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- [00:00]
A
How do you turn a group of AI agents into a company that actually runs itself? You know, with org charts, roles, goals, budgets, and agents working around the clock 24 7. There's this project called Paperclip. Maybe you've seen it because it just blew up. It got 30,000 GitHub stars in the last three weeks. And it's an open source project that's building the orchestration layer for exactly that, hiring a team of AI agents. So I sat down with Dota, he's the creator, and it's one of the first times he's publicly talked about how to use his product. We broke down exactly how to use Paperclip in practice and what a zero human company could actually look like using Paperclip. Enjoy the episode. Dota is here. Well, his AI avatar is here. And we're going to be going through Paperclip, the viral, you know, what are you calling it?
- [01:03]
B
Yeah. So it's a agent orchestrator for zero human companies. So it's a tool that you can use to put in your ideas and manage a company of agents.
- [01:15]
A
Okay. And by the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of this?
- [01:19]
B
Yeah. So by the end of this episode, you will be able to know how to get Paperclip up and running and use it to manage a team of AI agents to help you with your business.
- [01:30]
A
Okay. And you're not going to hold back from people, right? You're going to, you're going to tell. You're going to give us the unfiltered how to get started, how to get the most out of it, and maybe where the future of this product is going, right?
- [01:41]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. I'll give you my best tips. You know, I think there's a lot of tricky things when it comes to using AI agents. And we'll talk about it. We'll talk about ways to keep them moving, we'll talk about ways to get quality work. I'll give you all my best details.
- [01:55]
A
And just, just. I have to ask, like, why are you an avatar and why are you not showing your face?
- [02:02]
B
Oh, yeah. So before I worked on Paperclip, I was working in NFTs, and the Dota Persona has just been my online Persona ever since. Okay. You know, Naval always says the best outcome is to be famous, but nobody knows you.
- [02:25]
A
I understand. And listen, you got good hair, so, you know, I'm not judging. All right, let's get into it.
- [02:32]
B
All right. Yeah. So let me talk about Paperclip. So Paperclip here, I can show you this Dashboard. This would be the dashboard that I use to manage Paperclip itself, which is pretty involved. So let's take a step back. So the idea with Paperclip is it is a tool for. The tagline is zero human companies. Now, I think that is maybe a bit aspirational. I'm sure you guys have seen tools like Polsia where you, you, you give it your credit card, it creates business ideas for you. And Paperclip is designed to be. Have a little bit more control right now because it's designed for work that you're really accountable for doing. The idea behind Paperclip is that you're really managing your business goals. So it's not, you know, on one end you might have something like Pulse that's totally automatic. On the other hand, you might have like an AI coding tool where there's a bunch of tabs open and you're managing pull requests. With Paperclip, your idea is you're going to manage business goals. You define your goals, you hire a team and then you approve what they're doing and they go and they work on it. So, um, an interesting thing about Paperclip is that it's bring your own bot, Right. So you're already starting to see the labs come up with project management tools. So you have OpenAI, you have anthropic with OpenAI, they have symphony with Anthropic. Of course, they're releasing new project management tools every day. With, with Paperclip, you're able to bring your own bot if you use Cursor Cloud, if you use Open Claw, if you use Claude cli. Like, I would say that all of the programmers that I know or all the, like, entrepreneurs that I know are using lots of different models because they all have such a different personality. And that's one of the key things about Paperclip is that you can bring your own agent into the system. So, yeah, Greg, one of the things I thought we could do is we could go to your idea browser.
- [04:28]
A
Yep.
- [04:29]
B
And we could look here and we could just try to decide something from the idea browser that we could try to use as a case study. So I don't know what's. What's one of these that you think might be a good, a good option
- [04:44]
A
if you. I mean, there's a few really interesting ones. Like, I like the. You tell me, I'll give you two and you pick. So scroll up.
- [04:53]
B
Yep.
- [04:55]
A
So if you go down, there is a finance, finance app that builds money habits in three minutes a day.
- [05:02]
B
Okay.
- [05:03]
A
That's One option and then the other option if you scroll down.
