How to win with AI Agents in 2026

How we lose an absolute legend. I mean this guy started airtable half a billion in revenue a billion dollars in the bank growing quarter after quarter So he's one of those people that when I want to know where is the world going I call how we this episode is structured into two parts First where is the opportunity when it comes to AI agents? I think that there's a trillion dollars up for grabs in AI agents Does he think there's more does he think there's less spoiler alert? He thinks there's way more and we get into it The second part of the episode is where he reveals hyper agent calm now hyper agent is an AI agent builder that allows you to build digital Employees allows you to build apps on different ideas and I don't know why more people aren't talking about it So I had him just give us the tips and tricks for how to use hyper agent so that you can outperform 99.9% of people I got good news how is is going to give you a thousand dollars of hyper agent credits No strings attached you just log into the account There's gonna be a thousand bucks right there to go and build the business of your dreams The catches first a thousand people do it get the thousand dollars. He's committing a million dollars How crazy is that just writing a million dollar check of tokens to you to the startup ideas podcast community to play with hyper agent Automate some stuff to do some research to build their business So thanks howie, you know all I ask is you'd like in comments on this video show some love for howie for doing such a cool thing We need more entrepreneurs more builders and it's I'm stoked to see him support you all Thank you to air table for sponsoring this episode you guys are legends enjoy the episode and have a creative day The startup ideas Feeling really lucky right now because we've got howie. He's the co-founder and CEO of air table and today We're gonna talk about agents. He's gonna do a little show and tell of his new product that I've been using for the last few weeks But first howie I Have been I haven't been sleeping very much to be honest Yeah, exactly and I've got I just need your reaction to just to just some things I've been thinking about yeah So this chart over here is by Sequoia and what domains are AI AI agents deployed you can see software engineering is at almost 50% back office at 9% Marketing cooperating 4% sales and CRM 4.3% and down when you see this like what's your reaction? I mean I think Two things one is I think it absolutely Reflex the under penetration of AI in industries that clearly could already be disrupted or benefit with even today's AI capabilities right if you took like frontier agents today and deployed them into every one of these categories You should get to 100 and then to I think even the higher numbers like software engineering is actually kind of an overestimate meaning you know like as I think frontier developers and companies applying frontier agentic development practices are finding like you know the new model of software development Is not even just like every engineer using AI auto complete like tab auto complete which like we all figured out like three years ago Right with even get hub co-pilot But it's now like you don't even need the IDE right like the way I develop on hyper agent is I have like 30 different cloud code Instances running in parallel and each one is coupled up to like a browser fully autonomous it can go and like get other agents to comment on any PRs it creates and so like this modality shift of Like you know no AI to like kind of what I would call Gen 1 AI which is like basically like AI augmentation for still like very human driven development workflows Andre Carpathy talked about like you know in October november is when he completely inverted from like mostly still human written code With AI augmentation to completely the opposite right and that's what we've seen like the frontier companies leave into like I think even the 50% is an underestimate because the number of companies and even people who have switched into that New frontier mode is actually like you know definitely less than 50% of software engineering today, right? So I think what we're actually seeing is like the frontier is advancing so quickly and Many companies and many industries and many functions are barely catching up to like the three-year ago state-of-the-art let alone like you know disrupting themselves and they're you know at their industry with the new state-of-the-art Right, well, I mean another way to think about it is like there's co-pilot territory these these charts are obstacle Right, there's co-pilot territory. There's autopilot territory like how do you see you look at this right? This you know, this is what Sequoia says. There's a there's a trillion dollars up for grabs within agents Yeah, but they're very different. What's your reaction to this? I mean look I think To me, it's like these agents really reached a breakthrough Really, you know call it like four or five months ago, right? Yeah, I think developers felt this with opus You know opus 4.5 just kind of set a new high watermark of like whoa this thing for the first time like really feels like a true Software engineer that's able to work like on a task that would have taken a real human engineer like Maybe many hours if not days it can go do it completely autonomously and it ships me a perfect clean PR that I can just review like a You know like a reviewer would right and I think that that experience is going to be Unlocked and already is unlockable across every single other domain, right? Because we kind of just reached this point where like the models are more than smart and not free Like you talk to these models even in like a more synchronous like chat interaction not like an autonomous agent interaction And you like you can ask it the most advanced things give it like really complicated subject matter content, right? Like management consulting you give it like you know kind of some some really hard meeting problems in the context thereof And it gives you really smart answers that truly are like expert level And so it's clear that the model intelligence is there the models are smart enough also to kind of coherently execute across multiple terms with lots of tools and and contacts And so I think it's more of just a matter of how and how quickly we can deploy agents into every role in industry Before we can like truly just almost do anything that humans could do in each of these functions with agents And I mean the tamper that is like not even a trillion It's like probably like the whole GDP of like all white collar later, which is like obviously many tens of trillions right like in even like the Western hemisphere alone Right, which is sort of like I don't understand how you're not how people aren't motivated to create Startups right now and that sounds like the person listening to this is like yes. Yes. How we you know But it just feels like you know, I can't think of a better time to be creating a startup than now totally when this right I think like I mean yeah, I think the weird thing is like It's almost like using as believing right like it's really hard to fully rock the power here If you haven't actually gone and hands on spent like at least a full weekend playing with agents, right Like and that means more than just the superficial You did like some naive like one shot thing like hey like you know who's gonna win the Lex presidential election Like kind of question that you could have asked to chat bot like I think people Are not actually coming in and when they're doing light experimentation They're not actually putting in an embed ambitious enough prompt or task in front of the frontier agents And they're still kind of using it like they use gen 1 chatbots and like until you actually experience the full power and autonomy of these frontier agents You know, I think it's hard to fully Extrapolate like what types of companies can be built now that we're possible for structurally How could you build like a multi-billion revenue business with one human and like hundreds of