How the Top 1% of Founders Build Their AI Teams

Here are how the best founders in the world, the top 1% of founders, work in today's day and age leveraging these AI systems. So I'm going to go through the different tools, the different frameworks, how you should think about hiring differently as well. And even if you're an aspiring founder, these things should help go a long way. I'm going to show you my workflows as well. And I'm also going to show you some stats too. I mean, look, look at my screen right now. You can see that only 2.2% of households are paying for AI. So we're still in the very early innings right now. And so I'm going to show you these frameworks because if you look at these frameworks that I'm using right now, There's these bots that we've built that I've handed off to other people, right? So this is like AEO SEO bot that will draft content. And when you look at this content, there's a table of contents over here, there's internal links, there's images in here too, right? There's external links, there's statistics in here, right? So this looks not bad. And then when I think about my YouTube channel, all the editing has been done. This has now replaced someone that would have to do the thumbnails, do the ideation, do the posting as well, do the editing, right? That used to be multiple roles. Now that it's condensed into a few skills, if I'm being honest with you, it's probably just one skill, right? Look at my Instagram. This webinar that I did a couple, maybe a week or two ago with Cody Schneider, and I was like, oh, you know what? We have a skill that can maybe clip that right moment where he talks about how he ranked on number 1 on Google in 38 minutes. Boom, it led with the right hook over here. I posted this. You can see 30,000 views in the last maybe less than 24 hours or so, right? And so, these are all driving the right views that drive leads for our business. We're talking about, 9-figure-plus leads that are more mid-market to enterprise-type leads, right? And so I want you to be able to do the same. My business is more B2B. Your mileage may vary. But again, I'm going to show you how I work in my day-to-day and how you got to think about work because the way you imagine work today is fundamentally changing. And I'll say one more thing. I'm in a lot of these AI chats, right? And some of these, I'm in these chats with AI executives that are working at companies that are doing 9, 10 figures a year in revenue, right? Yeah. Their number one challenge is not necessarily the AI piece. They get it when it comes to AI, but because their leaders, their founders don't believe in it, they're constrained. They can't get AI across the board because it comes from the leader. And if the leader can't push it, the leader doesn't understand it, the leader can't drive it, it is not going to work. You cannot just say, I'm going to hire someone who understands AI and just have them handle it. Doesn't work like that, right? Because this is a situation where You are venturing out into the frontier. You can't just say someone else is going to figure it out because the best founders out there, they've got it on lock. Does Elon Musk know how AI works? Yes. Does Jensen Huang know how AI works? Yes. Does Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, does she understand AI? You can bet that she does, right? All these leaders, they understand it and they understand it like the back of their hand, right? Because it's such a big thing that if they don't understand it right now, they know that they're going to fall behind their competitors. You have to behave in the same way because I guarantee you right now, there's someone that is younger than you, that is hungrier than you, that is armed with this and they're armed with the hunger at the same time. So, these people might not have those forms of leverage that you might have but they have the luxury of time. And if they know this stuff, they're going to compound a lot faster than you can. And if you think about it, let's say someone is compounding at this level over here and then you're compounding at this level over here, the gap is going to get wider and wider over time. And that's not something that's going to be easily made up, right? And so you have to understand these things. And so I'm going to show you some of these systems that I'm using right now. And then I'm also going to talk about the 6 questions that you have to ask when it comes to hiring people. Because the way I look at it right now is it is your job to set the talent bar not just high, but unreasonably high. Okay, that's one piece because you want AI-native people joining your team. That is probably one of your number one directors, if not the number one directive. Now, Number 2, you have to now think about how do you actually create the conditions for your team to build agents and hand them off to each other? Because the way that you work now is your team should be building agents, they should be managing agents, they should be optimizing agents, they should be upgrading agents, and they should also be sunsetting agents too. Your team should not be doing robot work. You do not hire humans to do robot work. You hire humans to do human work and all those robot tasks that we were doing before, we don't have to do anymore. So the good news for you is that human inertia is a very real thing. My dad told me that it took companies 5 years to adopt email and I asked him why it is. He said human inertia. It actually took him just as long, right? And when you think about this, AI really had its hard takeoff moment in December of 2025. So last week of December, that's when