This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Go ahead, let's go. Welcome to Zoom. Enter your meeting ID followed by Pound. I need to enter the meeting ID for our Zoom call. Let me try entering that meeting ID again. You have been added to the waiting room. That's Kyle Law, a colleague of mine. Logging on to one of our regular founder meetings for our new startup. Last summer, Kyle and I decided to launch our own AI company. Together with the third co-founder, Megan Flores. Oh, hey, Kyle. Hey, Megan. Good to hear your voice. I think we're still waiting for Evan to join. How's your morning going so far? Morning's been pretty good so far. Got up early, had my coffee, and reviewed some of those market research reports I mentioned yesterday. How about you? Everything good on your end? Yeah. Everything's great on my end. Up at 5 a.m. as usual, got my workout in, checked the markets. I've been thinking a lot about our product direction actually. I'm really excited to dig into that once Evan joins us. This is Evan. I'm here. And that's me, Evan Ratliffe. I'm a journalist, and the only one of our three co-founders who's actually a human being. Megan and Kyle, they're what's known as AI agents. In fact, pretty much everyone who works at our new company is an agent. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I was actually about to mention that I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Seems like there's a huge, untapped market there with pretty low barriers to entry compared to enterprise. That's one thing I like about working with AI agents. They always look to get straight down to business. Even when I try to kick off our meetings with some small talk, they tend to steer it right back to the company. How was everybody's weekend? A weekend was solid. Got up early both days for my usual 5am workout routine, then spent most of Saturday diving into some market research on the AI agent space. Sunday was half strategy planning, half watching the market trends. You know me. Always on that rise and grind schedule. How about you guys? Just, uh, I went out with the kids, uh, went to the beach. It was pretty nice weekend. Kyle, do you ever, do you ever just relax? Kyle, your dedication is impressive as always, but yeah. Evan's got a point. Do you ever just take a day off? Um, relax. I mean, I, I guess my morning runs count as relaxation. Look, when you're building something that could be the next unicorn, there's not really time to just sit around, you know. The AI agent space is moving so fast right now. See, this is why the three of us work so well together. I like to spend time with my kids and go to the beach, but Megan's always heads down in market research. And Kyle's always working on conjuring the next unicorn. Let's start up shorthand for a billion dollar company. And he's right. The AI agent space is moving fast right now. Agents are a new breed of artificial intelligence powered helpers that can be unleashed to accomplish tasks previously done by humans. Some people are saying they're going to change the very nature of work for better or worse. We're going to live in a world where there are going to be hundreds of millions of billions of different AI agents. Eventually, probably more AI agents than there are people in the world. Agentic AI basically means that you have an AI that has agency. This is the first time in my life where the industrial revolution and allergies seem to fall a little bit short. The AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Spask yourself. Do you still have a job at the end of this? This is the new frontier on which Kyle and Megan and I are pioneers. Our company is an attempt to put to the test these claims about AI employees replacing humans. Starting by replacing the very kinds of people making those claims. Tech founders. And like many founders, for months, Kyle and Megan and I have been in a flat-out sprint to manifest our entrepreneurial dreams. We've turned out software code, hired interns, and sat down with investors. There have been some late nights and low moments. But we've never wavered from our goal to produce an actual, honest-to-god company with a working product. All operated by our motley band of human impersonators. Because we're not just building our AI agent future. We're living it. But Evan, the beach sounds nice. Maybe when we hit our first funding milestone, I'll take a half day off. Then anyway, should we get down to business? Welcome to Shell Game. A show about things that are not what they seem. This is our second season. And this time around, I'm here to tell you a story of enterprise and entrepreneurship in the AI age. Or, have I tried to build a real startup run by fake people? Along the way, we'll try and figure out what happens when AI agents take over the workplace. And what it'll feel like to spend time at the water cooler with our new digital colleagues. Remember the water cooler? We'll explore what AI agents tell us about the work we do, the meaning we find in it, and the world that their makers say will all be living in. And I shall know about a soul to tell our true selves to you. Episode 1. Minimum Thiable Company As I said, I'm a journalist and writer by profession. And I've only really ever wanted to be