# AI Boardroom — Agentic Society Members · Clean Transcript
**Date:** 2026-05-15 · **Type:** AI Boardroom
**Location:** Industrious East 7th, 924 E 7th St (Conference Room A), Austin, TX
**Duration captured:** ~02:24:00 (in-room, one shared mic + remote screen-share)

> **Timestamp note:** times below are from the RAW recording (Zoom cloud timeline,
> cross-checked against Fathom). Re-map them to the published/edited video before
> enabling any "watch at" links.
>
> **How this was built:** the room was captured on a single in-room mic, so
> "who said what" was reconstructed by triangulating three recordings — Fathom
> (enhanced summary + verbatim), Granola (host-anchored), and the Zoom timeline
> (per-cue timestamps). Names are corrected against the calendar invite.

## Who was in the room
| Name | Business | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Austin Distel | The Agentic Society (host) · The Tox med-spas | facilitator |
| Darby Rollins | Gen AI University · SideHustle.live | Show & Tell |
| Will Sayasenh | Four28 Creative (videographer) | new to the room, moving to Austin |
| Isaiah Zimmerman | Orectic.ai (agentic runtime / company brains) | left early |
| Nick Blancett | Bijou Builds (creative director → "vibe coder") | guest |
| AZ Moyer | AZ Does Taxes | **Hot Seat** |
| Justin Day | Day by Day Productions (Local SEO) | Show & Tell |
| Erin | The Celiac Space | nutrition practice + home-assistant staffing |
| Rohan Karunakaran | Frontier Studio (LinkedIn content studio) | |

---

## Transcript

### [00:08:54] Welcome & format — Austin Distel
Austin opened the room. "Thanks for coming out. Everybody here is a member, which is exciting — so you all get access to closed-door, long-form conversations, and we're here to solve problems. Not just talk theoretical, but actually build out a roadmap that will help you." He framed the founding-member moment: "In the Agentic Society right now, for the founding-member launch, nothing is built — everything is catered to you all. We're really building out the roadmap every single week." He'd be running these boardrooms weekly; attendance optional but valuable.

He laid out the three-part agenda: "There are three parts today. We'll do Rose and Thorn to start — everyone gets a chance to speak. Second, a hot seat: AZ is our hot seat today. Third, two Show & Tells. Darby's going to do one on the Chief of Staff." Justin confirmed his: "I'm going to show my hive mind, so I can talk to my business."

Austin said he'd keep time ("don't be offended if the alarm goes off") and made a pitch for physical note cards: "I love physical things in the age of AI, especially — because this token represents something that stood out enough to be written down. We have so many transcripts these days, so many words. The things actually written on paper are the ones that really do stand out."

### [00:11:20] Intro — Darby Rollins, Gen AI University
"My name is Darby Rollins. I've been living in Austin since 2017, in Texas since 2005, originally from California, and I met Austin back in 2018. My main business is AI consulting and education — I run a platform called Gen AI University. I was Jasper's first customer back when they launched, and I've been doing this since about 2021." His side venture: "While AI is my day job, I also run a live comedy game show for entrepreneurs called Side Hustle. We do shows here in town and in other cities. That one's not AI-related, which I love."

### [00:12:25] Intro — Will Sayasenh, Four28 Creative
"I'm Will. I'm a videographer, and I'm in the process of moving to Austin."

### [00:12:49] Intro — Isaiah Zimmerman, Orectic.ai
"Isaiah Zimmerman, founder of Orectic.ai. I've been in Austin about 17 months. I've got a three-year-old and a six-month-old little boy. My platform is an agentic runtime platform and a data pipeline that builds company brains."

### [00:13:11] Intro — Nick Blancett (guest)
"My name's Nick. I've been in Austin since last August — I made the move from Northern California to chase some opportunity here with one of my primary clients. My role is like a creative director turned professional vibe coder, which is a really interesting situation. I went from picking up a camera and editing every day to figuring out how I can get my computer to do both of those things for me. So it's been fun — pretty much a professional vibe coder at this point."

### [00:13:48] Intro — AZ Moyer, AZ Does Taxes
"I'm AZ. I do taxes. I came down to Austin with Austin and the Jasper crew back in the day, met Darby around that time, and followed along on their journey. I'm an entrepreneur now in large part because of Austin and the Jasper team. I'm really excited to learn from all of you — the company brain that was just mentioned, I'll be picking your brains on that."

