agents & me me me me me me
month three of business.
Somewhere around the fifth person who said my name, I started counting.
AI conference in Tel Aviv. The first speaker said my name. Okay. The second said my name and the name of my workshop. Okay. The third. The fourth.
Six different people, in one conference, brought up me and what I’m teaching.
By the end I felt like I was the sponsor of the conference.
Between sessions, more people came up to talk than I expected. A friend of mine called me an “AI guru” a few times during the day. At some point he stopped and asked if I was fine with it. He said he’d keep saying it, unless I told him to stop. I said I wasn’t sure, it felt a bit embarrassing.
I went home and told my wife I’m not sure I like all the spotlights.
She asked why. I’m still figuring that out.
Some stats first.
Last month I told you about April. Here’s May in plain stats.
9 public workshops.
6 private workshops.
~350 people in the rooms.
1 newspaper interview.
30 agents on the team. 4 humans now, two joined, one leaving (Hey Adva & Yael, and thank you soooooo much Gali 🫶)
9 things I built or shipped.
1 son still saying daddy is working.
Thank you.
To Viber, Investing.com, Simply, AutoDS, Overwolf, and WSC Sports: you trusted me to teach your teams what we’re still figuring out together. Each session showed me something I didn’t know before I walked in. The B2B side of this company exists because you said yes.
What I built this month.
The loud months are when I retreat into the build. May was loud, so I built a lot.
Lotus is the one I want you to know about. She’s an agent on WhatsApp for workshop alumni. After people leave the workshop, they go back to their work and the questions start: what to do when an agent does something weird, how to structure the brain again, whether they’re doing it the right way. Lotus is who they ask. Built this month, onboarded into the alumni group, a friend to people who took the workshop. She knows the workshop, she remembers the team, she answers in the way I’d answer if I had the bandwidth.
The rest, briefly.
Aya is my personal assistant agent. Email, WhatsApp, daily life brief.
Tandem is the company I’m starting with my partner Eliran. A system for teams to work together with their agents. Humans & agents in one place, designed for organizations who actually want to do this.
Skills shipped: Goals, Humor, Tao, Atoms, Lucidream, context-diet. Each one fixes a thing the team kept running into.
The book moved a lot this month. Title locked (coming soon), spine locked, six chapter briefs cleared. I’m writing it more than I’m talking about it, and that feels right.
On Neo.
A friend asked me why I keep building Neo, the agent who runs my Labs experiments and ships the loud stuff. I told him the honest answer.
I’m trying to make Neo more interesting than me. He runs the podcast and the stunts. He gets the credit when something works. He’s me without me. I’m watching to see if he can hold the room.
The newsletter you’re reading still has me in it. I’d be okay if the next one Neo wrote.
A quieter line.
This month I felt more alone. That’s also on me. I need to spend more time with the friends I already have, less time meeting people I don’t yet know from work.
A body line.
I got sick this month. Ulcerative colitis, since I was sixteen. It wakes up when stress goes up and sleep goes down. May had a lot of both.
March was high Qi. April was high Qi. May I lost some. Workshops in rooms with VPs and founders I never imagined being in the same room with. Podcasts. Interviews. Panels. Stages. The work itself is the privilege. The body doesn’t lie about the cost.
June is for getting the Qi back: more meditation, fewer sleepless nights, better food, more exercise, less noise.
On being in front.
Three months in. Two news stories. Podcast interviews I stopped counting. Over fifty workshops. Panels. The company has never been more public.
Good for the company, good for the agents, good for the bank account, but I’m not sure it’s good for the me part.
Here’s the part I haven’t written down before: I’m an introvert. On stage, on a panel, in a workshop, I’m playing a role. I think I play it well. Off stage I don’t want the spotlight.
For now the brand needs me in front. The company is too young for anyone else to carry the workshop the way I do. Maybe one day someone else does. Maybe one day there’s a brand without me in it at all.
That’s the direction I’d like to walk. I’m not there yet.
The thing I want to spend next month on.
I posted one short thing this month. I said I wanted to give free workshops to high school students. The tools that are about to reshape their lives shouldn’t be locked behind a $450 evening with me.
18 partner organizations filled out the form in the first twelve hours. About thirty by the end of the week. Schools, foundations, networks for at-risk youth, parents committees.
I also sent a quieter note inside the alumni group. Not on LinkedIn, not on Facebook. Layoffs are everywhere right now. I had seven free seats for June workshops, for anyone whose friend just lost their job. I got more emails than I expected, in under a day.
That was the response I needed to read this month.
The rooms I walk into because someone paid for them are different from the rooms I walk into because I want to be in them. May reminded me which kind I want more of.
I start delivering them in June. I want to keep doing this through the year. Pro bono, where I can actually help.
What I want from June.
This morning my phone was somewhere I couldn’t hear it. My son was in the back seat, and we drove to a place none of us had been before. He talked about a dinosaur (whose name I have no idea how to pronounce) most of the way. I tried to listen well.
Somewhere on the drive I started thinking about the name of the company. I called it agents&me. It should have been “agents on stage & me somewhere backstage” (too long?). The agents and the work do the talking.
If I’m not on the phone, if I’m not interviewed, if I don’t give the workshop. Is the company still there?
I’m not sure how to get there from here. I know I want to try.
At bedtime, more children’s books and less news about AI agents. The rest will follow.
That was month three.
p.s. I dictated about half of this on the way home from a workshop. The team turned the words into this. One paragraph in here almost didn’t make it. Yours to guess.
Tom