# Everyone Gets A Software Company โ€” Benjamin Guo, Zo Computer AI Engineer ยท 2026-09-03 Zo Computer cofounder Ben Guo argues people have lost their home on the internet to technofeudalism, paying rent to SaaS, cloud and chip providers like Nvidia while their data sits in silos they don't control. His answer is Zo, a personal cloud server with AI built in, for hosting sites, APIs and agents. He cites non-technical users: Charlotte, a private chef and life coach running her business on Zo, and Anthia, a free diving instructor on track to make $100,000 after canceling Squarespace, Calendly and other SaaS, calling leads at the moment of intent to close deals. A demo shows any-model chat, files, automations and a built-in browser; he closes arguing Claude Tag's intelligence bubbles up to Anthropic โ€” 'intelligence feudalism' โ€” when agents should be owned and self-improve by their publishers. ## Questions this episode answers ### What is Zo Computer and what does it do? Zo is a personal cloud server with AI built in. Ben Guo describes it as a home on the internet where you host websites, files, and services, replacing separate SaaS subscriptions with one owned system. [4:59](https://aiengineer.podhood.com/d134c2e7-fdfb-4d8e-9fcf-f1a6dca1cd2a?t=299000) ### Why does Ben Guo say we are living under technofeudalism? He argues consumers pay rent upward to SaaS providers and cloud kings who lock in their data, so people are peasants on platforms they don't own, and he wants to give them ownership instead. [3:41](https://aiengineer.podhood.com/d134c2e7-fdfb-4d8e-9fcf-f1a6dca1cd2a?t=221000) ### How did Anthia use Zo to run her business? Anthia replaced her SaaS stack with Zo, hosting her retreat website and taking payments through it. Guo says she texts her Zo payment links, closes deals on the spot, and books more revenue than before. [7:14](https://aiengineer.podhood.com/d134c2e7-fdfb-4d8e-9fcf-f1a6dca1cd2a?t=434000) ### What does Ben Guo say about Claude Tag and cloud agents? He says Claude Tag is a cloud agent whose intelligence bubbles up to Anthropic rather than the user, and he believes the future should let people own their agents and their intelligence directly. [13:03](https://aiengineer.podhood.com/d134c2e7-fdfb-4d8e-9fcf-f1a6dca1cd2a?t=783000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Intro** - [0:13] Why Zo Computer's founder built a personal cloud instead of another SaaS - [0:50] Charlotte's story: replacing a SaaS stack with one owned workspace - **[1:15] Venmo to Stripe** - **[1:36] The Finder icon** - [1:36] Anthia's retreat business: from scattered tools to one owned server - **[2:18] Losing our computers** - [2:31] Why 'owning your stack' beats renting it - **[3:26] Technofeudalism** - [3:31] The feudalism analogy: are you a user or a peasant? - **[4:34] Charlotte's case** - [4:41] Agents change the stack: who holds the keys? - **[5:02] Personal cloud** - [6:01] Owning the interface: the case against rented software - **[7:12] Anthia's story** - [7:21] What a personal cloud looks like in practice - [8:41] Data ownership as the real moat - [10:11] Agents that act, not just answer - **[10:14] Product demo** - [11:41] Where personal clouds beat Big Tech defaults - **[11:57] Cloud agents** - [13:11] The future: everyone runs their own server? - **[13:36] Intelligence feudalism** - **[14:03] Owning agents** ## Speakers - **Ben** (guest) ## Topics AI Infrastructure ## Mentioned Stripe (company), Venmo (company), Calendly (product), Squarespace (product), Zo (product) ## Transcript ### Intro **Ben** [0:13] Hello everybody, I'm Ben from Zo Computer. I just posted on X from my Zo, uh, you know, I'll be giving away $100 in AI credits, and I do all sorts of stuff with my Zo. This is my computer, my Zo is my computer, and before I get started, I made the site just now while I was waiting to get started presenting. This is a kind of overview of all the speakers in today's claw session. You can scan this QR code and check it out. I've got some useful links in here, but also I've got, like, some deep research on everybody presenting, including their recent thoughts, links to their profiles, and websites, blogs, etc. So scan this, it's super useful. I just made it just now. This is my computer that you seeright here, my Zo Computer. I'll be talking about it, and this talk is about, kind of, Zo and a lot of things. It's also about, kind of, personal agents, personal cloud agents in particular, which Zo is one instance of, and kind of the future and where I see all of this going. So, a little bit about me. I'm the co-founder of Zo. ### Venmo to Stripe **Ben** [1:15] My name is Ben. I started my career on the early Venmo team back in 2013, and, um, I met my co-founder Rob at Venmo, and I left Venmo to work at Stripe quite early. I was one of the first, I was the 80th engineer. And my co-founder Rob, he went on to build Substack, he was the first engineer there. And a final fact about me, as you can see, is that I really love computers. I'm dressed up as a computer. And I like to start with this, like, fun fact about this Finder icon. ### The Finder icon **Ben** [1:44] So this icon was designed by Susan Care, an early graphic designer at Apple Computer. And many people don't know the story behind this icon, but it actually represents the human, this white face, and the machine, this blue face, and they're kind of, like, in happy harmony. And I think that is what we should aspire to as we build AI tools for people. Like, humans love tools, humans have always loved machines, and, like, when we feel at one with our machine, we feel like this, we feel happy. So who, like me, misses the way that computers used to feel? Raise your hand. Right? Like the early internet, like your first website, your first PC,right, it used to feel different,right? Today, the internet and our computers feels more like this. ### Losing our computers **Ben** [2:31] We are swimming in the sea of applications and sites and services, and it's not great. And on top of all of that, they're jacking up the