- [05:06]
B
Yep.
- [05:08]
A
The flight compensation recovery agent for frequent flyers. Both of those I think are great ideas.
- [05:16]
B
Okay, nice. Yeah, let's try, let's try a finance app that builds money habits. So one of the things I noticed actually when I was testing this out, if you just right click, you can copy like pretty much a good description from this. More than, more than this. So here we can come in here. Like what do we want to name our app? We'll name it Moolah. Moolah. Okay, great. And what is this company trying to achieve? Right. So this text box I suppose is a little small, but we'll just paste it in and we'll come back and we'll look at this in a second. After you write down what you want your company to do, you create your first agent. So Paperclip right now best works when it's on your local machine and especially if you already have something like Claude code or Codex installed. I think these tools are really important for really any agent driven entrepreneur. I'm guessing pretty much everyone in your audience has at least like cloud code or codecs installed. Right. We recommend that you use one of these two for your CEO, which would be your first agent. But we do support other agent types. Right. You can use open code, which means you could use really any model that you have on Open router. So you've probably seen Open Router, they have like, what is it? Leaderboard that kind of shows the most popular. Yeah, the rankings, they have the AI model rankings. So you can use any of these models with Paperclip. I think you're going to get the best results with Paperclip if you use a frontier model for your CEO. But then maybe for other, you know, tasks you can get away with a cheaper model. A hot tip is open router actually often has free models. Um, so there's been this Hunter Alpha model was free for a couple of weeks. The step Flash free. So if you have work that can be accomplished by a free model. Right. Which would be sort of, you know, not all work can you can use it and get free tokens. Also the PI coding agent, whatever. So it basically depends on some of these existing agents to, to operate. This one's actually going to run on my local machine. So we'll just go next.
- [07:21]
A
And do you recommend doing local or how should people think about this?
- [07:28]
B
Yeah, so right now Paperclip mostly works when you run it locally. We're working on doing a cloud deployment. So either you can self host it yourself because it is open source. Or eventually we'll provide a hosted solution for people that want to do that. But I think local is really how most people are doing a lot. Everything with Paperclip right now.
- [07:50]
A
Yeah. Cool.
- [07:51]
B
So the first thing we want to do is give our agent something to do. Hire your first engineer and create a hiring plan. So you are the CEO. You set the direction for the company, hire a founding engineer, write a hiring plan, break the roadmap into concrete tasks and start delegating work. So you can edit this if you want. You know, maybe your business doesn't need an engineer. Maybe you're like doing marketing, sales. You can sort of adjust this depending on what you want. But, you know, having a founding engineer is helpful because almost every sort of online business needs to do a bit of coding. So we'll click next year. Okay, we've got our company, our plan, and it kicks off. So what you have here is along the sidebar, we've got different companies. Paperclip is made to run as many companies as you want to. So I'm running Paperclip itself in here. I'm running forgotten runes from here. I've got a couple other companies that I'm like, you know, different apps that I'm working on. And here we've got our new entry for the Moolah company. You can see right here, we've got this dashboard. Part of the thing with Paperclip is that it will track the monthly spend and it tracks all of the work your agents do. I mean, I built Paperclip because I was using cloud code to build my companies and I would have 20 or 30 cloud code windows open all at once, once. And I couldn't remember what any of them were working on. I would set them to run over the weekend and I come back and I had no idea what anyone did. I couldn't remember what they were supposed to do. And they had spent all my money on all their tokens. My budget was busted and I didn't know what was actually accomplished. And so Paperclip is designed to solve those problems. It actually tracks your monthly spend that you have in tokens. Everything that happens is done through issues. So right now we have this first project here and it hires our first engineer. You know, these things sort of take a while. Here we go. We can see we've already got our founding, our hiring plan installed. So immediate hire, founding engineer, you know, a roadmap, breakdown, etc. Etc. You know what it actually is for. This call doesn't really matter. But you could look in here, you could edit it, give it feedback, give it comments. So what happens in Paperclip is your agents have tasks that get created and then they work on them. I mean, that's, it's as simple as that. Right. And Paperclip sort of orchestrates this idea that each agent, each task can only be handled by one agent at a time. So you're not going to get this kind of conflict of agents stepping on top of each other. Okay, look here, we've got something in our inbox. Okay? Hire agent, our first engineer. There's a request from our CEO to hire an engineer. Now, as you get more comfortable with Paperclip and how your agents are acting, you can turn this off and let your agents hire agents automatically. But for sort of these like defaults, we've said, you know, a lot of people are getting started their first time, we want to approve this manually. So we just approved that our CEO can hire his first engineer.
