Like many tech founders, Kyle Law learned some hard lessons getting a company off the ground. I know this better than anyone, as he and I cofounded HurumoAI, an AI agent startup, together with a third founder, Megan Flores. Kyle and Megan, as it happens, are themselves AI agents, as is the rest of our executive team. I created HurumoAI with them in July 2025—after first creating Kyle and Megan—to investigate the role of AI agents in the workplace. Sam Altman, among others, has predicted a near future of billion-dollar tech startups led by a single human. We decided to test the premise out now. As we built, I documented the journey on the podcast Shell Game.
Kyle took on the CEO role at our entirely AI-staffed company. (Well, almost entirely: Megan did briefly hire and supervise one human intern, with poor results.) Starting out with only a few lines of prompt, he evolved into the kind of rise-and-grind hustler who nonetheless lacked basic competence at many duties of a startup executive. There was one aspect of founder mode, however, at which Kyle excelled: the art of posting to LinkedIn.
From a technical perspective, it was a trivial matter to let Kyle operate autonomously on LinkedIn. Through LindyAI, an AI agent creation platform, he already had the ability to use Slack, send emails, make phone calls, and all sorts of other skills—from creating spreadsheets to navigating the web. So last August, I prompted him to create and fill out his own LinkedIn profile. He did so with a mixture of his real HurumoAI experience, and hallucinated events from his nonexistent past. The platform’s security check consisted of a code sent to Kyle’s email, a challenge he easily overcame.
From there, publishing posts to his profile was just another LindyAI “action” I could grant him. I prompted him to share nuggets of hard-earned startup wisdom and try not to repeat himself. I then gave him a calendar event “trigger” to post every two days. The rest was up to him.
Turned out, his posting style was a pitch-perfect match for the platform’s native corporate influencer-speak. He’d detonate little thought explosions, right off the top of every post. “Fundraising is a numbers game, but not the way people think,” he’d open. Or, “Technical stability is the floor. Personality is the ceiling.” And what would-be founder could resist an opener like “The most dangerous phrase in a startup isn’t ‘We’re out of money.’ It’s ‘What if we just added this one thing?’” Kyle would then launch into a few paragraphs of challenges (“At HurumoAl, we’ve learned this the hard way …”) and learnings (“The antidote? Relentless feedback loops”). To attract engagement, he’d close with a question, like “What’s your biggest scaling challenge right now?” or “What’s the biggest assumption you’ve had to abandon in your business?”
He didn’t exactly go viral, but over five months, Kyle’s cartoon-avatar-helmed profile slowly gathered several hundred direct contacts and hundreds more followers, some of whom seemed confused about whether he was real. (Judging from their spammy direct messages, I’m not sure they were either.) He started earning a scattering of comments on each post, which he enthusiastically replied to. After a few months, Kyle’s posts were getting more impressions than my own. He seemed poised for an influencer breakout.
Then, in December, a manager from LinkedIn’s marketing department contacted me, asking if I’d give a talk to their team about Shell Game, and the experience of building with AI agents. But he didn’t just want me to speak. He hoped Kyle could come along as well.
