Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Mo Gawdat, Allie Miller, Gary Vee: The 6 AI Tools They Use Daily to Earn More | AI Tools 2026

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

What 6 AI tools are the smartest people in the room actually using every day? I asked the same question to dozens of founders, investors, and AI leaders this year — which AI tool changed your income the most? Six tools kept coming up.In this compilation, Mo Gawdat (former Chief Business Officer at Google X), Allie K. Miller (former Global Head of ML at AWS), and Gary Vaynerchuk (CEO of VaynerMedia) share the exact stack they use to earn more, work faster, and stay ahead — and how to start using each one this week. Silicon Valley Girl is a weekly AI and technology podcast hosted by Marina Mogilko. 📌 Launch your dream business with the best designs the world has to offer — Design.com: https://go.design.com/cd5msoz More from Silicon Valley Girl: Newsletter: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=aitoolstack-sub&utm_content=compilation_aitoolsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirlLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko Topics: AI tools, AI business, AI for founders, future of work, AI productivity, Mo Gawdat, Allie Miller, Gary Vee, AI stack, AI tools 2026, double your income with AI

Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify Advertising. You're among fans. I've interviewed over 50 founders and tech leaders in the past year.

And I kept asking all of them the same question. What AI tool has actually changed how you work and how you make money? Not what sounds cool, what you've invested in. What do you actually open up every morning? When did you have this aha moment with AI? Six tools kept coming up. I'm going to show you each one who uses it and exactly how it's making the money. And at the end, I'll tell you which two I personally can't stop using.

Yang Zhao is the CEO of Opus Clip, an AI video company that went from zero to 50 million users and a 215 million valuation in two and a half years. And his number one AI tool is surprisingly Chad GPT. And some of you might think, really, I thought founders running huge companies should be operating fleets of agents and custom AI systems. Why Chad GPT? The number one I-I-scale should actually go for first principle. It doesn't matter if you're using AI for, you know, design your poster, you know, vibe code your prototype. I think everyone should trade AI as your thinking partner or even thought partner,

which means that when you are having a problem of understanding your users, when you are having a problem of managing your teams, when you're having problems of figuring out your pricing or, you know, all the critical decisions in your lifetime, when you are a founder. I think traditionally you will just go reach out to your coach or some more senior people or people with relevant experience, right,

to ask for their advice. But I think in this era of AI, you should run through it with your, with, you know, Gemini or Chad GPT. They are actually a very, very senior, very omnipotent thinking partner. Just, you know, instead of like asking one line of questions through as many contexts as possible

and also do more than 20 rounds of back and forth communications, you will be mind-blowingly enlightened through these conversations. So nowadays, that's how I practice myself. Is there a certain daily practice that you have? I talked to Mustafa Suleiman on this podcast. He's a CEO of Microsoft AI, and he shared that every single day he would talk to Copilot and just tell co-pilot about what the day has been like

and the decision that he's made and how those decisions made him feel so that when in three months he has something like a similar problem, he still talks to the same threat in co-pilot. And copilot will be like, oh, when you made that decision three months ago, you actually regret it. So this time, listen this. Is there something similar that you have?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because I think the current chatbot memory is so powerful that. So what I, like, monthly, one of my monthly ritual is that I ask chat GPT about, you know, what are my major decisions in the past month? You know, give me some comment, feedback. But that means you shared every single decision. Yeah. How does it, like every night you just said and like these are the decisions I made or?

Yeah. Sometimes I, you know, talk to the AI in that way. And sometimes I would just forward. my decision just like I captured like a screenshot of our group discussion. I dropped the link of my the document of a PRD of a spec, that kind of thing too. Yeah, I kind of force myself to document. Yeah, to document. I love it. Magic starts happening when you stop asking Chad GBT one-line questions and start feeding it every decision, every screenshot, every document. Then it turns out. into the advisor that catches mistakes before they cost you money.