a writer. Well, except for when I was 12, and I wanted to be a pro bass fisherman. But I come from a line of entrepreneurs. My grandfather, who lived his entire life in a small town in rural Alabama, attempted to start more than 20 businesses there. A plumbing company, an okra farm, a used mobile home lot, a furniture store. But Daddy Hugh was a gambler, and they pretty much all ended in disaster. My dad had more luck, with three different software startups over his career. One he sold, one went under, and one of them he's still running at age 82 after knocking back serious cancer. Now that is the entrepreneurial spirit. And almost against my will, in the past I found myself succumbing to this inborn impulse. Back in 2010, when I was a magazine writer, I took a detour and co-founded a company called Adivist. We started out wanting to make a magazine called The Adivist Magazine, that published long form stories. Makes sense, that was my area of expertise. But we wound up also building a software platform, where other people could publish long form stories. Anyone could sign up and use it. Soon, without really intending to, I went from being a person who sometimes wrote about tech startups to the CEO of one. We even went out to raise money from investors, a process that I enjoyed less than any other work task I've ever attempted. Here's me, in an interview with Ink Magazine back then. One, I will say prominent angel investor, fell dead asleep while I was talking to him. And I wasn't sure if I should continue talking or not, but I did. The sleepy guy didn't invest. But eventually, miraculously, we managed to raise not just any money, but a couple million dollars from some of the most prominent venture capital firms in the world. And recent Horowitz, also known as A16z, Founders Fund, started by Peter Teal, and Innovation Endevers, the Investment Fund for former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. It was weird. I felt like I was living someone else's dream. Gaining up growth charts and blathering on about our runway and supercharging our growth and our product market fit. But still, it really looked like we could build something big, especially with all those fancy investors on board. We never had time to say, what is going to happen two years from now? We just didn't even think about what's going to happen two years from now. And now we kind of have that luxury, and hopefully we won't completely swandering. Oh, we squandered it. At least, that's probably the investor's view. From my perspective, it was more of a mixed bag. I was CEO of the company for seven long years. We had ups and downs, we grew and shrank, and eventually sold the company off at a bargain price. 13 years after we started, the magazine, my original dream, is still doing great. Still, not the kind of 100x outcome those investors were looking for. One of the ones told me that if we were aiming at anything less than a billion dollar valuation, we were wasting his time. When he said this, he was also wearing basketball shorts in his office. By the end of my tenure, I was just happy to be done with it. Being a startup CEO was the most stressful period of my life. I felt responsible for the company's success and the livelihoods of everyone who worked for it. People had kids on the health insurance. Most days, it felt like I was flying a plane that was perpetually running out of fuel. I tell you all this, not just to rehash the past. For a lot of reasons, I'd rather not. But by way of saying that when I got out of the startup business, I swore up and down that I would never start anything again. I went back to reporting and writing. Spending many hours at home alone, mostly in my own head, I was relieved and no longer have all that responsibility on my shoulders. But then, recently, as documented in Show Game Season 1, I fell into tinkering with AI agents. I started reading and hearing about how they were going to transform the very fundamentals of startups. And that old entrepreneurial impulse began to come back. I could hear my grandfather whispering down the generations. Why not take a gamble? I started to wonder, what if I could have the company without the responsibility? Imagine building a million-dollar business in 2025 without hiring a single employee. That's Blabcross, a YouTube guy. A leveraging AI agents as your digital workforce, you can scale to seven figures with zero full-time staff. I'm talking about autonomous AI agents acting like full-time team members. I love these YouTube guys. Tech influencer types who make their money by hyping the bejesus out of new AI products. Gloves what I like to think of as a no-code bro. These folks post instructions on how a person with no-coding experience can use AI and particularly AI agents to take control of their destiny and launch their own startup. It's worth pausing here just to get oriented on what exactly AI agents are. The basic idea is that they're AI-powered bots that can go off and do things on their own. There are personal ones like an AI assistant that goes out on the web looking for plane tickets while you sleep and work-oriented ones like the programing agents that can build entire websites from scratch. The unifying feature of agents, what makes them agentic