How to win with AI Agents in 2026

Limited BONUS: First 1,000 builders get $1,000. Claim yours while supplies lasts.: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/hyperagent I sit down with Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable, to talk about the agent economy and the launch of HyperAgent. We walk through Sequoia's charts on AI agent deployment, the economics of token-based work versus human labor, and why frontier agents have crossed a threshold that changes how companies get built. Howie then does a live show-and-tell of HyperAgent, including a custom "Greg Isenberg contrarian AI" skill he spins up in real time. This one is for anyone building a solopreneur business, operating a fleet of agents, or trying to figure out where to place their bet in the agent ecosystem Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 02:22 – Sequoia's AI agent deployment chart reaction 04:41 – Copilot vs Autopilot territory and the $1T+ opportunity 08:13 – Agent economics vs human labor costs 11:12 – Fastest enterprise adoption curve in history 14:48 – The agent command center and fleet of 20 agents 18:03 – What is HyperAgent? 19:43 – Live demo: hyperlocal real estate market reports 22:38 – HyperAgent as the founder, not just the developer 23:21 – Street View, Zillow redesigns, and visual tool power 24:15 – Command center view across a fleet of agents 25:48 – Skills as the key primitive for frontier agents 26:30 – Building the Greg Isenberg contrarian AI skill live 32:31 – HyperAgent vs Perplexity Computer, Manus, OpenClaw, Codex 34:52 – Reviewing writing skill 36:55 – The arbitrage of persistence 41:31 – Confidence milestones: first dollar, $10K/month 35:27 – Reviewing contrarian tweet drafts live 45:05 – Giving the agent feedback and building rubrics 50:15 – Connectors, OAuth, and building custom API skills 53:03 – How to get started with HyperAgent 01:01:54 – Credit giveaway for listeners 01:03:31 – Closing Thoughts Key Points Frontier agents have crossed a threshold in the last 4–5 months where they function as true autonomous coworkers, not just chat assistants. Reframe agent cost by value delivered: a $150 token spend for a board memo beats hours of human time, so anchor on opportunity cost. The real arbitrage is persistence: 99% of people quit after one shot, while daily practice for 30/60/90 days produces top 1% operators. Skills are the most important primitive in frontier agents, turning generally intelligent models into domain experts through playbooks. HyperAgent's differentiation is a low floor plus a high ceiling, with rubrics, LLM-as-judge evals, and fleet-wide observability for scaling. Aim for $100B companies with under 5 employees, built on fleets of always-on agents mapped to human job roles. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND HOWIE ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/howietl Hyperagent: https://www.hyperagent.com Airtable: https://www.airtable.com-

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Howie Liu is 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 Howie. 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 Hyperagent.com. Now, Hyperagent is an AI agent builder that allows you to build digital employees, allows you to build apps on different ideas.

• 0:44Greg Isenberg?

  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 Hyperagent so that you can outperform 99.9% of people. I got good news. Howie is going to give you $1,000 of Hyperagent credits, no strings attached. You just log into the account. There's going to be a thousand bucks right there to go and build the business of your dreams. The catch is first 1,000 people do it, get the $1,000. 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 Hyperagent, to automate some stuff, to do some research, to build their business. So thanks, Howie. You know, all I ask is you'd like and comment on this video.

• 1:28Greg Isenberg?

  Show some love for Howie for doing such a cool thing. We need more entrepreneurs, more builders, and I'm stoked to see him support you all. Thank you to Airtable for sponsoring this episode. You guys are legends. Enjoy the episode and have a creative day.

• 1:52Greg Isenberg?

  Feeling really lucky right now because we've got Howie. He's the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. And today, we're going to talk about agents. He's going to 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.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Agent psycho.

• 2:14Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, exactly. And I just need your reaction to just some things I've been thinking about.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22Greg Isenberg?