What I can say from my own personal perspective, I use Gemini, ChatGBT, GBT, Pervlexity, and Claude. I feel like when I need support, like emotional support in a business decision, when I want someone to be on my side, I go to Chad GPT. It's always that LLM that supports me in any decision, understands every feeling. But sometimes I don't want that, so I'll go to another model. Mo, Godat, former chief business officer at Google X, this even further. He makes three AIs fight for the best answer before Chad GPD gives him the final

version. So you have to question and you have to question deeply. If you remember 2016, if you searched Google, Google gave you a million and a half answers and said, I don't know the truth. You make up your mind. Okay. We didn't allow ourselves to have monopoly on what reality is. You asked Chad GPT in 2023 and it said, yeah, that's the answer. answer 100% that's the answer. And then you tell it no and it'd be like, oh yeah, by the way, you're right. Correct. Correct. Correct. And so what does that mean? It means that it's up to you still to find the truth, even though it comes to you in a format that appears to be true. And so what I do is I pit them against each other. I mean, I'm not a big fan of Chad GPT anyway, but I start

from Gemini who feels like a scientist to me, but an American scientist, if you don't mind me saying, and then go to Deep Seek and say, what's missing in this? And Deep Seek would say, oh, that's too American, okay? This is missing that and this and the motivation of this and the politician. Here is a business idea, right? Yeah, 100%. A chat that compares everything. Compares them to each other.

And then I take it and sometimes give it to Chad GPD and say, can you write this better? Yeah. You know, I don't mean that in a bad way. You're the California girl, right? The, you know, Silicon Valley girl. So, so CHAPD is a bit, California, and it just wants you to hear what you want to hear, right? So it writes it really. Very nice.

Yeah, it's nice. It writes it elegantly. It gives it to you. And then I give that back to Gemini or Grok or whatever. And you keep doing that. And remember, when I was studying engineering, we were not allowed scientific calculators. Can you imagine? I'm that old.

And when they gave me a scientific calculator, it reduced my problem solving time by 50%. Yeah. Most of my friends would take that 50% extra, finish their exams and go out and sit with their girlfriends. I would take the 50% extra and do the solution twice. That's the chance you have today. AI is going to make you dumb if you outsource your problem solving to AI. AI is going to make you the smartest you've ever been. If you take the parts that are not natural to the human brain,

you know, things like crunching a massive amount of information, things like searching at speed and so on and so forth, but get the AI to do the work so that you do the intelligence. Yeah. Right. And if you keep doing that, I believe that today I'm borrowing maybe 80 IQ points from my AIs, right? And ATIQ is very significant because AIQ is exponential. So the additional 80 is bigger than all of my IQ.

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The smart ones use it to earn more. For me, when it comes to work, when it comes to actually making money, if you've been watching this channel, you know what's coming next? Claude, right? My entire team works in Claude projects now. The same team of producers that we had a year ago now puts out twice the content every month, which actually doubled our revenue. And it all started with one podcast with Keen Katan Farouche,

who co-founded AI classes at Stanford with Andréi, one of the most influential figures in the AI field. After that conversation, I went home and rebuilt how my whole team operates, and a few weeks later, we got the results. At Workera, we are a big anthropic shop internally. We use a lot of clods. All our engineers are on this version of cloud called Cloud CodeMax, which is very powerful to code.

And across the company, we have, have things that we call skills, anthropic call these skills, where you can think of them as files that define a certain way of doing a certain thing. Like, here is how we recruit at work era. Or here is our brand guidelines. This is the font we use. This is how we speak.

These are the color palettes that you can use. Before, if an engineer wanted to build a website, they would have to call the marketing team at the end and say, can you review the font, can you review the alignment, can you review XYZ? Today, because it's all coded, you don't need anymore to talk to a human. The engineer just asks the LLM,

can you just verify that the copywriting is correct? The color palette is right. And they know that the marketing team has maintained that code. I love that. And so it cuts communication and it's very powerful. You gain actually so much speed and create so much more time for the marketing thing to think about, do we need to change our font?

