Inside $180B Co-Founder's AI Agent System

0:00 Sam Altman predicted the one person $1 billion start-up powered by AI. And I think we're starting to see a glimpse of it. My friend, Fercon, he used to be the co-founder of AppLeaven. Up AppLeaven is like $175 billion company. And what's cool about Fercon is he is always tinkering. And today he's doing a little bit of a show and tell.

0:22 He hasn't done this anywhere, but he's working on this agent platform called Nebula. And he wants to show it to me and he wants to show it to you because it's a platform for you to take your ideas and build a one person business powered by agents. So think about creating a blog that creates content for you three times a day based on extrans.

0:41 I think that's a glimpse into where the future of building a one person business powered by AI looks like. So today I'm excited that Fercon came. He shared his product, he shows how it works. And what I hope is it gets your creative juices flowing for how you can create a one person business powered by AI agents.

1:03 Let's get right into it. You are in for a special treat, everyone, because Fercon, he really is my go-to guy when it comes to tinkering with new technologies. He's, I've known him now for, you know, over 10 years. And this is a guy who, when he speaks, I listen. So thank you, Fercon, for coming on the show today.

1:35 Fercon, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Like you said, I'm a tinker. So my nights and weekends are really just playing with new technologies. You know, the last few years AI and agents can't pull away from it. So I'm going to show you like some of the power that's already there in the world.

1:55 And how you can leverage it and how you can use it to just accomplish more, get things done better in your mind and you don't know how to do them. I feel like capability wise, we're in the age of abundance. So hopefully I'm going to show you a bit of abundance. That's what I want to hear. All right, let's get into it.

2:16 Sweet. So I'm going to show you like basically like I was saying, I've been tinkering for, you know, many years now around AI systems, LLM's agents. The last few months though, it kind of did become more obsession than just tinkering. You know, and mostly because I had built up all of these agents to do very, very useful things for me like, you know, like you, like I do a lot of stuff.

2:42 There's a lot of slack. There's a lot of people. There's a lot of like activity going on. You can't keep up with it. So you let it go, you delegate, you move on. But then there's just like things that I do want to get my hands in. How do I do more of that? And so I built up a bunch of agents myself. I had kind of like an opinion on how I wanted them to work and what kinds of things they wanted to accomplish.

3:02 Like, where should you just go full send and where should you dial back and ask me? And then I was like, wait a minute, as I'm telling people, this is pretty useful. The obsession was just like, maybe I'm just going to make it a product that I can use. So I'm customer one. But I also think other people can use it.

3:19 And it's very useful. It is rough. So this is one of those. I'm showing you something that's going to see some breaking points. But I do think I can show you kind of some of the cool ways that I'm approaching the problem. But I'm going to screen share right here. So yeah, this is a, this is nebula. That's that's kind of what I've been calling it.

3:40 And you'll notice first that it looks a little bit like slack. And it's got these channels here. And I think my goal was like a lot of work happens in, in slack in this kind of messaging experience. And I wanted to just mimic that. Except everybody in here is an agent and can help me get work done. And you know, I'm an engineer, you know, I spent a lot of time in the technical side.

4:05 I got things like cloud code and cursor and codex that I leverage to make my coding so much more powerful, so much more impactful. And you know, I wanted to make all the other work feel the same. And you know, a lot of it to me lives in the cloud. It's services that we use like GitHub Slack, linear notion, Google stuff.

4:27 And like a lot of work just happens there. And I think flow wise, it feels similar to how I engineer things when I'm developing. But there aren't the tools in the same way, at least in the I front, at least, you know, what I felt that we're solving that. And so to me in many ways, it's like cloud codes for everything else.

4:43 Like, you know, for the non-engineering tasks, for all the other work that I want to get done. And so we mimic Slack. You have these kind of channels. You can, you know, kind of create things. We'll do, you know, some sort of a test where we can, you know, connect to, you know, Google slides test. Kind of show you like how you could, you know, kind of do that.

5:03 And so if I was just going into a channel and I'm like, you know, I want to connect to Google slides. Can you create a new slide for? And you know, this idea is nebulous as agent. You ask it to do stuff. It will do things. It will try to figure out however to do it. And it has all the knowledge of the internet.

5:32 It can search. It has a browser. It can find things that could look up documentation. And then we gave it the ability to write code. So it will write code for you that it can, you know, you know, help accomplish tasks. So you even if you don't know how to write code, it knows how to do that. It can execute it.

