253 - I Asked AI to Run My Business for a Week. Here's What Happened with Andrew Pignanelli

0:00I can say, do this every day and send BABM on Slack. And co-founder is going to go ahead and make that an automation. Wow. That's all I have to say. And it sets up everything for you. I actually learned that one the hard way. It sent like 20 different calendar invites to people in my spam folder. I actually learned that one the hard way. It sent like 20 different calendar invites to people in my spam folder. And I literally had to send apology emails to everyone and then block the people that needed to block. One of the coolest things that I use it for while fundraising, the co-founder, read all of these and put them in my calendar as holds.

0:32And it did that and it saved me a ton of time.

0:39All right, Andrew Pignanelli, welcome to NICconomics. I am really excited to have you. The reason I'm excited to have you is because you founded a company called the General Intelligence Company of New York. And your first product is this product called Co-Founder. I saw this video that was released and there was a tagline that you had in there that really caught my ear, which was we want to facilitate one person billion dollar companies which sounds outlandish but you guys have raised a good amount of money you launched in on september 8th of this year today is october 27th and you have already 6 000 customers you've got in the mid hundreds of daily active users the company is growing really really fast and i think you're tackling this really cool unique problem which is how do i as a founder extend myself without having to do it the traditional way, which is hiring a team, onboarding a team, and growing that way.

1:28And I think for people who are listening who are entrepreneurs, that's what they want to figure out is like, how do I grow my business without necessarily having to scale the people side of things? So my first question to you is, what does it mean to you to help companies become one person billion dollar companies? Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. This concept is really important for us. We like to think about entrepreneurs all the time and the challenges they face every day. And going after this one person billion dollar company is like a long term goal on just solving those problems for them, you know, in their day to day lives.

2:00We wanted to make it really, really easy for people to start companies and to run companies. And that's what we started was with that goal of making it so fast, so easy that you could have a business idea at night on Friday and then by Monday morning have an actual real legitimate business. And so that's really what we're working towards. We've seen it resonate with people too on like the early signups of these like startup founders and entrepreneurs and things that are just trying to use it to give themselves more time in the day. Yeah, it's really interesting. I've been thinking about this a lot myself because there is so much data out there that we just individually create, right?

2:38I've got my Gmail. I've got Google Docs. I've got text messages. We've got Slack. So you've got your CRM where you track leads, where you document things, et cetera. and like i'm constantly thinking how do i create an end-of-the-day context document so that tomorrow i can just be off and running and have ai help me with a number of these processes and as i've been thinking about it you know the hard part is getting all those to tie in but also making sure there's enough capacity for ai to look through it synthesize it and then you know give whatever analysis and context it needs how do you do it like how are you connecting to all these disparate data points.

3:18Is it magic? Don't lie to me. It's magic, isn't it? It's definitely not magic. And I sometimes wish it was. We plug into all these different systems and we off into them. We actually built these integrations ourselves because if you use someone else's standard, you tend to lose the ability to control the experience. So I am a novice. Are you technical? Are you like an engineering background? Okay. So I'm not. I am what the kids call a vibe coder. Cloud code is my tool of choice. But you said a couple things in there. So MCP, I just want to define that for people. So that's the model context protocol.

3:58Can you explain exactly what that is? Yeah, so MCP came out in, I think it was February, where this is the Anthropics take on how do we get a bunch of agents connected to a bunch of tools. And it's this new standard where you take like an API, which you can plug into some service and you give it a series of instructions attached to the tools. And so you can essentially just give this thing to an agent and it can read the instructions and use the server to run the tool. So if we're talking about emails, there is a Gmail MCP where it says, oh, if you want to send an email, use the send email tool.

4:37Now, this is different than an API, which is essentially just a list of all the tools that you can use. And so I think that's a big difference. Let's back up actually even just a little more because I want to talk about each one of these things. What problem is this solving that you created where entrepreneurs are trying to fix, right? Like what problem is it actually attacking? Yeah, so we call this the million paper cuts problem, which is less of like one single thing and more of like there's a million things you do every day that are small and they take a bit of time and they take a bit of brand capacity.