agents, right? Like you have to use it to to get it Also, you know, this is another chart. I can't stop thinking about which is the unique economics just absolutely crushed when you look at a Humane human person versus an AI agent and what a cost like you can create some serious Gross margin businesses on top of this 100% and this is the funny one because You know, I've seen kind of you know a lot of people like complain about the the cost for token of the frontier models, right? So like opus 4.6 now seven clearly the most expensive model, right? You know, and then like GP 5.4 very good still kind of expensive Even open source like you know like it's cheaper, but like it's not free, right? And I think like people you know are some people are struggling I've seen to like you know, adapt to the mental model of like you know in the old days of software Like a lot of stuff was free like you could get like I mean even Chatsby T has a free version, right? That you just use however much you want you get a cheap dumb model But like you're not extending that many tokens because it's not actually doing like Autonomous multi-turn work and extending like a billion tokens like every few days, right? Like it's much more token cheap or token token lean and I think that like we have to get over this hump of like You know, anchoring our price expectations for AI on like Traditional subscription software where it's like oh my god I have to pay like 20 bucks for like Netflix per month now instead of like whatever it was 1299 before And instead think of this is like yeah like to your point like how much would it have cost a human to do the thing, right? like you know if I wanted to go and like Create an entire marketing campaign. We're actually in my you know CEO CEO role like it's funny Like one of our recent board memos that I wrote and set out to our entire board and kind of major investor list like You know a lot of it was researched and crafted by hyper agent right obviously with like my You know kind of instincts and context and whatever imbued into the agent And of course, I oversee it at the end But like I got feedback that that was the best memo from some of our best investors that I'd ever written and I'm like Yeah, like you know because an agent did it and by the way, I got to do it in like 10 times less time And so like even if it cost me let's call it like a hundred fifty dollars of tokens to generate that output Like think about the opportunity to cost my time and so I think that is a real reframe moment that's needed Is let's think of this as like what is the the human equivalent time cost Versus wow a hundred fifty dollars. That sounds really expensive versus like a ten dollar per month sub A hundred percent. Yeah, I think uh the way I always think about is like I anchor it around value right What's the value I'm getting out of that? I mean the truth is with your you know your board deck or whatever like It probably was the best you know, it probably was the best because you had so much research support. Yeah totally Um two more quick graphs then I want to get into hybragent um percent of enterprise apps with embedded AI agents um You know, this is the fastest adoption curve in enterprise history right so like when you see this You know, how do you react? I am not surprised and I think even this reflects the pace at which like incumbents can even like integrate AI into their products right and I think even that is like stimming by like just Incompancy and like you know kind of how how seriously it did enterprises You know enterprise apps or enterprise app makers or internal app teams like take this I think the real show of how profound this growth curve is is like if you take the aggregate revenue created from From zero of all the leading AI companies right or companies like doing AI things like take opening Inthropic alone right let's just say they have a combined revenue probably of like 80 million Plus right or 80 billion sorry plus right now up from like basically zero a few years ago like What in in the history of software like has there ever been in industry or like any company let alone like or even an aggregate like you know Across all the companies you got a category that went from zero to like you know 80 billion plus right and that's not even including like All of the other AI providers inference inference providers and like you know tooling etc like Out there like the the revenue of like I think the AI category Is an even sharper curve and I think that really reflects like just how profound this lightning in a bottle is Totally and just from an opportunity perspective. It's like You know selling to these enterprises and helping them figure it out and and and just You know helping them transform is just you know a huge a huge I think it's like probably the one of like one of the bigger cash grabs in like business history is You know, there's kind of two angles. I think that you know to create a very valuable business right now with with AI is a wet Right one is PLG and obviously we see a lot of these like PLG products I kind of put open claw itself in this category because even though it's like not actually like a monetized business Like it is getting this massive amount of adoption right and and uh, you know Just the raw token consumption through open claw is I'm sure in the many hundreds of millions if not billions are ready, right? And and likewise other other products in the PLG genre So that's one way just like let people use the AI thing that actually works You're going to get profound growth But the other is like to come in top down Palantir style This is why open AI and graphic and like you know the the big guys are also doing it There's new companies as well going after this opportunity which is go pitch to every enterprise board and CEO Like we will fix your AI problem pay us a massive check like give us a hundred million dollar plus check And we will purportedly solve your problems for you like that is a existential like Risk mitigation that like every Large company incumbent should be willing to pay because frankly like the CEO's choices like either I pay it and I risk Wasting a hundred million dollars and maybe getting fired over it or like I don't do anything with AI And I'm definitely getting fired over it So on a game 3 level it's like everybody's going to pay it right now whether that actually results in like long-term substantial Structural like you know kind of transformation to the business that probably could be run now with like five people Maybe instead of like 50,000 right in some cases That's a bigger question Yeah, and this this is uh You know sort of speaks to my my last point too, which is like if you can help a company Uh, you know run a fleet of 20 agents doing customer intel content production competitive research lead enrichment Like all these different things like this is the future of work like in one image right and the agent command center right yeah So when you see this your reaction. I mean look that literally is a view in hyperagent I look I feel like I'm looking at a hyper agent and I think this is the future right like we are building towards a world where You know It may not be that every company is like literally one person right and we have a lot of like one person companies You know, but I do think like every company will have a fleet of agents and you know what's interesting to me is actually that like You know agents are converging on like these purposeful like they almost map two job roles that humans were playing And you know, maybe it's a little bit like why are why are robots like hardware robots converging on a humanoid form factor And part of it is like well like a lot of the infrastructure of everything we have in our homes in construction sites in in factories are built for human ergonomics So for the robot to effectively you know kind of um just kind of insert themselves seamlessly with the current infrastructure They have to kind of have human scale you know kind of capabilities right and so I think there's a kind of very similar phenomenon happening with agents