Do we need, rather than like every day talk to an engineer and say, no, change that font, change that font. So do you check the? the result afterwards like oh yeah the engineer does yeah okay the engineers do here's what i did after that podcast we're on so many social media channels we're on instagram youtube channels so i build a clod project for every single social media there's lincoln clod project newsletter cloud project and for example if we take this youtube's cloud project it has everything baked in my voice my past episode performance and that's all a notion so it's connected directly to our database the topics my

audience actually engages with and my interview style now it knows my channel so well it gives me better advice than most expensive strategists and by the way I'm not saying that we stopped getting outside help like a strategy because sometimes those people suggest something we haven't even thought about and our Claude hasn't even thought about like one of the strategists suggested we work on GEO generative engine optimization but Claude did the whole strategy and actually helped us work on it without us having to hire somebody who specializes in that and most people still have no idea this is possible which makes helping others set up there AI is seriously underrated niche. Now, we're starting to use AI agents too, and the workflow that

inspired me the most was Ali Miller. She's an ex-Amazon AI leader, and what she built for herself is kind of insane. So the last two years, we've seen like a big paradigm shift about a year, year and a half ago into like new age, agentic AI. So two years ago, you could kind of ask AI to do research for you. You'd get back a sort of synthesis. and you would have to do that, take that knowledge and then do something with it. But now the AI system that you're using or multiple agents can take action on your behalf. So when I look at an AI assistant that I just ask questions to and get an answer back, versus a thing that is meaningfully taking delegated work from me

and managing multiple hours worth of work and workflows, this felt like 20 to 30% productive. This, depending on the task, is anywhere between like 2x and 10x. Wow. So you're saying you actually have an AI agent who is your assistant who's doing things for you. Can you describe what it actually does? Yeah, I have 36 proactive workflows with 28 like master agents and each of them spin up probably two on average. So call it 50-ish sub-agents. And those are so that's yeah, that's almost a thousand agents, right? Almost 2,000 agents. It's, oh, not per workflow just as a total. So it's. somewhere around like 100 total agents. But what I look at is what can AI do that I don't have to kick off? Like this is one of the biggest changes. And I think any single person, even if you're just asking it like, hey, find me industry news this morning. If you know that you're going to go to it every single morning and ask that question, that process of asking, not just the task itself and

the prompt itself, but the task should be automated. So if there's like a competitor that you want to check in on every single morning, that should be scheduled. You can schedule things inside of Claudeco work, inside of Codex, inside of cloud code. You can schedule things within all of these tools so that you, while you're sleeping or doing other things or on a walk or hanging out with your dog, okay, that things can be running on your behalf. So when I say 36 proactive workflows, those are the things that my hands are up and they're constantly coming in as a new stream. Is that an email that you're getting every day or how does it look like? That's a good question.

Most of them are emails. I have them routed into different folders, but just two examples. Every single Friday morning, I have a recap of all of the urgent emails that I have not yet responded to, ranked by urgency, drafted, you know, some replies that I can get to it faster. It includes little the ability to delegate to people on my team and reminders if I don't reply to those emails. So that's a Friday proactive agent that is scraping, you know, my Gmail for the last five days and gets me a little download. Second one is morning briefing. So every morning I wake up, my AI agent has already been working for me for several hours, which is great.

and I wake up and I get this full readout of industry news, things that are happening in New York City or San Francisco that day that I can just have a social life, God forbid, I get, you know, kickoffs for my meetings. So if I'm having a client meeting and I'll be sitting down with like a Fortune 500 CEO or maybe it's their CFO and I haven't met with them yet, then in that proactive system, in that morning brief, all I have to do is like write back with a keyword and I can kick off an AI agent to make assets for that meeting. Another Ali's hack that everyone who's watching this should copy guidelines. Files that tell every AI on your team how you write, how you think, what to never do.

We built hours for every team member and every platform, podcast, YouTube, Instagram newsletter. And before we uploaded those files, every draft came back generic and very AI-ish. And I spent some time rewriting, so it sounds like me. Three documents do this work. Anti-AI writing style, how to never sound like AI, no generic AI phrasing, no filler, no clichés. My voice profile, how I actually write, tone, rhythm, openings, endings, my favorite texts, vocabulary, and the fact dossier. All the verified context about me, my work, my audience, that stays consistent everywhere. I share all these full templates, breakdowns, and instructions alongside other AI workflows in my newsletter, Future Proof.