5:14So think of it like you have a couple people trying to schedule a meeting and you need to get them together. You need to send a calendar invite. You need to send someone an email with info on your company. You need to get a document from one email, put it in another and send it across to someone. You need to forecast a budget, but it's relatively simple. Or you just need to research something. All of this stuff is relatively small on the surface, but if you're an entrepreneur and you're a business owner you have to do a million of these things every day and so our solution is with co-founder takes a lot of that off her plate and it's able to just do it for you we're pitching it as this sort of chief of staff or like self-completing to-do list that you have every day yeah because for a lot of entrepreneurs especially as you're scaling it's like oh it'd be nice to have somebody to schedule this meeting or to give me a prep document for this person I'm about to meet with or to be up to speed so that I can understand where I even pull sales data from a CRM.

6:14There's a lot of effectively either context building that you have to do as an entrepreneur or handing off context to another individual so they can go and execute a task. So like you're saying, it's like a million of these little cuts kind of throughout the day. This would allow across all of those data sources or I don't even know modes of communication, right? Slack, email, text, et cetera, for co-founder to help you as a chief of staff, right? It's like to kind of be an extension of you. Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's just like a thing doer, what we call it. And it pulls, and the reason it's good at that is because it pulls in the context from how you actually work.

6:52So like, instead of, instead of just doing stuff, it does stuff while knowing you. So instead of just scheduling a meeting, it knows, oh, you're not going to be there if you have to go across town, you're not going to be there in time. So you can't schedule at that restaurant. Or instead of just writing some random reply to an email, it can write a reply knowing the context you need to write that email, which is a really big thing that you see as an executive, is just having to have this knowledge to deal with these things. What are the biggest use cases you're seeing people use CoFounder for right now?

7:23We are seeing a lot of scheduling and emails. A big one is also research. One of the things GoFounder can do is it can monitor a set of like websites and give you updates on those websites. So if you give like 20 websites, it can give you an update everything every time something changes. So we're seeing people use this for competitor monitoring, for content creation, to let's say monitor a bunch of blogs and pull in content from them and then write your own blog piece. We're seeing people use it for recruiting. They use it for recruiting like automatically by setting up sequences. We see people using it for keeping themselves up to date every day.

7:57I think I'm the most curious about what's it doing in the scheduling? Is it making decisions? Are you, do you like, hey, co-founder, schedule a meeting with Barry for next week, find any time, and then it goes and does it? Or like, how does that interaction work? Depends on what you ask, right? So if you say find any time, it would use the, look at your calendar and find free slots on the calendar. if you say next week it's going to make a decision about what that means yeah maybe if you know you say next week it might be like monday and then it will look at the free slots in your calendar and then it will figure out who the person you were talking about is by searching them in your email and then it will actually send a calendar invite now we've built all these guardrails so that it's not just sending these things willy-nilly you know i actually learned that one the hard way by not having was very rails and plugging my email and calendar.

8:49And it sent like 20 different calendar invites to people in my spam folder, actually. Yeah, I literally had to send apology emails to everyone, and then block the people that needed to be blocked. The way that works now is like, it queues it up. And it's like, hey, this is the calendar invite this next week, you want to send it? Yes. And so the biggest This change from your workflow goes from like having to go and do that to just approving it. And now you're seeing all these things and you can just approve them and you can approve the emails that are written and then you can just hit all of these things at the same time.

9:23Can I see what that looks like? Yeah. And while you're pulling that up, I'm curious on your thoughts here. I've been thinking a lot about AI and agents in particular as if you want them to work well, you've got to treat them as humans. I know that kind of like sounds weird to say, but if you had unlimited money and could hire an assistant to handle your schedule, what would you need to tell them in order for them to work well? You'd have to be very specific. You don't just say, hey, schedule a meeting with Barry. It's like, oh, schedule a meeting with Barry at this place next week during these times.

