They Built an AI Agent for People Who Can’t Code — And It Spread Overnight

For non-technical founders, this feels like when somebody discovered fire. It's like giving like superpowers to a non-technical builder that always wanted to build, but always felt capped because of the technical knowledge. Hi Felipe and hi Julian. So, I'm Felipe.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Houston. Before this, I was building with Julian a product focused on tax firms in the US to help them do more taxes. How did your worlds collide? We're second-degree cousins.

" I saw Julian more than I saw my wife during that period. you like find out about Composable? Each of us has to connect to 30 tools individually. " What's the goal for Houston?

Like, what does winning look like for you guys? Our mission is to give everybody in the planet a personal AI agent. What's the downside to having a personal AI agent? There are jobs that will disappear, and there are jobs that will be created.

Anything you also want to share with everyone? We are going to launch the biggest hackathon for non-technical builders in San Francisco. Hi Felipe and hi Julian. Really appreciate you making the time.

Raul told me about your journey a bit, and your story is super interesting. I mean, from tax company to internal tool to Composable CLI, now Houston. I'm really excited to hear it all. Let's kind of set the stage by getting you guys to quickly introduce yourselves.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm Felipe. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Houston.

Before this, I was building with Julian a product focused on tax firms in the US to help them do more taxes, and I guess we'll tell you the story of how we ended up building Houston because of that. And in my previous life, I worked at a venture capital firm for 3 years, and at payment companies like Mastercard, and yeah, now building Houston, giving everybody in the world an open floor like a personal AI agent. Cool. I'm Julian.

In my previous life I was a machine learning engineer. Right now I'm a CTO at Houston. I've been working with ChatGPT since like week two after the launch. So building with AI, building cross-platform interfaces for people to just prompt and make things happen.

So I used to work at a video game engine where we went from prompt to video game. And before that I did a masters in philosophy of mind where I was a professor at the best university in my country about philosophy of artificial intelligence. So I've been doing this for a while. That's amazing.

And how did both of you cross paths? How do your worlds collide? So actually there's a backstory. We're second-degree cousins, but Julian was working in LA at the time when I was arriving to SF.

And actually his grandmother and my grandfather were um siblings and his grandmother was like, "Oh my god, Felipe is in San Francisco. " And I was right here and I told him, "Julian, get a plane, come to SF and let's build for 10 days. How come you didn't You never told me you were a machine learning engineer at a video game company? " And we we just got into a room, hacked for 10 days, and applied to YC, got called to an interview.

We didn't get in and but we ended up raising around here in San Francisco. Wait, that is so cool. You know, it's actually funny. I had a conversation with another founder recently and the very similar how they ended up like co-founding together.

They also were like stuck in like a room for like for so many hours and that's kind of So during that time you you realized how you guys very much kind of like click and you guys have a very complementing like personalities and work ethics you would say, yeah? I mean, I think the first thing was like testing working under pressure, right? So we worked nonstop for 10 days. He was literally sleeping sleeping on my couch.

I saw Julian more than I saw my wife during that period. Um but yeah, I think it was more about working together and just like how we got along with each other and we've been together for the past 15 months. That is amazing. And so and that was Houston, right?

That was when you guys like started building? Oh, no, that So, we started building AI agents for tax firms initially. So, we would do end-to-end tax prep for US tax firms and enable them AI agents. And then in the pursuit of doing a more automated thing like end-to-end work, we ended up building our internal tool that we called internally Houston.

It was our code name, right? And the moment that we built like we rebuilt our product of a couple of times and Houston was the answer to making agentic work happen and probably Julian can can talk what's under the hood. And then when we like a few weeks ago we we made a breakthrough in product and it was so impressive that we said we need to share this with more people and we started sharing it with founders in our office and then we did a private launch and it went viral. " We open-sourced it and it's now Houston.

So, Houston is the open claw for non-technical founders. So, we want to give everybody in the planet a personal AI agent. As you have a personal computer, now you'll have a personal agent. Well, that's really cool.

