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Arweave TX
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Starting and running early companies requires a series of prioritizations and tradeoffs of how to do a lot with a little bit, both of capital and time. Behind deep product insights are repetitive workflows core to how a business runs: email triage; competitive analysis; customer outreach; CRM updates; content creation; candidate screening. The tasks are consistent but take up an inordinate amount of energy.
Automation has always come with a lot of promise and struggled with execution. Traditional tools have been brittle, require constant maintenance, and can't handle the judgment calls that fill our work. What we actually want are agents that don't just execute tasks, but understand your business deeply enough to run these workflows autonomously, 24/7, continuously improving, and fully coordinated.
This is what Cofounder by the General Intelligence Company of New York enables. Their platform lets you break your business down into Flows—the repeatable workflows that make up everything from one-time setups to ongoing operations—and automate each one through a network of coordinating agents. The product suggests flows to fork and try and enables the creation of new ones, reformatting into a constantly self-updating to-do list where the tasks involved can be accomplished autonomously. The idea is to both take the repetitive work out of running businesses and also add opportunities for new insights and actions that wouldn’t be possible without this kind of platform.
Core to these capabilities and to the thesis of Cofounder is the ability to create, manage, and maintain deep context and memory. Cofounder approached this through layered memory architectures that consolidate, abstract, and persist information over time. Their system combines working memory, core memory, and long-term memory, enabling agents to operate with the full knowledge needed to make good decisions independently. The platform coordinates multiple agents, allowing them to work together across different time horizons and hundreds of integrations. Some flows execute immediately; others run continuously for months or years. This is a super challenging technical lift but one that gets us past incremental efficiencies to a fully new central nervous system for business operations where people orchestrate and agents execute.
The ambition is to use humans for creativity, alpha, and pressing the boundaries while using AI to run the operations. This idea is dauntingly large but cofounders
We’re seeing the benefit of Cofounder ourselves. Just a few examples of how we’re using it at USV: Cofounder sends us regular digests of updates and news around our portfolio companies and also their competitive sets; daily schedule breakdowns with context for each upcoming meeting; synthesizes board reports and various pockets of updates from a portfolio companies into succinct summaries we can use to update each other and then, in other formats, our LPs.
We're excited to lead Cofounder's seed round alongside Compound and Acrew as they build the platform every founder will use to start and run their company. Try it and let us know what you think.
Rebecca Kaden
2 comments
Comment system is clunky.
The use of glorified checklists has been around for a long time -- read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Guwunde.