24h Inside a $30M Silicon Valley AI Startup with No Employees

0:02[music] At 2:00 a.m. with GPT-3, I get Why can't you fix this bug? And I was like, I'm talking to a [ __ ] computer, and it literally will not fix that bug. And I'm like, what am I doing with my life? I'm going to build an AI that builds companies, and then I'm going to build a

0:17thousand companies with all my ideas. And the dream got really big. Everyone is building an AI in some way, shape, or form. But there's only a handful of people that are truly building at the [music] fringe of what's actually possible. And today, we're getting to meet one of them. It's a super ambitious project. So, [music] obviously, investors love really ambitious project that can change the world. It's also very impactful one if you can help the 99% be a more of a part of the economy. I'm going behind the scenes with Ben Broca, [music] the founder of Pulsar, a platform that uses AI agents to autonomously build and

0:52launch companies for anyone. The mission of Pulsar is we need to give a tool that is able to build any business, but also any [music] idea autonomously, setting up a bank account, talking to an accountant, doing taxes, talking to a factory to build something specific, [music] and then plugging into all of these to hiring a human. Ben just closed a $30 million [music] seed round by making VCs pitch his AI agent instead of him. And his goal is to build the first one-person billion-dollar [music] company. But the question on everyone's

1:20mind is, can he actually pull it off? What you really want [music] is just like Pulsar to rip. For you to tell Pulsar, "Hey, like here's my business. Just do it. I don't want to babysit you." AI just run for [music] a 24-hour straight. This should be such a perfect indication of the fact that you can do this, too. Anyone can do this. AI has

1:38just leveled the [music] playing field. Go nuts and build something that the world's going to use. All right. So, today, we are catching up with a guy called Ben Sarah. He's a previously exited founder. He's onto a new venture called Pulsar. It is a agent architecture that allows anyone to basically type a sentence in and build a business and have it run completely autonomously 24/7. I meant to go on a run in like 20 minutes. He's like a really good runner

2:10apparently. So, he said he was not that good, which is what every good runner says. But, he's going to smoke me, so we'll see what happens. [music]

2:32[music] Life of an entrepreneur is like I feel like you kind of need to be disciplined cuz it's such a ride and if there's so many ups and downs, you have to find those rituals because like you you only do your best work when you feel your best, right? Yeah. And and yeah, so that's why like it's like hard for me to

2:51live somewhere that feels right. To have a nice setup, like a nice life setup when I'm working on Pulsia. I'm working on hustling to give people best experience for my customers, like I I also feel good. Yeah. [laughter] I'm also in a good mental state. It's a beautiful spot. Cheers. Cheers. Super hectic run. Super hardcore. What's on today? What's going on? So, today is going to be about we have a podcast that we're going to do in an hour. We're actually doing a French

3:26French podcast. [laughter] Going international. Yeah, we're going to release this new feature called boost. It's code name boost. I don't know if we're going to call it new boost yet. Uh but essentially it's like a way for Pulsia to run autonomously for much longer because cost of intelligence is so high and like you know, Entropic open

3:43AI APIs for the top models are so high. You know, the initial product was just like um you know, you had to you had one task every night and then like in the product could ask Pulsar to do more tasks every day one by one and you can commission Pulsar to just like run

3:57continuously for hours and hours. [music]

4:06[music] All right, so we are on our way into San Francisco city to go to the office where Ben works at. He just finished up his podcast. It is absolutely crazy that within what was that like a month and a bit of actually like having this product live that he's at a 7 million annual recurring revenue. That is just insane. It is like unheard of heard of numbers here but it like in AI like it makes it possible and when you see what he's actually building and what he's built for someone like I'm like oh yeah, I would use that 100% like this is the

4:43future. This is insane.

5:01Can I be in? [laughter] Welcome to the vlog. How do you guys know each other? Uh we are French. French tech scene. Tech scene. She's a investor at Google Ventures and uh yeah. We met in LA I think 2 3 years ago at a party. at one of your investors party so Shervin Mirhashemi. Yeah. And

5:25the rest is history. Very excited about what he's building. I think you really building the future. Some people may not see it now but it's very exciting. Have you tried the chocolate croissant next door from the fromagerie? Oh my god. Do you want one? Let me get you one. You want one? Sure. Yeah, if I get You are the best one. I was telling

5:47him that like I fast every day. Hello, bonjour. Hi, bonjour. [laughter] In my Australian accent, bonjour. Sometimes the universe wants you to eat a croissant and you eat a croissant. [laughter] We've been like We've been like fighting it for like We've been fighting it twice on two separate occasions this morning and it's it's happened. Tell me who that was, what just happened. Like crazy