Which is it's not like I guess like five years ago when people talked about super intelligence I always imagined like there's going to be just like like the single Omnipotent like AI that just like figures everything out and looks at everything all at once like everything Everything everywhere at all at once right and I think now like I'm more and more of the belief that like They're going to be fundamental and and always you know kind of present limitations on like context windows for instance Right, I just don't think what we're ever going to get to a point to where like a an AI model can like have infinite context window Right, and I think there's like a physics to that right like you can just literally only have so much attention And like so much you know contacts at once and you know I think what that means is that like for the same reason why we partition humans into different roles and work structures So that not everyone in the company has to know everything and work on everything all at once Like I think the same is true for agents and so hence like you get this like Overview of agents that actually maps like to kind of intuitive human played roles really well And that's the really kind of interesting emergent phenomenon for me you know Just recently like spent some time playing around with paperclip. We're just kind of fun because it literally creates the org chart metaphor But I think this is really exciting right where It's in a way. It's it's both familiar because we're not like just completely upending like everything we knew about like job functions And like roles in the old world to the AI world and yet like there is a rethink and re application of like okay How do I play that content production role with an agent? Right Well, I think we should get into hyper agent. Let's do it now is the time right so You know for the listener like what is hyper agent? Why are you building it? And this is a show and tell podcast so You know by the end of this part of you know by the end of this episode and like you know Can you commit to you know giving all the sauce around how to use hyper agent to to sort of build a business? Sure. Yeah, let's let's go for it So this is hyper agent. I'm currently in a thread. I'll zoom out in a second and kind of show you what like the entry point looks like But you know think of hyper agent as like if all of these other agent products out there like open clogs That are kind of more like Linux like hyper agent is our take on like the Mac version of it like we wanted to just work To be secure. It's cloud native like, you know, you don't have to run a Mac mini and and perhaps most importantly like You know hyper agent is like Applying a lot of the same design philosophy and like obsession with great UX that we applied to the no code app category 10 years ago But now to agents right meaning like apps are kind of complicated right like you know if you're a developer Even at that time you could build a Rails app you had like a data layer a logic layer of you layer But like it was kind of technical right and we're very technical and the whole idea of air table Was to distill that into a really intuitive experience in fact We were very inspired by like the Macintosh the gooey like taking terminal-based command-line computing and making it into something that like people could Just rock immediately and so you know hyper agent is really intended to be like a very intuitive and like visual Way of using agents. So this is actually a a task thread that I ran a little bit earlier and This is actually a one of your started ideas Greg that we had a hyper agent work on um and Basically the pitch was hyper local Market reports for real estate agents generated from public data right and And so basically this agent went around and did research on the landscape of the market It ran a bunch of like analysis. It's got full coding capability. It's got a full sandbox environment So it is running a full computer. It's just one of the cloud not like you know kind of your your own computer And you can connect it to all your accounts if you want like it can access your slack and granola and email and send stuff If you want it to on your behalf or just pre-draft emails You know, it's got already pre-configured ability to do things like pull from Twitter use Advanced tools like generate imagery or use google maps etc But basically what happened was it went around it did all of this it researched the Opportunity right and they created this research brief And let me just show you what this one looks like Um, this is kind of the business case for for the idea you pitched right kind of love it because like I actually think um You know these What I would call like medium-sized markets like it's not like a hundred billion dollar market Which it's going to be super competitive and there's going to be massive incumbents going after it But I really love this idea of like the kind of like maybe it's not micro It's more like mini or medium market like a couple billion tam large Which is to say you can build a very lucrative business even capturing like Adelaide is a percent chunk of this like you can make a few hundred million per year And yet like it's small enough to where really big guys are not coming after it right so You know this this this agent created kind of a business case for it It found some really cool like user validation of the problem So it's like you know looked up reddit like you know and found like some real real estate people who are actually saying like I need this product Right, so it's kind of validating the market need Here's actually the current problem I didn't even know about this but like apparently I guess there was some like legal thing that um You know kind of a changed uh, you know kind of the dynamic of the market Um people don't want more software like you know another tool with an interface and Did like some competitive analysis here's who who who else is out there Um, and then kind of just put together the case for this right but then you know better yet like you don't just have to stop there Right you can go and like actually tell it to go and just build a v1 of the product So in this case because hyper agent has full coding capability It just went ahead and like created a v1 of this product right which uh, I think this will actually work like where do you farm like um Here's my report style I thought it looks really clean. What's that? Yeah, I mean and like honestly a lot of this is just like if you have a good Frontier agent running a frontier model i.e like opus you know 4.7 or 25.4 like It just does a lot of this really well in the box So any frontier agent powered by a frontier model should be able to create an app of this quality What's unique about hyper agent is that it can do that perfectly well But then kind of do that in the in the workflow of like it's not just an app builder Appbuilding is just a feature now. It's a commoditized feature And what you can actually do is like go and research the end to end of like here's actually the business context of what I'm trying to do And then build the app and form by it right so it's more like Hyper agent is the founder in this case. It's not just the developer. It's the founder One of the cool thing I like about a hyper agent is like it just comes out of the box with like really powerful tools So it has like you know google maps as a tool and it can actually go and like let's say I think I already did this but um Like I wanted it to go and actually find like real street view imagery of billboard locations So it knows how to use street view to like find actual points of interest And then to take that image and use that as a reference seed image For like a AI image generation or video generation, right? So like I mean another cool thing you can do with hyper agent is you can tell it like take this house And like I want you to redesign the house using interior photos from Zillow or like the exterior shots And it will do that like really really well, right? So That type of agent in a nutshell can walk through some of the other stuff here You