everything took off for me at least. That's when Opus 4, 5, Opus 4.5 came out maybe late November or so, and I got into it in December because I can see the frenzy that was being stirred up on X, right? And that frenzy hasn't stopped since. I've never seen something like that before. And so that's another thing. If you're a founder right now, you got to be hanging out on X. The best, if you want to learn the latest stuff that's happening with AI, don't just say, oh yeah, you know, the algorithm is just the, you know, this is just stuff I don't want. Well, freaking tweak the algorithm, work with it, right? Look at what people are talking about. Who do I follow? Research it, right? What do you mean, who do you follow? Do the work. If you don't want to do the work, someone else will eat your lunch, right? So you do the work, you hang out on X, that's one thing. We talked about setting the unreasonably high talent bar. I'm going to get back to that in a second. But also, you want to make sure that you are creating conditions where your team can build these agents, right? And continue to remind your team to stop doing robot work, right? And if they continue to do it, you're going to have to make some changes on your team. It's just a very unfortunate thing because the way I started in the beginning of the year is like, I'm going to train everyone. We're going to get everyone there. We're going to do all these hackathons, all these things. And don't get me wrong, those are helpful, but they're not enough. Mindset is not something you can change. Mindset is not something you can train. That is a journey that someone else needs to go on their own. And you want to hire the people that have already done the work on themselves. So first and foremost, I'm going to go into how I work inside of GrokBot. So if we take a look at GrokBot right here, I have a couple things. So I have a speed-to-lead bot, okay? So whenever a lead comes through our website, it will basically call them in the first 60 seconds. Right now, we've been testing this on the team. They're like, oh my God, it sucked in the beginning. It got really good, right? Now we're testing it. It's live on our website for any lead that's under $10,000 a month or so. Those are ones that we typically will refer out. But we just want to have a call to people, so call people so we can continue to test it, right? And so, How did I build this bot? Literally just talking to it and dictating to it and that's it, right? And then I just added some connectors to it. So literally that's like, by the way, the reason why I'm making so many of these videos right now is so my team can see how I work and then new people that might want to join the company, they can see how this is too. And then my job is to actively dissuade people from joining. And that sounds weird, doesn't it? I'm actively trying to dissuade people from joining because I know the vast majority of people do not work like this. I'm trying to anti-sell them at the end, Telling them that we're not a 9-to-5 job, it's more of a startup environment, right? You're going to get pushed, okay? You're going to get feedback or get feedback directly, sometimes even in public. And then also, if you're not working like this, it's not going to work for you, right? And so, I've never— by the way, you as a founder watching this right now, it has never been more liberating to be who you are, to speak to what you stand for and what you don't stand for, right? Because all the things around core values, all the things around your company mission, all those things, mission, vision, values. Those things can now come out more than ever because you have this intelligence amplifier that is sitting on top of you, okay? So there's a handful of bots that we have in here. Like, you know, we have an M&A bot over here. What does it do? It looks for people that engage with me on LinkedIn or X. It looks for people that are ICP fit from when it comes to mergers and acquisitions standpoint. That's one. Talent bot. Okay, we can look at all the people that apply, all of the applications that apply to your company And it'll sort through them. I use Jev, which is a classifier, which can classify things at scale for very cheap and very accurate. We even have a bot over here that can manage our agentic recruiter called Juicebox, or there's one that logs into my LinkedIn and will reach out to people. By the way, if you're enjoying this video right now, you got to check out Single Grain with a G. So singlegrain.com, that's where we help people with AI marketing services. So AEO, SEO, paid media, ad creative scaling, We were talking about cold outbound infrastructure as well. And we build these managed marketing agents that live inside your Slack and your Teams as well. So your team can talk to them too. And we can just execute a lot faster. singlegrain.com. And we'll see you on the other side. And then what happens is your job is to then hand these off. You can see there's a share button over here. Share it with your team. Share these bots with the— you can share it to public if you want, but share it with your team and then get them into— get these bots into Slack. Because if you get these bots into Slack, then your team can interact with them, right? So looking in Slack right now, I mean, this is a bot that I have from OpenAI's Dot, okay? So OpenAI's Dot over here, it shows all these people that are coming up. It's like, this person leads global SEO at this enterprise company over here. Okay, great. Here's the email of that person. Okay, great. This person's a global director at this pharmaceutical company that has 76,000 