  So this chart over here, it's by Sequoia. In what domains are AI agents deployed? You can see software engineering is at almost 50%. Back office at 9%. Marketing and copyrighting 4%. Sales and CRM 4.3% and down. When you see this, like, what's your reaction?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I mean, I think two things. One is, I think it absolutely reflects 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 two, 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 autocomplete, like tab autocomplete, which like, we all figured out like three years ago, right?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  With even GitHub Copilot, but it's now like, you don't even need the IDE, right? Like, the way I develop on Hyperagent is I have like 30 different Claude 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 one AI, which is like basically like AI augmentation for still like very human driven development workflows. Andre Karpathy talked about like, you know, in October, November is when he completely inverted from like most. Mostly still human written code with AI augmentation to completely the opposite. Right. And that's what we've seen like the frontier companies leap into.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  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 their you know, and their industry with the new state of the art.

• 4:42Greg Isenberg?

  Right. Well, I mean, another way to think about it is like there's co pilot territory. These, these charts are from Sequoia, right? There's co pilot territory, there's autopilot territory. Like, how do you see, you know, 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.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:01Greg Isenberg?

  But they're very different. What's your reaction to this?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I, I think, um, to me, it's like these agents really reached a breakthrough. Really, you know, call it like four or five months ago, right? And 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?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Because we've kind of just reached this point where like the models are more than smart enough. Right. 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 context. And so I think it's more of just a matter of how and how quickly we can deploy agents into every role and industry.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  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 labor, which is like obviously many tens of trillions. Right. Like in even like the Western hemisphere alone.

• 6:51Greg Isenberg?

  Right. Which is sort of like, I don't understand how you're not, how people aren't motivated to create startups right now in that sense. Like the person listening to this is like, yes, yes, Howie, you know? But it just feels like, you know, I can't think of a better time to be creating a startup than now.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 7:09Greg Isenberg?

  Right?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  I think like, I mean, yeah, I think the weird thing is like, it's almost like using is believing, right? Like, it's really hard to fully grok 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 a superficial, you did like some naive, like one shot thing like, hey, like, you know, who's going to win the next presidential election? Like kind of question that you could have asked a chatbot. Like, I think people are not actually coming in and when they're doing light experimentation, they're not actually putting in an ambitious enough prompt or task in front of the frontier agents. And they're still kind of using it like they use Gen one chatbots.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  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 were 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 get it.

• 8:13Greg Isenberg?

  Also, you know, this is another chart I can't stop thinking about, which is the unit economics just absolutely crushed. When you look at a human person versus an AI agent and what it costs, like you can create some serious gross margin businesses on top of this.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. 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 per token of the frontier models, right? So like Opus 4.6, now 7, clearly the most expensive model, right? You know, and then like GPT 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, adopt this 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 chat GPT has a free version, right? That you could use however much you want, you get a cheap dumb model, but like you're not expending that many tokens because it's not actually doing like autonomous

• 9:14Speaker 01

  multi-turn work and expending 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 12.99 before. And instead, think of this as 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, or actually in my, you know, CEO, CEO role, like, it's funny, like, one of our recent board memos that I wrote and

• 9:56Speaker 01

  sent 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 costs me, let's call it like a hundred fifty dollars of tokens to generate that output. Like, think about the opportunity it costs 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 human equivalent time cost?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Versus, wow, a hundred fifty dollars. That sounds really expensive versus like a ten dollar per month sub.

• 10:46Greg Isenberg?

  A hundred percent. Yeah, I think the way I always think about it 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, you had so much research support.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 11:06Greg Isenberg?

  Two more quick graphs and then I want to get into Hyperagent.

• 11:12Greg Isenberg?

  Percent of enterprise apps with embedded AI agents.

• 11:18Greg Isenberg?

  You know, this is the fastest adoption curve in enterprise history, right? So like, when you see this, you know, how do you react?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  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 stimulated by like just incumbency and like, you know, kind of how, how seriously 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 OpenAI and Anthropic alone, right? Let's just say they have a combined revenue probably of like eighty million plus, right?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Or eighty billion, sorry, plus right now, up from like basically zero a few years ago. Like, what in the history of software, like, has there ever been an industry where like any company, let alone like, or even in aggregate, like, you know, across all the companies, you got a category that went from zero to like, you know, eighty billion plus, right? And that's not even including like all of the other AI providers, 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.