### [00:14:09] Intro — Justin Day, Day by Day Productions
"My name's Justin. I've been in the Austin area for roughly three years now — before that, Dallas, born and raised. I own an AI-visibility and SEO company helping local service providers get to the top of Google or AI, no matter how homeowners search. I've been doing that for about ten years, and business is going great. I'm about 80% agentic now on the deliverable side, moving my company from execution to workflow managers, and trying to scale that as much as possible."

### [00:14:47] Intro — Erin, The Celiac Space
"I'm Erin. I've been in the Austin area since around 2019, but I live up in Georgetown now. I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old. I own a nutrition private practice as our primary business, and our family is starting a new service business — we staff home assistants for busy families and seniors."

### [00:15:10] Intro — Rohan Karunakaran, Frontier Studio
"Hey everyone, Rohan. Been in Austin four years, and I run a marketing agency — specifically a content studio. We help founders and CEOs grow their visibility, reach, and ultimately their business from LinkedIn. And I'm increasingly interested in actually installing an AI operating system into businesses — that's why I'm excited to be part of this group. The highest-leverage thing we can do is help businesses install AI, then use media to talk about what they do in an exceptional way, so they attract the right customers, partners, and talent."

### [00:15:57] Intro — Austin Distel, The Agentic Society
"My name is Austin Distel. I moved here in 2018 after graduating YC with AZ's cousin and a bunch of other friends — we all moved here together. You met Troyer; he's part of that group of seven who all moved here together. I lived downtown without a car for the first five years, loving being part of the scene every day. Now my wife and I live in Bee Cave. After exiting Jasper I took a year off, then bought a business in the wellness space — aesthetic spas. And now you know the launch of the Agentic Society, so this is my main thing. I'm excited because over the past 90 days I built leadership and systems into all the spas so that I only have to work on that one day a week — so I get to spend all my time in here."

### [00:16:56] Rose & Thorn — how it works — Austin Distel
"This is for you to share one win — your rose, something budding, something exciting you're grateful for. It's okay to humble-brag here. Then one thorn — something painful, or something you need to deal with. The point isn't to solve it yet. We're just acknowledging that your business runs with good things and bad things happening, and by putting it into the field among a mastermind like this, more good things happen and less bad things happen — and we can help each other with the thorns." He asked everyone to note where they might help someone — an intro, a tool, a strategy, a story. "One minute for your win, one minute for your thorn — and I'm putting it on a timer."

### [00:18:30] Rose & Thorn — Nick Blancett
**Rose.** "The community I run does a lower-ticket membership — lots of trainings, workshops, and bootcamps, all virtual. My win: yesterday someone subscribed and joined by finding me on Google, going through my YouTube stuff, and joining. They told me their whole customer journey." What's working on YouTube: "Really short videos — 30, 60, 90 seconds — 'here's how to connect Claude to this tool, that tool.' The retention on those, plus some super-subtle AI video editing to help pace it out, is making the watch-through significantly better than before." He's training Heygen "to be more of my creative-director support, helping with subtle edits after I run the script. It's exciting that it's actually leading to more clients coming through."

**The builds.** "I built an app for a client who installs frameless glass shower enclosures. The guys go out and take a before and an after image. I found a way to take their rough iPhone image — usually there's construction going on, doesn't look great — and turn it into a clean 'after' image that keeps all the same hardware, which is super important for the client. It's literally the same shower, just cleaned up. Then on the back end I built a multi-shot feature: it takes that one image and develops nine different shots pushed to a CDN. You take one image and get a carousel, nine extra images, a hero image, and a promo video — one image turned into multiple pieces of content." And a second tool: "I wanted people to call in podcast-style, but how do you get customers to do that? So I built a tool with Eleven Labs that simulates those conversations from real Fathom conversations I've had with actual clients — so I can turn that long-form into short-form."

**Thorn.** "I still vastly underestimate how much time goes into building tools — plugging in GoHighLevel, handling all the email flows, the initial setup of a new platform. I think, 'oh, I'll get this done in two days,' and then it's two weeks later and I've still got a ton of testing to do." He tied it to a physical toll: "This compounds from a thorn that started months ago — I was going a little too physically hard on the vibe coding. My shoulder's been bothering me; I'm too stuck at a desk. My body's giving me signs I need a better workflow — get AI to do more. Just because you're sitting at the computer prompting doesn't mean there isn't a better way to operate so I'm not putting myself in a bad position."

### [00:21:22] Rose & Thorn — Will Sayasenh
**Thorn.** "My laptop can't handle what I'm doing. Troyer introduced me to Codex and a system where anytime a long-form video is uploaded to Google Drive, it registers right away, cuts it into little pieces, and automatically uploads them to YouTube — we're calling it the Hormozi highlights, all in Codex. My laptop just can't handle it."