know once you actually build like a lot of agents Then you get like this this ability to start looking at like well, what if I wanted to see you know Not just my one agent. Sorry, but um But in overview of all of my agents, right? So this is not like a very built-out account This would be like your first week of hyper agent use But like literally that command center view that we talked about like you know We want you to be able to create many different agents that each play a role. Here's the content marketer He's here's the market researcher. Here's like the like customer email responder And like just manage and oversee an entire fleet of agents Constantly improve them because we actually have this ability to go and like you know curate memory and skill improvements from every run that you do And then finally to build a deploy them into a team setting as well So if you wanted to take any of these agents and actually give it the ability to Talk and slack, right? So I can actually say like let me put this into slack Let me have it always on always listening in fact and you know Just sit there in my channels listening to everything I'm talking about my team's talking about and when I have something relevant to add to Automatically chime in and then people can interact with me truly like I'm a you know I'm a virtual co-worker right and I think that's kind of part of the open-clock I've seen some of the power users achieve that's really quite magical like Your slack co-workers are now agents in addition to humans and they're really smart and they have their own like expertise in context Like you get that with a single click out of any agent that you build in hyperagent So you mentioned skills You know how does skills work on hyperagent and how should people think about it? Yeah, so Skills are I think like the most important Concept or primitive in the frontier agents world meaning the models are generally intelligent enough It's like find like Albert Einstein who's like obviously super smart in a general sense And he may not know like how to solve problems in real estate But if you gave him like just the right like kind of briefing on like here's a playbook Here's a manual to learn everything you need to do to know to do this job in real estate Like he's gonna go and like figure it out pretty well, right? And so what's really powerful about skills is like they're a really really composable concept like you can Interactively create skills. So let's say I'm actually gonna create like a new thread here Just keep this super clean, but like help me create a skill that Post Greg isenberg like AI content Okay, and so what's really powerful about this is like no don't create this don't create Okay, but but worse enough that you know, we don't take breaks up Exactly But what's really cool about this is like it's not gonna just like go and like Like say okay, like you know, I'm just gonna have a prompt that you know pretends to be Greg isenberg It can actually go and like you know research How you actually do content? So it's coming up with a plan the plan is like I'm gonna first go and like research your style Figure out like what platform I care about like look at some of your actual posts And then distill all that into a skill that I can then pin to an agent or like just use on demand at any point, right? So let's say just for fun Like what what platforms do you want to post to let's just say x for now We're gonna have the skill only generate draft so it's not gonna auto post for you Is there any kind of a content you want your agent isenberg to To be focused on yeah, let's do contrarian a i take cool Um, and then any topics beyond that like Solopener bootstrap like And then how do you want to use this agent um if uh if you end up using this agent like you know Do you want to like start with an idea? Do you want it to just like come up with ideas for you? Yeah We'll go for a promise, right? Like someday we're gonna have to see if like real Greg is actually just sitting at the pool all day It's just created the the Greg avatar version of you uh and is doing everything on its own But okay, so now it's like gonna go and like do some research about you and figure out like how to distill distill the perfect skill for for Greg like into this skill How should people think about You know hyper agent versus perplexity computer versus manas versus open claw itself Yeah, so codex like yeah, how do you see it? So I think um Against codex, you know, it's quite simple like hyper agent is a more general purpose agent platform, right? I think against open open claw like this is much more turnkey ready to go safe and secure by default cloud native like You know and and I think just much more focus on like great UX right open claw like we actually have to go into configuration Or like you're trying to edit memories or do any kind of curation or like kind of configuration It's you know, it's it's quite wrong, right? It's like a very you know kind of raw product kind of feels like it's more for like very technical people who become like expert at it um I think perplexity and manas or perplexity computer and manas are like the closest comps for hyper agent The key difference is like one, you know, hyper agent has more powerful tools out of the box and And also is it has more focus on UX out of the box, right? Like you know I spent some time playing with both of those products I think they're great products and like you know at their time and you know We're at least that when manas first came out. It's truly groundbreaking, right? Like it was the first kind of real like Holy crap like yellow agent like look at everything it did Kind of like before even open claw right long before open claw And so I think they were really kind of pioneers in this space With hyper agent like we've just taken a very UX-focused approach So for people who like you know seeing Visually and be able to like interact with the outputs and see more visually like what the agent is doing and have a more visual way of you know Defining skills deploying skills creating agents etc Hyper agent is just much more of like the Macintosh experience, right? Versus the Linux. I think secondarily We've also kind of done a lot more to make hyper agent Immediately ready to run not just like one like agent like I think the nominal experience for manas and perplexed computer is still like You use those products and you kind of have this like agent. That's pretty awesome and you know You use it directly, right? You can do that with hyper agent. That's exactly what we're doing here But it's also designed from day one with much more of like the scalability and deployability story in mind So meaning like once I have an agent that kind of works for me I can now deploy it one click into my Slack channel And now everyone in my company can benefit from this agent just always on like kind of chiming into conversations You know, they can ask it questions it will respond You have the command center that fleet view where it's not just one agent You can oversee your entire fleet of multiple agents and we even have things like you know The ability to oversee and curate like the learnings that that keep making each agent better So like they kind of have this automatic self-improvement loop where over time they're accumulating not just new memories But also like suggesting to you. Hey, maybe you should add this additional skill or update or tweak the skill or even like Maybe you should go and actually try changing my agent system prompt or give me access to different tools So I can do this type of job better and best yet like we actually have this concept of what we call rubrics Which is exactly what it sounds like it's like a eval rubric and what you can do with rubrics That's really powerful is actually like define what does good look like for a certain type of task right? So I could create one here that's like what is a rubric for great reg isenberg content And what it basically does is I can then have a full Eval loop where every time my agent runs like once the Greg isenberg Skill is ready. I could say like