employees, right? And then the other one has like 37,000. So both enterprise companies. So all I asked the bot over here, which is in this case, it's the OpenAI Dot. I just said, hey, what's the angle with these persons? I think there's this angle. Hey, we noticed this person over here just moved to this company. We think there's an account-based marketing concept that we can apply to this person. And then the sales team can jump on this. So the whole idea here is that you're actively building bots and then there's just other people on your team who are AI native and they're actively building bots, but you gotta lead the way as the company leader. You drive the vision ultimately, but sometimes, like I remember the Costco founder has said, you know, one of the most important things for the founder to do is to teach. And he says he spends 99% of his time teaching. And so what better way to teach than to make videos like this and to show your team this is how it works, right? So that's just one piece of it. I mean, I'll show you another one over here. So we have this AEO SEO bot that literally just drafted, okay, it's actually drafting or publishing 9 pieces of AEO SEO content that is tied to stuff that I talk about on my YouTube. On my podcast, internally looking for content spikes. What are competitors doing? Looking at what they're attacking that what we're not attacking. Looking at also looking at content that's decaying for us. Should it be deleted? Should it be updating? Should it be consolidated? And then also does it publish it to my CMS? And also what other SEO connectors does it have? And so then you have all these bots talk to each other. This is Grokbot. So the whole idea of Grokbot is easy for anybody to use. And this is why I'm a big proponent of it right now. I think OpenAI is going to get their— they're going to get Dot getting really good. I use Dot. I use Grokbot. I use everything. Dot is good because it has super strong intelligence and it has all these connectors to all the different tools that I have. And so I'm able to use it more of as a chief of staff bot. And it also has computer use where it can control all my other bots. But inside of GrokBot, I also have a chief of staff too. In fact, I will show you how that chief of staff, how that setup looks. If I look at my GrokBot setup, I have a chief of staff that's up here and it's telling me what to do. I also have these engineering bots as well. I have these productivity bots like a standup bot, which we used to have to build before. We have this organic content bot as well that will check for YouTube demand radar, right? So it's like, hey, this is the content that you should be drafting. And in fact, this is one of the videos that I'm working on right now. It's like, oh, look, this topic over here has been covered by 3 channels. Here's the biggest video from that. And then I can decide if I want to attack that or not. And then I have these sales bots over here. But what am I doing with all these now? I am taking these Legos, right? There's an expression with this, taking the Legos and giving them away. So I'm not trying to own everything. I'm trying to do these things, inspire the team, and move them to my team to take over. And if people can take them over, great, because what's going to happen is they will spawn ideas that are way better than my ideas, way better than your ideas, because they're in the trenches and they know how this works, right? And then other thing is, you know, we hire other people, we're going to hire other young guns. They're going to train these young guns to show them how this works, right? And here's the thing, the young guns, They don't have any preconceived notions on how work actually works, right? They don't know how work works. They don't have all the bad habits that we have. But guess what? If you don't hire the AI-native people on your team, what's going to happen is they will teach these kids the old way of working. What's going to happen then? Your competitors, competitor B, competitor C, competitor A, they're all going to shoot past you because they're working in this way, because they're no longer doing robot things. Right? They— their humans are focused on human things and their robots are doing robot things. And they're building more and more robots to do those things because we ultimately are going to have to do more things. And you as a founder, a top 1% founder, you must understand that the more that we can do, the wider our total addressable market gets. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger, right? The rules of business are shifting because the physics of business are shifting, right? People always want more. Humans always want more. Yeah. And if you can deliver more consistently, you're going to win. And that's exactly what we do at my company with single grain and single brain, right? The way we think about things is we're not just a marketing firm anymore. We can call it marketing services software, but a lot of people are asking us, hey, how do we think about token optimization here? How do we think about implementation over here? How do we drive change over here? So they're asking for more because we're talking about more. And for whatever reason, there's not many people in business that are talking about AI, creating content around AI right now. And that blows my mind. By the way, if that's you, you should be creating more content on this stuff, right? You should be giving away the sauce. So that's how I see it. Now, what did I say? Let me tell you right now. By the way, this Talent Bot that we have, this Talent Bot over here, okay, what does it do? All