9:53It's the same thing. It's just you're happening to be using AI, which feels a little bit weird. And so with what you're building, do you feel that philosophy? Am I oversimplifying it? Or is that like kind of a good way to think about how to interact with these agents? It is changing the way that you're thinking about this stuff now. Like we lean into stuff and companies where they're also down to lean into AI. if you're able to, you can lean into it really hard. And it does change the way that you work, right? So like instead of opening your email the first thing in the morning, maybe you'll open CoFounder and tell it to read your email.

10:29Or like instead of starting the chat session, you might make an automation that starts this chat session. What did you type in here? I'm looking at this right now. So CoFounder has a chat window that you go to and you're interacting with. So I asked it, what's my calendar look like on Thursday? And so this is to give you an idea of like how it works, right? So it used its memory system to see past calendar events, but future calendar events are not in the memory yet. And so it did a search and it found what I'm doing on Thursday, which this is all accurate. Like this is the things there. And then it's giving me a response, right?

11:04So morning, I do this. During the day, I'm speaking at that time. And then in the evening, I have cocktail hour and then a party, right? So that's how it kind of uses the tools. And it's got this to-do list. And this to-do list will like, it can be really long or it can be really short. So I can say... Oh, is that native in CoFounder? Yeah. So this is one of the ways we trip the agent into running for a long time. So I can say something like, it's true. And I can say something like, okay, put this in a Google sheet with each event in a row. and so now this is going to use the spreadsheet tool to go and put this in a google sheet and you'll see the to-do list like light up and uh it will be able to show you that i'm assuming you've given it access to your google drive and your gmail and like all these things have already been ported in yeah i can show you that in a minute let's just uh let's watch co-founder run on the sheet for a sec and then i'll go and show you the integrations yeah i mean it plugs into like everything you use in your workflow.

12:11What are you running this on top of? What model is this using? Right now this is using Claude 4.5 Haiku. We can use 4.5 Sonnet or we can use ChatGPT type models. So you can see there it made this to-do list where it has been to add them. And it's going to cross items off on this to-do list. As it does it? Does it? Yeah. And the models have been a little bit slow today. So it might be a little slower than normal, but it will go in like, you know, do this across different integrations and things. And you can make these to do this really long. Oh, yeah, there we go. So this shows you the human in the loop aspect a little bit.

12:51It can feed a Google Sheet and if I click show more, it should be able to run that. But it needs you to actually say yes, run. Correct. Yeah. So let me try this. Is it to the point yet where it's, it doesn't need you or like, why does it need the human in the loop. We've set this up so that you can go and do it like that because we don't want the agent just doing stuff for you. Right. So let's say this is a very long, complicated spreadsheet that you made. You don't want it just writing to that spreadsheet without your approval. Now, what you can do, though, is you can set this to auto-approve, which will just keep running.

13:30Just do it. And it will basically say yes to everything. And so if you're doing something it's a really long time you're going to want it to do that so if i click this i might have to log in with my other google account but not yet see there it is and really quickly i want to show you what connecting stuff looks like if you go to the integrations page we've got all these integrations connected and so like google drive intercom loops notion and i can show you how this works if i if i click disconnect here it will just disconnect it it just takes like three seconds to connect to Google Sheets and you just hit continue.

14:03And I don't think you can see in this tab, but I connect to my. No, I can't. I'm just looking at the account connection in progress. Yep. And then I just click that and then now it should be good. It was just like two buttons on the other side. I clicked the Google login screen. So, you know, we plug into all this different stuff. How is this different than like if I'm in Claude and I've connected my Google Drive and my Gmail and I want to query it. Like, is this different? Or like, how is it functionally different? Yeah, so you can do pretty like simple operations in a very similar way to Quad.

14:41But one of the biggest differences is the memory system that we've added. So this like knows things about me, as well as, so I can say something like what's going on in engineering and it will pull stuff from its native memory. And it will tell me what, you know, the things that have happened from my memory and in my company. And I think that's the biggest difference is it knows me and it can do this stuff. Yeah, because if I was in Claude, I'd either need to have, if it's a project, I'd either have to add new context documents to the project or have some way of getting it up to speed on what's going on.