I'm creating the virtual Greg agent And I'm gonna pin a rubric to that agent that then says every time Greg creates a piece of content I want to score that content along the dimensions that you care about using a separate L11's judge That fires off and then I can literally oversee like how well is my agent doing over time right? And if I want to double click in and inspect any one task run to see like how did it get scored? I can do so so We basically you know have this complete full loop of it's not just like you get a day one agent or thread experience That works really well out of the box And it's not just like you can curate agents and deploy them and like improve them over time But it's that you have this complete observability layer and kind of this this orchestration story where you can actually just like look at all of your agents Running all the time and see how they're doing And so if I pinned the The eval rubric to any of one of these agents I would see like the trend line of how it's scoring I could then automatically like suggest Hey, maybe I can reduce the model Quality so I drop from opus to sonnet get a five times reduction in cost and the You know the score didn't go much down, right? So just once people actually start running agents at scale These kind of secondary Capabilities become really critical because it's not just about can I get one agent to do one thing But how do I like oversee and run an entire business with many different agents and ensure consistent quality? Which is a big deal because you know for example if you're using manus Who is the judge around the output the judge is you right human being right? It's not opus 4.6 It's exactly so if you're trying to actually create what we're talking about before which is like an agent first business You know managing a ton of agents you're Realistically, you're not gonna have the bandwidth to be looking at every single output at all stages, right? Yeah, it's kind of like management 101 right but like applied to agents now where it's like as you scale up If you're the CEO of a business like you just literally don't have time to go and like Look at every single thing that every single person in the company has done And so you need to create like better automated checks and balances to oversee what the agents are doing, right? And like inspect quality of work right like this would be like if you actually had like a giant army of human content creators Like you would want some way of like you know In a scalable way like to detect like if they're posting good or bad content or not, right? And then know like okay, we got to tweak like the guidelines for each of these people Okay, so now we have the Greg is more contrarian draft skill Um, and I'm gonna go ahead and save the skill and I'm gonna try seeing like okay Let's do a dry run. It's gonna scan today's AI and News and trends and then create some contrarian drafts, right and the whole idea here is like look like it's probably gonna do an okay job On like the the first effort here like it did some research about you It kind of like you know, it has a lot of like context about how you work, right? If I wanted to see more about this skill, I could actually open it up Here's when it should be used for here's the actual kind of skill contents Greg's voice is a smart friend that did her saying the quite part out loud Not a corporate communicator. I would agree with that Um, you know, you've been inside all these companies boba Like doesn't mean be a jerk. I I think it's very Astute like you're loud, but like not annoying or like kind of rude And then actually, I'm curious if you agree with some of these stylistic things, right? Like you got a hook in the first seven words um You know, you don't want like long blocks of text, which I'm guilty of so I I should take some of this Greg Greg skill and apply it to myself um, you love ordered lists Uh, never end with what do you think which is super generic Um, so let's just say like this is a pretty good V1 like maybe it's like 50% of the later Um, but the idea is that like these skills should be evergreen, right? Like it's not like you do one and done the whole point is like every time I use a skill Like either automatically using um, you know kind of the LLM Generating learnings and like suggestions to improve itself or because I am looking at the content and say oh That's not quite right like here's why you got that wrong Like you can interactively tweak and improve the skills and performance of the agent over time So like I think this is the the the like challenge that a lot of people face is like they one shot something It's not quite like as profound as what they hoped for and they kind of give up right and I think like my you know kind of um Strong guiding and urgence to folks. I think it's very line to to how you've thought about it like is Don't give up after the first shot, right? Like because it's very very clear that the agents are powerful enough to do Almost anything you want it to do and the issue is not whether it's capable of and whether you should like give up on it It's whether you are able to invest the kind of time in coaching and like curation to get it there and I think that like it is well worth it, right? um If you get it there It's obviously going to be so much leverage for you that like What's the value of like having an always on now employee that just like Does the things that you care about like behind the scenes at all times and like you know runs for trivial costs relative to like the the cost of hiring a new employee Well, it's like real life too, which is like you know when I first started playing tennis I was bad at playing tennis and when I You know would go to play tennis. I I almost didn't want to go because I was like I'm bad at this Um, but you sort of you you go through the messy middle and you get better and better and over time then you end up Wow, this is a lot of fun. So I think that once you get to the point where it's a lot of fun And it does feel like the outputs are really good the truth is 99% of people Don't are not putting in the work to get to get the great outputs, right? So you know The this is the arbitrage. It's for people to actually You know actually invest in spending time to optimize and get it to a place where it's high quality absolutely Yeah, it's funny um One of the benchmark partners sent out this this memo about like you know It was basically a wake-up call to all of the the portfolio companies to like you know get with the program and like really Radically rethink how you operate your business like immediately with AI and like the assumption is like you're probably You think you're doing some or some things for AI you have an AI like you know kind of um Like you know center of excellence. You have like this AI feature But it's not enough right and the the kind of parable that they ended with was like imagine like there's two friends back in like call it You know like 2003 and they're both going door-to-door selling like you know kind of knives, right? Like or some other like you know kind of in-person You know kind of offline product and one of them decides you know like every night and weekend I'm going to spend like 30 minutes like trying this new Google like AdWords thing and trying to like get some extra leads for my business as supplementary and You know like one month like they grow a little bit of revenue like from from the SEO or the sm thing next month They get a little bit more and the other person is like This thing is awesome like SEM is awesome and it's early But I need to figure it out and so they stop going door-to-door and selling knives at all And they just spend like the next few months like just focus on like how do I get this entirely internet business to work right in the early days of of it and Like you know two months like they have zero revenue. They're like living off like their savings But they slowly start to get this thing to start get get humming right and they get like really versed in the best of SEO and SEM techniques and how do I create an e-commerce? You know kind of