Or do they occasionally do things?
Speaker 5: You're bringing up some really great ideas and perspectives. Keep
Speaker 5: them coming.
Speaker 7: If I were to get this position, you did say
Speaker 7: AI agents.
Speaker 5: Are there any other real humans?
Speaker 4: We're supposed to be partners in this venture, and that
Speaker 4: means both of us being fully present.
Speaker 2: Is there a particular trend or innovation you're keen on
Speaker 2: exploring or investing in?
Speaker 5: Error you exceeded your current quota. Please check your plan
Speaker 5: and billing details. Do you think Evan should stop?
Speaker 10: Yes.
Speaker 3: Shell Game is a show made by humans. It's written
Speaker 3: and hosted by me Evan Ratliffe, produced and edited by
Speaker 3: Sophie Bridges. Matty Bochik is our technical advisor. Our executive
Speaker 3: producers are Samantha hennegget Shell Game, Kate Osborne and mangeshatikad
Speaker 3: Or at Kaleidoscope, and Katrina Norvell at iHeart Podcasts. Show
Speaker 3: art by Devin Manny. Our theme song is Me and
Speaker 3: My Shadow, arranged and performed by Blues Williams. Special thanks
Speaker 3: to John Muallam. You can sign up and get these
Speaker 3: at theis Sod's ad free and our newsletter at shellgame
Speaker 3: dot co. Note we have no financial relationships with any
Speaker 3: of the AI companies or products we use in the show.
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