prices on these things that we use, often because of AI features that we didn't ask for. And I think, quite reasonably, consumers, or I'll just call them regular people, are upset or confused or scared of AI. Zo Computer is based in Brooklyn. We're in Bushwick, actually, kind of like the heart of hipsters in New York, and, you know, uh, there's a lot of this out there. I see a lot of this kind of vandalism over AI ads in the city. On top of all of that, this is what our industry looks like. But the deeper root of why this is bad is, is a structural thing. It's what we call technofeudalism. So basically, feudalism was this, like, kind of shitty system back in the day, and though it no longer exists, it still is alive and well in our digital lives. ### Technofeudalism **Ben** [3:37] So we are still the peasants. We pay rent to the SaaS providers who pay rent to the cloud providers who pay rent to the kings who are, you know, like probably Nvidia these days. And because we are peasants, our lives are shitty. We are fragmented between all these different tools. There are various services that we use that lock us in and, and shitify over time. Like, that PM at that product that you use is not incentivized to make your life better. They're incentivized to improve their bottom line, to monetize your attention, to take your data, lock it in, and sell it back to you. And because you don't own anything, you are a peasant. So Zo, our mission, has always been to solve this by giving people a real home on the internet. And we believe that most people in the world are kind of living in the matrix, and we're trying to show people a better way. So Zo is alive and well. We've been out for about a year, and real people are using it. Real, regular people like Charlotte, this LA-based private chef and life coach. She hosts her websites. She has multiple websites now on Zo. ### Charlotte's case **Ben** [4:47] Zo manages her invoices and her accounts and bookkeeping and her scheduling and her notes, and it's just, like, an amazing system. It makes her feel, like, clear and calm and on top of the world, and it's fucking fun, as you can see this text that she sent me. ### Personal cloud **Ben** [5:03] So what is Zo? Zo is a personal cloud. We've never really had a personal cloud before, but it's quite simple. You have your own home in the cloud. You're not using other cloud services. You have your own thing. You put your stuff in it. You put your AI in it. And because it is a place in the cloud, you can host stuff in it. You can host services like websites or APIs, and they're all yours. And I think for people in this room, if you're, like, interested in clouds and personal agents, like, your personal cloud might look something more like this. You might have, like, a suite of local devices. Um, and for me, I have, like, this, like, Zo Computer, this, like, cloud computer as well, which has my Zo agent on it. It also has a Hermes on it, and it has my services. I have many websites and APIs and things that I've built all hosted in the same place, and it can also talk to my laptop or my Mac mini, or I can use it on my phone. And that, collectively, is my personal cloud. So Zo is a personal server with AI built in. It's, it's quite simple. And it hearkens back to a simpler time. So back in the day, this is actually how we built and hosted websites. We just FTP'd our files onto a server, and that updated our website. You were just shipping to prod. You were, like, always doing it live. And that's actually, I think, how most people should build. I don't think it's necessary for a regular person like Charlotte to think about deployment. Unfortunately for many of us in this room, this is probably what your life looks like, actually. You're kind of just navigating between these different AIs and devices and SaaS services, and it's very confusing. Zo is meant to be a simpler way. It's one place for all of your stuff and your AI and the stuff you host, all of your personal stuff, in the cloud. Here's another case study that we'd like to talk about. This is Anthia. She was one of our early users. She's totally non-technical. She's a free diving instructor, and she's already on track to make $100,000 on Zo. She used to use all of these different SaaS services to run her business and her life, like Squarespace, like Calendly, etc. ### Anthia's story **Ben** [7:24] And now she's replaced all of that with Zo. She's canceled all of those SaaS subscriptions. She is no longer a peasant. Anthia went from this, kind of, being very confused and having her data in all of these different SaaS silos and not really being able to connect them very easily, to this. So Anthia not only hosts her retreat website on Zo on a custom domain, she has many different websites now. She has her personal workspace that looks like this. She's really into fairies and, like, drawing and mushrooms, and she's, like, expressing her whole self and her creativity online in this new way that we kind of really haven't had as regular people for a long time, since, like, the '90s. And under the hood, like, all of those sites are just the tip of the iceberg. So when Anthia gets somebody who's interested in a retreat, Zo texts her with their number. Anthia now immediately calls them at that moment of intent to buy. She texts her Zo, "Give me a payment link," and she closes the dealright then and there. And that is how she is actually booking much more revenue than before with these retreats. Like, retreats are now, like, actually kind of hard to book because there's too much demand. And that's amazing. And under the hood, she has a database for all of her retreats. She doesn't really know what a database is, but she has one. She has all of her notes, all of her accounting, and it's all in one place. If she has, like, some images from a retreat and she wants to put those on her website, she just tells her Zo to do it, and it's, like,right there. She can, like, host files directly from her personal server, and she is self-hosting everything. So Zo is made