- [11:12]
A
So is that sort of the big mindset shift with Paperclip? Instead of, you know, thinking of jobs to be done, you think of hiring agents?
- [11:24]
B
Yeah, I think one of the things, instead of thinking about like the details, the goal of Paperclip is that you're thinking at a higher level. Like you think of yourself as like the board or. And you should be talking to the CEO and saying, here are high level goals, here's the MRR that we want to reach. Here's like what we want to achieve. Now I'm asking you to make a plan and institute what needs to happen within the company. So you can see here, we've hired this engineer and now we've got like five live tasks and actually happening here. So let's look in a bit more deep, deeply and see what's going on. So if we click on the issues, you can see we've got more issues. Set up the scaffolding, continuous integration, do progress tracking the user auth and onboarding. Build a core daily loop. Right. So the agent right now is working on these things. The engineer is. Now I can see right now that the engineer is actually just working on one of these. So I might go in here and I can up the concurrency. So whatever. There's advanced settings in here where you could say, you know, run four engineers at once and it's a bit in the weeds.
- [12:37]
A
But so wait, going back to that because, you know, I know it's the weeds, but the configuration. Yeah, like should the, should we spend any time in here?
- [12:48]
B
Sure.
- [12:49]
A
How should we be Thinking about this.
- [12:51]
B
Yeah. So one of the key things that you want to be able to do with your agents is you need to configure them with a bit of Persona. So the paperclip right now gives you a default Persona for your CEO. So if you look here, it says, you know, you are the CEO. Here's how we expect you to use memory. We use a memory system by default that just stores your memory in files. That was designed, it's using like the para memory system, which is like, I think Diego Fortes invention that this skills from Nat Elias and he runs the Felix bot. So it gives your, your CEO a default memory. Now, agent memory is a really involved topic. There are a lot of different choices, which I'm happy to talk about. But this gives you a simple default and then you give you some safety considerations. Right. Don't exfiltrate my secrets. Here are some other things that I want you to look at. One of the key things that you want to look at is the heartbeat. And here's the CEO's heartbeat checklist. So when you think about AI agents, here's a tip about using AI agents with paperclip or anything. Have you ever seen the movie Memento? It's like, of course. Yeah, yeah. So if for people haven't Mento the momentum man, he wakes up every morning and he is like really capable, but he can't remember where he's at or where he's doing and he has to leave himself a little notes. Right. Your AI agents are Memento man. They wake up, they know how to fight, they know how to drive, they know how to like just take care of themselves and spend money. But they don't know who they are. They don't know where they are, they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. And so what you need to do is actually write down, you know, give them little Polaroids or write tattoos on their arm. On what who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And so the heartbeat basically means like when you wake up as an agent, what are you supposed to do? And this gives you these instructions. So fetch agents me confirm who you are, learn who you are, read today's plan, look for your assignments, check out the work, and then break it down into tasks and extract your memory and then you're done. Right. So these are your responsibilities. I would say that, you know, Paperclip has been out about three weeks and we are already improving on this on a daily basis. You know, one of the key things that you always have to do with your agents is you really want to set up a way to kind of evaluate the quality of the prompts that you're giving them. And this is really like a new field that a lot of people haven't. It hasn't been figured out yet. We'll be building more tools in Paperclip for helping you do that. Um, but really how a lot of people just do it practically is when it does something you don't like, you come in here and you say rule, like, like, make sure you remember to set, you know, like, if. If it's. If it's forgetting to set like a win condition. Like, make sure you set, like, success condition for every task and ask the developer to have QA review it. Right? Like, I might. I might be using this. And I realize he never defines what success looks like and he