And so, going back a little bit, why did you decide to kind of build a tax company and then what made you want to pivot to building Houston? So, the story goes back a little bit more before before building TaxFlow, I was building a legal tax and compliance product for a venture capital firm to help founders raise venture capital. And I had built a product to help founders raise sort of like $150 million for their pre-seed companies like building their international structures to be able to receive this. And I used to work a lot with law firms and tax firms.

So, when I saw how they were working like Excel, Outlook, Teams and making a million dollars with three people and they couldn't do more. I was like, there's no way they do this. And so, that's why we started solving that problem. But then in the in the middle like we're in the middle of the greatest change in humanity's history probably.

And what we saw is that what we built was so powerful that other industries could benefit from it and we actually open sourced it because we wanted like literally to push humanity forward, too. So, that's why we're pivoting to Houston. It's just to enable more people to be able to change their industries as well. That is amazing.

And at some point you built, like you mentioned, an internal tool on top of Composia to do that work. What was that internal tool? So, what we were doing was creating an Open Claw for tax preparers because we have tax preparers in-house doing lots of work for other firms. And we did traditional software like for for us traditional software is any AI-native software that uses Python work flows, for example, and then you just make different API calls, right?

To call an LLM. So, for example, if you have an app and you have like a generate email button, that's a traditional way of building software. Why? Because your AI that could do a lot of different things, in that case, you need to click and it will only write an email.

And then probably, if you don't have that integrated, you will copy the email and paste it anywhere, right? So, what we did was try to think how Open Claw could help us completing tax process, but we had an issue and that that is that our preparers, they were not technical at all, right? So, they were scared of opening a terminal session to launch Open Claw. Uh they were for them it was really weird to be working with this machine.

So, I ended up building a back-end for that. So, we built a native Mac machine app, sorry. So, that they could use all the power speed of Open Claw with multiple terminal sessions, but they never saw a terminal. They never did anything.

So, then doing all of the connections with within Open Claw at first, especially, was really time-consuming because you need to handle authentications, API keys, and our preparers had no idea what like an API key is. So, we integrated Composable, and right away the change was like amazing because you were connected to everything in just some clicks. The models know which tools to use, and we integrated that into our UI in a way that you just need to click. You don't even need to open a terminal.

" And we just print like a really cute button, so you just click it and open in Composable, you do all of the login of of Stripe, for example, in Composable, then you go back into Houston, and then you just continue, and you sent like 100 payment links, for example, if you are doing a pro Yeah, so in our like if I can recap it as well, what I think is as we were building our internal tools and internal agents, we found ourselves increasingly connecting to each and different tools separately, which was becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain, more difficult to see what we were connected to, right? And Julian and I started discussing like there must be a better way to do this. Like there's no way each of us has to connect to 30 tools individually. " And as Julian was saying, like our preparers were not engineers, they were business people, right?

" So, that's how we went into into Composable, and the other thing that made us choose Composable was how obsessed you guys were about the product cuz something was not working, we had deployed 400 beta users using it. Something was broken, and Julian wrote to I think it was an engineer from a team or the CTO and he was like, "Come to my office. m. m.

Julian was at your offices. m. he was like, "Okay, now I have clarity in what I need to do. m.

" So, that kind of obsession like it's nowhere to be found. Wow. Okay, so backtracking a little bit. So, is this why because you were your your customers were like non-technical like business people?

Is that why they were like scared of like the the terminal, right? Like they wanted Is that the reason why? Yeah. Yeah, I mean the main reason is imagine you're not an engineer and somebody tells you or like a car mechanic and somebody tells you open the hood of your car and fix your engine.

" Yeah. So, yeah. Okay, we we just want to give the power of using a code X a cloud code and an agent to someone that has no idea what those things mean. Okay, that's really cool.

And then yeah, and then you did you discover it Compoze- How did you like find out about Compozio even? Yeah, how uh I was looking at different ways for integrating tools. Okay. And I tried a lot of different tools.

Mhm. But yeah, at the end actually like I love that you have is the Compozio for you plan. " But our product for example is free for all the users like the the platform. Right?

Sorry, the Houston app. So, we wanted something also that allow us to give that for free to other users. They use their own subscriptions. So, we thought, "Okay, this would be amazing because everyone got can have their own Compozio subscription.