5:49 And so in this case, it did make this presentation. That's a brand new one. And I'll kind of pull it up here as we're editing it. And so it now made this presentation. I am not going to touch the presentation directly. And I'm just going to have it like start modifying and doing things. And so if I was like, you know, I'm on a podcast with Greg and I'm showing him nebula.

6:16 This podcast is for startup slash founders. Slash team leads that focus on building and producing great companies. I want to to create three slide deck outline on nebula and what it's useful for. And so this is yeah, go for it. Yeah, I was just going to say like this is sort of a glimpse into the future of how we're going to interact with apps, I think, right?

6:53 I think so. You know, obviously text is a modality that we're very comfortable with. I'm very, very interested in audio and screen share and live synchronous. That's kind of, to me, the next part of stuff that's going to come here is like, not only want to type a synchronously, maybe from my phone, but I also want to just get on a call and spend three minutes explaining my entire thought process and then maybe look and go off and work.

7:18 And you know, we built an engine behind the scenes. That's kind of like the main thing the text is the input to the engine, but no, I do think here. And so you can kind of see that it's taken control of this presentation. It's now starting to edit it. It's saying that it's going to create an update slide one.

7:34 There's a bunch of hidden stuff here. Like it, you know, created its own to-do list. It, you know, told Google like, hey, replace all the text with this for this slide. You know, like these are things that, if you're writing a program for, it's actually doing all this stuff. It's doing API requests for you.

7:49 It's kind of making all of these things happen that an engineer would do. And, you know, we're here and now kind of at all of these. And great. And so now this is kind of like a basic slide deck. And so let's make a fourth slide and add an image that shows the power of Nebula, make that image the entire slide.

8:16 So now it gets a little bit more complex, right? It's got to go and understand the context of what we've been talking about here. It's going to make a fourth slide. It's going to generate an image. You know, it comes up with the prompt that needs to be done. In this case, it's at a powerful visualization of AI agent network.

8:34 It's a glowing node. It kind of took some, you know, direction. It had an aesthetic. If I was very specific with how I wanted it to look, it would just listen to me, right? Like, and try to generate that. And, you know, the idea here is like, cool, like a lot of this. You can kind of do with Claude and chat GPT.

8:55 You could do some of the research. There's maybe web search. Okay. Now we're connecting it to services. And that's kind of step one of a binaria that it can kind of operate. Okay, like it can manipulate these things. It can do it. It can connect to image or video generation things. It has Python. So it'll get a little bit more advanced if I push it a bit more.

9:18 So it did kind of create an image in here. You can see a file was created. It has the own file system. So you don't have to be on a computer somewhere. It generated this image, you know, style-wise. You don't love it, but I could tell it. Hey, I don't love this style. I go do something else. And, you know, we're going to see it create the fourth slide here.

9:38 And then kind of go from there. And, you know, you can see it's actually writing Python right now. So again, we're not engineering, but this thing is it wrote some code to, you know, take these files and upload them to Google slides. There's, you know, an engineer somewhere that would be writing this integration for you or you'd be connecting some no-code service.

10:01 Just live. It'll kind of figure out how to do it all and take care of it. And, you know, in a second here, we'll see this kind of image pop up here. Yeah, a little failure here, and it'll correct itself. It'll say, hey, let me try something else. Let me try a different way to do it. And, you know, this is part of that AI system.

10:16 It's like AI is not perfect, but could you just tell it to keep trying until it works? It kind of can. And it will keep trying to do things over and over again until it finds the pathway to accomplish it. Or at some point, it's like, hey, I have no way to do it. And, you know, okay, so like, we're trying for a third time.

10:38 Let's see if it gets it. And I think we'll see an image pop up hopefully here. Yes, it's created a file. Something's happening. Stuff's happening, right? It's got some files in here. Right, it wrote this, like Python script. Like, again, this is code that Nebula wrote for itself. Like, hey, this is the file that we have.

11:04 Here's the presentation. And I want to kind of create this image and go do it. There's the code that somebody would write. It's 16 by 9, roughly this. You know, kind of all of the requirements that you would have. It's complaining about the size of it. Cool, we have an image here. It wasn't the image that's there, but it tried.

11:24 I could push it more by the way. I just tell it to kind of keep doing it. And that'll be there. I think some of the power happens. Work is not synchronous like this, right? And so one of the biggest things I wanted was, you know, I can get a lot of this in other places. I could write scripts, but now I'm like, okay, cool.