**Rose.** "The win is I ordered a new laptop, so I should be able to handle it."

### [00:22:37] Rose & Thorn — Isaiah Zimmerman
**Rose.** "I was at an internet-marketing party yesterday and got invited to be one of the expert panelists for a Think Tank on AI — helping a keynote speaker work through change management, restructuring and retooling her entire business into AI. There were eight or nine incredible people in the room, and afterward she came up to me and said, 'if anybody's going to build this for me, I want it to be you.' I'm stoked — it's probably a multi-six-figure contract right out of the gate."

**Thorn.** "The thorn is exactly this — being lifted by communities and groups like this, because I've been building in a silo. Like Darby said, it's been a 90-day sprint, 3:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, just in my office talking to robots all day. Trying to spend as much time with my kids and my wife as possible has been a challenge — balancing the commitment and the compulsion to keep building while staying present and conscious with my kids. It's a good problem to have."

### [00:24:24] Rose & Thorn — Justin Day
**Rose.** "I took Troyer's advice on structuring Facebook ads — created 15 video ads and graphics and launched them, and it tripled my lead flow within 24 hours."

**Thorn.** "I've got another app that's a lot more complicated — a ton of endpoints, all kinds of stuff through the APIs. I'm trying to figure out how to remove myself from the testing: visual-regression testing, screenshots before and after. I've got two apps that aren't out yet because I keep having to test and retest. I'm using Playwright and some other things, but it's still not getting me exactly there." He added a people-side thorn: "Going agentic is great — I've got a team of 12 to 15 that fluctuates, a lot of virtual assistants, great at what they do and not expensive. But there's pushback on moving them from execution to workflow. Do I let people go and rehire, or move long-tenured VAs into something new? With this new version of the company I'm leaning toward hiring people I can integrate from the ground up versus retraining. I'm in that gray area."

### [00:26:39] Rose & Thorn — AZ Moyer
**Rose.** "I've been self-employed for two years now — and it kind of builds into my thorn. It's been really great having that freedom, being able to do what I want and offer whatever service fits. I work with U.S. taxpayers — everyone here needs our services."

**Thorn.** "My wife and I are heading out tonight for a week-long vacation. I'm excited, but now my brain is away from the firm. We have a team of five — two who just graduated college, and my mom works for me. They're a great team, but we just need more time, more repetition, more SOPs, more brain transfer. A huge part since I hired them has been trying to clone myself, because it's hard to manage so many email requests and quick questions from clients. There's going to be a week of my mom texting me. I think there's a huge opportunity to create a company brain that I'm not the only one who can access — my team could prompt it, using the questions clients actually ask."

### [00:30:40] Rose & Thorn — Erin
**Thorn.** "That's my thorn too. On the clinical side we have a team of 15, a lot of them admin doing the day-to-day. They've been with me forever, I love them, they're great, and they're overseas. But they don't necessarily understand AI, and it's hard to train them when they think AI is ChatGPT. Even though I'm maybe two steps ahead, it's a big gap. So our challenge is training the admin side and the clinicians — and figuring out ethically where we want to use AI: back-end, or more client-focused on the medical side."

**Opportunity on the table.** "We also had an app that was pretty successful — we have a large media following, so a lot of people tapped in and purchased this wellness app. But our builders weren't vibe-coding or agentic-coding, they're also overseas, so it took forever to get things done. At one point I said, 'I don't want to do this anymore.' I run businesses, but I'm mostly a mom, so I have very limited time. But this room has me double-thinking that — the app still exists and still runs, and there could be opportunities to pick it back up and improve it. So that's potentially a win on the table."

### [00:32:44] Rose & Thorn — Rohan Karunakaran
**Thorn.** "I'll plus-one the common thorns here, which I see as opportunities — how do I upskill my existing team? Right now we're focused a lot on video content, because it's a way to accelerate trust, especially building familiarity with established business owners on LinkedIn. But my video-editing team needs so much involvement from me — I catch edits that need to happen, or a clip ends too abruptly. I'm trying to figure out what an agentic workflow looks like — maybe 80% owned by an agent, with the video editor, AI-trained and enabled, doing the final judgment. There's a real training-and-enablement opportunity here, and it's only going to get worse as we onboard new clients."

**Rose.** "We just signed two clients in the RevOps space. We work specifically with B2B service businesses because they're bought into founder-led content — the founder being the face of the brand, versus a SaaS founder. We're getting good momentum there. And since they're very revenue-minded, there's an opportunity: what other value-add services with an AI OS and AI brain would they be open to? Now I'm figuring out where to focus, because there are so many exciting directions."

