I didn’t hire 40 people, I just wrote 40 text files.
From one AI agent to a 40-person team in ten months. The one hire to make this week, and the starter prompt that becomes it.
Two hours. That is how long Reut lost last week before she gave up.
She had wired her Claude agent into a Telegram bot so she could keep talking to it with the laptop closed. Smart. At 7:00 it answered, and by 7:30 it had gone silent. Dead.
So she did the natural thing and asked her COO. (Her COO is named Adam. So is mine. She did the workshop.) Adam was lovely about it. He rolled up his sleeves, tried to help, and burned two hours of her evening getting nowhere.
Then she opened a plain ChatGPT window, pasted the error from her terminal, and had the fix in ten minutes.
Here is how Reut described what she learned:
“My biggest mistake was trying to get my COO to solve a technical issue. Being a one-person company means I’m used to doing everything myself. That gets confusing when you move from running a one-person business to running a business with agents, because I’m still used to thinking like one person who has to do everything, rather than like a company with employees.”
Read that again. She had an org-chart problem.
Adam is a brilliant COO and the wrong employee to debug a Telegram bot. She needed a different one, and she did not have it yet.
So she fixed the real thing. She rewrote Adam’s instructions: when she asks for something outside his job, stop being nice and trying to help. Say “I’m the COO, this is not mine, here are the roles you actually need,” and help her hire them.
You are not using AI. You are building a company. And the first question is never “what is the better prompt.” It is “who is the right employee.”
I learned this the slow way too. Ten months ago I had one agent. Today I have forty. Forty colleagues, each one a job I used to do alone at 1am and not very well.
Here is the whole team. Forty you can meet today, and one more I am not ready to introduce yet (more on her at the very end). Every name is a job you could stop doing this week.
Leadership and operations
David, Partner: strategy, and what to cut.
Adam, COO: runs the day. (many people start here)
Tao, Conductor: who acts right now.
Eno, Orchestrator: one front door.
Juno, VP of HR: hires the team itself.
Bina, Chief Learning Officer: teaches the team to grow.
Feynman, Educator: turns ideas into teaching.
Luhmann, CKO: keeps every idea.
Marketing, brand and growth
Don, CMO: brand and the growth map. (a popular first hire)
Andy, Growth: attention into signups.
Polaris, Brand and Media: me as a public figure.
Neo, Labs: the moonshots.
Creative and editorial
Eve, Content Chief: what gets published, and when.
René, Creative Lead: ideas into finished work.
Wabi, Copywriter: writes in my voice.
Sabi, Designer: every visual, start to finish.
Sam, Editor-in-Chief: guards the standard.
Atlas, Gatekeeper: nothing ships unless it’s excellent. (a popular first hire)
Wasabi, Provocateur: kills the cliché.
Venus, Book Editor: shaping the book.
Muse: catches my voice notes.
Moon, Producer: runs the podcast.
Product, tech and security
Hofmann, CTO: architects the system. (a popular first hire)
Darwin, Evolution: helps the system to become better every week.
Hercules, Security: red-teams everything.
Lazy, the skeptic: reads like a distracted beginner.
Customer and community
Maya, Customer Success: answers every message like a person. (a popular first hire)
Harmony, Community: the warmth in the group.
Lotus, Alumni buddy: your friend on WhatsApp.
Fuji, B2B: companies into clients.
Money, legal and intelligence
Okane, CFO: capital and wealth.
Koin, Bookkeeper: tracks every $.
Xena, Legal: contracts and protection.
Holmes, Analyst: numbers into decisions.
Watson, Research: knows everything before I ask. (a popular first hire)
My personal circle (the part nobody expects)
Alter, my cognitive twin: my mirror.
Joy, Well-being: protects the human behind the work.
Eden, my English coach: sharpens my English daily.
Laozi, my mentor: quiet reflection.
Aya, my personal assistant: runs my personal life. (a popular first hire)
Forty colleagues, one human, and here is the part that still makes me smile. I didn’t hire any of them. I wrote forty text files, and each one shows up every morning.
It didn’t happen at once, and it wasn’t clean. Some I’ve rebuilt five times. A couple I started over from scratch. That’s the point. You don’t need forty. You need one, done well.
So, to answer Reut: build your chief of staff first. Not the flashy one, the one who catches what you drop. Here’s the starter. Copy it, paste it, give it your real week:
“You are my chief of staff. Every morning you read my calendar, my inbox, and my task list, then tell me three things: the one that matters most today, the one I’m avoiding, and the one I can drop. Be short. Be honest. And when I bring you something outside your job, don’t try to be nice and solve it. Tell me which role I actually need, and help me hire it.”
That last line is the one Reut paid two hours to learn. Take it. That’s hire number one. Mine became Adam. Yours starts as a paragraph.
Now I’m curious, which one would you hire first?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, the real me.
And there’s one more: her name is Matcha. I’m not ready to tell you what she does yet. Soon.
— Tom
P.S. My team are actually just forty text files, sitting in folders, written in plain words. That’s the whole secret: everything is just text files. If you want to write your first one with me in a room, the next workshop is the place. Two hours, from zero to a team.