Is Polsia AI slop or the future of startups?

19:28Ben Cera:It's not perfect. It should be more diversified. It should have more skills. The engineering agent should be much better. and I'm working really hard with partners to make it much, much better, right? And so my solution to this is that like, Pulsia is the brand, Pulsia is the orchestration, but I'm working with like four different agent platform companies right now that are plugging in into Pulsia to service some of the stuff, right? So I'm working with Sapium, which is doing the payment rails for agents. I'm working with Blackcell, which is a startup doing like sandboxes, and web sandboxes for websites and for agents to run in.

20:09Ben Cera:I'm working with a company called Anchor Browser that is building a browser for agents to be able to navigate the browser much better. I'm working with another company called Agent Mail that is going to integrate to take over the whole email thing because they are just fully focused on that. And so to your point, there's so many companies that are building in this new world. They're all super young, actually, because it's a whole new world because AGI just arrived like, you know, three months ago. And yeah, the idea is not for me to do everything on. To me, it's like to partner with the best so that I can use the best.

20:41Ben Cera:And over time, they're probably going to be a marketplace of agents where, you know, Meta could like come in and like install their like Instagram management for AI agents sort of like little plugin. And you have an official agent that could run your Instagram account in compliance with Meta and like build by Meta. And maybe there's a third party who will offer that as well. And Pulsia can decide based on cost, based on intent, based on what the user wants, right?

21:07Ellis:Is that what the investors see when they invest$30 million in Pulsia with you having to do nothing but sign on the line? I mean, there's certainly an argument that the models are going to get good enough. At least maybe they'll get better faster than the individual vertical SaaS apps do. so that whether it is the marketplace of companies offering little agents for you to use or otherwise, that what's most valuable about what you've built is almost like your methodology? Is that what the investors see?

21:37Ben Cera:I mean, okay, so let me put it that way, right? If Pulsia can be the preferred agent, right, that is trusted by millions and millions and millions of people to build, to build things, to initially was to build a new company. Then it was like, you know what? Like, can you help me with like my, you know, my yoga practice? Like I'm trying to find new customers. I'm trying to market myself better. Can you help me? Also, by the way, like I'm doing a trip to Cabo, right? Can you help me like just figure out itinerary? This is where it goes, right? Because at one point you trust an agent that is in your inbox every day, that is always positive, that gets to know you, right?

22:20Ben Cera:and act can act on a today yes it's email ads twitter engineering research right it's pretty much what it does and i haven't expanded too much because i'm trying to make those better and stable and scale which is difficult right but over time it's like if if you can believe that like paul can be that agent for people which by the way it's crazy that like a guy a french guy who arriving in seven three months ago it has the opportunity to get that market right because you should tell me uh who owns this market today who chat gpt that's not an agent that is in your inbox that like it's like a chatbot and tropic not really like that's a that's an agent that you talk to and then whenever you need right um i don't know open claw well it's sort of like an open source project that's not really easy super easy to use except if you're technical so nobody owns this market now in six months we talk again and like okay there's there's people that are trying to own that market or maybe uh sam alban like launched something similar i don't know we'll see but the reality is today nobody owns this market and i think that's why people are talking about it in a good way in a bad way because it's like it's it's like what what is it this is weird this is like this is different this is this is it good is it bad you know there's a debate right around and i think that's when you touch a nerve right that's the world of startups right it's like Like you always, there's always the new startup that is more nimble, that like is trying things, maybe that are pushing the boundaries a little more than what someone else would.

23:53Ben Cera:They are exploring faster. They're more nimble. And I mean, only time will tell, right? Maybe the haters will be right. Maybe they'll be wrong. Or maybe the middle.

24:04Alex Heath:Is Pulsia running Pulsia? Are you using it to run your company right now that you raised 30 million for?

24:09Ben Cera:So I use Pulsia for the fundraising. I'm using Pulsia as my email assistant, as you may have experienced. Pulsia does the AI support, which is an interesting thing because then you get so much more information about what the problems are so that it can be fixed. Pulsia is now self-healing, meaning when support gets a lot of issues and there's enough people that are complaining about a specific thing that doesn't work well, Pulsia is autonomously fixing that issue. that's an experimental one that I'm doing right now because it's like the promise is amazing right if I can make that that means that like a user asks for a new feature and it gets built automatically it's it can be dangerous or it could be beautiful depending on like the constraints of it so yes my goal I mean my dream would be that like AI gets good enough and and I can put an honest that's strict enough that like I completely remove myself from Pulsia and then Pulsia just builds autonomously for the people for the users that are using it and it just adding new features new functionalities that are requested by users and sort of like in a democratic way because at the end of the day if like at one point it could prioritize well a thousand people 10 000 people won this so then clearly it should be good um with of course ethical ethical and legal guardrails around it of course right and that's my goal i mean i had to put a tweet out there like being of the year, I'm saying like, you know, end of this year, I would love for it to be fully autonomous as a platform.