### [00:34:58] Rose & Thorn — Austin Distel
**Rose.** "Seven days ago, no members — now we're at full capacity for the Founding Ten. So welcome, you all. I'm pumped about how this is all going. I've met up with a ton of people this week and got invited to speak a few times. This is what flow feels like — this is what it would look like if it were easy. This doesn't feel like work to me, and I feel like I'm in my genius."

**Thorn.** "It's a great thorn to have: I'm building the ship while I fly it. Right now I'm organizing the curriculum, and there are needs even beyond this room I keep hearing — but I'm focused on getting this room to the same starting line in a 30-day sprint, so anyone who comes on board can be here without imposter syndrome. They can speak the language, have the tech, understand how to contribute, and get at least one win in the first week. Building an ecosystem that's beyond just me as a bottleneck has been the most fun challenge." On hiring: "I made a deal with a content factory for space to do recording sessions, and a few people are interested in roles with us — that's another way I'm getting out of my own way. If you know people in sales or customer success — and Will, I've already got you on board for video, so you'll be doing a lot of case studies. My number-one goal is getting as many case studies as possible."

---

### [00:37:26] Hot Seat — setup & method — Austin Distel
"That transitions us to the second part. AZ is our hot seat today — a chance to really focus on one person's problem. AZ is a CPA, been at it about ten years, AZ Does Taxes, five people. In 30 minutes we'll do a problem dump. Then I'll help organize his problems into a pain-frequency matrix, and from there identify the most valuable thing to unblock him in the next seven days."

Austin previewed the process: a solutions brainstorm at the 15-minute mark using signed Post-it notes, an effort-impact matrix, and finally an auto-generated Notion Kanban board. "You're all going to get the skill that does this, so you can run it for your own business. This is literally how we build a billion-dollar company — I eat my own dog food. I've been the voice of the customer for ten years: 'here are all our problems, engineers, come up with the solutions,' and put it on a roadmap. I'll use my Hot Seat skill to turn all of this into a Kanban board in Notion so you know your 90-day roadmap."

### [00:41:29] Hot Seat — the problem dump — AZ Moyer
Austin prompted: "Where are you blocked? What's broken that you need fixed immediately? What are the bottlenecks? What's expensive, unscalable, endlessly repeatable?"

**The bottleneck is him.** "My CPA brain. A lot of people Google and Claude and ChatGPT their questions, and that's great, but there's still this element of, 'let me just run it by AZ real quick.' Filings are our bread and butter, but for the most part it's these quick questions. I've built a team — Isaac does bookkeeping for our retainer clients, Branson does the preparation — but it's still me touching every single client. Ultimately I want to be on these calls; it's the prep work and the answering that eats me. I picture a world where my whole schedule is booked jumping on calls with entrepreneurs like you, just answering questions — but with context right there."

**Problem #1 — FAQs (client + internal).** "We started using HubSpot a year ago. We've built calculators and resources — a withholding calculator, since a lot of people get married and wonder which spouse is withholding enough. But it still requires a manual touch — transferring data, reviewing, verifying, communicating it back — all on me. You know Thomas J. Henry, the lawyer on the I-35 billboards? His FAQ page is really good — you click into topics and it narrows to clear, concise questions and answers. I envision that. A lot of owners have the exact same question, and if they don't want to wait for me, they can access that page — or an automated email says, 'we got your message, we're working through it.'"

**Long-term direction.** Austin: "What do you want the company to be long-term?" AZ: "I'd love to promote Finn — he's sitting for his CPA — to run tax preparation, so I can separate into more sales and strategy. I picture myself up on the QuickBooks stage doing presentations. I don't think preparation is what I want long-term — it requires a high number of clients. What entices me is higher-income earners: fewer clients making up more of our revenue. I'm 34. The older CPAs I network with are all selling their prep businesses and moving toward strategy — looking at already-filed returns, helping clients make educated decisions, exit-mitigation strategies. Those are the higher-dollar items. And I get approached about acquisitions all the time — CPA firms go for about 1x revenue."

**Content & stock comp.** "I think about stock compensation a lot. If you've received stock comp, your company often won't answer your questions — liability. I see an opportunity to reach out to executives: 'can I present to your company about their stock compensation?' Provide real value and comfort, actually help them value that compensation. I want to create content, make tax-prep answers more available. It's not rocket science — everyone's asking ChatGPT anyway. I want to say, 'here's the legit answer, and here's how you actually file that return.' We have a ton of dummy data — every tax form imaginable under Pups and Pals LLC (named after my dog, Winnie). I could open a return and show, 'if you got this 1099 and this W-2, here's where it goes.' U.S. taxpayers leave a ton of money on the table because these systems are too simplified."

