In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Jacob Posel joins Jeremiah, Jack, and Rishabh to talk about HQ, a cloud-based file system built on top of Claude Code and Codex that launched two days before recording.

The origin story is good. Jacob meets Corey Epstein, sees a product called Indigo that was ahead of its time but waiting on AI to catch up. They stay in touch. Corey eventually puts Jacob on an internal tool called HQ. Jacob gets hooked, starts pushing the team to build a version for multiple people, and when Ramp published their internal Glass tool, Jacob tweets that they built Ramp Glass for everyone. The demand comes in fast, so he joined the company.

The core problem HQ solves is one that Jacob kept running into across every business he consulted with. AI tools are built for solo use. Everyone's working in silos, repeating work, building their own janky version of the same thing. HQ gives teams a shared cloud workspace where skills compound. One person's breakthrough becomes everyone's baseline.

Then the conversation goes somewhere more interesting. Rishabh pushes on who actually buys this. His argument is that the buyer isn't the average CEO, it's the founder, because founders are transformers and CEOs are optimizers. The person most likely to get value from HQ is someone who's willing to stay on the treadmill as the technology keeps moving, not someone who wants a finished system handed to them.

Jacob's take on pricing is worth sitting with. A customer costs about a dollar a month to serve. The play is distribution. Get HQ into as many businesses as possible, stay close to how people interact with AI, and the monetization builds from there.

The episode closes on something most people aren't saying clearly. Getting your team AI native isn't a software problem or a gamification problem. It's a coaching problem. And right now the gap between the people doing it well and everyone else is enormous.