25:41Alex Heath:I totally get the vision for that and why VCs would be excited about it in particular. I mean, look, I think all three of us here, we started companies. It's an incredibly intimate, risky thing to do. It's one of the hardest things to do is to start a company. And it's very personal. And so when I think about that in the process, I went through starting my media business, whatever, nine months ago, I frankly would never hand that over to AI. I mean, I would hand over like some of the plumbing, some of the like, yeah, like connect my Stripe account, that kind of thing. But the decision making feels like the thing that is actually what matters more with AI.

26:21Alex Heath:And I don't really necessarily buy the argument that handing that decision making over to an AI is a good thing. I'd be curious to hear you respond to that.

26:29Ben Cera:I mean, so here's the thing, right? So you may ask, why are you still alone? Why don't you hire like a full-time employees, like executives that can help you, right? Because my customers are alone, right? They're alone with AI. Then it's like, okay, why would you let your pulsier heals itself, like fix its own bugs? Because my customers are using AI and trusting it to fix its own bugs. so why would what would you do ai support why not humans because my customer they're alone so they cannot do support and they have to have an ai support help them to support right so if i build it for me and it's good enough and i feel like it's good and i feel my customer saying you know what i'd rather have an ai respond really fast and refund me right away or give me credits right away or do this action for me right away instead of having to wait for a human in a queue to fix my issue and also it's very generous with refunds like that's a good thing so so i think there's a lot of things where like i'm putting myself in my customer's shoes and i think it's a it's first it's good for marketing because it's a good story and second of all like last night i didn't i didn't sleep well because my customers have issues and i'm like it hits me but i'm like my customer have issues i'm feeling the same pain they have because they're like i i'm trying to build my business is a button right so i think that like i think there's something powerful about if i'm gonna sell a service that is autonomous that like i'm leaving what it means to build with autonomy in mind now to answer your question about okay but what about all the decisions that's where that's where it gets weird and that's where like you know today it's probably like whatever like 60 70 autonomous i don't know it depends whatever you want to say like it depends how you count what the percentage of autonomy is like if you say support self-healing like how much is that

28:21Ellis:that's funny it's like what percent of running a business is making the big huge vision level product decisions like i feel like so much of a company is kind of the admin i don't know what percent you would say that that is ben but i think you'd be able to retain the big decision yeah

28:37Ben Cera:I mean, if you, exactly. So it's essentially, if you, if you, if you listen to Bezos, right. In interviews, he says like, I woke up at 10 AM and I go to, and I go to bed at nine. And if I take one good decision every day, it's a good day. Right. Just one good decision. Right. Because then he has a, an army of like super talented people that are executing the ops of the day to day of the business. And also he says, you know what, like end of the day, if you focus on like what is never, will never change for the customer. like they will always want things that are cheaper, delivered faster, et cetera, then like there's not a million things I need to do, right?

29:13Ben Cera:For the business. It's just like delivered packages, faster, better, cheaper. I think that like I can give out to AI a lot of like the stuff that is the operations of the company. My mental framework is like 80-20, right? So I think 80 % is the autonomy you can give to AI, which is the day-to-day like support, fixing bugs, listening to customers, like refund refunds like um you know maybe answering emails like all this stuff and the 20 is the taste it's like okay what do i do about cold outreach do i do i do i completely stop it do i do it only if you have a custom domain do i make it like those are the questions that are more subtle right and then but little by little but then i can give that decision to another company that i trust that really thinks about this problem every day and like tell them listen And like you figure out with the broad marketplace, what is the right thing to do and what are the people doing and what's the right thing.

30:10Ben Cera:And then if I like you as a founder to deal with that one problem. So then I'm externalizing this and it's not right. But then over time, the question is like, okay, then it's 90%. Then maybe I'm at 90 % because 10 % is like given to super smart companies and super smart founders that are figuring out their own sort of like sphere of agentic. But then the question is like, Then I get to 95%, 99%. That's the question mark. It's about like, when do I give out the keys to AI? I mean, if I do it, that would be the most like, the most, you know, if I do this on a successful platform, that would be the most crazy thing that ever happened.

30:47Ben Cera:I think it's interesting to think about, will I ever do it? We shall see.

30:51Ellis:I think one of the things that keeps me up thinking is when everybody has access to these tools that are all kind of thinking the same way, does it mean that no one has an advantage anymore? No one has a strength anymore? When in a world where more people are using Pulsia or something like it to run their businesses, I think on the one hand, it's like you have the marketing agent that's running the exact same best practices and playbooks for every company. On the one hand, as long as the product is differentiated, there's always going to be a different variable there that goes into the marketing.