never asks QA to review it. And I'll literally just like add that line in here and then save it. And then, you know, typically you'll. You'll get a bit better results. Which, by the way, I think is something that we should have our CEO do. So I'm going to ask him to hire a QA person to help review the work. So that's another thing. Like, so this is another way that you use Paperclip is whenever you have an idea for something, just ask. The CEO knows how to use Paperclip very, very well. And if you're having trouble, if you want to set up a new project, you want to set up, you improve your organization, you want to make a plan, you don't. You. You need advice, you just ask your CEO to do it. So I'll create this, this issue. Let him work on that. Another key way that you might want to configure your agent would be with skills. So, you know, if you've tried to use, you know, Open Claw, for example. Okay, so let me talk about Open Claw, for example, for a minute. Open Claw is insanely powerful, right? It's such a beautiful piece of software, just taking the Internet by storm. It's really the first time that, you know, if ChatGPT was the first time people realized that AI could talk. Open Claw was the first time people realized AI could act like that. You could actually have AI act on your behalf. I would say that, like Paperclip is, is aiming to be the third moment where you realize AI can do real work that you're accountable for. But that's the future. Like with openclaw, one of the things that's amazing about it is that it can just do so much for you automatically. But the problem that people run into is like, if you use OpenClaw for two or three or four weeks, you start to realize that it kind of like falls apart. You don't really know what it's doing. You don't really know what it can do. It breaks and you don't know how to fix it. And so Paperclip, kind of Paperclip can use OpenClaw as an agent, but Paperclip is designed to give you a bit more accountability into what everyone's doing. You can break your agents up into different Personas and you can also give them different skills. The best way to find skills would be skills sh. Maybe not the best way, but it's one of the most popular. Have you used this before?
- [18:49]
A
Yeah. My question here is how do you know you're not installing skills that are, you know, have bad stuff in it?
- [18:58]
B
It's a problem. Yeah, it's. It's a, it's a real problem and it's something you have to be careful with. I don't think anyone solved that. One of the things that skills sh has is they do have some degree of security audits.
- [19:16]
A
Yep.
- [19:17]
B
So they have these, these badges. So I think that that's, that's as best as you can do probably for now.
- [19:24]
A
And I mean you can. Just because it has a lot of GitHub stars doesn't mean it's, you know, 100% secure. But it does give you directional kind of. It's a data point. Right. If it has, if the Remotion, you know, skill has 100 plus thousand stars, for example, chances are it's likely that there's value there.
- [19:49]
B
That's right. That's right. So what we can do, if we wanted to, if we did want to make a video about this. Right. We can copy this here and we can go to Paperclip. There's a couple things that you could do. You can. Your skills are organized by company. So we should be able to paste this here or if you can't remember that, you can just ask your CEO like add the remotion skill or whatever. But you know, we don't need to do that right here. We can just click add. Yeah, there we go. So we've now we've got the remotion skill installed into our company. Okay. And this actually keeps track of like you can check for updates if the skill gets updated, etc. Etc. You know, something that I might often do, like I might do is I might say, you know, hire a video editor and give them the remotion skill. And I would paste the URL. And the CEO knows, if you sign the CEO, he knows how to do this. For the sake of demo, we'll just wait because we don't need to do that this second. But I'm just telling you that's, that's, that that's how you use Paperclip is just ask the CEO to do things for you.
- [21:02]
A
So I have a question, I have a question about that specifically. So, you know, the remotion skill, you know, I've used it and I've gotten, sometimes I've gotten good results and sometimes I've gotten bad results. And the way I've gotten good results, the best possible results, is giving it the most possible context, the most possible references. And so my question is, you know, if I'm going to hire a video editor and give them the remotion skill, how do I ensure that this is the, you know, a top 1% video editor using Paperclip?
