The Startup Ideas Podcast - Become AI Native in less than 60 mins
Episode Date: June 8, 2026Become an AI Native Organization: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/ai-native-org In this episode I sit down with Theo to unpack what becoming AI native truly means. We define an AI native org as peop...le managing agents, agents reading and writing to the company, and the company growing smarter over time. Theo opens his actual workflows, walking through a working prototype, an auto-generated client proposal microsite, and a live usability test that synthesizes feedback into a V2 in one session. We close with service-business startup ideas built on this same system, plus a free consultation offer for larger companies. For founders and operators, the value lands as a concrete playbook for turning speed into customer signal and a durable moat. Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro 04:09 – The Demis Hassabis origin story 06:53 – Defining AI Native Organization 08:19 – Mapping the system: people, agents, context 09:18 – Why people lead: strategy, taste, trust 13:23 – Agents: models using tools in a loop 16:12 – Evals and defining "good" 17:34 – Skill chains explained 20:06 – Proposal skill-chain demo setup 25:48 – Proposal microsite walkthrough 30:46 – Building the Daily Blitz feature demo 32:50 – Context as the foundational layer 41:07 – Daily Blitz ships and the labs page 43:47 – Bootstrapping context with a small team 46:21 – Usability test and live feedback 51:18 – Startup ideas: productize the system 54:28 – Closing Thoughts Key Points An AI native org runs on three layers: people for judgment, agents for execution, and context as the shared brain. Everyone becomes a manager, so I set each agent up with a clear goal, the right skills, tools, and context. Skill chains fire playbooks back to back, lifting quality and keeping outputs grounded in real data. A living context layer gives agents 2020 vision, letting a personalized proposal ship in minutes. Live prototypes plus built-in usability tests turn raw ideas into customer signal the same day. The fastest service play right now: niche down by industry, function, and company size, then sell this system. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND THEO ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/TheoTabah LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theotabah/ LCA: https://www.latecheckout.agency/
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How do you become AI Native?
In this episode, it is an under 60-minute masterclass for how to become AI Native.
This is the type of content that people charge tens of thousands of dollars for,
but on this channel, we're giving away for free.
We're giving it away for free because I believe that people who understand how to become AI Native
are going to be able to outperform 99.9% of people on the planet.
These are the people that are going to get raises in an economy where job loss is prevalent.
These are the people that are going to actually create the one person, one billion dollar companies.
So in this episode, we break it down in the most clear way possible.
You'll learn everything you need to know about how to become AI Native.
What does a skill chain mean?
What are skills mean?
How do I think about context?
How do I pipe things into Claude?
And how it all works together.
I brought on my co-founder, Theo Taba.
And Theotabba leads the world around advising the best companies on the platform.
planet to become AI Native. And in this episode, he spills the sauce. This is the stuff that,
you know, he keeps for ourselves and our team. But I, I begged him to come on. He came on,
and he does an absolute masterclass for how to become AI Native and explains it in the most
clear way I've ever seen on the internet. So enjoy the episode, and I can't wait to see what you
build. I beg Theo Tabba to come on because I think that there's such a huge opportunity in
in becoming AI Native.
And everyone's saying this word,
AI Native this,
AIA-Native that.
But how do you actually become AI-Native?
So Theo is my number one call with this sort of stuff.
So welcome Theo to the pod.
By the end of this episode,
what are people going to get out of it?
Nice to see you, Greg.
They're going to get three things.
One, how to become an AI Native org.
We all want to know.
We're going to talk about it today.
Number two are two workflows in action
of how to turn this AI-native system that we're going to talk through into speed
that unlock signal from your customers, which is what this is all about.
And Greg, you're going to be our signal in this demo and these workflows.
And then number three, we've got to talk startup ideas, right?
So let's talk about a few service-based startup ideas.
I think, you know, I'm actually going to go out on a limb and say this is one of the hottest
and fastest growing markets in our lifetime in terms of this space for startup ideas.
So I don't want to come off as, you know, hyperbolic.
or overblowing anything, but I do think this is a huge opportunity for folks.
So by the end of the episode, people are going to find out what does it mean to be AI
native? What does that concretely mean? And they're also going to be able to figure out,
okay, if I want to be the one person, one billion dollar company or I'm working in a company,
how can I turn that organization into AI Native? And then for the first time ever,
you're actually going to allow us to peek inside of some of the workflows that you are doing
within the team that are things that used to cost millions of dollars to do that you're doing
by just becoming AI-Native.
And you're going to not hold back.
You're going to share all the sauce.
Give me an example of some of the workflows you're going to show just to give people the
taste and then let's get right into it.
Sure.
So here's a prototype.
You see this looks a lot like Spotify because that was the system we used.
this prototype, cool feature idea.
You can come and listen to music live with your friends.
This is just a demo, of course.
This is just one workflow that we're going to show
to build this in minutes.
This is fully functional, code it up.
And then also have it in a full testing suite
so you can get direct signal from customers.
This is just one of a lot of the things
we're going to talk about today.
So that's one kind of hint of what we're going to be showing.
And the trick there is
it's because you run an AI
native org that you were able to get such a high fidelity beautiful prototype and we'll get into that
later. All right. Let's go. Let's go. If you'll indulge me for a minute and everyone else,
I want to just tell a very, very quick story that ends with our dear friend Greg here. So
rewind. We're going back to the 70s. There's a four-year-old kid starts playing chess in North London,
becomes a master at age 13, absolutely crushing it, uses his chess winnings to buy a Commodore Amiga.
which is an old computer, new at the time, teaches himself to code, builds this amazing game,
as a lead developer on this amazing game called, I believe it's called Theme Park.
They sell over a million copies.