If you subscribe using the link below, I will send you the exact three-step workflow that we use. The link is in the description. And speaking of the newsletter, that's actually a perfect way to show you the next tool. Tool number three is called design.com, and thank you so much, design.com for sponsoring this segment of the video. This one is for founders, freelancers, consultants, anyone building income outside of a 925. It's an AI design platform that handles your entire brand in one place. Think logos, websites, business cards, social posts, presentations. The thing is, in 2026, your competitors can launch a product in a weekend.

AI has collapsed the build cycle. It's no longer a moat. What's left to compete on is how you understand your audience, how you feel the problem and how credible you look the second someone lands on your page. Most first-time founders ship with a logo that doesn't match their website, and socials that don't match either. Design.com closes that gap by turning a complex, fragmented design process into something simple, fast, and professional. Let me show you how it works. So I'm building this free newsletter and we call it Future Proof by Silicon Valley Girl. And I'll use it to walk you through a few key features.

Let's start with the basics. Logo creation. I type in the name and I hit generate. The AI instantly creates a full set of logos tailored specifically to my brand. So I started guiding it further. I add our brand color red and include keywords like newsletter, AI, career. So Design.com actually understands what future proof is about. Then I pick a style direction, abstract, mascot, corporate, classic, vintage, and the AI

refines the results around it. From there, I fine-tune everything through the AI chat. Replaced by Silicon Valley Girl as a tagline below the name, make the background white and the text red, replace the typewriter icon with the laptop, all the simple prompts, no design skills needed. And here's the most useful part. Once your logo is set, the platform automatically generates branded versions of everything else. You can create everything yourself in minutes with AI, a website, letterhead, social posts, invoices, even a full presentation, all powered by a library of over 1 million AI enhanced designs, 100% commercially safe and ready for real business use. The link to design.com is in the description. You can try it for free.

Okay, the next one is not really a single tool. It's a trend that I'm seeing in interview after interview across dozens of different tools. It's vibe coding. You describe what you want in normal language and the AI writes the code for you. I recently set down with Gary Vaynerchuk, early investor in Facebook, Twitter and Uber, and he's at something worth remembering. Learning to vibe code right now is a real window to build wealth and that window won't stay open forever. My intuition is it has the chance to create hyper micro wealth, the fragmentation of vibe coding and all this stuff and the stuff we're already seeing, right? Kids building out products very quickly and having success. If I lost my reputation and my personal brand, but I kept my knowledge

of how to make content on social, I would build an app that's $5 to $50 a month and I would make unlimited organic content on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and try to get customers. That's very interesting approach. I just talked to Bill Gurley, who's like a legendary investor. And he told me you can't even imagine how many websites are there that are just like passport photos. They charge you $6. And yes, AI can do that. But because we're still so used to go into a website and paying and they're making tens of thousands of dollars a month and we just don't realize it.

Because for me, as a person in Silicon Valley, right? I'm looking at all the businesses and I'm like, okay, I can totally see how Anthropic releases new lines of codes tomorrow and this business is done. It's not how consumers work. He's right. Exactly. It's not how it works. Yeah.

And in fact, I would argue what I do for a living and what I'm obsessed with actually explodes in this next era. It's all going to be about brand because you have to discover it. In 30 years, by default, somebody would be like, oh, let me go to the main AI thing and I don't need to. But there's going to be a long period of time here. Yeah. So there's this long tail. We still need to adjust. Whereas humans, we take some time to adjust a new reality.

When you're Silicon Valley girl and you even know who Bill Gurley is, you live. in a different world than the 99.9% of people on Earth who've never heard of Bill. And that's opportunity for everyone who's listening. Correct. Because transitioning to that era together with small companies, small businesses, other people educating them, I feel like there is a lot of potential there. Gary's right. And it's already happening inside billion-dollar companies with employees who aren't coders and aren't experts.

