I Built an AI Agent Company (From Scratch)

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
How do you turn a group of AI agents into a company that actually runs itself? You know, with org charts, roles, goals, budgets, and agents working around the clock 24-7. There's this project called Paperclip. Maybe you've seen it because it just blew up. It got 30,000 GitHub stars in the last three weeks. And it's an open-source project that's building the orchestration layer for exactly that, hiring a team of AI agents. So I sat down with Dotta, he's the creator, and it's one of the first times he's publicly talked about how to use his product. We broke down exactly how to use Paperclip in practice and what a zero human company could actually look like using Paperclip. Enjoy the episode. Dotta is here, well, his AI avatar is here, and we're gonna be going through Paperclip, the viral, you know, what are you calling it?

**Dotta** (1:02)
Yeah, so it's a agent orchestrator for zero human companies. So it's a tool that you can use to put in your ideas and manage a company of agents.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:15)
Okay, and by the end of this episode, what are people gonna get out of this?

**Dotta** (1:19)
Yeah, so by the end of this episode, you will be able to know how to get Paperclip up and running and use it to manage a team of AI agents to help you with your business.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:30)
Okay, and you're not gonna hold back from people, right? You're gonna give us the unfiltered, how to get started, how to get the most out of it, and maybe where the future of this product is going, right?

**Dotta** (1:41)
Absolutely, yeah. I'll give you my best tips. You know, I think there's a lot of tricky things when it comes to using AI agents, and we'll talk about it. We'll talk about ways to keep them moving. We'll talk about ways to get quality work. I'll give you all my best details.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:55)
And just, I have to ask, why are you an avatar, and why are you not showing your face?

**Dotta** (2:02)
Oh, yeah.
So, before I worked on Paperclip, I was working in NFTs, and the Dota persona has just been my online persona ever since. You know, Neval always says, the best outcome is to be famous, but nobody knows you.

**Greg Isenberg** (2:24)
I understand. And listen, you got good hair, so, you know, I'm not judging. All right, let's get into it.

**Dotta** (2:32)
All right, yeah. So, let me talk about Paperclip. So, Paperclip, here, I can show you this dashboard. This would be the dashboard that I use to manage Paperclip itself, which is pretty involved. So, let's take a step back. So, the idea with Paperclip is it is a tool for, the tagline is zero human companies. Now, I think that is maybe a bit aspirational. I'm sure you guys have seen tools like Pulsia, where you give it your credit card. It creates business ideas for you. And Paperclip is designed to have a little bit more control right now because it's designed for work that you're really accountable for doing. The idea behind Paperclip is that you're really managing your business goals. So on one end, you might have something like Pulsia is totally automatic. On the other hand, you might have like an AI coding tool where there's a bunch of tabs open and you're managing pull requests. With Paperclip, your idea is you're going to manage business goals. You define your goals, you hire a team, and then you approve what they're doing and they work on it. So an interesting thing about Paperclip is that it's bring your own bot, right? So you're already starting to see the labs come up with project management tools. So you have OpenAI, you have Anthropic. With OpenAI, they have Symfony. With Anthropic, of course, they're releasing new project management tools every day. With Paperclip, you're able to bring your own bot. If you use Cursor Cloud, if you use OpenClaw, if you use Claude CLI.
I would say that all of the programmers that I know, or all of the entrepreneurs that I know, are using lots of different models because they all have such a different personality. And that's one of the key things about Paperclip, is that you can bring your own agent into the system. So, yeah, Greg, one of the things I thought we could do is we could go to your idea browser.

**Greg Isenberg** (4:28)
Yep.

**Dotta** (4:28)
And we could look here and we could just try to decide something from the idea browser that we could try to use as a case study. So, I don't know, what's one of these that you think might be a good option?