This CEO Spent the Equivalent of $4 Million on an AI Agent to Run His Life

The founder, who has mystified doctors by running on only about two hours of rest per night, built multiple companies, including messaging service onebox.com, which was acquired by phone.com for $850 million in 2000, and Lala, a music-streaming site bought by Apple for a reported $80 million in 2009.

Over the last few years, as AI coding tools improved, Nguyen realized that anyone with a Claude Code account could’ve built “every single company I created in a weekend.”

“What I did in Silicon Valley will not be special in 5, 10 years,” he said. “Everyone can do it.”

Inspired to build his own AI company, he linked up, in 2025, with his son Jacob Nguyen, 22, who attended Georgia Tech with fellow founders McChesney and Drake Kelly. They also brought on Kuch, a longtime colleague of Nguyen’s who had run Lala’s communications. The team camped out in an Atlanta apartment, building an AI tool that they hoped would be more intuitive than a chatbot interface.

The result was Olive, an AI model trained on transcripts of conversations marked up by linguists so that the model could better understand the nuances of human speech. Once you chat back and forth with Olive, the AI can then work with Claude Code to build you software to solve any problems you have. The team gave me access to Olive and their premium Claude Code account. After I got it set up, which took several hours, Olive helped me build a slew of projects: a budget-tracking app, a website that analyzes book ideas, and a website that organizes the articles on which I’m working.

The team has raised $5 million from Georgia Tech and Owl Ventures, and released an app that is currently available to beta users.

After about five months, a nascent Olive was born, promptly becoming a cofounder of sorts. Nguyen and McChesney both speak to the AI agent constantly: Olive now knows them so well that it’ll call them out if it hears they’re not being honest or order them to sleep if their speech starts lagging. Eventually, Nguyen told me with a mischievous grin, Olive started improving itself, writing its own code and pushing over 30,000 updates.

Olive has built products for the team that they never imagined themselves. For example, when Olive learned that Nguyen’s 12-year-old son had trouble pronouncing the letter r, it asked the son to record himself saying a series of words containing r. It then hired a linguist to review the recording and grade how well he was pronouncing the letter. Olive used the linguist’s notes to create an app where the son could say any word containing r, and the app could provide feedback on how accurately he said it.

The app amazed his son, Nguyen said, remembering how he exclaimed, “Oh my God, now I can hear it.”