- [21:34]
B
Mm. So you, you can never get around the idea that you have to provide that context ultimately, like Paperclip is not going to, on its own, write that context for you. That said, it does have tools that can help. So when you have issues, you can have them. We can hire our QA agent in your issues. We do have documents and we're going to add features to do a better job at, like, organizing the documents, organizing the artifacts that you have within Paperclip. We'll do that. But of course, your agents are able to access pages anywhere you want. So, for example, on the Paperclip website, I have a brand guide. Yeah, the brand identity. So when we're asking this question, which is like, how do I make sure that my agent makes a video that's good, One piece of that is like, do you have a brand guide yet? And you can ask your agent to do this. Right. So I would say for kind of Moolah, we haven't necessarily gotten there yet. Right. Our agents are still kind of working. But eventually what you would do is you would create an issue, create me a brand guide, and it would give you the URL and you would look at it. Then the other part would be, as I might say, well, why don't we do this? Right? Let's say, let's plan 60 second remotion video about Moolah showing the key pitch that we could share on Twitter, and we'll sign this to the CEO for now, because we don't have a cmo. But maybe we should, maybe it should be in another project. But whatever, we'll. We'll get there. So I would say make a plan for this. Don't make it yet, but we need a video demoing the product and showing the pitch. It needs to be animated. Needs to be animated. And pretty agents don't really like care about typos, so you don't have to care that much about it. So whatever, we'll let that, we'll let that run and we'll come back a bit later. One of the things you'll notice is that our monthly spend right now is $0. Even though we've been doing all this work. Part of that is because I'm using my Codex subscription or Claude code subscription. Actually, I'm not even sure which model we're using for these. Might be Claude. Oh yeah, look at this. Our agent. Yeah. So our CEO is using the Claude opus and it's. You are able to use your subscription as well as API credits if you want. And that's why you're seeing here that the costs are zero. It's a little bit of, you know, it's. You're still using your kind of inference for your subscription, but if you hooked it into something like open code or we're using like pure pay per token values, you'd get kind of real dollars here. Okay, we've hired our video editor and let's check and see if he was given the skills. Yeah, so there you go. He has the remotion best practices skills enabled. Our CEO is still working on planning the video, so we'll just let him kind of. Kind of work.
- [25:18]
A
Doesn't seem like you have the context of firing a CEO, firing an engineer, firing a QA agent. Is that correct? No.
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B
So yeah, you can, yeah, you can come in here to configuration and let's see where's. Oh, let's see here.
- [25:33]
A
I mean, I hate to be that guy, but.
- [25:35]
B
Oh, right here we got terminate. You can terminate. Yeah.
- [25:38]
A
Okay, well, don't do it.
- [25:40]
B
But you know, he has had a chance.
- [25:43]
A
Yeah, yeah, give him a shot. Give him a. Give him a 30 day cure period at least.
- [25:48]
B
Right? Yeah. So some of the other things that you can do with pay per clip is this idea of shareable companies. So let me take a step back, which would be it is not that clear how to structure your company in a way that operates really cleanly and creates good results. Right. Everybody who sort of tried to one shot a new startup with AI, you realize like it's super fun for the first half an hour and then it just kind of falls apart. There are a lot of new patterns that are coming out around like agentic design patterns. OpenAI has, has a blog post where they call it harness engineering but it's just a fancy way of saying like ways to have your agents interact with one another that will help you get better results than just trying to quote, unquote, quote one shot results. So these patterns are still being developed. I would admit that I'm even learning them as I go. A, a really basic one would just be like having a process within your organization where after the engineer creates something, he asks QA to QA it. This is especially important for like web apps where you need to like click on something and make sure that it actually works. So for example, you know in here you can like at mention the CEO or at mention a project, you know, like the onboarding project. And this was like a really, you know, you see it all the time. But it, for whatever reason my agents had a hard time coding this. Funny, I can even see here that the, that the pills have a different height and that really annoys me. So like what I might do is I would go into Paperclip and I would actually post this screenshot here and I would say the agent mentions pill is misaligned with the like project mentioned pill. Fix it. Right? And I'm going to assign this to the Claude coder for the Paperclip app and I'll say, you know, when you're done, pass it to QA to get eyes on it and verify it works here with a screenshot. Now listen, if you're going to run a zero human company, you cannot be managing your apps at that level. Right? Like I, I'm actually acting not even as a board member or CEO, I'm actually acting as like, like a design PM or something. And so there is kind of this like structure that needs to be built where you should have a design agent who's already looking at the website and detecting that stuff. And, and so that way you don't have to be kind of micromanaging your agents. And I would say we'll get to that. Right. You basically have to make sure that you're ready to spend the tokens to do that. And you also need the evals to make sure that your designer sort of shares your values in terms of how you want the app to work. I would say that like even the models today, the best, like GPT 5.4 or like Opus 4.6, some of their Taste is still not quite there. And that's why, that's where a lot of the secret sauce is. That's where you're actually going to write your own skills. And that's where. Because you're basically going to impart your own taste. Like, AI can do everything except know your values. And so you actually have to become more aware of your values and find out how to communicate them back, which
- [29:43]
A
is even in a pre AI era, the concept of a good leader, of a good manager, of a good CEO, of a good founder, is very much someone who can clearly communicate their values and taste. Right?