15:14It's not persistent. And there's one thing that I haven't shown you yet, which is the way you make automations. Now, CoFounder is the easiest way to make automations in the world. so I can say okay do this every day and send be a bm on slack and co-founder is going to go ahead and make that an automation and this and that's it that's all I have to say and it sets up the web hooks and everything and it sets up the the context and the tools and everything for you and so if I click this it will go to the flow and this is like this is the automation now it runs every time. So if I want to like try it, I can click test and it's going to test it.

15:55It's going to run it right now for me. And like, you don't have to go through Zapier. Like you don't have to go through Zapier. It runs the automations for you. Exactly. Runs it for me right now. So it's, it's testing this right now. It's like pulling up the flow. And so now it's initiating, checking GitHub and sending a Slack message. That's really cool. Yeah. I mean, it's all natural language based. Like if I want to change the plan, if I go to the flow gear and I want to change the brand, I can just click it and I can edit it and change it right there. If I want to change the integrations, they happen automatically.

16:28I can't even choose these because the agent just knows what I want. So like if I was a business owner, I'd be like, you know what? I want marketing report end of day, every day. I want engineering to report every day, end of day. I want finance once a week. And I could come in here and say, give me the marketing end of day report. This is how I want it to look every single day sent to my email. And then it would just create that automation. Exactly. Yep. And you can have it asked you for permission to do whatever you want, or you can have it run automatically. So, you know, if I said to run automatically, it won't ask me permission to send it in.

16:59It will just send me the report. And like, it's all with natural language. So you can just tell the agent you don't like how something is, and the agent will change it for you. And so this is like a big part of our thesis for the company, which is like agents all the way down. Everything is an agent. Yeah. And if you do that, then you can do everything with natural language and we can like things just kind of work together and it can operate together. And that's how - Can it respond to emails for me? Like let's say that I wanted to, would I create an agent to do that? Or if I was like, hey, I just want you to go through all the emails that I get every day with questions that you know how to answer and answer those questions and then star all the things that I need to look at.

17:38Because as an entrepreneur, Or there are things that I don't need to look at, but they come to my email because whatever. Payroll processed. Here's the update that it actually processed. Or there's a customer question, but it was handled by my marketing team. I don't necessarily need to see that. But how would I set it up as an assistant to basically handle my emails? Yeah. So it's just as easy. Like this one, for example, is someone wanted to take emails from investor updates and forward them to whoever this is. And co-founder just has access to your email, right? I don't get investor updates because I'm not a VC, but it was just as easy, right?

18:15You can read my emails. And so I'm going to try to see if I can do this without leaking all the emails in my inbox on this podcast. But we'll see. What was your email address? NIK. Email from NIK at cofounders.com. I think I made the joke to you when I saw your video that I was like, yeah, I want to buy my website someday. So it's going to do when it's loading here, it will do a memory search. And it was not able to find you in the memory search, but it will be able to find you in the long run agent search. And so now it's just going to search my Gmail and find it. So it does two searches. Is it like storing a, I don't know, static context document every day of kind of updating your history?

19:02And then if it doesn't find it there, it runs an actual agent search? Correct. Yeah. So that works more for like concepts and like people you know. Does it currently respond to emails for you? Yeah, if you want to. So I can say, let's see, send an email to Nick saying I'm excited to be on his podcast. And so when it will pull up this thing, it's not going to send it immediately. This is one of those things where I have to approve it. But yeah, I mean, we've got a little email out in our tier. And one of the things is it makes a to-do list every time. So very simple tasks take a minute. We're looking into making that faster.

19:41but hey i don't know if you remember this but when we started this podcast we entered into a social contract i would spend time energy and money producing this podcast interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build buy start grow your business and you would like subscribe and leave me five star review now out of that we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights we both get a ton of value but i just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help.

