AI Agents for Founders, with Jake Schincariol

Founders Only Club is a private, vetted community of 600+ founders, investors, and creators. Members connect year-round through Premium membership, then deepen relationships at curated retreats and small-group Experiences.

On October 27, 2026, Eric Hinman hosted Jake Schincariol for the Founders Only monthly live call. Jake specializes in agentic infrastructure and automation. He exited his first business at 23 and now works with founders and their teams on AI fluency, strategy and adoption. The call ran in two segments: agents for your personal life, then agents to run and grow your business, followed by open member Q&A.

What an AI agent actually is

Jake started with the agentic loop. You give an agent a goal, it plans, takes actions behind the scenes, checks its work against your criteria, and keeps looping until the job is done. Newer agents run continuously, so you no longer have to re-prompt them at every step, which opens the door to more complex work.

He compared these tools to cars and to new hires. Neither is useful until it is set up properly. An agent harness, in his breakdown, has a few core parts:

• The application harness, the app the agent lives in
• Context, everything the agent knows about you
• Connectors, the bridges into apps like Gmail, Google Drive and Instagram
• Skills, your standard operating procedures written down for the agent

Context and skills: onboard it like a new hire

Agents start with no idea who you are. As Jake put it, "the easiest way to make sure they're aligned with your mission is by giving them exactly who you are, what you want to do, how you speak, how you act, your typical workflows." He suggested dictating that background with a tool like Wispr Flow.

Skills are how you stop repeating yourself. His method: do the workflow manually once with the agent, codify it into steps, then tell the tool to save it as a skill. From then on, the monotonous task follows your SOP every time.

Segment 1: agents for your personal life

Jake laid out four steps to set up a personal agent:

1. Pick an app, such as Instinct, Muse or ChatGPT
2. Connect your apps during onboarding, starting read-only
3. Brief it on who you are and how you work
4. Set rules, like asking before paying, sending or calling

He recommended treating the first week as a trial, and he called the morning brief the best place to start. A morning brief prompt scans your inbox, calendar and Slack, catches what you missed, and lays out your priorities for the day.

Other personal use cases he covered:

• Logging ideas by phone dictation so nothing gets lost
• Watching receipts for subscriptions you do not recognize, so you can keep or cancel them
• Travel. Jake shared that his agent caught a 50 minute layover he had booked by mistake, flagged it, contacted the airline and changed his flight while he was out for a run. "It works exactly like a VA would to make sure your schedule actually makes sense," he said.

Eric added his own experience: Muse helped him book bike rentals while he was in Spain, and it built an athlete resume from his Instagram and race results going back to 2009 for future posts.

Content and personal brand on autopilot

For personal branding, Jake suggested Grok Bot on X for SaaS products and Muse on Instagram for educational content. He said Muse helped him gain around 100,000 Instagram followers in about four months.

The Instagram workflow he described:

• Muse finds outlier videos in your niche and writes short form scripts aligned with your brand pillars
• It can publish to Instagram from Google Drive or Dropbox, from raw footage through to carousels with text overlays
• It can manage DMs, qualify inbound leads against criteria you set, log them in a CRM and send booking links

Segment 2: agents to run and grow your business

Jake shifted from assistants to operators, agents you hand a full process to rather than a single request. His rule for work agents is escalating permissions: start with manual reviews and read-only access, then grant write access only once you trust the output.

Business workflows he walked through:

• Team routing. Agents watch inboxes and route tickets or collaboration requests to the right person in Slack.
• Outbound prospecting. Claude can scrape local service businesses like plumbers, run visibility audits and draft custom outreach emails for your review.
• Email marketing. Grok Bot or Claude can study competitors' winning emails, build campaigns in Klaviyo and set up A/B tests.
• Meta ads. Claude or Muse can review the Meta Ad Library, write briefs, generate new assets with Higgsfield and save them to Google Drive.
• Video editing. Claude Code or Codex can take raw footage, match a reference editing style and automate short and long form edits.
• Landing pages and SEO. Connected to PostHog, Codex or Claude can track visitor behavior, run split tests and improve landing pages. Claude Code can also review Google Search Console keywords and write SEO blogs in your voice.

One second brain across every tool

Eric asked the question many members had: how do you manage several AI subscriptions without losing context? Jake's answer was a second brain in Notion that every agent connects to. One tool researches competitor ads and saves them to Notion, another generates assets from that research, and a third publishes the result.

He also advised picking subscriptions by priority, for example Muse for social growth paired with Claude or ChatGPT for development work. Eric and Jake agreed that keeping your prompts and skills in Notion makes you model agnostic if the underlying AI providers change.

Member Q&A highlights

Getting off vibe coding platforms. A member asked about moving off Base44. Jake recommended doing it quickly, since these tools resell Claude or ChatGPT underneath and throttle prompts. His path: download your files, spin the project up locally in Claude or Codex, and deploy it to a URL through Vercel.

What to budget. Jake recommended $100 to $300 a month for AI subscriptions and framed it against hiring: "you'd probably spend anywhere from like 5 to 10 grand a month on a new hire for a specific task."

Organizing a messy camera roll. You do not need to sort folders first. Give the agent context like date ranges for a specific race or event, connect Google Photos or Dropbox, and it can pull the right media. Prompts can also lock in brand fonts and overlay rules.

When an agent overwrites files. One member had Claude Code overwrite desktop files. Jake's fix was to turn on manual approval in the permission settings so the agent asks before changing anything.

Where to start with implementation. Jake described his order of operations: audit where your time goes, map the workflows, test them, then fully automate.

Key takeaways

1. An agent is a loop of plan, act and check. Give it a clear goal and clear criteria for done.
2. Context is everything. Brief your agent like a new hire on who you are, how you speak and how you work.
3. Turn repeat workflows into skills. Do it once by hand, then save it as an SOP.
4. Start with a morning brief and treat week one as a trial.
5. Escalate permissions slowly. Read-only first, write access once you trust it, and manual approval for anything risky.
6. Use a shared second brain in Notion so context carries across every tool and survives model changes.
7. Benchmark AI spend against a hire. Jake's range is $100 to $300 a month.

Join the next conversation

Founders Only live calls are part of membership: monthly conversations with operators like Jake, plus open Q&A where members bring real questions and get real answers. The next live call is Tuesday, November 10.

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