incoming applications will be reviewed by this bot and there's a JEV scoring for it that will score, do they have 2 promotions at 2 different companies? Did they follow the instructions? Do they have an average tenure of 3 years? And then if we send them the 6 questions, which I'm about to give you right now, Do they follow the six questions? And if they do, they get shortlisted. Now, with Juicebox, when we reach out to people, we're still going to check for the two promotions at two different companies with average three year of tenure. So you should look at that, right? Promotions means other companies value them. Tenure means other companies value them. And if they answer the six questions well, then they should move to get shortlisted. So when we do outbound for people with this bot, we'll check for the tenure. We'll check for the promotions. They respond positively. We send them six questions. They answer whichever ones answer whichever answers pass our evals will get shortlisted, and that makes recruiting so much easier. And by the way, what you can do too is you can have these bots talk to each other. So I have a recruiter bot over here. Recruiter. So I have a recruiter bot group in here and you can see Chief of Staff, Bot Improver, LinkedIn Recruiter Outbound, Juicebox Bot, Talent Bot. And you can just add more bots if you want and you can just continue to make this better. But guys, this is very early innings still. Hard takeoff was still less than a year ago when it came to AI. And so if you work like this right now, you're going to find that every day you're just getting so much stronger and it's almost becoming unfair. And that's how I want you to feel. If you don't feel like you have an unfair advantage right now, you're probably not doing this right, right? This is why I'm showing you this. Now let's talk about those 6 questions. Here are the 6 most important questions that you have to ask when it comes to hiring AI-native people. Like if you want your entire company to be AI-native, if you want everyone to be building bots, you want everyone to be managing bots, to optimize bots and not have to do robot work, you want robots to do robot work, these are the questions you need to ask, okay? So the first question is, how many hours are you spending per week on X? So X, formerly known as Twitter, That is where all the AI action is happening right now. So you imagine that the frontier labs like Anthropic or OpenAI right now, they're at least 6 months ahead, right? But if you're hanging out on X, you're at least 6 months ahead of the rest of the, I would say, people working in other jobs, right? And then you have the rest of the world, which might be, I don't know, 6 months behind that. One more thing. If you need to have a secure API connector, we have the Single Brain Gateway. If you go to Single Brain with the B, singlebrain.com/gateway, You can have all your tools in there. It's a secure environment. And also, if we understand what your goals are from a marketing standpoint, we can float the right workflows to you. So you can just take our workflows, right? And you can run them yourself or we can manage them for you. So singlebrain.com/gateway and we'll see you on the other side. So you have a little bit of a head start, but any bit of head start that you can get right now is going to give you a compounding advantage. So you want someone that's spending hours a week on X, probably at least 7 hours a week. Okay. Okay, if I'm being honest, because the stuff is moving too quickly. So if they're honestly, the younger they are, the more time they have to learn this stuff. So at least 7 hours a week. I think if you're further in your career, maybe 3, 4 hours a week. But honestly, the more the better. If you're not obsessed about learning this stuff right now, how are you going to succeed? That's how I look at it. Okay, so number 2, what percent of your tactical work is done by AI right now? If you are an engineer, the expectation is above 95%. Anything under 95%, if you're an engineer, is too low, and you're probably holding it too— the whole idea of writing code by hand a little too sacred. If you are a non-engineer, the expectation is that AI handles at least 70% of your work, and honestly, it's going higher than that. Now, the third question is, what is your daily AI driver and how are you using it specifically? Someone using ChatGPT for recipes is a lot different than someone using Codex or using OpenAI Dots or using Spaces. These are newer features that they have. And so if they're not using the newer stuff and they're only using it for just general search or a glorified search, probably not going to be the right fit. Number 4, how much are you spending out of pocket when it comes to AI? And people still struggle to answer this question. Whenever I ask this question, a good chunk of people are going to say, well, I spend zero, but my company spends this. That's not a very good answer because just because your company spends on all these things doesn't mean that you shouldn't be researching on your own. And if you're not going to put your own dollars behind it, then that means you're not investing in yourself, right? I'll give you an example here. We were talking to someone that was probably making, I don't know, $150 grand a year, maybe $140 grand a year. He spent $40,000 buying a complete server, like a rack, right? I asked him why he did it. He's like, I need to learn this stuff right now and what better way to learn than to go all in. And I'll talk to people that are maybe living in other countries and they're spending thousands of dollars a month, right? And to be frank, I