They will manage their API keys. We're not in charge of them. So for this to bring this up like globally, that worked amazing. That's amazing.

And and we are researching. You did a good job and we found you guys researching. Yay. Yeah, this is I think something that I've kind of as like as someone in marketing like I think it's very important to kind of there's this term called like retrieve-ability.

So really making sure your product is retrievable when you like are just like you know, chatting to like the AI to like um chat or Claude or or just going on like search. It's just you can find it. It's like it's going to solve your problems. That's awesome.

And you know, actually like I was looking at uh composer via cloud code, right? " So but I like at first it didn't had any his knowledge that it was the best. So you want to look into that. That is so awesome.

And so you eventually started using the CLI. Like what made you try it? What clicked that hasn't like kind of clicked before? Yeah.

Well, that was really fast. Like we I remember the pain of connecting open cloud to Gmail for the first time that I needed to create a Well, we had a an an app on Google Cloud Console and so on like all of the dev steps that I needed to do. Where I was sure that my non-technical like team members, I will need to go one by one doing all the setup for them. Uh with composer like it just happened automatically.

So it's amazing. Yeah, and and I think we were just looking for ways to do this in a more agentic way. And I think previously we had used the first version of composer that didn't have the CLI and you guys launched the CLI and I think we were one of the first users to use it like the second day that you launched it if I'm not mistaken. Um cuz we like our product is born in the terminal.

So anything that any CLI tool that we can use we will use it first natively, you know? So that was a great surprise. And so you mentioned how you ended up coming to the Composio office. Okay, let's let's like break that down a little bit more.

Give me more detail. What was going on at that point and what wasn't working? Okay, so like Composio CLI is for is a tool for terminals, right? So you don't really need to show the user like anything graphically.

In Houston, we want to show the user all of the things that they are connected to. So for doing that, you guys have an MCP and you have Composio platform, which is different. " So you didn't have that command because it was not needed for doing that on a terminal. We needed that because we needed to show on a UI all of the connections.

And I was doing something really hacky like getting all of the connections from Composio platform, then try to connect to a short list of 45 apps, and my model was trying to connect to everyone all the time just to show the user which were connected and which not. But if I left one app outside of that that short list, then they would never know. So that wasn't working for us and I was like, "Okay, this is an open source project. " And I contributed a change then Rahul replied like the day they they after, but with more questions.

So I replied, then he replied, and I was like, "Okay, this will probably take a lot of time, so I just scraped all of Rahul's information and looked like he was active on on Twitter. And I just added him on Twitter and I was like, "Hey dude, I'm I wrote this PR for you on the GitHub repo. Uh do you want more context? " Sure, uh I would love to.

Can you jump on a And I was like, "Okay, you're in a sec? " And he was, "Okay, cool. This is my office. " I was like, "Sure.

" Yeah. Okay. And we met like 25 minutes after that and then we did all of the Well, we discussed a lot about We spent like an hour talking about CLIs and architectures and models and what would be best for for the tool in general. It was like a really inspiring conversation, I think.

Then he did the fix, so everything worked. Wow, it happened all so quick and because you had this meeting with OPI like the next like day, you just Yeah, you were like really like kind of rushing. m. or like you were at the office?

m. m. He was like, "Okay, I will touch base with our engineer because I want to understand like which is the best way to implement it. I will I want a second opinion.

m. he was like fixed. And it was fixed. And how did you guys feel after it was like you guys were like Did you kind of experience that before with like other or did you Did you really like how they're very like fast kind of They really cared about kind of Yeah, the fixing?

I'm going to reply to that. Like I think as a founder, that's the intensity you expect from a partner, right? " You know? As opposed to not feeling that and probably having to switch.

So yeah, that was very That was very good for us to feel aligned in terms of execution, like the the execution mode we expect. And it's the one we're in, you know? Yeah, I love that. So the tool went from something you and your co-founder use internally to something that other people are outside are using.

How did that happen? So, we planned out a private workshop in our offices like last Thursday. We wanted to do it for like 20 people and 70 showed up. " Via WhatsApp, we shared the app in a WhatsApp group like download it, we'll help you set it up.