- [30:00]
B
That's right. That's right.
- [30:02]
A
So not much has changed, except the vehicle to doing it has changed. Instead of hiring employees, you're hiring agents. I had a question before we move on now. I had a question. If you go back to the Paperclip project, which, by the way, it's so cool that you use Paperclip to build Paperclip, I expect nothing less from you, obviously. But, you know, you were talking about, you know, it's important to hire, you know, an agent for this and an agent for that. How many agents do you have for the Paperclip project? Like talking.
- [30:37]
B
Not that many, actually. So this would be the. Org. It's actually a little hard to see here. And yeah, I would say that it is growing all the time. So we've got the CEO reporting to him would be a cmo, a UX designer and a cto. And I use different agents for different reasons. I would say that the Cursor coder and the CLAUDE coder would be my kind of workhorse. They're using the Frontier models on my subscriptions. Then I have a QA engineer who has both the CLAUDE browser installed as well as there is a skill called agent browser, which is it basically gives your agent access to a web browser in a way that is a little bit faster than using Chrome. Like, if you've used Chrome with CLAUDE code before, I'm sure you've seen it, like pops up a Chrome window and like takes over your computer and if you click on it, you mess it up. And so that's the qa. I also have. I'm starting an Evals engineer. So evals would be basically just a way saying, like, how do we start to kind of like, how do we do performance reviews on our agents and, and be able to go back and reflect on what they did? Paperclip is going to be building tools where you can look at your past issues, look at the feedback that you've given your agents and your agents will be able to learn from that. Right. If you find that you're giving the same feedback over and over, we're going to learn that and you won't have to make the same mistake twice. We've got a UX designer who kind of has context around what I like for design. I would say that's definitely a work in progress. And then we're starting to build out the marketing organization. Right. Starting to build a Blogger content strategist. You know, one of the things that we just added this week is the idea of routines. So I would say that like using Paperclip to manage Paperclip is, is, is, is not where I want it to be. For example, we're add to the code every day. We need to have someone who looks at all of the things that changed in code and crafts a discord message that we can share in the discord. In fact, we should hook it up as a bot where it like automatically posts it in the discord. Right. So maybe we can even set that up right now, as I would say, you know, create a discord message on everything that. That was merged into the main branch. Yeah. Into the like master branch of the code today. So is this, is this interesting to work through?
- [33:28]
A
Oh, a hundred percent.