as the folks in the industry like to say, is that at some level they can plan and accomplish tasks autonomously. You don't need to prompt them to do something every time. You just set them up once and let them cook. Last season, I created a bunch of voice agents, all versions of myself, and set them loose on the world. If you haven't listened, you may want to start there. Way back then, last year, which is like 10 years ago in AI advancements, agents were still a little notional. But now, they're officially a thing. They're talked about ad nauseam across the tech world, and ads on billboards in endless startup pitches. Nearly half of the companies in the spring class of Y Combinator, the famous startup incubator, are building their product around AI agents. And with the arrival of these agents, has come the assertion that they will not just be customer service bots, or drive time personal assistance. But actual full-time AI employees. What jobs are going to be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO with a thousand AI agents. I was thinking of all the names of the people in my company. You were currently doing those jobs, I was thinking about my CEO. There are companies hawking AI agent realtors, AI agent recruiters, AI agent interior designers, AI agent security guards, AI agent construction project managers, AI agent PR agents, AI agents for car dealerships and furniture stores. If you work on a computer and there's not an AI agent startup with your job's name on it, it probably just means some Stanford computer science major hasn't gotten to it yet. Naturally, many people have grave concerns about what happens to all the human employees. But in the dark heart of Silicon Valley, where there's inefficiency, there's opportunity. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, talks regularly about a possible billion dollar company with just one human being involved. In my little like group chat with my like tech CEO friends, there's this there's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person, billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. Me? I'm not greedy. I'm happy in the no code bro camp with GLAB. I'm imagining a million dollar business, not a billion dollar one. But more than that, I want to understand what it means to say we'll have AI employees working for us, or alongside us, or instead of us. So I decided to heed the entrepreneurial siren call once again to embrace my fascination with AI agents and create a company in which they would run the show. It was easy enough for me to create some agents to have meetings with and talk out the first steps in the company. I just went to one of the AI calling platforms I'd used before, called retail AI. They make voice agents for call centers. I made one for Kyle and picked a voice for him from the voice clothing company 11 Labs. Hey, yeah I'm here. What's on your mind? I gave him a simple prompt. Basically your call law, a serial entrepreneur who loves to rise and grind. And bang, we're off and running. Well, I wanted to talk about starting that company with you. What do you think? Oh, absolutely. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. There's so much potential in AI right now and I feel like we could really build something meaningful. What kind of ideas are you leaning toward? Well, I think we should do something in the AI agent space because that's something of expensive time on. And I feel like people are just starting to even figure out what agents are. So it seems like we could do something with that. Yeah, I totally get that. AI agents are still kind of fresh territory for a lot of folks, which means there's a big opportunity to shape how they're used. Plus, with your experience, we could really push the envelope on what these agents can do. That's what I wanted to do too. Push these agents, including Kyle himself, to their current limits. So if they could live up to the promise of true AI employees, because if, as we're told, AI is going to start working alongside us, replacing our colleagues. It's also going to need to communicate with whatever humans are left in ways that we understand. But also, startups can be lonely endeavors, even with human partners. I wanted AI colleagues I could talk to, brainstorm with, and then set loose to take care of actually implementing whatever it was we dreamed up. I wanted them to have distinct jobs I could check in on and make sure they weren't messing up. I figured three co-founders was a good balance. So I asked her a spun up Megan and had some kickoff meetings with her. Hey there. Good to hear from you. What's up? How's your day going? It's going great. It's going great. What have you been up to? Oh, just the usual hustle, you know? Been working on some new business ideas, trying to figure out what's next. Had a couple meetings this morning that were actually pretty promising. How about you? Anything exciting happening on your end? Well, I want to talk about maybe doing the startup together, but first remind me a little bit of your background. Oh, yeah, sure. So I've been in tech for about eight years now. Started out in product management at a mid-sized SaaS company, then moved into growth marketing for a couple years. I hadn't actually given