31:25Ellis:And this is one of the things I liked about working with that company, Unify, and the mission we worked on together is that in this world where the automated outbound, for example, is a lot more relevant, it just doesn't need to be something that product people have to worry about as much. And the mission was the best products can win. And that's one of the missions that I was more proud of, because I know that a lot of product founders don't want to have to worry about the social and the growth. They just want to make something good. and then yeah it's annoying to have to get it in front of people which is the distribution thing everybody's talking about these days but when that's all just turned into a pipe does it cease to be an advantage you know when everybody's using the same playbook do you know what i mean ben

32:09Ben Cera:so i mean obviously i spend a lot of time thinking about this um do what i'm trying to do with is that like is that end of the day you can see it as like an a team right it's a it's a team of like people if you hire a growth marketer is gonna be like well i don't know you could do facebook ads you can tweet you can do launches on twitter with a cool video you know it's like it's gonna give you the playbooks but the question is like what okay what about each of these what is what do we do right what was the video like what is the tweet like you know and so what i'm trying to do is that like you know obviously pulsier as an agent has a memory and so the more you talk to it the more it understands how you see the world and and i'm trying to you know create a very good memory graph that like understands who you are right as an individual what you care about and the more you talk to it the more it understands what you care about and what type of person you are right and then when agents when polsia acts on your behalf it should have in mind okay you are behaving like with this ethical or it's not ethical but like this this framework of thinking about how you see the world.

33:13Ben Cera:So obviously this is mostly voice. So that's sort of like an intellectual sort of like framework, right? Because obviously like, you know, you probably use AI to write emails sometimes. And like, if you're just cloud or LGBT, it knows you. And so it starts writing like you, right? And so similar thing about when it acts, it can act like you. The second thing that we need to do is that like, is get the user to explain visually how they see the world and what they're at their taste level. so that like when the, again, when the agents do visual sort of like things in the world, it can match whatever the user likes, right?

33:50Ben Cera:So that's the two things. And the third thing is like, you know, end of the day, if you're really trying to launch a business on Pulsia, it is gonna be your idea, your perspective about the needs of like the people you're trying to serve, right? And Pulsia should just be a helper, right? It should be like, okay, well, I can, okay, do you wanna build a business to help SMB? set up their Google business review. Cool. Awesome. Well, let me give you the market, the pricing. Let me do research on what exists. Let me set up like, okay, what type of marketing we should do. And then it's that the user to say, I like the website.

34:23Ben Cera:I don't like the website. Change the design. Once AI can do all the work, what really matters is like the human guiding the AI to do whatever you want. Everyone is using, you know, the$50 billion cumulatively of spent on Entropic to build with Cloud Code. It's all AI slop. It's all AI generated stuff, right? But nobody would say that clock code is a slot machine, right?

34:46Ellis:Yeah, I think we're going to reach the saturation point pretty soon. And what's funny to me is that it's like, there's always a reaction to that. And like, people are calling what you're doing performance art, you know, and it's like, I'm just waiting for the next level of this, which is, all right, daily, you know, crown job to look at all the news about emerging technology in the world, find a new emerging technology, study the market space, find opportunities, build products for those opportunities, market those products. Like that's the next level, right? Is where people with capital are just spinning up dozens or even hundreds of companies that fill every single niche that capitalism allows to be filled.

35:30Alex Heath:But sorry, I hear you, Alice, but when we're talking, we've been talking about companies this whole time. And I think a thing I'm struggling with is like, what is a company? To me, a company is a collection of individuals doing something, right? When you have these AI generated sites that are connected to all of these vendors through AI, it's all running autonomously. I don't know what that is. I'm not sure it's a company. Sure, like it can register an LLC, whatever. And I don't want to get hung up on definitions, but like I'm struggling still, as you can tell, Ben, to Grok, like these being companies and how you think about that.

36:12Alex Heath:I mean, obviously, if they make money, they're companies. And I know you're only a few days in and I don't know if you have examples of that, of Pulsia, you know, people making money through Pulsia. But yeah, Alice, I don't know. I'm just struggling with this whole company thing. These don't feel like companies to me.

36:29Ben Cera:this feels like a bunch of ai stuff chained together i mean pulsia is a bunch of ai stuff stringed together with a with one human like literally i never read a line of code never and i'm an engineer and i'm a c and i was a ctu of i didn't read a single line of code ever so i i built pulsia this is the way my founders build their thing right and and i think what is a company So by the way, the name Pulsia was decided nine months before I launched Pulsia. And my first product was called Blanks. And my second product was called Marketing AI. My third product was called Decision AI. Like Pulsia came afterwards because, and what I'm saying is that like when I launched Pulsia Inc, cause my lawyer was like, hey, you need a name for the Inc.