Listen to what Duolingo CEO, Leo von An, told me about two of his team members. We now teach chess on Duolingo. so for a long time we only taught languages now we teach a few other things. Chess is the latest course we added. This course got started by two people, neither of whom knew chess, neither of whom knew how to program.

They basically vibe coded the first prototype of it. Now, the final version that is actually in the app, of course we put some engineers in there, etc., but they really got very far. In a span of about six months, they created the whole curriculum for chess. They created a prototype of the app, all entirely with AI.

And again, these people did not know any chess. And whose idea was that? Was it their idea? It was their idea to do that. They also, well, they're the ones who wanted to add chess. By the way, they came to me a year earlier to say, we want to add chess. I said, I don't want to add chess because it's just a game and we're an education app. But what happened was that a few months later, I talked to the minister of education of my country.

I'm from Guatemala. And she said to me, our education system, Our public education system in Guatemala is so broken that I'm considering sending every student a chess board so that at least they'll learn logical thinking. And when she said that to me, I thought, oh, wow, okay, this is actually useful. Part of education. Yes. So then this is when I told them, okay, you can add the chess course. But I said to them, but I don't have any engineers to give you.

So go ahead. And they figured it out. Six months, right? About six months. And now is your fastest growing course? Yeah. I mean, at this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning. Wow, this is fascinating. Can you tell me step by step, what was their process? So if somebody's

watching and they're like, wow, if Dolingo is able to do such a spin-off, which is kind of different from languages, if I want to start something with AI and build a fast-growing product, what are the like five steps they need to take? These two guys, the first thing they did was probably learn chess, probably because they didn't know any chess. And that's one of the reasons they wanted to add it because they themselves wanted to learn chess. But after that, what they did is they really started looking at, you know, kind of the different tools that are out there for learning chess. They're basically doing market research, try to figure out what's out there for learning chess. They found that really what was out there was not all that great.

And then they decided to start vibe coding something. To be fair, this person does have some technical knowledge. They're not an engineer, but they have some technical knowledge. And so they downloaded cursor. And at first they made just chess puzzles. then they realized that the AI was not very good at making chess puzzles. So then they decided to train it with some. There's an online database of a lot of different chess puzzles.

So they trained the AI with that and it got a lot better. And then after that, what they started doing was just more and more mobile prototypes for me to play with until I told them that it was kind of good enough to really put it in the app. We're talking about all these tools. We're probably in less than 1% of population, who actually uses these tools. Like with social media, I remember when I started 12 years ago, it was a really, really small percentage of creators.

Now we're the whole industry. It's so much harder to break in. I have 35 people on my team. I'm sitting in the studio that I build in my house. It's the whole thing. It's my full-time job. I still have my company, but I don't run it day-to-day because I don't have time.

I have this. The same thing is happening with AI. We're in less than 1% actually using it very actively. And there's so much opportunity right now. speeding up your work, teaching others how to use this stuff. Realize that you have this limited amount of time where you can use AI to your advantage. And if you're watching this video,

you're already in that small group of people who's gonna become much, much more productive. And I just came back from TED, and everyone was talking about, like, in a few years, a lot of companies will lose to their competitors because their competitors increase their margins by a lot by using AI. So you can not only increase your productivity with AI,

but also find people like you, and help them do that. Maybe it's your new business, maybe it's a core, whatever it is. But anyways, I just want you to realize we're still very early, and this is the worst version of AI that we're seeing right now. Yes, it makes mistakes, but it's already amazing. And it's only going to get better from here. And the thing that you should be working on right now is learning how to communicate with AI the right way. If I can create a list of top three AI-related game changers in my life in the past few months, this one is going to be top three. I stopped typing. I talk to my computer, I talk to my phone, I talk to my iPad.

