Everyone Gets A Software Company — Benjamin Guo, Zo Computer

Transcript

Hello everybody, I'm Ben from ZoComputer. I just posted on X from my Zo. I'll be giving away $100 in AI credits, and I do all sorts of stuff with my Zo. This is my computer. My Zo is my computer. And before I get started, I made the site just now while I was waiting to get started presenting. This is an overview of all the speakers in today's CLAW session. You can scan this QR code and check it out. I've got some useful links in here, but also I've got some deep research on everybody presenting, including their recent thoughts, links to their profiles, and websites, blogs, et cetera. So scan this. It's super useful. I just made it just now. This is my computer that you see right here, my Zo computer. I'll be talking about it. And this talk is about Zo and a lot of things. It's also about personal agents, personal cloud agents in particular, which Zo is one instance of, and the future, and where I see all of this going. So a little bit about me. I'm the co-founder of Zo. My name is Ben. I started my career on the early Venmo team back in 2013, and I met my co-founder, Rob, at Venmo. And I left Venmo to work at Stripe quite early. I was the 80th engineer. And my co-founder, Rob, he went on to build Substack. He was the first engineer there. And a final fact about me, as you can see, is that I really love computers. I'm dressed up as a computer. And I like to start with this fun fact about this Finder icon. So this icon was designed by Susan Kerr, an early graphic designer at Apple Computer. And many people don't know the story behind this icon, but it actually represents the human, this white face, and the machine, this blue face. And they're in happy harmony. And I think that is what we should aspire to as we build AI tools for people. Humans love tools. Humans have always loved machines. And when we feel at one with our machine, we feel happy. So who, like me, misses the way that computers used to feel? Raise your hand, right? The early internet, your first website, your first PC, right? It used to feel different, right? Today, the internet and our computers feels more like this. We are swimming in the sea of applications and sites and services, and it's not great. And on top of all of that, they're jacking up the prices on these things that we use, often because of AI features that we didn't ask for. And I think quite reasonably, consumers, or I'll just call them regular people, are upset or confused or scared of AI. ZoComputer is based in Brooklyn. We're in Bushwick, actually, in the heart of hipsters in New York, and there's a lot of this out there. I see a lot of this vandalism over AI ads in the city. On top of all of that, this is what our industry looks like. But the deeper root of why this is bad is a structural thing. It's what we call techno-feudalism. So feudalism was this shitty system back in the day. And though it no longer exists, it still is alive and well in our digital lives. So we are still the peasants. We pay rent to the SaaS providers, who pay rent to the cloud providers, who pay rent to the kings, who are probably Nvidia these days. And because we are peasants, our lives are shitty. We are fragmented between all these different tools. There are various services that we use that lock us in and shittify over time. The PM at that product that you use is not incentivized to make your life better. They are incentivized to improve their bottom line, to monetize your attention, to take your data, lock it in, and sell it back to you. And because you don't own anything, you are a peasant. So Zo, our mission has always been to solve this by giving people a real home on the internet. And we believe that most people in the world are living in the matrix, and we're trying to show people a better way. So Zo is alive and well. We've been out for about a year. And real people are using it. Real regular people like Charlotte, this LA-based private chef and life coach. She hosts her websites. She has multiple websites now on Zo. Zo manages her invoices and her accounts and bookkeeping and her scheduling and her notes. And it's this amazing system. It makes her feel clear and calm and on top of the world. And it's fucking fun, as you can see this text that she sent me. So what is Zo? Zo is a personal cloud. We've never really had a personal cloud before. But it's quite simple. You have your own home in the cloud. You're not using other cloud services. You have your own thing. You put your stuff in it. You put your AI in it. And because it is a place in the cloud, you can host stuff in it. You can host services like websites or APIs. And they're all yours. And I think for people in this room, if you're interested in CLAWs and personal agents, your personal cloud might look something more like this. You might have a suite of local devices. And for me, I have this Zo computer, this cloud computer as well, which has my Zo agent on it. It also has Hermes on it. And it has my services. I have many websites and APIs and things I've built all hosted in the same place. And it can also talk to my laptop or my Mac Mini, or I can use it on my phone. And that collectively is my personal cloud. So Zo is a personal server with AI built in. It's quite simple. And it harkens back to a simpler time. So back in the day, this is actually how we built and hosted websites. We just FTP'd our files onto a server, and that updated our website. You were just shipping to prod. You were always doing it live. And that's actually, I think, how most people should build. I don't think it's necessary for a regular person like Charlotte to think about deployment. Unfortunately for many of us in this room, this is probably what your life looks like. You're navigating between these different AIs and devices and SaaS services. And it's very confusing. Zo is meant to be a simpler way. It's one place for all of your stuff and your AI and the stuff you host, all of your personal stuff in the cloud. Here's another case study that we'd like to talk about. This is Anthea. She was one of our early users. She's totally non-technical. She's a freediving instructor. And she's already on track to make $100,000 on Zo. She used to use all of these different SaaS services to run her business and her life, like Squarespace, like Calendly, et cetera. And now she's replaced all of that with Zo. She's canceled all of those SaaS subscriptions. She is no longer a peasant. Anthea went from being very confused and having her data in all of these different SaaS silos and not really being able to connect them very easily to this. So Anthea not only hosts her retreat website on Zo on a custom domain. She has many different websites