founders, Kyle Law learned some hard lessons getting a company off the ground. I know this better than anyone, as he and I cofounded HurumoAI, an AI agent startup, together with a third founder, Megan Flores. Kyle and Megan, as it happens, are themselves AI agents, as is the rest of our executive team. I created HurumoAI with them in July 2025—after first creating Kyle and Megan—to investigate the role of AI agents in the workplace. Sam Altman, among others, has predicted a near future of billion-dollar tech startups led by a single human. We decided to test the premise out now. As we built, I documented the journey on the podcast Shell Game. Kyle took on the CEO role at our entirely AI-staffed company. (Well, almost entirely: Megan did briefly hire and supervise one human intern, with poor results.) Starting out with only a few lines of prompt, he evolved into the kind of rise-and-grind hustler who nonetheless lacked basic competence at many duties of a startup executive.…