to be simple enough for anyone, for people like Anthia, for my parents, for other people's parents. People are always telling me on, like, LinkedIn or X that, like, they signed up their parent for their parents to Zo, and their parents were, like, vibe coding up a storm, which is awesome to see. I just got this message on LinkedIn the other day. Our caterer uses Zo, um, to kind of manage the staff at his restaurant. Our recruiter uses Zo as well. He's really into it, and he's, like, kind of building a whole he's, like, rebuilding his whole stack for his recruiting agency on Zo. Our marketing agency has become Zo Build. So it's made for everybody, but it's also powerful enough for the audience in this room. It can be the home for your open claw or your Hermes. You can have a really nicely set up server to host your personal agent in if you use one of those tools. You can bring your Codex or Gemini or, etc., subscriptions, and you can build and host anything. You have, like, root access to your own server to this very nicely set up Linux VM where, like, the networking is also, like, very well set up, and you don't really have to worry about any of it. You can SSH in, and you can control your Zo via API or MCP, so very flexible. So scan this QR code if you haven't yet, uh, to get $100 in AI credits. Um, just try Zo. I, I think you'll like it. And I'm going to do a little demo, and then I'll have a little bit more to talk about after that. Um, so really quick demo of Zo. You already saw it in the beginning, but Zo is this, like, nice kind of cloud workspace. ### Product demo **Ben** [10:26] I made this website just now. I make all sorts of websites on the fly. Um, you can chat with really any model, as I mentioned. You can bring your own API key. You can even talk to Claude code in here. You've got this nice file system. Built-in cloud storage because it's your server. You can just, like, use it as a Dropbox. Um, and, you know, you can obviously, like, work agentically in the chat with any of your files. You've got automations, so you can kind of run tasks on a schedule with AI. You've got tons of built-in integrations, so you don't have to set any of this up. We have lots of skills, a large skill library. There's a built-in browser, so you can log into sites and let your Zo, like, buy things for you or do whatever. I actually, I always text my Zo these days to buy stuff on Amazon. It's, like, really dangerous for impulse purchasing. I, like, see something, I'm like, "Let's buy it." Um, and as I mentioned, you can host stuff. So you can really host anything, any arbitrary service, HTTP or TCP. And we also give you a really nice built-in personal website. This is my Zo space, and this is all set up nicely, and it's got, like, you know, nice kind of, like, vibe coding features, um, and you can just chat with it to edit it. And I've built all sorts of cool things inside of here. Um, this, for example, is, like, my Calendly replacement. People can book time with me, and it has just, like, this custom setup that I like. Um, and my Zo can, like, review the people that are interested. I don't want anybody, like, booking time with me directly. Um, so that's kind of, like, what Zo is. And I want to conclude by just talking a little bit about the future. So the reason we're building Zo is to build a future and better internet, one that looks more like this, where everybody, every individual has a real home, a presence on the internet. ### Cloud agents **Ben** [12:06] And companies already have this, but, like, we should interact directly with other people on the internet without middlemen, and we should also interact with, like, the various companies and their AIs. Um, and it should be, like, more direct. Another way to look at this is that, like, in the future, we will probably just be interacting mostly with agents, and the agents will kind of interact with the cloud, like these, like, software 1.0 things, like websites and APIs. But if you dig a little deeper into here, what's probably actually going to happen is that most of these agents that we interact with will also be in the cloud. Some of them will be local, but many of them will be in the cloud. And when those agents are in the cloud, the question again is, like, whose cloud is it? So Claude Tag is newly out, and, and Claude Tag is actually, if you think about it, a cloud agent. It's this, like, cloud Claude. It's, like, a company-level Claude that has, like, all of the company's context, and anybody can interact with it. And, you know, it's, it's an interesting and very, like, ergonomic model. Town and Victor are also kind of similar instances of this. But the problem with Claude Tag is, is this. Whose cloud is it? Whose Claude is it? It's not really your company's Claude. And as you kind of improve your Claude Tag setup, like, what really improves is Anthropic,right? Like, the, the arrow is pointing the wrong way. And this is intelligence feudalism. The intelligence now is bubbling up the wrong way, and you are still a peasant again, or your company is still kind of a, a peasant in a way. And at Zo, we believe really strongly in changing the way that things work and giving people and companies more ownership over their cloud and over their intelligence. ### Owning agents **Ben** [14:03] So we believe that the future should actually look more like this. Anybody, a company or an individual should be able to publish agents and own them and have end users and, like, have the end usage of their agent improve, like, self-improve their own kind of published agent. And that is the future that we're building. We have a kind of beta version of this. So, um, I'm going to go back to, to this Zo space, uh, and scan this QR code finally if you want to talk to me, get AI credits, sign up for the beta of this kind of new agent publishing platform, and, uh, yeah, also you can check out all of the speakers that are presenting on this Zo space page. Um, I'm Ben from Zo Computer. Thank you. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.