6:13proximity, right? So, it's actually that's the It's an investor from Google Ventures that I met uh a while back in LA actually at like a party that like one of my investor uh threw back then. And yeah, when I moved to uh SF she was one of the people that like I knew and then we hang out and she actually she had the studio in Marina that she rented from me for like a month. I was in Marina for a month. That's why I wanted to take you here. It's such a cool peaceful place to get coffee to get the fourth coffee of

6:39the day. And yeah, it's so random that I ran into her but like it's sort of like that serendipity you get in SF [snorts] where you keep on running into people casually and then it's like well yeah, when you want to raise a round then it's so much easier when you're right there and you can just chat about it over

6:55coffee over croissant, right? Literally. Literally. And it's like if I was in Paris or in um wherever it's like you that doesn't happen. Yeah. So, you you can still build you can still build great things but you don't run into those people that like lift you up that like give you opportunities to like go

7:12bolder, go faster, you know? Yeah. That's what you get out of SF. That's why it's a magical place. We're getting to Scipion's HQ which is one of the infrastructure for agent sort of companies I work with to help me scale Buffer here without having to rebuild the whole internet myself. So, yeah the idea is like partnering with the best SF AI agent startups that are all getting started and are all building the the infrastructure for this future that's coming that's now and coming soon. Yeah. Um and yeah, it's like working with other people without hiring

7:47employees.

8:03[music] The thing to think about it would be interesting is sort of like having all these different channels and so for each one there's obvious big ones we could target. Yeah. We say it's the podcasters, it's like, you know, if it's a late night show, I mean, that's more difficult to do, but like at which at which stage of the company or which feature we think they could be

8:25interested. Yeah. Cuz of course we can wait until they invite us, but like we can also provoke it with like our network of people, but we can maybe today today is not good, but like if we announce the fundraising, maybe trying our luck to say who knows like uh the fundraising we should boost force it on each of those channels because like the story is too beautiful to Yeah. not being on all those things those those channels. So, you know, the the story is basically sort of under company raising [ __ ] ton of money uh and

8:55actually the company growing fast. Yeah. I think this should be one of the priority of from us, but also the PR agency Of course. to really be sure that we going to be pushed on all those different channels. Yeah, I was thinking, you know, for example, the solo founder journey and and that's something interesting like the Those are obvious moments. Yeah. Then there's like features that are like could sound boring, but actually we could turn it

9:16into something an interesting story. Yeah. Right? So, we talked about boost like the Okay, yeah, it's just a button to get Polestar to be autonomous. God mode. But actually, no, let's turn it to let's call it god mode or YOLO mode or like, you know, like something that's more interesting than boost. [music] It's pretty cool to hear how Ben is actually thinking about go-to-market, virality, and customer acquisition. And that is one of the most critical pieces in getting a company like this to a venture scale outcome. But building a product that can actually deliver on

9:47that promise is a whole other challenge. And that comes down to the infrastructure partners making it all work behind the scenes. And that was exactly where we were headed next. Polly obviously is building an AI that can build and runs businesses for for the 99% which means we get a lot of non-technical people that like go to Polly and ask them for their dream

10:09company or their dream projects. And sometimes Polly needs to use a browser to act and to do things. For those who don't understand, would you mind introducing exactly what the product is? Yeah. So, Anchor Browser is basically an identical browser automation workflow that allow you to basically automate anything you want on the web without the hassle of a are you human or are you a bot and do it as fast as you can. So, that's basically what we do and that way we allow agents to

10:44interact with the web in a seamless way. Polly is super pumped to be partnering with you know, with Seeker, with Anchor Browser, with Black Cell, and a few and a few other companies we're talking to to get everyone to benefit from each other, right? Because everyone is is is building a part of the stack, going very deep in a part of the stack. And you know, like Polly is like building more like the the end product, like the autonomous loops, the orchestrations, uh the like memory layers, uh and obviously like the consumer you know, the consumer growth, right? Which is a big part of like what Polly does

11:21and educates people. It's so funny like, you know, you were solo founder, but it still takes a village, right? You know, you can be a CEO and raise all the capital and hire an army with like the Lord of the Rings, you know? So I go, "Okay, I'm Frodo." [snorts] [laughter] Like, "Guys, I have the ring, but like I need like you guys to come with me cuz

11:45like we're going to Mordor." [laughter]

11:51[music] So, right now the infrastructure is kind of it's quite a challenge to build, but it's amazing to see that much apps being deployed in a few second in few milliseconds or even nanoseconds. It's insane. And it's really cool like I love that, you know, we started working on just this inbox, which by the way is a whole thing with like all the security challenges of those agents going wild and like trying to like break everything if they can. And so being able to contain them into this inbox where it's like, you know, you stay here. You stay in the corridor. And also, you know, end of the day it's