And as as we said like it became viral. We're still in beta. We haven't officially launched. We're in beta.

We expect to be launching in the next few days. Uh but around 400 to 500 people are using it right now. 200 more in the waiting list. And we expect to be having 1,000 users by end of month.

At least. Congrats. That's incredible. Why why do you think so why did it go viral?

Like why do you think people really loved it? I mean, first it's it's a beautiful product. You should go try it yourself. But second, I think that for non-technical founders this feels like when somebody discovered fire, you know?

It's like giving power like superpowers to a non-technical builder that always wanted to build but always felt capped because of the technical knowledge. So, once that is off the table and they can do something with natural language, it feels magical. And that's how it's it was feeling. There's an aha moment like, "Wow, I can do that.

" And now they can. So, I think that yeah, giving that sense of being technical to a non-technical user or giving them that ability to build something is very powerful. That is amazing. Was there a moment like a specific moment where when you decided to make it public or did it just like did it happen?

Like was that something you wanted to eventually do? And I think it was very organic to be honest. " And then they told their teams and their teams told their friends and their friends told their friends and it was like there's something here. We need to pursue this, and that's what we're doing.

So, walk me through it. As a What is like Houston do? Like walk me through it as a like through it like I'm a potential user. Like like who's getting So, you mentioned that the the people who are getting the most of it right now are like tech non-technical founders.

Non-technical builders, correct. There is Yeah, builders. Imagine you're a knowledge worker. So, you do marketing at Commsult you.

So, you can download Houston, and you can create your own personal agent. You can give it a role, a job description. You can give it access to tools via Commsult you, and then you can prompt it to do things within those tools. So, for example, if you dream of having a personal assistant that can help you I don't know, do social listening, scrape uh give you reports, give you a database, give you ideas on what to do content about, execute that content on tools, you know, edit that content, do scripts, record, edit videos, like all of that.

It's literally like hiring an employee, you know, that learns as you work. So, yeah, if you have a ChatGPT subscription or a Claude subscription, you can go from just chatting to executing work, like co-working with an agent. So, yeah, any knowledge worker that needs to do something with an interface nowadays at their job can use Houston. And why do you guys like Why do you think you guys are the right fit um for for kind of building this and like yeah, co-founding this?

So, I'm going to I'm going to reply that in two ways. First of all, we have absolute founder market fit. Julian was lead machine learning engineer at a video game engine company. He knows inside out how to build like video game interactions and make this enjoyable for people, and I come from a background where I've been building community-based back companies.

I used to run my own startup operator community of 100,000 people. So, we know how to build stuff that people can build with others, like video games, community. So, I think we're uniquely positioned to get a product like this to market. Um and second of all, I think anybody could do it.

We're just executing and I hope everybody else, good luck as well, you know? But yeah, I think we're uniquely positioned to execute in this idea. That's awesome. And if you had to rebuild Houston without Compozio, what would that look like?

What would that have to look like? It'll be a nightmare. Like I think we would need to build Compozio, which I wouldn't want to do. Yeah, cuz it would it probably take just yeah, so much work and No, like I I think that the the thing that make everyone feel that this has superpowers is that they it is using their tools.

And like I don't want to get into build a tend out like 1,000 integrations because we have been seeing people using Houston in ways that we never thought about it. For example, we never tried Notion because we don't use Notion, for example. But there are a lot of people who use Notion and they're doing crazy stuff with Houston and Notion just because they have the already made integration. So, I think yeah, the first part will be to find something like Compozio or build our own integrations, which would be take a lot of time.

Yeah, but one word, if you're looking for one word for other companies out there thinking about integrating to Compozio or not, like nightmare is the word without Compozio, you know? And the word with Compozio, I would say like ease. Yeah. So, are you Is that true?

So, you're both you're running two things right now. So, Houston and the and Tax Flow, right? So, Tax Flow became a verticalized version of Houston. So, imagine you're a tax firm, you can use Houston for tax would be the version that Tax Flow is.