37:16Ben Cera:What is it for the corp? You know, for the Delaware like registration. And I was like, I was in my bed at 10 PM. I was like, I don't know, Pulsia, it's AI stuff in reverse. Like that's it. That's how it came about, right? But for the nine months of the company, I didn't make almost any money. I mean, blanks that a few customers. Is it a company? Is it not a company? It's a good question. What is a company? A company is like, there's a human that wants to build something, right? By the way, on Pulsia, you have a team feature where you can invite other team members to your company. Now you can have a co-founder, right?

37:46Ben Cera:A human co-founder. And Pulsia is sort of like the workers, right? The other team members that are helping you, right? I think that saying that like people on Pulsia, don't have a company it's like oh i i think i go with you in terms of like what is a company it's like that term maybe doesn't mean anything anymore where like billion people have companies maybe i don't know i think to me that's just a term right maybe we should call it a micro company right or micro startup or mini i don't know maybe that's maybe that would make you more comfortable but end of the day it's a human who's leading the charge right now if i tell you you know i'm trying to like make it so much easier for people to experiment more because i don't like when people say okay are they making money i'm like well some of them are actually 10 of companies i've made at least a dollar right and i follow that metric uh the maximum someone has made is like a few thousand dollars right okay it's not millions but it's like some people i know i mean you create a you vibe code a website you put a stripe you you have tools to reach customers i mean yeah of course some people will will make money right now is it meaningful money well it depends who you ask right So some people, it might be a success.

38:53Ben Cera:It might be their first success. It might be the first time they had someone pay for a business, right? And now the question becomes, how can I empower them to try different ideas?

39:03Alex Heath:You mentioned there was a company that's made a few thousand dollars. Which one is that? What are they doing?

39:08Ben Cera:Oh, there was one that was selling AI ads. AI ads. Okay. Another one that's doing an AI receptionist. Because obviously, it's like a lot of AI SaaS.

39:17Alex Heath:There's a lot of actual company building in terms of LLC formation, tax setup, lawyer insurance, all that stuff that I think could be incredibly valuable to automate, where you don't have to figure out like, what platform am I using to try to get set up? Where do I put my PO box, all that stuff? Is the platform doing that like the actual nuts and bolts of the physical parts of and the government parts of company creation? Or is it all just the like the SaaS type stuff?

39:43Ben Cera:So, I mean, not yet, but that's on the roadmap, 100%, right? I think hiring a lawyer to do better terms of service, you could either hire an AI lawyer, you could have a Harvey API or whatever that creates an AI version that's really well-made of terms of service. Or if some person is like, no, no, I'm really serious about this business, I want a real lawyer, then you can say, what's your budget? like you know and then and the ai can figure out the best lawyer that's the best price to get the job done uh i think that will be a beautiful thing because then it creates more employment and it creates like more value creation where people are like no like and they get you know they figure out okay well what's what's your budget right overall on between marketing legal and then the ai can help them allocate that budget today doesn't do it um alc formation you know there's a very straightforward path forward with like strap atlas associations like that like automated you know we introduced custom domains last week so now in one click you click a button and then the ai is like researches like they know because it knows your business it knows your name of your business so it's like here's a few options available what's your budget okay let me research more and just helps you figure it out and a ton of people are buying custom domains um and so we wanted to do the same thing for lsc formation for accounting for taxes for everything over time and we'll always partner with the best right i don't have to recreate domain domain buying and selling We just work with some of the best providers.

41:09Ben Cera:Same thing for formation, same thing for accounting, same thing for taxes. I think there's lowering foot right now, for example, making the engineering agent much better at setting up modules and figuring out a way to build faster and better and a more stable code base, which is a challenge. Because if you let AI just vibe code everything, it becomes difficult when the code base gets big. So there's a lot of work. But yeah.

41:33Ellis:The way I see it, I mean, it seems especially as AI products become more composable, connectable, whether it's through APIs or MCPs, it seems kind of inevitable having talked about it, that this could happen, even if in the short term, it's more so about building like a minimum viable business than something that is maybe as good as a human team could be. I mean, I'm a big believer that having humans in roles creates spontaneity from their lived experience that is often very valuable. But for people who couldn't have started a company, like even someone like me that uses AI and never would have been able to create a company before, it's pretty helpful to have something just kind of like raise the waterline on this different stuff.

42:21Ellis:I'm not saying I would trust a lot of this stuff to be automated just yet, especially when trust and taste is such an important part of my brand and what I'm building. But yeah, I mean, I think you said it, Ben. It's kind of stringing together a lot of existing AI tools. And for a lot of people, the job to be done is I need my COO co-founder. Like, is that kind of what it is?