• 12:51Greg Isenberg?

  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 opportunity.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I think it's like probably the one 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 as a wedge, right? One is PLG and obviously we see a lot of these like PLG products. I kind of put OpenClaw 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 OpenClaw is, I'm sure in the many hundreds of millions, if not billions already, right? 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 and you're going to get profound growth.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  But the other is like to come in top down Palantir style. This is why OpenAI and Anthropic 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 choice is like, either I pay it and I risk wasting a hundred million dollars and maybe getting fired over it.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Or like, I don't do anything with AI and I'm definitely getting fired over it. So on a game theory 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, uh, that's a bigger question.

• 14:48Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, and this is, you know, it sort of speaks to my last point, too, which is like, if you can help a company, 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? An agent command center, right?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Greg Isenberg?

  So when you see this, your reaction?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  I mean, look, that literally is a view in hyperagent. I look, I feel like I'm looking at a hyperagent, 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 mapped to job roles that humans were playing, right? And, you know, maybe it's a little bit like, why are, why are robots, like hardware robots, converging on a humanoid form factor?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  And part of it is like, well, like, a lot of the infrastructure of everything we have in our homes, in construction sites, in factories, are built for human ergonomics. So for the robot to effectively, you know, kind of, 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 superintelligence, I always imagined like, there's gonna be just like, like, this single omnipotent, like, AI that just like figures everything out and looks at everything all at once, like everything, everything everywhere all at once, right?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  And I think now, like, I'm more and more of the belief that like, They're going to be fundamental and always, you know, kind of present limitations on like context windows, for instance, right? I just don't think 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 could just literally only have so much attention on like so much, you know, context 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 org 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,

• 17:20Speaker 01

  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, I just recently like spent some time playing around with Paperclip, which is kind of fun, uh, cause it literally creates the org chart metaphor. Um, 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 reapplication of like, okay, how do I play that content production role with an agent?

• 18:01Greg Isenberg?

  Right. Well, I think we should get into Hyperagent.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 18:05Greg Isenberg?

  I think now's the time, right? So, you know, for the listener, like, what is Hyperagent? 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, like, you know, can you commit to, you know, giving all the sauce around how to use Hyperagent to, to sort of build a business?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, let's, let's go for it. So this is Hyperagent. I'm currently in a thread. I'll zoom out in a second and kind of, um, show you what like the entry point looks like. But, you know, think of Hyperagent as like, if all of these other agent products out there, like OpenClog, et cetera, are kind of more like Linux, like Hyperagent is our take on like the Mac version of it. Like, we want it 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, Hyperagent 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?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  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, a view layer. But like, it was kind of technical, right? And were very technical. And the whole idea of Airtable was to distill that into a really intuitive experience. In fact, we were very inspired by like, the Macintosh, the GUI, like, taking terminal-based command-line computing and making it into something that like, people could just rock immediately. And so, you know, Hyperagent is really intended to be like a very intuitive and like visual way of using agents. So, this is actually a task thread that I ran a little bit earlier. And this is actually one of your startup ideas, Greg, that we had a Hyperagent work on.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  And basically, the pitch was hyper-local market reports for real estate agents generated from public data, right? 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 own computer. And you can connect it to all your accounts if you want. Like, it can access your Slack and granola and email. It can 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,

• 20:34Speaker 01

  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 it created this research brief. And let me just show you what this one looks like. This is kind of the business case for the idea you pitched, right? I kind of love it, because like, I actually think, you know, these... What I would call like medium sized markets, like it's not like a hundred billion dollar market, which is 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 couple billion TAM large, which is to say you can

• 21:18Speaker 01

  build a very lucrative business, even capturing like a double digit 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, uh, you know, this, this, uh, this agent created kind of a business case for it. It found some really cool, um, 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. Uh, 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

• 22:01Speaker 01

  don't want more software, like, you know, another tool with an interface and did like some competitive analysis. Here's who, who else is out there. Uh, 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 Hyperagent 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, uh, my report style.

