Andrew Pignanelli wants to enable one-person billion-dollar companies with AI chief-of-staff 'Cofounder'

Intelligence Company of New York. He's waiting in the reream waiting room. We have Andrew

Hagnanelli. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Andrew, sorry to keep you waiting. How are you? Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company, and give us the news. What's

Yeah. So, uh, my name is Andrew. Actually,

the flow. The flow. Can we get a side profile of the flow real quick?

It's really nice, right?

Oh, there we hit the gong for the flow. Hit the gong for the flow. There we go.

Nice. Nice.

Um, sorry to interrupt. They do like the hair. They definitely like the hair.

That's great. That's great.

Yeah. I mean, I Sorry, I think there's a little bit of delay here. Um, and my name is Andrew. I run General Intelligence. Today, we just announced our $8.7 million seed round, which

Send it, John, again.

Let's go.

Incredible. Uh, who led it? It was led by USB. So, you know, we're New York based company. We love New York City. We wanted someone who was right here at home and I only have to walk two blocks from the board meeting, which is really nice.

That's amazing.

Um, uh, give us the history. I mean, first time on the show, obviously. I've followed you for,

uh, probably, I don't know, a year, close to a year now. But, um, what, uh, yeah, give us kind of the origins, what you guys are working on, all that good stuff.

Yeah. So, we started working on this about a year ago with this kind of crazy idea of like what if we could get agents to run companies and

we really worked backwards from that. We like we we picked let's go with the craziest thing we can do because I bet that there's a way for us to get resources for it and if the idea is a little bit crazier, they'll give us more resources. And so, we picked that

uh me and my co-founder uh Obby and we started working on it. We started working on a demo we worked on for about two months and then in March we were like let's turn this into a company. So the initial demo was just an agent that could call some tools and um then we did a a small round in March led by compound ran the company for about 6 months before launching co-founder in September. Uh and we were able to make that launch go very very well. Um and so you know we we got viral with that. People loved it. People really liked using the product. Uh we went viral through the sweaters too. The sweaters actually helped us promote our product more than probably the product itself.

Wait, so what was co-founder and what was the sweater? Was co-founder wearing the sweater?

Uh, you know, co-founder is a plant. So Oh, I have a bunch of them right here. That's that's co-founder. And uh it's like this AI chief of staff. So it will let you hook stuff up and do automations. And uh we've built it into this very proactive like assistant feeling thing. So, you're not just really telling it what to do. It will actually prompt you instead of you having to prompt it. Um, and we wanted to figure out how do we how do we promote this? And so, uh, I went and I got these sweaters made and they're like very rainbowy like they have all the all the different colors.

The logo name on there, too. That's cool.

Yeah. Underutilized underutilized merch format.

Yes. I never see the cozy sweater. That's cool.

Very cool.

Yeah. Um, and we posted about him like we just got our first shipment of him. I just posted a photo and it goes by virus like a million plus views and I I go from having like 300 followers to a couple thousand and we were going to launch three days later and so this made it really easy for us to launch and and have co-founder do well.

Yeah. So I mean how do you think the the the business actually evolves? Do you think that uh there's a world where the you know the product is plugging into all of the enterprise tools? It seems like with even just the co-founder branding it feels like this is an early stage product or that's at least like the the the early adopter would be a small company. You're not coming into a company where it's like yeah we already have a data lake and they 5,000 employees and we need you to go around and find stuff. It's much more of a you know an early stage tool. Is is that correct or you think it'll grow? Like h how do you think um the the use case will change over the next few years as you build out the business?

Yeah, so it's definitely early stage. Um we we want people who are let's say between like three and and 50 people um on smaller companies, but we're really going from co-founder to this full stack AI business. So, our goal is to get agents to run companies, and we've decided, you know, we're not going to be able to do that by adding one piece to an assistant until it gets really far. We're actually working on a full stack AI business. Um, we realized while while building these ourselves that we had this ability to make these workflows internally where you're taking like a customer support ticket and you can directly plug that into an agent that writes some code and plug it into an agent that that reviews and QAs the feature and then ships it to prod without any people involved. And so we're sprinting towards this entire business uh with with just agents and we think we can get there by March. What uh what kind of businesses do you think are most uh the name implies you're trying to build a general intelligence. I imagine that means an AI that could run any business, but have you thought about uh specific types of businesses that are best suited to be run by an agent? Uh and and how how are you like testing the product? I understand you probably test it internally with your own team. Uh but uh yeah, when you talk about like timeline to uh an agent running an entire business by March, like what kind of business is that? What like how do you make that more concrete?

Yeah. So, uh some of the things that we test are the ability to actually do something end to end, right? So, this whole uh write a piece of code that can get shipped to prod without any people involved. Um that's something you can test, right? if it breaks broad, it it's going to, you know, be a failure there. Um, but we're working on this with a couple of businesses, smaller businesses internally, and like there there's not public yet, but the way that the business looks is very similar to ourselves. So, it's a software company uh in B2B, and it also relies a lot on how the agent market develops. So we rely on other agents by other companies like uh like a coding agent where we're going to be using looks like factory or tempo or something like that. Customer support agents by uh companies like Sierra and Decagon. Um and then uh sales market agents like like rocks.

Rocks.

We're going to be building this in a way that like leans on those agents and those are conducive to a B2B software company and that's really what we're building first.

That's very cool. Are you AGI pilled?

Very AIDS. know, we all have different definitions, right? And so my personal definition, it's in my Twitter bio. I keep it the the timeline that I think we're going to have to AGI, and it's much faster than everybody else's, but my definition is like

tomorrow. It's tomorrow.

My timeline is tomorrow.

Really?

5.2.

Um,

we'll see.

Yeah. 5.2 is my is my AGI for sure.

We're we're thinking about it like like you know, Her the movie Her.

Yeah. My personal definition is when do we get that? Um a we already have people falling in love.

Don't we already have that just with some of the population?

Yeah. I mean we're kind of close, right? Like like some of the stuff that you could do today is 90% of what you can do in that movie. And I bet within the next 12 months it'll be 100%.

Yeah. Sort of like a diffusion question because like smartphones have arrived. Uh there are Amish people that don't use smartphones, right? Like there are plenty of people that that don't. There's probably millions of people that don't use smartphones for a variety of reasons. Uh there will I I believe like for you know a hundred years there will be people that will be like I don't talk to clankers right but at the same time like we are pretty close. Uh anyway we we could talk about AGI for the next two hours but uh we have to move on. So thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations

great great to meet finally congrats on the progress. We're going to keep we should we should add like something to our ticker like what is Andrew's AGI time. get the we'll get the update daily. But uh yeah, congrats on congrats on progress.

We'll talk to you soon.

Have a good one.

Goodbye. Cheers.

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