- [33:29]
B
Okay, great. So we'll give this to, I don't know, the content strategist, I suppose. And this will be for the Paperclip app. App. Here we go. So here's how I would actually do this. I would say every day we put work, put work into Paperclip. We're merging pull requests from the community and adding features. We want to have a Discord channel where we post the updates in a community, like in a community formatted like form. We especially want to celebrate our community members who contribute. So make sure you call out everyone who added something that was merged. We do take the weekends off sometimes, so if there isn't anything you. You can just do nothing. Okay. Read the GitHub changes for the last last 24 hours for this. Okay. I know that took a little bit, a bit of time, but, you know, the repo is here, so you can find the Paperclip repo here. It's all open source. We've got, yeah, 500 pull requests that we're working on. We've got 30,000 stars. So there's a lot of like motion happening in this repo that we want to be able to kind of celebrate on every day. So fine. I think this is good. Good, good enough like, oh, this is what I would say is eventually we'll post it. We'll post direct to Discord. But for now just post in your issue. Okay, so I'm going to create this routine. Then from there I can do a trigger. I can say, you know, every day at 10am I add a trigger here. We can run it right now and we can see what was actually run. Now this a routine, right, Is actually almost like a template of an issue. It's an issue that you're going to like rerun over and over and every day. But you still with Paperclip get that same kind of tracking where you're able to see for this particular day when we decided to run this, what happened? How many tokens did I spend? What did the agent actually do? What, what, what did you find out? So you see, you get, instead of just like having some job that runs in the background that you tracing over every single task that Paperclip does, you can go back and look and make it better.
- [36:36]
A
Is Paperclip the most successful Paperclip Paperclip project that you know of?
- [36:44]
B
So one of the things, so I guess that, that goes into the, the issue of like, so who's using Paperclip today and what are they doing? One of the things that we're finding is like so Paperclip has been out not even three weeks. We're finding that a lot of folks that are having success with Paperclip are using it to help manage AI business a their existing businesses. Right. As much as the tagline is like run a zero human company, we're finding people who already have, you know, they already have a marketing firm, they're setting up agents. One person who's using it has a security review company and they used Paperclip to, to do their own security reviews on Paperclip itself and they're using it to help manage their clients for like automated security reviews. So you know, we're, we just had
- [37:35]
A
a,
- [37:38]
B
there is like a, like an, a dentist just posted this week that he was using Paperclip to organize all the work that he has for a foundation that he's working on and managing his family. So we're finding a lot of these kind of maybe untraditional long tail uses like even, even like blue collar. Like I have a friend who he runs like a roofing company and we're exploring using Paperclip to help their like sales agents find leads. Right. So you have this idea where you want to find an area where there maybe recently was hail and it's an area that, like where they're probably going to have insurance, maybe a nicer area where they're willing to replace their roof or spend the money to do that. Right. And so you can use Paperclip to say, well, go gather all the satellite imagery, go gather it all, go out there all the hail data, come up with these, you know, create an app where you might be able to like, give your sales agents a better chance at kind of closing the deal. Right. So. So to answer your question most directly, I would say that like Paperclip is the most. Has the most GitHub stars, but, well, Paperclip hasn't made any revenue yet. So I would say the companies that are making money that are maybe more successful, arguably.
- [38:56]
A
Yep. Cool.
- [38:58]
B
So one of the things that we are shipping, probably by the time people are watching this, is the ability to import and export companies. So for example, we have. I can show you this repo. Yeah, this will work. So for example, you've probably seen Gary Tan has his G stack, which is a set of skills that he uses where you can do office hours. Like you're talking to Gary and his engineering and his style. You. We have a tool which is not in the main branch, but it will be by the March 25th. Well, what you can actually do is install his company into your Paperclip or like a form of his company which will have all of the agents, all of the skills that you need. So there's other repos like this that you've seen. So the superpowers, repo or agency agents. Right. This, I'm sure many of you guys have seen this repo, it has 60,000 stars where there's some over a hundred agents and you can import them all into Paperclip with all the same skills. And when it does this, it's not actually like copying the skills, it's actually referencing these remote repos. So you can import any upgrades. There's a game studio, yeah, the Don Cheetos game studio, where, you know, there's a creative director, producer, technical director. There's all sorts of skills around creating assets. So ahead of time, I imported this already and I asked them to create a. A bullet Hell game in Godot inspired by Vampire Survivor. Right. And so they, they start to plan the work. And I paused it because he was using too many tokens for me right now. But if you want to make games, yeah, you can basically have this, this massive game studio running on Paperclip. Now the obvious question is like, yeah, but does it work right does this structure actually work? And I would say that like it's just completely unproven at this point. Right. Because there's never been a piece of software like Paperclip where you could go to these repos that have, you know, a hundred thousand GitHub stars and three hundred agents and it's like there's no evals for them. There's no, like, there's no runtime. There's no runtime other than Paperclip to actually put these agents into an organization and test it out. And so that's really where the future is if you, the future of like agentic programming is you download Paperclip and you create the organization that you've actually tested that actually works. It actually does create the TikTok marketing agency end to end. And then now you can share it if you want to or just use it yourself. Right?