• 22:35Greg Isenberg?

  It also looks really clean.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  What's that? Yeah. I mean, and 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 GPT-5.4, like it just does a lot of this really well out of the box. So any frontier agent powered by frontier model should be able to create an app of this quality. What's unique about Hyperagent 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. App building is just a feature now. It's a commoditized feature. And what it can actually do is like go and research the end to end of like, here's Is actually the business context of what I'm trying to do and then build the app informed by it, right? So it's more like Hyperagent is the founder in this case, it's not just the developer, it's the founder.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  One other cool thing I like about Hyperagent 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 AI image generation or video generation, right? So like, I mean, another cool thing you can do with Hyperagent is you could 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.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  And it will do that like really, really well, right? So that's Hyperagent 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 an 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 Hyperagent 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, here's the market researcher, here's like the like customer email responder.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  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 be able to 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 in 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. 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 coworker, right?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And I think that's kind of part of the open clogs during is I've seen some of the power users achieve. That's really quite magical. Like your Slack coworkers are now agents in addition to humans and they're really smart and they have their own like expertise and context. Like you get that with a single click out of any agent that you build in Hyperagent.

• 25:48Greg Isenberg?

  So you mentioned skills, you know, how does skills work on Hyperagent and how should people think about it?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  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 to keep this super clean.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  But like, help me create a skill that posts Greg Isenberg like AI content. Okay, and so what's really powerful about this is like

• 26:51Greg Isenberg?

  No, don't create this, don't create this.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  But but worse enough that, you know, we don't take Greg's business. Uh, 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 could 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, um, just for fun, uh, like what, um, what platforms, uh, do you want to post to?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Let's just say X for now, uh, we're gonna have the skill only generate drafts. So it's not going to auto post for you. Is there any kind of, uh, content you want your, uh, agent Eisenberg to, uh, to be focused on?

• 27:49Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, let's do contrarian AI takes.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Okay, cool. Um, and then any topics beyond that, like?

• 27:56Greg Isenberg?

  Soloopener, bootstrap, lifestyle.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  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?

• 28:11Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I don't want to do it anywhere.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Like, we'll go full autonomous, 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, uh, 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.

• 28:38Greg Isenberg?

  How should people think about, you know, Hyperagent versus Perplexity Computer versus Manus versus OpenClaw itself?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 28:49Greg Isenberg?

  Codex?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:50Greg Isenberg?

  How do you, how do you see it?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  So I think, um, against Codex, you know, it's quite simple. Like Hyperagent is a more general purpose agent platform, right? I think against Open, OpenClaw, 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 focused on like great UX, right? OpenClaw, like we actually have to go to configuration or like if 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 raw, 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've become like expert at it. Um, I think perplexity and Manus, uh, or perplexity, perplexity, computer and Manus are like the closest comps for Hyperagent.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Um, the key difference is like, one, you know, Hyperagent 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've 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, or at least when Manus first came out, it's truly groundbreaking, right? Like, it was the first kind of real, like, holy crap, like, YOLO agent, like, look at everything it did. Kind of like before even OpenClaw, right? Long before OpenClaw. And so I think they were really kind of pioneers in this space. With Hyperagent, 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

• 30:18Speaker 01

  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, et cetera. Hyperagent 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 Hyperagent immediately ready to run not just like one, like, agent. Like, I think the nominal experience for Manus and Perplexity 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 Hyperagent, 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,

• 31:03Speaker 01

  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 this 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.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And best yet, like, we actually have this concept of what we call Rubrics, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's like an 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 Greg 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 going to 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 LLM's judge that fires off.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  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, um, the, the eval rubric to any one of these agents, I would see like the trend line of how it's scoring.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I could then automatically like suggest, uh, hey, maybe I can reduce the model quality. So I dropped 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. Cause 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?