Makes money from that.
Goes to school for computer science.
The person is becoming a little more apparent here, but goes to school for computer science,
gets a job, runs a studio, building AI native games, goes back to school, does this PhD in cognitive neuroscience.
It's fascinated with the brain, wants to know how it works,
starts a company, gets funded by none other than Peter Thiel, and they do some incredible stuff, man.
They do some really incredible stuff.
They fold every protein on the planet.
They create an AI that beats the world's best go player, which I think has an insane amount of combinations, more atoms than atoms in the universe, something like that.
And I think Google then buys them in 2014.
This, to me, I heard, was why Elon started Open AI because he felt like this amount of power in one company's hands was a little too dangerous.
Fast forward to 2024, the dude gets knighted and wins a Nobel Prize.
So underachiever, you know, real underachiever.
Thanks, buddy.
Do you know who this person is, Greg?
Well, I know because look at him.
And I was just with him.
That's Demis.
You were just with him.
Amazing.
Yes, you were just with him.
So this is you and Demis at Google I.O.
This is Demas Asabas, co-founder of DeepMind.
And who's this, Greg?
With JD.
That's JD.
I love that guy.
Our boy.
Yeah, J.D. Choi, shut up.
Demas had a killer quote at Google I.O.
Running 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction is worse than standing still.
He did emphasize the importance of speed, but that, again, direction is super important.
And that, I think, ties back to an AI native org and what this is all about.
out. So you can't just run fast for the sake of running fast. You can't just have speed for the
sake of speed. You have to do it in service of your customer and you have to know what you're
running to. And this is the magic when you can work so quickly, understand the signal,
understand what you're working towards and have this AI native system set up. You can deliver
incredible value for your customers and, quite frankly, build a moat that makes you unstoppable.
So this is what I've broken down.
An AI Native org is one where people manage agents.
Agents can read and write to the company
and the company gets smarter over time.
Those are the three bullets.
There's, of course, a lot of detail buried in these
that we're going to talk about.
But this is the system that allows companies
to move with speed and get signal from the market
and that creates their mode.
And just because you use chat GPT
does not make you an AI native company
or an AI native person, right?
that's like the
the thing you know I speak to people and they say they're AI
native and then I look into their workflows and it's
they're just using chat TBT
I couldn't agree more it's like if you had a website
and called yourself like a tech company
it's just the gap is massive
so you've good it's good that you're using that stuff
don't get me wrong but we want to really build this
moat that's what an
Native org can actually unlock is this system, which is comprised of people, agents, and context.
We'll get into each one of those.
That produces incredible speed where you can produce anything in minutes.
I flash a little teaser of that.
We're going to do a couple of those.
And then signal where you actually get to hear from the market often really quickly.
And then all of that feeds back into the system and this gets smarter and better over time.
Tracking so far?
Yes, sir.
Amazing.
Okay.
Well, let's get into the system.
Let's break this down a little bit.
So you had this in your newsletter.
I love this.
And it mapped really well, of course, to what an AI Native org is comprised of.
So you have people at the top.
I'm very bullish on people.
Get into that in a second for strategy, taste, judgment.
And of course, that trust piece.
You have agents interfacing with the context on behalf of those people.
And that context is really key.
I think you called out you have to make your company readable to agents like AI readable or agent readable.
A lot of people use different terms, consumable, legible, et cetera, et cetera.
But I like readable.
Let's just stick with that.
And this is that shared context layer where the agents essentially have perfect vision,
2020 vision on what the company is comprised of.
And that interface between you and that data becomes an incredible level up.
And that really allows you to move with speed.
And again, get that signal to deliver for customers.
All tracking still?
Let's talk.
Okay.
So let's talk about.
people. There's no AI Native org without AI Native people. Let's just be super clear. Like,
obvious, but I think people jump right to like, let's get the agents in the system. If your people
aren't using this and they're not understanding or do not understand how to use agents and how to
use the system, it doesn't matter. You can put all the tech you wanted your company. You can put all
the agents, all the AI, all the tools. It's not going to matter. And so the big reframe here is what the
role of a person becomes. So we have this high level how things were pre-AI, where a lot of your
work was done in the middle on the execution part. And a little of it was spent on either side,
figuring out what to do, the strategy, et cetera. And then on the end, reviewing the work,
is it good enough, is it not good enough? What needs to change? Who needs to see it communicating
that work? The funny thing, though, is like these bookends are actually really important. That,
some might say is the work. That is like the really important meaty part of the work.
The research and the draft, all of that, of course, we had to do. But the bookends are really important.
So we have this thing where AI actually eats the middle. And now with AI, you're freed up to focus on the beginning and the end while AI, quote unquote, eats the middle.
It does all of that execution work on your behalf. And you get to focus on executing and deploying your judgment.
your taste, all of that accrued knowledge and all of the things that make you great as a professional
at the beginning and at the end of the work.
Dream come true. Yeah, I think a lot of people know this now.
You know, I think a lot of people are like, okay, yes, I understand that my new job is to manage agents,
but they're not sure what that really means.
They're not, and I think that's a great point, and that's what we're going to get into with
agents. But I think the main takeaway here is that everyone is a manager now.
And that reframe of making sure your agents are set up for success like a manager would with their team is the unlock in terms of how you look at this.
It's not, I've got a new tool like Salesforce.
So I've got a new tool like Excel.
It's very different than that because essentially you have unlimited employees at your disposal and you need to make sure they're set up for success.
Because I think Andy Grove, you know, godfather of management once said, you know, the success of a manager is the success of their team or, you know, judge based,
judge based on the output of their team.
And to me, that is it.