I use an app called Whisperflow. I installed it across all my devices, and my prompting became so much better. Ellie Miller told me to complain to my AI. You know how easy it is to complain when you're talking versus typing? Because when I'm speaking, I naturally give way more context than I'd ever bothered typing. So my posts, emails, and drafts, they sound more like me and also saves me so much time. complain to AI. You can say, oh my God, Rina and Allie were telling me to make all of these freaking context docs. It feels like it's going to take so much time. Claude is likely to come

back and go, wait a second, I will ask you the three questions that will give me the highest signal and therefore we will only use five minutes of your time. Yeah. And we'll at least get you started with some sort of context docs so that I at least moved away from completely generic into 50% Alley Zone. And then I can save 100% Alley Zone for later. but like, you gotta start. And here's what I notice. People who are advanced in AI are not the ones paying the most to their AI tool.

They are the ones spending the most hours inside one, giving it context, playing with it, adding files, building processes. Alex Mashrabov built Hicksville to 200 million in revenue in nine months. And here is how he uses AI. I'm an immigrants. So, you know, it just takes quite a bit of effort. to come with a logical linear storyline.

O3 Mini became my coach, really. This was the first aha moment for me. The second aha moment was around Gemini 3 Pro model. So I felt that my economic productivity really depends on how much I use Gemini 3 model. These capabilities of the model which can process voice, which can make image, which has also deep reasoning capabilities and deep reasoning. research, this was mind-blowing to me. So that's why I feel that my just economic throughput really depend on how much I use Gemini 3 today. I also love using Gemini. Here's my use case.

So Gemini is Google's product and Google owns YouTube. So it actually understands what makes a video work on that platform. It's trained on a lot more data versus other LLANs. So what I do, I upload the script of a video. I'm about to shoot and ask it to identify where viewers are likely to drop off. And I can do the same with a video that's already recorded. For example, I sit down in an interview. It's one hour and I'm like, okay, we need 40 minutes. I go to Gemini, upload the transcript. And I'm like, identify the least interesting parts that would affect how the video is performing.

So here is the six tools the richest AI founders are using right now. Pick one today. Start with whatever is blocking your income. Perplexity computer lets you connect your QuickBooks, your fidelity, your Charles Schwab, if you're interested in investing. Claude is really good at spotting patterns. Chat GPT is very supportive, so if you need strategist, I'd go to chat GPT. If you're more like into deep analytical thinking spreadsheets, tables, that's Clod and Gemini.

It's a matter of giving them information and tailoring them for yourself. And as I mentioned, two more for me personally. Perplexity computer. So on the 15th of every month, it pulls from my QuickBooks and sends me a full picture. My margin, projected tax owed, tax strategies I can run this month to lower the bill, comparison to my last year, what's eating into my profit, like all of this high-level CFO type of review. I used to use my accountant who charges by the hour when we talk about this. Now I use perplexity computer and it also runs my investments. I actually used Claude before that

to create my investment strategy and perplexity executes it. So I am investing heavily an S&P 500, I'm buying Google stock, and my meta, and my Microsoft, but I actually, I want to be dollar cost averaging and I want to buy them on the right days. So perplexity computer tracks when the dip is happening and tells me to buy on that day. That's it. That's my dollar cost averaging. And also because I receive those emails regularly, I feel like I'm more disciplined when it comes to investing.

The second one is granola. Every meeting I take gets recorded, transcribed, and sorted. At the start of every new meeting with the same person, I have, first of all, a clean list of follow-ups waiting. What we agreed on last time, what I still owe them, what they still owe me, so we don't start from scratch.

And then I heard somebody say, if you're not recording your team's conversations, you're basically losing on a lot of decisions. I totally agree. Grinola now has folders for every team member, and I can upload them to Claude, run them against that person's KPIs and numbers. I feel like my Claude is becoming a digital C.O.

Of course, I still have my CO, and we make strategic decisions, together, but we're able to accomplish so much more because we actually have this operational analyst. And there is a rule that I now run for myself. If it's repetitive and if it's not the work that depends on my creativity, I automated. In 2026, it is not optional. So if you want to stay ahead of AI and keep growing your income, please subscribe to this channel because here I'm dedicated to sharing the most practical tips with you and see you in the next one. Bye bye.