• 33:46Greg Isenberg?

  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, a human being, right? It's not Opus 4.6, it's a human being. So if you're trying to actually create what we were 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?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  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 gotta tweak like the guidelines for each of these people. Okay, so now we have the Greg Eisner contrarian draft skill.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna go ahead and save this 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 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? And if I wanted to see more about this skill, I could actually open it up. Here's what it should be used for. Here's the actual kind of skill contents. Greg's voice is a smart friend at dinner saying the quiet part out loud. Not a corporate communicator, I would agree with that. You know, you've been inside all these companies, blah, blah, blah. Like doesn't mean be a jerk.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I, 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. You know, you don't want like long blocks of text, which I'm guilty of, so I should take some of this Greg, Greg skill and apply it to myself. You love ordered lists, never end with what do you think, which is super generic.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Let's just say like this is a pretty good V1 like maybe it's like 50% of the way there. 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 uh you know kind of the LLM generating learnings and like suggestions to improve itself. Or because I am looking at the content and saying, 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 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?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And I think like my, you know, kind of um strong guiding and urgency to folks. And I think this is very aligned 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 and coaching and like curation to get it there. And I think that like it is well worth it, right? Like 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?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:46Greg Isenberg?

  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. 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

• 38:29Greg Isenberg?

  to a place where it's high quality.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny. One of the benchmark partners sent out 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 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,

• 39:11Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 SEM 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

• 39:53Speaker 01

  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? Commerce, you know, kind of, you know, a website that like allows people to transact directly there versus like just giving them a number to call me. And, you know, the pair, 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 is probably built like

• 40:34Speaker 01

  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 to door, which is getting harder and harder. And like, you know, kind of that, that market's 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 solopreneurs doing this, like, where do you see or like, how often, like, what is the, the average like break even point?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Literally either in terms of like, you get to the point where you can like self-sustain a full-time, you know, kind of like business, right? Uh, like, and that becomes your paycheck, or just even where it like even feels like it's starting to, to pan out.

• 41:31Greg Isenberg?

  I think that there's like multiple milestones that people hit where they, you know, it's a game of confidence, you know?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:39Greg Isenberg?

  When you make your first internet dollar, no matter what it is, it rewires your brain.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:45Greg Isenberg?

  So if you can take an idea and make one dollar a stranger, just one dollar, it's going to rewire your 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 too sporadically. So what I encourage people to do is to actually try the product, you know,

• 42:25Greg Isenberg?

  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?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:41Greg Isenberg?

  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, outsized returns because it compounds.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  That makes sense. I mean, it's kind of like, um, you know, I'm not a writer, but like I've heard from writer friends, like the most important thing is not to like, wait for like the one weekend where you're going to have like the spurt 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 stops. Like some of them are going to 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 savvy.

• 43:27Greg Isenberg?

  So do we have some tweets?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  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 AI silencer boom is mostly content farm fiction. They say 82% of US businesses have zero employees. Um, what do you think about this one?

• 43:55Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, what I like about it is, you know, when I do tweets, because I'm a human being, largely there's no data. It's just like, I have a hot take.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:04Greg Isenberg?

  So what's cool about this is there's research and the truth is, um, though, you know, people, people obviously want data associated with their tweets.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  So yeah, with a team of hyper agents, uh, doing all the research for you and like coming up with content ideas. Now, now you have time. Um, oh, this is kind of cool. Uh, is this true? That med V is actually not a legitimate business. I actually, I hadn't, um, I'd followed like the first arc of that story, which is, oh my God, this thing is like so massive. But, uh, I mean, it's a little 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.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  It's kind of interesting.

• 44:56Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I mean, these are all what I would call like kernels for really good, great tweets.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:04Greg Isenberg?

  Like.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  B O R P. 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, I want to give you feedback on your skill. What's like one thing that you want to like, give it some feedback on?