Or as Greg Eisenberg once said to my wife,
I really like turndown services at hotels
because a turndown service is like when they clean your room
right before bed and they basically, I have a lot of trouble sleeping.
So, you know, the fact that like everything is optimized for the sleep, you know,
and everything is like perfect.
Never met a turndown service I didn't like.
So you want to, you know, and I find I sleep better like that.
So I have to bring it back to Seinfeld very quickly.
Are you a sheets tucked in or untucked in a hotel room, Greg?
In a hotel room?
Yep.
That's a great question.
That feels like a personal question.
It is personal.
I'll share.
I'll share it with the thousands listening right now.
I would say I'm an un-tucked person.
I don't, it's like I don't need the constraint in my life.
Like, don't constrain me, you know, if I, especially I'm six foot three.
I know, I know people watch me on YouTube.
They're like, when they meet me in real life, they're like, whoa, you're large, you know, you're tall.
They don't say large.
They say tall.
Come on.
You're going to say credit.
Yeah, exactly.
So I would say untucked.
And yeah, let's keep going.
I'm the same.
All right.
Let's talk about agents, that second layer.
You have done, I think probably the most comprehensive job on the internet.
And I'm not being, you know, we work together.
I think, you know, I'm shooting straight.
Compared to everyone on breaking this down, Ross Mike, Remy,
You've had some killer folks on who explain agents, so I'm not going to spend too much time here.
I'm just going to do a quick refresher and then talk about why they're important.
Agents or models using tools in a loop.
This is from Barry Zhang and Anthropic, a great engineer.
You got to give them an environment.
You got to give them tools and you got to give them goals.
And coming back to everyone's a manager now and how to think about that,
I think this kind of overview is really what I wanted to focus on.
So if we look at this, you want your agents right now.
Now, there's probably three levels.
You're just chatting with chatGBT.
That's kind of base level or clod or whomever.
Number two is you've actually got some agents running.
And you're sitting there, clicking, waiting for the next question to pop up or permission
to be granted or prompt or check in to happen in your cloud code or in your codex.
Approve, approve, approve.
Maybe you have auto edits on.
But someone's just there waiting for an agent to ask you if the next step is okay.
The next state is the agent autonomy.
And think about it like a new hire, right?
At the beginning, you're having to babysit them a little bit, giving them what they need.
And then over time, they're actually coming to you with stuff and they're running for days without your oversight.
Maybe weeks.
And it's incredible because they're doing great work.
And they understand everything and they're absolutely nailing it.
This is what you want your agents to get to.
And in order for an agent to have autonomy, they need these four things.
They really need these four things.
If they need a clear goal, they need the skills, they need the tools, and they need the context,
all of those to succeed and be autonomous, again, I will bring it back to your first day on the job.
If I walked in to a new company and was expected to put a board deck together for the following week on day one with no management,
what would I do?
Maybe the goal is somewhat clear, but a little bit fuzzy.
Do I have the skills to do that?
maybe from a past job but not so much.
Do I have the tools?
I don't even know where to start.
It's my first day.
Do I have the context?
I don't know what's going on with this company.
I just started.
I will fail at that job.
And I think people get impatient with the models or AI
because they don't get what they want right away
with a very simple prompt or none of this baked in.
And so this is really what I want to harp on.
Again, I know you guys have covered some of this,
but I think having all of this baked in,
the right goals, the right skills for your agent,
the right tools for them,
and that context, which we're going to talk about next,
is what unlocks agent autonomy.
The other piece on that is, you know, you,
and this can go into context,
but you don't know what good looks like.
So the concept of an eval,
can you expand on what that is
and why it's an important piece of this whole puzzle?
So an eval is essentially your visibility
into the output of an agent.
So what did the agent do?
and can you see how they got there and what was produced?
And the thing that is produced, how does it, like, what is the evaluation of it in terms of
like is an 8 on 10, a 9 on 10, a 10 on 10, and comparing it to a desired output?
So that will come from your skills, the goal, and of course the context all together with the right tools.
So what I mean by that is if you have a standard, a quality bar, an SOP, this is this is,
is what good looks like, that can get folded into a skill. It can also get found in context,
right? It can be a reference document of something that is the pinnacle. And the goal clearly defines
what success looks like when something is great, how to measure if it's great, and when it needs
to be great, and when it needs to be done. And so when you combine these things together,
and then, of course, give the age of the right tools, you actually get the output that you want
to the degree or quality you want over and over and over again.
So we have a skills library because again, this isn't all single player, right?
When you're an AI Native org, you have to think about how the team will benefit from this.
How can other folks use agents and how can those agents use skills?
So LCA has a skills library for our org.
This is a demo-ish version, meaning it's not fully complete.
We didn't want to show everything.
But this is ours, as you know, are our skills library.
So we have a bunch of skills here that people can come in, learn about,
and get started. You already know what skills are, so I'm not going to go too deep into this,
but still our favorite reference is Neo in the Matrix when they upload Kung Fu or, you know,
combat training directly into his brain. Thank God none of us have the, you know, wires in the
back of our necks, but this is essentially what you're doing with agents for skills. Neo loves it.
I love this movie, by the way. So we have a bunch of skills here, and inside you'll see something
that has five skills together. That's an interesting skill.
and that's what we call skill chain.
And again, skill chains aren't something brand new,
but essentially allows you to fire a lot of skills sequentially
to make sure that your output is even better.
So you don't always want to cover that later, right?
We are.
We're about to get into a demo man.
We're about to jump right in
and then I'll show you how the skill chains fire.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, because I think skill chains is a really important concept
that actually a lot of people have been covered.
So I'm excited for that.
Yeah, as the agents get more,
autonomous and as the skills and the models get better.
