Why a 30-year Valley veteran is teaching AI through a talking rooster.
Written by
Derek Beda
Founder, Psios LLC · Morgan Hill, California
I've worked in Silicon Valley for thirty years. Gap Corporate. AMD. PayPal. The rooms got bigger, the titles got better, and at some point I realized the work had moved away from me — away from building the thing — and into meetings about the thing.
I left. Started Psios LLC. Took on a few founder projects at once, including California Smart Valve. Moved back to Morgan Hill where I grew up. Caregiving for my brother became part of the day. Watching my roommate's 5-year-old some afternoons became the other part.
The one thing the last year taught me: solo founders who also have lives don't have the luxury of theory. Workflows, not frameworks. Ship, not strategize.
"I wanted a co-founder. I got Claude. I wanted a co-founding team. So I built a flock."
HAL came first — the AI authority figure. A rooster because roosters run mornings, and standups are mornings. The cyan-glow eye is a direct wink to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He's the Steve Jobs of the flock: demanding, shippable, warm.
Cypher is the developer I used to be at 2am — 47 tabs open, Clean Code on the desk, SUDO JUICE in hand. He's Uncle Bob meets Neuromancer. I built him so I could talk to my younger self about TDD without sounding preachy.
Pixel is the marketer I wish I'd hired earlier. She's Tim Ferriss's 80/20 with Casey Neistat's ship-daily discipline and a ring light that's been on since 2019. She makes the flock visible.
Derek — that's me — is the host. Rod Serling narrator energy. I tell you what's about to happen, get out of the way, and come back at the end for the closing line.
The idea
Treat AI like a team.
Most "AI for founders" content treats AI like a tool — a smarter spell-checker, a better search box. That's the wrong unit. AI is a coworker: you hand it tasks, it hands them back, you iterate. Agile, applied to a flock of one.
Every workflow in the Solo AI Workflow Pack is structured exactly this way. Trigger. Prompt. Steps. Outcome. Copy it, paste it, run it, ship. No philosophy.
Agile training that's actually fun to watch.— the original slogan, still true
The rules
What AIGTB promises (and doesn't).
We will always
- Teach workflows you can run in under 10 minutes.
- Credit our sources — Uncle Bob, Sutherland, Ferriss, and the rest.
- Reply to every thoughtful email (Derek does this himself).
- Ship weekly — videos, updates, or nothing at all. No 'coming soon' theater.
We will never
- Sell your email. To anyone. Ever.
- Do bait-and-switch pricing (founding members keep their rate forever).
- Ship a workflow we haven't run ourselves.
- Use fake urgency, fake testimonials, or fake scarcity.
What's next
The roadmap, such as it is.
- Season 01
The Playbook + daily Shorts + The Coop.Now
Free PDF lead magnet. Three shorts a day, Mon–Fri. The Coop — our $27/mo founding-rate community — opens as the audience grows. Live weekly standup with Derek, monthly workshop, prompt library.
- Season 02
AI-rendered video pipeline.
The shorts get made by the flock themselves — Remotion animation + ElevenLabs voices. Scripts written with Claude. Same quality, 10× the cadence.
- Season 03
1-on-1 add-ons for members.
Coop members can book paid 1-on-1 sessions with Derek as an add-on — capacity-gated, sold separately. Capacity ramps as the community grows.
- Season 04
psios.com tools.
The infrastructure behind AIGTB becomes its own product — starting with the click tracker that attributes every TikTok view to a dollar.
Start here
Grab the free Playbook.
If you're going to judge whether this is worth your time, judge the actual work. Twelve workflows. 15 pages. Free.