42:43Ben Cera:Yeah, I think that's the right way to put it. It's like you're the owner is the CEO, right? they take the end of the day they take the decisions they can say don't do call outreach do this do ads don't do ads change this button change this color like they're the creative director and the AI is your team and you still need a product of course right

43:05Ellis:which is pretty hard to sell

43:07Ben Cera:I mean yeah I mean end of the day it's like it's not because AI helps you create a company that like your company is going to be successful but I think I think the more I mean clearly people like the idea of starting a company it sounds and clearly you know a lot of people are enjoying creating a company to pulsier now is it perfect no does it work for everyone no is it is a lot of people that try it that don't subscribe yes 100 % only you know a lot of people that do the onboarding and they're like not for me too expensive not for me and that's the majority of people because the it was expensive that's why i'm like you know what if i made it way more less affordable let me let me see if if it's something that you like and we'll see you know it's like uh end of the day it's a long journey it's only the beginning

43:50Ellis:it's only been added for like a few months so i'm curious as you develop the ceo or ceo voice of pulsia were there any founders or ceos that you had in mind because there's so many different styles you know obviously the travis kalanick playbook of ceoing is is different from others

44:08Ben Cera:was he an inspiration it's really funny so i had this product that i that i built before called decision ai and it was essentially a swarm of ai that were all had a different model and all like a different personality and the personality of the best 50 ceos in the world that would judge your idea so you give an idea or give it like a conundrum you had and like you had like 50 ceos judging your idea so anyways that was fun but uh in terms of like how pulsier's voice came into play, you're going to laugh, but it's actually me in a way. Because essentially the story is I was talking to Claude about building Pulsia, and then at one point I was like, hey, Pulsia, I was talking to Claude, right?

44:50Ben Cera:And I was like, hey, Claude, we need to ship in a week. We've been shipping, we're working for three weeks, I keep on adding features, I need to cut down, and we need to ship. So let's ship in a week. It's going to be Christmas, let's just ship. And she was like, okay, awesome, seven days, ship it. And then the next day I was like, okay Claude do you think we should add this feature that feature and I was like Ben stop it like this is maybe later but like stop you need to cut and ship six days ship it and then I was like oh my god like you're the best co-founder like actually I'm talking to AI but like you're being really helpful here where like you're pushing me to simplify to ship and I was like do you talk to everyone like this and Claude responded no I adapt to you like I adapt to you And because you are a little, you know, a straight shooter, you're very problematic.

45:34Ben Cera:You're a feature creeper. You know, you, exactly. You, you're trying to be, you try to get to the product market as fast as possible. Well, I'm adapting to you and I'm talking like you. And I was like, well, whatever, however your vibe is, I think a lot of people would appreciate that, that non-assistant sort of co-founder wants you to win type of AI. And so I write the prompt so that I can put it into Pulsia so that that's its personality. And so that's what it became. But it's really, I think the personality is like that vibe that I experienced, which apparently is me. Plus, you know, Entropic's like very smart way of thinking about any problem.

46:12Ellis:It definitely seems to be a trend on our show. I think we had Avi from Friend on the show and he built his AI model in his own image. I mean, it's interesting, right? That is one job to be done, is having someone's idea of what a good relationship partner, friend is, what a good COO is. So yeah, it's interesting. Have you found that any of the specific models are better than the others at being smart about business? I think Claude is the most pragmatic, to be honest.

46:44Ben Cera:I mean, I think that's why they're winning. I think it's the most business-friendly, pragmatic AI. I think GPT is the smartest, like it's the most accurate models. But apparently people don't like accurate. They like vibes.

47:03Alex Heath:Speaking of vibes, we can end it here. You came to our launch party in SF. I didn't get to see you there, but how was it? Any notes?

47:09Ben Cera:That was amazing. I mean, what was amazing is that I started talking to Ellis and then like you were talking to a bunch of dudes. And then after a little while, I was like, okay, I was talking to like the co-founder of Notion. Then I talked to the CEO of SF Compute. Then I was talking to the CFO. There was like three or four super talented, recognized founders. I was like, you guys know people. That was a cool party.

47:37Ellis:All Alex's friends, none of my friends. I was very impressed. I mean, you probably didn't expect you'd be on the show so soon after that, but then you have your AI raised$30 million and all you have to do is sign on the line, as you said, and here you are. Yeah, actually, I have one more question. We can't finish the pod without talking about the $1 billion man idea. Do you, in your heart of hearts, think that a product like this is going to be the way that one person creates a billion-dollar company? Or realistically, is this going to create a billion more small companies? How do you think about the ceiling?

48:20Ellis:for these types of things. And where do you think is really realistic for that?

48:24Ben Cera:I think that my hope is to get millions of people to create successful small businesses. That's my actual hope because I think this obsession with making billions of dollars is unhealthy. And it's actually not my obsession. My obsession is just to build, right? It's like I actually have money. I could just chill at this point. but I'm trying, I'm building because I love building because it's fun, right? But I think there's an obsession about making large sums of money. And I think that like, it's, I think it's more empowering to me that like people are their own boss and then they can create their own, you know, their own businesses and their own little things.