20:14And if you want, even share this with a friend. You could kind of just operate within co-founder and never leave that window. Like you don't need to go to Slack. You don't need to go to your email. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. It just feels like you could get any updates here and not have to like context or not or windows switch, I guess. Is that, did you design it that way? We did, yeah. And we're actually launching this feature we call like to-do list or home where instead of mini to-do list, it has an email. I don't know. I guess it's like running issues with the Gmail tool. But you could do everything from within CoSounder and basically make this to-do list and then have it complete itself.

20:55Can you tell it, hey, these types of emails, you can always respond if you know X, Y, Z. like can you effectively automate the responses does that make sense because like i've handed off things to my executive assistant she just answers emails i don't i don't have to like check anything but there are certain things she can't she stars them for me and then i look at them later yeah so here's an example of like one that looks at at my email for spam and it's really inefficient but it does work where it will say oh you know if it if it's from here march the email as spam and like here's an example of some email from someone and it scanned all these emails and it said oh you know these are none of these are spam so it didn't actually need to mark them as spam but i could also have it respond to these emails so i like respond to the last one and then it will just like pull it up and write a response if i'm an entrepreneur if i wanted to use this how hard is the onboarding?

21:55Because if I just connect my Google Drive, there's a million things in there. Do I have to tell the AI what's what or does it go through and sort of comb it and self-identify what's important and what's not? It goes in and it finds all that stuff out. It structures the memory for you on its own. And actually people love our onboarding. Truth is sweet. I've become known as like one of the nicest onboardings in the industry. And it figures out your style, it figures out your calendar. And it just, it reads this for you. And we actually designed the onboarding so that you only have to type something in twice, which is your name.

22:30And it's actually already filled in for you. It's your name and your company's website. And both of these things are filled in for you if you use your company email. And so. What industries are you seeing people use this in right now? Is it just a lot of tech founders or are you getting people, you know, SMB owners all the way to corporate individuals? Like who's actually using this tool? We've seen a lot of tech founders. I think that's our biggest sort of segment. We also have people from like mid-sized startups, like thousand person companies, some of the companies you might have heard of. I don't know if I should name drop it or not right now.

23:05That's okay. Yeah, it's fine. Big companies. The biggest companies, many people. They're huge. They're huge. We do have a number of investors that use it too because they like the monitoring system a lot. Also, I've talked to a bunch of investors while fundraising, and I think it stuck with them. And then we've had some requests for like services businesses as well, like people doing agencies or like accountants and things like that that are just using it to save themselves time. What's the monitoring function? You can set it, you can give it like a list of URLs and it will monitor those websites for changes.

23:44And so what DCs will use it for is companies they're interested in or competitors of deals they're looking at. So you can give it like 20 URLs. These are all the competitors. And then say, oh, monitor these for any blog posts or press releases so you know when they get funded. How many could you monitor? Is it just like, what's the limit? I actually don't know. I think it's like 100 or something. We may have just set that because if you go higher, it gets really expensive because we're basically putting a little mini, very cheap mini agent on these websites. It's a check. Yeah, I mean, I think 100, I could look into more.

24:23Are you using this? Of course. I use it for managing my schedule. I use the monitoring for competitors. I know all my competitors. I know everything about them. What's your favorite thing? So what do you use it the most for? I like the scheduling. I have a draft and send emails, and I have a draft and send calendar invites so that I don't have to think about it. Okay, so one of the coolest things that I use it for while fundraising, and I think this is the most useful thing that I've used it for ever, was when you're fundraising, you get introduced to like 40 different people, you have to meet them all as quickly as possible.

24:53And so you immediately turn these conversations into scheduling. And the problem is someone has an assistant or someone needs to get another person on. And so you have all of these email chains where there's a date and time decided, but they're not in your calendar. And it is impossible to tell when you're free and when you're not. So I told CoFounder, read all of these and put them in my calendar as holds so I can reason about when I'm free. It did that and it saved me a ton of time. I mean, I would have had to have an actual assistant to be able to do something like that. I've had this pendant, it's called the Limitless AI, but there's others like Plod and I can't remember.