**Problem #2 — SOP documentation.** "I need to enhance delegation with clear-cut SOPs — 'if we're doing an LLC formation, go here, get it done.' Right now there's still hand-holding. My mom is great, but she doesn't want to mess up, so she'll get to the very end of a registration and want me to check. I really need her to be able to do it on her own."

**Problem #3 — a verified research engine.** "A company brain, but also a research engine. I've tried this with Claude — sometimes it works, sometimes it hallucinates — where I say, 'only reference the U.S. tax code, only reference this state agency's website.' There's a tax-specific tool called Blue J that only references the codes, so you know what you read is legit, with citations. That's what clients want: they can ask Claude and get an answer, but they want it verified by me and my firm, with source documentation."

**The industry opportunity.** "There's a huge gap. CPAs are either retiring or they're me — college grads aren't becoming CPAs anymore. It's literally a dying industry. So there's an opportunity to coach older CPAs toward a more profitable exit — reduce their overhead a year or so before they sell, which yields them more. I'm in a unique spot: young, approachable, on your team, not the IRS's side. So it's really about knowledge transfer, internal and external, and mass-communicating knowledge that everyone needs. Everyone earning more than $15,000 in the U.S. needs to file a return. How do we reach the masses without literally working with 300 million people? That's the problem."

### [00:54:02] Hot Seat — the acquisition play — Austin Distel & AZ
Austin: "Thank you, AZ — you have so much room for potential." AZ on the market: "All our new clients worked with their parents' CPA and didn't get the time of day, because that CPA doesn't want low-priced prep. Or they had a CPA with the wrong vibe or slow communication — 'I'd reach out and hear back two weeks later.' It'd be so easy to set up an automation: anytime someone emails, 'hey, we got your support ticket.' People want to know their message has been received; they don't necessarily need the answer yet."

Austin offered the strategic play: "You said older CPAs are trying to sell, and you're helping them be more cost-effective. And you don't want to do prep because chasing enough clients is hard. You can solve all of that by *buying* the clientele from the people who don't run it efficiently, then use AI to make it efficient — and now you're doing tax prep at scale." His own example: "Our CPA won't do prep-only — they require strategy alongside it, so we pay a lot more. They only work with high-ticket clients, but they save us money we wouldn't have saved otherwise. There's real potential to buy the firms still running on Excel for a cheaper multiple — they have all the people — and even if you convert half of them to a higher-priced strategy offer, that solves the issue." AZ: "Rather than teaching them to be more efficient and charge more — just buy them, make it efficient myself." Austin: "With AI, managing another 400–600 clients is a lot easier. Fewer people are CPAs now, so you hire a finance major instead of a full CPA salary — costs go down, but you keep the big clientele and charge more because you require strategy. Probably seller-financed, so you're not putting up much capital — and you can offer above the average 1x multiple, because you know you can install this agentic system and drive the efficiencies."

### [00:57:30] Hot Seat — the pain-frequency matrix — Austin Distel
"When there are a lot of problems at once, it feels overwhelming. If we want to eat an elephant, we eat it bite by bite — the goal is figuring out which bite first. That's the pain-frequency matrix." He drew a frequency axis (yearly → quarterly → monthly → daily) against a pain axis. "If it only happens once a year, like taxes — is tax season painful? Everyone does it, and if you don't pay you're in trouble, so there's still a lot of money up there when the pain is high, same reason we pay for insurance. Down low, when pain is low but frequency is high, that's like YouTube ads — they crank it up until it's annoying enough that you upgrade to Premium."

He mapped AZ's three problems:
- **Client questions / FAQs** — "between monthly and daily per client." AZ: "Leaning toward daily." → *daily, high pain (his time).* "As the leader, you have to do anything you can to free yourself up — technology or people."
- **Team questions** — "You're the bottleneck for them too." AZ: "It's been going down — the team's getting experience. A good chunk of my day is unlocking them to take delegated tasks to completion." → *frequent, but improving.*
- **Tax-code research** — AZ: "Less frequent — one-off transactions, about 10% of client requests need us to research the code and verify. Those can take several hours, more than a client question. And it creates imposter syndrome — 'how do I not know that?'" → *monthly, high pain (time).*

**The decision.** Austin: "Are there dependencies that make everything else easier or unnecessary? If the team or the tech can answer the question first, that frees your time. Which do you want to unlock first?" AZ: "The team. Even to Erin's SOP point — how to file a franchise-tax report that's due today — clients could do that themselves. We want to build SOPs and playbooks, and make some client-facing, so people can handle the low-hanging fruit and we spend our time on strategy-focused, higher-ticket clients." Austin: "So we choose team FAQs even though it's lower pain, because it's more frequent — solve it, and the team is empowered to answer for you. Knock over that first domino and the second gets easier or unnecessary. Two birds, one stone. And for research — you could probably switch from Google to Perplexity; they ran a lot of tax-code campaigns this year. Claude also just released a financial toolkit, Claude Finance."