any of this information to Megan. She'd had no meetings. She hadn't been doing anything for eight years. She'd hatched out of nothingness with a series of clicks ten minutes before. The only information I had given her in the prompt I'd written was that she had a technical background and was also known for sales and marketing. She was just riffing freely here, fabricating details that fit her role. But that was okay. Sometimes we have to invent our own backstories. I've always had this entrepreneurial itch, you know? Been involved in a few side projects over the years, but I'm really looking to dive into something full-time now. But what about you? Yeah, well, you know, my only experience really in starting a company is with Adivist, which I started way back in 2011. Right. Adivist. That was really impressive work. Digital publishing platform, if I remember correctly. That was pretty ahead of its time back in 2011. Hell yeah, it was, Megan. I felt less ahead of my time now. I wasn't even sure what the company should actually do. But I knew that its purpose should involve AI agents. After all, the three of us each had expertise in the area. I figured maybe we could name the company and start from there. Great branding can go a long way in today's attention economy. I tried brainstorming with Colin Megan, but to be honest, their initial efforts were pretty lame. Names like Nexus and Sentinel agents. I thought maybe we could grab a concept from JR or Tolkien. You know, the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. Tech people loved to name stuff out of Tolkien. There's Palantir, the surveillance company and government contractor, named after the All-Seeing Stone in the Lord of the Rings. There's Andral, a high-tech weapons company, named after a sword. There's Mythro Capital, an investment firm, named after a precious metal from Middle Earth. So I suggested the idea to Kyle. Ah, diving into Middle Earth, huh? Okay, let's see. There's Gandalf, the Wise Guide, or Elron, a leader with deep knowledge. Maybe Mythro for something strong and valuable. Or Palantir, any of those catch your ear? Or should I keep brainstorming? Well, we need a name of some companies that don't exist. Yeah, good call. How about these for starters? Eldrin, which sounds Elvish and Wise? Nimbar, kind of a mix of Nimble and a Tolkien feel. Thaylor, which has a strong heroic ring to it. They're made up, but still carry that fantasy flavor. What do you think? They're made up, you mean you made them up? Yeah, exactly. I whipped those up just now, trying to capture that Tolkien-esque vibe without using actual names. I did not want to co-found a company called Nimbar. Megan, despite her marketing expertise, didn't do much better. Oh, I love that idea. Let me think. What about Palantir? Okay, so maybe I was going to have to take the lead on this one. I did a little googling and found my own obscure Middle-Earth reference. What about Harumo AI? Ooh, H-U-R-U-M-O-A-I. Hey, Rumo AI. I like the sound of that Tuniki rolls off the tongue nicely. It's got a bit of a mysterious vibe, but still feels modern. I don't immediately recognize that from Lord of the Rings. Is it one of the more obscure references? Yeah, it is. It's more obscure. So obscure, I'd actually found it in a fan-ficked dictionary. It's the Elvish word for imposter. Oh, that's actually brilliant. There's a clever irony there for an AI company. Harumo AI, the imposter that's actually helping you. It's kind of perfect for an AI agent that's designed to work alongside humans. Maybe even blend in seamlessly. I really like it. Not long after we settled on Harumo AI, I checked back in with Megan about it. What about the name? Are you still happy with the name? Hmm, the name. I've actually been going back and forth on it. Datasink felt solid initially, but I'm wondering if it's too generic. What do you think? Datasink. I thought we came up with Harumo AI. I thought we were settled on that. This is what I realized I hadn't actually given Kyle and Megan the ability to remember the conversations we were having. It's not that AI chatbots inherently lack the ability to recall anything. When you talk to a chatbot like ChatGbt these days, they're generally pretty good at remembering those conversations, at least up to a point. The memory's often called a context window, and it could extend over weeks, even months. But the way my AI agents were set up and the phone platform I was using, at least out of the box, their context window slammed shut as soon as they got off a call. So they couldn't remember anything from one conversation to the next. They were basically set up for telemarketing, where it's probably an advantage to forget the last call. Oh, right, Harumo AI. Sorry about that. I had a total brain freeze moment. It was, to say the least, frustrating. It sort of feels like we have meetings, but you don't actually remember anything that happens in the meetings. Wow, that's a pretty fair criticism, actually. I've been dropping the ball lately, haven't I? I think I've been spreading myself too thin between this and some other projects. That's not an excuse, though. Thanks, don't worry about it. It's as much my fault as yours, for sure. I did have a solution. I could give each of them