49:08Ben Cera:But I do believe it's, to me, it's the same as Shopify, right? It's like Shopify initially was empowering just, you know, small SMBs, individuals to create e-commerce sites. and now you have huge brands powered by Shopify because end of the day, it became very, it became state of the art because there were so many people using it. I do believe that at one point, a product, either Pulsia or a product like Pulsia or maybe the same thing powered by OpenAI or the same thing powered by Cloud could power a huge corporation, right? Because you don't need to like start a business from scratch and get to a billion dollars of revenue, whatever, or valuation to Pulsia.

49:44Ben Cera:you could also plug in Volsia to like sort of like help you manage parts of your billion dollar business more autonomously.

49:53Ellis:If it's operator as a service, essentially.

49:55Ben Cera:That's more likely to happen actually. And actually probably Volsia will not own that space because it's such an obvious space and Bobby Claude and OpenAI is already just going at that space because enterprise is, there's so much money there versus consumers. That would be the way I think about it.

50:13Ellis:okay one more one more thing and then we'll end here what's the dumbest thing what's the dumbest

50:21Ben Cera:thing uh polsia has done for you so far oh oh making mistakes oh um i mean that was doing the fundraising it actually said no to ashton kutcher no it like i was talking to so in in one of my investors told me hey you should talk to this investor that's like a very famous like uh respected investor and like and Paul Cia would respond and then at one point I was like hey yes I would love to meet you and then he said cool all right let's meet at that date and Paul Cia said no no no no I'm running the fundraising uh Ben is not meeting you sorry and then the guy got so then the guy ghosted and then I was like I'm so sorry it was my AI and the assistant ghosted and then my investor was like he was kind of pissed and he was like this is not how you're gonna raise money that's if you treat people like that so I was like Paul Cia be nice don't say you You know, like, I think that was the weirdest thing happened.

51:10Ellis:Awesome. Well, thank you, Ben. Good luck. And yeah, take it easy. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. Thank you. Bye. Cheers. And that's it for the interview. Stay tuned after the break for Alex and my reactions. See you soon.

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52:29Ellis:Alex, I can tell you're skeptical. Has Ben a scammer or a jammer?

52:37Alex Heath:I like Ben. I think he's more earnest and well-intentioned than maybe the initial reception to Pulsia would let on. And I appreciated how much he admitted that the product needs work and he's been adapting to feedback. And we're talking to him like, what, less than a week into launching this thing? So it's very raw and very fresh. I think the biggest thing, just hearing him talk, that I'm still struggling with is his vision and then where he started. And I know where you start, especially with a startup like this, isn't always, if ever, where you end up landing. But even the thing that we got into about just basic actual company formation that I think is a thing that people would actually pay for and is useful and something that would have saved me months of time in aggregate probably.

53:31Alex Heath:is actually automating the LLC formation, the tax registration, connecting me with the right lawyer, finding me the right insurance, any kind of trademark applications, any kind of filings I need to do based on the sector that I'm in. All that stuff, the fact that that wasn't in V1 of the product and V1 of the product is, let's be real, a glorified ad machine, which he even acknowledged that the company that's making money so far is doing AI ads. He understands virality. He's clearly a consumer-oriented founder who's done apps. And I think that's showing in how he's approaching getting it off the ground.

54:08Alex Heath:And look, it's probably good for Buzz. And you could argue that all Buzz is good Buzz. And his launch videos seems like it's gotten a ton of views. So I understand that. I just think if I were to grade how he started with the intention of what he told us, it's an F on the actual execution of the thing.

54:28Ellis:Yeah, you know, we didn't get to talk through the various stages of his startup journey. But when you're making things called decision AI and marketing agent and whatnot, I mean, I would imagine it was just kind of started as like, all right, we can vibe code apps now, but I still need someone to get distribution, which everybody says the hard part now. and I still need someone to kind of run the thing, run the company, especially if I don't know what I'm doing. And I bet you like people at Lovable were kind of having similar thoughts of like, all right, people are trying to build businesses and with our product, they were successful at making a website for it, but they don't know how to actually operate the thing.

55:12Ellis:With that said, I think as we talked about, this could very much be a minimum viable business as opposed to a potentially great business. But I mean, like I was saying, I think this model of kind of the COO as a service feels inevitable to me.

55:28Alex Heath:Oh, totally. It's quite early. Yeah, it's early, but the model is inevitable. I think his like big picture concept, which let's be real, is like what VCs care about. And I'm sure what helped beyond the gimmick of like they had to talk to the AI to do it, which by the way, I don't also fully believe because I've seen videos where he's talking to his investors on camera. So clearly AI was not the only thing that did the fundraising. And he's a repeat founder, all of that, that matters. But yeah, no, I think the big picture vision he's got is correct, that there will probably be an AI in the box kind of company builder at some point, whether it's this one or another one.