And as skills can start to call another skill, you can start to have that agent autonomy
really start to show up and play a huge role in how you do the work.
And that's the difference, again, between that AI Native org versus a one that's maybe
more AI assisted or AI curious or aren't AI at all.
You're just waiting there and essentially you're managing on hard mode.
you're assuming every agent is like an ultra junior super smart but you can't unlock that intelligence
and you're just constantly there trying to direct it trying to steer it and it actually just
gets frustrating in the end and maybe you abandon it instead of really having that autonomy skill
chains allow you to have more autonomous agents um you've already covered skills and what they are
they're marked down files you guys know this and then skill chains like i said are running playbooks back
to back essentially it's a macro skill with skills inside of it so skill one then fires call skill
skill two, skill two fires and then call skill three, skill three fires and then off we go. So I'm going to
give you a demo and a workflow of one thing that we use now. This is a first sip workflow. So normally,
I wouldn't have to touch anything for this to fire. This fire is automatically on a trigger. However,
I didn't want to leave it to a trigger picking something up by chance in this hour. So we're going to
fire it ourselves. And we're going to just call something,
in this fake environment that, you know, we at LCA, we work with clients, and what we're going to do is pretend there's a new prospect out there.
People have heard of Spotify. Let's just say Spotify is a new prospect. So we're talking to them. We've spoken to them over months, but we haven't actually closed the deal yet.
And now they're ready to get a proposal from us. How are we going to work together? We've had meetings. We've spoken about it in Slack.
we have figured things out that we need to get done.
And normally, this would fire only on the request for a proposal,
picked up in a meeting transcript or sent in my inbox.
So it would scan, and I'll get into that in the brain and the context very soon.
It would pick up that trigger and then fire this skill chain that we were just talking about.
So it fires three skills here.
And I'm just kind of kicking it off manually.
And in about three minutes, four minutes, we'll actually see the
output of this proposal and I'll break down the skill chain that went into it. But let me jump ahead
just to talk to you about that skill chain. So this proposal flow will get into the capture in a
moment when I talk about the brain and the curate. But in the execution phase, which I just triggered,
it fires three skills. Creates a proposal microsite. So, you know, used to send proposals,
emails, raw text. Sometimes that works, but not always. You might want something a little more
elevate it. Creates a beautiful microsite. Number two is a copy skill. So make sure that it sounds
really tight. It doesn't sound like AI. It doesn't sound like someone else. It sounds like me and in
the conversations we've had. And number three, a QA skill. So it reviews at all. Make sure we're not
over-promising anything. Make sure we're not saying something completely egregious. And make sure we're
not making anything up that is not pulled directly from transcripts or from the data. And so once it's
done, it deploys it
live on a link and I can see it
and then it pings me in Slack.
I'll
pause there. Do you have any questions on
this skill chain before I jump in and see
how we're doing with Claude?
I think
just the whole concept
of a skill chain is
like people stop at maybe a
skill, right? And they're missing
the chain to actually get
high quality stuff. I also think that
a big reason why people
stop using AI
as a part of their workflow
is they say, well, it hallucinates.
It hallucinates.
And this kind of combats a lot of that, I would say.
Totally right. It does.
When people say AI hallucinates,
one, imagine again, like an eager new hire
who wants to impress you
and will just kind of do things to get the job done
without considering that it might break trust.
It's literally fake it until you make it.
Exactly.
But exacerbated times a thousand.
So yeah, AI loves to fake it until they make it.
And your job is to make sure that they don't fake it.
Or you minimize that as much as possible.
And I also want to say one more thing about this proposal thing is LCA, you know,
we don't talk about it very publicly, but LCA is, I mean, works with literally
most of the biggest companies on the planet
building AI products, designing, engineering it,
and also building AI native orgs.
And a big piece of why we're able to close Fortune 2000s
so frequently is this.
LCA is competing against companies that aren't doing this, right?
that aren't creating these like personalized proposals going the extra mile.
And, you know, this has been, the result of this has been, you know, millions of dollars of revenue because of this.
So this is like a big deal.
It is.
And another thing I just want to add to that is you and many folks who are, you know, coming from a sales background or sales org knows how important speed.
is to closing the deal or striking while the iron is hot. And this is critical, right? So
what normally happens here, what could happen here for companies is someone says, I'd like a
proposal. You have to then go back, review all the notes, in between meetings when you have the
time. You have to get back to them, say you're on it, you'll get them something. Then you have to
confirm with the team when there's availability. You have to talk through it. It might be days
before you get them that proposal. They might have cooled off or gone somewhere else. And that's
just the reality of sales and the reality of the market that we're in in the AI era that we're in.
You can see this already created this.
I will risk opening Slack and it is here.
You can see at 1037 AM, so what is that, a minute, two minutes ago.
I got a little note from this is just something I set up.
Aziz is my middle name and this is like a cool.
I don't want to get it too deep into the story here, but this is my more future guy.
And he pings me every time there's a new proposal ready for me to review.
So I'll click on this and here we go.
I'm not saying this is absolutely perfect,
but this is the past that I want.
This is the speed to the signal for me.
Is this something that I like and is something that we want?
So Home and Discovery Sprint for new listener retention.
Boom.
This is again a demo.
This isn't a real proposal.
Spotify has not come to us to ask for this.
I just want to clear that up.
But this is the proposal that gets created.
So you've got the outline.
You've got the opportunity.
You've got the whole breakdown.
So like if you go, sorry, if you scroll up, it's like, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to embed some of our, you know, here's the opportunity.
So you know.
I can break this down.
I'm going to break it down in a second because I think there's some really cool pieces here.
I want to give an overview.
It's a whole plan, week by week, what we're going to do, the team, how we're going to do the work.