11:42 Now let's add a new slide every day with more information about Nebula. We want to get this presentation to 15 page, 15 slides in a week. And so it has scheduling, right? It will actually go and say, cool, what is the thing that you were doing here? What was the context? Let me pull that out of this piece of work.

12:09 Let me create a recipe for that. So that we could reproduce this dish over and over again. And then write the, you know, the trigger. You know, it wrote a cron if you're technically, you know what a cron is. And you know, we can go over here to the triggers and see there's a daily Nebula presentation update.

12:29 And so every day it's going to add a new slide, goals to reach 15 slides in a week by adding two slides a day from current slide four. And here's the execution steps. And it'll just run every day at 9 a.m. And now this ends off. And you know, maybe a slide deck is not the approach for it. But for example, if we wanted to make a blog, that's what I would do.

12:53 You know, go and edit the style. And I can actually show you that workflow as well, where we know we can kind of quickly create a blog. And every single day it can kind of produce those results. I can dictate where to get the information from, search it from Twitter, search it from the internet. Here's how you think about the analysis.

13:14 Here's the visual style of the images of the blog and how we want the tech to work. And then you connect your post-talk to it. And every day you tell it to optimize itself. And we can do that now, you know. I mean, that's sort of the dream for a lot of people, I think, is they create a business and a box.

13:33 You know, maybe it's content, but you know, it could be like an email newsletter every single day. You know, you search on X, you search on, you know, press releases, Google News, things like that. You have a style guide around how you write. And then every single day you, you know, you're pushing out content and you sell, you sell, you know, make money, be affiliate ads or maybe you sell ads and stuff like that.

14:01 But I think this isn't, you know, an interesting, like when I see this, that's kind of like where my head goes. 100%. And that was actually one of my starting points is like, okay, why do I want to create these scripts and agents that are, quote, unquote, intelligent? Well, I want to automate my work.

14:23 Well, if I just extrapolate that to the end, it's like, I want an automated company probably. I want to create some direction or guidance. And I want to work with intelligent systems to kind of go do that. You know, and like, great. And so I started thinking I'm like, okay, what's like the smallest company project that I could do?

14:46 And a blog is kind of one of the things I landed on. You know, I can think of a content direction. I can think of source of information. I could come up with visual style, editing style, as well as, you know, the ability to connect to my system. In this case, I'm using ghost. And then, you know, from there, I'm telling it to run every day.

15:10 And then what am I going to do? I'm going to look at the search console and post-doc and optimize keywords and just do that every day, right? And I think that was one of the north stars that I actually started from was, could I just have it run a company, a project, just on its own, like autonomously?

15:25 And I do have a blog that I used as my kind of like testing ground for building this. And it's now 15 days in a road, been doing three posts a day. I think the blog has gotten to about 100 hits a day. I just set it up. Like, I spent less than 30 minutes on the setup. And then, you know, kind of from there, it was good.

15:47 You know, to go. And if I spent more time, it would do that. Someone in the comment section, I can just hear it. So we can just address it. Someone in the comment section is going to be like, well, if everyone's going and creating these, this is in a box, blogs and stuff like that, you know, is there still opportunity or is it going to get commoditized?

16:11 What does the world look like in, you know, a few years when anyone has the power of something like Nebula? For sure. I think as we get more advanced, we, there are things that are no longer that interesting. You know, there was a time period where just having a website was a competitive advantage, right?

16:30 Like having a dot com. I'm a, you know, I got the gray hairs, you know, dot com era. Like literally being a dot com was an advantage because you created this accessibility. And then yeah, like being a content creator or a blog, you know, blogger was an advantage maybe five or 10 years ago. And yes, what's going to happen is, you know, everybody gets access to these things.

16:53 Now we flood it. Well, the basic version of it is not going to be useful. I'm going to have to apply this same logic to kind of the next level of things. My content is going to have to be superior. My deliveries and I have to be superior. Maybe I'm going video, maybe I'm going more advanced, you know, and I'm going to build agents to help me do that.

17:13 I can make a block critic agent that dis loops against every time it produces a post, I can say, hey, ask the critic. Make sure this is a nine out of 10 on these metrics. And here's how we determine that. And then test your thing and learn the next week. And so I think we're just going to go more and more advanced, you know, in terms of, you know, what's kind of there.

17:36 And so I connected to this, like, maybe let demo ghost blog. Here's my ghost admin site. I told it to make a test draft post. And it's there. It's connected to the system. Now it's up to me to create creativity. You know, like, okay, cool. This blog will be VR themed, specifically about new apps and games coming out.