• 45:20Greg Isenberg?

  I would say, you know, the tweets that tend to do well are, sound, sound very friend to friend.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And is there like, do these all just feel like a little too like, like they're not like colloquial?

• 45:35Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. These feel a little too formal or like stiff or something.

• 45:44Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly. Yeah. And that's something like, I would notice that. Right?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:50Greg Isenberg?

  And so what we can do, like, we would put this in the eval, right?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  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? 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 Rubik, 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 at which you would do a Rubrik, which is not that hard, actually.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Like, 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 Rubrik to score great, correct style content, which I'll queue up for after it updates the skill. And, and then it will go and help me create that Rubrik, save it, pin it to this agent or to this skill, and then automatically run every future time I create content.

• 47:05Greg Isenberg?

  And is it possible to, for example, get an email every single day at 8:00 AM with, you know, some ideas?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  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 8:00 AM? And so then what it's gonna do is like, say like, I wanna now save this thread into an agent. And the agent is gonna be given a run schedule of like, every day, 8:00 AM, 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 want it to poll every 30 minutes. But we're making it much more of a first-class thing within Hyperagent, where you can literally just click a button, turn any agent or any thread alive.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And then the feeling is gonna 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 via Telegram, or over email, or in Slack, whenever it comes up with new stuff. So like, the UX or the mental model is meant to be like, wow, this just becomes like a always-on, like 24/7, agent that pushes ideas to me, or even like, can go and like preemptively draft and post content. Like, if you wanted it to go full YOLO, you could actually have it just go and like, tweet the content itself, right?

• 48:33Greg Isenberg?

  Good old full YOLO mode.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:37Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I don't recommend full YOLO mode, just because, I mean, there's no need 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.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:55Greg Isenberg?

  No one, you know, and...

• 48:59Greg Isenberg?

  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.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:10Greg Isenberg?

  I think, I think it's, it's definitely worth it for, for this specifically.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  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, is what 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 drop a 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, it could be simple, like inbound inquiries from like internal folks saying like, hey, when you have time to meet? It could just preemptively go ahead and like suggest a time, right? Or even like pre-book it on my calendar.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Or customer emails that are like innocuous or like asking for like, or trying to give input on a feature. You 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.

• 50:15Greg Isenberg?

  And I think you, you all have like a ton of connectors built into Hyperagent, right?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what'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, it could be like Renola.

• 50:37Greg Isenberg?

  Notion maybe?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. Connect, can I connect to Notion and pull in all my notes?

• 50:46Speaker 01

  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? You could basically have Hyperagent go and learn that API. So I actually I'll say like, actually, never mind on this. 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?

• 51:22Greg Isenberg?

  I'm assuming, well, do you have Linear built in here?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Uh, we do have a connection to Linear, but actually, maybe Twilio could be a good example, right? Like where you can O 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 regardless. So can you still help me build a custom skill to integrate with Twilio via API, right? And so now what's gonna hap- 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?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, let's say what we wanna do, SMS, voice for now, maybe phone numbers. We'll do an API key off and any specific workflows? Think like, maybe, actually, I wanna build a voice and SMS service that can call restaurants for reservations or something, right?

• 52:54Greg Isenberg?

  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.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:04Greg Isenberg?

  If someone has heard about, you know, this is the first time they're hearing about Hyperagent. They wanna, they wanna get started and they, you know, what's a plan for them to? Like, what should they do? How do they get started? How do they get the most out of Hyperagent?

• 53:17Speaker 01

  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's like super intuitive. Like, I can usually just like ask the agent to figure something out and it 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 Hyperagent, which like Hyperagent actually can help you brainstorm that. In fact, we just shipped a new, better onboarding flow where 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,

• 54:01Speaker 01

  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 contacts? 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 week's emails and Slacks and like look at your past granola meetings. And you know, of course, all that context is private to you. But like now, Hyperagent 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

• 54:46Speaker 01

  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 pitch. Or 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, Hyperagent 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 summarized all the materials. Here's what you you should know about them, right? But the whole idea is that like Hyperagent itself can help you identify use cases. Or you could come in just with a really broad prompt, like kind of interested in billing, building a solo entrepreneur business. I don't know, I'm kind of interested in like real estate.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  I want to pick one of Greg's, you know, kind of ideas that are open source. 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 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.