12:29about reducing costs for our full sale, which means we can reduce costs for the customer and get more customers. Yeah, it's the new infrastructure like only pay on demand like when you're using stuff, you pay, but otherwise it's free. Exactly. So. like I feel like the internet was built for you I mean, it was built for humans and for and all those like web servers and boxes it was built for a company to build one web server and so there's like minimum commitment and cost. And when it's just an agent is spinning up a, you know, we're going to launch a feature soon where it's like a user can launch

13:00like 10 businesses in parallel and just like AB test them. And it's like, "Well, I cannot pay like 10 bucks a month for 10 personal accounts." That makes no sense cuz actually those are temporary businesses that get built within like in minutes. Yeah. And so it's super exciting for you guys to to sort of like figure out At some point we'll reach the the the infrastructure problem probably where we need to have more servers. Yeah. But that's our More data centers. Yeah, more

13:29data centers whatever. Yeah. Exactly. [laughter] Need to find VCs or I don't know someone that is excited about this about this scale.

13:44[laughter] Yeah, and then there's the whole GPU problem like that something we want to tackle afterwards. Like we started with a sandbox, but we we want to optimize the whole infrastructure network-wise, storage-wise, GPU-wise also. And so that's a whole ecosystem that we want to provide. And at some point we'll tackle the GPU problem with our own data centers. All the network is inside this data centers, so you have the most optimal sandboxing and agentic platform

14:18to work with. [music]

14:26Seapium is like the infrastructure [music] that makes Pulsar possible. Pulsar was imagined and vibe coded by me, but very quickly as the system scaled, it's like okay, there's a whole infrastructure of like, you know, how do I how do I make sure that like when Pulsar agents run, they're secure, it's scalable meaning if we go from like 1,000 customers to 10,000 to 100,000, it scales. How do we make sure that like agents have all the best APIs and at the better at the best cost and that they are allowed to use those skills. So that was sort of like the the initial partnership. I was like, well,

15:06you guys build the payment rails and the API rails, and I'll bring the customers. [laughter] And it's like we win together. And now we're like buying GPUs. [laughter] And now we're like actually, okay, so how do we go to from from like 7 million run rate to 70 million run rate? How's it going on the GPU side? Yeah, it's still a mess. Yeah, it's hard to get GPUs. And it's hard to make those GPUs work at like So we had a good concession today with Um What are they saying? Are they saying like I feel like it's literally their job to

15:40run models. I told them. And so it's like what do you mean like the top open-source model is as an issue running on your [ __ ] GPUs? Like it doesn't make any sense to me. Just so I can understand like for the audience who doesn't understand how this all works. So you're buying GPUs from companies. How does that even work? Are you physically building infrastructure out

16:04west to like hold the GPUs? And also there is companies who are actually um running those GPUs and they kind of resell the GPUs with the model. So it's similar to Anthropic, you know, when you go to Anthropic APIs like technically Anthropic is running GPUs to run their model. But there there are companies that actually kind of reserve and buy kind of GPUs that they will run for you and you decide the model that you want to run on those GPUs. So you can decide which open-source model you want to run. So they kind of run those GPUs and then you book those GPUs for

16:34a year, two years, three years. Uh and then it's your kind of rack and our servers of GPUs. And then you can just run all your traffic. And that's at no cost. You just pay the GPUs. And then it's up to you to optimize it and to leverage all those GPUs. But to get GPUs it's like a black

16:51market. It's almost impossible to get. Every one of those big companies and they just got sold right away. Uh so we're always competing against uh people in Asia, people everywhere to get some allocation of GPU uh which is quite quite interesting. So it's all about connection and you know putting investors to figure out how we can connect with the right funders uh and making the right connections to get some priority. To get compute, that's

17:20crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any sort of advice you'd give a founder who's looking to do something, I guess a bit similar like this? Like what would you say to those guys out there? I mean, what I think is that until you have product market fit, you should force yourself to be alone or a micro team, like you and one other person and that's it. Anyone on the team and if it's just you, it's just you, you should use AI all day long, like Flaco or Codex or Pulsia, whatever you want. And once you have product market fit, try to get AI to replace employees. And

17:55what I'm trying to say there is that like it will force you to fully understand where is the edge. And because once you understand what the edge is, it might give you ideas to actually do the business you were trying to start in the first place. And it's the only way to being able to win in this age is to fully understand the cutting edge. And if you start hiring too fast and then you rely on someone else's knowledge to build, that's where you may lose. And so, stay lean, stay solo,

18:21and go get them.