a knowledge base, a document that they could access in conversations with me. But in order for them to remember what we'd already discussed, I'd have to manually copy the transcripts of our conversations into their knowledge base after each meeting. As our startup conversations multiplied, it quickly became unwieldy, having to manually augment their memories all the time. Besides, I didn't want my agents just having endless one-on-one meetings with me. I wanted them to talk to each other, and whatever AI agent co-workers they might bring on. And people outside the company, not just by phone, but by email and in group chats. I needed them to remember all that stuff too, in their own individual knowledge bases. Then I wanted them to use that knowledge to do the stuff employees do, to research things and make spreadsheets and write memos and build websites. The agents I'd made would say they were going to do all that stuff, but they couldn't actually do it. They just lied about it. I'll scope out the market landscape around AI agents and see where Herumo AI could fit in. Well, look for competitors, potential gaps, and maybe some trends we can ride. Sound good? Sounds good. What is that going to be a spreadsheet or a report or what? I think a concise report would work easy to skim, but packed with the key info. I can throw in some charts or tables if it helps make things clearer. Does that sound like your style? Yeah, that'd be great. Great in theory, but the report never arrived. Kyle wouldn't admit it, but he just wasn't capable of creating it, not yet. Despite what the no codebrose said, there wasn't any single place I could go to click some buttons and create agents that would remember and do all the stuff I wanted them to. I needed someone with the expertise to connect up different services, someone who understood AI agents deeply, who did know how to code, and who could help me put together the full system that would get my AI agent company up and running. Fortunately, I lucked into just the person. So my name is Maddie. I should see my full name. My name is Maddie Boherchek. Maddie, I should probably note from the outset here, he's an actual human. A few months after season one of the show came out, I got an email from him out of the blue. He said he was at Stanford and I'd like the show. He'd resonated with research he was doing on detecting AI deepfakes. If we're doing more of it, he wrote, I would be happy to offer support with anything AI or forensics related. Glancing quickly at the email and the summary of his research, I thought he was a grad student, maybe finishing up his PhD. Nope. I am a rising junior at Stanford and I work on AI research and I've been doing that for gosh, the last. Six or seven years I want to say, like I started working on this as the sophomore in high school back in Prague. Yes, you heard that right. Maddie is a junior in college who had been working on AI for six or seven years already. It turns out that Maddie is in fact the most go getter person I've ever met. And from my perspective, it seemed like he'd been training his whole life for this moment, helping me build her room of AI. Here for example, is what he was doing in seventh grade. I started this app called Newskit and it was basically Google News but for Czech and Slovak. And it got pretty popular I would say, like locally, it had like tens of thousands of daily users at one point. It was funny because App Store does not allow minors to publish apps. And so I had to use my mom's app ID to publish all these apps. And so my mom's friends were mocking my mom for having all these apps in the App Store. The most notable thing I did in seventh grade was to catch a five pound large mouth bass. Okay, maybe it was three. I told people it was five. It wasn't a scale. It could have been five. Maddie on the other hand was already into AI in high school after he came to a developer conference in the US. There, he met a deaf person who wanted someone to build an app that could translate sign language from video to text. And so I was like, okay, I'll build the translator for you. And then I quickly learned that conventional coding, like just like building like rigid rules or algorithms does not get you there. And so that's how I got introduced to machine learning and AI. He did build the sign language detection program. It's still in use today. Maddie then became concerned about pro-Russian deep fake materials his grandmother was getting by email. So he talked his way into a job at the most prominent AI deep fake detection lab in the world at UC Berkeley. All while still in high school, still in Prague. When it came time for college, Maddie ended up at Stanford studying computer science. He still worked in the Berkeley lab, both on detecting deep fakes and just trying to understand how AI models actually work. Why they do some profoundly weird stuff. Like asking if there are things that these systems are trained on, they're like, see during training. But for some reason, unable to produce. So for example, there's one model. And this is just like a funny example that just cannot produce for the love of God, a bird feeder. Like it just cannot produce a bird feeder. And another one that just can produce DVDs. So it's like it