• 56:07Greg Isenberg?

  Last question before, before we head out. You know, I was just talking to someone on the, on another, on actually this podcast, talking about Hermes agent. And one of the things we're talking about is when you're picking one of these platforms, be it OpenClaw, Hyperagent, Codex, whatever, you're sort of like investing in an ecosystem. My question for you, Howie, is why should someone, you know, invest in the Hyperagent ecosystem? Like, where do you see Hyperagent going over the next few years?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we have a lot of experience building great PLG products. I mean, obviously, Airtable 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 SMBs, some of the like fastest-growing companies like McCour run a lot of like stuff on Airtable. And, you know, I think like the, the, um, the experience that we have of

• 57:21Speaker 01

  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 Hyperagent, 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

• 58:07Speaker 01

  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 standpoint, 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.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:16Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it really is the most, Hyperagent's 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, it's a 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 a lot of people are just going to be like, sign me up.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, I mean, look, like, 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.

• 1:00:00Greg Isenberg?

  Well, some people, yeah. Howie, some people are like, they're, they're, you know, they're, what they love doing is like obsessing over tuning every single detail and stuff like that. And those people, you know.

• 1:00:15Greg Isenberg?

  That an open claw might be for them, right? But if you want more.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, that, but I believe that like you don't have to sacrifice the tunability, right, or the 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 and like give it a lot of refinement, you can. And like, you can go quite far in terms of curating memories. Uh, 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 are related memories clustered by both like, you

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  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 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, um, uh, low level command line interface kind of, kind of experience and like you're okay not having the control plane, like the deploy ability, the ability to oversee many agents and deploy them at

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  scale and manage across a team, then, you know, maybe those people like aren't going to appreciate Hyperagent as much.

• 1:01:53Greg Isenberg?

  Totally. Well, I'm stoked to see how it evolves. Thanks for doing a little show and tell. You got me fired up.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:02:00Greg Isenberg?

  How we, I'll include links, uh, where to follow you, but also where to sign up to Hyperagent in the description, in the show notes.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  And we're gonna do a really generous credits giveaway for your listeners. I mean, one of the benefits of launching Hyperagent within Airtable, 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 growing and like, you know, kind of profitable business with Airtable that allows us to be even more generous and liberal with like, we just wanna get people to really adopt Hyperagent, get value out of it, and we want it to become the standard, right? Like, we want it to become like the iPhone. And so, you know, we're willing to be very, very generous.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Like, we're not trying to make money and nickel and dime 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 OpenClaw community has gotten kind of sad about, like, you can't get subsidized credit for, for use in OpenClaw. 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 Hyperagent.

• 1:03:32Greg Isenberg?

  Well, we, this is a group of people who are listening to this who appreciate that because this is a group of people who actually, you know, they listen and actually go and build stuff, so.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Greg Isenberg?

  Uh, thanks for the love, Howie, and, um, you have to, you have to...

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  I love this, um, the, the solopreneur and like, you know, small, uh, early-stage like startup and small business owner, you know, audience. I think, um, you know, it is where more AI innovation is gonna happen far faster than, frankly, within many large kind of incumbent companies, right? You just have the agility and like, the only thing keeping you from going and deploying agents everywhere is like, just your willingness and like, putting in a little bit of time, right? Uh, but, you know, we're already seeing in our early adoption base with Hyperagent, like, you know, some of these like, um, small shops... Have become super 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

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  able to do for a much, much, much longer time, right? It 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 be plugged into 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.

• 1:05:05Greg Isenberg?

  From your lips to God's ears, baby. Thanks a lot, Howie. I'll see you next time.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Awesome. See you.