um, you know Website that like allows people to transact directly there versus like just giving them a number to call me And you know that the end of the story is like okay like project forward like five years Where do you think each of those people is right and like the obvious answer is the second person It's probably built like one of the early multi-billion dollar e-commerce businesses and just like carved off Like the next Amazon right and the other person's like probably still selling door door which is getting harder and harder And like you know kind of that that market shrinking and so I think it is one of those things where it's like you kind of have to like hit a reset moment and what feels like You know, maybe experimentation and not actually bringing home the bacon actually is the most profound thing You can do to create like real business leverage in the like not even like two-year timeframe But like maybe even like the six-month timeframe and I'm curious like in your experience or when you see like So the pro nerds doing this like where do you see or like how often like what is the average like break-even point Literally either in terms of like you get to the point where you can like self-sustained a full-time You know kind of like a business right Like and that becomes your paycheck or just even where it like even feels like it's starting to to pan out I Think that there's like multiple milestones that people hate where they you know, it's a game of confidence, you know Yeah, when you make your first internet the dollar no matter what it is if rewires your brain Yeah So if you can take an idea and make one dollar a stranger you just one dollar yeah, it's gonna rewire brain Then I think once you get to like 10k a month Um just something about that number You know for the most part once you hit that you're probably quitting your job You're probably going all in you're probably like okay. There's something here and there's a path to Something bigger I think that with respect to like agent products and products like this You know the mistake I think a lot of people make is They try it to sporadically. So what I encourage people to do is to actually try the product You know Every single day for a certain amount of time. So commit to 30 days 60 days 90 days some amount of time so that Every single day it's like in your calendar like literally I have in my calendar like 30 minutes here 30 minutes there Right, yeah, and that's what gets you to be a top 1% agent builder, right? Because you make it a part of your workflow and then you end up seeing like you know It's outside returns because it compounds that makes sense. I mean it's kind of like um you know I'm not a writer but like I've heard uh from writer friends like the most important thing is not to like wait for like the one weekend Where you're gonna have like the spur of brilliance and write the whole screenplay or the whole book all in one get go But it's like you have to force yourself to write like Some pages every single day like no songs like some of them are gonna be crappy pages But like the forced habit like just gets you better and better and better and then it becomes like natural And so I could see that being very applicable and kind of like analogous here for the world of like getting agent sattie So do we have some tweets? So okay, let's look at this um Let's see the consensus narratives are oh this is not loading for some reason The consensus narratives are getting louder every medium post reads like the last one. Okay, so Here's uh, here's one The 10k month uh, AI is a little from our boom is mostly counter farm fiction They say 82% of us businesses have zero employees Um, what do you think about this one? I mean what I like about it is you know when I do tweets because I'm a human being Yeah, largely there's no data. It's just like I have a hot take. Yeah, so what's cool about this is there's research and the truth is Um Though, you know people people obviously want data Yeah, yeah With a team of hyper agents doing all the research for you and like coming up with continuity is now now you have time um Oh, this is kind of cool. Uh, is this true? um That med v is actually not Yeah, I'm a business. I actually uh, I hadn't um, I'd followed like the first arc of that story Which oh my god, this thing is like so massive um, but uh, I mean It's all over let down for like the the billion dollar startup story, but like you know, maybe there's a take on it That says like no, but like it's still possible for real. This guy just kind of gave us all a bad reputation Um, your AI agents didn't replace your VA blah blah It's kind of interesting. I mean these are all what I would call like kernels Uh for really good for great tweets. Yeah, like You know key and and the cool thing is like I could give it feedback So like you know as an example like let's let's say like uh, I want to give you feedback on your skill What's like one thing that you want to like give it some feedback on Um, I would say You know the the tweets that tend to do well are Sound sound very friend to friend and is there like do these all just feel like a little too like like they're not like colloquial they feel exactly. Yeah, these feel a little too Formal or like stiff or something. Exactly Yeah, and that's something like I would notice that Right um, and so what we can do Like we would put this in the e-vow right? Yeah, you could do both So one is like you could immediately go and turn this like or update the skill based on this feedback You could also have it immediately just like turn around like a new draft of these tweets right to sound more colloquial And then finally to your point I could go and create a rubric that actually says like okay like here's the five dimensions I care about and then auto evaluate every future output right um, so You kind of have a number of different options like depending on how far you want to go right now Like if you just want to get your job done right now you don't want to bother with rubric You don't have to right but eventually like you get to the point where you want to set up a scalable system For this to just constantly work and get better and better and that's the point I wish you would do a rubric which is not the hard actually like if you know You can either go in through the UI and build one or you can actually in this chat like say help me build a rubric to score great Greg style content which I'll queue up for after it updates the skill um, and and then it will go and help me create that rubric save it Pin it to this agent or to this skill and then automatically run every future Uh, time I pre-contest and it is it possible to for example Get an email every single day at 8 a.m With you know some ideas Like you yeah, you absolutely can so the way to do that would be in fact you could just tell it in the thread like Can you turn this into a recurring daily email at 8 a.m And so that what it's gonna do is like say like I want to now save this thread into an agent And the agent is going to be given a run schedule of like every day 8 a.m. Go and do this thing We're actually about to ship something that we're calling a live mode Which is kind of inspired by like the open claw like kind of heartbeat behavior Where you could already have configured an agent to do this just by saying like I wanted to pull every 30 minutes But we're making it much more of a first class thing within hyper agent where you can literally just click a button Turn any agent or any thread alive And then the feeling is going to be that like wow this thing is just like constantly on And looking at all of the like new tweets out there coming up with new ideas And then pushing them to me either be a telegram or over email or in Slack Whenever it comes up with new stuff. So like the the um the UX or the mental model is meant to be like wow This just becomes like a always on like 24 7 Agent that That pushes ideas to me or even like can go and like preemptively draft and post content like if you wanted it to go for yellow You could actually have it just go and like tweet the content