A little bit about LCA and Y us, the cost, you know, I made sure that in the skill we were going to show real numbers.
so we just want Spotify premium for the team.
And then a little outro.
What's the cheapest sprint of all time.
What's cool is, so I'll give you a few things.
One, it looks pretty good.
Like it's pretty well organized.
It's pretty dialed.
It's in the Spotify branding mixed with LCA's branding.
So I like that.
The spacing, the hierarchy, it all looks pretty dialed, which I love.
So what I like here, I'll bring your attention to,
it should I asked it to make sure that we bake in some context,
from the past calls that we've had with Spotify.
So you'll see a line here.
So a home that works feels like a record store clerk who knows you.
Again, and the one hands you a record says, trust me.
So why is this line important?
I'm going to show you something as a preview to the brain or the contact section
that we're about to cover right after this.
This is a, I spun up a brain, put it on GitHub for this episode.
We have a shared LCA brain, but this is one that I put here.
So you can see a brain is just, or context,
it's just a bunch of folders with markdown files in them.
A bunch of folders to help guide the agents,
read-mees.
You're essentially guiding the agent through your tree structure of folders and files
and then helping them land at the right information.
There's a bunch of different search ways or ways to architect search to go about this.
But this is how we've done it.
And you can see here in Spotify, you can see correspondence,
and you can see things.
things like meetings. And you can see this one meeting intro called a Maya. Again, this is stuff that
we put here to make sure that the proposal could pull from something. So this is the first ever
conversation between me and Maya that happened months and months ago. I learned a little bit about
her that call. She's a vinyl person. But here you can see she said the thing about records or the
person behind the counter hands you something and says, trust me, that's discovery. That's the feeling.
So this is a cool line that she said to me in a meeting that I probably would never really remember
when I'm crafting the proposal later on and coordinating with the team.
What's good about this omniscient AI who sees everything has the perfect context
is it whips up this proposal and bakes in those little moments of connection
that I would love to do, given more time.
We would love to do.
I do want to give this level of personalization,
and then you can see it here in these moments.
So there's a few of those peppered throughout this proposal,
I would hope, because that's what it should do.
It's a direct ask in one of our skills to make sure that it pulls from the transcripts and layers in personalization.
You can see here, and good luck in November save something for mile eight.
This is because we know, I think there's something in here.
So I run training NYC Marathon in November.
You know, again, like, and then I think somewhere else she mentions mile eight and how that's like the toughest mile.
So again, you're baking this stuff in on top of a great proposal, on top of doing it in the literally.
under five minutes from the moment it was requested. So that's kind of the magic here that we can
start to see when you get to this level of AI-native operating. And I think something that's cool is,
again, normally I just fired this in Claude, but it's magic for me when I don't even know
a proposal was asked for because I'm on the road, I'm in meetings, I'm doing something else.
An email comes into my inbox and someone says, okay, we'd love to learn a little bit more. I'd
to see a proposal or show me what this might look like. The brain will understand that,
which I'll explain right now, pull in that trigger and fire this all without me ever having to
lift a finger or even know that I needed to do this. So it's crazy to get that slack ping and then be
like, oh, proposals ready. What are they talking about? I already have a proposal. And then I go back
and see what their reference of the breadcrumbs were. And I'm like, oh, amazing. I have it.
Review, send it off. And they're amazed because they're like, how did you get this to me? I just
ask for it. And, you know, again, you got to balance that, but I think it's really cool.
I'm actually what I'm going to do is start another one quickly as I talk in a context because I
don't want to miss out on this. And this one I'm going to speak to a little bit, and I hope it
works. But this is going to be, I showed you that Spotify prototype. You saw that proposal.
They want to increase retention. So I know people use whisper flow. People use a bunch of other things.
I'm a Luddite when it comes to this.
I just like using the native mic feature.
And to me, I find it works fine.
So let's do that.
I want to create a feature for Spotify.
I wanted to help increase retention.
I think it should be a daily mini playlist or daily blitz of three songs.
I should be able to access it from the homepage.
And when I get in, there are three handpicked songs for me.
I know why they were picked.
I'm able to save that playlist, share with a friend, or play the music.
And the goal of this is to build this in under 10 minutes, use all the context you have,
make sure it's beautiful and matches the design system, and make sure that I can test retention.
Okay, so I have this.
I'm just going to go backslash goal here, because like I said, running this command helps make sure this
on I'm going to run the other skill chain that I was talking about. So we have this skill chain.
So I'm going to run this. Again, this, I'm running it on medium effort and I'm running it on
auto. I would never normally do this. I would have it on high effort or ultra high. I might even,
and not for this episode, but I might even have the workflow feature in now where I have subagents
going and really trying to optimize this design by going and vetting other things. And we're
not going to talk about that now, I don't think. And I would definitely have permissions on.
I would want to review if it's building the right thing.
I would want to review some of this for this high stakes work.
I love autonomy, but there are levels and places where you want autonomy to start.
So while this is building, you want to talk about context?
Yeah, let's do it.
You're love, dude.
This is what this whole episode should be.
Let's go.
No, I just have a big, I think this is such a key part of the whole puzzle.
So, yeah, let's go into it.
It is.
This is that foundational layer that powers the agents to make you truly AI-native.
and therefore your org.
So before, Greg, could you tell me what LCA's SOP is for getting back to clients?
No, I cannot.
No.
Could you walk into, let's take you back, stumble upon and know what their strategy was for 2014,
when were we there, 2013, 14, 50, what their strategy was or their definitions of success were for 2014?
No, I can't.
Even though I was in those board meetings.
Exactly.
And could you tell me who just got hired at LCA two weeks ago?
