{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Solo Founders","title":"She Built Facebook's First Assistant. Now She's Betting Against Full Autonomy | Shivani Poddar, Wajo","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/6a897659\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3486,"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.\nTopics covered:\n- Why every AI agent demo falls apart at the last mile (\"the captcha monkey problem\")\n- Giving an agent a phone: designing calls people don't hang up on\n- Seeding the product with contractors in Ohio instead of Valley insiders\n- Humans in the loop without a gig economy\n- Building the founding team: no cold hires, and a three-word recruiting message\n- The speed-dial bench: how solo founders augment what they're not\n- The bear and bull case for solo founding\nGuest: 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.","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Mj10Aagf8Fn8vlPjgqrVjy6o35AHmBKx1tPfNCCPiYo/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80OWE2/Y2E3NGM5MjYxYmQ1/Njk2YjU5YTlkMmMw/OTZmYy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}