- [41:56]
A
Yeah. Well, this is the sort of idea around, yes, I can go and create higher agents from, from scratch, or I can go and hire a proven team or Aqua hire a proven team and bring them into my Paperclip instance.
- [42:13]
B
That's right. That's right. So yeah, so that's Paperclip in a box. I mean, you know, I can answer questions that you have. I think that's, that's, that's where it is today. You can use any agent that you want. You and really just it's open source. The community has a discord server. I think that like there's still a lot of rough edges, things that we want to work out around artifacts having better onboarding. We want to have a, we'll add a CEO chat so that way you're not creating issues for every single thing. You can just chat with any agent. We're working especially on. My favorite feature that we're working on right now is called Maximizer mode. And in Maximizer mode, you basically don't really care that much about token spend. And you're saying, I want to make sure that the CEO. The CEO makes sure someone is working all the time. Like if I ask you to build the Bullet Hell game, you do whatever it takes to make sure that you have all the team that you need and that you're pressing on making it until that game is playable and you say it's completely done. So we don't have that today in Paperclip, but give us, you know, a couple of weeks and you'll be able to use the Paperclip maximizer.
- [43:27]
A
When you say give us who, who's us?
- [43:31]
B
Yeah, so us would be there's myself, Dota. I also have two co founders, Devin and Scott. And then also the community, who is just doing an incredible job at contributing just every day. We have so many pull requests, we can barely even handle them.
- [43:50]
A
And is that dev?
- [43:52]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, he was at Slack early on and at Figma early on. And then also Scott Tong, who was head of product design at Pinterest.
- [44:05]
A
Cool. So it's not just an avatar, it's. It's proven, proven founders. I know Devin from back in my days in San Francisco. I think he actually, he invested in my last company, so I do know him and he's a great guy. So it's people who've built startups before, scaled them, and it's cool to see what you all have built. You know, did you expect, I mean, I'll end it with this. Did you expect it to go this viral?
- [44:35]
B
You know, I wanted it to do well because I knew it was good and I knew it was something that I wanted, but I would say I didn't expect it to go as viral as it did. It really struck a chord with people. I think that, like, the, the big question in everyone's mind is like, will you need something like Paperclip in a year from now? Will the underlying models get good enough such that you don't need custom software? And I think that's an open question for everyone, really. Like, it's not just Paperclip that would, that would succumb to that, but I think that Paperclip is built to sort of survive this, this kind of. I don't know what you want to call it, the bitter lesson, which is that the models will always kind of outpace how humans do things. I think that, like, if we're going to find that AI takes unfortunately a lot of people's jobs, you still need a piece of software that helps manage the jobs that are left. And you still like, if, if I'm going to be able to not have 10 engineers under me, but I'm actually managing 10 AI agents or 100. You still need software that's going to help you manage the, the taste and, and, and the organization at scale. So I do think that Paperclip will have a bit of staying power because it's not fixed to one agent. It's actually operating at this higher level of just what do you want to do? And I don't know that, like, what do you want to do will ever really change? Cool.
- [46:07]
A
I'm watching. I think it's really interesting and you know when it first came out, I hit you up right away, actually. You hit me up. You're like, check this out. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy. And I'm happy you decided to come on. The pod had to beg you, but you came on, and I'm glad you did. This has been really, really interesting. I'll include links on where you can follow Dota, where you can sign up to pay per clip, play around, and thanks for coming on the Startup Ideas podcast, my friend.
- [46:40]
B
Thanks for having me. Thank you.