I could.
No, I can't.
No.
So even I struggle with some of these things, right?
Because there's so much going on and everyone's doing this and then multiply that when you're at a bigger company by a number of teams and people.
You're essentially blind to the organization.
And I think, you know, big reveal the context layer.
the context layer like literally allows you to see everything and not everything in a
the eyes open the eyes open I'm not sure we're storytellers here at LCS as you know um but the uh
the true magic is of course you can add permissions you can make sure what's gated you can make
sure that people see the right things at the right times but what's cool is you're essentially
giving agents 2020 vision on your company and so when you have these questions when you want to
know these things when you're building stuff that requires this type of intel, you have it. You don't
have to wonder, you don't have to send 14 messages or wait days for the answer. You have it. And that's
the magic of this context letter. So I'm going to zoom out and just walk through it at a high level.
High level, let me take you through it. There's a capture stage, a curation stage, storing in your
brain or this context layer, using it to execute, and then having customers experience it and that all
flowing back into itself. So let's talk about capture. You have a bunch of stuff going on in your
company from a bunch of different tools, places, we have Slack messages, we have meeting recordings,
we have emails, we have boards and linear, we have on and on and on it goes. All of this information
contains context and a lot of it is actually really helpful in producing what you need to produce
for customers. So I have a routine that runs to collect this and bring it into almost like an inbox
for my brain. So every hour takes it in, maybe every two, takes it in and leaves it there.
It brings all this stuff in. And you can give rules, you can say where it pulls from and what
folders to look at. Very easy. And you can just go and build this if you haven't already in
Claude. You can jump in and create a routine right here in the routines tab. And you can set it up.
It's a cron job. It essentially just runs regular. It's like co-work scheduled tasks,
but on steroids. So you can run these and work with Claude and create it.
it'll do it or work with codex it'll do it so you bring all this stuff in you don't want everything in
your brain right you don't want all of the information from everywhere sitting in every folder
like piling up piling up piling up you want to curate it to a degree so before you file it
you have like a cure almost like a librarian okay cool what actually needs to be in here what do we
want in here so reads it cleans it up files it decides what's to ignore and then some of those things
might be triggers like the proposal I spoke to you about. What do we act on? So it detects some
language, acts on it. So it's a curation step. And then you store it in this brain or this company
readable, agent readable context layer, this memory layer, this brain that again, like I mentioned,
there's some other companies solving this major enterprise level, other levels like a glean, for example,
notion AI. They're like search plus context plus an agent layer, chat layer on top.
If you want to get locked into that provider, a little bit of a black box on how it all works,
but sometimes really great for your use case. Awesome.
We like to do some of the things ourselves, and this to us has worked really well.
So the brain here is, like I said, it's just a series of folders with a bunch of different
files in those folders, organized in a way that agents can search and retrieve,
and then write back to and improve over time.
That's in your brain.
You have agents.
people managing those agents pulling from that to execute and do the work. So they leverage the
context. So I think what I covered, you know, you want to bring in the context, you want to file
the context, you want to make the context legible, and then you want to leverage the context.
You can direct the agents and set goals for them. You can ideate in prototype, which is what
we're actually doing. Right now, it's cooking in clod. You can create these artifacts. You can run
skills and tasks. You can review this work, ship it. And then if I zoom out, all of that flows back
into the work, into the system itself.
All of those little things, and I'll get into traces in a moment or exhaust, as some people
like to call it.
From that execution, you ship it out.
People get to experience it.
The context actually becomes value.
And that's what you're trying to unlock as an AI native org, is going from that system,
using it to work at incredible speeds, and then you're getting signal, you're delivering
value, and you're getting signal back from customers.
So I'll talk about a labs page in a second on how you can,
ship some of this stuff out, it can realize the value. And again, all of that signal from the market
goes back into the system and then gets curated and then back into the brain. One little note I'll
add before, you know, I want to hear what you have to say or ask about this is a lot of the work
that gets done or produced, let's say that proposal or let's say this prototype, there are a lot of
decisions made along the way, which is tough in big orgs or even in small orgs,
keep track of of why did we make that decision. There's a lot of work that happens along the way,
a lot of documents, explorations, et cetera, that are actually really valuable. So that's like
cutting room floor stuff. Those are the traces. That's some people call the exhaust. That's really
important to come back in and then make new artifacts based on that. Maybe there's a learning or a lesson
in how to get to a decision like this or how to create something. And your brain can act on all
of these traces to create this and store it instead of leave it in this graveyard of files
that no one ever looks at again. So another really cool thing about this system.
So what you don't want to have happen is you're bringing in the wrong context. So you basically
don't want to have output that agents are doing and it flowing back into the capture because
you know, you want to make sure that the human has basically said like this is good, this is bad,
edit this, right? So is what you're saying, you know, the experience is what is the human layer
that basically allows the right type of context to flow back into the capture section and the brain section?
It's great call out. So a couple things. One is here. The humans still manage the agents, right? So you
still have to have some human in the loop and some judgment on what is good and what is it.
And when you do, whenever you're chatting, whenever you're managing that agent, you will be
telling it stuff and it will be remembering it and writing it back, updating the skills,
making sure it knows what's good and what's not, updating the memory and maybe even
piling it or packaging up into lessons. So that's one piece here on the leveraging the context.
And this is more from your customers and from the market. So you're going to see stuff on how
they're reacting. Are they buying more because of the new feature that you just dropped? Are they
churning faster because of your new landing page? All that stuff. And that signal is what will
flow back into your tools and then therefore fall back into your brain and then update accordingly.
Makes sense. Let's check in on Claude. Okay, it's built. So what I didn't cover briefly is the
labs page. I showed you this, but this was part of a labs page. We should see, ah, there it is,
the Daily Blitz. So we spoke about this.