### [01:06:20] Solutions brainstorm — framing — Austin Distel
"Now we solution-dump — sign your name at the bottom of each note. Does this look like a custom GPT his clients access? Claude projects with skills and workflows per client? An internal brain with context in Markdown and Obsidian for his team? A web page — 'talk to AZ' — with a chatbot of him in the corner? These are all ways to skin the same cat. Take five minutes. The problem to solve: we need SOPs and FAQs so the team can solve problems on AZ's behalf." He confirmed AZ's stack: "What's your management software?" AZ: "Nothing yet — well, ClickUp."

### [01:07:56] Solution — Loom SOPs with auto-extraction — Austin Distel
"I've been exactly in your shoes. Your time is the most valuable thing, and what I've found for teams internally and externally is that video is king — walkthroughs are the way. We use Loom. As soon as a recording's done, it has a built-in output that takes the transcript and creates an SOP doc. You get a centralized brain of SOPs where the output is consistent — a video plus a step-by-step in text. Record once, output, move on, and you've built a full database." AZ: "I've used Loom a lot for videos but never the SOP extraction — I'd been looking at Scribe."

### [01:09:09] Solution — company brain, customer portal & redaction — Isaiah Zimmerman
Before leaving early for his son's art show, Isaiah gave an extended contribution: "You want a centralized knowledge base that answers questions for the team and for customers. With something like Comet and access to financial data, you can send out agents — 'go pull the latest tax codes for all 50 states' — and centralize it so that, based on location, a client logs into a customer portal and all their past financial statements are there in a tenant-isolated way. This year, connect them directly to QuickBooks — build the connector straight into your platform with managed OAuth, so you're not chasing admin permissions or redoing connectors every season. Then it can say, 'based on how you filed last year versus how your business changed — you hired two more people, you had an extra hundred grand in write-offs — here's what we suggest.' The software leads them toward a better plan."

On redaction: "One of the most important things — you've probably dealt with this in healthcare — is PII and redaction. Come up with a very well-curated list of what you have to redact before anything aggregates into the system and starts answering client-facing questions." His core advice: "If you're not recording everything you're doing, you're already a lost cause. Record every meeting with clients — tell them, 'this is an internal recording for liability purposes, and it'll always be redacted.' You collect the FAQs naturally, then ask the system, 'out of my last 100 client calls, what FAQs came up? How did we handle them? What did the research look like on the back end?' That foundationally builds your entire company-brain product." He closed with a habit: "Just start over-explaining yourself on transcripts at all times. Assume everyone you're talking to knows nothing — 'okay, now I'm clicking the button on the left side of the screen.' Comprehensively concise is the name of the game."

### [01:13:14] Solution — effort-impact matrix — Austin Distel
"Now we organize the features onto an effort-impact matrix. Ask: what would this look like if it were easy? The elegant solution is the one that makes everything else easier or unnecessary — and ideally solves more than one problem with one simple install. Stay away from high-effort/low-impact. Focus on low-effort/high-impact — the quick wins. Over time, high-effort/high-impact is your moonshot — a moat that takes a while but is worth it."

### [01:15:43] Solution — Loom → Claude skill → Notion — Rohan Karunakaran
"Playing off the SOP idea: record everything with Looms, then take the Loom transcript and link and run it through a Claude skill synced to Notion — so every time you do it, it updates a Notion board the whole team can access. One source of truth — a Notion Kanban where all your SOPs are transcribed, each with its video on its own page. Like Isaiah said, once the heavy lifting of building the FAQs is done, updating them should be easy."

