My son starts kindergarten in a few weeks. There is a list of school supplies, there are lunches to figure out, and somewhere in there a first-day meltdown I can already see coming.

August is my favorite month. My birthday is on the 11th, and it is kind of your second chance at summer. June goes by too fast, July is BBQs and being away somewhere, and then you are wondering where your summer went. Lucky for you, there is still a month left.

But August is also back to school. Not just supplies but also systems to be created. Ways to be a little more efficient before September hits. And it can get overwhelming to manage on top of everything else.

You have a team at work or at school. You and your partner or your family probably call yourselves a team. So what if you had one more, a virtual one, that you built yourself and can turn to whenever you are not sure what is next.

You don't hire one person to run a whole company. Even solo, you lean on a few people. Someone in operations. Someone good with numbers. Someone who tells you the truth. And if we are dreaming, a Wendy Rhoades on retainer (😉 to my Billions fans).

So why build a team when you can just ask AI a question and get solid advice?

Fair. Here is the catch. AI is built to hand you the safest, most common answer. Ask a general question and you get the middle of everything it has ever read.

Give it a role and that changes. A persona with one job, a point of view, and instructions for working with the others. You can shape its point of view by telling it which books it should have read, or what life philosophy it should work from.

You are not asking for better answers. You are deciding who is answering.

So before you build your team, think about what you want them working from. The books you would hand a new hire. The way you like decisions made. The principles you actually live by, not the ones that sound good.

Here is how to build yours. Paste this into a regular chat, then make it yours:

That gives you a markdown file. Read it, cut what does not sound like you, add what is missing. That file is your team.

Not sure what yours should look like? Here is a template of mine: virtual-team-template.md

Great, so you picked your people. What's next? We need to give them somewhere to work. They need an office.

What I am about to explain is very simple. There are fancier and more expensive ways to run a team of agents, but the goal here is for everyone to have a virtual team regardless of how comfortable you are with AI. The simplest way, and the one that won't cost you anything, is to put them in a project.

A project in an AI tool is a folder that remembers. You set the instructions once, and every conversation you start inside it already knows who your team is. Claude and ChatGPT call these projects. In Gemini it is a Gem.

You are making one project called My Virtual Team, or whatever name makes you smile, and pasting in the instructions you just generated. After that, anytime you need your team, you open the project and ask.

Here is what mine looks like:

See that About Me file. If you have not introduced yourself to your AI tool yet, start there. It takes five minutes and it makes everything that comes after it better. (Create my hot start document)

One more thing worth knowing: this setup is not just for home. Swap the roles and My Virtual Team becomes a launch team, a job hunt team, a renovation team. Same project, different people. I have a Builder Team helping me think through ideas for Cinz.AI. It has a CTO, a UX, a CRO and my twin Anytime I'm not sure about something and want an expert opinion, I ask my builder team.

Step by step instructions plus a short video of the whole setup ⬇️

Then ask your team to introduce themselves. Watching four people you invented show up and say what they are here for is a small, ridiculous thrill. Do that one tonight.

🤖 A parent runs 11 agents. The a16z Show sat down with Jesse Genet, a former founder who sold her company and now runs her household with 11 AI agents while homeschooling four young kids. Each has a name and a job, from coding to building her kids' curriculum to ordering groceries. Here is the part that stopped me: she describes her own technical background as conversational, not hands-on, and had never opened a terminal until about six months before that episode. Her setup runs on a rack of Mac minis. Yours costs nothing and takes ten minutes.→ Watch it here

🧑‍💻 Zuckerberg just described your Try it Tonight. On Meta's earnings call Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg said he expects billions of people to have a personal AI agent within five years, helping with finances, health, relationships, and running a household. That is a CEO talking about his own products, so hold the timeline loosely. But read that list again. It is almost exactly the team you are building tonight. → Read it here

💼 Your coworkers are already doing this. Gartner looked at where AI agents are heading at work. The average company ran about 15 agents last year. By 2028 they expect Fortune 500 companies to be running closer to 150,000. Only 13% think they have the right rules in place. And their advice to companies is not to lock it down but to train people, since blocking the approved tools just sends everyone to the unapproved ones. So the thing you are building tonight at your kitchen table is the same skill your workplace is scrambling to teach. You are not late, you're right on time. → Read it here

No job posting. No interviews. No awkward first day. You have a team. Available whenever you need them.

A month ago the answer to "who can help me think through this" was nobody, or your already stretched partner, or a group chat at 11pm. Tonight it is four people who know your situation and answer immediately.

They will get better at this. Every conversation you have inside that project teaches them a little more about how you work and what you actually need.

And they are not permanent. If one of them is not pulling its weight, rewrite it. Change the tone, change the job, fire it and hire a different one, no hard feelings. That is the part I love. You are the one who decides who is on this team.

So here is what I want to know: which one of the four are you leaning on first? Hit reply and tell me. Chief of Staff, the parenting one, money, or logistics.

See you next week. ✌️

Cinz

Cinz.AI

Your unfair advantage, one week at a time.

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