This is what we before this didn't exist.
It's here now, which is awesome.
But before we had this live event thing that I showed you,
let's check out the Daily Blitz and see how it turned out.
All right, slow burn.
Sounds funky, man.
Let's dive in.
So this is actually pretty nice.
This is like pretty clean card.
It's right on the homepage like I asked.
And we can click in.
Now you have this playlist.
Why we built this for you.
Great.
It tells me why.
One you love with two.
fresh picks. Love that on a little playlist. And I can play this Blitz very loud in my
headphones. You probably didn't hear it. But I actually have the music playing live right now,
which is super cool. And I can also share it, which is awesome. Oh, I've got some friends there
and I can share it. So just for context, the reason why LCA is building these things is,
you know, you have two, there's two parts of the business, right? There's the how to make AI
org stuff, which is what kind of like what you covered, which is like the skills and just helping
companies figure this out. But the other part of the business is designing the next iterations
of apps, websites that are AI native. Right. So a big part of your proposal process is,
I mean, there's a million design firms out there, right? So you want to stand out. And a way that
you're standing out is by sharing these prototypes with stakeholders at potential clients.
And you're kind of just showing, you're using, basically what you're doing is you're using
all the amazing contacts from the team and all the years of, you know, six years of work of
working with the world's largest companies and you're kind of like putting it in there.
And that's helping you kind of inspire what these prototypes look like.
Is that correct?
Totally right.
And the new unlock here is how fast you can get feedback from some of the stuff you're producing,
which is actually, as you know, in the game of product, the whole game, right?
Is you want to produce things and check them out and see how they feel.
As much as you want to write a however many page PRD and slowly build it and get it out there over weeks or months,
if you can build a prototype in under 10 minutes that looks like this, allows people to feel it,
get real reactions, that's like the game.
Well, so my question is an obvious one, which is, it's like, oh, someone listening to this
is like, okay, great, Theo, you have all this amazing context because you have like a team
of 55 people or whatever of some of the smartest people in AI and product.
I don't have that context.
So for people who, you know, don't have that context, but who want good, you know, good outputs,
be it product, be it.
whatever, how do they bootstrap context?
The world is a large and lovely place, my friend.
So we are not the only people who have produced beautiful work.
I think for net new stuff, we're among the best in the world of thinking about AI
flows, conversational U.X, how to design for trust, especially with agents.
Not a lot of people have done that.
If you're looking back on this, this is go to Mobin.
Mobbin has an MCP now.
Mobbin is a library of a bunch of beautiful apps,
their flows and all of the different permutations.
Get Spotify's design system or another one that's similar,
create a skill around it,
plug into a Mobbin MCP,
and all of a sudden,
you can create this in minutes as well.
So this isn't only LCA stuff.
Maybe the idea, okay, cool, retention.
We had something called the Daily Five back in an early startup.
And maybe these ideas are easier to come by for us
or faster to come by from us.
and maybe our agents are more plugged into that.
But in terms of producing something like this,
people can do it just by using the right tools
and creating the right skills
and then slowly loading in the right context over time.
Right. So I think the takeaway there is
once you figure out what your output is,
you want to see which MCP exists for that output
and then see how you can kind of scrape some of these ideas
and things that are working or trending and stuff like that,
such that the, you know, the output is good.
Exactly.
So those are the tools piece.
Yeah.
And you give them the skills piece as well.
So create a skill around the Spotify brand or whatever company brand or new brand.
Maybe there's some great, there are a ton of great UI skills out there as well.
You give it a clear goal.
And then the context you have, well, maybe you're light on that if you're going from
scratch, but find ways to provide context on why this would be a great product or what would
make it a great idea and then feed it those MD files or kind of give it that access.
This is something that I wanted to do with you.
I know we're coming up on time, but maybe if we can, let's do it.
So on the labs page, what we didn't show is this test, right?
This is just the labs experiment is part one.
The test is part two.
You can flash your phone now, Greg, and do this if you're,
want, or I can just copy this URL and send it to you. But I'm going to show you what this test
looks like, and I'm going to slack you the URL if you're cool with that. And what we're going to
do, I'm going to complete this test. So right now, this is part of the skill chain that I was talking
about earlier. So we have a skill chain firing for this that essentially looks like these five skills
right away. There's a hypothesis we're trying to test. You know, we cruise, we blitz through it in
Claude Code. Normally, like I said, I would go through these. And the building.
prototype skill, then a usability test skill, which we're going to show right now, a feedback synthesis
skill, and then a V2 skill. So this was cool. Imagine getting feedback right away and building it on the
spot. That's even cooler. And so that's what these skills allow us to do. So if you have it open
on your, excuse me, on your screen right now, you can start it. And this is essentially what you're
going to go to. There's a little bit of a usability test. This is like what a researcher might do
with someone. And it asks you a few questions. How often you listen to Spotify? How do you find
your music? I replay what I know. And now I can open this daily bliss and it tells me like high level
what to do. I go through the workflow. It asks me questions along the way. Oh, you know, how much did
you want to listen to these after looking at the songs? A lot more. I love them. Go through it,
et cetera, et cetera.
And then I'm just going to kind of quickly,
how would you like very likely,
except I wish it had more,
more options or something like that.
How valuable.
Let's just give it a five.
Actually, let's give it a seven.
I need new music always.
How easy is it to open?
Let's just keep going.
Yes, I did.
great recommendations.
Can you say more?
No, I can't.
Okay.
So not sure if you were able to fill it out also, but that was the prototype.
I just filled in essentially a research report.
You can see the signal tab.