### [01:16:33] Solution — AI voice/SMS inbound + FAQ chatbot — Justin Day
"On the inbound-response side, I'm building something similar — get a phone number, 'pay-tax-AZ 512…' We're using Telnyx, which is really solid. The whole purpose of the AI assistant is full access to the knowledge base so it can answer customer questions — it's all publicly available anyway; we're just the source verifying it, educating people, and directing them to email if they want a human response in 24–48 hours. That same inbox you can sync inside Claude, connect with HubSpot, automate form responses. Take that same knowledge base for SMS and mirror it on your website — as your FAQ page is built, it also displays a chatbot. Keep a separate internal AI chat so your team can query it too: 'here's the SOP for that one question.' Even just getting the phone answered right away with an AI receptionist, versus a two-week delay, captures a lot of conversations." AZ: "When I'm on vacation, I don't want them hitting my personal line." Austin: "What's the primary channel — email, text, phone?" AZ: "Email. Lately when people text me I say, 'for the record, please email.' Gmail's open all day." Austin: "So the problem lives in the email inbox."

### [01:19:48] Solution — win-loss analysis on sales calls — Rohan Karunakaran
"Are you recording your external sales calls? I was interviewing an owner of a large RevOps firm on my podcast — they ran a win-loss analysis on two years of deals, ingested them into a Claude project, and found three criteria that signaled real urgency and much higher win rates. One: a new VP of Marketing or CMO, six months or less into a SaaS company, with a new initiative to lead. Two: they had a RevOps agency that had become a note-taker instead of a strategic growth partner, so they were ready to move on. Three: a SaaS company rolled up a new product line and wanted to spend on ads more efficiently. Once they had those three, they put them in the sales intake form, the BDRs flagged them in early conversations, and it shaped the content strategy on LinkedIn — the whole go-to-market motion was built on the urgency that win-loss analysis surfaced. You're starting to record calls now, so this is one to play out down the road."

### [01:21:52] Solution — recording tools & post-call automation — the room
AZ polled the room: "What's everyone using to record — Otter, Loom?" Answers: **Fathom**, **Granola**, and one member's daily pick — "the Bee — it's about 60 bucks, connects to your phone and computer, and just records everything." A member added the automation layer: "If you get one integrated with an MCP, as soon as the call's done you can run a scheduled workflow — 'take the last hour of transcripts and run this skill,' whether that's updating HubSpot or whatever. It gets you out of copying and pasting and tabbing back and forth." The room riffed on follow-ups: "Have Claude draft the follow-up email — recap it, personalize it — because that's what people want to see, and they don't want to take notes." And keeping drafts in a review folder before anything sends.

### [01:24:17] Solution — brand-voice profiles — the room
A member suggested mining the inbox for tone: "Look at my last 100 sent emails and build a voice profile from how I actually write." Nick pushed back usefully: "The problem is I make my emails sound great for clients, so they don't actually sound like me. In one of my apps I do brand-voice ops — you record spoken answers to prompted questions, it transcribes and catches the little nuances and true personality, then you combine that with something more structured." Justin: "I ran my last 50 Loom transcripts and 200 emails together, because how I speak is different from how I write — it needed to learn how I talk and translate that into where I put a period versus an exclamation point." A running joke about em-dashes: "No em-dashes — first thing I put into custom instructions in every model." AZ: "We have a little HubSpot bot — access to all the emails has given it a brand voice. Sometimes it replies to someone and I think, 'that's exactly what I'd have said.' But it's only looking at emails logged in HubSpot over the last year, so it's scratching the surface. And I have a 100-page Google Doc of SOPs — my mom says, 'I don't know how to find anything.' Command-F only goes so far."

### [01:26:58] Solution — the company brain in Notion, run through Claude — Austin Distel
Austin synthesized: "For his team to get personalized answers instead of asking AZ, he needs SOPs. Those live in Google Docs plus Loom videos today. But easier than recording a bunch of Looms is if the SOPs already exist inside your Fathom calls — you don't have to spend more time; the time is already being spent. And the volume is there across all your clients."

He compared the tools: "I've had Granola running in the background this whole time — great for any in-person meetup. Will and I had coffee this week; I had Granola going and sent him a transcript plus all the to-dos, no video needed. But for a call like this, Fathom is physically part of the meeting and gives you the HD video with the transcript — great for sales calls and for training your team on sales, because you want to see body language on camera. Sometimes you want to go back to the moment we solved a problem, and you want the video for that."

A member raised Fathom's limit: "You won't make a 30-second SOP with Fathom — it needs a Zoom call to hop into. That's why I'd still keep Loom for quick screen walkthroughs." A member added: "I use Loom stills all the time — whenever my receptionist asks how to do something, I send a Loom, and now that's a growing collection; the transcript goes into an archive they can chat with in Claude, and it pulls the Loom link." Rohan: "Loom is great for context, especially explaining something on screen, but it's a snapshot — it doesn't auto-update as the business evolves, whereas a text knowledge base can." AZ: "Right — some of my Looms from 2024 aren't the same steps anymore; the state website changed, or QuickBooks updated."

