What does a founder need in place before AI agents can run part of the business?

Vlad Podoliako, founder of Belkins, says the founder has to lead the change and build the memory first, or every agent starts cold.

Two things, according to Vlad Podoliako: the founder leading it personally, and a memory the agents can draw on. He says the founder is the only person who holds all of the company's knowledge, so the change starts with them. And an agent that has to be told everything from scratch each time isn't worth building, in his view. Memory comes first.

Vlad co-founded Belkins in 2017 and says he's run it for ten years. By his count he now has about sixteen companies, some that added AI to how they already worked and some built on AI from day one. I asked him how he brings agents into a company, what works and where it breaks.

Who has to lead the move to AI?

The founder. Vlad was blunt about this, and he said it applies whether the company is new or ten years old.

You need to comprehend that only one person who can get this done is you.

Vlad Podoliako, 24:06

His reasoning is that you built the company, you met the people, you hold the context. It will take your time and energy. Nobody else can decide what the next step is, because nobody else knows the whole business.

When I asked whether his companies were built on AI from the start or had AI added later, he said he has both. What surprised me was his next point. The foundation is pretty similar either way. The difference shows up later, in how much the business depends on what the agents remember. That's a relief for owners who didn't start with AI. You aren't behind on the part that matters most, because in both cases it starts with you deciding what the company knows and writing it down.

Where should you start automating?

With your own week. Vlad says the first question is what's stealing your time: being stuck in email, stuck in the calendar, buried in research or reading stacks of PDFs. He tells founders to start using AI tools on their own work and find out what they can take off their plate.

Once you've freed up your own time, you have a working example. That's what lets you help others use AI more naturally, he says, and that's what an AI-forward company needs: people who approach work differently. The usual enemy is bureaucracy. Bigger companies in particular get stuck in piles of tools and approvals, and in his words that kills progress.

I'd add one thing from our side. Pick the first job for an agent the same way Vlad picks his own tasks. Start with the work that eats hours and needs no judgment, and keep a person on anything that does.

Why does memory matter more than the model?

Because without it, every agent starts cold. This was the heart of Vlad's answer for companies built on AI. He says he's built an extensive memory system out of his own knowledge, one that follows the same logic and patterns his thinking does, so the agents working across sales, marketing, legal and the rest already know what he knows.

I don't want to build a company or build an agent that always starting everything from scratch. We call it cold invocation of the agent.

Vlad Podoliako, 27:09

The alternative is explaining yourself every time: I'm building this, for this reason, in this way. Vlad says the memory about you, what you've built and what you know should already be stored. With that in place, he says he can run a hundred things at once without the quality slipping. Without it, in his opinion, building on agents doesn't make any sense.

We call this the company brain, or the co-CEO. You write down your beliefs, your vision, your values, your boundaries, how you work and what you want to earn, and it lives in one place the agents read from. What surprised me when I built mine is that it remembers what I said three or four weeks ago, things I'd forgotten, and brings them back to me in my morning briefing.

How does memory keep a founder from drowning in information?

It lets you stop carrying everything in your head without losing any of it. Vlad described the flood: newsletters, the news, markets, what his team is doing, what he's building, his personal life. If he tried to hold all of it, he said, he'd explode.

His fix is the same thing he did with people at Belkins, pointed at a new kind of helper. You hand the load to a person you trust, or to agents that know your knowledge and experience. Either way you free up your thinking without forgetting.

Hundred percent memory is the key here.

Vlad Podoliako, 29:59

Which work should stay human?

Selling, for Vlad. He's spent fifteen years in sales, sales tech and marketing tech, and he doesn't think a buyer will sit through an AI pitch.

It's just impossible to someone to listen a robot for like one hour of listening to pitch something for them to buy. That's ridiculous. No one will do that.

Vlad Podoliako, 24:06

People need to speak to people, he said. Other functions are more open to agents. That matches what I see. Agents do well on the work behind a relationship, like research, follow-ups, scheduling and reporting. The conversation where someone decides to trust you with their money still belongs to a person.

What does a founder get back?

Time to build what excites them. I told Vlad that before AI I'd never have believed anyone could run sixteen businesses. Now I believe that kind of reach is open to an ordinary owner, and I say that as someone who works three days a week.

Vlad's parting advice was not to be afraid to create what's in your head, even if it sounds stupid out loud. Nobody can promise how it turns out. What matters, he said, is doing what excites you and what you love. If you want to see what an agent is before building your first one, start with what an AI agent actually is.

Cut from You’re the Bottleneck: How AI Is Changing Delegation for Founders.