Right now, there's zero out of 10.
Oh, one completed.
That was me.
I just completed it.
In theory, you could send this link to five people, 15 people, 40 people, whatever
you want. Maybe you have a community on Discord or Slack that you want early testers. You send
this out, people complete it. And then all you have to do is now with one answer, we're probably
not going to get a great synthesis. All you have to do is click this. This is another skill. And it'll
synthesize the results. And imagine when there's 50 results or 100. Oh, actually you do. Here's
some lessons. It generates some lessons. Wow.
expectation, discovery, validation.
And right there, I could click plan V2 and then execute it.
And I could have a V2 done in the same session.
Wow.
And then I think, you know, I've seen some people talking about like autonomous product
building and stuff like that.
Like that's where this comes in, right?
So on this on the Startup Ideas podcast, I talk a lot about building companies via the ACP framework,
audience community product.
And in an AI world where this exists, you know,
your product, just like, you have this deep connection between the community and the product.
And you're just able to create a product that has a higher probability of success when you have
something like this, right? Otherwise, you're just kind of flying blind.
Totally. And this, like, the fidelity of the insights that you get, again, that perfect 2020 vision
because of the context is awesome. So you can go to results. And eventually you can,
can see everyone here. This is a little custom thing that we built, but again, did it all with
Claude. Wasn't that challenge. It's not like, you know, it was all elite engineers doing this.
We were able to do it. And then you can have a report generated. And when 50 people, 20 people,
10 people have kind of gone in and tested, you've got that. So I think a really cool opportunity.
You can see the impact on speed. There's a little grid here. We don't have to talk about them all.
But a proposal might have taken up to three days and now it takes minutes. You can saw that clickable
prototype, again, not a prototype in Figma, not a design prototype. A functional prototype
could take one to two weeks to figure out what to build, do it, get it out in people's hands,
took minutes, not only to get the prototype done, but also collect feedback and then potentially
synthesize into the second version. So a lot of cool stuff. If we have five minutes, Greg,
do you want to jam startup ideas or are we at a time? Let's give a few startup ideas.
and yeah, I'm curious what you got.
Okay, I want your feedback here.
My take is, based on what we just showed you,
and based on what we just talked about,
this AI-native system of people, agents, and context
that unlock speed for companies that gets them signal
in real time allows them to build better things and create a mode.
This is a framework that we love, that we created, that we use.
You can now go deploy this,
if you want in what I think is the hottest, best market right now for startup ideas if you're
into services. And eventually, you could create products. So TBD, if it's a 30-day sprint or an AI
acceleration team, you're very incredible with offers. But the game here is to niche down,
which you always talk about. And the three vectors are industry function and company size.
So industry could be pick your niche, commercial real estate, dentistry, whatever it is.
Pickett, restaurants are a very hot, very, very hot niche right now because they are especially
fragmented and can really use this. Now, you can't go too small, they won't have the budget,
but as you go up, function, who do you want to support in that industry, which team, and
then company size, and then get incredibly good at understanding those workflows. You might
already have an unfair advantage in one of these and producing the right service offering to help
bring the system to those companies. Does that try? I mean, yeah, this is like no-brainer.
This is like, it's stupid how good it is. You know what I mean?
It's like, yeah. If you're like, hey, what can Le Chega do? We're going to spin up five new
companies. It would literally be this times five with different industries. Like, that's literally
I mean, yeah, I think like LCA in theory like would do this. But because like LCA focus
This is on Fortune 2000.
There's just so many other markets that people can go after.
Yeah.
And a way to prioritize it, you had a similar to upgrade in your newsletter, which I loved.
I changed it just slightly to go from niche to general and then low frequency, high frequency.
So if you can find niche workflows, so force very specific niche industry, function, company size,
that are high frequency
and you can create those workflows
and show people those
on a sales call in a brief
in a proposal and content
keep doing that over and over
you will have a layup ahead of you.
And then you can go to general,
but still very important
because once they get the niche stuff,
they're going to want the stuff
that they do all the time
that's a little less niche,
and then you can go into the high value niche
but low frequency
but might have higher ROI.
Love it.
cool man
and that's the episode right
we could cook for days my friend but that's the episode for now
yeah I think
we can go so much deeper into so many
parts of this
but in under an hour
this masterclass of how to become
AI native showing some
examples this has been amazing
I'm putting you on the spot but I'm going to
include as my pin comment
if you're a company doing
more than $10 million a year in revenue
and you're looking for
a free consultation from
Theo or team.
You can go and
grab it.
Maybe you can give away like 10 or 15.
Absolutely. Maybe not 15, but we'll give away a few
for sure. Okay, we'll give away 10, 10, 15 minute consultations.
If your company doing 10 million dollars a year
revenue go and click the link
Theo is a criminally
underfollowed
account on
on social on X so I'll include where to find him
on the internet too
Theo is there one thing you want to leave people with
for this episode
I think like all this stuff about AI
native and AI everything
can be overwhelming and can
sound like a lot and it feels like you have to be
a technical guru and genius to
just get started and just kind of make dense in this progress. But really to become an AI
native org, think through the lens of managing agents and what those agents need to succeed.
And you will be well on your way to being ahead of most companies in the world. So I think just
get started. Don't be scared. Scrape your knee and get stuff done. And if this has been interesting,
just let me know, you know, because I'd love to have Theo back on the podcast again, but I want to
create stuff that is valuable for you. So please let me know.
know in the comments section like this like this episode if you got an ounce of value out of it
and I'll see you in there I read every single comment I respond to a lot of them and uh Theo I hope
well I'll see you I'll see you soon but I hope people like this episode and uh you come back on
again thank you so much you would love a man thank you cheers