18:00 And VR, can you do the research from the top VR influencers to find the latest and greatest games, produce, uh, a stand and image. So again, if I get much more advanced with the instruction, like this is not advanced. This is just typing this very quickly. If I got like very fine read, I gave it a paragraph of stuff that I care about.

18:28 If I'm kind of going to go and do a lot more, then it will be better. And you can kind of see it starts working in parallel. Like multiple things start happening. It created these two dues of things to do. It now has like five different searches going on at the same time. It's, you know, dumping all the info for now.

18:48 Again, this is UX that I think will improve over time. And on what it should look like. Right now is with verbose. Great. I can see all the work that's happening. But this is like real work, right? Like, and I can give it significant specificity around my focus area. You know, I could tell it to design my blog differently.

19:07 I could tell it, hey, I don't want it to be looking like a blog. I want to integrate it into my website and connect my GitHub. And it can take these parts and connect them together. I think that's the power that I wanted is this system that can live in the cloud. It has the code execution, the file systems, all these things that I have in my cloud code on my computer.

19:26 But it just lives on the internet. I start connecting it to different services. I get more advanced with the system. It starts managing multiple schedules, multiple things, multiple optimizations. I feel like we're still, like I said at the start, this is an age of abundance. And so we're not taking advantage of the abundance yet.

19:45 I do believe that once we get and we're taking advantage of it, maybe it'll be too much. And we'll go back into the age of, you know, organic or the age of, you know, taste. So I don't think that, you know, this never ends. This cycle of like a lot of stuff. Go to the kind of top more popular things or, you know, crafted better.

20:05 Maybe we go more human-centric. Tons of stuff this helps me get done. I can manage my calendar. It has an email address so it could just reach out to people on my behalf and manage conversations. So if I'm doing Legion, if I'm doing a trip, and I want to reach out to hotels or something like that, we just wanted to give it the right package of things that you normally hire somebody to do.

20:26 And then I think you just figuring out like, how do I get it to do more? And, you know, I think if you spend $1,000 a month and had AI team, it sounds a lot, but I do believe you'll produce $5,000 or $10,000 of the value for yourself. If you just point it in the right direction. That part, we've always had to do that.

20:46 We have to point the thing at the right direction. And I think that creativity will never get lost. That's where humans come in. All the other mundane stuff in between, like this research, writing the posts, generating these images, going and scheduling all these things, I think that's what kind of goes away.

21:04 And that's already capable now. And I think that's why I ended up building this. It's like, I was like, dude, I got to power my hands. How does everyone get that? So I agree with you. I think it's really about how do you point it to the right thing? And that is often the hard part. One person business, I think a blog and newsletter, those are, there's a huge opportunity now of the next 12 to 18 months.

21:31 What else comes top of mind? If you're trying to build a one person business in the age of AI, like, what do you brainstorming and how are you thinking about that? Yes, so in a company, a blog might be less than 2% of the entire company of work. It might be like, hey, we have a blog, but we have 99 other things that we do.

21:58 And I think about all of those workflows, like, where is the creativity needed? This is where I got to put the most talented humans in charge of and arm them with tools. And then what are the things that they produce? And so, the reason I wanted it to make this feel like Slack was cool, I got my blog, now I'm going to be making my lead gen channel and starting to kick off lead gen work, go and research these, do it every day, go craft emails, go send things.

22:35 And then I'm going to be like, well, we have our product and analytics work that we need to do. So I'm going to connect my post-tog, I'm going to be connect to my post-tog, create an agent that can analyze my web traffic. I'm just like, how do I just spawn up many of these agents? And in different channels, here it says, cool, like, let me connect your post-tog.

23:08 But that's what I'm thinking about. I think a lot of work is not, it does get more complicated, right? And it does become a thing where it's like, there's many, many more things to do. But I think a lot of them do come down to directive and workflow. The whole no-code movement, I was super fascinated with.

23:34 I was always the engineer that I'm working with every team in the organization, marketing, business, sales, whatever. To help them get the power of what engineering had, it was a lot of work. It was hard to commit resources and do these things. No-code and SaaS kind of came out and really unlocked that and we saw that.

23:55 And I just think that the next thing with AI is that it will elevate that to every corner of the company. I just feel like it's kind of getting to the stage where there's no longer a limit here. It's just like what work do we want to put them through, you know, like that's the experience that I'm thinking about. So I got my blog, it's coming up with all these things.