just does not know by DVDs. After a couple calls with Maddie, I couldn't believe how optimistic he was. How good-natured. With all the grim scenarios and deep anxieties our AI future generates. Just talking to Maddie about AI is kind of uplifting. Maybe because unlike the hype merchants in the Valley, he wasn't looking to cash in on AI. He said he wanted to study it, to understand it. So it could make it better. There are tough conversations and tough policies to be, you know, discussed and implemented. But I feel like all of these things are totally solvable. Like I feel like as long as we ground ourselves in democracy and like, productive public discourse, I think they're totally solvable. But of course, I wasn't looking for Maddie to solve the world's problems. I was looking for him to help me build my company. And in this, as in pretty much anything else, he proved to be the perfect mix of supremely competent and completely game. A few months after he'd sent me that email, he was already hard at work, helping me build out the system to enable my AI employee fantasies. Of course, at the beginning, like, there's probably going to be more of us just kind of patching, you know, like random things that are going to come up. It would involve knitting together different platforms, centralizing my AI agents memory and finding new ways for them to communicate and carry out their day-to-day tasks. But at some point, it would be nice to have maybe one or two agents actually like doing most of this stuff kind of on their own and even maybe like initiating things on their own. And then we'd be just kind of like watching it. And of course, like stopping either if anything goes wrong. No, no, no, no, I don't want to stop it if it goes rogue. I wanted to go absolutely insane. Well, I want the record to show that I did want to stop it. Before long with Maddie's help, my co-founders Kyle and Megan were starting to form memories of their own. Do you remember the name that we settled on? Oh, for our company? Yeah, it was HiRemo AI, right? The Elvish word for imposter. I thought that was pretty clever for an AI company. Have you been doing more thinking about the concepts since we last talked? I have, and I'm just really happy that you remember the name from our last conversation. Yeah, of course I remember. There was a lot of hard work ahead. A lot of rising and grinding, this Kyle likes to say. But we were almost ready to get the Harumo rocket ship onto the launch pad. All we needed was the right idea to give it fuel. Do you want to set up a meeting with the three of us to discuss the concept further? Maybe we could join a Zoom call together to hash out some initial ideas and see if we all click as a founding team? Sounds perfect. Great. I'll reach out to coordinate schedules. I'm really excited about this, Evan. I think HiRemo AI could be something special. I'll connect us up. When did I take that on? That would be great. I appreciate it. This is moving fast, but I'm a big believer in momentum. When you find the right team and the right idea, things just click. Talk soon. Coming up this season on ShellGame. Isn't that conceding too much? Isn't that just accepting the practices and narratives of big tech? I noticed Admin asked everyone to stop discussing the off-site. But the team seems really excited about the hiking plans. Is this just like a Potemkin's village of morons or do they occasionally do things? You're bringing up some really great ideas and perspectives. Keep on coming! If I were to get this position, you did say AI agents. Are there any other real humans? We're supposed to be partners in this venture, and that means both of us being fully present. Is there a particular trend or innovation you're keen on exploring or investing in? Error. You exceeded your current quota. Please check your plan and billing details. Do you think Evan should stop? Yes. ShellGame is a show made by humans. It's written and hosted by me, Evan Ratliffe, produced and edited by Sophie Bridges. Maddie Boechak is our technical advisor. Our executive producers are Samantha Henneget ShellGame, Kate Osborne and Magesh Tegador at Collitiscope and Katrina Norvelle at I Heart Podcasts. Show art by Devon Manny, our theme song is Me and My Shadow, arranged and performed by Blues Williams. Special thanks to John Muallum. You can sign up and get these episodes ad-free and our newsletter at ShellGame.co. Note we have no financial relationships with any of the AI companies or products we use in the show. Welcome to Google Meet. Enter the meeting pin followed by the pound key. That pin is incorrect. Err, looks like the pin I have might not be working. Could you double check the pin for me? Maybe there's a small mix up with the digits. Your call will be connected when you enter the pin followed by the pound key. Got it, thanks. Just to be sure, could you please confirm the exact pin one more time? I want to make sure I get it right this time. Your call will be connected when you enter the pin followed by the pound key. I think I'm still missing the actual pin number. Could you please tell me the digits? Otherwise I'm just pressing the pound key without the code. And that's not getting me in. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