But Houston can now be Houston for law, Houston for tax, Houston for design, Houston for yada yada, you know? I love that. So, Houston's becoming the main thing, but then you can like Yeah, but it's for so many different industries and like Yeah. Tax Flow is a verticalized version of Houston.

understand we don't know what we don't know in terms of security, in terms of like risks. Like we have to make an extra effort to keep ourselves educated and like understand what's going on to not fall for things we don't know we can fall for, I would say. Okay. That's amazing.

All right. What about you? Yeah, I agree. Awesome.

And you mentioned speed before. What does that mean to you? Startup speed? Like what does startup speed mean to you?

Speed? We we're doing releases on a daily basis. Like we we have one-day sprints and two reviews a day. So our SLA is if a user sends feedback 24 hours after it must be fixed.

That's like our intention right now. Like that's the kind of intensity we're building Houston with. Okay, so the Composio team like shipped a feature for you the same day. Do you Did you kind of expect that?

Do you expect that going forward? Or like Do you feel Yeah. Or was it like Well, I mean I think that I met a lot of people here on the Bay Area that were that's like they work ethic, you know? Like because it's people that cares a lot about their product.

Like my session with a Google was more like like you were like of course I can do this feature. But like I really want to understand your needs because I really want to improve Composio. You know? So I think that like right now speed like developer speed Well, we're really fast because we're using AI for everything.

But for me it's more about like being obsessed with the product, being obsessed with like cultivating relationships because I know that every time that I fix something for for one of our users they will want to come back because they will know like okay, I had this issue and they fix it, right? So they will like even if we have more bugs and whatever they will be here because they will feel like they listen to me. There are changes that doing the changes they need. They're working towards helping me.

So I think for me that's that's why why I perceive also Composio. Like I think that they also want to do something like this. And then if you could change one thing about how Houston's built, like in front of the tooling, anything, what would it be? I think that is not more is not like what would I change but what would I need built because right now we're planning to do also Houston for enterprise.

And that has two different ways of hooking, so it's for working for teams. So, you have an agent that is part of the team, not a personal agent. So, like all of the team members our knowledge compounds into one agent that everyone gets to use. And we handle permissions and all of the different things.

So, right now I'm planning to build that infrastructure. So, it's not something that I would change, but something I would still need to build. Okay. And is your team like is it just you two or you guys have like other teammates?

We're four people and we're spread around the planet. Argentina and Colombia and SF right now. So, yeah. And why Argentina and Colombia?

What made you to choose those? Great talent. That's the only reason and same time zone. Yeah.

Great talent. Oh, so what is So, great talent in terms of like engineers or like what what's the trade? Product and engineering and there's another backstory and it's that we're originally from Colombia before we moved here to SF. Yeah.

Yeah, Colombia seems very beautiful. I'd love to visit. Wow. Okay, that's amazing.

And then anything that I didn't ask that you think is actually like very like a very interesting part of the story or anything you else want to share to everyone? We'll be doing a launch a launch in the first days of May. We still have to nail down on a couple of details, but we are going to launch the biggest hackathon for non-technical builders in San Francisco. So, we would love to invite you guys and have you there.

Wait, this is amazing because I'm non-technical and I would love to come. Oh my gosh. Yes, you're more than invited. Well, I'll just spread the word as well.

Like this is going to be a good like start to my SF journey. Yeah, and then another thing is we'll we'll be launching like publicly around April the 30th or first week of May also. So, would love to share with you how that goes so that we can do a coordinated launch and mention you guys like hey, we partner with Composio and give you distribution, right? Cuz we're going to have like a thousand people sharing and we want people to share the video.

So, if you give us some assets, we can probably do something there and probably even shoot some of the videos in your office, maybe like one scene in your office and yeah. And because like actually Composio is like comes pre-installed with Houston when you download the app. So, it's inside the app. So, everyone will be using Every Houston download will be a Composio user.

Oh my god, that's amazing cuz we are trying to like increase our total call number. Like yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Super really appreciate. I mean, this is such a wonderful like such wonderful collab.

Like Houston and Composio like just going to take off. That's amazing. Well, this is really great. Felipe and Julian, thank you so much.

Really appreciate you walking through your whole journey and can't wait to see all your launches in the hackathon. Yes, and hopefully we'll see you there building.