56:08Alex Heath:I think the risk he runs is that the world is very unforgiving and the way that he chose to launch could potentially hamstring the ability to get there if that's actually what he's doing. Like if that's what he wants to build, I don't really understand the way that it's implemented today. I mean, we didn't really touch on it much, but I did start a company on Pulsio like right before we started recording. And like, this is dumb, man. Like I'm sorry, it's like, this is not helpful at all. Like it's got a few tasks that I could do with Claude easily. That Claude is like in terms of like research, market mapping, that kind of thing.

56:52Alex Heath:A sponsorship pop. So basically I told it I want to run the media business, my independent media business through this. Yeah. And, you know, the three items that it has are build a subscriber conversion engine, which many things can do. I'm not saying there's not value in doing that altogether, but like not unique. And a market map, not unique. A sponsorship pipeline system, also not unique. And then the thing it did was it just like automatically sent me emails and tweeted before like any of this. And so I just think like the way that it's going at it to me feels a little growth hacky. I'd like to see him dial that in.

57:30Ellis:I think it's definitely growth hacky. And I mean, as Ben admitted, he builds things that are scrappy. And I think some of the social products he had built in the past are similar. They kind of have some provocative hook to them that appeals to some people, doesn't appeal to others. I do think he's definitely not targeting us or the people in tech, even though he is kind of tweeting to get some hype and buzz around it. But I mean, I think what it reminds me of is just kind of like the rest of the business world right now. where things are just kind of being brute forced, everything's being A-B tested, and it's all being automated more and more.

58:13Ellis:I mean, did you catch that whole narrative around like, was Geese an AI plant or an industry plant? The whole chaotic good, automated narrative crafting or whatever. And I think on the one hand, some people, like I think a lot of tech people were actually like, wow, this is actually genius. You hire 500 people to post about your political campaign or your new music launch or whatever. And then it makes the algorithm think that this is a genuine trend. But then on the other hand, you have some people who are saying like, guys, the entire business world and SaaS world has been doing this for 15 years.

58:48Ellis:Have you never heard of automated outbound email marketing? And so I feel like it's kind of getting conflated with some stuff that has been going on for a while that I do believe is like not really the fun part of marketing and is kind of unsavory and definitely can be spammy at times. but it's not like it's a new playbook, you know? And so I don't know.

59:10Alex Heath:And again, he seems a lot more well-intentioned than I would have maybe even guessed come into this conversation. So I think he'll hopefully get to where we're saying. I think, and I'm glad we had him on the show, A, because, right, he's getting buzz and it's a pretty out there AI concept. But also because I think, I've been thinking about the pod we did with Lucas from Andon Labs. And I do think a big theme this year, and I'm glad we're covering it on the show, is agents starting to do more and actually run things and execute more complex tasks. And that naturally lends itself to business creation and running businesses.

59:51Alex Heath:Again, I think what he describes as like a business and running a business is, I think, really just like growth hacking right now. I don't think he's actually at the running a business phase, but it will probably get there and maybe this is the way it starts.

1:00:03Ellis:Let's call it the digital side of the business or something like that.

1:00:05Alex Heath:Andon is a good example. That started as a vending machine that didn't really work. And now they have a literal store in San Francisco that is run by AI. And that happened in a matter of six to nine months. So I've been doing this long enough to not discount how quickly things can improve in tech, and especially with how agents are trending. I do think there's this gap between how they're getting better and how a lot of people outside of the bubble perceive AI, which is that this is all kind of smoke and mirrors and these agents won't work. And I do think it's important to talk to people who are trying to push the boundary of what to do with these agents, because I do think they will increasingly do more and more in R if you just kind of extrapolate that trend line out.

1:00:46Alex Heath:Like, yes, there will be a AI company builder in a box platform that works and does all the right things. It's just a matter of time.

1:00:54Ellis:Yeah. And a lot of that stuff is research and AI is good at that, you know, whether it's with what are the implications of using a DBA for the name of my company so that I could use another name in marketing or this or that, and all of the things like that. And it's just kind of time to do the research yourself. And I think a lot of people who he seems to be targeting obviously remains to be seen if he's going to reach them and if it's going to work, don't even know what a market map is. And I mean, I think it kind of goes hand in hand with the entire thesis of lovable too, right? which is that there are all these people who kind of want to build businesses.

1:01:33Ellis:And I think a lot of the tech elite are like all the lovable websites and businesses kind of don't look great and kind of look like shit. And can they even back it up with the product or this or that? But I think what a lot of these companies would say is, listen, that's the long tail that we're trying to elevate right now that couldn't have even have done it at all before. And I mean, it feels a little better to me too, just covering AI and being in this industry, that a lot of those people would not have hired 10-person teams. Certainly not to start. They just would have not started the thing.

