I'm joined again by Imran Muthuvappa to walk through how to build your own AI Chief of Staff using a tool called Nebula. Imran shows me how to spin up specialized agents that handle the work a real chief of staff would do — surfacing team blockers, tracking project status, holding people accountable to offsite vision goals, running daily agenda briefings, and prospecting ICP leads. We also get into mini apps, model selection for cost efficiency, and why personal software is becoming a real category. By the end, the takeaway is clear: every role now has a "work on the job" component where you supervise yourself and offload tasks to agents.
Links Mentioned:
Try Nebula: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/nebula
Precall Agent: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/precall-agent
Project Status Agent: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/project-status-agent
Lead Gen Agent: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/lead-gen-agent
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
02:13 – What is Nebula
02:54 – What an AI Chief of Staff Actually Does
4:26 – Nebula vs OpenClaw vs Hermes
06:09 – Building the Blockage Radar Agent
09:47 – Agent Features
12:04 – Choosing Cheaper Models for Simple Tasks
13:15 – Building Project Status Agent
13:53 – Connecting Tools to Agents
17:38 – Building Vision Tracker Agent
22:07 – Mini Apps and Personal Software as a New Paradigm
25:13 – Building a Daily Agenda Agent and Second Brain Integration
30:25 – Hours Saved vs. Anxiety Reduced for Founders
33:02 – Building the Lead Gen Prospector Agent
39:19 – Final Thoughts: Automate Three to Five Things
Key Points
An AI Chief of Staff handles the boring executive support work — calendar, email, LinkedIn, project status — so a human can focus on decisions.
Nebula lets you build, deploy, and share custom agents through a Slack-like interface, where each agent has its own goals, tools, and system prompt.
Voice input via SuperWhisper or WhisperFlow gets you to roughly 150 words per minute, which Imran calls the biggest productivity lift available right now.
Cheaper models like the Nebula model handle most chief-of-staff tasks well — reserve frontier models like Opus or Sonnet for deep coding or reasoning work.
Mini apps inside Nebula are spinnable web dashboards that connect back to your agents — a glimpse of personal software replacing off-the-shelf tools.
The new skill is judgment: picking which three to five things to automate out of your week.
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The Startup Ideas Podcast 