now. She has her personal workspace that looks like this. She's really into fairies and drawing and mushrooms. And she's expressing her whole self and her creativity online in this new way that we haven't really had as regular people for a long time since the 90s. And under the hood, all of those sites are just the tip of the iceberg. So when Anthea gets somebody who's interested in a retreat, Zo texts her with their number. Anthea now immediately calls them at that moment of intent to buy. She texts her Zo, give me a payment link. And she closes the deal right then and there. And that is how she's actually booking much more revenue than before with these retreats. Retreats are now actually hard to book because there's too much demand. And that's amazing. And under the hood, she has a database for all of her retreats. She doesn't really know what a database is, but she has one. She has all of her notes, all of her accounting, and it's all in one place. If she has images from a retreat and she wants to put those on her website, she just tells her Zo to do it. And it's right there. She can host files directly from her personal server. And she is self-hosting everything. So Zo is made to be simple enough for anyone, for people like Anthea, for my parents, for other people's parents. People are always telling me on LinkedIn or X that they signed up their parents to Zo and their parents are coding up a storm. It was awesome to see. I just got this message on LinkedIn the other day. Our caterer uses Zo to manage his staff at his restaurant. Our recruiter uses Zo as well. He's really into it. He's rebuilding his whole stack for his recruiting agency on Zo. Our marketing agency has become Zo pilled. So it's made for everybody. But it's also powerful enough for the audience in this room. It can be the home for your OpenCLAW or your Hermes. You can have a really nicely set up server to host your personal agent if you use one of those tools. You can bring your codex for Gemini subscriptions, et cetera. And you can build and host anything. You have root access to your own server to this nicely set up Linux VM. The networking is also well set up and you don't really have to worry about any of it. You can SSH in and you can control your Zo via API or MCP. So very flexible. So scan this QR code if you haven't yet to get $100 in AI credits. Just try Zo. I think you'll like it. And I'm going to do a little demo and then I'll have a little bit more to talk about after that. So a quick demo of Zo. You already saw it in the beginning, but Zo is this nice flat workspace. I made this website just now. I make all sorts of websites on the fly. You can chat with any model as I mentioned. You can bring your own API key. You can even talk to CloudCode in here. You've got this nice file system. Built-in cloud storage because it's your server. You can use it as a Dropbox. And you can work agentically in the chat with any of your files. You've got automations. So you can run tasks on a schedule with AI. You've got tons of built-in integrations. So you don't have to set any of this up. We have lots of skills. A large skill library. There's a built-in browser. So you can log into sites and let your Zo buy things for you or do whatever. Actually, I always text my Zo these days to buy stuff on Amazon. It's really dangerous for impulse purchasing. I see something, and I'm like let's buy it. And as I mentioned, you can host stuff. So you can host anything. Any arbitrary service. HTTP or TCP. And we also give you a really nice built-in personal website. This is my Zo space. And this is all set up nicely. And it's got nice vibe coding features. And you just chat with it to edit it. And I've built all sorts of cool things inside of here. This, for example, is my Calendly replacement. People can book time with me. And it has this custom setup that I like. And my Zo can review the people that are interested. I don't want anybody booking time with me directly. So that's what Zo is. And I want to conclude by talking a little bit about the future. So the reason we're building Zo is to build a better internet. One that looks more like this. Where everybody, every individual has a real home, a presence on the internet. And companies already have this. But we should interact directly with other people on the internet without middlemen. And we should also interact with the various companies and their AIs. And it should be more direct. Another way to look at this is that in the future, we will probably interact mostly with agents. And the agents will interact with the cloud. Like these software 1.0 things like websites and APIs. But if you dig a little deeper into this, what's probably going to happen is that most of these agents that we interact with will also be in the cloud. Some of them will be local. But many of them will be in the cloud. And when those agents are in the cloud, the question again is whose cloud is it? So Claude is newly out. And Claude is actually, if you think about it, a cloud agent. It's a cloud. It's a company level cloud that has all the company's context. And anybody can interact with it. And it's an interesting and very ergonomic model. Town and Victor are also similar instances of this. And it's like Claude. But the problem with Claude is this. Whose cloud is it? Whose cloud is it? It's not really your company's cloud. And as you improve your Claude setup, what really improves is Anthropic. Right? The arrow is pointing the wrong way. And this is intelligence feudalism. The intelligence now is bubbling up the wrong way. And you are still a peasant again. Or your company is still a peasant in a way. And at Zo, we believe strongly in changing the way that things work. And giving people and companies more ownership over their cloud and over their intelligence. So we believe that the future should actually look more like this. Anybody, a company or an individual should be able to publish agents. And own them. And have end users. And have the end usage of their agent improve and self-improve their own published agent. And that is the future that we're building. We have a beta version of this. So I'm going to go back to this Zo space and scan this QR code finally. If you want to talk to me, get AI credits, sign up for the beta of this new agent publishing platform. And also you can check out all the speakers that are presenting on this Zo space page. I'm Ben from ZoComputer. Thank you. If you want to talk to me, get AI credits, sign up for the beta of this kind of new agent publishing platform. And, yeah, also you can check out all the speakers that are presenting on this Zoespace page. I'm Ben from ZoComputer. Thank you. 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