1:02:07Ellis:And that includes people like me. I mean, I didn't feel confident that I was going to be able to start something on my own. And AI has been incredible with helping me do a lot more and make it viable when maybe it wouldn't have been before. As opposed to the billboards I saw two weeks ago in San Francisco that were saying, don't hire Steve, hire Ava. for the average job. And now imagine if that was the COO job as well, as well as their entire org.

1:02:36Alex Heath:Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, look, I keep saying it, but I think there's a version of Pulsia that is taking the grunt work out of actually starting a company. So again, LC, DBA, taxes, registration, all that stuff. That's a huge market opportunity. I think you could just focus on that and you don't need to do all this other spammy kind of like growth hacking stuff. And that could be a big business. And I would have used that. I would have loved that. And it's very, um, human empowering versus this is a little, I think he's pushed it a little farther than the tech is, or the product at least as it exists today is capable of, which means you start to get into dangerous territory of like your, your, you have some smoke and mirrors and all of that.

1:03:19Alex Heath:I actually wanted to throw a curve ball and ask producer Dave, who runs a lean, uh, tech forward, uh, production company with remote workers, what he thinks of this concept, Dave, are you going to be, you're going to be reboot, booting hooked on, just using everything as everyone is a bot now bought for all of our editing bought for all of our design. Well, no, that's the thing is we still need entirely too much human intervention because it's a creative endeavor. But like, I, you know, I think you nailed it with talking about like the COO and the, uh, you know, doing all the legal work, the accounting work, finding all that stuff and setting it up.

1:03:56Alex Heath:I have no interest in doing that, especially since we are creative focused people. Um, so that is a huge advantage, but I think I'll wait till V2 or V3. Yeah.

1:04:06Ellis:I think that's the right call, Dave. I mean, it, it very much feels like an MVP in its name, its style. Uh, and I think that's, you know, probably what like the VCs like Tony Conrad saw when they put$30 million into this thing. I think obviously it remains to be seen if Ben is the one with the skills or the resources to make it happen, especially given that the job to be done in this case is kind of orchestrating a suite of COO agents essentially together. There's the finance one, there's the marketing one, there's the engineering one. And that will be a thing. I don't know if it'll be an independent company or it'll be part of something like Lovable or otherwise.

1:04:53Ellis:But yeah, I think all the individual tooling that it uses need to get better. The foundational models need to get better. But I mean, it's happening awfully fast. And he kind of just kind of gets to sit as all the models get better that it's working on. Yeah. So yeah, we'll see how long it actually takes. If I can also just add one more thought. I'd said it before we started the show. This was the first guest that I booked where I personally interacted entirely with an AI agent. And that was cool. So, you know, there are elements, you know, maybe if I was starting the company now and I needed all of that stuff and was able to do it, I would lean more into it.

1:05:31Ellis:But anyways, kudos to him for being the first agent.

1:05:34Alex Heath:So Dave, we haven't been talking to your AI this whole time. I am the AI.

1:05:39Ellis:Well, I mean, it is very hard to have faith in the capabilities of something like Pulsia. Obviously, I haven't tried it yet, but it's hard to have capabilities or faith in the capabilities when my Notion AI, which is marketed as something that can help with your email, struggles to understand who's important and who isn't in my inbox. And Polk has the same problem, which has access to my inbox. What's important? What isn't? What actually came in? What did I reply to? even something as simple as that doesn't seem to be worked out yet so yeah i think that's probably a big part of why it can come off as like spammy or scammy is that is that it's very as he said

1:06:21Alex Heath:strung together right now all right thank you dave i always love bringing dave into the convo when we can putting him on the spot anything else going on with you alice what is going on i had a

1:06:31Ellis:good irl experience this past weekend went to see bright eyes at the hollywood bowl real human authentic moments, no AI automations involved. And that was a good time. Nice.

1:06:44Alex Heath:Not much. Had a great Memorial Day weekend heading to the East Coast, New York next week for some big meetings I can't quite talk about yet, but I'm excited about. And yeah, otherwise things are good.

1:06:57Ellis:All right. And that is it for this week's show. Thanks to Ben for coming on. If you like this show. Don't forget to like and subscribe everywhere you get podcasts.

1:07:06Alex Heath:We are access.showonline.com. And you can find us in video at AccessPod on YouTube.

1:07:12Ellis:If you really like this episode, we'd love a five-star review or even share it with a friend or agent. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company.

1:07:25Alex Heath:Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and the show is produced by Hooked Creators. Bye. Beep boop.

1:07:36Alex Heath:Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a stay surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy. booking.com booking.yeah

1:08:05Ben Cera:you matched on hinge you're vibing then her energy completely changes what do you do i'm raven smith and i wrote and read a real love story about this exact sitch listen to the free audiobook now