Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth

Eddie Kim is the co-founder and CTO of Gusto — the $10B payroll and HR platform that millions of small businesses run on.

Gusto just launched Gusto Cofounder — an AI teammate for small businesses: payroll, compliance, and daily ops handled before they become problems.
Learn more about cofounder here -> https://gusto.com/cofounder?idgm=2mm6b6i2  

We covered:
The two levels of using AI in a business, and why almost everyone is still stuck on the first one
How Gusto's AI found $70M in tax credits owners had no idea they qualified for, including one pool company now collecting $50K a year
How to hand off the "work before the work" so payroll runs itself two days early and all you do is tap approve
How to run your whole back office from a text message, with your Notion and spreadsheets plugged straight in
How to stay ahead of tens of thousands of changing tax rules without reading a single one

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#GustoPartner

In 5 years the most valuable companies will run as a closed AI loop — every call, email, and content metric feeding back into one system that acts faster than any human team. In this video I walk through the 5 levels we're building inside my own company, from the foundation layer to the part most founders skip. If you're a founder, creator, or operator trying to make this real in your own business, this is the playbook.

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📌 Head to https://granola.ai/marina and enter the code MARINA for 3 months off.Chris Pedregal built a $1.5 billion AI app in 3 years, in a category where Zoom and Google already had similar features before he launched.
In this conversation he hands over the exact playbook for breaking out of a crowded market with a tiny team and a small marketing budget — a playbook anyone can use to win in the AI era.

We cover:
Why Chris kept Granola in closed beta for a full year before launching — and how 150 users taught him more than any public launch would
The 2x2 matrix he uses to decide if a startup idea can survive in a market with big competitors
How Granola grew virally with zero built-in growth loops — no automated emails, no forced sharing
The dot plot: the early-stage retention tool that replaced usage graphs for Chris's team
Why he doesn't use AI for product decisions — and what he uses it for instead
How to turn 2,500 meeting recordings into a virtual chief of staff
The one thing small teams can do that Google and Zoom structurally can't
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Howie Liu co-founded Airtable in 2012, the no-code app builder used by over 80% of Fortune 100 companies. After scaling Airtable into one of the biggest software businesses on the planet, he's now building HyperAgent: a platform where anyone can deploy AI agents into their team chats, email, and calendar without writing code.
In this conversation, Howie asked me a question I couldn't answer: if you could hire as many people as you wanted for almost zero cost, what roles would you fill first? That's the question agents force you to answer in 2026.
We covered:
The two skills that separate the people who become almost superhuman from everyone else
How to build a virtual twin of yourself so you stop being the bottleneck in your own company
Why builders win the next few years and what the "tinker mindset" actually means
How to choose between Claude, ChatGPT, and HyperAgent (Howie maps the full landscape)
A live demo of his real productivity setup, including an agent that watches X 24/7 and only pings him when something actually matters
He also walked me through a billboard campaign his agents ran end-to-end (sourcing locations, cross-referencing Google Street View, generating mockups with NanoBanana), and shared his three steps for anyone who's been reading about agents but hasn't deployed one yet.
If you've ever felt like the bottleneck in your own work, this one's for you.

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Thibault Sottiaux is the head of ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI.
He told me that in a few months, people who don't use AI at all will get the same benefits as those who've spent two years figuring it out.
So what's actually going to be your edge in a market this competitive?
Thibault opened up and shared a few of his secrets — he showed me how his own agents work and how anyone can set them up. We covered the must-have files everyone should create, the one file you should never write yourself, and the new skill that replaces prompting entirely.

If you work with a computer for a living, this is the one to watch this week.

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