Amigo

YC's latest request for startups list is out, and it lists "AI Personal Staff" for everyone - this is precisely what Amigo enables. "The world's richest people employ lots of human staff to provide personal services. These are things like tax accountants, personal lawyers, and money managers, but also personal trainers, private tutors, and even personal doctors. The list goes on and on. Why can only the rich afford this? Because software hasn’t been able to replace these types of personalized knowledge work tasks…until now..." Amigo's long-term vision is to enable this future by helping the world's experts create a digital version of themselves that they can offer to their clients for a fraction of the cost. Imagine having the world's best therapist, coach, lawyer in your pocket, 24/7.

A quote I received last night from a user who is paying for a coach's Amigo Clone. She has had 4 coaching sessions in the last 10 days - these would have normally cost her $1400 USD, but now she pays only $20. This is the inevitable future. Really makes my 15 hour days feel worth it :)

A confession... I actually don't love some of the Amigo clones we've built 😐 But that's exactly why Amigo works. There's a reason there are 1M+ expert service providers out there. There's a huge amount of variance and uniqueness - based on lived experiences, style, and structure. Whether you vibe with a coach or therapist or not is entirely dependent on this variance existing. If all our Amigo clones felt the same, what would be the point? One of our angel investors told us he invested because he had never talked to an AI system that "annoyed" him before. While most AI aims to please users at all costs, we're focused on capturing each expert's true style - whether that works for you or not.

Excited to welcome our newest team member, Mika A. to our GTM team - he will be working closely with our customers to help them build and launch their Amigo (the AI version of themselves) into the world. Prior to joining us, Mika was at C3, where he worked AI-powered sustainability products that generated $25M in revenue. He has also spent time building several consumer AI products that have reached thousands of users globally. Super excited to have him join us 🙂!

When we built V1 of Amigo , we thought nailing the tone and language was everything. But we were very wrong. Turns out, the structure and framework of a conversation matters WAY more. No coach or consultant ever just spends the sessions answering questions. If you talk to 10 exec coaches or consultants, each has their own playbook. That's a lot of uniqueness from person to person. Our tech stack at the time couldn't capture this. We were building on top of existing AI orchestration layers, which just wasn’t giving us the control we needed over our Amigos. So we threw out our architecture and rebuilt it from scratch. This time, not just to sound like that person, but to actually behave, reason, and use context exactly like them. Our philosophy: if you're going to replicate someone's expertise, you better capture what actually makes them exceptional 🤷 If you're a service professional who wants to scale your business using a digital version of yourself, my DMs are open!

I recently asked one of our users about the smallest thing they've ever talked to their Amigo about 👀 "A Facebook comment annoyed me once, so I had a session about it." They would never bring this up with their human coach or therapist - why waste part of a $300/hour session on something so small? But with unlimited access, they can come in for everything. Every small annoyance, every little thing that irks them. This perfectly captures what happens when you remove the cost-per-session barrier. You no longer ask: - "Is this important enough to bring up?" - "Can this wait until next session?" - "Is this worth the time?" No problem is too small. No conversation is too trivial.

The concept of building your digital brain is exciting...until you wonder who actually owns it? So let me break down exactly how we handle this at Amigo: Your content is your IP. Period. When you train an Amigo, everything you input remains yours forever. We're simply licensing it to build YOUR digital brain. Your Amigo is also 100% yours. Here's what this means in practice: you can pause it, delete it, or export it anytime. No one except you can monetize it. That would defeat the entire point of what we're building. We win by being your partner, not by owning your IP. You focus on growing your business, we'll handle the infrastructure 💪

Excited to welcome our newest team member, Tony Shi, who will be responsible for working with our customers, helping them build and launch their Amigo (their digital twin) into the world. Prior to joining us, Tony was the founding Product Manager at Sensible, an enterprise LLM document extraction platform, where he helped 5x to 7-figure ARR! Super excited to have him 🙂

I love being an early adopter, so I decided to make a coaching clone. My goal was straightforward and challenging: How could I harness the power of AI to offer personalized coaching at scale? Over several months, I trained a variety of GPTs, meticulously shaping their outputs to deliver meaningful, structured, and tailored coaching conversations. But despite my best efforts, something was missing. I didn’t want my AI to simply replicate what I know; I wanted it to capture the nuances of my coaching style—integrating my proven methodologies and personal approach to problem-solving—to co-create transformative client experiences. Find out how I did it, and how you can try AskSherri for free! Link in comments!

Announcing the 2025 GSV Cup 50! 🎉 The GSV Cup, presented by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and GSV Ventures, recognizes the world’s most innovative digital learning and workforce skills startups. More than just an award, the GSV Cup champions pre-seed and seed-stage companies that are poised to make an outsized impact on the global education and skills landscape. The GSV Cup 50 are front and center at the ASU+GSV Summit, with unparalleled opportunities to present and demo their solutions for those eager to discover, collaborate with, and support the next wave of innovation. After the most competitive GSV Cup yet with over 1,900 nominations from around the world, we’re proud to unveil the 50 visionary startups that are enabling, advancing, and revolutionizing Learning at the Speed of Light across the entire “PreK to Gray” spectrum. Join us in congratulating the 2025 GSV Cup 50, and don’t miss your chance to see them in action on GSV Cup Demo Day at the 2025 ASU+GSV Summit—April 6-9 in San Diego! https://lnkd.in/g39sRWx Amigo, Atypical AI, Avoca, Axio AI, Bloom, Boddle Learning, BrightBee, Brisk Teaching, Careerflow.ai, Cerebry, Class Companion, Coconote, Doowii, Inc, Ed Machina, Eddi, Ednition, Emversity, Fizz, Flint, Gizmo, Glasp, GrowthSchool, Heeyo.ai, Hoogly, Kollegio, Lightscreen AI (YC F24), Ludenso, Lyssn, Masters' Union, Mentava, Mesa School of Business, mytalents.ai, Outsmart College, Paloma, Praxis AI, Puzzicle, Quizard AI, SchoolAI, Schoolytics, SigIQ, Sizzle AI, Skillfully, Snorkl, Solvely.ai, Stimuler, Toko, Training All People, Unriddle, Upsmith, and Woolf. #GSVCup50