He Built an AI That Can Run a Billion-Dollar Company and It Went Viral | Andrew Pignanelli (GIC)

Description

About a month ago, Andrew Pignanelli’s LinkedIn post launching Co-Founder, an AI chief-of-staff that runs your business with you, went viral. In this episode, we go behind that moment to unpack the tech, product, and philosophy behind it. Andrew shares how The General Intelligence Company (GIC) is building agent systems that remember context, make long-term decisions, and act autonomously. We dig into the company’s two-agent architecture, memory layers, and the culture of experimentation that shaped the build. Plus, what it means to “run vision-first” in a space moving this fast. -- Brought to you by Autoskills (https://autoskills.ai) – Helping teams go from AI-curious to AI-ready with tailored workshops and hands-on adoption. -- Key Takeaways • Context is everything. AI without memory or goals can’t make reliable decisions. • Experimentation is a superpower. Great teams ask for outcomes (“make it 10% faster”) and let engineers prototype freely. • Context engineering is the new frontier. The challenge isn’t retrieval. It’s choosing which 20 paragraphs of context matter. • Knowledge graphs over vector search. GIC builds structured relationships between people, projects, and data. • Taste matters as much as tech. Human judgment now shapes what feels “right” in an agent’s behavior or interface. • Vision-first beats incremental. GIC bets on big missions that attract deep believers and top talent. -- ⏱ What’s Covered (01:15) Andrew’s journey from Velvet to The General Intelligence Company (02:27) The idea behind Co-Founder (03:55) The viral launch and early traction (05:30) Why “memory” is the last step to general intelligence (12:04) How GIC structures agents (15:30) Knowledge graphs and grounding memory in real data (19:18) Letting engineers experiment (23:55) Context engineering and “taste” as product principles (28:43) The building of Co-Founder (35:10) Why GIC runs vision-first (41:27) How Co-Founder makes entrepreneurship accessible (48:42) AI, jobs, and ownership (54:56) What’s next for Co-Founder and the path to general intelligence -- Resources & References • LangChain — Framework for building agentic and retrieval workflows • Devin — AI software engineer for dev teams • Claude (Anthropic) — Model family for long-context reasoning • GIC Blog — Deep dives on memory, context, and architecture -- Where to find Andrew Pignanelli: • LinkedIn: andrewpignanelli • X/Twitter: @ndrewpignanelli • Website: The General Intelligence Company 👀 They’re hiring: generalintelligencecompany.com/careers Where to find Haroon Choudery: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haroonchoudery/ • X: https://x.com/haroonchoudery