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She Built Facebook's First Assistant. Now She's Betting Against Full Autonomy | Shivani Poddar, Wajo
Description
Shivani Poddar led engineering on Google DeepMind's autonomous coding agent. Then she went solo to build Fo — the personal agent whose viral launch admitted what no AI lab will: AI often can't finish the job alone, so her agent hires vetted humans and picks up the phone itself. A decade of building assistants at Alexa, Meta, and DeepMind, distilled into the sharpest product thesis of the agent era — plus her playbook for building a founding team without a co-founder.
Topics covered:
- Why every AI agent demo falls apart at the last mile ("the captcha monkey problem")
- Giving an agent a phone: designing calls people don't hang up on
- Seeding the product with contractors in Ohio instead of Valley insiders
- Humans in the loop without a gig economy
- Building the founding team: no cold hires, and a three-word recruiting message
- The speed-dial bench: how solo founders augment what they're not
- The bear and bull case for solo founding
Guest: Shivani Poddar — solo founder of Wajo AI (maker of Fo); ex-Google DeepMind, Meta, and Alexa; backed by Vinod Khosla, Jeff Dean, and Gokul Rajaram.