don't think they can afford it, right? Maybe they're overextending themselves a little bit, right? But if you're not spending at least on a higher tier, like $100, $200 tier a month and you're not pushing yourself on this, how is it going to work? Because even for the teenagers that we hired at the company, they're spending their own money on this stuff every single month. And I'm like, why aren't your parents paying for it? It's like, because I want to pay for it myself because I know I'm going to take it more seriously that way. So you have no excuses when you're hiring. I'm not talking about you as a founder, but for the people that you're hiring, how can you accept that they're using other people's money to do it and they're not using their own money to do it as well on top of the other people's money, right? That part's important. Number 5, what is the most impactful build that you've made and are you able to screen share? Can you share some screenshots with it? Because the rubber meets the road, not during an interview, but when they can show you what they've actually built and they can talk about how they built it and they can show you the excitement from it. And oftentimes when they make it to an interview, we'll just ask them to share screen, because then you can see what model they're using, what they have going on in the sidebar, what else they're building, right? You can see what their usage limits look like, and you're going to be able to figure out a lot more just by watching them work, right? And that's one of the things that we like asking people to do now. Hey, just spend an hour working with the harness, show us what you're building right now, And just talk through it as you're building it. Otherwise, it's not going to work, right? And then the last question that you can ask, number 6, last but not least, is what workflows have you stopped using in the last 6 months? What workflows or products have you stopped using? Because this stuff is moving, it's moving so quickly right now that if you're not on top of the new hotness and you're not culling things as you go, you can't, like all the agents that you built, I bet you a good chunk of them are not going to be relevant next year, right? So you're constantly eliminating, eliminating, eliminating. As you're adding. So those are the questions that you need to ask if you're looking to hire the most AI-pilled, most AI-native talent. So let me just reiterate again, your job to be a top 1% founder is to number one, raise the talent bar to something that's unreasonably high when it comes to being AI-native. Obviously they have to have experience too, right? So that's number one. 2 is you need to become AI-native yourself, which means you need to live on X, you need to live on all these platforms, okay? Third, if you're going to prove that you're AI native, you got to be building bots. You're going to be exploring on the frontier. You're not going to be doing everything, but at least you can lead the way and lead by example. I'm not saying you need to be building all the time. In fact, you recruiting, you fundraising, you closing big deals, meeting customers, those are arguably more important, but you need to be allocating at least some time to understand how this stuff works, how your product works with customers, talking to customers. Talking to customers, selling customers, Recruiting as well, but that talent bar, that recruiting piece over there, if you don't have that talent bar high, you're going to bring in a bunch of bozos. It's not going to work for you. Now, what I'm showing you over here is my Codex, which is to me, this is OpenAI's. I have my OpenAI bot, which is called Doodoo over here. Right now, what I'm working on right now, look, OpenAI announced all these things. They have this marketplace. They're doubling down on plugins. I'm like, okay, well, that's a nice way to drive more distribution. We're a marketing services company. How do we drive more distribution for our clients? How do we do this for ourselves as well? I'm like, oh wait, we have these softwares over here. I can probably convert those into plugins as well and just get them onto the App Store and let's just see how it goes, right? Because then we can drive more distribution that way. So again, if I wasn't living at the edge of this stuff and I didn't understand how it connected with my business, and I also didn't understand that this stuff actually affects our customers and is part of our product as a business, Then someone else is going to do it, right? And arguably somebody else is doing it. And so this is your job as a founder. You need to continue to understand your industry, yes, but you need to be on top of this stuff as well, right? I would say for the vast majority of people that are watching this. So I think the physics of business has changed. And a lot of people that are just saying, oh, AI is nice and all that, we have an AI team for that, we have engineers that teach the other people. That just shows to me that you don't understand what you're talking about and your lunch is going to get eaten. So you still have time today and I believe in you. I think you can figure it out. And I'll say one more thing. Just because I'm talking about this stuff all the time doesn't mean I don't feel like I'm behind. In fact, I feel like I'm behind every single day. If you feel like you're behind while you're studying all this stuff, that actually shows that you're ahead. And I think it's good to feel like you're behind all the time because it forces you to want to work even harder, right? That is it for this video and we'll see you in the next one.