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.
Topics covered:
- Why every AI agent demo falls apart at the last mile ("the captcha monkey problem")
- Giving an agent a phone: designing calls people don't hang up on
- Seeding the product with contractors in Ohio instead of Valley insiders
- Humans in the loop without a gig economy
- Building the founding team: no cold hires, and a three-word recruiting message
- The speed-dial bench: how solo founders augment what they're not
- The bear and bull case for solo founding
Guest: 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.
What is Solo Founders?
The Solo Founder's Podcast features in-depth interviews with solo founders building remarkable companies. Each week, host Julian Weisser sits down with solo founders who are either operating at serious scale or doing something right now that you need to know about. From Series B and beyond to founders breaking out in real-time, these are the conversations that define what it means to build solo. New episodes every week.