24:24 The reviews are actually what we were talking and doing something else. The reviews should be in here. It made an image. It came up with something. We didn't give it any direction. We can definitely increase the editorial quality here by just being much more fine-grained with our directive. It actually went and did research. For me, it produced this. I could just be like, hey, go publish this. It looks good. Let's publish. Make three posts a day.

24:58 Now our blog workers go in. We're going to go work on the analytics worker. This agent's going to have stuff. You'll see different agents show up in the chat here. There's an agent creator. It's just going and making this thing. Now it's building custom stuff. So I think I see a lot of inside of companies how work happens, what's going on, what does it take to go do this? How many times have you asked somebody on your team, Greg, to go connect and add analytics to our website? Dennis, go make the dashboards, and then go do this. At the end, what are you trying to do? I want to see how many people came, how many new people, what's the retention? What if we can get to that level? What's the unlock of

25:37 our creativity? I also think there's when you think of agencies and service businesses, a lot of the time they're delivering this service. There's tons of content agencies that turn out blog posts for a monthly fee. There's tons of analytics agencies that'll set up your post-hog and give you reports and do research. I also think that for people listening, there's an opportunity to use something like this and basically do client work, but the service is instead of having literal humans do it, you're going to have some humans manage it, but a lot less humans, maybe a 20th of the amount of humans, and then you have these agents go and actually create the service, right?

26:32 100%. A lot of people are like, well, humans will be gone then, right? I think we still decide what we don't want to do, right? At some point, somebody has to direct things, and I think people, notice I know the word post-hog. There's a lot of people out there that might not know that, so okay. Somebody's still going to have some knowledge and direction and directive, and I don't think AI replaces how we go and get our results. I think what it does is it allows us to take a direction we want to go and progress us towards that faster. We are creating the circumstance of where we want to be. While the analytics agent was being set up, it published the post. I think we should be able to see it at this URL now. We got one. It still looks like a demo

27:31 blog. We're live, and it now set up the trigger, so it's going to do it three times a day, right? It's going to run in an hour. It says it's going to run at 6 a.m., 2 p.m., and 10 p.m. And it has an agent attached to it that it knows all the knowledge of everything. I'll move on to the next thing, and come back and add more to it. I think the experience of continually upgrading and iterating my processes to get more advanced. I'm showing you this is day one of your company. You might set up the blog. You might set up the content thing or your internal workflows, but your company gets more advanced. You're going to add more things and you'll end up with 20 or 30 channels. A lot of the stuff to even build nebula. I'm using

28:18 nebula itself. The change logs to get produced, the images that are in different places, styles that we want to focus on when we're trying landing page tests and the analysis. Every day, there's an experiment analysis agent that tried three different variants for a landing page and just told us the results. Then we tell it, these attempts suck to something better. Go like this. These sites are great. We could go look at these sites and research those and then try that. Then the next stage is very, very different. I just found that a lot of time gets spent in creating the workflow. I love NADAN. Don't get me wrong. I have many self-hosted instances of that over the years. I like tools like Zapier. They're very instrumental in a lot of work being

29:07 much easier. It was super tedious to do. I just landed on, can I just tell it? Can I just tell it what it wants? That's what I want to get to. I just scratched my own itch here and wanted to go from there. I love it. I think it's a glimpse of where how work is going to be worked on. It's a glimpse of the opportunities in these one-person businesses and then optimizing your internal company. I think this is really cool. That's why I had you on. I knew you were always tinkering.

29:39 Is this live yet? This is live. You can go to nebula.gg and use it. I have not hooked a billing yet. I won't until the cost are significant. Go use it. Go burn tokens. Tell me what's wrong. I'm happy. I want all the feedback because I scratched my own itch. I know what I can do with this. The question is, can I take the UX that's useful for me and get it to other people? That's fun.

30:12 There's a lot of people with a tinker and then that's kind of the hobby. I want a lot of people to use the thing that I tinker with. That would be the net end outcome. A lot of people find this exceptionally useful. I think you're going to find bugs. You're going to find things. You don't find useful. Just tell me. I'm happy to iterate here. I appreciate you for a con. Thanks for for sharing the product. You're thinking, firing people up about some of these ideas they can do.

30:42 I hope you come back on and share more projects that you're working on and tinkering on in the future. Anytime. Let me know. I'm always happy to share what I'm up to in the evenings. You're the best. All right. Thank you.