EP29: Reclaiming the Internet: Ben Guo on Personal AI, Techno-Feudalism, and Building Zo Computer

So you've talked a little bit about AI as like this extension of human creativity and sort of the collaboration that we're going to have with these machines as it goes forward.

You know, what do you think are some of the gaps to achieving that? Are they technical? Are they cultural? Like, do we...

do you see that people are just like reluctant to turn some of their information over to these agents or is it more that like there's just still, they're not efficient enough, they're not high quality enough? Like what are the problems that need to be solved on both sides of that?

Yeah, lots of answers there.

But one that I think is really interesting is the more cultural point.

I think the way that AI tools and workflows are marketed to people is often about replacing the human.

That's what these big labs are doing, where they're scaremongering.

And I think that there's a different narrative that What we have here is really the same evolution of computers to begin with.

Computers have always been this amazing creative tool for augmenting human potential and creativity.

And I think AI is just the natural evolution of that.

And it's this ability to leverage computers better than we've been able to ever before for a much larger segment of the population.

Gotcha, and how do you think the adoption curve is gonna grow? Where do you think it's gonna start? Who are the people that you're seeing lean into this first?

Yeah.

I think really it's kind of like people that can see the clear ROI on these things that they're doing.

So often it's people that are kind of like maybe higher leverage to like their solopreneurs, S&B owners, and they just kind of like want to like have better work-life balance to like kind of get more things done to be more on top of their work and their life.

And you can see with these people that like work and life often really blurs.

I think in that that audience, like the personal agent, makes a ton of sense.

And also kind of like owning your own tools and your stack also makes a ton of sense.

So you see this in the open cloud community, but also in basically everybody that's kind of a little bit AI curious, but maybe non-technical.

I think they're often of this kind of like solopreneur, builder shape.

And so how do you guys think about using these things internally? Like, do you use a lot of agents internally? You know, are you a cloud code shop? Are you a codex shop or whatever? And how's that evolved since, like, I don't know if you feel this way, but I always tell people this sort of like, I don't know, late November, early December release of Claude Code last year, like was a tipping point for me in a lot of ways.

And so I'm curious if you guys have used these and if you've been using them a long time, like what have the step functions been like and how do you change sort of how you manage it over time?

Yeah, totally.

I'd say that we're a Zo shop at this point.

We've hired a lot of our growth non-technical folks who just have come from our user base, people that are really passionate about Zo and building cool stuff, but often non-technical, but kind of systems-minded.