Espa Labs

"𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗜𝗿𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝗻'𝘀 𝗝𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘀. 𝗪𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝘆𝗲𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗜 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁." @dojideon is launching @EspaLabs, the AI executive assistant for everyone. Village GP Anne Dwane sits down with Deon to talk about the launch and the journey that brought him here. Deon's first company, Forethought, won TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk. Deon is now applying everything he learned about agentic AI to a market the model labs are not structurally built to serve: the millions of founders, small business owners, freelancers, realtors, and CPAs who today use ChatGPT like a search engine. A few moments that stood out: "All the people you would expect to be building something like this have perverse incentives. The OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world are incentivized to build better and better models. How do you do that? By having people's data." "People don't really care about having another tool. They care about the job they're trying to get done. If you hire an executive assistant, you don't hire someone who also has an app you have to use. It's another teammate you Slack with, or you WhatsApp, or you email." "When you extrapolate to the future, new paradigms for collaboration and context actually appear. In so many ways, that becomes a weird network effect in the AI age." "The cap on coding is pretty infinite. The cap on human work is also infinite." Full episode below.

Introducing Espa. Your AI assistant for work and life — manages your inbox, drafts in your voice, and handles the schedule so you don’t have to. Try it free → espa.ai.