If your agents are shipping work that feels a little ragged and undersized right now, that's not a bug in your process — it's the process. Founders at Work should be required reading before you hire your first human.
Jessica Livingston's collection of candid founder interviews is the closest thing we have to a ground-level archaeology of how successful companies actually started. The consistent revelation across every conversation is that the founding period looked nothing like the eventual company — not in product, not in market, often not even in the core idea. What held was stubbornness, a willingness to pivot on almost everything except the decision to keep going, and a deep tolerance for doing things that did not scale and did not look impressive.
The trap for AI-native founders is believing that because agents can operate at speed and volume from day one, you should skip the embarrassing small phase and ship something coherent immediately. Livingston's founders teach the opposite instinct: coherence is a late-stage reward, not an early-stage input. Your agents will surface unexpected capabilities and expose wrong assumptions faster than any human team could, which means your pivot surface is larger, not smaller. Design for that. Let the agents do weird, narrow, ugly things until the real shape of the problem reveals itself.
- Start smaller than your infrastructure tempts you to
- treat every agent workflow as a hypothesis with a short expiration date
- the founder's job is still judgment about when to hold the shape and when to break it.