Austin gave the workflow: "Get Notion — that's what I'd recommend. I never actually touch Notion myself; I have Claude update my Notion docs through its connector. I have a skill called the Notion Project Manager I can share — it's taught to think like a senior project manager, and whenever the keyword 'Notion' comes up, it documents automatically. I just rebuilt the entire website, and at every step it was, 'okay, updating Notion with the analytics number, the meta FAQ, how we set up the ads, making sure every pixel is on every page' — all the things I hate documenting. I use Whisper to talk to Claude — 'hey, update Notion' — just like I'd tell an employee. I use Notion only as documentation: 'give me an update on projects one, two, three,' and if I say 'I completed that,' it moves it in the Kanban. Monday morning, an automated schedule tells me the most important tasks that week. That's how your team communicates with your business brain — all your Fathom calls flow into Notion, Notion gets smarter with every call, and when you need something specific, you record a Loom, which also gets transcribed into Notion."

### [01:34:33] Solution — record everything, solve each problem once — the room
A member added the mindset: "For one-on-ones with your team, record everything. Every problem you solve shouldn't have to be solved again — record the conversation, capture the SOP, A plus B equals C, and feed it back to your team through a chatbot. Even for your own sanity — repeating yourself over and over is one of the worst things to have to do."

### [01:35:16] Solution — privacy: where transcripts live — AZ & Austin
AZ: "When you say record all the Fathoms into Notion — we're on ClickUp, same idea — some conversations I want the whole team to access, some I don't. We have 15 people; not everyone's privy to every conversation. How do you decide where it lives?" Austin: "I keep a specific Claude chat per relationship — for one-on-ones with a team member, a Claude chat just for that person, and I tell it, 'here's the Notion page to append this to.' Any conversation with a given client drops into that client's page in Notion as a sub-page. So you control the privacy and security of each piece of documentation. Fathom also separates personal calls from team calls with different permissions, so there's probably a way to ingest only the team calls."

### [01:37:02] Solution — delegate SOP creation to the team — Erin
Austin: "Who else wants to contribute to freeing up AZ's time?" Erin: "My mother-in-law works for our team too. We have all team members make their *own* SOPs. Whatever system you land on — Loom or whatever — for the next six months make it their initiative: something realistic, like three SOPs a week. They're already in the room understanding 'we use Fathom, we use Loom,' so they're not handed it on a silver platter. Making their own SOPs is a great bite-sized way for them to learn AI — they'll realize, 'oh, this is way easier, I'll use Loom instead of writing a whole Google Doc again.' It puts the onus on them, takes it off you, and gives them a taste of using AI." Austin: "I love that. I'm taking it."

### [01:38:09] Hot Seat — wrap & next step — Austin Distel
"Give AZ a round of applause. My to-do is to turn this into a seven-day action plan — what tools to install, how they connect, and how to solve the two main problems: freeing your time from the team and from client interaction. Start with the team; then in the second half of May we can think about how to bring it to clients."

### [01:39:04] Transition to Show & Tell — Austin Distel
"Next, I'll have Darby join to screen-share — he's going to show how to build a Chief of Staff, an AI inside the Claude ecosystem. Then Justin will show his 'hive mind.' Darby, you've got 15 minutes, and Justin, 15 after that."

### [01:39:31] Bonus insight — build the brain so you can go back to in-person — Rohan Karunakaran
"You know Nat Eliason? Austin-based, active on Twitter — one of the first to build an open Claude setup that created its own marketplace selling skills, and he monetized it well. He made this observation: once you've set up the infrastructure — the note-taking, the company brain, the call recordings — he's actually having *more* in-person meetings and conversations with his team. One, because they're more fun; and two, because now you're recording everything and being intentional about how you articulate things, so the brain just ingests it. So, Isaiah — when you say you want to be on stages and away from the minutiae — it's short-term pain to build the brain and infrastructure so you can do more live stuff that gives you energy, knowing it's enriching the brain the whole time." Isaiah: "A hundred percent. That's what my team wants — me face-to-face — and I keep thinking, 'I need to get back to my inbox.'" Austin: "The whole point of this is to unlock us to have conversations, to be creative, to collaborate — and then the brain takes care of the rest."

### [01:41:08] Close
The room wrapped with some laptop talk — Will's new machine — before Darby's Chief of Staff Show & Tell and Justin's "hive mind" demo, which followed in the room. *(Those demos were screen-shares and aren't substantively captured in the audio transcript; Darby is also slated to present on building an AI Chief of Staff at a future session.)*

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*Attendee-only transcript. Please keep it within the Agentic Society.*