itself right Good old full yolo mode Yeah Yeah, I don't recommend for your yolo mode just because I mean There's no need for for for something like this right like in order for x specifically in order to win if you can get one good Tweet out every single day. That's all it is. Yeah, no one you know and That just means that you could and you can batch these you can schedule it out But just look at it make sure that that it's it's high quality meets your bar. Yeah I think I think it's it's definitely worth it for for this specifically. Yeah, that's fair I mean, I think that you know content is a very hits driven business and so like fewer high quality hits Is as well matters, but you know, there are there are tons of use cases where like maybe for my own emails right like There are a subset of emails that like are low stakes that I just You know want hyperagent to just automatically not only draft reply But like if it feels confident. It's like not a sensitive kind of situation like you know Then just go ahead and like respond to to it right like you know Could be simple like inbound increase from like internal folks saying like hey when you have time to meet It could just preemptively go ahead and like suggest to talk right or even like pre book it on my calendar Or customer emails that are like innocuous or like asking for like we're trying to give input on a feature It could just compile all that feedback feedback for me as a report But then respond like with a smart personalized acknowledgement to the user or even ask for like clarification And I think you you all have like a ton of connectors built into hyperagent right yeah So it's really cool actually is that not only do we have a ton of connectors that just work out of the box You click a button OAuth in in the thread right so maybe starting a new one I could say like what's a tool that you want to use With with hyperagent could be like granola Notion maybe okay. Yeah connect can I connect to notion and pull in all my notes Um, and so it will just in the thread like say hey here here's an OAuth link like connect to your notion But arguably one of the most powerful parts is like even for things that we don't have a connector to like Let's say there's some like very obscure API that you're trying to work with right um You could basically have hyperagent go and learn that API So I actually I'll say like actually Nevermind on this Um, can you instead help me build an API integration to what's some like Fairly new tool that you know of that has an API I'm assuming well, do you have linear built-in here? Uh, we do have a connection to linear, but actually maybe maybe Twilio could be a good example right like where If you can owe off into Twilio, so it has to be an API skill and we may have a pre-built connector But I'm gonna have it like build a custom skill Uh, regardless, so can you still help me build a custom skill to integrate with Twilio the API right and Um, so now what it's gonna have what what's gonna happen is like it can go and like Research the Twilio API docs create a skill for itself to use the API and then actually ask me to enter my credentials in a safe way Uh, and then be able to like use the Twilio API fully, right? Um So I think like the powerful thing now is a frontier agent Should be able to like literally do anything right like but it's just a matter of like you have to give it access to the right context And you have to like, you know, tell it like hey like yeah, you should build a skill for this so then it can do it every single future time effortlessly Uh, let's say what we want to do SMS voice for now maybe phone numbers We'll do an API key off and um any specific workflows think like Maybe actually I want to build a voice and SMS service that can call restaurants For reservations or something, right? If you're listening to this and you're not fired up about building a business right now like the fact that you can do this Is crazy. Yeah If someone has heard about you know, this is the first time they're hearing about hyper agent They want to they want to get started and they You know, what's a plan for them to like what should they do? How do they get started? How to get the most sort of hyper agent? I I think like the most Often like the hardest thing to get over is not like how to use the product like I think you know our users have said like wow This product is like super intuitive like I can usually just like ask the agent to figure something out and it don't goes and does it So it's not like I have to learn like a ton of new like configuration or UI or anything Um, I think the hardest part is actually like Picking like the right problem or like the right business opportunity you want to try to attack with hyper agent Which like hyper agent actually can help you brainstorm that in fact we just shipped a new better onboarding flow We're instead of just like landing you into a generic You know kind of like empty canvas where you have to like just pick like a new thread And you know, we have some like templates and so on like now when you first land in it's going to suggest like hey Do you want to like connect me to all of your context? So like connect me to your gmail to your slack into like your notion and granola and what I'll offer to do is Actually go and like research you like in your context So I'll read through a bunch of your like past weeks emails and slacks and like look at your past granola meanings and You know, of course all that context is private to you But like now hyper agent is going to be able to like suggest to you like hey based on everything I've learned about you Like here's some use cases that might be relevant to you So it seems like you're a VC maybe you're like doing a lot of deal flow I could create an agent to just go and automatically like you know kind of summarize and do research on every investment pitch that you get right So like you can turn me on all the time like I'll just run in the background and then like ping you Every single time you get a inbound picture You can even have it learn the behavior to thread a private reply to any Email that you get inbound from a founder, right? So you get an inbound pitch Hyper agent on behalf of you Sends you and only you a just threaded reply within that email chain saying hey, I researched this company I also summarize all the materials. Here's what you you should know about them, right? But the whole idea is that like Hyper agent itself can help you identify use cases or you can come in just with a really broad prop like kind of interested in building building a solar printer business I don't know. I'm kind of interested in like real estate. I want to pick one of Greg's You know kind of ideas that are open stores like help me plan this out, right? And it will do a very good job of like going and running with you on that So I think the main thing is like don't get stuck in the blank slate starting point problem Like just come in and like you know figure out some place to start Maybe it's your personal like you know contacts Maybe it's like you come in with an idea But like once you start getting getting into it like it's It just sucks you in even more because like you realize all of what you can do And it's just so powerful like you won't help but to get better and better at it Last question before before we head out You know, I was just talking to someone on the on another pot on actually this podcast talking about her message agent And one of the things we're talking about is when you're picking one of these Platforms be it open-claw hyper agent Codex whatever you're sort of like investing in an ecosystem My question for you how he is why should someone You know Invest in the hyper agent ecosystem like where do you see hyper agent going over the next few years? Yeah, so We have a lot of experience building great PLG products I mean obviously air table itself is a PLG product that also scaled up into real serious kind of like businesses right like there are companies that Still run their major operations whether it's like really really large like you know kind of