Imagine a company with no human staff, founded and run solely by an AI agent. It sounds like the stuff of sci-fi, but this is a vision of the future that former Monzo co-founder Jonas Templestein is now working to bring into existance.
Templestein quit Monzo in December 2022 to found a new startup, Nustom, with the aim of building generative AI coding tools for SaaS products.
Now, eight months down the line, the firm is pivoting away from its initial business model to instead create its own startups using AI.
The first product off the production line is garple, which creates domain names for new companies.
Templestein decribes this as a Level 2 startup where "people might ask AI agents to write software from a plain-English spec or tell it execute well-defined customer service processes. At this point entire departments (like support or QA) get largely replaced by AI".
Further down the line, Templestein posits the ultimate in evolved startups, in which AI agents decide which businesses to start, raise capital (through crypto tokens or other means), and then build and run them independently.
"No humans required," he says. "This would require major reforms in the legal and financial system."
The position has been backed by former Monzo chief Tom Blomfield, writing on X:
Templestein's perspective is already being pondered by the likes of BNPL giant Klarna which has trimmed hundreds of jobs from its workforce and vowed to stop hiring humans amid claims that "AI can now perform all of the jobs".
Klarna chief Sebtastian Siemiatkowski says that he is not immune from the rise of the robots, reasoning in a lengthy post on X that he could easily be replaced by an AI agent.
"I am not necessarily super excited about this," admits Siemiatkowski. "On the contrary my work to me is a super important part of who I am, and realizing it might become unnecessary is gloomy. But I also believe we need to be honest with what we think will happen. And I would rather learn and explore than pretend it does not exist."