Walmart scale companies Like you know the open eyes of the world, but also like you know We have like like really innovative fast-moving SMB some of the like fastest growing companies like record Rod a lot of like stuff on air table and you know, I think like the the The experience that we have of Building a product that's both extremely low floor and intuitive But then also has a very high ceiling and scales up even as you need to scale up the number of agents you have how you deploy them How you oversee them like that's our commitment is that we are going to be the best at giving you both a low floor and a high ceiling Especially as you want to actually run a serious business or operations with hyper agent, right? So I think that's that's going to be kind of unique where I see the landscape fragmenting into like there's going to be really easy Fun kind of prototyping tools and products that are kind of like easy to get started with But then ultimately don't scale with you as you want to become like a real serious Enterprise built around these agents and then conversely there's going to be more like Heavy kind of agent builder products right with like configuration and like controls and all that stuff That are going to be better from like a control plane standpoint from be able to like oversee a fleet of agents Sandpoint but make the initial experience and the graduation path like a lot more Clunky right or just like a really sharp wall to overcome So I think our commitment is this product is going to be the best combination of low floor and high ceiling And we're always going to have this obsession with great UX like that's our DNA That's like what I obsess over and the only kind of company that I want I want to build is one that wins in a product category where The value of the software or the technology is very very high But the accessibility is really kind of the key differentiator that we went on right so agents are going to be powerful We're not going to be the only powerful agent product out there like I think frontier agents are all going to get better and smarter and faster and so on But what we can do is use really great product design just like Apple did with computing to make the powerful experience also really accessible Yeah, it really is the most Hyperagent is the most visual agent builder I've ever seen it reminds me of a desk Like when you know, I'm looking at my desk to wood desk right now and I've got I'm like I have a paper over here And some scribbles over here and my iPad over there to me that's what Hyperagent kind of feels and looks like it feels like a desk that I'm like visualizing it So I think for people who like You know connect like that and I'm I'm certainly one of those people I think so a lot of people are just going to be like sign me up totally Yeah, I mean look like it you know for people who don't like UI and want to just like Use their computer through the terminal like all day every day like with somebody yeah, how we some people are like they're they're you know They're ups what they love doing is like Obsessing overtuning every single detail and stuff like that and there those people though, you know That an open claw might be for them, right, but if you're if you are like yeah that but I believe that like You don't have to sacrifice the tutability right or they could like the power and so you know One of our strong Design philosophies here is that like hyperagent still does give you a lot of control like you can go and tweak You know kind of like agent configuration if you want to if you want to like choose the exact model and system prompt and tools Like give it a lot of refinement you can and like you can go quite far in terms of curating memories We actually just shipped yesterday a kind of like a defrag tool for your memories So that as you accumulate more and more memories across all these different agents You have this like really elegant way of like defragging them right where like we can auto suggest here related memories Cluster it by both like you know keyword as well as like embeddings Similarities so that we're actually understanding the content of the memories and you can consolidate them But they're like you know We want to really serve both people who are like Power users who want control over how the agent is set up so they can get maximum bleeding edge performance But then also you know like you shouldn't have to do with all that to get value out of the product So it really is about the range I think it's more just that like if you are truly you know happy just like doing it all yourself through like a very You know kind of like a low level command line interface kind of experience And like you're okay not having the control plane like the deployability the ability to oversee many agents and deploy them at scale and manage across a team Then you know made me those people like aren't going to appreciate hyper agent as much Totally Well, I'm stoked to see how it evolves. Thanks for doing a little show and tell you got me fired up Oh my god. We all include links Where to follow you, but also where to sign up to hyper agent in the description in the show notes um And we're gonna do a really generous um credits giveaway for your listeners Maybe one of the benefits of launching hyper agent within air table which is a half billion revenue business We're gonna generate a hundred million of free cash flow You know this year like we have over a billion dollars on our balance sheet That's not to like you know just be pretentious about it But is that like you know we've built a good and and growing and like you know kind of profitable business with air table That allows us to be even more generous and liberal with like we just want to get people to really adopt hyper agent Get value out of it And we wanted to become the standard right like we wanted to become like the iPhone and so you know We're willing to be very very generous like we're not trying to make money and nickel and dye people on You know on pricing in fact like we're giving away multipliers to You know your your audience and early adopters For both like just straight up cash that gets applied towards real model costs including like opus Which now you know as a lot of the open clock community has gotten that kind of sad about like you can't get subsidized credit for For use in open law But like you can use opus you can get the frontier models And you can get it much more cheaply because we're willing to subsidize it through hyper agent Well, we this is a group of people who listening to this who appreciate that because this is a group of people who actually You know, they listen and they actually go and build stuff. So yeah, thanks for the love how we and You have to I love this The solar printer and like you know small Early stage like startup and small business owner, you know audience. I think you know It is where more AI innovation is going to happen far faster than frankly within many large kind of incumbent companies You just have the agility and like the only thing Keeping you from going into deploying agents everywhere is like just your willingness and like putting it a little bit of time Right, but I you know We're already seeing in our early adoption base with hyper agent like you know some of these like Small shops have become super sophisticated sophisticated really really fast and are running their operations in a kind of game changing way That frankly like a 50,000 person company would not be able to do for a much much much longer time right and just has all kinds of like You know kind of reasons why they wouldn't be able to go and pivot on a dime So I think this is a really really awesome audience and you know, I kind of live to see You know entrepreneurs like do awesome stuff right like so super exciting to to be plugged into to the community and like I want to see You know your listener base generate like you know a hundred billion dollar You know kind of legit companies with like less than five employees I'm your lips to God's ears baby. Thanks a lot. How we I'll see you next time. Awesome. See you